something out of nothing

'You gather things up like a person who leaves a burning house, which means very randomly ... I am not seeking an answer. I just want to say, "This is very odd, indeed"' (WG Sebald)

I have been re-reading texts by and interviews with WG Sebald. Alongside the uncanny repetitions and correspondences, the looping narrative structures, the mysterious photographs that act like 'barriers or weirs which stem the flow' and 'slow down the speed of reading' (Sebald), the displacements, double binds, silent catastrophes, spectral (re-)apparitions, somnambulist circlings and vertigo, the constellations of melancholic stones and dust and fog of this 'ghost hunter', I have been struck by his accounts of the 'questionable business' of writing and its compulsive, draining 'preoccupation with making something out of nothing'.

In an interview with Eleanor Wachtel (1997): 'Once you get hold of a thread you want to pull it out and you want to see, you know, what the colours of the pattern are. And the more difficult it gets ... the more intrigued you become, the more you know that there is something buried there. And the less you want to give up on it".

Later in the same interview: 'It is a characteristic of our species, in evolutionary terms, that we are a species in despair, for a number of reasons. Because we have created an environment for us which isn't what it should be. And we're out of our depth all the time. We're living exactly on the borderline between the natural world from which we are being driven out, or we're driving ourselves out of it, and that other world which is generated by our brain cells. And so clearly that fault line runs right through our emotional and physical makeup. And probably where these tectonic plates rub up against each other is where the sources of pain are. Memory is one of those phenomena. It's what qualifies us as emotional creatures, psychozootica or however one might describe them. And I think there is no way in which we can escape it. The only thing that you can do, and that most people seem to be able to do very successfully, is to subdue it. . And if you can do that by, I don't know, playing baseball or watching football on television, then that's possibly a good thing, I don't know".

Eleanor Wachsel: "What do you do?"

Sebald: "I walk with the dog. But that doesn't really get me off the hook. And I have, in fact, not a great desire to be let off the hook. I think we have to try to stay upright through all that, if it's at all possible".

From a public discussion with Joseph Cuomo (2001): "I never liked doing things systematically. Not even my PhD research was done systematically. It was always done in a random, haphazard fashion. And the more I got on, the more I feel that, really, one can only find something in that way, i.e., in the same way in which, say, a dog runs through the field. If you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he's looking for. I think that, as I've always had dogs, I've learnt from them how to do this ...

"And so you then have a small amount of material, and you accumulate things, and it grows; one thing takes you to another, and you make something out of these haphazardly assembled materials. And, as they have been assembled in this random fashion, you have to strain your imagination in order to create a connection between the two things ... You have to take heterogeneous materials in order to get your mind to do something that it hasn't done before. That's how I thought about it. Then, of course, curiosity gets the better of you...".

From The Rings of Saturn, in a section related to Michael Hamburger:"For days and weeks one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life".

And finally, in the same book, Sebald returns to the recurrent trope of writing and/as weaving: "That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, it is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread".

 

(text from 2018)

birdland (patti & max)

'But if I see before me the nervature of past life in an image, I always think that this has something to do with truth. Our brains, after all, are always at work on some quivers of self-organisation, however faint, and it is from this that an order arises, in places beautiful and comforting, though more cruel, too, than the previous state of ignorance. How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?' (W.G. Sebald, 'Dark Night Sallies Forth', After Nature) 

On Saturday, after the funeral of an old friend in a witheringly cold north Norfolk, we drove to Aldeburgh to see Patti Smith at Snape Maltings. She was performing 'Max', a spoken word and song tribute to WG Sebald, as part of a symposium to mark the 10th anniversary of Sebald's death - with Richard Mabey, Rachel Lichtenstein, Robert Macfarlane and others - and the launch of Patience (After Sebald), Grant Gee's new film essay in response to The Rings of Saturn (which includes contributions by Tacita Dean, Iain Sinclair, Adam Phillips, Dan Gretton etc.).

Patti was astonishing. At the age of 64, in white dress shirt trailing cuffs, black jacket, jeans, boots, and Lennon glasses, she looks like a cross between Keith Richard and an Easter Island statue, her long face breaking into a disarming smile, her voice a blowtorch. Her marshaling of blooded energy in songs that she heats over time and brings incrementally to a shamanic boil wholly belies her apparent 'age'. At times she vibrates and burns like magma, at others she's like a wistful kid, then in a flash ancient, weathered, beyond the clumsiness of gender, a voice from elsewhere.

'Whispering madness on the heathland of Suffolk. Is this the promis'd end?' (Sebald, After Nature).

At one point, a woman near the front shouted, 'Patti, you're a goddess!' 'A shabby one', she replied, with a quiet laugh. ('With a laugh that's a rustling turned inwards', Sebald, After Nature). At another point, a young pissed guy shambled up to her at the lip of the stage, shouting and flicking v-signs: 'This is shit, man. And your audience is shit!' With an exquisite softness and without judgement, she tried to give him his money back. The young punk and the mother of punks; it was clear where the radical energy, openness, humanity and attack lay. After he left, bundled unceremoniously out of the door by an unnecessarily assertive punter, she said: 'Too bad he left when he did. Cos the next song features 27 punk guitarists, and it's specially for him'.

She combined readings from Sebald's associationally layered meditation/poem After Nature ('what is this being called human?') with accompaniment from her daughter Jesse on piano and a young composer Michael Campbell on guitar and vibraphone, with songs (including the song she wrote with Springsteen, 'Because The Night', 'Pissing in a River' and 'Ghost Dance', and a startling cover of Neil Young's 'Helpless' - 'Big birds flying across the sky / Throwing shadows on our eyes'). In addition she read a poem she'd written about Sebald, and shared musings on her own circuitous links to this place via Herman Melville and Billy Budd, Benjamin Britten, her Norfolk ancestry (the Harts), her love of Sebald - her friend Susan Sontag had first recommended him to her - and of the sea.

She opened up the quiet apocalypse of Sebald's poem, made it immediate, available, pulsing, an animate and fluid landscape of memory, illumination, displacement and loss edging towards lament and song. And - a white-hot highlight for me - she sang a staggering, ecstatic version of 'Birdland' from Horses, her wing-flutter hands articulating and sculpting space, taking flight, lifting us all up up up in to the belly of the spaceship within a theatre whose beamed roof mirrors the ribcage of some vast upturned sea vessel:

His father died and left him a little farm in New England.
All the long black funeral cars left the scene
And the boy was just standing there alone
Looking at the shiny red tractor
Him and his daddy used to sit inside
And circle the blue fields and grease the night.
It was if someone had spread butter on all the fine points of the stars
'Cause when he looked up they started to slip.
Then he put his head in the crux of his arm
And he started to drift, drift to the belly of a ship,
Let the ship slide open, and he went inside of it
And saw his daddy 'hind the control board streamin' beads of light,
He saw his daddy 'hind the control board,
And he was very different tonight
'Cause he was not human, he was not human.

And then the little boy's face lit up with such naked joy
That the sun burned around his lids and his eyes were like two suns,
White lids, white opals, seeing everything just a little bit too clearly
And he looked around and there was no black ship in sight,
No black funeral cars, nothing except for him the raven
And fell on his knees and looked up and cried out,
"No, daddy, don't leave me here alone,
Take me up, daddy, to the belly of your ship,
Let the ship slide open and I'll go inside of it
Where you're not human, you are not human".

But nobody heard the boy's cry of alarm.
Nobody there 'cept for the birds around the New England farm
And they gathered in all directions, like roses they scattered
And they were like compass grass coming together into the head of a shaman bouquet
Slit in his nose and all the others went shooting
And he saw the lights of traffic beckoning like the hands of Blake
Grabbing at his cheeks, taking out his neck,
All his limbs, everything was twisted and he said,
"I won't give up, won't give up, don't let me give up,
I won't give up, come here, let me go up fast,
Take me up quick, take me up, up to the belly of a ship
And the ship slides open and I go inside of it where I am not human.
I am helium raven and this movie is mine",
So he cried out as he stretched the sky,
Pushing it all out like latex cartoon, am I all alone in this generation?
We'll just be dreaming of animation night and day
And won't let up, won't let up and I see them coming in,
Oh, I couldn't hear them before, but I hear 'em now,
It's a radar scope in all silver and all platinum lights
Moving in like black ships, they were moving in, streams of them,
And he put up his hands and he said,

"It's me, it's me, I'll give you my eyes, take me up, oh now please take me up,
I'm helium raven waitin' for you, please take me up,
Don't let me here, the son, the sign, the cross,
Like the shape of a tortured woman, the true shape of a tortured woman,
The mother standing in the doorway letting her sons
No longer presidents but prophets
They're all dreaming they're gonna bear the prophet,
He's gonna run through the fields dreaming in animation
It's all gonna split his skull
It's gonna come out like a black bouquet shining
Like a fist that's gonna shoot them up
Like light, like Mohammed Boxer
Take them up up up up up up
Oh, let's go up, up, take me up,
I'll go up, I'm going up, I'm going up
Take me up, I'm going up, I'll go up there
Go up go up go up go up up up up up up up
Up, up to the belly of a ship.
Let the ship slide open and we'll go inside of it
Where we are not human, we're not human".

Well, there was sand, there were tiles,
The sun had melted the sand and it coagulated
Like a river of glass
When it hardened he looked at the surface
He saw his face
And where there were eyes were just two white opals, two white opals,
Where there were eyes there were just two white opals
And he looked up and the rays shot
And he saw raven comin' in
And he crawled on his back and he went up
Up up up up up up
Sha da do wop, da sha da do way,
sha da do wop, da sha da do way,
Sha da do wop, da shanna do way,
sha da do wop, da shaman do way,
Sha da do wop, da shaman do way,
We like birdland.

A spirit passed, and the hair on my flesh stood up.

Yes yes, my god, we like birdland too. A (not so) shabby goddess took us there by the hand, a force of nature, an old old soul.

This being called human.
___________________________________________

W.G. Sebald, After Nature (trans. Michael Hamburger), New York: Modern Library, 2002

For Aida Edemariam's Guardian interview with Patti Smith (22 January 2011), see here. For Stuart Jeffries' Guardian article (25 January 2011) about Patience (After Sebald), see here. For a Guardian podcast of a conversation with Grant Gee about Sebald, see here. For the original 1975 recording of 'Birdland', see here

Photo of Patti Smith by Annie Leibovitz

Text first written in January 2011

i hear these voices

' year after year
a pebble bank raised
by the waves of the sea
all the way to the North,
every stone a dead soul ...'
(WG Sebald, After Nature)


A bright Sunday morning in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, wandering along the shingle beach. Lots of dog walkers, the odd fisherman. The scale of the human figure in this place.

Located amongst the pebbles slightly north of the town is Maggi Hambling's 2003 sculpture Scallop - its stainless steel rim pierced with the words I HEAR THESE VOICES THAT WILL NOT BE DROWNED, a phrase from Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes. Stencils cutting blue and white letters against the sky. The white dome of Sizewell shimmers in the distance.

From varying angles and distances, the form of Hamblin's sculpture shifts. At different moments, the scallop shell flickers into another fleeting life as a seagull's wing, or the breaching of a whale's tail fin, or an outsized hand erupting from the beach and opening towards the sky, or the silhouette of a fishing boat, or an upturned coracle, or some drifting undersea plant, or a blackened wreck. At one point, Sue sees the turret of a submarine.

Close up, the corrugations of the shell resemble ripples on water, rhythmic wave structures, wind-sculpted patterns in sand, or perhaps sound waves, a kind of braille drone. On its sea side, the metal shell serves as a surface for sitting and staring out to sea. A contemplative throne from which to hear the voices that will not be drowned, carried on the wind. To ponder fragilities and durations, the mortality and transformations of forms.

The time of space.

'Along the horizon
freighters cross over
into another age
measured by the ticking
of Geigers in the power station
at Sizewell, where slowly
the core of the metal
is destroyed'
(WG Sebald, After Nature).

Someone has left a bunch of fresh flowers in a small protected enclosure within the scallop.

Something of the steel's angles reminds me of the Sydney Opera House roofs, and Clive James' analogy with a gang of 'nuns in a loose ruck'.

Perhaps inevitably, the elemental flatness, glare, exposure, shingle, and neighbouring nuclear power station are reminiscent of Dungeness. And a few hundred metres further north we come across a black tarred cottage rather like Jarman's (without the garden): a tiny sepulchral refuge in the face of the sea, the wind, the sky. Another place to contemplate le temps: time and weather, time's weathering.

*****

As we amble along the beach towards Sizewell, every footstep a tiny hissing avalanche, suddenly I remember Richard Long's Crossing Stones, the 1987 text work that records his coast-to-coast walk across Britain and back. From Aldeburgh to Aberystwyth in Ceredigion, West Wales - over 300 miles in 10 days. He carried with him a single pebble, which he left on the beach near Aber, before picking up another and taking it back a further 300 miles to deposit it here on the beach at Aldeburgh.

626 miles in 20 days in order to exchange two pebbles.

A Sisyphean act of displacement and transplant, a new assimilation on a new beach, both beaches moving incessantly with the tides. Remote stones and places brought into a new antipodal East/West relation, both pebbles crossing to the 'same' situation but utterly different. Separation/reparation. The space between - Long's long walk - now all but disappeared, his elliptical and self-effacing description its only trace.


In two weeks time I'm going to Aberystwyth. Perhaps I'll take a pebble with me for the next two weeks - to London by car, to and from work, on the train to Wales - deposit it on the Cardigan bay beach, and then, maybe, one day return to Aldeburgh with a second stone from Aber. A sort of attenuated, indirect, lazy homage to Long's displacement, with a hint of its connective absurdity and none of its 'heroism'.

Perhaps I will.