“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.”

In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), written in Paris shortly before his attempt to flee Nazi-occupied France, Walter Benjamin describes Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus hanging in his workspace. In his interpretation, the angel faces the past as catastrophe piles wreckage upon wreckage at his feet. The winds of progress have caught his wings and blows the angel backwards, into the future. This is Benjamins’ famous image of the Angel of History.

Benjamin, a secular Jew deeply engaged with Jewish mysticism, made this painting central to his philosophy, not knowing (or perhaps knowing?) that underneath was an image of Martin Luther1, whose antisemitic writings were later weaponized by the Nazis. Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies (1543) called for burning synagogues, destroying Jewish homes, confiscating religious texts, and banning rabbis from teaching, arguing that antisemitism was part of an “authentic” German Christian heritage, not just Nazi ideology. One image piled on top of another image, superseding its affective power. But the irony of US-American Christian Nationalists now working with Jewish zionists in a genocidal project is rich.

The idea of “progress” is only possible for those who would turn their backs on the past and ignore the wreckage piling up behind them. The will not see that Nazi fascism rests on the catastrophic extermination of native peoples in the Americas, and the ideology of manifest destiny. Hitler explicitly studied U.S. history and praised what he called “the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity,” according to biographer John Toland.2 Hitler was impressed by U.S. resettlement programs that opened the West to white settlement, particularly the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the forced relocations like the Trail of Tears. They will not see how the deliberate use of starvation as a weapon, including the U.S. military’s policy to “kill every buffalo you can” to starve Native peoples, directly influenced Nazi hunger policies, and later down the line, the cutting down of olive groves by Zionist Jews and forced starvation of the Palestinian people.

No question, our progress too meant catastrophe for so many. It is something we have not had to face, tough I think, at some level, we have known it all along. We have known the smart phones we hold means the forced labor of children mining the minerals used to make them. We have known the early industrialization period textile mills employed (if it can be called that) children with small fingers and women. Now that an effort is underway to decimate the old economy, starve and/or imprison the weakest among us, and push women out of the labor force and into domesticity… the feeling in the pit of our stomachs is a recognition of that buried knowledge. They are performing a cesarian on a “new economy,” forcing it to be prematurely born. Many of us will find there is not place for us in this vision of progress.

Benjamin believed that “all progress” brings chaos and catastrophe, that progress is not gentle but violent and unpredictable. His insight was how what appears as “normal” has already meant catastrophe for millions of people. Our current discomfort is us finally seeing, what was always and undeniably true. This is a moment that calls for the difficult recognition that our prosperity, as a nation and a peoples, is premised on the subjugation of others. It calls for witnessing, and ultimately reparations. It calls us to question whether prosperity and progress necessarily entails catastrophe and subjugation, as Benjamin believed in his last days, or is this zero-sum game === patriarchal capitalism? Is this view realism, or is it pessimistic? Benjamin has been accused of being overly pessimistic, his melancholia (a fancy psychoanalytic word for depression) a personal affliction… Is our imperfect human natures the cause, or is this a western thing? Are we doomed? Can a practical idealism take root in these questions?

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Still, the immediate lesson is this: Document what’s being lost. Write down stories. Save physical media, print out posts if you can. Take photos and save them offline. Bear witness to this moment without turning away. The angel couldn’t stop the storm, but it refused to look away. Neither should you. And like the Angel, you may not be able to stay and awaken the dead, or make whole what is being actively destroyed, but at some point we will have to sort through what remains. We will need to eat and metabolize it as surely as any other kind of substinance.

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Not long after the attacks of 9/11, a friend of mine and I went to a conference in the state of Georgia, and wanting to see the beach and water, we rented a car to get there. I don’t remember seeing the beach that day, but what I do remember is that we pulled into a gas station to get gas, and got into a conversation with a middle aged woman who, upon learning that we were from New York City, shared with us how distraught she was over the attacks. She asked us if we knew anyone who had died, and we answered that yes, we did, and told our story. But it felt strange… it was a strange retelling among the many retellings of that period. Her reaction and emotions were so big, I had to wonder if my tame-by-comparison feelings were a sign of my own repression. Maybe there was something wrong with me, if I was so close to it and yet felt so little… But I quickly concluded that she must have had something going on in her life, some grief she could not directly tell or metabolize, and that she projected this grief onto the 9/11 event, so far away from her. You may recall that there was a long period of national mourning, but much of it appeared to me as the weaponization of a generalized US-American grief, a hype campaign to manufacture consent for a war for oil, and control in the Middle East.

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I have been feeling a lot of grief this past week “because” of a baby whale that got beached of the coast of Oregon near Yachats. It appears Hope, as the whale was named, got tangled in some fishing or crabbing gear, so it is totally our fault. Hope was found alive on the beach on Saturday, whereupon people flocked there to pour water on it all night and kept her (later discovered to be a he) alive for the high tides on Sunday morning and afternoon, hoping she could free herself. People dug trenches in the sand, tried to push and pull Hope free, attached an ingenious pulley system to try to get her unstuck but it failed. All efforts failed, and Hope was euthanized on Monday, and this gave rise to anger.

Scientists were trotted out to say it was the best thing to cut short her suffering, etc, but the cold language of science is far from the language of the heart. It was no comfort, and in fact, it felt like salt in the wound. It felt like “officials” did not do enough at all, even as they discouraged people from going down to help. Admittedly, something about Hope broke me… her vocalizations and flopping about as she tried very hard to get back out to the ocean depths. I hope Hope knew many humans also tried really hard to free her. Whales are smart, there are so many stories of them saving humans. It is so sad that we could not save Hope.

This even was far away from me, but being from Oregon, it felt very close to my heart. But I recognize that I’m like that lady that we met at the gas station in Georgia. All of my grief over everything attached itself to the story of Hope the whale, and my outsized feelings told me I need to pay attention now.

I like to know how things work, its a way to feel in control that will be familiar to many of you. So while I am going through my feelings, I tell the story to say that you too may get to feeling some outsized feelings, and that these feelings may attach to inexplicable things or events. First and foremost, you are not alone. I believe many of us are going through something like this.

Second, if you do not feel your feels and figure out how to move through it, your grief can be weaponized against you. I am noticing that TikTok, where I encountered and then followed the story of Hope, is now serving me a lot of similar animal-in-peril content, like they have my number. Stirring up our emotions, and then being able to direct or misdirect us though the tether of our collective grief, is something I am keeping an eye on. Look out for content that evokes feelings, images that provoke strong reactions. Ask questions about how that all works.

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Coming back the the Angel of History, when you look at the image, you will not see all the things that Benjamin saw there: the piles of debris, the gusts of wind. It was his interpretation, what he made of an image with which he lived day in day out. The images we live with, day in day out, serve as mirrors for us. We project onto them, and they mirror back to us things that we cannot look at directly. What we consume, image-wise, can make a huge difference in our survivals passing through this difficult time. Make an effort to surround yourself with images that nourish and support you. Art is one of the surest ways to maintain our sanity, an antidote but also, if we are not careful, poison.