1
00:01:17,300 --> 00:01:21,800
In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end,

2
00:01:22,400 --> 00:01:26,160
I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope

3
00:01:26,160 --> 00:01:29,860
of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I've completed

4
00:01:29,860 --> 00:01:31,120
a long stint at work.

5
00:01:32,200 --> 00:01:35,540
And in fact my hope was realised, up to a point.

6
00:01:36,600 --> 00:01:40,340
For I've seldom felt so carefree as I did then, walking for

7
00:01:40,340 --> 00:01:44,340
hours in the day through the thinly populated countryside, which stretches

8
00:01:44,340 --> 00:01:45,540
inland from the coast.

9
00:01:48,000 --> 00:01:52,340
I wonder now, however, whether there might be something in the old

10
00:01:52,340 --> 00:01:56,700
superstition that certain ailments of the spirit and of the body are

11
00:01:56,700 --> 00:02:00,180
particularly likely to beset us under the sign of the dog star.

12
00:02:22,970 --> 00:02:28,110
Sebald, Winifred Georg Sebald, was born in Wertheim-Allgäu in the Bavarian

13
00:02:28,110 --> 00:02:29,250
Alps in 1944.

14
00:02:30,270 --> 00:02:36,710
He studied in Germany at Freiburg and in 1967 he moved to

15
00:02:36,710 --> 00:02:42,030
England, first to Manchester and then to East Anglia, to Norwich, where

16
00:02:42,030 --> 00:02:48,550
he settled and lived out his working life as a professor of

17
00:02:48,550 --> 00:02:53,490
European literatures and literature and translation at the University of East

18
00:02:53,490 --> 00:02:54,230
Anglia.

19
00:02:55,290 --> 00:02:57,290
And success came late to him.

20
00:02:57,650 --> 00:03:01,950
He wrote his books first in German and then carefully oversaw their

21
00:03:01,950 --> 00:03:03,550
translation into English.

22
00:03:04,150 --> 00:03:07,450
And it was when the books began to appear in English that

23
00:03:07,450 --> 00:03:12,070
his rise in the English-speaking literary world began.

24
00:03:13,830 --> 00:03:16,810
Max came to the Harville Press.

25
00:03:17,650 --> 00:03:21,030
We were all sitting round, everybody in the company, Max, and one

26
00:03:21,030 --> 00:03:25,870
of the questions we asked him was, which category would you like

27
00:03:25,870 --> 00:03:26,870
your book to be in?

28
00:03:28,150 --> 00:03:32,370
And Max said, oh, I'd like all the categories.

29
00:03:33,010 --> 00:03:38,810
I want fiction, I want biography, I want autobiography, I want travel,

30
00:03:38,970 --> 00:03:40,690
I want history, I want...

31
00:03:40,690 --> 00:03:43,010
he probably didn't say Holocaust studies.

32
00:03:43,130 --> 00:03:46,410
But anyway, there wasn't a category that he didn't require.

33
00:03:47,290 --> 00:03:51,350
Well, it turns out that when you're dealing with the people who

34
00:03:51,350 --> 00:03:56,930
do the classification, they will only allow you three, because humour is

35
00:03:56,930 --> 00:03:57,850
so...

36
00:03:57,850 --> 00:04:01,690
so badly unkind, will obviously go for all of them, on the

37
00:04:01,690 --> 00:04:06,070
utterly mistaken assumption that booksellers would be forced to have a copy

38
00:04:06,070 --> 00:04:07,370
in each shelf.

39
00:04:07,370 --> 00:04:08,910
Well, it doesn't work like that.

40
00:04:08,970 --> 00:04:12,810
So there were three, and I don't honestly remember what the final

41
00:04:12,810 --> 00:04:14,970
three were, but Max was very clear.

42
00:04:15,089 --> 00:04:18,230
And what he was saying, turn it round as you like, was,

43
00:04:18,690 --> 00:04:22,090
don't put me in a box, I want to be in all

44
00:04:22,090 --> 00:04:22,470
the boxes.

45
00:04:23,210 --> 00:04:26,710
You know, I'm not writing a familiar formula.

46
00:04:32,980 --> 00:04:36,040
Well, one of the odd things about the book is it begins

47
00:04:36,040 --> 00:04:39,580
as an account of somebody having finished a book, because he's finished

48
00:04:39,580 --> 00:04:42,020
a piece of writing and he now feels apparently carefree.

49
00:04:43,000 --> 00:04:46,740
And it seems to me the book starts inviting you to imagine

50
00:04:46,740 --> 00:04:49,960
what it's like to feel suddenly released from something.

51
00:04:50,780 --> 00:04:53,400
He's going on this wonderful walk, within several lines.

52
00:04:53,780 --> 00:04:55,060
He couldn't be more depressed.

53
00:04:55,400 --> 00:04:56,800
It's like the thing Freud says about headaches.

54
00:04:57,060 --> 00:04:59,760
The moment somebody says to themselves, God, isn't it marvellous, I haven't

55
00:04:59,760 --> 00:05:01,860
had one of those headaches for ages, that's a sign they're about

56
00:05:01,860 --> 00:05:02,240
to get one.

57
00:05:04,600 --> 00:05:10,240
Sable says, I felt incredibly free, carefree, and suddenly he's not free

58
00:05:10,240 --> 00:05:11,000
and full of cares.

59
00:05:19,000 --> 00:05:22,780
Later, in one of the long hothouses built against the brick walls

60
00:05:22,780 --> 00:05:26,860
of the kitchen garden, I struck up a conversation with William Hazel,

61
00:05:27,540 --> 00:05:30,500
the gardener who now looks after Summer Leighton with the help of

62
00:05:30,500 --> 00:05:31,560
several odd job men.

63
00:05:32,620 --> 00:05:36,080
When he realised where I was from, he told me that during

64
00:05:36,080 --> 00:05:40,300
his last years at school and his subsequent apprenticeship, his thoughts

65
00:05:40,300 --> 00:05:44,040
constantly revolved around the bombing raids then being launched on Germany

66
00:05:44,040 --> 00:05:48,540
from the 67 airfields that were established in East Anglia after 1940.

67
00:05:50,260 --> 00:05:53,800
People nowadays hardly have any idea of the scale of the operation,

68
00:05:54,000 --> 00:05:54,460
said Hazel.

69
00:05:55,760 --> 00:06:00,100
In the course of 1,009 days, the 8th Air Fleet alone

70
00:06:00,100 --> 00:06:06,120
used a billion gallons of fuel, dropped 732,000 tonnes of bombs,

71
00:06:06,120 --> 00:06:11,340
and lost almost 9,000 aircraft and 50,000 men.

72
00:06:12,780 --> 00:06:16,320
Every evening I watched the bomber squadrons heading out over Summer Leighton,

73
00:06:16,720 --> 00:06:19,800
and night after night, before I went to sleep, I pictured in

74
00:06:19,800 --> 00:06:24,600
my mind's eye the German cities going up in flames, the firestorms

75
00:06:24,600 --> 00:06:29,960
setting the heavens alight, and the survivors rooting about in the ruins.

76
00:06:34,590 --> 00:06:38,030
Often the narrator feels that he's kind of irradiated by a melancholy.

77
00:06:38,890 --> 00:06:42,770
He doesn't quite know where it comes from, and it colours the

78
00:06:42,770 --> 00:06:43,170
landscape.

79
00:06:47,440 --> 00:06:50,920
The book is literally full of geography in that almost every page

80
00:06:50,920 --> 00:06:54,620
has a place name on it that you can identify on a

81
00:06:54,620 --> 00:06:54,860
map.

82
00:06:56,590 --> 00:07:00,750
So I came up with this idea, fairly simple, of doing a

83
00:07:00,750 --> 00:07:05,510
digital project for mapping books where essentially I would take the locations

84
00:07:05,510 --> 00:07:10,150
that appear in books or locations around books and plot them on

85
00:07:10,150 --> 00:07:13,270
a digital map, so you could zoom in and zoom out, and

86
00:07:13,270 --> 00:07:16,310
The Rings of Saturn was the first book that I plotted.

87
00:07:17,310 --> 00:07:21,310
This red map serves as the core of his walking tour, and

88
00:07:21,310 --> 00:07:24,890
then at each place he mentions places around the world that are

89
00:07:24,890 --> 00:07:25,870
further removed.

90
00:07:25,970 --> 00:07:28,050
Then there would be a link out to those places.

91
00:07:30,880 --> 00:07:34,760
On the surface it's a walk in Suffolk, and his experiences of

92
00:07:34,760 --> 00:07:41,400
these landscapes down there, the beaches and the heaths and the kind

93
00:07:41,400 --> 00:07:43,020
of emptiness of that whole place.

94
00:07:43,360 --> 00:07:47,500
Then associated with it is a whole encyclopaedia of other things.

95
00:07:47,620 --> 00:07:50,560
So when he goes to places, he touches off on a certain

96
00:07:50,560 --> 00:07:53,580
writer or a certain event, and then the book kind of spirals

97
00:07:53,580 --> 00:07:54,720
out into something else.

98
00:07:55,000 --> 00:07:59,260
So it's a kind of walk, and then it's also this encyclopaedia

99
00:07:59,260 --> 00:08:04,360
of people and things and events which interest him, some of which

100
00:08:04,360 --> 00:08:06,960
are quite directly tied to the walk and some which aren't.

101
00:08:06,960 --> 00:08:10,860
For me, silk is the centre of this book in some ways

102
00:08:10,860 --> 00:08:18,360
because of how carefully Zabel kind of silks silk around throughout the

103
00:08:18,360 --> 00:08:18,780
chapters.

104
00:08:19,180 --> 00:08:21,460
It'll just be a little metaphor in one chapter.

105
00:08:21,540 --> 00:08:24,140
I think he mentions it in Chapter 1 just for a second

106
00:08:24,140 --> 00:08:27,900
and then moves on, foreshadowing what comes.

107
00:08:28,060 --> 00:08:31,120
I think it's almost in the last chapter that the silk thing

108
00:08:31,120 --> 00:08:32,520
finally happens.

109
00:08:40,919 --> 00:08:45,320
The title The Rings of Saturn is one of the more enigmatic

110
00:08:45,320 --> 00:08:47,620
titles amongst Max's books.

111
00:08:48,340 --> 00:08:51,960
It even, in the original German, had a subtitle, An English Pilgrimage.

112
00:08:52,760 --> 00:08:55,640
But it tells you something about the state of publishing today that

113
00:08:55,640 --> 00:09:00,740
we thought it better to leave the subtitle off because we didn't

114
00:09:00,740 --> 00:09:02,480
want people to think it was a travel book.

115
00:09:05,570 --> 00:09:10,250
Although it's enigmatic, once you've read the epigraph, it's one of the

116
00:09:10,250 --> 00:09:12,770
clearest of Max's titles.

117
00:09:14,270 --> 00:09:18,890
The second epigraph in the book is from a German encyclopaedia which

118
00:09:18,890 --> 00:09:24,530
talks about The Rings of Saturn as being fragments of a moon

119
00:09:24,530 --> 00:09:28,630
that wandered too close to the planet of Saturn and was shattered

120
00:09:28,630 --> 00:09:34,310
by the gravitational pull but remains as a ring of dust particles

121
00:09:34,310 --> 00:09:37,310
forever circling the planet that destroyed it.

122
00:09:37,310 --> 00:09:41,370
So if you think of the way The Rings of Saturn works

123
00:09:42,050 --> 00:09:49,330
as an attempt at several walks round an idea of England in

124
00:09:49,330 --> 00:09:54,970
concentric rings made up of shattered fragments of a past, you begin

125
00:09:54,970 --> 00:09:55,690
to get the picture.

126
00:10:02,530 --> 00:10:06,210
The thing that it's closest to for me is Virginia Woolf's The

127
00:10:06,210 --> 00:10:10,510
Waves where you just feel that there's an attempt to capture perception

128
00:10:10,510 --> 00:10:15,650
in all its really fleeting and really fast way in which we

129
00:10:15,650 --> 00:10:17,490
perceive and we put things together.

130
00:10:17,850 --> 00:10:20,330
But, of course, he constructs it so exquisitely.

131
00:10:20,450 --> 00:10:22,070
Every sentence is beautifully crafted.

132
00:10:22,210 --> 00:10:24,170
So I don't know what the genre is.

133
00:10:24,510 --> 00:10:25,110
I don't know.

134
00:10:27,850 --> 00:10:33,590
Probably known better to you than to me, Virginia Woolf, the wonderful

135
00:10:33,590 --> 00:10:40,030
example of her description of a moth coming to its end on

136
00:10:40,030 --> 00:10:41,870
a window pane somewhere in Sussex.

137
00:10:42,630 --> 00:10:45,650
And this is a passage of some two pages only, I think,

138
00:10:45,810 --> 00:10:49,650
and it's written somewhere, chronologically speaking, between the battlefields

139
00:10:49,650 --> 00:10:54,430
of the Somme and the concentration camps erected by my compatriots.

140
00:10:55,270 --> 00:11:00,510
And there's no reference made to the battlefields of the Somme in

141
00:11:00,510 --> 00:11:01,190
this passage.

142
00:11:01,750 --> 00:11:07,470
But one knows, as a reader of Virginia Woolf, that she was

143
00:11:07,470 --> 00:11:12,330
greatly perturbed by the First World War, by its aftermath, by the

144
00:11:12,330 --> 00:11:16,510
damage it did to people's souls, the souls of those who got

145
00:11:16,510 --> 00:11:19,450
away and naturally of those who perished.

146
00:11:20,190 --> 00:11:25,430
So, you know, I think that a subject which at first glance

147
00:11:25,430 --> 00:11:30,390
seems quite far removed from the undeclared concern of a book can

148
00:11:30,390 --> 00:11:32,410
encapsulate that concern.

149
00:11:38,340 --> 00:11:44,040
And in Lowestoft, a pavement of fish glittering, an absolute tidal flow

150
00:11:44,040 --> 00:11:50,080
of fish, the abundance, the overabundance of the sea, that it's a

151
00:11:50,080 --> 00:11:53,560
moment when there's too much, that the herring have come so close

152
00:11:53,560 --> 00:11:58,220
to shore they've almost committed suicide and thrown themselves up, and there's

153
00:11:58,220 --> 00:12:01,960
nothing that can be done, the fish rot away, and there are

154
00:12:01,960 --> 00:12:06,880
strange concepts of trying to understand the luminescence of these fish and

155
00:12:06,880 --> 00:12:08,100
to extract light.

156
00:12:09,980 --> 00:12:13,420
So there's these small disjunctions that start to occur.

157
00:12:14,120 --> 00:12:16,580
I took his word that that's herring.

158
00:12:16,640 --> 00:12:18,040
I wouldn't know what herring looks like.

159
00:12:18,280 --> 00:12:19,560
So, OK, that's herring.

160
00:12:19,660 --> 00:12:20,440
It's a little off.

161
00:12:20,500 --> 00:12:21,280
It's a postcard.

162
00:12:23,740 --> 00:12:26,980
But, you know, as you move on, he's talking about the herring

163
00:12:26,980 --> 00:12:31,240
and about sort of this wonderful colour that is emitted when they

164
00:12:31,240 --> 00:12:35,300
die and yet, you know, he gives us this close-up of

165
00:12:35,300 --> 00:12:38,900
this large black and white fish, and I think you kind of

166
00:12:38,900 --> 00:12:40,560
just sort of breeze past that.

167
00:12:40,660 --> 00:12:42,180
It doesn't offer any information.

168
00:12:42,420 --> 00:12:48,320
It seems to just affirm what you're reading in a very non

169
00:12:48,320 --> 00:12:49,040
-Zabaldian way.

170
00:12:49,120 --> 00:12:49,940
It usually doesn't do that.

171
00:12:50,040 --> 00:12:51,200
It doesn't illustrate things.

172
00:12:52,240 --> 00:12:55,780
If you're careful, you think, Wow, I wish it was in colour.

173
00:12:55,880 --> 00:13:00,520
I'd really love to see this kind of effervescence and phosphorescence that

174
00:13:00,520 --> 00:13:01,000
occurs.

175
00:13:01,820 --> 00:13:04,040
And then I think this is one of the strangest images.

176
00:13:04,440 --> 00:13:11,400
It's talking about using this phosphorescence to light this passageway, and all

177
00:13:11,400 --> 00:13:14,780
I could see was these fins on the fish.

178
00:13:15,040 --> 00:13:19,620
You know, I'm starting to pick up this pattern between these fins,

179
00:13:19,920 --> 00:13:23,260
and then I see them here, and I kind of think, Oh,

180
00:13:23,300 --> 00:13:25,420
well, that's kind of a clever artist thing.

181
00:13:25,520 --> 00:13:27,620
We do that all the time, you know, kind of start to

182
00:13:27,620 --> 00:13:28,380
work formally.

183
00:13:29,000 --> 00:13:31,780
And then the shock of sort of turning the page and seeing

184
00:13:31,780 --> 00:13:39,020
this image, I immediately had to go back and start to figure

185
00:13:39,020 --> 00:13:43,580
out where this began, you know, from somewhere to this end image,

186
00:13:43,800 --> 00:13:51,780
and I naturally started there because there is something that's very similar

187
00:13:51,780 --> 00:13:54,920
between these images, you know, the dead fish.

188
00:14:07,600 --> 00:14:10,240
This, to me, called out for interpretation.

189
00:14:10,600 --> 00:14:13,600
I felt I needed to go back and really pay attention, and

190
00:14:13,600 --> 00:14:16,320
it was the first time when I read The Rings of Saturn

191
00:14:16,320 --> 00:14:17,280
that that occurred.

192
00:14:19,450 --> 00:14:24,910
I think it's very hard to do this, to use this medium

193
00:14:24,910 --> 00:14:28,950
of book, you know, the linearity of a book, and to use

194
00:14:28,950 --> 00:14:31,510
the images to pull you back.

195
00:14:32,330 --> 00:14:35,570
That is why it is like a journey, even as you're reading

196
00:14:35,570 --> 00:14:39,650
it, because you're constantly having to go back.

197
00:14:40,190 --> 00:14:40,870
I was blown away.

198
00:14:41,090 --> 00:14:43,550
I really thought this is where we have to sort of stop

199
00:14:43,550 --> 00:14:46,870
and reconsider what he was doing.

200
00:14:48,090 --> 00:14:52,370
He's become very, very important for contemporary artists, I think, and for

201
00:14:52,370 --> 00:14:55,710
that reason, we have to also reconsider and think of him as

202
00:14:55,710 --> 00:14:57,170
both a writer and an artist.

203
00:15:15,930 --> 00:15:19,430
What I was writing about Sebald, I rang him up.

204
00:15:19,430 --> 00:15:22,930
I just ran up the university and said, can I speak to

205
00:15:22,930 --> 00:15:23,730
Professor Sebald?

206
00:15:23,790 --> 00:15:27,030
I wanted to reproduce his photographs in the book I was writing

207
00:15:27,030 --> 00:15:29,810
and also in an exhibition, and I wanted to put across their

208
00:15:29,810 --> 00:15:32,710
particular mood, which I hadn't really seen before.

209
00:15:32,870 --> 00:15:36,550
He explained that they were just sort of snappy snaps or boots,

210
00:15:36,710 --> 00:15:39,790
but he would put them on the photocopy of these colour prints

211
00:15:40,630 --> 00:15:45,710
and photocopy and re-photocopy until they had that black, smudgy, grainy

212
00:15:45,710 --> 00:15:45,970
look.

213
00:15:46,170 --> 00:15:48,710
I said, could I borrow some for an exhibition?

214
00:15:48,710 --> 00:15:51,690
He said, well, they're on a shelf and they're quite high up

215
00:15:51,690 --> 00:15:53,350
and it's on the other side of the room, and there was

216
00:15:53,350 --> 00:15:58,110
this long sign, so I was wondering whether I should say, do

217
00:15:58,110 --> 00:15:59,910
you want to get up?

218
00:16:06,100 --> 00:16:11,060
Well, the spell of enchantment was cast on me by him about

219
00:16:11,060 --> 00:16:16,880
12 years ago, and I ended up wanting to write a book

220
00:16:16,880 --> 00:16:18,940
about him, and I realised that...

221
00:16:18,940 --> 00:16:19,820
I mean, he's a biographer.

222
00:16:19,820 --> 00:16:24,860
He's a biographer who walks his subjects back into life, or maybe

223
00:16:24,860 --> 00:16:27,940
he walks forward after them into death.

224
00:16:28,020 --> 00:16:29,320
It's never quite clear.

225
00:16:30,960 --> 00:16:34,260
It soon became obvious to me that the way to write about

226
00:16:34,260 --> 00:16:36,620
him, but I was wrong in this assumption, was to follow him,

227
00:16:37,100 --> 00:16:42,180
was to footstep his footsteppings of earlier feet and turn his own

228
00:16:42,180 --> 00:16:46,060
method back upon himself, and so I started to do that, and

229
00:16:46,060 --> 00:16:53,000
I re-walked most of the Rings of Saturn walk, and I

230
00:16:53,000 --> 00:16:56,320
really wanted it to be a grey day, and it wasn't a

231
00:16:56,320 --> 00:16:56,720
grey day.

232
00:16:56,820 --> 00:17:00,940
It was a bright day, and there were people bathing in the

233
00:17:00,940 --> 00:17:05,839
fountains at Lower Stoft, and I realised very quickly that I was

234
00:17:05,839 --> 00:17:09,119
having far too much fun to footsteps about.

235
00:17:09,880 --> 00:17:14,380
At Pinnock Abroad, I swam, and then I slept the night by

236
00:17:14,380 --> 00:17:18,800
a big bloom of poppies and woke up at dawn with a

237
00:17:18,800 --> 00:17:23,540
glorious easterly view and swam again, and my memory of that walk

238
00:17:23,540 --> 00:17:28,480
is one of delight, really, and a refusal of the walk to

239
00:17:28,480 --> 00:17:32,080
conform to my idea of what the walk should have been, and

240
00:17:32,080 --> 00:17:34,320
so I realised that if I were going to write this book,

241
00:17:34,380 --> 00:17:36,800
I had to drop myself out of it entirely.

242
00:17:37,180 --> 00:17:38,000
I couldn't be there.

243
00:17:38,000 --> 00:17:43,080
It was a completely bad fit between footstepper and footsteppy.

244
00:17:58,810 --> 00:18:03,430
Of the zone, oh, in Stork, of course, absolutely.

245
00:18:03,870 --> 00:18:08,930
This landscape that looks really sort of innocent and normal, and yet

246
00:18:08,930 --> 00:18:11,570
you can't move through it without it somehow ejecting you and is

247
00:18:11,570 --> 00:18:13,890
that magic place where you can go and get what you wish

248
00:18:13,890 --> 00:18:16,090
for, which is never what you think you want.

249
00:18:16,550 --> 00:18:20,710
Yes, maybe he makes Suffolk rather like the zone, but actually when

250
00:18:20,710 --> 00:18:23,830
you go to Suffolk and you walk some of his walks, you

251
00:18:23,830 --> 00:18:25,570
feel it is the zone.

252
00:18:25,870 --> 00:18:29,530
When I walked up to Ben Acre Broad, that weird landscape where

253
00:18:29,530 --> 00:18:32,830
the lake and the shingled beach are sort of almost butted up

254
00:18:32,830 --> 00:18:36,170
together, and you know that one day the lake's going to tip

255
00:18:36,170 --> 00:18:38,310
into the sea or the sea's going to tip into the lake,

256
00:18:38,610 --> 00:18:39,570
I was so frightened.

257
00:18:39,890 --> 00:18:41,310
I was actually carrying a video camera.

258
00:18:41,730 --> 00:18:42,230
I was so frightened.

259
00:18:42,290 --> 00:18:43,070
You can see it in the footage.

260
00:18:43,150 --> 00:18:45,390
I'm just shaking and getting frightened.

261
00:18:45,450 --> 00:18:49,350
I couldn't actually go very far up towards Ben Acre Broad because

262
00:18:49,350 --> 00:18:50,490
it did feel like the zone.

263
00:18:50,830 --> 00:18:53,450
And do you remember in Stalker there's the man who ties the

264
00:18:53,450 --> 00:18:58,570
stones into the white handkerchief and throws them, and something in the

265
00:18:58,570 --> 00:19:02,270
zone guides where the stone lands and then you can walk safely.

266
00:19:03,110 --> 00:19:05,430
And I definitely would have loved to have had a stalker with

267
00:19:05,430 --> 00:19:05,570
me.

268
00:19:05,630 --> 00:19:06,750
I was so frightened there.

269
00:19:11,650 --> 00:19:19,350
Dust-laden, mist-laden, being penetrated by odd and misdirecting lights, the

270
00:19:19,350 --> 00:19:24,730
attempt here is really to become lost in a fog.

271
00:19:25,470 --> 00:19:30,990
Yes, well, in these kinds of natural phenomena, like fog, like mist,

272
00:19:31,290 --> 00:19:36,970
which render the environment and one's ability to see it, render this

273
00:19:36,970 --> 00:19:38,270
almost impossible.

274
00:19:38,690 --> 00:19:41,130
There are all these phenomena that interest me greatly.

275
00:19:41,130 --> 00:19:45,790
One of the great strokes of genius in standard 19th-century fiction,

276
00:19:45,950 --> 00:19:48,230
I always thought, was the fog in Bleak House.

277
00:19:48,610 --> 00:19:49,050
Oh, yes.

278
00:19:49,670 --> 00:19:58,990
And it's this ability to make of one natural phenomenon a thread

279
00:19:58,990 --> 00:20:06,590
that runs through a whole text and kind of upholds this extended

280
00:20:06,590 --> 00:20:10,690
metaphor is something that I find very, very attractive.

281
00:20:11,290 --> 00:20:17,770
The substances that recur, dust, ash, spume, cloud, vapour, these are the

282
00:20:17,770 --> 00:20:22,750
substances of that coast, and they're all particular in both senses of

283
00:20:22,750 --> 00:20:24,490
that wonderfully precise word.

284
00:20:24,610 --> 00:20:29,490
They're specific, but they're also made up of particles, and he's fascinated

285
00:20:29,490 --> 00:20:34,030
by comminuted substances, substances that have been reduced down and down and

286
00:20:34,030 --> 00:20:34,290
down.

287
00:20:34,290 --> 00:20:37,670
I think he talks once about them being on the borderline between

288
00:20:37,670 --> 00:20:41,870
being and nothingness, and you realise that this whole coast, actually,

289
00:20:42,310 --> 00:20:48,170
aerially, marinely and terrestrially, comprises these comminuted substances on

290
00:20:48,170 --> 00:20:49,270
which he's walking.

291
00:20:52,650 --> 00:20:56,870
Yes, it's a study of nature in all its forms, and the

292
00:20:56,870 --> 00:21:03,150
walker's approach to viewing nature is a phenomenological one, and the

293
00:21:03,150 --> 00:21:08,110
scientist's approach is a much more incisive one, but they all belong

294
00:21:08,110 --> 00:21:08,590
together.

295
00:21:14,220 --> 00:21:18,720
For me, reading Sable is like a discovery, given there's been so

296
00:21:18,720 --> 00:21:23,780
much schlock written about post-Holocaust writing and so much terrible

297
00:21:23,780 --> 00:21:26,140
exploitation of the Holocaust and all that.

298
00:21:27,240 --> 00:21:32,780
Sable seemed to have a way, actually, of thinking about these issues

299
00:21:32,780 --> 00:21:37,260
in a way that was neither sensationalist nor self-pitying, but that

300
00:21:37,260 --> 00:21:40,780
could be, on the one hand, sort of grimly humorous, but also

301
00:21:40,780 --> 00:21:41,940
very, very straightforward.

302
00:21:42,300 --> 00:21:45,220
It was like the best version of journalism one could imagine.

303
00:21:46,140 --> 00:21:50,040
Really straightforward documentary writing that was really artful at the same

304
00:21:50,040 --> 00:21:50,420
time.

305
00:21:51,600 --> 00:21:53,080
You wanted to listen to this voice.

306
00:21:54,200 --> 00:22:00,680
The reader needs to be prompted that the narrator has a conscience

307
00:22:00,680 --> 00:22:04,340
and that he is and has been perhaps for a long time

308
00:22:04,340 --> 00:22:05,800
engaged with these questions.

309
00:22:06,980 --> 00:22:12,980
And this is why the main scenes of horror are never directly

310
00:22:12,980 --> 00:22:13,660
addressed.

311
00:22:13,820 --> 00:22:17,140
I think it is sufficient to remind people, because we've all seen

312
00:22:17,140 --> 00:22:24,380
images, but these images militate against our capacity for discursive thinking,

313
00:22:24,980 --> 00:22:30,820
for reflecting upon these things, and also paralyse, as it were, our

314
00:22:30,820 --> 00:22:32,140
moral capacity.

315
00:22:32,980 --> 00:22:36,060
So the only way in which one can approach these things, in

316
00:22:36,060 --> 00:22:44,280
my view, is obliquely, tangentially, by reference rather than by direct

317
00:22:44,280 --> 00:22:45,060
confrontation.

318
00:22:47,200 --> 00:22:57,200
BELL RINGS He's in

319
00:22:57,200 --> 00:22:57,840
Southwark.

320
00:22:58,280 --> 00:22:59,660
He's in the Crown Hotel.

321
00:23:00,760 --> 00:23:06,020
And he's reading a copy of The Independent on Sunday.

322
00:23:07,320 --> 00:23:14,180
And he then sees this image of the people, as he says,

323
00:23:14,180 --> 00:23:17,620
hanged in rows like crows or magpies, Serbs, Jews and Bosnians.

324
00:23:19,740 --> 00:23:25,720
And he basically then talks about the Ustasa, which was the equivalent

325
00:23:25,720 --> 00:23:28,520
of the SS, basically, in Croatia, in the war.

326
00:23:29,580 --> 00:23:35,460
Many historians regard them as even more terrifying than the SS.

327
00:23:35,880 --> 00:23:36,960
I mean, they were...

328
00:23:36,960 --> 00:23:40,540
The methods of killing were pretty unimaginable.

329
00:23:41,820 --> 00:23:47,920
He then says that the documents relating to these killings are recorded

330
00:23:47,920 --> 00:23:48,400
in...

331
00:23:48,400 --> 00:23:52,560
He talks about 50,000 documents abandoned by the Germans and Croats

332
00:23:52,560 --> 00:23:57,060
in 1945, which are kept to this day in the Bosanska Krajina

333
00:23:57,060 --> 00:23:58,200
archive in Banja Luka.

334
00:23:59,740 --> 00:24:03,920
And then he describes the fact that this place, where the archives

335
00:24:03,920 --> 00:24:08,400
are now housed, was the headquarters of the Heeresgruppe E intelligence

336
00:24:08,400 --> 00:24:08,900
division.

337
00:24:09,980 --> 00:24:12,540
And at this moment, I thought, hang on a minute, I've heard

338
00:24:12,540 --> 00:24:18,100
that name before, that word, because that was the intelligence division that

339
00:24:18,100 --> 00:24:20,600
Kurt Waldheim worked in during the war.

340
00:24:23,340 --> 00:24:27,740
And then he describes one of the Heeresgruppe E intelligence officers at

341
00:24:27,740 --> 00:24:31,320
that time was a young Viennese lawyer whose chief task was to

342
00:24:31,320 --> 00:24:35,280
draw up memoranda relating to the necessary resettlements, described as

343
00:24:35,280 --> 00:24:37,100
imperative for humanitarian reasons.

344
00:24:38,940 --> 00:24:42,880
And then he describes how for this work he was awarded the

345
00:24:42,880 --> 00:24:47,640
silver medal of the crown of King Zvonimir with oak leaves by

346
00:24:47,640 --> 00:24:50,480
the Croatian head of state Pavlović, who was kind of Hitler's ally,

347
00:24:51,060 --> 00:24:52,780
which was absolutely accurate and true.

348
00:24:53,460 --> 00:24:58,420
And then he describes that in later life he occupied various high

349
00:24:58,420 --> 00:25:01,540
offices, among them that of Secretary General of the United Nations.

350
00:25:02,360 --> 00:25:05,600
And reportedly it was in this last capacity that he spoke on

351
00:25:05,600 --> 00:25:09,180
to tape for the benefit of any extraterrestrials that may happen to

352
00:25:09,180 --> 00:25:12,900
share our universe, words of greeting that are now, together with other

353
00:25:12,900 --> 00:25:17,360
memorabilia of mankind, approaching the outer limits of our solar system aboard

354
00:25:17,360 --> 00:25:19,280
the space probe Voyager 2.

355
00:25:20,720 --> 00:25:25,660
And that idea that this man is the representative of humanity.

356
00:25:25,880 --> 00:25:31,040
As the Secretary General of the United Nations, an organisation of 147

357
00:25:31,040 --> 00:25:35,740
member states who represent almost all of the human inhabitants of the

358
00:25:35,740 --> 00:25:40,280
planet Earth, I send greetings on behalf of the people of our

359
00:25:40,280 --> 00:25:40,620
planet.

360
00:25:41,760 --> 00:25:46,420
We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only

361
00:25:46,420 --> 00:25:51,160
peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon, to be

362
00:25:51,160 --> 00:25:52,820
taught if we are fortunate.

363
00:25:54,220 --> 00:25:58,920
We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are

364
00:25:58,920 --> 00:26:04,060
but a small part of this immense universe that surrounds us, and

365
00:26:04,060 --> 00:26:07,620
it is with humility and hope that we take this step.

366
00:26:38,930 --> 00:26:43,430
As I sat there that evening in Southwark, overlooking the German Ocean,

367
00:26:44,530 --> 00:26:48,010
I sensed quite clearly the Earth's slow turning into a dark.

368
00:26:49,710 --> 00:26:53,010
The huntsmen are up in America, writes Thomas Brown in The Garden

369
00:26:53,010 --> 00:26:57,110
of Cyrus, and they're already past their first sleep in Persia.

370
00:26:58,350 --> 00:27:01,630
The shadow of night is drawn like a black veil across the

371
00:27:01,630 --> 00:27:06,030
Earth, and since almost all creatures from one meridian to the next

372
00:27:06,030 --> 00:27:10,850
lie down after the sun has set, so he continues, one might,

373
00:27:11,590 --> 00:27:16,110
in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone

374
00:27:16,110 --> 00:27:21,330
bodies, row upon row, as if levelled by the scythe of Saturn,

375
00:27:22,150 --> 00:27:26,410
an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness.

376
00:27:30,150 --> 00:27:34,530
Saturn is the planet who rules over melancholy.

377
00:27:36,830 --> 00:27:41,610
The planet Saturn was connected to the bile, as Mars, the planet

378
00:27:41,610 --> 00:27:46,190
of war, was connected to cholera, to anger, and the black bile

379
00:27:46,190 --> 00:27:52,310
was thought by Renaissance medical thinkers and by the philosophers to be

380
00:27:52,310 --> 00:27:54,750
the source of depression.

381
00:27:55,950 --> 00:28:01,150
Depression was in those days, and of course to some extent today

382
00:28:01,150 --> 00:28:05,770
too, considered to be very productive of art and inspiration.

383
00:28:06,590 --> 00:28:11,650
So though the melancholic suffered a great deal, the melancholic was also

384
00:28:11,650 --> 00:28:15,950
inspired and creative, more creative than other people.

385
00:28:17,190 --> 00:28:22,730
In this tradition of melancholy, it's as though these people, or people

386
00:28:22,730 --> 00:28:26,810
who feel this, are people who feel some inexplicable sense of loss,

387
00:28:27,550 --> 00:28:31,390
and they're people who try and locate this in history, as in,

388
00:28:32,030 --> 00:28:36,830
why am I feeling so fundamentally at a loss and so unattached?

389
00:28:37,670 --> 00:28:40,650
And it's as though the history gives you some sort of story

390
00:28:40,650 --> 00:28:45,030
about this, but the feeling is somehow that there's been some catastrophe

391
00:28:45,030 --> 00:28:48,670
that can't be located, and that one is living in the aftermath

392
00:28:48,670 --> 00:28:49,590
of that catastrophe.

393
00:28:58,230 --> 00:29:01,630
Sobald hears that there was a little pleasure train that would take

394
00:29:01,630 --> 00:29:05,990
you to Southworld, on a narrow gauge, I think, and he's told

395
00:29:05,990 --> 00:29:10,210
that the old engine had, underneath the black paint, it had a

396
00:29:10,210 --> 00:29:14,510
Chinese golden dragon, and that it had originally been made for the

397
00:29:14,510 --> 00:29:16,930
emperor to travel about in, in Peking.

398
00:29:16,930 --> 00:29:20,510
But he then goes off into one of his most superb fugues

399
00:29:20,510 --> 00:29:25,210
about the last days of imperial China and the reign of the

400
00:29:25,210 --> 00:29:26,810
Empress Dowager Cixi.

401
00:29:27,570 --> 00:29:32,650
The Taiping Rebellion was actually put down very, very bloodily indeed, and

402
00:29:32,650 --> 00:29:34,370
it was a story of great horror.

403
00:29:35,050 --> 00:29:39,910
It's another example of where he's using something else to refract his

404
00:29:39,910 --> 00:29:45,130
main preoccupation, that the genocidal wars of the 20th century were

405
00:29:45,130 --> 00:29:47,770
foreshadowed by these Victorian imperial wars.

406
00:29:48,890 --> 00:29:52,870
He's actually also making you think about travel routes as well.

407
00:29:53,550 --> 00:29:54,990
I mean, he invokes the Silk Road.

408
00:29:55,910 --> 00:29:58,450
So his walks meander, his mind meanders.

1
00:29:59,118 --> 00:30:03,395
and the pattern of the

2
00:30:03,395 --> 00:30:04,655
structure of the book meanders.

3
00:30:05,115 --> 00:30:08,812
I don't know if anybody's actually done a map of the rings

4
00:30:08,812 --> 00:30:12,511
of Saturn, of how the motifs actually can be played out and

5
00:30:12,511 --> 00:30:13,550
related to one another.

6
00:30:14,169 --> 00:30:18,707
So I was writing about the book, and as I was reading

7
00:30:18,707 --> 00:30:23,305
the first chapter, I made a little sort of marginal flowchart of

8
00:30:23,305 --> 00:30:25,743
what the material consisted in the first chapter.

9
00:30:26,823 --> 00:30:29,222
And as soon as I made this for the first one, I

10
00:30:29,222 --> 00:30:31,001
started making them for every chapter.

11
00:30:32,180 --> 00:30:35,338
And then when I was done, I thought, well, why the hell

12
00:30:35,338 --> 00:30:38,456
shouldn't I just make one big, huge graph of the whole thing?

13
00:30:41,575 --> 00:30:44,733
Green is the beginning of the chapter, red is the end of

14
00:30:44,733 --> 00:30:47,911
the chapter, but then as I went on, I started adding blue

15
00:30:48,591 --> 00:30:50,210
for death or despair.

16
00:30:52,868 --> 00:30:57,306
And there's more blue sort of towards the end of the book.

17
00:31:00,974 --> 00:31:05,171
I wouldn't know how else to talk about my relationship to this

18
00:31:05,171 --> 00:31:08,350
book but to use the word love, because that's how I feel

19
00:31:08,350 --> 00:31:08,829
about it.

20
00:31:08,889 --> 00:31:11,568
I mean, it's like a personal relationship.

21
00:31:13,107 --> 00:31:16,285
I think that you fall in love with the meandering because the

22
00:31:16,285 --> 00:31:19,623
book allows you to do that and gives you the room to

23
00:31:19,623 --> 00:31:20,063
do it.

24
00:31:20,442 --> 00:31:24,800
Some people experience that as being adrift in a way that makes

25
00:31:24,800 --> 00:31:28,978
them uncomfortable, and they're impatient with a book like this because they're

26
00:31:28,978 --> 00:31:30,537
not driven through the pages.

27
00:31:31,557 --> 00:31:35,175
And I think that impatience is a manifestation of a kind of

28
00:31:35,175 --> 00:31:35,834
anxiety.

29
00:31:36,574 --> 00:31:40,492
They don't want the freedom to assemble the book for themselves.

30
00:31:40,911 --> 00:31:43,310
They want to be told what to think a little bit.

31
00:31:46,249 --> 00:31:51,066
The British tradition is of walking as recovery, and the American tradition

32
00:31:51,066 --> 00:31:56,363
is of walking as discovery, that striding forwards into the oncoming air

33
00:31:56,363 --> 00:32:00,401
of the world for the Romantic tradition, British Romantic tradition, is a

34
00:32:00,401 --> 00:32:05,638
way to strip away the accretions of civilisation, the hawking and hammering

35
00:32:05,638 --> 00:32:12,154
of time lived in cities, and return yourself to some original state.

36
00:32:12,273 --> 00:32:13,293
I mean, that's Rousseau.

37
00:32:13,633 --> 00:32:16,252
I mean, it's European as well as it's British, but the American

38
00:32:16,252 --> 00:32:18,151
tradition, it's there in the road movie.

39
00:32:18,331 --> 00:32:23,087
It's there in the sense that we travel to liberate ourselves, to

40
00:32:23,087 --> 00:32:27,785
discover new ways of being, to acquire whole new methods of life

41
00:32:27,785 --> 00:32:30,724
that may themselves turn into habits but don't begin as them.

42
00:32:34,242 --> 00:32:38,100
A strikingly large number of our settlements are orientated to the West,

43
00:32:38,679 --> 00:32:43,277
and where circumstances permit, relocate in a westward direction.

44
00:32:44,336 --> 00:32:46,415
The East stands for lost causes.

45
00:32:48,053 --> 00:32:51,492
Especially at the time when the continent of America was being colonised,

46
00:32:52,132 --> 00:32:55,830
it was noticeable that the townships spread to the West, even as

47
00:32:55,830 --> 00:32:57,928
their eastern districts were falling apart.

48
00:32:59,088 --> 00:33:03,285
In Brazil to this day, whole provinces die down like fires when

49
00:33:03,285 --> 00:33:07,303
the land is exhausted by overcropping, and new areas to the West

50
00:33:07,303 --> 00:33:08,283
are opened up.

51
00:33:09,222 --> 00:33:14,159
In North America too, countless settlements of various kinds complete with gas

52
00:33:14,159 --> 00:33:19,996
stations, motels, and shopping malls move West along the turnpikes, and along

53
00:33:19,996 --> 00:33:25,213
that axis, affluence and squalor are unfailingly polarised.

54
00:33:26,473 --> 00:33:29,671
I was put in mind of this phenomenon by the flight of

55
00:33:29,671 --> 00:33:30,011
Dunnage.

56
00:33:31,510 --> 00:33:34,748
It appears to be a picture taken at the end of the

57
00:33:34,748 --> 00:33:39,305
19th, early 20th century, and it's of the cliff at Dunnage on

58
00:33:39,305 --> 00:33:45,262
the Suffolk coast, which is dominated by the ruined silhouette of one

59
00:33:45,262 --> 00:33:49,520
wall with some arches in it, and the tower of Dunnage Church,

60
00:33:49,700 --> 00:33:52,517
which, for anybody who knows that part of the world, is an

61
00:33:52,517 --> 00:33:56,115
image of transience, if there ever was one, because that cliff retreats

62
00:33:56,115 --> 00:33:58,954
at such a rate, this church, I think, doesn't exist at all

63
00:33:58,954 --> 00:33:59,794
there now.

64
00:34:01,053 --> 00:34:03,512
We used to go there a lot when I was a child

65
00:34:03,512 --> 00:34:08,529
because my grandmother lived in a village just inland, my father's mother

66
00:34:08,529 --> 00:34:11,767
lived in a village just inland from Dunnage, and we were made

67
00:34:11,767 --> 00:34:14,806
to stand on the cliff and keep quiet.

68
00:34:14,865 --> 00:34:16,964
It was probably a strategy of our parents to shut us out,

69
00:34:17,003 --> 00:34:18,383
but we were made to keep quiet so that we could hear

70
00:34:18,383 --> 00:34:20,902
the church bells ringing underwater, which, of course, we never did.

71
00:34:22,341 --> 00:34:26,799
And in fact, to strike a yet more personal note about it,

72
00:34:26,859 --> 00:34:29,657
it's a picture which has a particular resonance for me because it

73
00:34:29,657 --> 00:34:34,355
was later on those cliffs that my grandmother jumped off and committed

74
00:34:34,355 --> 00:34:34,714
suicide.

75
00:35:11,844 --> 00:35:15,042
My way from Dunnage took me at first by the ruins of

76
00:35:15,042 --> 00:35:19,339
the Grey Friars Monastery, through a number of fields, and then to

77
00:35:19,339 --> 00:35:25,216
an overgrown scrubland where stunted pines, birches, and rampant gorse grew so

78
00:35:25,216 --> 00:35:27,755
densely that the going was very hard.

79
00:35:28,994 --> 00:35:32,312
I was beginning to think of turning back when all of a

80
00:35:32,312 --> 00:35:36,150
sudden the heath opened out in front of me, shading from pale

81
00:35:36,150 --> 00:35:37,529
lilac to deepest purple.

82
00:35:37,969 --> 00:35:42,467
It stretched away westward with a white track curving gently through its

83
00:35:42,467 --> 00:35:42,766
midst.

84
00:35:44,186 --> 00:35:47,864
Lost in the thoughts that went round in my head incessantly and

85
00:35:47,864 --> 00:35:53,540
numbed by this crazed flowering, I stuck to the sandy path until

86
00:35:53,540 --> 00:35:58,078
to my astonishment, not to say horror, I found myself back again

87
00:35:58,078 --> 00:36:01,176
at the same tangled thicket from which I had emerged about an

88
00:36:01,176 --> 00:36:05,574
hour before, or as it now seemed to me, in some distant

89
00:36:05,574 --> 00:36:06,133
past.

90
00:36:08,282 --> 00:36:13,219
Months after this experience, which I still cannot explain, I was on

91
00:36:13,219 --> 00:36:18,956
Dunnage Heath once more, in a dream, walking the endlessly winding paths

92
00:36:18,956 --> 00:36:19,335
again.

93
00:36:19,976 --> 00:36:23,334
And again, I could not find my way out of the maze

94
00:36:23,334 --> 00:36:27,052
which I was convinced had been created solely for me.

95
00:36:27,072 --> 00:36:30,550
I think it was Camus who said that he talked about the

96
00:36:30,550 --> 00:36:34,148
rip that can happen when you're just, like, wandering along and then

97
00:36:34,148 --> 00:36:37,826
things sort of rip or tear, and you see things as they

98
00:36:37,826 --> 00:36:38,745
actually are.

99
00:36:39,345 --> 00:36:41,763
And then most of the time we just turn away and we

100
00:36:41,763 --> 00:36:43,682
sort of just sew it up and just sort of move on

101
00:36:43,682 --> 00:36:45,022
and don't notice it.

102
00:36:45,102 --> 00:36:48,440
But Sebald, I mean, it's like he has no skin or he

103
00:36:48,440 --> 00:36:51,597
has no mechanism by which he can sew it up and walk

104
00:36:51,597 --> 00:36:52,198
away from it.

105
00:36:52,198 --> 00:36:56,994
It rips, he sees another reality, and he just tips into it.

106
00:37:01,622 --> 00:37:05,360
And when I looked down from this vantage point, I saw the

107
00:37:05,360 --> 00:37:09,938
labyrinth, a pattern simple in comparison with the tortuous trail I had

108
00:37:09,938 --> 00:37:13,836
behind me, but one which I knew in my dream with absolute

109
00:37:13,836 --> 00:37:17,893
certainty represented a cross-section of my brain.

110
00:37:24,000 --> 00:37:28,058
So Thomas Brown is a really important figure for Sebald in this

111
00:37:28,058 --> 00:37:28,317
book.

112
00:37:28,317 --> 00:37:34,513
Thomas Brown was a 17th century physician, theologian, philosopher, poet,

113
00:37:34,614 --> 00:37:34,834
really.

114
00:37:35,593 --> 00:37:41,490
And he talks about this quincunx, which is this pattern that consists

115
00:37:41,490 --> 00:37:44,828
of five nodes, essentially, and five lines between them.

116
00:37:44,968 --> 00:37:49,805
And the notion being that this pattern exists everywhere in nature, sort

117
00:37:49,805 --> 00:37:50,865
of like a primitive network.

118
00:37:51,265 --> 00:37:56,762
And it's sort of a very cabalistic, pre-modern notion of seeing

119
00:37:56,762 --> 00:37:57,740
pattern in the world.

120
00:37:58,121 --> 00:38:01,378
And Sebald, I think also in his writing, is looking for these

121
00:38:01,378 --> 00:38:08,395
sorts of patterns, how they occur in historical events and connections between

122
00:38:08,395 --> 00:38:08,795
people.

123
00:38:09,135 --> 00:38:11,953
He's always picking up on these sorts of uncanny connections.

124
00:38:12,793 --> 00:38:14,492
The uncanniness is very important.

125
00:38:15,591 --> 00:38:19,328
And one thing he writes about East Anglia is that East Anglia

126
00:38:19,328 --> 00:38:21,608
is really part of Germany, because he says the Rhine used to

127
00:38:21,608 --> 00:38:26,545
come down, and actually, that's the mouth of the Rhine, the East

128
00:38:26,545 --> 00:38:27,225
Anglia and Holland.

129
00:38:27,225 --> 00:38:31,641
So it's really a kind of German place that's kind of got

130
00:38:31,641 --> 00:38:33,241
marooned by mistake over there.

131
00:38:34,000 --> 00:38:36,219
At the end of his life, he did begin to write more

132
00:38:36,219 --> 00:38:37,618
about German subjects as well.

133
00:38:37,799 --> 00:38:41,016
You know, he came back to literature and the air war and

134
00:38:41,016 --> 00:38:41,676
things like that.

135
00:38:42,016 --> 00:38:46,014
And the books are always about these exiles, you know, these people

136
00:38:46,014 --> 00:38:49,711
who have escaped Germany and living in England, but they're not always

137
00:38:49,711 --> 00:38:50,671
terribly happy in England.

138
00:38:54,429 --> 00:38:56,827
Did Max become an Englishman?

139
00:38:56,827 --> 00:38:58,307
It's a very interesting question.

140
00:38:59,327 --> 00:39:01,505
Conrad certainly became very English.

141
00:39:01,805 --> 00:39:04,604
T.S. Eliot, an American, certainly became very English.

142
00:39:05,543 --> 00:39:07,862
Neither of them, I think, became Englishmen.

143
00:39:07,942 --> 00:39:09,821
I don't think that that's possible.

144
00:39:10,600 --> 00:39:14,398
No, Max was European, international in everything that he did.

145
00:39:14,978 --> 00:39:16,516
He loved England dearly.

146
00:39:16,556 --> 00:39:19,435
He loved the part of England that he made his home, East

147
00:39:19,435 --> 00:39:21,154
Anglia, intensely.

148
00:39:22,654 --> 00:39:26,751
But one of his closest friends there was the English poet, Michael

149
00:39:26,751 --> 00:39:31,509
Hamburger, brother of the English publisher, Paul Hamlin, who were both born

150
00:39:31,509 --> 00:39:33,687
in Germany and came to England in the 30s.

151
00:39:33,807 --> 00:39:36,766
So to me, his sense of being part of European culture was

152
00:39:36,766 --> 00:39:39,444
far more important than his national identity.

153
00:39:52,497 --> 00:39:57,693
Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences

154
00:39:57,693 --> 00:39:58,274
connect?

155
00:39:59,173 --> 00:40:03,731
How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or

156
00:40:03,731 --> 00:40:06,589
if not oneself, then one's own precursor?

157
00:40:07,489 --> 00:40:11,966
The fact that I first passed through British customs 33 years after

158
00:40:11,966 --> 00:40:15,563
Michael, and I am now thinking of giving up teaching as he

159
00:40:15,563 --> 00:40:19,161
did, that I am bent over my writing in Norfolk and he

160
00:40:19,161 --> 00:40:22,859
in Suffolk, that we are both distrustful of our work and both

161
00:40:22,859 --> 00:40:27,497
suffer from an allergy to alcohol, none of these things are particularly

162
00:40:27,497 --> 00:40:28,196
strange.

163
00:40:29,656 --> 00:40:32,914
But why it was that on my first visit to Michael's house,

164
00:40:32,974 --> 00:40:37,151
I instantly felt as if I lived or had once lived there,

165
00:40:37,532 --> 00:40:41,889
in every respect, precisely as he does, I cannot explain.

166
00:40:42,339 --> 00:40:42,789
Yes.

167
00:40:44,458 --> 00:40:48,266
And that was also our village shop and post office.

168
00:40:49,865 --> 00:40:51,164
Everything gone.

169
00:41:15,870 --> 00:41:21,287
And he particularly disliked the sound of modern German and the way

170
00:41:21,287 --> 00:41:27,944
people spoke around him, because the German that he used was, as

171
00:41:27,944 --> 00:41:29,563
he said, a 19th century German.

172
00:41:30,182 --> 00:41:37,658
So he said, he asked me if I knew the German word

173
00:41:37,658 --> 00:41:40,297
for mobile phone, and I didn't.

174
00:41:40,417 --> 00:41:43,715
Then he said, with a look of horror, it was a handy.

175
00:41:44,774 --> 00:41:49,232
So he wasn't at home in Germany, he wasn't at home in

176
00:41:49,232 --> 00:41:52,710
Norwich, so I asked him if he'd ever been in a place

177
00:41:52,710 --> 00:41:53,569
where he felt at home.

178
00:41:53,629 --> 00:41:54,369
I'll give you an example.

179
00:41:54,889 --> 00:42:00,825
Max, when we were working on Vertigo, being very frustrated, because at

180
00:42:00,825 --> 00:42:04,343
one point in that book, he wants to use the language of

181
00:42:04,343 --> 00:42:05,363
Nazi bureaucracy.

182
00:42:06,942 --> 00:42:10,199
And he said to me once that the problem with English is

183
00:42:10,199 --> 00:42:12,519
you just, you don't have the fascist language.

184
00:42:12,519 --> 00:42:15,677
We can't do it, it just sounds ordinary.

185
00:42:16,576 --> 00:42:23,373
So we had to settle for the plainest, not most bureaucratic language,

186
00:42:23,493 --> 00:42:28,210
but plainest language we could manage and hope that the sense of

187
00:42:28,210 --> 00:42:28,630
the German.

188
00:42:28,730 --> 00:42:32,448
But we've got to realise we're not even reading Saybal's book, we're

189
00:42:32,448 --> 00:42:35,146
reading a book by Michael Hulse, who's the translator.

190
00:42:35,606 --> 00:42:39,524
It was a strategy that he doesn't write directly into English, he

191
00:42:39,524 --> 00:42:42,662
writes in German, and then it's translated.

192
00:42:42,942 --> 00:42:47,179
And he could perfectly well translate it himself, but he chooses not

193
00:42:47,179 --> 00:42:47,419
to.

194
00:42:47,919 --> 00:42:51,677
So you've got another version which is already filtered, and it's not

195
00:42:51,677 --> 00:42:56,134
that different, I don't think, from the reports I've heard that the

196
00:42:56,134 --> 00:43:00,311
Midsummer Murders, this generic TV series set in a perfect English village,

197
00:43:00,412 --> 00:43:04,989
by the time it's translated into French, where it's very popular, takes

198
00:43:04,989 --> 00:43:08,347
on a sort of existential gloss, it becomes something else, it's much

199
00:43:08,347 --> 00:43:09,347
moodier and weirder.

200
00:43:09,347 --> 00:43:19,191
Do you get

201
00:43:19,191 --> 00:43:22,250
many Fitzgerald or Omar Khayyam pilgrims coming here?

202
00:43:22,610 --> 00:43:25,928
Yes, we get a great many, rarely, in the summer, though, of

203
00:43:25,928 --> 00:43:28,346
course, being right out in the country here, we don't all know

204
00:43:28,346 --> 00:43:30,585
how many people, you know, do come.

205
00:43:30,885 --> 00:43:35,083
I've got here some of the lines from Omar Khayyam, as translated

206
00:43:35,083 --> 00:43:37,801
by Edward Fitzgerald on life after death.

207
00:43:38,281 --> 00:43:42,498
Strange is it not that of the myriads who, before us passed

208
00:43:42,498 --> 00:43:46,716
the door of darkness through, not one returns to tell us of

209
00:43:46,716 --> 00:43:50,413
the road which to discover we must travel to.

210
00:43:52,053 --> 00:43:55,691
They weren't literal translations, but true in the general sense and their

211
00:43:55,691 --> 00:43:57,010
feeling for the original.

212
00:43:58,709 --> 00:44:03,607
Fitzgerald described the endless hours he spent translating this poem of 224

213
00:44:03,607 --> 00:44:08,244
lines as a colloquy with the dead man and an attempt to

214
00:44:08,244 --> 00:44:09,823
bring to us hidings of him.

215
00:44:10,783 --> 00:44:15,000
The English verses he devised for the purpose, which radiate with a

216
00:44:15,000 --> 00:44:21,077
pure, seemingly unselfconscious beauty, feign an anonymity that disdains even

217
00:44:21,077 --> 00:44:25,654
the least claimed authorship and draw us word by word to an

218
00:44:25,654 --> 00:44:30,751
invisible point where the mediaeval orient and the fading occident can come

219
00:44:30,751 --> 00:44:34,369
together in a way never allowed them by the calamitous course of

220
00:44:34,369 --> 00:44:34,749
history.

221
00:44:38,467 --> 00:44:42,925
Then he walks down to this bull inn, which I was astounded

222
00:44:42,925 --> 00:44:46,663
as well that most of these places you can find and he

223
00:44:46,663 --> 00:44:49,001
goes, this is a great little bit in there and then he

224
00:44:49,001 --> 00:44:53,058
goes to this shop where he meets these strange, oh, they don't

225
00:44:53,058 --> 00:44:53,359
have it.

226
00:45:03,802 --> 00:45:09,199
There's a beautiful section in Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Transparent Things,

227
00:45:09,360 --> 00:45:13,737
where he talks about how when you concentrate on a material object,

228
00:45:13,857 --> 00:45:17,915
he says, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntary

229
00:45:17,915 --> 00:45:19,374
sinking into its surface.

230
00:45:19,394 --> 00:45:23,832
And he talks about, Nabokov has this beautiful phrase, the dream life

231
00:45:23,832 --> 00:45:24,371
of debris.

232
00:45:25,111 --> 00:45:27,570
And that seems to happen again and again in Sebald, that what

233
00:45:27,570 --> 00:45:33,726
begins as a particular object that is seen in all its specificity

234
00:45:33,726 --> 00:45:39,143
and radiance of that, slowly shimmers, becomes a kind of quicksand, sucks

235
00:45:39,143 --> 00:45:42,701
the gaze of the viewer and the footfall of the walker down

236
00:45:42,701 --> 00:45:43,240
into it.

237
00:45:43,521 --> 00:45:48,358
And we find ourselves at Bergen-Belsen or in the Congo.

238
00:45:50,517 --> 00:45:53,635
The Rings of Saturn are a mental landscape.

239
00:45:53,815 --> 00:45:55,693
It's like Blake's mental traveller.

240
00:45:56,174 --> 00:46:00,951
But like Blake, he brings in names of the real, but into

241
00:46:00,951 --> 00:46:04,149
his own cosmology, which is made up of all sorts of things,

242
00:46:04,549 --> 00:46:10,105
including this constant sense of destruction that the landscape he's describing

243
00:46:10,105 --> 00:46:13,064
is where the bombers, I mean, this is one of the key

244
00:46:13,064 --> 00:46:15,703
parts of the book, is this man he meets very early on,

245
00:46:16,183 --> 00:46:19,940
who talks about being a child and watching the fleets of bombers

246
00:46:19,940 --> 00:46:24,357
going over night after night to firebomb German cities.

247
00:46:24,678 --> 00:46:27,516
It's a kind of small detail that grows out of the English

248
00:46:27,516 --> 00:46:28,676
landscape very well.

249
00:46:30,814 --> 00:46:32,433
This is a defensive coast.

250
00:46:32,993 --> 00:46:36,071
It looks out onto the German Ocean, as Sebald calls it, and

251
00:46:36,071 --> 00:46:38,430
it's bequeathed a sort of architectural paranoia.

252
00:46:39,070 --> 00:46:43,927
Much of the landscape has been constructed in order to resist invasion

253
00:46:43,927 --> 00:46:46,825
by humans, but also invasion by the sea.

254
00:46:46,825 --> 00:46:53,021
And that exerts a very powerful imaginative pressure on the walker.

255
00:46:54,281 --> 00:46:56,840
I wrote this essay called WG Sebald.

256
00:46:57,340 --> 00:47:01,817
It began with driving through the Dutch landscape and suddenly realising we

257
00:47:01,817 --> 00:47:02,357
were lost.

258
00:47:04,116 --> 00:47:07,974
And previously, I'd been given this sort of map of Berlin.

259
00:47:08,174 --> 00:47:09,733
I think we'd just moved to Germany, and I'd given them a

260
00:47:09,733 --> 00:47:12,631
map of Berlin on a cloth, on a handkerchief.

261
00:47:13,171 --> 00:47:17,728
And my father immediately triggered something in him, and he remembered that

262
00:47:17,728 --> 00:47:22,126
he had found this cloth map that had been blown out of

263
00:47:22,126 --> 00:47:23,605
an aeroplane as it crashed.

264
00:47:25,104 --> 00:47:27,723
He just went and put his hands on it immediately.

265
00:47:28,522 --> 00:47:31,600
He said, I was near a place, and he leaned across the

266
00:47:31,600 --> 00:47:34,559
map and he said, Goch, right?

267
00:47:34,899 --> 00:47:35,618
This place, Goch.

268
00:47:37,357 --> 00:47:40,755
And then in February, I was driving around Holland on the borders

269
00:47:40,755 --> 00:47:44,833
with Germany, and I was with this curator, Rita Kersting, and we

270
00:47:44,833 --> 00:47:45,373
were lost.

271
00:47:45,852 --> 00:47:47,212
And she started to talk about it.

272
00:47:47,452 --> 00:47:49,390
Well, she came from a town near there.

273
00:47:49,470 --> 00:47:52,909
And I don't know what made me say it, but I just

274
00:47:52,909 --> 00:47:54,088
went, Goch?

275
00:47:54,328 --> 00:47:55,867
Which is a tiny town, in fact.

276
00:47:56,307 --> 00:47:58,865
And she said, yes, how the hell did you know?

277
00:48:02,493 --> 00:48:03,752
And so there was that going on.

278
00:48:03,772 --> 00:48:07,330
And then parallel to that was Rufus Isaac, my great-great-uncle.

279
00:48:07,410 --> 00:48:09,109
His sister had bought a Van Gogh.

280
00:48:09,269 --> 00:48:12,228
Van Gogh's family came from Goch.

281
00:48:12,408 --> 00:48:16,285
And then realising that that took me to Marconi through his brother,

282
00:48:16,425 --> 00:48:19,504
Godfrey, who was the first managing director of the Marconi Corporation.

283
00:48:20,323 --> 00:48:23,262
At that point, I was reading the chapter on Roger Casement.

284
00:48:25,101 --> 00:48:26,780
I knew about Roger Casement.

285
00:48:26,920 --> 00:48:28,119
I'd known about him for a while.

286
00:48:28,519 --> 00:48:30,697
And then, of course, I had a knife through the heart where

287
00:48:30,697 --> 00:48:33,436
I realised that it was my great-great-uncle, Sir Rufus Isaac,

288
00:48:33,716 --> 00:48:36,094
who'd been the hanging judge on that particular case.

289
00:48:37,114 --> 00:48:39,133
It was a true shock to me, actually.

290
00:48:39,353 --> 00:48:40,212
A true shock.

291
00:48:41,871 --> 00:48:44,670
There were all these connections, sort of broadly and in a way,

292
00:48:44,790 --> 00:48:47,048
but also close to how I make my own work, which is

293
00:48:47,048 --> 00:48:50,067
relying on a sort of objective chance method where you go along

294
00:48:50,067 --> 00:48:53,024
and then something happens and it makes you take a different direction.

295
00:48:54,264 --> 00:48:58,622
Coincidences, like dreams, if you talk about them, they become dead.

296
00:48:58,782 --> 00:48:59,341
They're inert.

297
00:48:59,981 --> 00:49:01,899
You know, they don't mean anything to anyone else.

298
00:49:02,720 --> 00:49:05,838
And the only thing you can do with them is to transmute

299
00:49:05,838 --> 00:49:08,656
them, to change them in some way, which is, of course, what

300
00:49:08,656 --> 00:49:09,336
Sabal does.

301
00:49:09,836 --> 00:49:11,675
He takes you down these poetic cul-de-sacs.

302
00:49:12,194 --> 00:49:15,013
And you don't care that you're being led nowhere, of course, because

303
00:49:15,013 --> 00:49:16,271
you learn so much on the way.

304
00:49:21,269 --> 00:49:25,607
To this day, the area between Woodbridge and the sea remains full

305
00:49:25,607 --> 00:49:26,926
of military installations.

306
00:49:27,865 --> 00:49:31,403
Time and again, as one walks across the wide plains, one passes

307
00:49:31,403 --> 00:49:37,140
barracks, gateways and fenced-off areas, where, behind thin plantations of

308
00:49:37,140 --> 00:49:42,617
Scots pines, weapons are concealed in camouflaged hangars and grass-covered

309
00:49:42,617 --> 00:49:43,056
bunkers.

310
00:49:43,777 --> 00:49:48,694
The weapons with which, if an emergency should arise, whole countries and

311
00:49:48,694 --> 00:49:53,131
continents can be transformed into smoking heaps of stone and ash in

312
00:49:53,131 --> 00:49:53,631
no time.

313
00:49:55,090 --> 00:50:00,287
Not far from Orford, and already tired from my long walk, this

314
00:50:00,287 --> 00:50:03,566
notion took possession of me when I was hit by a sandstorm.

315
00:50:04,685 --> 00:50:08,843
I was approaching the eastern fringe of Rendlesham Forest, which covers several

316
00:50:08,843 --> 00:50:12,541
square miles, and was for the most part reduced to broken and

317
00:50:12,541 --> 00:50:16,778
splintered timber in the terrible hurricane of the 16th of October, 1987.

318
00:50:18,017 --> 00:50:22,775
Suddenly, in the space of a few minutes, the bright sky darkened

319
00:50:22,775 --> 00:50:26,793
and a wind came up, blowing the dust across the arid land

320
00:50:26,793 --> 00:50:28,172
in sinister spirals.

321
00:50:29,131 --> 00:50:33,549
The last flickering remnants of daylight were being extinguished and all

322
00:50:33,549 --> 00:50:38,426
contours disappeared in the greyish-brown, smothering gloom that was soon

323
00:50:38,426 --> 00:50:41,484
lashed by strong, unrelenting gusts.

324
00:50:42,524 --> 00:50:46,941
The mealy dust streamed from left to right, from right to left,

325
00:50:47,181 --> 00:50:52,098
to and fro on every side, rising on high and powdering down,

326
00:50:52,558 --> 00:50:56,256
nothing but a dancing, grainy whirl for what must have been an

327
00:50:56,256 --> 00:51:01,693
hour, while further inland, as I later learnt, a heavier thunderstorm had

328
00:51:01,693 --> 00:51:01,973
broken.

329
00:51:04,511 --> 00:51:08,629
When the worst was over, the wavy drifts of sand that had

330
00:51:08,629 --> 00:51:11,568
buried the broken timber emerged from the gloom.

331
00:51:12,987 --> 00:51:18,003
Gasping for breath, my mouth and throat dry, I crawled out of

332
00:51:18,003 --> 00:51:21,202
the hollow that had formed around me like the last survivor of

333
00:51:21,202 --> 00:51:23,601
a caravan that had come to grief in the desert.

334
00:51:25,360 --> 00:51:26,998
A deathly silence prevailed.

335
00:51:28,338 --> 00:51:31,197
There was not a breath, not a birdsong to be heard, not

336
00:51:31,197 --> 00:51:38,872
a rustle, nothing, and although it now grew lighter once more, the

337
00:51:38,872 --> 00:51:43,510
sun, which was at its zenith, remained hidden behind the banners of

338
00:51:43,510 --> 00:51:46,788
pollen-fine dust that hung for a long time in the air.

339
00:51:48,487 --> 00:51:53,964
This, I thought, will be what is left after the earth has

340
00:51:53,964 --> 00:51:55,223
ground itself down.

341
00:51:58,391 --> 00:52:00,969
I walked the rest of the way in a daze.

342
00:52:48,323 --> 00:52:50,982
I used to go up to Orford with my parents and my

343
00:52:50,982 --> 00:52:55,160
brother when I was little, quite often, but it was only when

344
00:52:55,160 --> 00:52:59,996
I was more properly grown up that I heard the story of

345
00:52:59,996 --> 00:53:04,195
the Orford Merman, which goes roughly like this.

346
00:53:04,255 --> 00:53:07,953
I mean, it's many hundreds of years ago, this, and the fishermen

347
00:53:07,953 --> 00:53:10,331
at Orford, because Orford was then on the coast in a way

348
00:53:10,331 --> 00:53:16,488
that it absolutely is not now because everything's silted up, caught in

349
00:53:16,488 --> 00:53:20,086
their nets what I suppose was something like the village idiot or

350
00:53:20,086 --> 00:53:25,163
an idiot from a village nearby, anyway, somebody who was clearly very

351
00:53:25,163 --> 00:53:30,399
sort of ill and disabled in certain respects, and in the story

352
00:53:30,399 --> 00:53:34,877
that's come down, they consider him to be a Merman and they

353
00:53:34,877 --> 00:53:38,296
torture him to try and get him to speak, so they tie

354
00:53:38,296 --> 00:53:41,494
him up in the ruins of the castle which stands in Orford

355
00:53:41,494 --> 00:53:46,031
and they roast him in flame and poke various things into him

356
00:53:46,031 --> 00:53:48,970
and so on and so forth, and of course, he's somebody who

357
00:53:48,970 --> 00:53:52,328
is incapable of speaking and eventually they let him go, so the

358
00:53:52,328 --> 00:53:55,206
whole thing has been a complete, at least barbaric waste of time.

359
00:53:57,965 --> 00:54:01,243
They cut him down, they hauled him up the whirlpool of the

360
00:54:01,243 --> 00:54:04,821
stair, they dragged him past their wives and children gawping in the

361
00:54:04,821 --> 00:54:08,938
square and silently, as though the words they used to know before

362
00:54:08,938 --> 00:54:12,996
were all dead now, they carried him down to the shingle shore,

363
00:54:13,676 --> 00:54:16,794
they slid him tail first in the sea and washed the bitter

364
00:54:16,794 --> 00:54:20,832
drops of blood crust from his finger ends and salt spit from

365
00:54:20,832 --> 00:54:25,449
his lips, and all the while, still silently, they watched the tide

366
00:54:25,449 --> 00:54:30,327
bring in a brittle, dimpled, breaking flood of silver through his skin,

367
00:54:31,086 --> 00:54:35,004
then open up his glistening eyes in which they saw their fear

368
00:54:35,004 --> 00:54:40,581
rise up to greet them one last time and fade and disappear.

369
00:54:41,680 --> 00:54:46,378
Disappear while they stood back like mourners round a grave, and watched

370
00:54:46,378 --> 00:54:52,194
his life ebb out of theirs wave by wave by wave.

371
00:55:00,740 --> 00:55:04,737
When I was first in Orford, it was forbidden to approach the

372
00:55:04,737 --> 00:55:09,235
island, but now there was no longer any obstacle to going there

373
00:55:09,235 --> 00:55:13,712
since, some years before, the Ministry of Defence had abandoned secret research

374
00:55:13,712 --> 00:55:14,372
at that site.

375
00:55:15,391 --> 00:55:18,370
One of the men sitting idly on the harbour wall offered to

376
00:55:18,370 --> 00:55:22,168
take me over for a few pounds and fetch me later after

377
00:55:22,168 --> 00:55:23,147
I'd had a look around.

378
00:55:24,846 --> 00:55:27,545
Once we were on the other side, I took leave of my

379
00:55:27,545 --> 00:55:32,141
ferryman and, after climbing over the embankment, walked along a partially

380
00:55:32,141 --> 00:55:36,480
overgrown tarmac track running straight through a vast, yellowing field.

381
00:55:37,379 --> 00:55:41,297
The day was dull and oppressive and there was so little breeze

382
00:55:41,297 --> 00:55:44,915
that not even the ears of the delicate, quaking grass were nodding.

383
00:55:46,114 --> 00:55:51,151
It was as if I were passing through an undiscovered country and

384
00:55:51,151 --> 00:55:54,529
I still remember that I felt, at the same time, both utterly

385
00:55:54,529 --> 00:55:57,728
liberated and deeply despondent.

386
00:55:59,996 --> 00:56:02,915
When the National Trust were given the site, which was around 2000,

387
00:56:03,195 --> 00:56:05,194
they saw it first as a nature reserve.

388
00:56:05,613 --> 00:56:08,692
It was quite a troublesome one because lots of people in 4x4s

389
00:56:08,692 --> 00:56:10,870
used to zoom over the nests and there was lots of illegal

390
00:56:10,870 --> 00:56:11,910
stuff going on.

391
00:56:12,230 --> 00:56:18,246
They decided to try and preserve the melancholy, windswept, deserted atmosphere

392
00:56:18,785 --> 00:56:24,483
that Seabell describes and they put together a painter and a writer

393
00:56:24,483 --> 00:56:29,380
and an archaeologist which had never happened in a conservation project before

394
00:56:29,380 --> 00:56:32,698
where what tends to happen is the archaeologist and the military historian

395
00:56:32,698 --> 00:56:35,896
who will bring this weight of facts and explanation.

396
00:56:36,156 --> 00:56:39,195
They will tell you how radar works and what happened in this

397
00:56:39,195 --> 00:56:42,633
building and it was the first time the National Trust consciously placed

398
00:56:42,633 --> 00:56:46,990
as much emphasis on atmosphere and association and it was also the

399
00:56:46,990 --> 00:56:49,049
first time they said let's just let the buildings fall down.

400
00:56:49,049 --> 00:56:52,907
They said let's let them crumble over time and that was a

401
00:56:52,907 --> 00:56:56,985
really brave thing to do and that's what's happening.

402
00:56:57,164 --> 00:57:00,323
They're just going to crumble away gently over the next few hundreds

403
00:57:00,323 --> 00:57:00,822
of years.

404
00:57:02,142 --> 00:57:07,098
My sense of being on ground intended for purposes transcending the profane

405
00:57:07,098 --> 00:57:11,796
was heightened by a number of buildings that resembled temples or pagodas

406
00:57:11,796 --> 00:57:15,134
which seemed quite out of place in these military installations.

407
00:57:16,814 --> 00:57:20,392
But the closer I came to these ruins, the more any notion

408
00:57:20,392 --> 00:57:24,869
of a mysterious isle of the dead receded and the more I

409
00:57:24,869 --> 00:57:29,566
imagined myself amidst the remains of our own civilisation after its extinction

410
00:57:29,566 --> 00:57:31,365
in some future catastrophe.

411
00:57:33,484 --> 00:57:37,982
To me too as for some latter-day stranger ignorant of the

412
00:57:37,982 --> 00:57:41,900
nature of our society wandering about among heaps of scrap metal and

413
00:57:41,900 --> 00:57:46,637
defunct machinery the beings who had once lived and worked here were

414
00:57:46,637 --> 00:57:51,314
an enigma as was the purpose of the primitive contraptions and fittings

415
00:57:51,314 --> 00:57:56,951
inside the bunkers the iron rails under the ceilings the hooks on

416
00:57:56,951 --> 00:58:01,728
the still partially tiled walls the shower heads the size of plates

417
00:58:02,607 --> 00:58:05,286
the ramps and the soakaways.

418
00:58:08,595 --> 00:58:12,512
I think you get a very interesting moment in these properties between

419
00:58:12,512 --> 00:58:17,110
the point when they're totally off the map and the short moment

420
00:58:17,110 --> 00:58:21,767
later when the artists are more or less forcibly deposited there to

421
00:58:21,767 --> 00:58:26,545
make artworks from there being no possibility of getting in to the

422
00:58:26,545 --> 00:58:30,882
absolute welcome that's thrown at certain people to make works that give

423
00:58:30,882 --> 00:58:38,438
a kind of poetic to these dangerous, dirty, difficult spaces and the

424
00:58:38,438 --> 00:58:40,777
first ones in have a kind of real charge and then it

425
00:58:40,777 --> 00:58:47,053
becomes very processional and very bleached of energy in some ways there's

426
00:58:47,053 --> 00:58:50,291
much more of a charge places have to be broken into or

427
00:58:50,291 --> 00:58:54,009
infiltrated souvenir shops and point of view here I take you the

428
00:58:54,009 --> 00:58:56,588
photograph this is the point of view you know it's all too

429
00:58:56,588 --> 00:59:00,146
fixed but I don't think one should be too sort of elitist

430
00:59:00,146 --> 00:59:02,445
about this you know it's all very well if we're the first

431
00:59:02,445 --> 00:59:05,943
to be there then that's fine but it is important to try

432
00:59:05,943 --> 00:59:09,361
and think how do you democratise this but I don't think that

433
00:59:09,361 --> 00:59:14,097
we should simply slam the doors in the face of pilgrims who

434
00:59:14,097 --> 00:59:19,995
you know have been ignited by a piece of literature as I

435
00:59:19,995 --> 00:59:24,492
was sitting on the breakwater waiting for the ferryman the evening sun

436
00:59:24,492 --> 00:59:28,890
emerged from behind the clouds bathing in its light the far-reaching

437
00:59:28,890 --> 00:59:34,247
arc of the seashore the tide was advancing up the river the

438
00:59:34,247 --> 00:59:38,624
water was shining like tinplate and from the radio masts above the

439
00:59:38,624 --> 00:59:44,881
marshes came an even scarcely audible hum the roofs and towers of

440
00:59:44,881 --> 00:59:49,258
Orford showed among the treetops seeming so close that I could touch

441
00:59:49,258 --> 00:59:52,916
them there I thought

1
00:59:53,298 --> 00:59:56,017
There, I thought, I was once at home.

2
01:00:01,635 --> 01:00:08,211
So we found the interview on KCRW with Michael Silberblatt and transcribed

3
01:00:08,211 --> 01:00:08,932
the interview.

4
01:00:09,431 --> 01:00:11,791
We were left with Sebald's words.

5
01:00:12,810 --> 01:00:15,748
I thought, well, I want to sort of play around with his

6
01:00:15,748 --> 01:00:16,008
words.

7
01:00:16,068 --> 01:00:17,769
I can't really figure out how to do that.

8
01:00:18,548 --> 01:00:22,026
So I cut them up and I started to make these, you

9
01:00:22,026 --> 01:00:24,025
know, very strange little poems.

10
01:00:24,526 --> 01:00:27,423
I was convinced that this was like a Ouija board, you know,

11
01:00:27,484 --> 01:00:30,123
that if I did this in the right frame of mind, that

12
01:00:30,123 --> 01:00:31,442
he would talk to me.

13
01:00:33,062 --> 01:00:36,960
I mean, I assume that Sebald must have known the Freud essay

14
01:00:36,960 --> 01:00:37,580
on the uncanny.

15
01:00:37,721 --> 01:00:40,859
And Freud says something very simple in the essay, which is that

16
01:00:40,859 --> 01:00:45,357
when we have what we think of as an uncanny experience, it

17
01:00:45,357 --> 01:00:49,935
actually is a recovery of an experience that was once familiar and

18
01:00:49,935 --> 01:00:52,474
then had to be estranged in some way.

19
01:00:52,474 --> 01:00:55,752
So that if I go somewhere and have an experience of deja

20
01:00:55,752 --> 01:00:59,610
vu, say, or I feel something uncanny is happening to me, it's

21
01:00:59,610 --> 01:01:04,348
because, unknown to myself, I'm having a memory of an earlier experience

22
01:01:04,348 --> 01:01:07,688
that was probably pleasurable, but I had to in some way disown.

23
01:01:09,247 --> 01:01:11,865
The most uncanny place is one's home.

24
01:01:12,605 --> 01:01:15,905
As in, it appears to be the most familiar place, but actually

25
01:01:15,905 --> 01:01:17,544
it's the most unfamiliar place.

26
01:01:19,782 --> 01:01:21,541
He wasn't at home in Germany.

27
01:01:22,001 --> 01:01:23,301
He wasn't at home in Norway.

28
01:01:23,421 --> 01:01:26,660
So I asked him if he'd ever been in a place where

29
01:01:26,660 --> 01:01:27,358
he felt at home.

30
01:01:27,880 --> 01:01:33,137
And he said that he thought of one place, and it was

31
01:01:33,137 --> 01:01:35,696
the island of St. Pierre in the Lux at Yenne in Switzerland.

32
01:01:36,036 --> 01:01:40,914
And it's best known because it was where Rousseau took refuge in

33
01:01:40,914 --> 01:01:41,913
1765.

34
01:01:41,913 --> 01:01:47,472
And what he said, and I can read this because it's exact,

35
01:01:47,792 --> 01:01:51,150
he said, I felt at home strangely because it is a miniature

36
01:01:51,150 --> 01:01:57,008
world, one manor house, one farmhouse, a vineyard, a field of potatoes,

37
01:01:57,367 --> 01:02:00,086
a field of wheat, a cherry tree, an orchard.

38
01:02:00,306 --> 01:02:02,605
It is one of everything, so it is in a sense an

39
01:02:02,605 --> 01:02:02,985
ark.

40
01:02:04,884 --> 01:02:07,663
It's like when you draw a place when you were a child.

41
01:02:14,981 --> 01:02:18,280
I think Sable is, as well, wittier than he seems to be

42
01:02:18,280 --> 01:02:18,839
very often.

43
01:02:19,478 --> 01:02:22,856
I think Sable knew that only children have homes, that adults don't

44
01:02:22,856 --> 01:02:27,395
have homes, and that there's something childish in the best sense and

45
01:02:27,395 --> 01:02:29,254
the worst sense about the idea of home.

46
01:02:30,213 --> 01:02:33,973
And I think that dinky little island, which is a bit like

47
01:02:33,973 --> 01:02:40,310
a doll's house island, is a picture of all one's wishful fantasies

48
01:02:40,310 --> 01:02:46,266
about home, which are to do with safety, a controllable environment, a

49
01:02:46,266 --> 01:02:49,326
kind of security in terms of invasions.

50
01:02:49,886 --> 01:02:54,564
And it's a bit like this is a toy that he's placed

51
01:02:54,564 --> 01:02:59,342
on the map of his books, as if to say, wouldn't it

52
01:02:59,342 --> 01:03:01,041
be nice if it could ever be like this?

53
01:03:01,242 --> 01:03:02,801
But actually, it's exactly the opposite.

54
01:03:03,541 --> 01:03:07,718
We're not on an island, we're all interconnected, and we're interconnected in

55
01:03:07,718 --> 01:03:09,338
ways that are horrifying to us very often.

56
01:03:10,117 --> 01:03:12,456
I think that's where he wanted to end up.

57
01:03:14,635 --> 01:03:18,814
You know, I always think, I think it was Diane Arbus, strangely,

58
01:03:19,094 --> 01:03:24,152
another photographer who said that, you know, the gods and their kind

59
01:03:24,152 --> 01:03:28,091
of playful glee put us down in the wrong place and that

60
01:03:28,091 --> 01:03:32,829
we spend our entire life trying to not find the place where

61
01:03:32,829 --> 01:03:36,706
we're supposed to be, but to find who we were supposed to

62
01:03:36,706 --> 01:03:36,966
be.

63
01:03:42,925 --> 01:03:46,962
Sebald's rise to the literary pantheon was remarkable.

64
01:03:47,203 --> 01:03:50,282
It happened in less than ten years.

65
01:03:50,541 --> 01:03:54,619
He went from being unknown to being raised on the shoulders of

66
01:03:54,619 --> 01:03:57,677
opinion formers on both sides of the Atlantic, and had he not

67
01:03:57,677 --> 01:04:01,136
died, I feel sure he would by now have won the Nobel

68
01:04:01,136 --> 01:04:01,618
Prize.

69
01:04:01,677 --> 01:04:03,656
Many people have said as much.

70
01:04:05,156 --> 01:04:07,214
Well, I didn't meet him exactly.

71
01:04:07,354 --> 01:04:09,794
I saw him in the flesh one time.

72
01:04:09,794 --> 01:04:14,692
We were both doing programmes in Broadcasting House, and you know you

73
01:04:14,692 --> 01:04:17,230
go into that lift whenever he talks to each other to come

74
01:04:17,230 --> 01:04:24,987
down, and I heard this conversation with him, and there'd been a

75
01:04:24,987 --> 01:04:28,286
piece in one of the standard or one of the papers that

76
01:04:28,286 --> 01:04:33,284
afternoon saying Sebald was refusing absolutely to do more than one interview

77
01:04:33,284 --> 01:04:37,382
for this book, and while we're standing there in the lift, he's

78
01:04:37,382 --> 01:04:41,280
got his PR woman with him, and they're describing four other interviews

79
01:04:41,280 --> 01:04:44,959
they're going to do that afternoon, and he looked the kind of

80
01:04:44,959 --> 01:04:48,157
most weary man I'd ever seen in my life.

81
01:04:48,817 --> 01:04:51,916
He had a little bit of a moustache, and he looked very

82
01:04:51,916 --> 01:04:55,654
exhausted by the whole process, and yet there was a kind of

83
01:04:55,654 --> 01:04:57,054
twinkle that he...

84
01:04:57,054 --> 01:05:01,033
I thought maybe everything with him isn't to be taken at face

85
01:05:01,033 --> 01:05:06,270
value, and it was that accidental thing of two completely strangers who

86
01:05:06,270 --> 01:05:09,749
didn't know each other just standing in this lift a couple of

87
01:05:09,749 --> 01:05:13,388
minutes going down, and he walks away into doing his interviews, and

88
01:05:13,388 --> 01:05:15,187
I walk off back to Hackney.

89
01:05:15,387 --> 01:05:19,604
But I was really, really pleased to have that moment, like again

90
01:05:19,604 --> 01:05:22,204
the painting of Monsieur Courbet on the road.

91
01:05:22,344 --> 01:05:25,403
You know, you're this man with his rucksack and his hat, and

92
01:05:25,403 --> 01:05:29,002
it's two strangers who see each other on a road and pass

93
01:05:29,002 --> 01:05:33,099
in different directions, and so he kind of figured there for me

94
01:05:33,099 --> 01:05:37,018
strongly as an icon from that one single incident.

95
01:05:41,056 --> 01:05:43,536
This was a gentle man.

96
01:05:44,356 --> 01:05:51,552
I think he was probably one of the gentlest people that I

97
01:05:51,552 --> 01:05:52,711
have ever had the opportunity.

98
01:05:53,572 --> 01:05:58,029
You could not but like him, even as you admired him.

99
01:05:58,029 --> 01:06:03,548
There was something profoundly likeable about him.

100
01:06:04,806 --> 01:06:07,806
I wouldn't say that I knew him well, but I liked him

101
01:06:07,806 --> 01:06:10,424
very much, and we certainly saw each other pretty often for a

102
01:06:10,424 --> 01:06:10,704
spell.

103
01:06:11,304 --> 01:06:17,982
Everything about him felt soft, everything sort of gentle and unobtrusive, but

104
01:06:17,982 --> 01:06:22,120
absolutely watchful and wary, and with a...

105
01:06:22,120 --> 01:06:24,419
And I'm not just sort of back-forming this either from the

106
01:06:24,419 --> 01:06:27,997
books, but with a sense that he might get up and not

107
01:06:27,997 --> 01:06:32,615
come back at any moment, a sort of wandering otherness about him.

108
01:06:35,604 --> 01:06:39,543
I set out on foot in a north-westerly direction along the

109
01:06:39,543 --> 01:06:44,281
old Roman road into the thinly populated countryside that lies to the

110
01:06:44,281 --> 01:06:48,159
south of Halston, and I knew then, as little as I know

111
01:06:48,159 --> 01:06:51,637
now, whether walking in this solitary way was more of a pleasure

112
01:06:51,637 --> 01:06:52,836
or a pain.

113
01:06:54,156 --> 01:06:57,535
At times on that day, which I recall as being both leaden

114
01:06:57,535 --> 01:07:02,493
and unreal, a gap would open up among the billowing clouds, and

115
01:07:02,493 --> 01:07:05,772
the rays of sun would reach down to the earth, lighting up

116
01:07:05,772 --> 01:07:09,250
patches here and there and making a fan-shaped pattern as they

117
01:07:09,250 --> 01:07:13,848
descended, of the sort that used to appear in religious pictures symbolising

118
01:07:13,848 --> 01:07:16,607
the presence of others of grace and providence.

119
01:07:18,167 --> 01:07:21,106
It was afternoon by the time I came to the lane which

120
01:07:21,106 --> 01:07:24,905
leaves the Roman road across a cattle grid and leads through a

121
01:07:24,905 --> 01:07:31,181
meadow to Chestnut Tree Farm, an ancient moated house, where Thomas Abrams

122
01:07:31,181 --> 01:07:34,840
has been working on a model of the Temple of Jerusalem for

123
01:07:34,840 --> 01:07:35,980
a good 20 years.

124
01:07:36,759 --> 01:07:40,357
He spent 18 years bringing back the temple, which was the opulent

125
01:07:40,357 --> 01:07:44,175
focus for religious worship in Jerusalem when Jesus was alive.

126
01:07:44,436 --> 01:07:47,414
But why did the 67-year-old decide to focus on this

127
01:07:47,414 --> 01:07:48,953
particular piece of history?

128
01:07:48,953 --> 01:07:52,613
The constable decided to paint a picture, and I decided to build

129
01:07:52,613 --> 01:07:53,052
a temple.

130
01:07:53,392 --> 01:07:56,551
Now pilgrims and scholars from all over the world trek to the

131
01:07:56,551 --> 01:08:00,350
village of Fressingfield to see the largest and most detailed model of

132
01:08:00,350 --> 01:08:00,869
its kind.

133
01:08:01,669 --> 01:08:05,327
And as the Easter weekend approaches, even more visitors have booked to

134
01:08:05,327 --> 01:08:05,747
see it.

135
01:08:06,108 --> 01:08:09,166
I'm quite proud, but, you know, it's like everything else.

136
01:08:09,346 --> 01:08:12,305
It's just a way of life to me, and I enjoy it.

137
01:08:13,124 --> 01:08:18,082
100,000 handmade clay bricks and 3,500 painted figures have gone

138
01:08:18,082 --> 01:08:20,262
into it, and it still isn't complete.

139
01:08:20,561 --> 01:08:22,479
But that doesn't deter the experts.

140
01:08:22,860 --> 01:08:26,458
In Jerusalem, there's plans to rebuild a full-scale version of King

141
01:08:26,458 --> 01:08:27,159
Herod's Temple.

142
01:08:27,678 --> 01:08:31,355
They're using Suffolk's miniature version as a blueprint for the real thing.

143
01:08:31,735 --> 01:08:33,136
Sarah Doyle, Anglian News...

144
01:08:33,136 --> 01:08:36,275
As I took my leave and mentioned that I had walked over

145
01:08:36,275 --> 01:08:40,413
from Oxford and was now going on to Halston, Thomas said that

146
01:08:40,413 --> 01:08:43,752
he would drive me, as he had an errand in town anyway.

147
01:08:44,991 --> 01:08:48,290
So we spent the quarter of an hour to Halston, sitting side

148
01:08:48,290 --> 01:08:51,869
by side in the cab of his truck, and I wished that

149
01:08:51,869 --> 01:08:55,027
the short drive through the country would never come to an end,

150
01:08:55,486 --> 01:09:00,205
that we could go on and on, all the way to Jerusalem.

151
01:09:03,403 --> 01:09:06,942
But instead, I had to get out at the Saracen's Head in

152
01:09:06,942 --> 01:09:12,340
Halston, an inn several centuries old, whose guest rooms, as it transpired,

153
01:09:12,340 --> 01:09:16,279
were furnished with the most fearful pieces one can imagine.

154
01:09:17,937 --> 01:09:21,277
I don't know where it quite comes from, but I do like

155
01:09:21,277 --> 01:09:26,095
to listen to people who have been sidelined for one reason or

156
01:09:26,095 --> 01:09:26,394
another.

157
01:09:27,534 --> 01:09:32,112
Because in my experience, once they begin to talk, they have to

158
01:09:32,112 --> 01:09:35,411
tell you, they have things to tell you that you won't be

159
01:09:35,411 --> 01:09:37,749
able to get from anywhere else.

160
01:09:38,290 --> 01:09:42,009
And I felt that need of being able to listen to people

161
01:09:42,009 --> 01:09:46,306
telling me things from very early on, not least, I think, because

162
01:09:46,306 --> 01:09:50,044
I grew up in post-war Germany, where there was, I say

163
01:09:50,044 --> 01:09:55,183
that quite often, something like a conspiracy of silence, i.e. your

164
01:09:55,183 --> 01:10:01,300
parents never told you anything about their experiences, because there was, at

165
01:10:01,300 --> 01:10:05,179
the very least, a great deal of shame attached to these experiences.

166
01:10:05,818 --> 01:10:09,336
So one kept them under lock and seal, and I, for one,

167
01:10:09,537 --> 01:10:16,014
doubt that my mother and father, even amongst themselves, ever broached any

168
01:10:16,014 --> 01:10:16,913
of these subjects.

169
01:10:17,294 --> 01:10:22,232
And there wasn't a written or spoken agreement about these things, it

170
01:10:22,232 --> 01:10:25,430
was a tacit agreement, it was something that was never touched on.

171
01:10:26,150 --> 01:10:29,888
So I've always, I've grown up feeling that there is some sort

172
01:10:29,888 --> 01:10:35,765
of emptiness somewhere that needs to be filled by accounts from witnesses

173
01:10:35,765 --> 01:10:36,786
one can trust.

174
01:10:40,564 --> 01:10:44,602
The Sable narrator is kind of on the run, and what he's

175
01:10:44,602 --> 01:10:49,060
most fearful of is stopping, but he keeps having his attention arrested.

176
01:10:49,720 --> 01:10:52,918
And it's the moment at which he stops, something happens, that it's

177
01:10:52,918 --> 01:10:56,876
as though he begins to accumulate stuff that is eventually going to

178
01:10:56,876 --> 01:10:58,477
be incorporated in a narrative.

179
01:10:58,817 --> 01:11:00,735
So it's as though he begins by saying, I want to tell

180
01:11:00,735 --> 01:11:03,054
you a story about a walk, and by the end he's telling

181
01:11:03,054 --> 01:11:05,834
you, I've in fact told you a story about the catastrophes of

182
01:11:05,834 --> 01:11:08,613
Western culture since the Second World War and before.

183
01:11:09,113 --> 01:11:13,090
So that the fear is that if you allow yourself to become

184
01:11:13,090 --> 01:11:16,929
a writer, the catastrophe will be like an avalanche, whereas if you

185
01:11:16,929 --> 01:11:18,388
keep walking, you might be OK.

186
01:11:19,888 --> 01:11:23,886
The subtitle of The Rings of Saturn is an English pilgrimage, and

187
01:11:23,886 --> 01:11:26,605
it's a very curious title when you think about it, because a

188
01:11:26,605 --> 01:11:32,823
pilgrimage is a movement towards healing, towards resolution, towards self

189
01:11:32,823 --> 01:11:38,860
-understanding, and actually what this foot journey results in is catastrophic

190
01:11:38,860 --> 01:11:46,257
dilapidation of foundations, a vanishing of stabilities, and it puts him in

191
01:11:46,257 --> 01:11:47,037
hospital.

192
01:11:48,517 --> 01:11:51,635
What are we trying to accomplish by doing this, going on this

193
01:11:51,635 --> 01:11:51,875
trip?

194
01:11:52,235 --> 01:11:53,835
Are we trying to prove that he did it?

195
01:11:54,714 --> 01:11:56,954
Are we trying to experience what he experienced?

196
01:11:59,032 --> 01:12:01,331
Or do we just not care and we're just going to have

197
01:12:01,331 --> 01:12:01,930
a good old time?

198
01:12:03,631 --> 01:12:06,749
One thing that's happened in the last decade, there's been this huge

199
01:12:06,749 --> 01:12:10,667
revival of pilgrimage across the world, in fact, so that on the

200
01:12:10,667 --> 01:12:13,746
way to Santiago de Compostela, they're reopening these mediaeval hostelries,

201
01:12:13,806 --> 01:12:17,444
which have been closed for decades or hundreds of years, and there's

202
01:12:17,444 --> 01:12:21,503
definitely some modern desire to find meaning through physical effort.

203
01:12:22,503 --> 01:12:25,422
It's interesting because the word pilgrimage, in English at least, has the

204
01:12:25,422 --> 01:12:30,139
word image in it, and after we got back, I did some

205
01:12:30,139 --> 01:12:34,857
research and I found these maps that were created for pilgrims that

206
01:12:34,857 --> 01:12:36,436
didn't actually go on pilgrimages.

207
01:12:36,877 --> 01:12:40,575
They would use them to sort of meditate on and use the

208
01:12:40,575 --> 01:12:45,772
images to move their mind through the different parts of the land

209
01:12:45,772 --> 01:12:47,193
on their way to Jerusalem.

210
01:12:48,132 --> 01:12:49,972
They were called itinerary maps.

211
01:12:51,110 --> 01:12:53,330
It's rather what Wim Wenders said about Kings of the Road, that

212
01:12:53,330 --> 01:12:56,689
you have an itinerary, and once you have an itinerary, it becomes

213
01:12:56,689 --> 01:12:58,149
quite easy to kind of write, in a way.

214
01:12:58,567 --> 01:13:00,367
Something I never worked out, you know, you sit in a room

215
01:13:00,367 --> 01:13:03,306
day after day, and you think, well, what will I write about

216
01:13:03,306 --> 01:13:03,846
today?

217
01:13:04,386 --> 01:13:06,464
And if you actually go out for a walk, and you walk

218
01:13:06,464 --> 01:13:11,522
15 miles, you're going to get enough for 750 words, 1,000

219
01:13:11,522 --> 01:13:12,662
words, no trouble at all.

220
01:13:13,041 --> 01:13:15,740
I think it wasn't until I did my East Anglian journey that

221
01:13:15,740 --> 01:13:17,180
I thought, this is a doddle.

222
01:13:17,440 --> 01:13:19,699
You know, you kind of go to Cromer, oh, you're going to

223
01:13:19,699 --> 01:13:22,338
just write about in Cromer, then you move on around the coast,

224
01:13:22,338 --> 01:13:25,436
oh, look, there's a kind of old Cold War, early warning station,

225
01:13:25,677 --> 01:13:28,376
you know, so it sort of takes care of itself.

226
01:13:30,054 --> 01:13:33,474
I don't think that works at all anymore now, because they're all

227
01:13:33,474 --> 01:13:36,892
doing it, you know, the countryside is black with people going for

228
01:13:36,892 --> 01:13:38,132
walks to write books.

229
01:13:38,631 --> 01:13:42,270
The only way to do it is obviously you have to walk

230
01:13:42,270 --> 01:13:46,628
somewhere ever more extreme in more and more peculiar circumstances.

231
01:13:46,748 --> 01:13:50,367
I wouldn't get away with just walking around the M25 orbital motorway

232
01:13:50,367 --> 01:13:50,587
now.

233
01:13:50,587 --> 01:13:55,246
You'd have to walk around the six orbital motorways of Beijing.

234
01:13:57,944 --> 01:14:02,342
The last ten years have been so kind of mediated that I'm

235
01:14:02,342 --> 01:14:06,340
sure that people feel the desire to go and...

236
01:14:06,340 --> 01:14:08,119
You know, people are going a lot in the art world now,

237
01:14:08,259 --> 01:14:11,318
a lot of artists are going and finding extraordinary places.

238
01:14:12,337 --> 01:14:15,536
I know artists have gone to Antarctica, to, you know, everywhere.

239
01:14:16,236 --> 01:14:18,256
I mean, it's a globalisation in extremity.

240
01:14:19,994 --> 01:14:27,292
I think people do feel that there is increasing homogenisation of the

241
01:14:27,292 --> 01:14:32,870
country, that places are actually becoming less places, they're becoming more

242
01:14:32,870 --> 01:14:36,468
like spaces, they're becoming more abstract, they're becoming infinitely

243
01:14:36,468 --> 01:14:37,288
reproducible.

244
01:14:38,188 --> 01:14:41,746
What's important for Sobald is that actually he finds the particular within

245
01:14:41,746 --> 01:14:45,105
them, he finds why this place is important, why this particular hall

246
01:14:45,105 --> 01:14:49,563
is important, because this person stayed here, because this event happened on

247
01:14:49,563 --> 01:14:51,742
this place, because here there was a village and now there is

248
01:14:51,742 --> 01:14:52,602
no longer a village.

249
01:14:52,921 --> 01:14:56,659
He encourages a deeper form of engagement with the place.

250
01:14:58,219 --> 01:15:01,397
And he is now a layer of that history, of which he

251
01:15:01,397 --> 01:15:01,818
writes.

252
01:15:02,457 --> 01:15:04,676
He wasn't while he was walking, but he is now.

253
01:15:04,877 --> 01:15:08,556
He's a very definite part of that landscape.

254
01:15:17,091 --> 01:15:21,189
This is a pilgrimage because the man is dead.

255
01:15:21,189 --> 01:15:24,888
The man is dead, and so he's ripe for a cult.

256
01:15:25,549 --> 01:15:29,506
And the way you would read his book is to think that

257
01:15:29,506 --> 01:15:33,444
you could follow along his track and get some insight into it,

258
01:15:33,484 --> 01:15:36,364
whereas I think that's probably completely untrue.

259
01:15:36,504 --> 01:15:39,503
It's probably the worst way to get an insight into what he's

260
01:15:39,503 --> 01:15:44,020
doing is to literally follow along, because he's a mythologist and a

261
01:15:44,020 --> 01:15:46,100
lot of the things in there he's invented.

262
01:15:46,699 --> 01:15:50,457
You want to understand his methods, not the kind of literal sense

263
01:15:50,457 --> 01:15:51,657
of being out there.

264
01:15:51,857 --> 01:15:53,397
Although, why not do that walk?

265
01:15:53,436 --> 01:15:54,156
It is a great walk.

266
01:15:54,276 --> 01:15:54,716
Enjoy it.

267
01:15:56,116 --> 01:16:00,014
It's not by chance that after that walking holiday he collapsed and

268
01:16:00,014 --> 01:16:01,293
he found himself in a hospital.

269
01:16:01,973 --> 01:16:08,110
There's an undertow, isn't there, of some sort of despair or some

270
01:16:08,110 --> 01:16:13,587
inability to connect to where he is, some attempt to belong somewhere,

271
01:16:13,689 --> 01:16:14,489
in some place.

272
01:16:15,027 --> 01:16:17,627
And maybe that appeals to us, you know.

273
01:16:17,707 --> 01:16:20,465
Maybe that's what we want.

274
01:16:20,606 --> 01:16:24,644
Maybe all things material that we try to construct in order to

275
01:16:24,644 --> 01:16:27,922
contain the chaos or the fears or whatever it is.

276
01:16:28,563 --> 01:16:30,781
He sort of goes, well, they aren't actually valid.

277
01:16:30,882 --> 01:16:31,961
They don't have any meaning.

278
01:16:32,341 --> 01:16:38,038
And there's great comfort in that when everything collapses around you, isn't

279
01:16:38,038 --> 01:16:38,318
there?

280
01:16:42,017 --> 01:16:45,156
Ditchingham Churchyard was the very last stop on my walk through the

281
01:16:45,156 --> 01:16:46,635
county of Suffolk.

282
01:16:46,635 --> 01:16:50,733
The afternoon was already drawing to a close, and so I decided

283
01:16:50,733 --> 01:16:54,032
to return to the main road and continue a short way in

284
01:16:54,032 --> 01:16:58,030
the direction of Norwich to the Mermaid in Heddenham, where the bar

285
01:16:58,030 --> 01:16:59,030
would be opening soon.

286
01:17:00,368 --> 01:17:03,728
I would be able to phone home from there to be picked

287
01:17:03,728 --> 01:17:04,307
up.

288
01:17:22,310 --> 01:17:25,029
Quite near the beginning of Wings of Saturn there's a photograph of

289
01:17:25,029 --> 01:17:30,746
Southwold Lighthouse and I was aware this was also the place where

290
01:17:30,746 --> 01:17:34,106
Peter Greenway's Drowning by Numbers was filmed.

291
01:17:34,945 --> 01:17:38,744
And so I took the ritual which is found within Drowning by

292
01:17:38,744 --> 01:17:43,181
Numbers, where the son of the coroner, at each point that he

293
01:17:43,181 --> 01:17:46,240
comes across a death in the film, he lets off a firework.

294
01:17:46,781 --> 01:17:51,139
And so I decided as a mark of memorial that I'd set

295
01:17:51,139 --> 01:17:54,557
off a firework by the side of the road where Sabo died.

296
01:17:55,237 --> 01:17:57,896
I got back home that evening and was looking at the photographs

297
01:17:57,896 --> 01:17:59,155
on the computer.

298
01:18:00,095 --> 01:18:05,173
And what I typically wanted was not a flash of light, but

299
01:18:05,173 --> 01:18:07,671
the smoke, very Sibelian substance.

300
01:18:08,451 --> 01:18:11,330
And so I had four photographs where the smoke was making nice

301
01:18:11,330 --> 01:18:12,770
shapes and so I was very pleased with those.

302
01:18:12,849 --> 01:18:17,149
And then I looked at the final image that I took and...

303
01:19:10,747 --> 01:19:15,764
Now as I write and think once more of our history, which

304
01:19:15,764 --> 01:19:20,663
is but a long account of calamities, it occurs to me that

305
01:19:20,663 --> 01:19:25,360
at one time the only acceptable expression of profound grief for ladies

306
01:19:25,360 --> 01:19:29,818
of the upper classes was to wear heavy robes of black silk

307
01:19:29,818 --> 01:19:32,278
taffeta, or black crepe de chine.

308
01:19:34,376 --> 01:19:37,695
And Sir Thomas Brown, who was the son of a silk merchant

309
01:19:37,695 --> 01:19:41,693
and may well have had an eye for these things, remarks in

310
01:19:41,693 --> 01:19:46,312
a passage of the Pseudodoxia Epidemica that I can no longer find,

311
01:19:46,911 --> 01:19:51,009
that in the Holland of his time it was customary in a

312
01:19:51,009 --> 01:19:54,988
home where there'd been a death to drape black mourning ribbons over

313
01:19:54,988 --> 01:20:00,526
all the mirrors and all canvases depicting landscapes, or people, or the

314
01:20:00,526 --> 01:20:05,884
fruits of the field so that the soul as it left the

315
01:20:05,884 --> 01:20:12,141
body would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a

316
01:20:12,141 --> 01:20:17,818
reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of the land now

317
01:20:17,818 --> 01:20:20,957
being lost forever.