Sparks of Randomness

In memoriam Walter Benjamin

03.10.2023
Philippe Vandenbroeck

In October 2020 I attended a week-long photography masterclass with Claudine Doury. The workshop was offered by Eyes in Progress in the small French village of Cosprons, on the Mediterranean Côte Vermeille. During that week, I learned that Walter Benjamin had committed suicide in September 1940 in the nearby Spanish border town of Port Bou. I decided to develop my project as a small homage to this wayward thinker.

"What is 'solved'? Do not all the questions of our lives, as we live, remain behind us like foliage obstructing our view? To uproot this foliage, even to thin it out, does not occur to us. We stride on, leave it behind, and from a distance, it is indeed open to view, but indistinct, shadowy, and all the more enigmatically entangled."

Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street

Soon after the Cosprons workshop I wrote a poem:

There is no scintillating image
That captures the life of a man,
Who rekindles worn-out gestures,
And gingerly collects scraps
From the funeral pyre of history.

His is the hour between
Dog and wolf, when things,
Suspended in the muffled silence
Of condoned forgetfulness
Emit a green opalescent glow.

Yet something continues to breed.
He is resignedly open to the
Affect of vitality, the sparks
Of randomness that illuminate
The mossy cartilage between ruins.

In September 2023, I returned to the region. My wife Ann and I walked the Chemin Walter Benjamin from Banyuls to Port Bou. It was Benjamin's last journey as he tried to escape from the hands of his Nazi persecutors. Now it's a signposted walk that keeps the memory of this thinker alive. For me, the walk is part of a more extensive project that seeks to engage in geopoetic experiments in relation to the lives and works of four classic German authors: Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Jünger.