When Laurie released Strange Angels, I was so amused to read that she felt angels were everywhere when she was writing—she couldn’t keep them out of the songs. I was amused because I thought I was the only one trying to hold my own with the playful and exasperating winged ones. Among my many parts in the play we were enacting, I suppose I was Gretel—lots of poetic license and my study partner was Hansel. I actually was a cocktail waitress for exactly one night before I asked the manager of the lounge to help me get my car unstuck and showered him with mud. Angel antics … And my SP and I could assuredly relate to “you’re really bringing me down” … “you can really be a bitch” and even wasting his life and mine on our stupid legend. Personally I think the wicked witch was the author of the script.
But too late to make a long story short … I never understood the rest of the song and the other day I mentioned this. What the hell did that song mean? I wasn’t expecting an answer because angels refuse to—as they say—play trained poodles. But lo and behold …
Some of us think we exist to move progress along as though we’re born with the tasks of combating all disease, feeding the hungry, reducing the obese, ending all war, educating everyone, building cities and lord knows what else. We need to move our century forward. And we imagine that there have been others like us before who did their parts, tossing us the baton before they died so we could pick up where they left off.
And while this is fun, it is not a necessity and it may not even be happening. While life is all illusion, progress may well be an illusion within the illusion. And according to these angels, the storm from Paradise is blowing the angel—“lucky” me playing one in the play—backwards instead of forwards—into the future because I think this is where I need to go. And I’m being blown backwards because they want to get my attention to say this may not be what you think it is. Progress is quite possibly not the aim. If progress is the aim, why does history teach us nothing? If we’re smart enough to play the life game, how come we aren’t smart enough to do it right? Possibly because flawed as it seems—we are doing exactly what we want to. This is the desired effect.
I can’t say this all makes sense to me yet and I can’t say that I am unique simply because a crowd of angels have decided to camp out at my place. Not only could this happen to just about anyone, it probably is but people don’t talk too much about angels except in the traditionally religious sense—which these angels dismiss as something the “wrapping paper angels”—angels that look like they leaped off Hallmark prints and not them—are doing. Face it—first you think you’re nuts and then you’re petrified everyone else will think you are. Angels. We all like the idea as long as they keep their distance.
So I don’t know if I have the ability to understand the paradox of progress but it was unexpectedly sweet of them to offer an explanation. Needless to say, I was shocked—it was so unlike them …
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 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.
When Laurie released Strange Angels, I was so amused to read that she felt angels were everywhere when she was writing—she couldn’t keep them out of the songs. I was amused because I thought I was the only one trying to hold my own with the playful and exasperating winged ones. Among my many parts in the play we were enacting, I suppose I was Gretel—lots of poetic license and my study partner was Hansel. I actually was a cocktail waitress for exactly one night before I asked the manager of the lounge to help me get my car unstuck and showered him with mud. Angel antics … And my SP and I could assuredly relate to “you’re really bringing me down” … “you can really be a bitch” and even wasting his life and mine on our stupid legend. Personally I think the wicked witch was the author of the script.
But too late to make a long story short … I never understood the rest of the song and the other day I mentioned this. What the hell did that song mean? I wasn’t expecting an answer because angels refuse to—as they say—play trained poodles. But lo and behold …
Some of us think we exist to move progress along as though we’re born with the tasks of combating all disease, feeding the hungry, reducing the obese, ending all war, educating everyone, building cities and lord knows what else. We need to move our century forward. And we imagine that there have been others like us before who did their parts, tossing us the baton before they died so we could pick up where they left off.
And while this is fun, it is not a necessity and it may not even be happening. While life is all illusion, progress may well be an illusion within the illusion. And according to these angels, the storm from Paradise is blowing the angel—“lucky” me playing one in the play—backwards instead of forwards—into the future because I think this is where I need to go. And I’m being blown backwards because they want to get my attention to say this may not be what you think it is. Progress is quite possibly not the aim. If progress is the aim, why does history teach us nothing? If we’re smart enough to play the life game, how come we aren’t smart enough to do it right? Possibly because flawed as it seems—we are doing exactly what we want to. This is the desired effect.
I can’t say this all makes sense to me yet and I can’t say that I am unique simply because a crowd of angels have decided to camp out at my place. Not only could this happen to just about anyone, it probably is but people don’t talk too much about angels except in the traditionally religious sense—which these angels dismiss as something the “wrapping paper angels”—angels that look like they leaped off Hallmark prints and not them—are doing. Face it—first you think you’re nuts and then you’re petrified everyone else will think you are. Angels. We all like the idea as long as they keep their distance.
So I don’t know if I have the ability to understand the paradox of progress but it was unexpectedly sweet of them to offer an explanation. Needless to say, I was shocked—it was so unlike them …
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 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 sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html