| Laurie Anderson – The Dream Before Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| The second half of the song, i.e., from the line, "History is an angel, . . ." is a (lovely) paraphrase of one of Walter Benjamin's theses on history. Benjamin, if you haven't encountered this name before, was a terribly important German Jewish writer and theorist who died in 1940 attempting to escape the Nazis. Benjamin quite liked Paul Klee's painting, Angelus Novus, which he appropriated in a metaphorical narrative about Klee's angel (Google "Angelus Novus" on Google images) as the angel of history being blown into the future by a storm blowing from Paradise. The angel wants to fix the mess in front of the angel, the pile of debris, but can't because the storm has been caught in the angel's wings. So, the angel is Anderson's appropriation of Benjamin's appropriation of Paul Klee's Angelus Novus. It's important to keep in mind that Benjamin lived through the first half of the 20th century and died in Port Bou, Spain, as he tired to make it to Portugal where he would catch a boat to the United States. Notions such as history as "a pile of debris" become clearer given the context of the European catastrophe. | |
| Laurie Anderson – The Dream Before Lyrics | 11 years ago |
|
The reference to angels is taken directly from the writing of Walter Benjamin, the German literary critic and theorist. The angel is a metaphor and is linked to the painting, Angelus Novus, by Paul Klee. The context is late 1930s Paris during the National Socialists' rise to power in Germany. "The quotation comes from thesis IX of On the Concept of History by Benjamin. The text of IX: A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." Thesis IX is preceded by this epigraph, translated from the German, as is Benjamin's text, above, by Benjamin's friend, Gershom Scholem: My wing is ready for flight, I would like to turn back.If I stayed timeless time, I would have little luck. For more, see http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html |
|
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.