cycle to a Transmediale co-project, transitlounge, that Jodi is part of, hang there for awhile. the collaborators in Sydney are asleep. Jodi has invited her writer’s group who actually show up. meet yet another writer in Berlin. this is becoming a theme. then off to Doris’ place for what I didn’t realize was a regular sit-down dinner. I’m late. Barbara is there, so we have a chance to catch up after one lady left finally — I didn’t get her name, but she talked almost non-stop for three hours. amazingly no one told her to shut up. she seemed used to be the talking nexus, uff. a cold ride home on the borrowed bike in the pouring rain.
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 upon 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 from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This 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”