What We (I) Want and When We (I) Want It

Forche writes in The Angel of History, “If you ask them anything they go on telling you the same thing forever./ Not what happened, but what may happen./ Death understood as death./ The world in its worlding./ Our hope put into question./ Figures dead and alive/ whispering not truth but a need for truth when one word is many things” (51). Rich, I believe, says something quite similar, though the context is very different, and what Rich hopes for, or rather laments, is that there is no reader that might not misunderstand her because words mean many things. Rich, I hope, is being ironic, while Forche here works to underscore what feels like a sense of frustration tied to Benjamin’s and Heidegger’s (both on different sides of the Nazi question) understanding of history, where the world itself is a thing to which we must bow and that encompasses within its bounds all particular actions and movements, guaranteeing the repetition of things within the rules and nature of the world, and where Benjamin’s understanding seems fatalistically similar, though he maintains some hope in Marx and the iteration of remembrance as a tool that might finally lead to synthesis (crudely: “if we don’t remember the past: doomed to repeat it” or “history repeats, first as tragedy, second as farce,” farce being the better but still more tragic of the two since it arrives out of a failure to prohibit the reoccurrence of particular expressions of power (sorry for all this exposition!). Where Rich’s impulse, even if ironic, tends to want to be able to be clear, to be able to say the thing and have it be recognized as such by all, without miscomprehension, I feel like Forche is far more cognizant of the privileges/dangers of difference, that difference might both be the thing that guarantees a wealth of expression and that dictates the very failures of understanding and desire that might be said to have caused the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century. Difference then is something to be celebrated and reviled (see Forche’s compendium of quotes, references, all quite beautiful vs. the signs of the world’s particular failure: Shukkei-en; Theresienstadt, the life of Ellie), since it is primarily this want or need for truth that binds together the sublime with the horrific.

Odd then, for me at least, that Forche in Blue Hour seems to have gone the route of the mystic in some ways, attempting to catalogue, or maybe even to write, the book that Valery says, “contains everything that you could possibly wish to know” and that melts “until it could no longer be distinguished from this world that is about us” (AoH, 77 my emphasis). Where Rich continues to strive toward clarity and toward recognizing personal pain as a direct link to the experience of the world, thereby asking that we come to recognize or even privilege similarity in order to mobilize a broad range of resources (from food to simple empathy) in order to tackle larger goals, Forche seems to insist on the privilege of the private and its difference/similarity to the larger things of the world, tying all together as participants in a kind of history that privileges truth as truth, as the larger things, the larger movements that obliterate the personal and the individual (which brings to mind a quote by J. Berger: “Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one”).