ARTicles vol.5 i2a: Making Angels

And we, spectators always, everywhere,
looking at, never out of, everything!
–Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. Leishman and Spender

Wim Wenders, from the first treatment for Wings of Desire:

The genesis of the idea of having angels [in Wings of Desire] is very hard to account for in retrospect. It was suggested by many sources at once. First and foremost, Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Paul Klee’s paintings too. Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History. There was a song by the Cure that mentioned ‘fallen angels,’ and I heard another song on the car radio that had the line ‘talk to an angel’ in it. One day, in the middle of Berlin, I suddenly became aware of that gleaming figure, ‘the Angel of Peace,’ metamorphosed frombeing a warlike victory angel into a pacifist. […] There have always been childhood images of angels as invisible, omnipresent observers; there was, so to speak, the old hunger for transcendence, and also a longing for the absolute opposite: the longing for a comedy! THE DEADLY EARNEST OF A COMEDY!

Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus (left) 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 toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage 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 in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Wim Wenders, from the first treatment for Wings of Desire :

Even though the angels have been watching and listening to people for such a long time, there are still many things they don’t understand. For example, they don’t know and can’t imagine what colors are. Or tastes and smells. They can guess what feelings are, but they can’t experience them directly. As our angels are basically loving and good, they can’t imagine things like fear, jealousy, envy or hatred. They are familiar with their expression, but not with the things themselves. They are naturally curious and would like to learn more, and from time to time they feel a pang of regret at missing out on all these things, not knowing what it’s like throwing a stone, or what water or fire are like, or picking up some object in your hand, let alone touching or kissing a fellow human being. All these things escape the angels. They are pure CONSCIOIUSNESS, fuller and more comprehending than mankind, but also poorer. The physical and sensual world is reserved for human beings. It is the privilege of mortality, and death is its price.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. Edward Snow:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic
orders? And even if one of them pressed me
suddenly to his heart: I’d be consumed
in his stronger existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure,
and we stand in awe of it as it coolly disdains
to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.
And so I check myself and swallow the luring call
of dark sobs. Alas, whom can we turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and the sly animals see at once
how little at home we are
in the interpreted world. That leaves us
some tree on a hillside, on which our eyes fasten
day after day; leaves us yesterday’s street
and the coddled loyalty of an old habit
that liked it here, stayed on, and never left.

5_2