is life without making full use of what we already have, because life is given only once?
When I turn to my already gathered knowledge and experience, especially in times of unspeakable destruction that impales our future, I frequently turn to one of the most creative minds of the 20th century, Paul Klee. The title of this blog, “Becoming is Superior to Being,” is a Klee quote.
Among Klee’s paintings are a series of angels. Like in one of his most famous, “Angelus Novus,” Klee’s angels are very fragmented creatures, appearing very elusive. Angelus Novus so took Walter Benjamin that he bought the painting. In his interpretation of the painting, Benjamin seems to see in the angel the despair many of us feel in our not being able to help the victims of yet another unjust war. Benjamin wrote:
“A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows 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 towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling up ruin upon ruin 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 its back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
“Art does not reproduce the visible, rather it makes visible.”
—Paul Klee
You are blind to what you hear
Listen to what you see
Do not fear the truth beneath
Reach for roots beneath the trees
Listen to the words you seek
Don’t listen to a word they say
Do NOT listen to a word you’ve heard
Do not listen to a word you’ve heard
People are people we live for our own
Live how you think not by what you’ve been told. . .”
Justin Nozuka – Don’t Listen to a Word You’ve Heard
— kenne
Little Dune Picture by Paul Klee — The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas
“In immanence, I am ungraspable.”
— Paul Klee
Becoming is Superior to Being 