Hollering From The Bottom Of A Wishing Well

Black Book 67, September 30, 2009: I'll tell you what?

Letting one more day roll slowly down the long dark hill into the past.

What a wondrous and distressing scrap heap there is down there at the bottom of the hill, a bottomless bottom full of wrecked hearts, wonders, wishes, busted dreams, the echoes of first hellos, an impossibly tangled chorus of goodbyes, forgotten thoughts, regrets, good intentions, scattered fairy dust, failed attempts, cribs, coffins, fallen wished-upon stars, lost love, tricycles and training wheels, cast-off fashions and fads, dismembered dolls, shit that no longer works or is no longer needed or that just hurts too damn much to hold onto for one more day. And under it all, entire civilizations and layer upon layer of prosaic trash.

Your first smile is down there somewhere, first giggle, first kiss, first dog, first Christmas and Fourth of July. Every forgotten memory, every bright morning and long dark night of the soul, every moment of ecstatic, extinct passion. Your beloved old moon globe is down there somewhere, along with the first record (John Denver) you ever bought at Sterling Drug, and your Schwinn Stingray bike with the sparkly green banana seat and sissy bar.

To think of all your own contributions to the landfill at the bottom of the day is almost more than you can bear. In many ways this bottomless landfill is a sort of collapsed Tower of Babel, an immense, sprawling collection of discards from the library of all mankind. No man can visit there who ever hopes to return, but it is rumored that many of the most abject specimens of humanity have nonetheless made the journey, and they spend their days roving over the mountains of the past, searching with sticks and broken rakes and improvised shovels for some reminder of the people they had once been.

A resonant scrap from a single wasted, otherwise wholly forgotten day is of course previous to these scavenger angels. And how much more precious must be the discovery of a personal photograph, a familiar toy, a love letter written in their own hand?

It’s a lottery, of course, but it’s what keeps those poor wretches going.

There must be millions upon millions of love letters in that landfill, written in every language ever spoken on earth, and I like to imagine that while these scavengers are stumbling through those miles of sad detritus they must be startled time and again by the sounds of laughter and happy, disembodied but familiar voices, rising up from crevasses in the mountains of trash, sometimes from someplace fairly close, sometimes from far below, but almost always sounding like voices carrying from a front porch somewhere in memory’s gloaming, or from a dock on a dark lake, moving on the wind of a perfect summer evening in childhood, in a place far, far away and now long gone.

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 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.

—Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”