everything is on the point of decline
the european melancholy got to me
in february i read too much w.g sebald and thought about killing myself at a rate that far exceeded the advised amount. it was as if i’d stopped just long enough for him to get in me. i couldn’t stop seeing the world through his eyes, the grey death around every corner.
i watched a documentary about the man in question. one of the talking heads said that he went through life “as if he had no skin”, and wasn’t that the truth. everything he saw wounded him too much, it went right through him and never came out. the pictures in the book blur. a pile of herring in a booming fishing town morphs into a pile of corpses at the front of the Allied liberation. the sight of it enough to turn every inch of your hair white. what do you do, in the face of that? run into the forest like saint jerome1 and bash yourself to bits thinking endlessly and only of the horror.
“He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: “'The horror! The horror!”” (The Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad)
i mean, for whatever else i’m going to say about him, Sebald’s view of time really got under my skin. he writes time like no other author i’ve read. for him, time only stretches backwards and accumulates. it can be tethered in places, like in The Rings of Saturn, which focuses on the European history of mass death, but for the most part history is just the most despairing game of free association you’ve ever played. he often pairs this with walking, or some kind of constant movement, which is interesting because his whole thing is like, well walk as far as you like, you’re never getting away from the constant atmosphere of death. the ground is always and forever just about to give way beneath your feet. the grain of sand caught in your collar today will be a sandstorm tomorrow, and you’ll lose everything.
it’s all very melancholy. too melancholy. i don’t know that Sebald is aiming to cast any grandeur2 at casting this impression of being at the end of time (as i think it might naturally come with looking backwards), but he does end up tangling himself into a lot of the aesthetic pleasures associated with the picturesque tradition. like the mangled satisfaction you feel when looking at ruined English countryside homes covered in creeping ivy, or a golden dragon on the side of a train suffocated beneath layers of black paint. the end of an era, or whatever. but it ends up feeling like a way to convince yourself there’s a significance to this vantage point, of standing at the end of a century of mass death, like it means anything beyond sheer brutality and ignorance.
all of this begs the question: well now what? in the same way that i was incredibly unimpressed with the imperial ‘woe is me’ of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (and its vile 20th century film repetition/adaptation, Apocalypse Now) i find that i’m at a loss with what to do with…all of it. because it’s like, okay, in your heart you took pity on and tried to save the little moth banging itself to pieces against your window, but in your attempt you’ve frightened it to death, so now you’re condemned to live with the sight of its ‘tiny claws that stiffened in their last agony, until a draft of air detaches them and blows them into a dusty corner’ (Austerlitz). speaking on the metaphorical level here it’s like…well are you going to do anything about that? give the moth a little burial, or light a cigarette in memory of a life extinguished? or are we going to sit around perpetually paralysed by the horrific meaninglessness of everything that is, was, and will be?
i don’t mean to say that Sebald is a bad writer at all, only that both him and Conrad (and many others, i’m sure) fall into this overwhelming sense of paralysis, which is nothing more than a museumizing instinct and a total failure of the imagination. i say museum deliberately here; as in the fixedness and confinement involved in assembling a collection. that kind of ordering doesn’t allow for flux or change, and maybe even encourages a narrative instinct that is a collapsing-inwards. hence the failure of the imagination. the end of imperialism, for instance, was unimaginable for Conrad, which is why he must settle for uselessly exclaiming: ‘The horror! The horror!’. The same goes for protagonist Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s endlessly frustrating Remains of the Day, who spends all of his time wandering around his memories in a daze, unable to bear the slow decay of the imperial structure and the loss of his role in it.
this depressive orientation is about as good as a millipede curling in on itself. the creature may have the illusion that it’s hidden and protected, but you or i can see as clear as day, with our own eyes, that it’s all right there. i don’t know that we’re necessarily in a world after empire (also an endless debate re: the prefix of ‘post’colonial studies, but that’s not my business rn), but i also don’t know that walking around paralysed by the weight of it all is…the move. quite literally it’s the antithesis of movement. do anything else. imagine a different world and then do everything you can to make it happen! hold a funeral for the little dead moth! it’s all right there.
"Le Strange, who had always kept a tame cockerel in his room, was reputed to have been surrounded, in later years, by all manner of feathered creatures: by guinea fowl, pheasants, pigeons and quail, and various kinds of garden and song birds, strutting about him on the floor or flying around in the air. Some said that one summer Le Strange dug a cave in his garden and sat in it day and night like St Jerome in the desert. Most curious of all was a legend that I presume to have originated with the Wrentham undertaker's staff, to the effect that the Major's pale skin was olive-green when he passed away, his goose-grey eye was pitch-dark, and his snow-white hair had turned to raven-black. To this day I do not know what to make of such stories.” (The Rings of Saturn, W.G Sebald)
a fantastic review which challenges this narrativised notion of Sebald as the last great modern man https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii131/articles/ryan-ruby-privatized-grand-narratives