Potentialities, or Could Walter and Martin have been friends?

Earlier this year (about a month or so before squirrel* {BS}), I started again to read works by one of my top two "favorite"^ writers, Walter Benjamin, whose first volume of his collected writings in English I finished in toto last July.  To be sure, I've read a lot of these three collections that I own (I have Volumes 3, 2 & 1 in my collection the first {or the 3rd, depending on your perspective} of which I received as a "gift / bribe" from Malynne at the end of the first course I took with her "Cults of Personality: Hitler, Stalin Mao").  

This second volume has begun with quite a lot of short reviews and happenings-related short pieces rather than the deeper philosophical pieces that he's most known for (if Benjamin can be said to be well known in any capacity).  The reason for this is clear, with Benjamin as a young man in is mid-20s he was struggling post university to find work and publishing these short, timely works wherever he could.  Two such articles published just a couple weeks apart in a couple different newspapers were both clearly derived from one single meeting / conversation / interview with André Gide, and another couple were (very) short reviews of a book by Karl Gröber.  What's amazing to me is not the brilliant extent to which he so brazenly double dips (nor the fact that you used to just be able to do book reports and send them to a publication and get paid for it!), rather it's the way that all of it is dripping with intentionality, but so rarely concerns itself with execution.

Por ejemplo, in Benajmin's interview with André Gide, Gide repeatedly discusses the lecture that he had planned to given while he was visiting Berlin (his visit to Berlin being the occasion of Benjamin's meeting with him), but that he has been so distracted by such visits and because of the nature of Berlin life, "the leisure [he] had counted on never arrived," and he never got the chance to write the lecture. And so, instead of giving a lecture, he just vaguely outlines the ideas he had intended to cover to Benjamin, who dutifully laps them up and writes them up for two separate German newspapers, and his (Gide's) work is "complete". 

I love this concept of doing something just by saying it out loud.  Come to think of it, this is rather the same method of work employed by Peter from my time at MPS, a deep underlying faith that if you just talk about what you want to have happen it will come into being (although in this latter case it involved employing an entire staff of people who were basically there to just try and discern his wishes, and then carry out all of these whims as much as possible). In the earlier case of Benjamin and his contemporaries, the focus is much more on the potentiality of having had a great idea, and then thinking about how great it was, and not concerning yourself terribly with the fact that it never came to fruition.

Another thing that I find compelling about Walter Benjamin is that he is a near exact contemporary of my grandfather, Martinus Kvidt.  Born just 9 months apart, Benjamin on the pre-anniversary of my own wedding on 15 July 1892, and Martin on MKE day 14 April 1893, they were both part of The Lost Generation of their respective countries, and while my grandpa was off to Europe to fight in World War 1, Benjamin was a country or two away studying away at university.  

I'm not entirely sure why, but I have always been interested in synchronicities - the phenomenon of things things happening at the same time in different places (and in different worlds, even - fictional and historical and historical fictional or futural historical...).  For years, I have tried to find (or create) a calendar app that would allow for historical events to be created throughout the past (weirdly, google calendar seems to have an odd glitch {or maybe it's actually iCal that has the glitch} where you can create some events in the far distant past and they will sometimes reappear, so I sometimes am able to re-discover that George McFly was murdered on March 15, 1973 {or it possibly could have been early in the morning of the 16th; anyway the same week as when the Watergate break-in guy was being paid off...} while looking through my calendar, but other times not, as the event appears and disappears unpredictably on my Calendar app).

I like to think about contemporaries in history, art, cinema (like, for instance what was going on in 1999 cinema that made it such a spectacular sampling of content while the history of that moment wasn't especially exciting - although we were on the brink of a lot that would happen in just the next few years and ultimately set up much of what we find around us today...), literature and also to consider the generations looking back at their influences from prior generations (a process that I would have thought I could have generalized as a faster and faster process, with TikTokkers citing Taylor Swift as major influence {some 10 years earlier}, whereas Benjamin and many thinkers of his era largely looked back Centuries, and in particular 150 years give or take to the Romantic Era of German literature {your Goethes & your Schillers, etc.}, but I think this tends to over-generalizing the history of cultural influencers {ikr!?}.

Perhaps the greatest of these Influencers of the 19th Century (don't worry, I'm bringing this in for a landing) is the Kurt Cobain or Jim Morrison of his era, John Keats, who died at 25 and then suddenly thereafter became a famous and great poet.  Keats is of course most famous for writing the poem that you read in high school, "Ode to a Grecian Urn" and for aggrandizing the concept of Negative Capability.

 Negative Capability, Keats called when one is “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reason.” 

More than anything, this concept seems like the philosophical equivalent of the thinking without necessarily doing life philosophy we were talking about before (rather like the "Harold Hill Think Method" of marching band instruction!, "la-di-da-di-da-di-daaa").

*We had a moment this past spring, where we encountered a full-on squirrel nest in the engine block of our erstwhile Ford Edge, a vehicle that had had (before and after) A LOT of other issues once it was rapidly wandering out of warranty.  It took some help, but we have finally found our way out of that Capitalist death trap, and are generally on to lower and worse things, but at least out of that!