Writing In The Crosshairs: HISTORY IS AN ANGEL

Monday, July 15, 2013

HISTORY IS AN ANGEL

I have a historical fantasy soon to be released on audiobook:

Why do I write Historical Fantasy?

There are so many fascinating historical figures who now are lost in the mists of Time.

I read of their lives and go

WHAT IF?

Really you say

Like who?

Walter Benjamin was born on this day in 1892.

Benjamin translated Baudelaire and Proust, and although he died at age forty-eight —

a probable suicide, his attempts to flee the Nazis having failed —

he is regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most important critics and cultural theorists.

Here in one of his last works, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,”

Benjamin (top image below) meditates on a Paul Klee watercolor he owned (bottom image below),

turning it into a bleak vision of human history as an apocalyptic junkpile:

The angel's 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.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's speech to the graduating class of Divinity College in Cambridge, Mass., was delivered on this day in 1838.

Several years earlier Emerson had left the ministry; many passages in his controversial speech suggest the reasons why.

Here he blasts the preacher who is a life-denying "formalist":

"I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say, 'I would go to church no more.'

A snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was real; the preacher merely spectral.

He had lived in vain.

He had not one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined.

If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it...."

RITES OF PASSAGE

has the undead Samuel McCord on a cursed transatlantic steamer where he meets and clashes with

Ralph Waldo Emerson of all antagonists.

Cora Pearl (1835–July 8, 1886), born Emma Elizabeth Crouch

She was a 19th-century courtesan of the French demimonde, who enjoyed her greatest celebrity during the period of the Second French Empire

Sam also reunites with Cora Pearl and with her lover,

Duke de Morny,

with whom he strikes sparks.