Walter Benjamin, Borges, Freud, The disappeared on newsprint

I don't have Walter Benjamin in front of me at the moment. Illuminations is on my bookshelf, but I'm not there, so everything that I can say about him is coming out of memory at the moment. In Illuminations there is part called "On Storytelling" or "The Storyteller" in which Benjamin, who celebrates Kafka for this, explains that the true storyteller derives his power from "death". I don't think that in such a context the word "death" is so simple. It is, afterall, the inexplicable and human unknown that is the source of all fear and power. That which we do not know scares us, and yet it is the most mythologized and the center of religion, if you look at different religious perspectives as all finally helping the human psyche try to make reason out of the ureasonable. To approach the unknown without explaining it away, to approach that which scares us to give us power, rather than disguise it so as to push it away (which, according to Freud, only haunts us even more as the inner and outer spheres of being can collapse in one moment and create a trauma that is rooted in our archaic fear of death, which we have sought to overcome through modernity [the Uncanny]), is to become the storyteller. I was thinking about how this connects to how Borges, who is the Argentine favorite son of literature, or at least the most internationally known, and his obsession with The Double.   I have long felt that his poetry is never emphasized enough, or at least not as much as his essays or stories.  Some of them are not of a great poet, but others are truly beautiful in their darkness and ability to convey the atmosphere of Buenos Aires, to translate his sensory experience into words.  Death is a central theme to many of his poems, and he draws death into the realm of the Buenos Aires, or perhaps I have it backwards.  The Buenos Aires of Borges is inhabited by death, and by ghosts and meditations on a seemingly mystical realm of myth.  

In "Remorse for Any Death" ("Remordimiento por cualquier muerte" I find a resonance with Benjamin's discussion of the proximity of the storyteller to death.  

Free of memory and hope,

unlimited, abstract, almost future,

the dead body is not somebody:  It is death.

Like the God of the mystics,

whom they insist has no attributes,

the dead person is no one everywhere,

is nothing but the loss and absence of the world.

We rob it of everything,

we do not leave it in one color, one syllable:

Here is the yard which its eyes no longer take up,

there is the sidewalk where it waylaid its hope.

It might even be thinking

what we are thinking.

We have divided among us, like thieves,

the treasure of nights and days.

The dead body stands it for the concept of death, it is the sum of that which it represents.  The individual is no longer important, he is the nothing more and nothing less than a mystical phenomenon that haunts us with its darkness.  The corpse is "abstract", "unlimited", and full of future possibilities.  It is closer to life than the living; it holds more potential, more power.  The dead person, or Death itself, is ubiquitous:  "the dead person is no one everywhere".  It is the "loss and absence of the world", yet it is full of contradictorily part of this absence and the possibilities of the future.  In my opinion, the robbery, at the end of the poem, is really the robbery of the dead body, or Death itself, of its proper and mystical place.  It is robbed of its "treasure of days and nights", for it is truly the underlying power to everything, the light and the dark, the loss of the world and its future.  It is like the underestimated "God of the mystics". 

Perhaps to understand the melancholic part of the Buenos Aires air, is to see the city as largely inhabited by ghosts.  To revisit my last post, the mournful resignation, or perhaps even indignation, towards the present, is the presence of ghosts, either from a past or a constructed past (are they ever really so different?).  There is a newspaper, Página 12.  It is very much government propaganda, although the quality of writing is extremely witty and often is accompanied by a literary supplement.  Everyday there are, I guess what you could call adds, put in by families to mark the anniversary of their loved one's disappearance.  You are reading these beautiful little boxes with a photo and a strong message from the family that demands that justice truly be sought, that the perpetrators not be pardoned.  Sometimes you realize the young age of this person, who now would truly be in adulthood.  It's when I look at the date and feel this collapse in time that occurs in which years matter, to see that each year goes by since a family has lost their loved one, and to think that in the mundanity of my everyday activities there are several memorials on paper in front of me,  that I feel that there is nothing more powerful than the death I am witnessing (in memorial form) in front of my eyes in newsprint.  These are both tragic stories because they are individuals, but also part of this Death energy, that encircles me as a reader.   These "adds" are so very close to the storytelling in which Walter Benjamin finds authenticity, truth, and yet they are not even really "stories" or "vignettes".  They are photographs with a small note to a disappeared loved one, a note filled with anger and passion, that will never be read by the individual it addresses, but which also is meant to address all of us.  There is an authentic type of storytelling here, it collapses space and time, it is about absence and the unlimited future.  And this all provides frustration and catharsis simultaneously.