Leakage

After encountering an old Irish speaker on a mountain road, George Moore wrote to this friend A.E.:

"Can the dreams, the aspirations and traditions of the ancient Gael be translated into English? I asked if the belief of the ancient Gael were not a part of his civilisation and had lost any meaning for us."

'In the 17th Century' writes Walter Benjamin, "the word Trauespiel was applied in the same way both to dramas and historical events'. And if there is an allegorical gaze, which estranges objects in its sad embrace, this also has an objective correlative, and describes historical states of affairs. When, in time of historical catastrophe or epochal change, the thread of intelligibility seems lost from events; when once thriving ways of life have calcified into hollow conventions, or when traditions enter the stages or their terminal decline; when particular histories, their time of potential lost, congeal into the closed shape of a Destiny and are surrendered to the condescension and abuse of posterity's gaze: it is in such conditions that the 'allegorical' (in Benjamin's sense), no longer our way of perceiving the world, is the very ruined appearance that the world returns to us, asking only, it seems, our own empty mimesis, its own gloomy picture of a world in devastation or else grown tired.