Blogue-Blague

Walter Benjamin & Travel as Collecting

“…what I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship between a collector and his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection….This or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories… The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are frozen as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them. … To renew the old world—that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things… Property and possession belong to the tactical sphere. Collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationary store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in pursuit of books!” “…Now I am on the last half-emptied crate, and it is way past midnight. Other thoughts fill me than the ones I am talking about—not thoughts but images, memories. Memories of the cities in which I have found so many things: Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence, Basel, Paris: memories of Rosenthal’s sumptuous rooms in Munich, of the Danzog Stocktum where the late Hans Rhaue was domiciled, of Sussengut’s musty book cellarin North Berlin; memories of the rooms where these books had been housed, of my student’s den in Munich, of my room in Bern, of the solitude of Iseltwald on the Lake of Brienz, and finally of my boyhood room, the former location of only four or five of the several thousand volumes that are piled up around me…. For a collecteor—and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be—ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to things. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” –Walter Benjamin, Unpacking my Library“…and yet for all of that, I had still never gotten used to the breathtaking impermanence of things.” –Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys
We approach the world, futilely, as collectors. Travel demonstrates as much as any personal intimacy that we cannot elicit perfect, unmoving loyalty. Writing anything down is basically sentimental, an act of preservation, an attempt to hold a moment or image still. Travel writing wants to defeat the impermanence of being in any one place. In keeping records of the intangible—people or places or experiences –we attempt to forget that the things we love are not, in fact, things, and therefore can’t be kept, preserved, or possessed.
Benjamin writes in Unpacking my Library, about the relationship between a collector and the things he or she collects, figuring that relationship as an extreme intimacy. This figuration extends into much of his other writing. His massive Arcades Project is in part an accounting that turns Paris into a collection, numbered, categorized, recorded and kept permanent. The same intimacy between a collector and his things characterizes Benjamin’s relationship to the places he visits and then describes.
Location is necessarily fleeting. As with art and with beauty and even, finally, with people for whom we feel things, there is nothing to be done about it. Our impulses toward everything that we encounter are essentially frustrated. Even the literal collection of objects, as chronicled in Unpacking my Library, is in the end an exercise in futility, as mortality of course erases all ledgers. Owning a place by governmental authority is no more feasible than guaranteeing love by marital law. Neither is in fact a promise; there is no security from one moment to the next.
Conquest of one kind or another has forever been one human answer to the looming truths of impermanence. Collection, particularly as Benjamin figures collection, is a sort of small-scale conquest. If you collect shoes or books or records, you want to conquer shoes or books or records by having the most of them, by having enough of them (though, of course, there’s never such thing as enough). Benjamin’s pieces recounting Marseille or Spain or Naples have always seemed to me reminiscent of early American explorers’ journals, in which trees and birds and animals and everything else are written down in minute detail. If something is unrecorded, the logic goes, it is therefore unknown and unpossessed, and the person who names it owns it. Columbus gave names to newly discovered objects, trees and animals and fruit, in order to claim ownership of them. He collected them by announcing them.
This recording or naming was a literal method of ownership when travel existed primarily for the purpose of conquest, when travelers brought nations and pieces of land back to monarchs like so many wrapped presents. Benjamin’s naming has a far less literal consequence. He does not gain any active ownership of the places he visits, and he isn’t recording anything that isn’t already known. This uselessness lends poignancy to his actions in writing and recording. As in our relationships with people, we think we can put our hands on a place or a person and record our relationship to it or them, record our presence there, as tangibly as sailing to an uncharted country and declaring its name to be “America.”
Of course, we’d like to collect the people we love and the people we desire. That’s why we tell stories about them. Narration is a kind of collecting. Cities and bodies are interchangeable in much travel writing because going somewhere is the same thing as being with someone physically, and each activity is as fleeting, as impossible to hold onto or to concretely prove, as the other. In old stories about seduction, physical proof is often the object; a lock of hair, a bedroom key, a letter in the lover’s handwriting. Consider the miasma over a handkerchief in Othello. Consumerist acquisition appeals, sets up its camp in the same place as sexual and romantic desire, because it promises to assuage these afflictions. What a relief that one can in fact own something. It doesn’t matter as much to own a pair of shoes as it matters to prove that someone once wanted you or loved you or that you really did travel to Paris or Thailand or Africa, but maybe if you buy enough shoes, the ache of impermanence will calm, close up into a peaceful silence. Of course, it never does, so we continue to apply a consumer’s impulse to essentially un-acquirable things. Perhaps the explorers who documented fruit and trees and animals and land-masses and brought them back to European rulers as though in boxes with price tags experienced a greater alleviation of this longing than we can imagine. Maybe by conquering, by naming a country and populating it with their subjects or relatives, they were able to in some way bridge the gap between personal desire and material acquisition.
Chronicling, like acquisition, is a failed defense against impermanence. We can’t take our stuff with us when we go, but we can’t even take our experiences with us into the next moment, except by recording them, by talking about them. Gossip can be understood through these texts as perhaps a function of longing rather than a malicious impulse; if we don’t tell someone about what happened or where we’ve been, that experience may just vanish. Telling people what happened is the acquisitive impulse applied to experience. Buying too much stuff is the same thing as telling secrets. Indiscretion is a kind of longing.