ENTROPY of the IMPERIAL YOUTH

"Entropy of the Imperial Youth" by Troy's Work Table.

Watercolor and India ink on 9" x 12" watercolor paper.

ANGELS of BENJAMIN

Angelus Novus by Paul Klee. India ink, colored chalk, and brown wash on paper. 1920.

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My wing is ready to fly

I would rather turn back

For had I stayed mortal time

I would have had little luck.

—Gerhard Scholem, “Angelic Greetings”

"There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm."

—Thesis IX, On the Concept of History, by Walter Benjamin, translation by Dennis Redmond.

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And then there is another angel...

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"I turned from my window, heavy of heart as only a near and certain joy makes us, when I felt and alien presence in the room. It was nothing more than a stirring of the air, so that the words which formed themselves on my lips were like the creases suddenly thrown off a limp sail before a fresh breeze. 'Once more each year / the Christ child dwells / on Earth below / midst weal and woe'—with these words did the angel who had begun to take form in them evaporate. I did not stay any longer in the empty room."

—from "A Christmas Angel" by Walter Benjamin, as found in Berlin Childhood Circa 1900, translation by Carl Skoggard.

SAINT DEMETRIOS

Saturday night the wife, the child, and I wandered up to Seattle for the forty-seventh annual Saint Demetrios Greek Festival. The friend D. was celebrating his fifty-first annual celebration of his birth into the world. The overlap of the two events and many worlds they encompass—Greek, non-Greek, terrestrial, celestial, and so many more—made for an interesting evening.

We had Greek food—gyros, Greek fries, roast lamb sandwiches, Alfa lager, loukoumades, baklava. We watched Greek dancers. We watched the child dance on stage with other children. We listened to live Greek music—vocals, clarinet, accordion, drums, guitar. We helped look for chairs that were becoming available, in order to commandeer them for our table. We watched the friend D. open his various gifts, mostly books—The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders, The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald, Our Ecstatic Lives by Steve Erickson.

We wandered as our group of people grew to twenty or so, a small enclave in the midst of hundreds. We encountered and chatted with a person with which I attended high school. We marveled at stained glass windows of the four Gospel writers. We viewed ikons of Mary and Jesus and the various saints. We smelled the scents of souvlaki and moussaka as it wafted through the church grounds.

We returned to the table of the friend D.'s birthday celebration and bid him farewell, as we headed back to the car for our drive home, the mystical space and time of Saint Demetrios Greek Festival still echoing in our very beings.