The same evening I watch the documentary “Patience” about W.G. Sebald’s book The Rings of Saturn for the second time. I am looking for a quote I had written down in my notebook without mentioning the source. I suspect it is from Sebald. I find out it isn’t, but it is in the documentary, it is about him.
“....
if you allow yourself to become a writer, the catastrophy will be like an
avalanche, whereas if you keep walking, you might be ok.”
The quote is somewhere towards the end
of the documentary. Just before it goes into the subject of pilgrimage. The
Rings of Saturn, a story about a long walk, is subtitled “An English pilgrimage”. And as the narrator
explains, a pilgrimage is a movement towards healing, towards resolution,
towards selfunderstanding. But in the book, the narrator, Sebald himself, collapses.
The walk results in catastrophy, a vanishing of stabilities.
Saturn is the melancholy planet. It
represents our limitations in power and control. It intensifies feelings of
isolation and sadness. Its rings were once a moon that circled closer and
closer around the planet until it got too close and was ripped apart by tidal
forces. Now its particles circle around the planet at an equal distance in an
endless movement.
Reading Sebald always makes me realise
there can be great comfort in it, when everything collapses around you. When things
fall apart. When the centre cannot hold. Once, in an interview, being asked why
he was still writing when at the same time his view of the world was so
pessimistic, his answer was that he was trying to create very small lagoons situated
out of time, to discover specific truths, in as far as that is possible. He
said that trying to describe the unbearable things in such a way that they
loose their heaviness, makes it possible to communicate them, to open peoples’
eyes.
One of my favorite moments in Rings of
Saturn is when Sebald meets Edward who lives with his mother and sisters in an
old manor house somewhere in the countryside. “Ever since leaving school in 1974, Edmund, the youngest, had been
working on a fat-bellied boat a good ten yards in length, although, as he
casually informed me, he knew nothing about boat-building and he had no
intention of ever going to sea in his unshapely barge. It’s not going to be
launched. It’s something I do. I have to have something to do.”
He makes me realise I’ve been building
my own boat.
And to come back to the subject I’m
dealing with here, on this blog, in this project (and this is Sebald again): It
is not about reaching some sort of christian or spiritual goal but it is about “auf eine bestimmte Weise zu gehen und zu
sehen”, to walk and to see things in a specific way.
Sebald chose to walk and to write but
he once said that he could just as well grow cucumbers. It doesn’t matter what
you do. As long as you go about it in the right way. And when you grow
cucumbers at least you know you will have a crop you can show to the outside
world. Something they can eat. Something they understand.
There is sadness in this thought but
Sebald masters his sadness well. Like Rilke he sees how it is an inseperable
part of life. It is connected to change. No change without sadness. No newness
without sadness.
“For
they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something
unfamiliar. Our feelings become mute in timid shyness. Everything within us
steps back; a silence ensues, and the something new, known to no one, stands in
the center and is silent.”
Rilke wrote this in his Letters to a
Young poet and I encountered them here, in Sweden, in the most Sebaldian way
possible. In the middle of a walk along the pilgrim trail from the west-coast
to the east-coast of Sweden I started the second day in a tiny place called
Flädie. In the afternoon I collected Rilke’s book at a library where I had
ordered it because I wanted to reread it. The eighth letter, the one about
sadness, is written in Flädie. I had no idea.
“For
it is not inertia alone that causes the unspeakably monotonous and unrenewed
human condition to repeat itself again and again. It is the aversion to
anything new, any unpredictable experience, which is believed untenable. Only
he who can expect anything ... will have a relationship to life greater than
just being alive ... when a sadness arises within you of such magmitude as you
have ever experienced, or when a restlessnes so overshadows all you do ... you
must believe that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten
you, that it holds you in its hand. It shall not let you fall.”
Life is a pilgrimage. But those of you
who read this all down to these last lines know already. You know it doesn’t
matter if your answer is a yes or a no. You know that there is no need for the
question.
