Sestina: Walter Benjamin at Port Bou
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In a situation with no way out, I have no other choice but to end it. It is in a little village in the Pyrenees where nobody knows me that my life will be finished. I ask you to transmit my thoughts to my friend Adorno and to explain to him the position in which I saw myself placed. There is not enough time to write all the letters I would have liked to write.
—purportedly Walter Benjamin’s last communication, a postcard dated September 25, 1940)
So here it is, my one last border-zone.No going back but no way forward; the signsWere always bad and worse each time I leftSome latest short-stay refuge. Clear to read,Those lethal constellations where my lifeAnd death lie open to the scholar’s gaze.
What price my cultivation of that gaze,That famous eye for detail, if its zoneOf reference finds no room for such real-lifeEvents or factual details, just for signsThat rival schools of exegetes can readIn ways to please all parties, right or left.
I bore their quarrels with me when I left,Good comrade Brecht who begged me lift my gazeFrom cryptic texts for once and try to readDispatches from the latest battle-zone,And shrewd Adorno who detected signsOf occult thinking in my work and life.
He had a point, let’s face it: not a lifeThat came to much, and now with no time leftTo make sense of those constellated signs,Those scattered indices that met my gazeYears back when first I strayed into their zone,But only now, near death, have learned to read. [End Page 101]
I’ll leave my colleagues something more to read,My eighteen ‘Theses,’ fragments from a life –A damaged life – beyond the contact-zoneOf all but exiled souls, a message leftTo dark cryptanalysts whose alien gazeAlone might help decipher my last signs.
No symbol glows translucent in these signs.They’re allegories which he who runs may read,Or he who turns a disaffected gazeOn all past portents of a better life,Such as might elevate whatever’s leftOf mine into some all-redemptive zone.
Why take those signs for tokenings of life?How learn to read the idioglyphs I’ve left?What errant gaze might scan that trackless zone? [End Page 102]
Christopher Norris is Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cardiff, Wales. He has written more than thirty books on aspects of philosophy and literary theory, among them (most recently), Re-Thinking the Cogito: Naturalism, Reason and the Venture of Thought; Derrida, Badiou and the Formal Imperative; and Philosophy Outside-In: A Critique of Academic Reason. His volume of verse-essays, The Cardinal’s Dog and Other Poems, was recently published in a second edition by De La Salle University Press (Manila) in association with Seventh Quarry Press (Swansea, Wales).
