NEW POEM, BY STEVEN BENSON, IN “TOWARDSUTOPIA”:”RE-TERRITORIALIZATION OF LIVERPOOL”. SEE BOTTOM OF BLOGROLL TO THE RIGHT

SEBALD AND CRITICAL THEORY EMBODIED/ENSCRIBED IN A HUMAN FORM; BY STEVEN BENSON

I have been reading some critical theory based on Deleuze and Guatarri. Critical theory is all very well,and often gives a useful framework, and is a catalyst for new ways of looking at texts. But, it does seem to me that, in Sebald’s writing, especially his prose-fiction and poetry, critical theory is LIVED OUT, in approachable, compassionate and HUMAN forms and manifestations; that is, empathy with his characters in warm writing, quietly emotional. He read the Frankfurt School writers in the 1960s; I have no evidence (he MAY have done!) read Deleuze, Guattarri, Derrida or any lesbian and gay studies or Queer Theory; but in his noncriticism -based writings we have an assimilable, credible, indescribably moving and compassionate WORKING OUT of theories from various schools of critical thought.

For instance: 1.”deterritorialization”(a deleuzian concept), ie how marginalized races, sexualities and differently abled people are sidelined and written out of history by the hegemony; or, to use another Deleuze term “made minor” in the context of “major” dominant power.

2. Sebald goes further than this: he REterritatorializes, ie, reclaims, these people- by allowing the abject a voice so that the objects(done TO) become SUBJECTS through his narratives, and are rescued FROM marginalisation (to the edges of hegemony, often oppressive and brutal history) by his reparative stories. They are re-written back into history. Examples are the emmigrants’ narratives, and  Austerlitz, and “Dr.K”, in “Vertigo”( ironically or, possibly, knowingly, to Sebald, Kafka is the starting point for Delueze’s concept of the “minor”; and Sebald adds the further “minorisation” of Dr. K’s suppressed-by hegemony and brutality again{see this posthttp://decayetude.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/sebald-reclaims-kafka/}-homosexuality/bisexuality, all in very HUMAN terms. Here, altho Dr. K possibly succumbs to the “jackboot of history”, Sebald is doing, through narratives of great warmth and power, the reparative work of lesbian and gay studies, for instance.

Other obvious examples are the gay couple, Cosmo and Ambros, the(again gay) Roger Casement , the (once more gay!!) Henry Selwyn and the love of his life, Naegeli; and Austerlitz, the displaced Jewish person(as well as Dr. K and others of course, all marginalised/”deterritorialized”in various ways). Sebald was himself an emmigrant, always expressing, via his sebaldian narrator, and in interviews, his sense of being without a homeland, and being an outsider figure,even in the progressive  UEA in East Anglia, but especially an outsider from morally compromised Germany with its unwillingness (especially upto the 1960s) to try and understand what had happened under the Third Reich and why(as well as his father being in the Wehrmacht and working under the Third Reich)

So it is all there, like theory WORKED OUT,  in the flesh(of piercingly human narratives), embodied. But obviously much much more, in its sad, melancholic tone, which yet, almost paradoxically, gives it  sense of reparativeness as he RESCUES for posterity these lost “deterritorialised”/marginalised figures and narratives,( themelves composites of real people and fiction.)

What I am saying, essentially, is WHERE are minor and reparative , and possibly ALL theories, AFTER Sebald’s writings?: because he has  done (nearly) all of it, encapsulated warmly, empathically and compassionately in his own blend of narrative, history, (semi) autobiographical memoir, geography(psychological and physical), history, what man has done to man; its all there. So, in comparison, sometimes theory seems dry, having immersed myself in this greatest of all great writers, with his vast(HUMAN) scope of subject and his incomparably beautiful, mournful yet ennobling and, somehow, life-enhancing, tone. But, strangely and ironically, theory also informs it, and adds to the appreciation of Sebald’s richness.

SEBALD, ADORNO AND THE PROGRESS/NON PROGRESS OF HISTORY:A POEM, BY STEVEN BENSON

Whilst Adorno

And

Benjamin

Believed

We had to

Have

“Negative

Dialectics”,

And an

“Interregnum”,

Respectively,

In order to

Stand back and

Contemplate

The horrors of

History,

Especially

Stalin

And the

Holocaust:-

Sebald believed

History was an

Inexorable

Monolithic

March towards

Destruction

(Both man-made

And from

Nature itself):

An UNstoppable

Juggernaut.

This induced

Feelings of

Melancholia and

Indeed

Despair;

Because in

Sebald’s

Worldview,

History

Catapults

Back upon

Itself,

Like Benjamin’s

“Angel of

History”,

Whilst

Simultaneously

Trying to

Move forwards

(A doomed

Attempt).

{Inspired by part 3., “Dark Night Sallies Forth”, of “After Nature”(trans Hamburger), where Sebald’s experience of mid/late 60s Manchester-cf “Bleston” in “Across the land and the Water”-with its slum clearance and decayed industrialism, engendered his sense/foreboding of the cataclysmic end of history, or of history being dragged backwards into destruction. See also the Max{sic!} Ferber section of the “Emmigrants”, another recounting of this time; and , for a more FACTUALLY accurate account of the Manchester period of his life, because Sebald(knowingly) PLAYS with the facts,see chapter 2 “The Sternheim years” by Richard Sheppard, pp. 64-81 and 82-88, plus notes pp.95-106, in “Saturn’s Moons”(ed Caitling and Hibbitt, 2011). This invaluable essay also details Sebald’s knowledge of, and personal correspondence with, Adorno; and his knowledge of much of Benjamin’s work and his familiarity with the Frankfurt School’s ideas generally.

SEBALD LINKS:AFTER “PATIENCE”(THE NEW FILM BY GRANT GEE) AND AFTER “AFTER NATURE”(TRANS. HAMBURGER 2002).BY STEVEN BENSON

Having watched this hypnotic and poignant film(“”Patience:After Sebald: A Walk Through the Rings of Saturn”, 2012,dvd) and read all three sections of “After Nature”, Sebald’s poem, written in the 1980s, BEFORE his famous prose fiction- and eerily prefiguring many of his later thematic concerns-I feel  am entering a sebaldian maze of

desolation

destruction-wreaked by man on himself and other men

the uncanny-In Freud’s sense of the “unheimlische heimat”(see earlier posthttp://decayetude.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/the-uncanny-return-an-unsettling-re-working-of-unheimlisches-heimat/,and my personal response to this idea, in the form of a poemhttp://towardsutopia.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/unheimliche-heimatunhomelyuncanny-home/, ie the feeling that you have been somewhere BEFORE: it both has some of the familiarity of a “heimat”(“homeland”)yet is strangely UNfamiliar(“unheimlische”),because part of oneself has usually (subconsciously) been severed from oneself, and thus seems familiar because it has left its (unsettling) residue in the subconscious mind(recognizing one’s own suppressed homoerotic feelings is an example Freud himself, in his earlier writings, used) but is, simultaneously, estranged from oneself. The most striking example, in Sebald’s later writing, is in “Rings of Saturn” where the sebaldian narrator not only feels he has not only previously BEEN to his  friend and translator( the poet Michael Hamburger’s) house; but that he actually lived his friend’s LIFE, that is he had  BEEN him. Another explanation of this-which would fit neatly with the homoerotic sublimation/suppression theory, with which I agree-is object identification: the sebaldian narrator is in love with the poet and therfore wanted to BECOME him (or aspects of him);in other words, a sort of wishful -thinking identification with the beloved

the effect of attrition in nature-for example the erosion of the Suffolk cliffs(Dunwich) and the silting up of the Suffolk coastal rivers(touched on in the film).

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

The film is visually evocative and haunting; and, from the viewpoint of an introductory understanding of Sebald’s concerns, themes and style, and of the expansion of the author’s OWN grainy mesmerising photographic images and benjaminesque “captures”(of lost time) into the director’s OWN images,it is very effective. However,to any experienced reader of Sebald, I felt that some of the added commentaries detracted from letting the landscapes and black and white images speaking for themselves. I think the film would also be likely to lead to further exploration of Sebald’s OWN writings. The soundtrack, by “The Caretaker”, “mashed-up” and looped Schubert songs, from 78s, is itself haunting and eerie: music from a distant planet.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

So, moving into “After Nature”,and concentrating on the first two poems of the sequence. “After Nature”:what does each word mean/refer to?

1. To Sebald(and/or to the sebaldian narrators therein)

2. Because I believe, to a resonable degree, in the Barthian “Death of the Author” thesis,( and am thus imposing my own subjectivity ON TOP of Sebald’s intended meanings): what does it mean to Me, as an individual reader?

NATURE: refers tothe natural, ie NON manmade environment, as opposed to the man-MADE one of, for example, the destructions of wars;and  the (concomitant) oppression and destruction (sometimes) of marginalised “groups”/peoples, for  instance Jews and homosexuals and many others(Sebald refers, for example, in Part 2,to the cruel colonisation of Inuit peoples.) However “natural” (non man-made or non adulterated) nature is not always beneficent either: there are floods, merciless (ice) landscapes, siltings and cliff collapses.  This more the direct concern of Part 2, “And if I remained by the outermost Sea”, about the botanist and explorer, Steller. Part 1, about Grunewald the homosexual early 16th century painter,is more about  what man has done to man(with , in MY  interpretation, the emphasis on MAN, most wars , though not quite all, being caused by men’s exteriorization of their inner insecurities unto outward competitiveness, tribalism and thereby sometimes resulting in warfare).Grunewald’s figures, in his paintings, are distorted and tortured(literally; there is much about Christ’s crucifixion) ; and SELF-tortured and SELF-distorted. there is a strange passage(pp.18/19) where it is left ambiguous, playing into history’s lack of definite knowledge in this matter,whether Grunewald and Matthias Nithart are the two aspects of Grunewald himself or that they are lovers; probably both, knowing Sebald’s(later)writings on homosexual oppression; and there is the idea of “ two painters  in ONE{my capitals} body/whose hurt flesh belonged to both”, a wholly OVERT reference to  the same-sex love affect between Grunewald and Nithart/”Nithart”(whether he existed historically or not is irrelevant here because to the sebaldian narator they  are re-imagined as TWO lovers{interestingly, the translator is Michael Hamburger himself!})

3. what is “natural”, ie innate to each individual as regards sexual orientation, ie. “After{Grunewald and Nitharts’}Nature”, their NATUAL homosexuality and love for each other:”pursuing the study/Of their own nature”, p.19.

There is a lot going on in this passage from p.17-19!Firstly,we have Sebald’s usual exteriorization of the inner psychological, desuetudinous self/landscape into EXternal catastrophe, which is, in contrast to the naturality of Grunewald and Nithart’s relationship,UNnatural, (in the sense that man corrupts nature and causes wars or lays the foundations for nuclear catastrophes); or, as, with Grunewald, his obsession with PHYSICAL bodily wounds, a sort of somatisation of inner psychological and emotional scars; thus, Grunewald gets the plague and comes out in all kinds of (exteriorized) “excresences”. Secondly, there is the link again between Freud’s idea of the INTERNAL  manifestation , via somatisation, of EXternally inflicted wounds, played out in Grunewald’s tortured, masochistic art, mirrored, again, by numerous lists of GLOBAL catastrophes; so we have the start of a theme here, in the 1980s, which is to recur, in the 1990s, in the later fiction. Intererestingly, Sebald corresponded with , and was familiar with, the work of Adorno, in particular, but also Benjamin(to be explored in a poem shortly): this was at the time, 1966-8, of his being a reader at University of Manchester, a dark time in his life (cf Richard Shepherd,”The Sternheim Years”,in “Saturn’s Moons,”ed.Jo Caitling and Richard Hibbitt,2011, for a factual account of this period).I might make some comments on the last section of “After Nature” (“Dark Night Sallies Forth”) which uses his time in Manchester as a springboard for obscure(even for Sebald) links to more global catastrophes. However, I feel somewhat overwhelmed , for the present, having reached this apogee of knowledge and awareness of the absolute darkness of at least SOME of Sebald’s vision(HE has been accused of draping atrocities in “aesthetic melancholia”; not so-a very reductive reading, but his writing style IS, nonethless aesthetically startlingly beautiful and graceful) But the visions of all three sections of this earlier book and of lots of his later work go far far deeper than adopting a pose of aesthetic melancholy or even(solely) a true position of such; that one could think this is truly risible!.

…………………………………………………………………………….

Anyway, I am stepping back form the edge, something most(if not all)of  Sebald’s narrators and characters were unable to do.Perhaps the manifold readings of “after” and “Nature” are best crystallised in a poem(by myself!):

AFTER:

Decimated

Blank

White

World

Post nuclear

Annihilation

(Think Orford Ness);

Or some other

Apocalypse…

NATURE

Taking

“After”

Oneself,

Being

Oneself,

AS Nature

Made us,

INCLUDING

Homosexuals:

We are made

LIKE Nature:

AFTER Nature.

“HE EXPERIENCED /THE EFFECT OF FORESAKEN THINGS IN A FOREIGN SPACE”(“AFTER NATURE”, PART 2): ANOTHER SEBALDIAN POEM, BY STEVEN BENSON

I have heard it said

That, when

One reads

Sebald,

All kinds of

Resonances

Echo

Around

Oneself.

What is this

Uncanny

Pre-figuring

And

Con-figuring

Of the self

Through

This

Great Writer?

They re-afffirm,

Re-echo

Ourselves; they

Reflect back

Ourselves

To us

A

Sort of

Doppelganger

Effect

Sometimes

That Sebald takes

To its

(Un)natural

Conclusion

 

“BUILDINGS THAT BEGIN TO SUBSIDE/AS SOON AS ERECTED”: A SEBALDIAN POEM BY STEVEN BENSON

Decayed “Grand “Hotel Scarborough; read the reviews on Trip Advisor to see whats it is like inside!

former ballroom?”Grand” again

The above is a quotation from part 2, “And if I remained by the outermost Sea”, of “After nature”

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Dunwich;

Scarborough.

One has

Already

Fallen

Into the sea

(Its churchbells allegedly

Toll

Beneath

The sea);

The other

Is slipping

Very gradually

Into the sea

NOW,

Despite the

Helpless

Sea defences;

As “The Grand”

Becomes

“The Decrepit”;

Just as

England’s former

Second city

Became a

City

BELOW

The sea

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Time erodes.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

This connects to my short story re the fall into the sea, in 1993, of the Holbeck Hall Hotel, Scarboroughhttp://decayetude.wordpress.com/2012/05/05/the-hotel-and-the-guest-a-story-of-sebaldian-malaise-and-an-essay-in-psychogeography/

“BLESTON:A MANCUNIAN CANTICAL”(SEBALD “ACROSS THE LAND AND WATER”, TRANS GALBRAITH, 2011):AN EXPLORATION, BY STEVEN BENSON

From 1966-68 Sebald was an Assistant Teacher at Manchester University. I have written my OWN response to his experience of Manchesterhttp://decayetude.wordpress.com/2012/04/29/two-sebaldian-poems1-dark-satanic-mills/, his experience being detailed in the Max {sic!Sebald was known to his friends as Max}Ferber section of “The Emmigrants” and the last part of “After Nature”(“Dark night sallies forth”). At this time it is documented (in “Saturns Moons” ed Caitling et al)how Sebald would read Michel Butor’s novel “L’Emploi du Temps”(translated as “Passing Time”, 1956)which, amongst other things, is about Butor’s experience also as a Teaching Assistant at Manchester University(1956-8), and where Bleston appears as the name for Manchester. There is an excellent blog on Butor, Sebald, music, time and space and related issues athttp://cathannabel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-539

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Part 1:”Fete Nocturne”

Sebald’s usual precoccupations arise immediately:

1. Death and what happens/doesnt happen thereafter(“Now that death is all of life”)

2. Nocturama(night-time animal/bird life, cf near opening of “Austerlitz”){“The starlings have forgotten their old life../Staying in Bleston all winter”})

3.A “mute” world of shadows and wraith like images, which are “shuttered”, that is, not quite real/alive(a metaphor which very often recurs in Sebald, such as also exists in the maze-like physical{mirroring psychological} lostness of the sebaldian narrator’s walk across Dunwich Heath in “Rings of Saturn” later). “And without image” could be a reference to the doppelganger, which has no reflection/image in a mirror;and to the idea of Benjamin of the photographic “capture”, which purports to “capture” forever a lost moment in time; but here there is a capture/”capture” of NOTHING. The months are “lifeless and the trees “sootcovered”. The usual psychogeographical link is made:these starlings are “screaming at night in the heart/In the brain of the city huddled together” and “sleepless”(Co-incidentally, there is a reference to the old Lewis’s department store warehouse, Lewis’s having had till 2001 a branch in Manchester:I have a post on the last remaining Lewis’s, with “captures”,as it died, in 2010 herehttp://decayetude.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/desuetudeimages-and-text-on-decay-and-memory-inspired-by-sebald-and-the-death-of-a-department-store/ ). So the city has, metaphorically, human attributes, which lead to the characteristic sebaldian feeeling of malaise and uneasiness and occlusion of the personality, as an implied(via metaphor) mirror of the darkness of the (external), geographical city.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Part 2. Concensus Omnium.

The theme of dark abandonment persist here(a “blank” and “foresaken place”). There may be a conscious/ unconscious reference to TS Eliot here, in regard to the latter’s timeless Rose Garden in “Four Quartets”(opening of “Burnt Norton”), a dead rose having already been introduced in part 1:”Bleston knows an hour/Between summer and winter/Which never passes and that/Is my plan for a time/Without beginning or end”; this could be Eliot’s still point of the turning world too. However, it is not at all Eliot’s Edenesque vision of eternity/outside time here: “All we experience/Becomes bitter{sic} Bleston”

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Part 3:”The sound of Music”

Sebald here, implicitly, introduces his theme of how little “right” has he , compared to those who have suffered atrocities and been persecuted(“the history/Of  torture a travers les ages”), with hidden early reference to the inexpessible, limitless suffering of those caught up in the Holocaust(as usual, an oblique reference); there is guilt at allowing oneself to experience ONE’S OWN sadness(“whose right it really is “). Again, everything is “defunct”;”The mere shadow of a feast-day phantom”; “burnt husks”(Again a conscious or unconscious reference to Eliot’s “burnt -out ends of smoky Days”??). We somehow do not believe “the sick are /Miraculously healed” in this God/god-forsaken place(the “ships waiting in the fog”).

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Part 4. “Lingua Morta”{“Language of the Dead”}

This section is especially reference-laden, a precursor to the consciously ironic and playful last section; we are, indeed, in danger of being “lost in the filaments” of obscure references and the traps of language (Eliot’s “slippery words”). The title obviously continues the pre-occupation with  a spectral, shadowy, dark, even dead, city, reflecting back, externally, the poetic narrator’s own INNER derelict psychological condition,though this is not as overt as in the later wasteland spaces of the occasion when the sebaldian narrator gets lost in the labarynth that is Dunwich Heath(“Rings of Saturn”).

This new theme of the maze of words(“fil d’ariane”,”Ariane’s thread”), an echo of Butor’s novel, with which Sebald was concerned  at the time (see references to it in “Saturns Moons”, ed Caitling et al, 2011); where , to Butor, the labarynth is the maze of words and also of his fighting to escape from Manchester(Bleston).There are two references to revenants, again a major pre-occupation of Sebald’s in his prose fiction: 1. “Kebad Kenya” refers to soemone who, as a revenant, takes possession of other men’s bodies.2. “opgekilte schottns” are frozen shadows(tellingly, probably from the Yiddish, with disturbing associations of concentration camp corpses or inmates, subject to unspeakable tortures); but also, according to Galbraith, (in his notes to his translation,p.179)”revenant murderous shadows”. So Bleston is not only dark and unwelcoming and full of wraiths but these shadow-dwellers are vengeful, and this adds to the growing feeling of menace.The MICROcosm of Sebald’s(or at least the poetic sebaldian narrator’s) and Butor’s  experiences of Bleston/Manchester extrapolates outwards, MACROcosmically, into a typically (but early)sebaldian meditation on “the natural history of {human-caused} destruction”(“If the years of all humanity lay/Strewn about him in their thousands debris”). See also my post on Eric Santner’s hypothesis,in ” On creaturely Life:Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald”(2006), developed by myself,(herehttp://decayetude.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/thanks-to-eric-l-santneron-the-sebaldian-narators-repressed-homoeroticism-homosexual-panic-and-natural-catastrophecatastrophization/): that catastrophe in Sebald is on both a global scale and on an inner psychological scale, and relates to, firstly, the sebaldian narrators’ concern for, but also sometimes identification WITH, marginalized and persecuted groups, especially homosexuals and Jews and Jewish homosexuals; the implications of which (Santner and I discuss) are strongly indicative of Freud’s theory that outer obsession with catastrophe and dereliction and destruction is, in essence, a sublimation of unexpressed homoerotic desires in both the characters/”characters”(they often merely MIRROR the narrator) AND in the sebaldian narrator himself-though sometimes,like the Cosmo and Ambros story(in the later “Emmigrants”. 1993) the characters’ sexuality is, presumably, expressed and actualised, but at the cost of social ostracisation at the least and persecution and/or death, at the worst. This disturbing psychological underlay is oddly present through many of the sebaldian narratives and, in fact, seems one of the most connecting, overarching of the many threads, in my opinion.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Part 5 Perdu dans ces filamants(“Lost in these traces/filaments”)

Well, here Sebald is playful, in his characteristically doleful manner!The title is a quotation from “L’emploi du Temps”(itself probably a reference to Proust and “A la recherche du temps perdu”; or an anti-reference, if time can’t be regained, if, even via memory, it just passes/vanishes), translated as “Passing Time”, by Michel Butor, where it refers, in its literal meaning, to a virus lost amongst its own branches; and the feeling of abandonment(“foresakeness”) is re-inforced by the  part quotation “Eli, ELi”( from “Eloi, eloi,lama sabachthani”{“My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?”, Mark 15:34.}). Next, we have an anti-peaen  to Bleston’s libraries where even a “World Bibliography of Bibliographies”, Sebald ironically says, cannnot furnish a solution to the word’s terrible problems(of man’s destruction of man). Sebald then quotes Adorno, in turn quoting Pascal(thanks again to Iain Galbraith’s invaluably elucidatory notes): “On ne doit plus dormir”-”It is not possible to sleep any longer”), that is, after all the atrocities committed throughout the centuries of man’s inhabitation of this planet. Books are not the solution, despite their accumulated attempts at wisdom. Also, there is an implicit refernce here, I believe, to the Nazi’s burning of books by “unacceptable” writers(“A revision of all books at the core/Of the volcano has long been overdue”). There is a further reference to Benjamin: his famous “Angel of History” who tries to look, positively, into the future, but is simultaneously dragged back into the horrific past (cf Adorno’s “negative dialectics” and Benjamins “interregnum” where we need time to reflect to stop the merciless dialectic of history and to change direction): “No glance back to the future survives”. And we end with a musical lament:”Flutes of death for Bleston”

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

This longer poem, and many of the shorter ones, in this posthumous and masterly translation by Galbraith, are very beautiful. The translation is so redolent, it can almost stand alone as an independent work of art.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Comments and your own interpretation of any of the poems in “Across the Land and The Water” very welcome!

SEBALD AND PERSONAL MEMORY:BY STEVEN BENSON(THAT’S ME!)

“For how hard it is

to understand the landscape

as you pass in  a train

from here to there

and mutely it

watches you vanish”

(Sebald, “Across the Land and Water”, collection, trans Galbraith,2011)

…………………………………………………………………………………………..

I bought “after Nature”(Sebald’s epic poem, in three sections, prepared for publication in 1988, trans Michael Hamburger) in Grasmere, Lake District, in 2009. Sometimes, when falling asleep, i can bear to remember this place; other times, I cannot bear it.We vanish INTO our own memories  and sometimes AWAY FROM them: they elude us sometimes or we NEED them to elude us (to protect ourselves/ myself).

Of course, speaking LESS personally, Sebald is (as early as his student years in the 1960s)commenting on Germany’s convenient and shameful collective memory loss after the Second World War; which was one of his deepest pre-occupations and why he rarely returned to Germany and was forever an emmigrant, in the manner of one of his own narratorial creations. This is evidenced by “Somewhere”(In the “Year before Last” section of “Across Land and water”(p.135), which refers to the Turkenfeld poem, Turkenfeld being a subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp; here the purportedly idyllic nature description covers over  the place’s  story of horror(thanks to Iain Galbraith, in his excellent intorduction to “Across land and Water for this elucidation); in the same way that the collective consciousness of Germany in the late 40s and the 50s covered over the memories of genocide.

So, when we read Sebald, be it his prose-fiction of poetry, we are plunged into , and sometimes enmired in, firstly, collective cultural memory; and, secondly,our own PERSONAL memories, because , as Galbraith again points out(in “Death of the Author” style), we (re)build our OWN personal version of the poem, a process, he himself says, mirrors that of translation.So, our personal (to SOME extent, because it is rewarding and, indeed, necessary, to try and elucidate Sebald’s OWN “objecttive”/objective INTENDED meanings)reconstruction and re-envisionning of the works in question, in the light of our OWN experiences,is an integral part of the reading(I stress, this is not at all to minimise the fact that neither I, nor Sebald himself,went throught the horrors he felt he could only obliquely refer to{see his interview with Michael Silverblatt, available on You-Tube, recorded 8 days before his untimely death]). So, in the light of the second point,personal, subjective re-visualization of the meaning to US(as unique individuals)- I return to “After Nature”, which I am now going to finish, inspired by Galbraith’s pointing out that a lot of the poems which were retained , and, indeed, some of those taken out as too similar,were precursors of the later longer poem. I do this with some trepidation about what memories it will recall to me; memories embedded in the landscape and village where I bought the book,Grasmere; happy but disturbing memories. Memories I am ineffably glad I still have, but which can be painful to re-live.

So, there are the landscapes of PERSONAL memory, where the EXTERNAL landscape morrors one’s own INTERIOR memories/psychology; a sort of PSYCHOgeography again, mediated by books and memories: Wordsworth remembering chilhood in Grasmere, myself remembering Grasmere experiences and Sebald himself ritorno in patria (in the last sections of “After Nature” and “the Emmigrants”, and the disturbing memories there catalyzed).Layers within layers.

…………………………………………………………………………………..

We are ALL on a

Train journey

Where the

Landscape

Of our

Memories

Recedes

Quietly

Behind us.

MARIENBAD

Yes,I remember

Marienbad;

Well I don’t

Really.

But in my mind,

Its worn

Stucco,

Its Towering

Once grand

Hotels;

Its decaying spas;

AND its

Tortured history,

Neither German

Nor Czech:-

Paint a picture

Of people

Looking longingly

For miracle cures

As they sit

And walk…

On Zimmer frames,

Amongst

Derelict

What once was

Splendour

“THE LANDSCAPE…/AND MUTELY IT WATCHES YOU VANISH”-SEBALD’S MUSINGS ON TIME, MEMORY, DECAY, DERELICTION AND DESUETUDE; HE SPEAKS FOR HIMSELF, IN QUOTATIONS FROM HIS NEWLY (POSTHUMOUSLY)PUBLISHED BOOK OF POEMS”ACROSS THE LAND AND THE WATER”

The poems in this collection date from between the 1960s and the end of his life , in 2001. I have chosen the particular quotations on the grounds of:

1. poetic memorability and beauty(even in translation)

2.relevance to the themes of his prose  fiction, as in the title to this entry

……………………………………………………………………………………

“..and time sheds

its skin every year”(“L’Instruction du Roy”)

……………………………………………………………………………………..

“…..limbs benumbed

in the quicksilver of their angst”(“Near Crailsheim”)

……………………………………………………………………………….

“Sailing backwards

as a passenger with

banished time”(“Norfolk”)

………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

“of a mountain that was printed

entirely in japanese colours”(“Unidentified Flying Objects”)

…………………………………………………………………………………………………

“the stone collection

of our feelings”(“The Sky at Night”

………………………………………………………………………………………………..

“brickwall catacombs

Liverpool Street station”(“Day Return”)

……………………………………………………………………………………………………….

“… moribund supermarkets”; and “funeral parlours dubious/antique shops”(“New Jersey Journey”)

“Across the Land and the Water: Selected poems 1964 to 2001, translated by Iain Galbraith”)