The future looms, but remains distant, indistinct, mountainous and unfathomable, the present stalls, unable to engage its drive forwards. Meanwhile the past swallows everything up as quickly as it is seen, instantly rendering it into a story.
It seems that the movement of the present forwards in time is magnetically connected to the future, that the future drags the present forwards, creating the illusion that neither are moving, always the same distance from each other, whilst the past is increasingly encroaching on the present, failing to maintain the balance.
Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, wings outspread, faced the past, seeing only a pile of debris grow bigger as history's fallen civilizations, wars and ruins accumulated and pushed him into the future. In our present, Benjamin's angel has also been consumed by the debris - we stand in it too. Maybe we are looking back at him, or he is looking back at us. In our present, we persist in laying foundations for the future on the uncleared debris of the past.
