#das ausdruckslose

Found the Walter Benjamin quote from Gershom Scholem’s ‘The Story of a Friendship’:

Benjamin’s deep, inner relationship to things he owned – books, works of art, or handcrafted items, often of rustic construction – was evident. For as long as I knew him, even during my last visit with him in Paris, he loved to display such objects, to put them into his visitors’ hands, as he mused over them aloud like a pianist improvising at the keyboard. During the months I am writing about I noticed on his desk a Bavarian blue glazed tile, depicting a three-headed Christ, he told me that its enigmatic design fascinated him. In time he gradually added to his collection various small figurines and pictures, mostly reproductions. Even then a print of Mathias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece hung on the wall of his study, where it would remain for many years to come. In 1913 as a student he had made a special trip to Colmar to see the original. His notes from those years often refer to the Isenheim panels; he ws overwhelmed by what he called das Ausdruckslose, their quality of expressionlessness. In the twenties he was apt to offer philosophical reflections as he brought forth a toy for his son. Once he brought along from Moscow a silver dagger over which he launched forth with reflections on terror that were only half ironic. In his room in Paris hung a tattoo artist’s large pattern sheet that he had acquired in Copenhagen. He was particularly proud of this item and regarded it on the same plane as children’s drawings and primitive art.

I connect this to Benjamin’s kabbalah of meaning and memory - the way he will locate intensity of memory, emotion and the spiritual, in physical locations and things. This is particularly noticeable in his Berlin reminiscences. They create a personal symbolism that is nevertheless located in the shared physical world.

This has been important for me – understanding this, using physical locations and things to explore emotional spaces, trying to understand its praxis.