Intermittent Benjamin: Pretzel, Feather, Pause, Lament, Clowning

[all_unnecessary]

Such unconnected words are the starting point of a game that was very popular during the Biedermeier period. What you had to do was link them up meaningfully without changing their oder. The shorter the sentence and the fewer the intervening clauses, the more the solution was admired. This game produced the most wonderful discoveries, especially among children. To children, words are still like caverns, with the strangest corridors connecting them. Now, however, imagine this game being turned back to front: think of a sentence as if it had been constructed according to these rules. This would, at a stroke, give it a strange exciting meaning for us, In reality, something of this perspective is contained in every act of reading. It is not just ordinary people who read novels in this way - that is to say, for the names or formulas that leap out of the text at the reader. The educated person, too, is constantly on the lookout for turns of phrase or striking expressions, and the meaning is merely the background on which rests the shadow that they cast, like figures in relief. This is particularly apparent with texts that are regarded as sacred. The commentaries designed to serve such texts fix on particular words, as if they had been chosen according to the rules of the game and assigned to the reader as a task. And in fact the sentences that a child will compose from a group of words during a game really do have more in common with those in sacred texts than with the everyday language of grownups. Here is an example that shows how a child of twelve joined up some prescribed words: "Time sweeps through nature like a pretzel. The feather paints the landscape, and if a pause ensues, it is filled with rain. No lament is heard, for there is no clowning around."

--Walter Benjamin, Excerpt from "Thought Figures," SW2pt2, 726-7.