+travel essay. france+spain

pilgrimage to portbou
+ellia bisker

The unique value of the "authentic" work of art has its basis in ritual.
—Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Why visit Walter Benjamin’s grave? It was a pilgrimage. Benjamin had near-cult status where I did my undergraduate work—so much so that long before I ever read Art in the Age I could refer to it with the comfortable ease of an insider. At Vassar the art history professors referred to him with the Germanic "Ben-ya-meen" (much to the disgust of an actually German classmate of mine), except for a few holdouts who called him the even more pretentious "Ben-ha-meen" or, splitting the difference, just "Ben-a-meen." (To this day it just feels wrong to me to pronounce his name as it is spelled.)

Near-cult status; practically sainthood. Partly it was his compelling story—the unfinished masterwork, the failed attempt to escape from Nazi-occupied France, the suicide on the Spanish border, the permission for his companions to cross over, granted the very next day—it had all the makings of a classic tragedy. Plus his work was applicable to virtually any discipline in the humanities. Art? Literary criticism? Culture studies? History? You name it, he was relevant. By the time I was taking a senior seminar on Benjamin, particularly on his last, incomplete work, the Arcades Project, a running question had become: What Would Benjamin Do—or more precisely, What Would Benjamin Think? My seminar class went to Paris over spring break and walked through the streets and arcades, trying to see them through Benjamin's eyes.

The pilgrimage was a sincere act that began more or less in jest. A few years after we graduated, my friend Seth was reading Benjamin in his Master’s program and was making vague noises of going to Paris to see if that would help him figure out what the hell the man had actually been talking about (still kicking himself for not applying to take the seminar with the free trip). I frequently daydreamed about returning to Paris, where I had lived for a semester in college; I told Seth that if he went I would go along as his translator. This was pure escapist fantasy, a pleasant distraction from the daily grind of my day job and his thesis—until, almost without realizing it, we had purchased nonrefundable plane tickets to France. Then I learned about the monument to Benjamin’s memory in the town where he ended his life, and it was immediately obvious that this was the true purpose of our going. Equally obvious was that we would go by motorcycle. Seth loved to ride bikes, and renting a motorcycle would be significantly cheaper than renting a car to get to semi-remote Portbou, Spain, and anyway why do things halfway? As it turned out there was virtually no way to get there without a vehicle of some kind, not unless we wanted to emulate the great man himself and walk through the mountains, and in retrospect I can’t think of a better way to go.

The idea of the journey itself was almost like an academic in-joke, a contradiction in terms. To take a complicated journey to physically go to the actual gravesite of a man whose most famous idea had to do with the increasing dislocation of meaning from original objects was ridiculous, to say the least—even more so when one considered the fact that the grave might or might not even be where he was really buried. What did authenticity even mean under the circumstances? What did it matter? We rented a motorcycle in Nîmes and made our way around the Mediterranean coast, the sea an impossibly turquoise glow to our left as we passed sights of astonishing beauty in unrecordable instants.

We couldn't hear or speak in the deafening wind of our passage. All we could do was point: pale rows of trees lining the road like long stately columns; leaf-green irrigation canals mirroring the trees that hung over them; brilliant expanses of wild poppies growing untended in empty fields. The wind stripped the heat from our bodies and muscled against us like a living thing. Bushes of fragrant golden flowers grew along the side of the road and filled our helmets with the scent of fresh honey. This was not a reproducible experience.

When we hit the Pyrenees I was surprised to find myself suddenly gripped by gut-dropping fear. Here the road pitched steeply as it wound around the mountains, becoming a series of swooping blind curves around a cliff face that offered us the most magnificent view yet: the mountainsides covered with perfectly spaced rows of crooked grapevines, and the heart-stopping drop to the rocky sea below.

Seth pulled over to rest. “You doing okay?” he asked. I nodded wordlessly, my mouth as dry as paper, allowing my bloodless fingers to slowly unclench from the seat they gripped. “If you’re thinking that we might die, you could be right,” he said cheerfully. “But I feel pretty comfortable.” Somehow his equanimity made me feel better. It was true. I could be right. We could die. It would be too bad, of course, but all things considered, there were worse ways to go. I gritted my teeth and white-knuckled it through the rest of the turns, and we crossed the Spanish border without incident.

Portbou was a bright, quiet fishing town on a serene blue harbor that seemed to be populated entirely by old men and their dogs. A pair of them showed us the way to the Benjamin memorial, and we climbed up to it on stairs cut into the living rock. The monument was lonely and ineffable, a mute object. An angular metal tunnel, it led down from the clifftop toward the sea, where it dead-ended at a wall of glass pocked with a couple of what appeared to be bullet holes and inscribed with a Benjamin quotation: “It is more arduous to honor the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless.” It is an ironic statement for a memorial to a figure as renowned as Benjamin, but even in death he continues to assert his strenuous conviction that a traditionally linear historical narrative oppresses the masses. The marker of what may or may not be his grave bears a similar message: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin describes “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of everyday reality by accepting its reproduction.” Seth and I could have been satisfied with the images of Benjamin’s grave and memorial that are easily available online. But it seemed particularly inappropriate to try to “overcome the uniqueness” of this specific reality, to relegate the physical objects commemorating of the end of Walter Benjamin’s life to the realm of virtual replication. In spite of the age in which we live, it is still sometimes possible to experience authenticity.

Before we left the memorial site to begin our return journey, we paid our respects according to Jewish tradition, and this might be the action that best embodies what we were seeking with our visit. We each placed a small stone on the grave. This marked our having been there.

Ellia Bisker's poetry and prose have appeared in Pif magazine, 20 Pounds of Headlights, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Toasted Cheese, ReadyMade, the Utne Reader, and Graphic Poetry, a project of the design studio WIG-01. She is a graduate student living in New York City, where she works with a small circus, proofreads teen novels, and writes and performs songs on the ukulele. She is still not licensed to operate a motorcycle. Visit her Web site at www.elliabisker.com.