Portbou
27 July 2019
We finished our cycle ride in Perpignan and I belatedly realized that we were near Portbou in Spain, the place where Walter Benjamin died and was buried.
The next day, a small group of us decided to visit the small Catalonian town. Coming after six intense days tracing the cols of the Pyrenees, cycling in support of a refugee charity it was apposite to finish our journey here - a short train ride across a border and on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea.
On the way there, we read some material about Benjamin and his fate as he tried to escape from the Nazis, a small passage was shared that referenced an alternative to the generally accepted suicide story: a theory that while waiting in Portbou for safe passage he died of a brain haemorrhage. The writer goes on to say that were this true it would be an antidote to “the widespread tragically accented and seductively poignant suicide story... part of a mythologisation of Benjamin as an unlucky melancholic. In the absence of that story the accent falls... more on Benjamin as a representative of a typical fate, that of a refugee, the displaced person, only one of many forced on the run, who may or may not have reached a destination that he was forced to choose. He comes to stand in as a symbol of emigration at all times - though unusually in his case he is one of the few that are named, a refugee whose name we know.
”The site of the graveyard on the margins of Portbou is an extraordinary setting - perched on low cliff overlooking the small bay. Just outside its walls there is a memorial sculpture to Benjamin - an iron corridor of steps that slices into and down the cliff edge stopping short so that it hangs dangerously above the sea. ‘Passages’ is a powerful monument to the lost and found of human displacement and I was deeply moved by it, and also because something of my friend Saul who had taken his own life a few weeks earlier seemed to be there and was swirling around and through me in the cloudy, blowy weather, over the dark cerulean sea. Suicide is a kind of displacement, a refuge from life. Saul had a particular nature and was a generous and perspicacious thinker himself who would have read everything by Benjamin. Throughout the morning, thoughts of both of them would momentarily dislodge the other in my mind so that at points they merged as one and I found myself at times with tears running down my cheeks. Later on down at the beach it began to rain and we swam. The grey water thick and heavy but comforting, warm, supportive.
In the small amounts of Benjamin’s writing that I have read, his figuration of progress and history in Paul Klee’s image, Angelus Novus, as the angel of history was something that took (and still takes) me time to appreciate. But remembering it on this journey and rereading some notes online I came to a clearer understanding. Here’s the painting:
And it is what Benjamin manages to extract from this quirky oddball angel that is remarkable.“...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 upon 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 from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such 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.”
It is a desolate conception and its pitiful poignancy hit me hard in the moments standing outside the graveyard by the iron corridor by the sea with the wind blowing in my ears, and on the train back i wrote this haiku:
resting in Portbou
Benjamin’s Angel watches
the refugee’s death