The Past Keeps Returning To Us

Did you notice that Holbein the Younger's painting, Christ in the Sepulcher, makes an appearance in Summer in Baden Baden?  It's Dostoevsky's favorite painting.

 

Sebald: Frustration, Writing, & Tea

I was moved by the accuracy and poignancy of Sebald’s observations on the frustrations of the writing life.  Poking around online I found some of the recommendations he gave to his final class of writing students and some thoughts on his use of imagery, both of which I found interesting and helpful.

Below are selections from our reading that are true to my experience of literary floundering. All of these come from Austerlitz.

I went through a difficult period which dulled my sense of other people’s existence, and from which I only very gradually emerged by turning back to the writing I had long neglected. (p. 32)

But the more I labored on this project over several months the more pitiful did the results seem. I was increasingly overcome by a sense of aversion and distaste, said Austerlitz, at the mere thought of opening the bundles of papers and looking through the endless reams I had written in the course of the years. (pp. 119-120)

But now I found writing such hard going that it often took me a whole day to compose a single sentence, and no sooner had I thought such a sentence out, with the greatest effort, and written it down, than I saw the awkward falsity of my constructions and the inadequacy of all the words I had employed. If at times some kind of self-deception nonetheless made me feel that I had done a good day’s work, then as soon as I glanced at the page next morning I was sure to find the most appalling mistakes, inconsistencies, and lapses staring at me from the paper. However much or little I had written, on a subsequent reading it always seemed so fundamentally flawed that I had to destroy it immediately and begin again. (p. 120)

Now and then a train of thought did succeed in emerging with wonderful clarity inside my head, but I knew even as it formed that I was in no position to record it, for as soon as I so much as picked up my pencil the endless possibilities of language, to which I could once safely abandon myself, became a conglomeration of the most inane phrases. There was not an expression in the sentence but it proved to be a miserable crutch, not a word but it sounded false and hollow. And in this dreadful state of mind I sat for hours, for days on end with my face to the wall, tormenting myself and gradually discovering the horror of finding that even the smallest task or duty, for instance arranging assorted objects in a drawer, can be beyond one’s power. (pp. 120-121)

If someone had come then to lead me away to a place of execution I would have gone meekly, without a word, without so much as opening my eyes, just as people who suffer from violent seasickness, if they are crossing the Caspian Sea on a steamer, for instance, will not offer the slightest resistance should someone tell them that they are about to be thrown overboard. (p. 121)

The entire structure of language, the syntactical arrangement of parts of speech, punctuation, conjunctions, and finally even the nouns denoting ordinary objects were all enveloped in impenetrable fog.(p. 122)

I could see no connections anymore, the sentences resolved themselves into a series of separate words, the words into random sets of letters, the letters into disjointed signs, and those signs into a blue-gray trail gleaming silver here and there, excreted and left behind it by some crawling creature, and the sight of it increasingly filled me with feelings of horror and shame. (p. 122)

It is comforting at the very least to know that self-disillusionment, horror, and shame are emotions that genius writers attribute to themselves as well.

Also…

Here, for anyone who is interested, is the route that Austerlitz walks in Greenwich, London on his way to the Observatory.

…and so to the Foot Tunnel running under the bend in the river. Over on the other side we climbed up through Greenwich Park to the Royal Observatory, which had scarcely any visitors apart from us on this cold day not long before Christmas. At least, I do not remember meeting anyone during the hours we spent there, both of us separately studying the ingenious observational instruments and measuring devices, quadrants and sextants, chronometers and regulators, displayed in the glass cases.

 (p. 96).

After crossing under the Thames via an underground foot tunnel, he emerges here.

He then walks past this ship, the Cutty Sark, the last surviving tea clipper, which has such profound historical and artistic significance for myself, before continuing on his way.

As I mentioned in class, it is interesting to me that Sebald, that among everything else he sees on the walk, going so far as to note with with excruciating detail the history of the grounds spread out before him, he would fail to mention this ship. 

The leafless trees on the slopes of the park were already deep in the shadows rising from the earth; before us, at the foot of the hill, was the broad square of turf, black as night and crossed diagonally by two pale sandy paths and the white façades and colonnades of the National Maritime Museum, and on the Isle of Dogs on the far side of the river the sparkling glass towers rose above the rapidly gathering darkness into the last of the daylight. As we walked down to Greenwich, Austerlitz told me that a number of artists had painted the park in past centuries.

We know that nautical history and industrialization were topics of concern for Sebald, as evidenced in passages like these from The Emigrants:

The Manchester Ship Canal, Ferber told me, was begun in 1887 and completed in 1894. The work was mainly done by a continuously reinforced army of Irish navies, who shifted some sixty million cubic metres of earth in that period and build the gigantic locks that would make it possible to raise or lower ocean-going steamers up to 150 metres long by five or six metres.

And later,

Ships of the Canada & Newfoundland Steamship Company, the China Mutual Line, the Manchester Bombay General Navigation Company, and many other shipping lines, plied the docks near the city centre. The loading and unloading never stopped: wheat, nitre, construction timber, cotton, rubber, jute, train oil, tobacco, tea, coffee, can sugar, exotic fruits, copper and iron ore, steel, machinery, marble and mahogany—everything, in fact, that could possibly be needed, processed or made in a manufacturing metropolis of that order.

But alas, for whatever reason, he fails to mention the ship standing directly in his line of sight. It is entirely possible that I am biased, however. 

Here are a couple blog posts I’ve written about the Cutty Sark elsewhere:

The Famous Tea Clipper Races

Visiting the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, England

Long Sentences...Long Scenes...

Reading Summer in Baden-Baden, reading the introduction, Sontag saying that Tsypkin was into Antonioni (but not Tarkovsky), then reading these incredibly long sentences got me thinking about Antonioni's The Passenger, its final scene, an unbroken, long shot that last like eight minutes, and then being reminded of a quote about slow cinema, "Magnification of time permits our understanding of it," which is from a talk given by Christopher Holliday.

Olivier Messiaen's 'Quartet for the End of Time'

I had been listening to this piece some when we were reading Sebald; the dissonance of birdsong transcriptions placed amid those strangely unnerving piano chords and menacing clarinet runs—plus the fact that Messiaen composed and first performed the piece in a prison camp in Görlitz during WWII—felt like they brought something to bear on Sebald's meditations on the natural world as a backdrop for the horrors of the 20th Century.

And then it shows up again in Outline! Here is the excerpt:

Presently Clio, the pianist, put her hand up. She said that she too had found it difficult to write about an animal. She knew nothing about animas: she had never even had a pet [...] But the assignment caused her to notice things differently: walking home, she had not looked at the things she looked at but instead had become, as she walked, increaingly aware of birds, not just the sight of them but also their sound, which, once she attuned her ear to it, she realized she could hear constantly all around her. She remembered then a piece of music she had not listened to for a long time, by the French composer Olivier Messiaen, written during his internment in a prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War. Some of it was based, or so she had understood, on the patterns of birdsong he had heard around him while under detention there. It struck her that the man was caged while the birds were free, and that what he had written down was the sound of their freedom. (p. 205–6)

Here it takes on a slightly different valence, due to Cusk's preoccupation with the way individuals (perhaps especially artists?) define themselves in the negative, by their relation to other lives and other stories. Messiaen paid attention to the birdsong because he was not, could not be, the bird.

Richard Strauss' Last Four Songs (Vier Letzte Lieder) were the great composer's farewell to a world that was forever destroyed by the events that underlie all of Sebald's work, especially Austerlitz.  These songs have been important to many important people, including too many writers to name (the songs make notable appearances, to take one example, in several of Philip Roth's novels).  They've certainly been my steady companions since I first listened to them sometime late in 2003, and I've listened to all the great vocal interpreters, but it became clear to me early on that Gundula Janowitz's 1971 version, under the complicated but much-admired conductor Herbert von Karajan and his Berliner Philharmoniker, was the most affecting.  I've had many arguments about this over the years with people.  It came as a wonderful surprise to me to learn, then, shortly after he died earlier this year, that David Bowie--who has also long been a musical companion of my days--had long shared the same preference for Janowitz' recording of the Last Four Songs:

"There is one piece of music that puts me in a place that no other music does. It's called Four Last Songs, written by Richard Strauss. Particularly a performance by Gundula Janowitz. It can definitely bring me to tears." - David Bowie in Rolling Stone, Oct 2003

(Make sure to have volume up, and play through to the last song, "Im Abendrot."):

The Last Four Songs - Richard Strauss

Grant Gee's Patience (After Sebald)

and the soundtrack...