Joanne Diaz and Jason Reblando
Passages
—after Dani Karavan’s Passages (1994)
The corridor of steel
commemorates the emergencies
in which one man drilled down
into everything: history and progress
and technology, yes, but fragments,
too, and the rags of time, and the curiosities
of the Parisian arcades, only to find
himself at the end of a difficult mountain pass,
heartsick, weary, with a suitcase full
of all the wrong papers. A sheet of glass
separates the viewer from the seduction
of a fall into the sea. In four languages,
the etched glass reads: Historical construction
is devoted to the memory of the nameless.
Of course, there is no hope of escape
from history, and things made of glass
have no aura. At the top of the chute,
the cemetery is a city of marble caves.
One unhewn stone marks nothing more
than the idea of him, littered now
with hundreds of tiny pebbles
left by so many pilgrims. A little boy gathers
a handful, then creates a solar system in the sand.
Image by Jason Reblando
Authors’ Note: The italicized phrases come from Benjamin’s “The Dialectical Image” in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940, translated by Edmund Jephcott and edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Harvard University Press, 2003), 406 and “Experience and Poverty,” from Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2: 1931-1934, translated by Rodney Livingstone and edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Harvard University Press, 1999), 734.
“Passages” is an excerpt from a word/image project titled La Ruta: Walter Benjamin’s Final Passage. This ekphrastic project provides an exploration of exile, migration, and the complex histories of borders—especially the border between France and Spain.
Joanne Diaz reads “Passages”
Joanne Diaz is the author of two poetry collections, The Lessons and My Favorite Tyrants, and her next book is forthcoming from Barrow Street Press in 2026. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she has also received fellowships from Ragdale and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is the Isaac Funk Endowed Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University.
Jason Reblando is an artist and photographer whose work is in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His monograph, New Deal Utopias (Kehrer Verlag) was published in 2017. He teaches photography at Illinois State University.