A Shared Meal

Abstract

When I first read the last sentence of Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, ‘For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter’ (1969, p. 264), a ‘spark of holiness’ (Scholem, 1974, pp. 347–8) enlivened my day, and this disrupting illumination still persists. Under the sway of this moment, the everyday, the hearth, the home and the dinner table, is caressed into place by a time no longer proportioned by history, rather it is opened to a loving disorientation, ‘moving the walls of our dwelling’ (Irigaray, 2008, p. 92), making possible a becoming of thinking, writing and performance: a breathtaking moment embracing not only the simplest of memories, but the forgetting and recalling of the devastation of the world. Here in the moment of a pause, a full joyous season is gifted, making for a delightful lapse in the ontological order where everyday moments become alive with wonder. Fecund moments filled full by now-time, Jetztzeit (Benjamin, 1969, p. 261), not the homogenous, empty time of expectation, but ready moments in the present, a decisive ‘now’ unfolding not as chronos, the linear time of history, but kairos, a time of decisive, living ripeness. Such moments introduce a sacred revelatory disruption to the world order, stilling a brutal political and economic historicity in a world where ‘even the dead [are not] safe from an enemy [that] has not ceased to be victorious’ (Benjamin, 1969, p. 255). From such a threshold the possibility of making, of letting a work be, opens upon a shining expanse.