Original subtitles

In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end,

I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope

of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I've completed

a long stint at work.

And in fact my hope was realised, up to a point.

For I've seldom felt so carefree as I did then, walking for

hours in the day through the thinly populated countryside, which stretches

inland from the coast.

I wonder now, however, whether there might be something in the old

superstition that certain ailments of the spirit and of the body are

particularly likely to beset us under the sign of the dog star.

Sebald, Winifred Georg Sebald, was born in Wertheim-Allgäu in the Bavarian

Alps in 1944.

He studied in Germany at Freiburg and in 1967 he moved to

England, first to Manchester and then to East Anglia, to Norwich, where

he settled and lived out his working life as a professor of

European literatures and literature and translation at the University of East

Anglia.

And success came late to him.

He wrote his books first in German and then carefully oversaw their

translation into English.

And it was when the books began to appear in English that

his rise in the English-speaking literary world began.

Max came to the Harville Press.

We were all sitting round, everybody in the company, Max, and one

of the questions we asked him was, which category would you like

your book to be in?

And Max said, oh, I'd like all the categories.

I want fiction, I want biography, I want autobiography, I want travel,

I want history, I want...

he probably didn't say Holocaust studies.

But anyway, there wasn't a category that he didn't require.

Well, it turns out that when you're dealing with the people who

do the classification, they will only allow you three, because humour is

so...

so badly unkind, will obviously go for all of them, on the

utterly mistaken assumption that booksellers would be forced to have a copy

in each shelf.

Well, it doesn't work like that.

So there were three, and I don't honestly remember what the final

three were, but Max was very clear.

And what he was saying, turn it round as you like, was,

don't put me in a box, I want to be in all

the boxes.

You know, I'm not writing a familiar formula.

Well, one of the odd things about the book is it begins

as an account of somebody having finished a book, because he's finished

a piece of writing and he now feels apparently carefree.

And it seems to me the book starts inviting you to imagine

what it's like to feel suddenly released from something.

He's going on this wonderful walk, within several lines.

He couldn't be more depressed.

It's like the thing Freud says about headaches.

The moment somebody says to themselves, God, isn't it marvellous, I haven't

had one of those headaches for ages, that's a sign they're about

to get one.

Sable says, I felt incredibly free, carefree, and suddenly he's not free

and full of cares.

Later, in one of the long hothouses built against the brick walls

of the kitchen garden, I struck up a conversation with William Hazel,

the gardener who now looks after Summer Leighton with the help of

several odd job men.

When he realised where I was from, he told me that during

his last years at school and his subsequent apprenticeship, his thoughts

constantly revolved around the bombing raids then being launched on Germany

from the 67 airfields that were established in East Anglia after 1940.

People nowadays hardly have any idea of the scale of the operation,

said Hazel.

In the course of 1,009 days, the 8th Air Fleet alone

used a billion gallons of fuel, dropped 732,000 tonnes of bombs,

and lost almost 9,000 aircraft and 50,000 men.

Every evening I watched the bomber squadrons heading out over Summer Leighton,

and night after night, before I went to sleep, I pictured in

my mind's eye the German cities going up in flames, the firestorms

setting the heavens alight, and the survivors rooting about in the ruins.

Often the narrator feels that he's kind of irradiated by a melancholy.

He doesn't quite know where it comes from, and it colours the

landscape.

The book is literally full of geography in that almost every page

has a place name on it that you can identify on a

map.

So I came up with this idea, fairly simple, of doing a

digital project for mapping books where essentially I would take the locations

that appear in books or locations around books and plot them on

a digital map, so you could zoom in and zoom out, and

The Rings of Saturn was the first book that I plotted.

This red map serves as the core of his walking tour, and

then at each place he mentions places around the world that are

further removed.

Then there would be a link out to those places.

On the surface it's a walk in Suffolk, and his experiences of

these landscapes down there, the beaches and the heaths and the kind

of emptiness of that whole place.

Then associated with it is a whole encyclopaedia of other things.

So when he goes to places, he touches off on a certain

writer or a certain event, and then the book kind of spirals

out into something else.

So it's a kind of walk, and then it's also this encyclopaedia

of people and things and events which interest him, some of which

are quite directly tied to the walk and some which aren't.

For me, silk is the centre of this book in some ways

because of how carefully Zabel kind of silks silk around throughout the

chapters.

It'll just be a little metaphor in one chapter.

I think he mentions it in Chapter 1 just for a second

and then moves on, foreshadowing what comes.

I think it's almost in the last chapter that the silk thing

finally happens.

The title The Rings of Saturn is one of the more enigmatic

titles amongst Max's books.

It even, in the original German, had a subtitle, An English Pilgrimage.

But it tells you something about the state of publishing today that

we thought it better to leave the subtitle off because we didn't

want people to think it was a travel book.

Although it's enigmatic, once you've read the epigraph, it's one of the

clearest of Max's titles.

The second epigraph in the book is from a German encyclopaedia which

talks about The Rings of Saturn as being fragments of a moon

that wandered too close to the planet of Saturn and was shattered

by the gravitational pull but remains as a ring of dust particles

forever circling the planet that destroyed it.

So if you think of the way The Rings of Saturn works

as an attempt at several walks round an idea of England in

concentric rings made up of shattered fragments of a past, you begin

to get the picture.

The thing that it's closest to for me is Virginia Woolf's The

Waves where you just feel that there's an attempt to capture perception

in all its really fleeting and really fast way in which we

perceive and we put things together.

But, of course, he constructs it so exquisitely.

Every sentence is beautifully crafted.

So I don't know what the genre is.

I don't know.

Probably known better to you than to me, Virginia Woolf, the wonderful

example of her description of a moth coming to its end on

a window pane somewhere in Sussex.

And this is a passage of some two pages only, I think,

and it's written somewhere, chronologically speaking, between the battlefields

of the Somme and the concentration camps erected by my compatriots.

And there's no reference made to the battlefields of the Somme in

this passage.

But one knows, as a reader of Virginia Woolf, that she was

greatly perturbed by the First World War, by its aftermath, by the

damage it did to people's souls, the souls of those who got

away and naturally of those who perished.

So, you know, I think that a subject which at first glance

seems quite far removed from the undeclared concern of a book can

encapsulate that concern.

And in Lowestoft, a pavement of fish glittering, an absolute tidal flow

of fish, the abundance, the overabundance of the sea, that it's a

moment when there's too much, that the herring have come so close

to shore they've almost committed suicide and thrown themselves up, and there's

nothing that can be done, the fish rot away, and there are

strange concepts of trying to understand the luminescence of these fish and

to extract light.

So there's these small disjunctions that start to occur.

I took his word that that's herring.

I wouldn't know what herring looks like.

So, OK, that's herring.

It's a little off.

It's a postcard.

But, you know, as you move on, he's talking about the herring

and about sort of this wonderful colour that is emitted when they

die and yet, you know, he gives us this close-up of

this large black and white fish, and I think you kind of

just sort of breeze past that.

It doesn't offer any information.

It seems to just affirm what you're reading in a very non

-Zabaldian way.

It usually doesn't do that.

It doesn't illustrate things.

If you're careful, you think, Wow, I wish it was in colour.

I'd really love to see this kind of effervescence and phosphorescence that

occurs.

And then I think this is one of the strangest images.

It's talking about using this phosphorescence to light this passageway, and all

I could see was these fins on the fish.

You know, I'm starting to pick up this pattern between these fins,

and then I see them here, and I kind of think, Oh,

well, that's kind of a clever artist thing.

We do that all the time, you know, kind of start to

work formally.

And then the shock of sort of turning the page and seeing

this image, I immediately had to go back and start to figure

out where this began, you know, from somewhere to this end image,

and I naturally started there because there is something that's very similar

between these images, you know, the dead fish.

This, to me, called out for interpretation.

I felt I needed to go back and really pay attention, and

it was the first time when I read The Rings of Saturn

that that occurred.

I think it's very hard to do this, to use this medium

of book, you know, the linearity of a book, and to use

the images to pull you back.

That is why it is like a journey, even as you're reading

it, because you're constantly having to go back.

I was blown away.

I really thought this is where we have to sort of stop

and reconsider what he was doing.

He's become very, very important for contemporary artists, I think, and for

that reason, we have to also reconsider and think of him as

both a writer and an artist.

What I was writing about Sebald, I rang him up.

I just ran up the university and said, can I speak to

Professor Sebald?

I wanted to reproduce his photographs in the book I was writing

and also in an exhibition, and I wanted to put across their

particular mood, which I hadn't really seen before.

He explained that they were just sort of snappy snaps or boots,

but he would put them on the photocopy of these colour prints

and photocopy and re-photocopy until they had that black, smudgy, grainy

look.

I said, could I borrow some for an exhibition?

He said, well, they're on a shelf and they're quite high up

and it's on the other side of the room, and there was

this long sign, so I was wondering whether I should say, do

you want to get up?

Well, the spell of enchantment was cast on me by him about

12 years ago, and I ended up wanting to write a book

about him, and I realised that...

I mean, he's a biographer.

He's a biographer who walks his subjects back into life, or maybe

he walks forward after them into death.

It's never quite clear.

It soon became obvious to me that the way to write about

him, but I was wrong in this assumption, was to follow him,

was to footstep his footsteppings of earlier feet and turn his own

method back upon himself, and so I started to do that, and

I re-walked most of the Rings of Saturn walk, and I

really wanted it to be a grey day, and it wasn't a

grey day.

It was a bright day, and there were people bathing in the

fountains at Lower Stoft, and I realised very quickly that I was

having far too much fun to footsteps about.

At Pinnock Abroad, I swam, and then I slept the night by

a big bloom of poppies and woke up at dawn with a

glorious easterly view and swam again, and my memory of that walk

is one of delight, really, and a refusal of the walk to

conform to my idea of what the walk should have been, and

so I realised that if I were going to write this book,

I had to drop myself out of it entirely.

I couldn't be there.

It was a completely bad fit between footstepper and footsteppy.

Of the zone, oh, in Stork, of course, absolutely.

This landscape that looks really sort of innocent and normal, and yet

you can't move through it without it somehow ejecting you and is

that magic place where you can go and get what you wish

for, which is never what you think you want.

Yes, maybe he makes Suffolk rather like the zone, but actually when

you go to Suffolk and you walk some of his walks, you

feel it is the zone.

When I walked up to Ben Acre Broad, that weird landscape where

the lake and the shingled beach are sort of almost butted up

together, and you know that one day the lake's going to tip

into the sea or the sea's going to tip into the lake,

I was so frightened.

I was actually carrying a video camera.

I was so frightened.

You can see it in the footage.

I'm just shaking and getting frightened.

I couldn't actually go very far up towards Ben Acre Broad because

it did feel like the zone.

And do you remember in Stalker there's the man who ties the

stones into the white handkerchief and throws them, and something in the

zone guides where the stone lands and then you can walk safely.

And I definitely would have loved to have had a stalker with

me.

I was so frightened there.

Dust-laden, mist-laden, being penetrated by odd and misdirecting lights, the

attempt here is really to become lost in a fog.

Yes, well, in these kinds of natural phenomena, like fog, like mist,

which render the environment and one's ability to see it, render this

almost impossible.

There are all these phenomena that interest me greatly.

One of the great strokes of genius in standard 19th-century fiction,

I always thought, was the fog in Bleak House.

Oh, yes.

And it's this ability to make of one natural phenomenon a thread

that runs through a whole text and kind of upholds this extended

metaphor is something that I find very, very attractive.

The substances that recur, dust, ash, spume, cloud, vapour, these are the

substances of that coast, and they're all particular in both senses of

that wonderfully precise word.

They're specific, but they're also made up of particles, and he's fascinated

by comminuted substances, substances that have been reduced down and down and

down.

I think he talks once about them being on the borderline between

being and nothingness, and you realise that this whole coast, actually,

aerially, marinely and terrestrially, comprises these comminuted substances on

which he's walking.

Yes, it's a study of nature in all its forms, and the

walker's approach to viewing nature is a phenomenological one, and the

scientist's approach is a much more incisive one, but they all belong

together.

For me, reading Sable is like a discovery, given there's been so

much schlock written about post-Holocaust writing and so much terrible

exploitation of the Holocaust and all that.

Sable seemed to have a way, actually, of thinking about these issues

in a way that was neither sensationalist nor self-pitying, but that

could be, on the one hand, sort of grimly humorous, but also

very, very straightforward.

It was like the best version of journalism one could imagine.

Really straightforward documentary writing that was really artful at the same

time.

You wanted to listen to this voice.

The reader needs to be prompted that the narrator has a conscience

and that he is and has been perhaps for a long time

engaged with these questions.

And this is why the main scenes of horror are never directly

addressed.

I think it is sufficient to remind people, because we've all seen

images, but these images militate against our capacity for discursive thinking,

for reflecting upon these things, and also paralyse, as it were, our

moral capacity.

So the only way in which one can approach these things, in

my view, is obliquely, tangentially, by reference rather than by direct

confrontation.

BELL RINGS He's in

Southwark.

He's in the Crown Hotel.

And he's reading a copy of The Independent on Sunday.

And he then sees this image of the people, as he says,

hanged in rows like crows or magpies, Serbs, Jews and Bosnians.

And he basically then talks about the Ustasa, which was the equivalent

of the SS, basically, in Croatia, in the war.

Many historians regard them as even more terrifying than the SS.

I mean, they were...

The methods of killing were pretty unimaginable.

He then says that the documents relating to these killings are recorded

in...

He talks about 50,000 documents abandoned by the Germans and Croats

in 1945, which are kept to this day in the Bosanska Krajina

archive in Banja Luka.

And then he describes the fact that this place, where the archives

are now housed, was the headquarters of the Heeresgruppe E intelligence

division.

And at this moment, I thought, hang on a minute, I've heard

that name before, that word, because that was the intelligence division that

Kurt Waldheim worked in during the war.

And then he describes one of the Heeresgruppe E intelligence officers at

that time was a young Viennese lawyer whose chief task was to

draw up memoranda relating to the necessary resettlements, described as

imperative for humanitarian reasons.

And then he describes how for this work he was awarded the

silver medal of the crown of King Zvonimir with oak leaves by

the Croatian head of state Pavlović, who was kind of Hitler's ally,

which was absolutely accurate and true.

And then he describes that in later life he occupied various high

offices, among them that of Secretary General of the United Nations.

And reportedly it was in this last capacity that he spoke on

to tape for the benefit of any extraterrestrials that may happen to

share our universe, words of greeting that are now, together with other

memorabilia of mankind, approaching the outer limits of our solar system aboard

the space probe Voyager 2.

And that idea that this man is the representative of humanity.

As the Secretary General of the United Nations, an organisation of 147

member states who represent almost all of the human inhabitants of the

planet Earth, I send greetings on behalf of the people of our

planet.

We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only

peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon, to be

taught if we are fortunate.

We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are

but a small part of this immense universe that surrounds us, and

it is with humility and hope that we take this step.

As I sat there that evening in Southwark, overlooking the German Ocean,

I sensed quite clearly the Earth's slow turning into a dark.

The huntsmen are up in America, writes Thomas Brown in The Garden

of Cyrus, and they're already past their first sleep in Persia.

The shadow of night is drawn like a black veil across the

Earth, and since almost all creatures from one meridian to the next

lie down after the sun has set, so he continues, one might,

in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone

bodies, row upon row, as if levelled by the scythe of Saturn,

an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness.

Saturn is the planet who rules over melancholy.

The planet Saturn was connected to the bile, as Mars, the planet

of war, was connected to cholera, to anger, and the black bile

was thought by Renaissance medical thinkers and by the philosophers to be

the source of depression.

Depression was in those days, and of course to some extent today

too, considered to be very productive of art and inspiration.

So though the melancholic suffered a great deal, the melancholic was also

inspired and creative, more creative than other people.

In this tradition of melancholy, it's as though these people, or people

who feel this, are people who feel some inexplicable sense of loss,

and they're people who try and locate this in history, as in,

why am I feeling so fundamentally at a loss and so unattached?

And it's as though the history gives you some sort of story

about this, but the feeling is somehow that there's been some catastrophe

that can't be located, and that one is living in the aftermath

of that catastrophe.

Sobald hears that there was a little pleasure train that would take

you to Southworld, on a narrow gauge, I think, and he's told

that the old engine had, underneath the black paint, it had a

Chinese golden dragon, and that it had originally been made for the

emperor to travel about in, in Peking.

But he then goes off into one of his most superb fugues

about the last days of imperial China and the reign of the

Empress Dowager Cixi.

The Taiping Rebellion was actually put down very, very bloodily indeed, and

it was a story of great horror.

It's another example of where he's using something else to refract his

main preoccupation, that the genocidal wars of the 20th century were

foreshadowed by these Victorian imperial wars.

He's actually also making you think about travel routes as well.

I mean, he invokes the Silk Road.

So his walks meander, his mind meanders.

and the pattern of the

structure of the book meanders.

I don't know if anybody's actually done a map of the rings

of Saturn, of how the motifs actually can be played out and

related to one another.

So I was writing about the book, and as I was reading

the first chapter, I made a little sort of marginal flowchart of

what the material consisted in the first chapter.

And as soon as I made this for the first one, I

started making them for every chapter.

And then when I was done, I thought, well, why the hell

shouldn't I just make one big, huge graph of the whole thing?

Green is the beginning of the chapter, red is the end of

the chapter, but then as I went on, I started adding blue

for death or despair.

And there's more blue sort of towards the end of the book.

I wouldn't know how else to talk about my relationship to this

book but to use the word love, because that's how I feel

about it.

I mean, it's like a personal relationship.

I think that you fall in love with the meandering because the

book allows you to do that and gives you the room to

do it.

Some people experience that as being adrift in a way that makes

them uncomfortable, and they're impatient with a book like this because they're

not driven through the pages.

And I think that impatience is a manifestation of a kind of

anxiety.

They don't want the freedom to assemble the book for themselves.

They want to be told what to think a little bit.

The British tradition is of walking as recovery, and the American tradition

is of walking as discovery, that striding forwards into the oncoming air

of the world for the Romantic tradition, British Romantic tradition, is a

way to strip away the accretions of civilisation, the hawking and hammering

of time lived in cities, and return yourself to some original state.

I mean, that's Rousseau.

I mean, it's European as well as it's British, but the American

tradition, it's there in the road movie.

It's there in the sense that we travel to liberate ourselves, to

discover new ways of being, to acquire whole new methods of life

that may themselves turn into habits but don't begin as them.

A strikingly large number of our settlements are orientated to the West,

and where circumstances permit, relocate in a westward direction.

The East stands for lost causes.

Especially at the time when the continent of America was being colonised,

it was noticeable that the townships spread to the West, even as

their eastern districts were falling apart.

In Brazil to this day, whole provinces die down like fires when

the land is exhausted by overcropping, and new areas to the West

are opened up.

In North America too, countless settlements of various kinds complete with gas

stations, motels, and shopping malls move West along the turnpikes, and along

that axis, affluence and squalor are unfailingly polarised.

I was put in mind of this phenomenon by the flight of

Dunnage.

It appears to be a picture taken at the end of the

19th, early 20th century, and it's of the cliff at Dunnage on

the Suffolk coast, which is dominated by the ruined silhouette of one

wall with some arches in it, and the tower of Dunnage Church,

which, for anybody who knows that part of the world, is an

image of transience, if there ever was one, because that cliff retreats

at such a rate, this church, I think, doesn't exist at all

there now.

We used to go there a lot when I was a child

because my grandmother lived in a village just inland, my father's mother

lived in a village just inland from Dunnage, and we were made

to stand on the cliff and keep quiet.

It was probably a strategy of our parents to shut us out,

but we were made to keep quiet so that we could hear

the church bells ringing underwater, which, of course, we never did.

And in fact, to strike a yet more personal note about it,

it's a picture which has a particular resonance for me because it

was later on those cliffs that my grandmother jumped off and committed

suicide.

My way from Dunnage took me at first by the ruins of

the Grey Friars Monastery, through a number of fields, and then to

an overgrown scrubland where stunted pines, birches, and rampant gorse grew so

densely that the going was very hard.

I was beginning to think of turning back when all of a

sudden the heath opened out in front of me, shading from pale

lilac to deepest purple.

It stretched away westward with a white track curving gently through its

midst.

Lost in the thoughts that went round in my head incessantly and

numbed by this crazed flowering, I stuck to the sandy path until

to my astonishment, not to say horror, I found myself back again

at the same tangled thicket from which I had emerged about an

hour before, or as it now seemed to me, in some distant

past.

Months after this experience, which I still cannot explain, I was on

Dunnage Heath once more, in a dream, walking the endlessly winding paths

again.

And again, I could not find my way out of the maze

which I was convinced had been created solely for me.

I think it was Camus who said that he talked about the

rip that can happen when you're just, like, wandering along and then

things sort of rip or tear, and you see things as they

actually are.

And then most of the time we just turn away and we

sort of just sew it up and just sort of move on

and don't notice it.

But Sebald, I mean, it's like he has no skin or he

has no mechanism by which he can sew it up and walk

away from it.

It rips, he sees another reality, and he just tips into it.

And when I looked down from this vantage point, I saw the

labyrinth, a pattern simple in comparison with the tortuous trail I had

behind me, but one which I knew in my dream with absolute

certainty represented a cross-section of my brain.

So Thomas Brown is a really important figure for Sebald in this

book.

Thomas Brown was a 17th century physician, theologian, philosopher, poet,

really.

And he talks about this quincunx, which is this pattern that consists

of five nodes, essentially, and five lines between them.

And the notion being that this pattern exists everywhere in nature, sort

of like a primitive network.

And it's sort of a very cabalistic, pre-modern notion of seeing

pattern in the world.

And Sebald, I think also in his writing, is looking for these

sorts of patterns, how they occur in historical events and connections between

people.

He's always picking up on these sorts of uncanny connections.

The uncanniness is very important.

And one thing he writes about East Anglia is that East Anglia

is really part of Germany, because he says the Rhine used to

come down, and actually, that's the mouth of the Rhine, the East

Anglia and Holland.

So it's really a kind of German place that's kind of got

marooned by mistake over there.

At the end of his life, he did begin to write more

about German subjects as well.

You know, he came back to literature and the air war and

things like that.

And the books are always about these exiles, you know, these people

who have escaped Germany and living in England, but they're not always

terribly happy in England.

Did Max become an Englishman?

It's a very interesting question.

Conrad certainly became very English.

T.S. Eliot, an American, certainly became very English.

Neither of them, I think, became Englishmen.

I don't think that that's possible.

No, Max was European, international in everything that he did.

He loved England dearly.

He loved the part of England that he made his home, East

Anglia, intensely.

But one of his closest friends there was the English poet, Michael

Hamburger, brother of the English publisher, Paul Hamlin, who were both born

in Germany and came to England in the 30s.

So to me, his sense of being part of European culture was

far more important than his national identity.

Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences

connect?

How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or

if not oneself, then one's own precursor?

The fact that I first passed through British customs 33 years after

Michael, and I am now thinking of giving up teaching as he

did, that I am bent over my writing in Norfolk and he

in Suffolk, that we are both distrustful of our work and both

suffer from an allergy to alcohol, none of these things are particularly

strange.

But why it was that on my first visit to Michael's house,

I instantly felt as if I lived or had once lived there,

in every respect, precisely as he does, I cannot explain.

Yes.

And that was also our village shop and post office.

Everything gone.

And he particularly disliked the sound of modern German and the way

people spoke around him, because the German that he used was, as

he said, a 19th century German.

So he said, he asked me if I knew the German word

for mobile phone, and I didn't.

Then he said, with a look of horror, it was a handy.

So he wasn't at home in Germany, he wasn't at home in

Norwich, so I asked him if he'd ever been in a place

where he felt at home.

I'll give you an example.

Max, when we were working on Vertigo, being very frustrated, because at

one point in that book, he wants to use the language of

Nazi bureaucracy.

And he said to me once that the problem with English is

you just, you don't have the fascist language.

We can't do it, it just sounds ordinary.

So we had to settle for the plainest, not most bureaucratic language,

but plainest language we could manage and hope that the sense of

the German.

But we've got to realise we're not even reading Saybal's book, we're

reading a book by Michael Hulse, who's the translator.

It was a strategy that he doesn't write directly into English, he

writes in German, and then it's translated.

And he could perfectly well translate it himself, but he chooses not

to.

So you've got another version which is already filtered, and it's not

that different, I don't think, from the reports I've heard that the

Midsummer Murders, this generic TV series set in a perfect English village,

by the time it's translated into French, where it's very popular, takes

on a sort of existential gloss, it becomes something else, it's much

moodier and weirder.

Do you get

many Fitzgerald or Omar Khayyam pilgrims coming here?

Yes, we get a great many, rarely, in the summer, though, of

course, being right out in the country here, we don't all know

how many people, you know, do come.

I've got here some of the lines from Omar Khayyam, as translated

by Edward Fitzgerald on life after death.

Strange is it not that of the myriads who, before us passed

the door of darkness through, not one returns to tell us of

the road which to discover we must travel to.

They weren't literal translations, but true in the general sense and their

feeling for the original.

Fitzgerald described the endless hours he spent translating this poem of 224

lines as a colloquy with the dead man and an attempt to

bring to us hidings of him.

The English verses he devised for the purpose, which radiate with a

pure, seemingly unselfconscious beauty, feign an anonymity that disdains even

the least claimed authorship and draw us word by word to an

invisible point where the mediaeval orient and the fading occident can come

together in a way never allowed them by the calamitous course of

history.

Then he walks down to this bull inn, which I was astounded

as well that most of these places you can find and he

goes, this is a great little bit in there and then he

goes to this shop where he meets these strange, oh, they don't

have it.

There's a beautiful section in Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Transparent Things,

where he talks about how when you concentrate on a material object,

he says, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntary

sinking into its surface.

And he talks about, Nabokov has this beautiful phrase, the dream life

of debris.

And that seems to happen again and again in Sebald, that what

begins as a particular object that is seen in all its specificity

and radiance of that, slowly shimmers, becomes a kind of quicksand, sucks

the gaze of the viewer and the footfall of the walker down

into it.

And we find ourselves at Bergen-Belsen or in the Congo.

The Rings of Saturn are a mental landscape.

It's like Blake's mental traveller.

But like Blake, he brings in names of the real, but into

his own cosmology, which is made up of all sorts of things,

including this constant sense of destruction that the landscape he's describing

is where the bombers, I mean, this is one of the key

parts of the book, is this man he meets very early on,

who talks about being a child and watching the fleets of bombers

going over night after night to firebomb German cities.

It's a kind of small detail that grows out of the English

landscape very well.

This is a defensive coast.

It looks out onto the German Ocean, as Sebald calls it, and

it's bequeathed a sort of architectural paranoia.

Much of the landscape has been constructed in order to resist invasion

by humans, but also invasion by the sea.

And that exerts a very powerful imaginative pressure on the walker.

I wrote this essay called WG Sebald.

It began with driving through the Dutch landscape and suddenly realising we

were lost.

And previously, I'd been given this sort of map of Berlin.

I think we'd just moved to Germany, and I'd given them a

map of Berlin on a cloth, on a handkerchief.

And my father immediately triggered something in him, and he remembered that

he had found this cloth map that had been blown out of

an aeroplane as it crashed.

He just went and put his hands on it immediately.

He said, I was near a place, and he leaned across the

map and he said, Goch, right?

This place, Goch.

And then in February, I was driving around Holland on the borders

with Germany, and I was with this curator, Rita Kersting, and we

were lost.

And she started to talk about it.

Well, she came from a town near there.

And I don't know what made me say it, but I just

went, Goch?

Which is a tiny town, in fact.

And she said, yes, how the hell did you know?

And so there was that going on.

And then parallel to that was Rufus Isaac, my great-great-uncle.

His sister had bought a Van Gogh.

Van Gogh's family came from Goch.

And then realising that that took me to Marconi through his brother,

Godfrey, who was the first managing director of the Marconi Corporation.

At that point, I was reading the chapter on Roger Casement.

I knew about Roger Casement.

I'd known about him for a while.

And then, of course, I had a knife through the heart where

I realised that it was my great-great-uncle, Sir Rufus Isaac,

who'd been the hanging judge on that particular case.

It was a true shock to me, actually.

A true shock.

There were all these connections, sort of broadly and in a way,

but also close to how I make my own work, which is

relying on a sort of objective chance method where you go along

and then something happens and it makes you take a different direction.

Coincidences, like dreams, if you talk about them, they become dead.

They're inert.

You know, they don't mean anything to anyone else.

And the only thing you can do with them is to transmute

them, to change them in some way, which is, of course, what

Sabal does.

He takes you down these poetic cul-de-sacs.

And you don't care that you're being led nowhere, of course, because

you learn so much on the way.

To this day, the area between Woodbridge and the sea remains full

of military installations.

Time and again, as one walks across the wide plains, one passes

barracks, gateways and fenced-off areas, where, behind thin plantations of

Scots pines, weapons are concealed in camouflaged hangars and grass-covered

bunkers.

The weapons with which, if an emergency should arise, whole countries and

continents can be transformed into smoking heaps of stone and ash in

no time.

Not far from Orford, and already tired from my long walk, this

notion took possession of me when I was hit by a sandstorm.

I was approaching the eastern fringe of Rendlesham Forest, which covers several

square miles, and was for the most part reduced to broken and

splintered timber in the terrible hurricane of the 16th of October, 1987.

Suddenly, in the space of a few minutes, the bright sky darkened

and a wind came up, blowing the dust across the arid land

in sinister spirals.

The last flickering remnants of daylight were being extinguished and all

contours disappeared in the greyish-brown, smothering gloom that was soon

lashed by strong, unrelenting gusts.

The mealy dust streamed from left to right, from right to left,

to and fro on every side, rising on high and powdering down,

nothing but a dancing, grainy whirl for what must have been an

hour, while further inland, as I later learnt, a heavier thunderstorm had

broken.

When the worst was over, the wavy drifts of sand that had

buried the broken timber emerged from the gloom.

Gasping for breath, my mouth and throat dry, I crawled out of

the hollow that had formed around me like the last survivor of

a caravan that had come to grief in the desert.

A deathly silence prevailed.

There was not a breath, not a birdsong to be heard, not

a rustle, nothing, and although it now grew lighter once more, the

sun, which was at its zenith, remained hidden behind the banners of

pollen-fine dust that hung for a long time in the air.

This, I thought, will be what is left after the earth has

ground itself down.

I walked the rest of the way in a daze.

I used to go up to Orford with my parents and my

brother when I was little, quite often, but it was only when

I was more properly grown up that I heard the story of

the Orford Merman, which goes roughly like this.

I mean, it's many hundreds of years ago, this, and the fishermen

at Orford, because Orford was then on the coast in a way

that it absolutely is not now because everything's silted up, caught in

their nets what I suppose was something like the village idiot or

an idiot from a village nearby, anyway, somebody who was clearly very

sort of ill and disabled in certain respects, and in the story

that's come down, they consider him to be a Merman and they

torture him to try and get him to speak, so they tie

him up in the ruins of the castle which stands in Orford

and they roast him in flame and poke various things into him

and so on and so forth, and of course, he's somebody who

is incapable of speaking and eventually they let him go, so the

whole thing has been a complete, at least barbaric waste of time.

They cut him down, they hauled him up the whirlpool of the

stair, they dragged him past their wives and children gawping in the

square and silently, as though the words they used to know before

were all dead now, they carried him down to the shingle shore,

they slid him tail first in the sea and washed the bitter

drops of blood crust from his finger ends and salt spit from

his lips, and all the while, still silently, they watched the tide

bring in a brittle, dimpled, breaking flood of silver through his skin,

then open up his glistening eyes in which they saw their fear

rise up to greet them one last time and fade and disappear.

Disappear while they stood back like mourners round a grave, and watched

his life ebb out of theirs wave by wave by wave.

When I was first in Orford, it was forbidden to approach the

island, but now there was no longer any obstacle to going there

since, some years before, the Ministry of Defence had abandoned secret research

at that site.

One of the men sitting idly on the harbour wall offered to

take me over for a few pounds and fetch me later after

I'd had a look around.

Once we were on the other side, I took leave of my

ferryman and, after climbing over the embankment, walked along a partially

overgrown tarmac track running straight through a vast, yellowing field.

The day was dull and oppressive and there was so little breeze

that not even the ears of the delicate, quaking grass were nodding.

It was as if I were passing through an undiscovered country and

I still remember that I felt, at the same time, both utterly

liberated and deeply despondent.

When the National Trust were given the site, which was around 2000,

they saw it first as a nature reserve.

It was quite a troublesome one because lots of people in 4x4s

used to zoom over the nests and there was lots of illegal

stuff going on.

They decided to try and preserve the melancholy, windswept, deserted atmosphere

that Seabell describes and they put together a painter and a writer

and an archaeologist which had never happened in a conservation project before

where what tends to happen is the archaeologist and the military historian

who will bring this weight of facts and explanation.

They will tell you how radar works and what happened in this

building and it was the first time the National Trust consciously placed

as much emphasis on atmosphere and association and it was also the

first time they said let's just let the buildings fall down.

They said let's let them crumble over time and that was a

really brave thing to do and that's what's happening.

They're just going to crumble away gently over the next few hundreds

of years.

My sense of being on ground intended for purposes transcending the profane

was heightened by a number of buildings that resembled temples or pagodas

which seemed quite out of place in these military installations.

But the closer I came to these ruins, the more any notion

of a mysterious isle of the dead receded and the more I

imagined myself amidst the remains of our own civilisation after its extinction

in some future catastrophe.

To me too as for some latter-day stranger ignorant of the

nature of our society wandering about among heaps of scrap metal and

defunct machinery the beings who had once lived and worked here were

an enigma as was the purpose of the primitive contraptions and fittings

inside the bunkers the iron rails under the ceilings the hooks on

the still partially tiled walls the shower heads the size of plates

the ramps and the soakaways.

I think you get a very interesting moment in these properties between

the point when they're totally off the map and the short moment

later when the artists are more or less forcibly deposited there to

make artworks from there being no possibility of getting in to the

absolute welcome that's thrown at certain people to make works that give

a kind of poetic to these dangerous, dirty, difficult spaces and the

first ones in have a kind of real charge and then it

becomes very processional and very bleached of energy in some ways there's

much more of a charge places have to be broken into or

infiltrated souvenir shops and point of view here I take you the

photograph this is the point of view you know it's all too

fixed but I don't think one should be too sort of elitist

about this you know it's all very well if we're the first

to be there then that's fine but it is important to try

and think how do you democratise this but I don't think that

we should simply slam the doors in the face of pilgrims who

you know have been ignited by a piece of literature as I

was sitting on the breakwater waiting for the ferryman the evening sun

emerged from behind the clouds bathing in its light the far-reaching

arc of the seashore the tide was advancing up the river the

water was shining like tinplate and from the radio masts above the

marshes came an even scarcely audible hum the roofs and towers of

Orford showed among the treetops seeming so close that I could touch

them there I thought

There, I thought, I was once at home.

So we found the interview on KCRW with Michael Silberblatt and transcribed

the interview.

We were left with Sebald's words.

I thought, well, I want to sort of play around with his

words.

I can't really figure out how to do that.

So I cut them up and I started to make these, you

know, very strange little poems.

I was convinced that this was like a Ouija board, you know,

that if I did this in the right frame of mind, that

he would talk to me.

I mean, I assume that Sebald must have known the Freud essay

on the uncanny.

And Freud says something very simple in the essay, which is that

when we have what we think of as an uncanny experience, it

actually is a recovery of an experience that was once familiar and

then had to be estranged in some way.

So that if I go somewhere and have an experience of deja

vu, say, or I feel something uncanny is happening to me, it's

because, unknown to myself, I'm having a memory of an earlier experience

that was probably pleasurable, but I had to in some way disown.

The most uncanny place is one's home.

As in, it appears to be the most familiar place, but actually

it's the most unfamiliar place.

He wasn't at home in Germany.

He wasn't at home in Norway.

So I asked him if he'd ever been in a place where

he felt at home.

And he said that he thought of one place, and it was

the island of St. Pierre in the Lux at Yenne in Switzerland.

And it's best known because it was where Rousseau took refuge in

1765.

And what he said, and I can read this because it's exact,

he said, I felt at home strangely because it is a miniature

world, one manor house, one farmhouse, a vineyard, a field of potatoes,

a field of wheat, a cherry tree, an orchard.

It is one of everything, so it is in a sense an

ark.

It's like when you draw a place when you were a child.

I think Sable is, as well, wittier than he seems to be

very often.

I think Sable knew that only children have homes, that adults don't

have homes, and that there's something childish in the best sense and

the worst sense about the idea of home.

And I think that dinky little island, which is a bit like

a doll's house island, is a picture of all one's wishful fantasies

about home, which are to do with safety, a controllable environment, a

kind of security in terms of invasions.

And it's a bit like this is a toy that he's placed

on the map of his books, as if to say, wouldn't it

be nice if it could ever be like this?

But actually, it's exactly the opposite.

We're not on an island, we're all interconnected, and we're interconnected in

ways that are horrifying to us very often.

I think that's where he wanted to end up.

You know, I always think, I think it was Diane Arbus, strangely,

another photographer who said that, you know, the gods and their kind

of playful glee put us down in the wrong place and that

we spend our entire life trying to not find the place where

we're supposed to be, but to find who we were supposed to

be.

Sebald's rise to the literary pantheon was remarkable.

It happened in less than ten years.

He went from being unknown to being raised on the shoulders of

opinion formers on both sides of the Atlantic, and had he not

died, I feel sure he would by now have won the Nobel

Prize.

Many people have said as much.

Well, I didn't meet him exactly.

I saw him in the flesh one time.

We were both doing programmes in Broadcasting House, and you know you

go into that lift whenever he talks to each other to come

down, and I heard this conversation with him, and there'd been a

piece in one of the standard or one of the papers that

afternoon saying Sebald was refusing absolutely to do more than one interview

for this book, and while we're standing there in the lift, he's

got his PR woman with him, and they're describing four other interviews

they're going to do that afternoon, and he looked the kind of

most weary man I'd ever seen in my life.

He had a little bit of a moustache, and he looked very

exhausted by the whole process, and yet there was a kind of

twinkle that he...

I thought maybe everything with him isn't to be taken at face

value, and it was that accidental thing of two completely strangers who

didn't know each other just standing in this lift a couple of

minutes going down, and he walks away into doing his interviews, and

I walk off back to Hackney.

But I was really, really pleased to have that moment, like again

the painting of Monsieur Courbet on the road.

You know, you're this man with his rucksack and his hat, and

it's two strangers who see each other on a road and pass

in different directions, and so he kind of figured there for me

strongly as an icon from that one single incident.

This was a gentle man.

I think he was probably one of the gentlest people that I

have ever had the opportunity.

You could not but like him, even as you admired him.

There was something profoundly likeable about him.

I wouldn't say that I knew him well, but I liked him

very much, and we certainly saw each other pretty often for a

spell.

Everything about him felt soft, everything sort of gentle and unobtrusive, but

absolutely watchful and wary, and with a...

And I'm not just sort of back-forming this either from the

books, but with a sense that he might get up and not

come back at any moment, a sort of wandering otherness about him.

I set out on foot in a north-westerly direction along the

old Roman road into the thinly populated countryside that lies to the

south of Halston, and I knew then, as little as I know

now, whether walking in this solitary way was more of a pleasure

or a pain.

At times on that day, which I recall as being both leaden

and unreal, a gap would open up among the billowing clouds, and

the rays of sun would reach down to the earth, lighting up

patches here and there and making a fan-shaped pattern as they

descended, of the sort that used to appear in religious pictures symbolising

the presence of others of grace and providence.

It was afternoon by the time I came to the lane which

leaves the Roman road across a cattle grid and leads through a

meadow to Chestnut Tree Farm, an ancient moated house, where Thomas Abrams

has been working on a model of the Temple of Jerusalem for

a good 20 years.

He spent 18 years bringing back the temple, which was the opulent

focus for religious worship in Jerusalem when Jesus was alive.

But why did the 67-year-old decide to focus on this

particular piece of history?

The constable decided to paint a picture, and I decided to build

a temple.

Now pilgrims and scholars from all over the world trek to the

village of Fressingfield to see the largest and most detailed model of

its kind.

And as the Easter weekend approaches, even more visitors have booked to

see it.

I'm quite proud, but, you know, it's like everything else.

It's just a way of life to me, and I enjoy it.

100,000 handmade clay bricks and 3,500 painted figures have gone

into it, and it still isn't complete.

But that doesn't deter the experts.

In Jerusalem, there's plans to rebuild a full-scale version of King

Herod's Temple.

They're using Suffolk's miniature version as a blueprint for the real thing.

Sarah Doyle, Anglian News...

As I took my leave and mentioned that I had walked over

from Oxford and was now going on to Halston, Thomas said that

he would drive me, as he had an errand in town anyway.

So we spent the quarter of an hour to Halston, sitting side

by side in the cab of his truck, and I wished that

the short drive through the country would never come to an end,

that we could go on and on, all the way to Jerusalem.

But instead, I had to get out at the Saracen's Head in

Halston, an inn several centuries old, whose guest rooms, as it transpired,

were furnished with the most fearful pieces one can imagine.

I don't know where it quite comes from, but I do like

to listen to people who have been sidelined for one reason or

another.

Because in my experience, once they begin to talk, they have to

tell you, they have things to tell you that you won't be

able to get from anywhere else.

And I felt that need of being able to listen to people

telling me things from very early on, not least, I think, because

I grew up in post-war Germany, where there was, I say

that quite often, something like a conspiracy of silence, i.e. your

parents never told you anything about their experiences, because there was, at

the very least, a great deal of shame attached to these experiences.

So one kept them under lock and seal, and I, for one,

doubt that my mother and father, even amongst themselves, ever broached any

of these subjects.

And there wasn't a written or spoken agreement about these things, it

was a tacit agreement, it was something that was never touched on.

So I've always, I've grown up feeling that there is some sort

of emptiness somewhere that needs to be filled by accounts from witnesses

one can trust.

The Sable narrator is kind of on the run, and what he's

most fearful of is stopping, but he keeps having his attention arrested.

And it's the moment at which he stops, something happens, that it's

as though he begins to accumulate stuff that is eventually going to

be incorporated in a narrative.

So it's as though he begins by saying, I want to tell

you a story about a walk, and by the end he's telling

you, I've in fact told you a story about the catastrophes of

Western culture since the Second World War and before.

So that the fear is that if you allow yourself to become

a writer, the catastrophe will be like an avalanche, whereas if you

keep walking, you might be OK.

The subtitle of The Rings of Saturn is an English pilgrimage, and

it's a very curious title when you think about it, because a

pilgrimage is a movement towards healing, towards resolution, towards self

-understanding, and actually what this foot journey results in is catastrophic

dilapidation of foundations, a vanishing of stabilities, and it puts him in

hospital.

What are we trying to accomplish by doing this, going on this

trip?

Are we trying to prove that he did it?

Are we trying to experience what he experienced?

Or do we just not care and we're just going to have

a good old time?

One thing that's happened in the last decade, there's been this huge

revival of pilgrimage across the world, in fact, so that on the

way to Santiago de Compostela, they're reopening these mediaeval hostelries,

which have been closed for decades or hundreds of years, and there's

definitely some modern desire to find meaning through physical effort.

It's interesting because the word pilgrimage, in English at least, has the

word image in it, and after we got back, I did some

research and I found these maps that were created for pilgrims that

didn't actually go on pilgrimages.

They would use them to sort of meditate on and use the

images to move their mind through the different parts of the land

on their way to Jerusalem.

They were called itinerary maps.

It's rather what Wim Wenders said about Kings of the Road, that

you have an itinerary, and once you have an itinerary, it becomes

quite easy to kind of write, in a way.

Something I never worked out, you know, you sit in a room

day after day, and you think, well, what will I write about

today?

And if you actually go out for a walk, and you walk

15 miles, you're going to get enough for 750 words, 1,000

words, no trouble at all.

I think it wasn't until I did my East Anglian journey that

I thought, this is a doddle.

You know, you kind of go to Cromer, oh, you're going to

just write about in Cromer, then you move on around the coast,

oh, look, there's a kind of old Cold War, early warning station,

you know, so it sort of takes care of itself.

I don't think that works at all anymore now, because they're all

doing it, you know, the countryside is black with people going for

walks to write books.

The only way to do it is obviously you have to walk

somewhere ever more extreme in more and more peculiar circumstances.

I wouldn't get away with just walking around the M25 orbital motorway

now.

You'd have to walk around the six orbital motorways of Beijing.

The last ten years have been so kind of mediated that I'm

sure that people feel the desire to go and...

You know, people are going a lot in the art world now,

a lot of artists are going and finding extraordinary places.

I know artists have gone to Antarctica, to, you know, everywhere.

I mean, it's a globalisation in extremity.

I think people do feel that there is increasing homogenisation of the

country, that places are actually becoming less places, they're becoming more

like spaces, they're becoming more abstract, they're becoming infinitely

reproducible.

What's important for Sobald is that actually he finds the particular within

them, he finds why this place is important, why this particular hall

is important, because this person stayed here, because this event happened on

this place, because here there was a village and now there is

no longer a village.

He encourages a deeper form of engagement with the place.

And he is now a layer of that history, of which he

writes.

He wasn't while he was walking, but he is now.

He's a very definite part of that landscape.

This is a pilgrimage because the man is dead.

The man is dead, and so he's ripe for a cult.

And the way you would read his book is to think that

you could follow along his track and get some insight into it,

whereas I think that's probably completely untrue.

It's probably the worst way to get an insight into what he's

doing is to literally follow along, because he's a mythologist and a

lot of the things in there he's invented.

You want to understand his methods, not the kind of literal sense

of being out there.

Although, why not do that walk?

It is a great walk.

Enjoy it.

It's not by chance that after that walking holiday he collapsed and

he found himself in a hospital.

There's an undertow, isn't there, of some sort of despair or some

inability to connect to where he is, some attempt to belong somewhere,

in some place.

And maybe that appeals to us, you know.

Maybe that's what we want.

Maybe all things material that we try to construct in order to

contain the chaos or the fears or whatever it is.

He sort of goes, well, they aren't actually valid.

They don't have any meaning.

And there's great comfort in that when everything collapses around you, isn't

there?

Ditchingham Churchyard was the very last stop on my walk through the

county of Suffolk.

The afternoon was already drawing to a close, and so I decided

to return to the main road and continue a short way in

the direction of Norwich to the Mermaid in Heddenham, where the bar

would be opening soon.

I would be able to phone home from there to be picked

up.

Quite near the beginning of Wings of Saturn there's a photograph of

Southwold Lighthouse and I was aware this was also the place where

Peter Greenway's Drowning by Numbers was filmed.

And so I took the ritual which is found within Drowning by

Numbers, where the son of the coroner, at each point that he

comes across a death in the film, he lets off a firework.

And so I decided as a mark of memorial that I'd set

off a firework by the side of the road where Sabo died.

I got back home that evening and was looking at the photographs

on the computer.

And what I typically wanted was not a flash of light, but

the smoke, very Sibelian substance.

And so I had four photographs where the smoke was making nice

shapes and so I was very pleased with those.

And then I looked at the final image that I took and...

Now as I write and think once more of our history, which

is but a long account of calamities, it occurs to me that

at one time the only acceptable expression of profound grief for ladies

of the upper classes was to wear heavy robes of black silk

taffeta, or black crepe de chine.

And Sir Thomas Brown, who was the son of a silk merchant

and may well have had an eye for these things, remarks in

a passage of the Pseudodoxia Epidemica that I can no longer find,

that in the Holland of his time it was customary in a

home where there'd been a death to drape black mourning ribbons over

all the mirrors and all canvases depicting landscapes, or people, or the

fruits of the field so that the soul as it left the

body would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a

reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of the land now

being lost forever.