mills

W.G. Sebald, Vertigo. Sebald’s novels, it is said, are thematically haunted by the Holocaust even when they do not overtly treat it as a subject. It is perhaps true as well that the Holocaust haunts his novels because as the destruction of a culture and its memory par excellence it exemplifies his real thematic obsession: memory and its disappearance.

That said, the sentence quoted above is exemplary of his style: an ordinary observation of a European scene imbued metaphorically with sorrow or horror. As I read it, I thought of how uniquely we are marked by our metaphors, or by their absence.

When you see a crowded train platform, what do you see?

• “…people…fleeing from a city doomed or already laid waste”?
• Enthusiastic moshers heaving to some thrumming cacophony?
• A scarcely distinguishable mass of froth and scum?
• The long-sought crowd into which you can disappear?
• Enormous atoms in a kind of Brownian motion?
• The lonely wanderers of urban life as painted by George Tooker?

Probably something else yet: the process of metaphor-making, which can be rather automatic, is a highly individual one, as one learns in childhood when one describes clouds with a friend: dinosaurs, cars, houses, letters. The last point in the list is notable: when one sees Tooker’s work, it affects one’s metaphor-making dramatically, a process described in this lovely quote posted by Meaghano.

How creative one’s metaphors are varies, but so too does one’s instinct towards metaphorical thought. I imagine many think not of imagery but of description: all these people! Or analysis: it must be rush hour, or perhaps a station is closed. Or some combination, etc.

In Immortality, Milan Kundera says he would like

“…an experiment that would examine, by means of electrodes attached to a human head, exactly how much of one’s life a person devotes to the present, how much to memories, and how much to the future. This would let us know who a man really is in relation to his time. What human time really is. And we could surely define three basic types of human being depending on which variety of time was dominant…”

He calls this a form of the aforementioned “existential mathematics.” I would like a poetic psychology which could class humans by their instinct for metaphors, how variegated and constant it is, and whether it delights or upsets them. Surely for every metaphor that amuses or engages there is one, like Sebald’s, that disturbs or discomfits, triggering through the imagination a panic attack or despair.

W.G. Sebald, Vertigo. There is a life that we have been destroying: the slowness of the past, the monuments and movements of which seem to have taken an incomprehensible amount of time to unfold, is ontologically unintelligible to us; scale of sufficient magnitude begins to be a difference not of degree but of kind.

We are a life being destroyed: already the teenagers stacked on motorbikes in Beijing, texting as they weave through traffic while chatting and listening to music, cannot understand how it takes us so long to say anything or why we should want a bit of quiet while writing out our over-long notes, some more than 140 characters, to one another.

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz. Sebald’s prose alternates between the most luminous, affecting descriptions imaginable, not at all lyrical but structured with unfailing prosaic perfection and a visual density that draws his subjects in your mind almost against your will, and ponderous, subtly amusing formulations of a very Germanic sort. Above, one of the latter that struck me.

Through the various concerns of Sebald and his fictional character Austerlitz runs the quality of futility: whether in shatteringly fruitless pursuit of a history annihilated by the Holocaust or laboring vainly to recompose lost memories from his own life, the terrible elusiveness of the past -which literally does not exist and whose barest outlines fade rapidly from mind despite this or that artifact or record- reduces Austerlitz to exhausted despair. Once one loses continuity with one’s past there is no recovering it, and it is on such continuity that our sense of identity is built.

The furious efforts of totalitarianism in the 20th century to subsume us into their “all-embracing and absolute perfection” involved attacks on identity and historical continuity alongside the actual slaughter of innocents. Nearly as vile as the Communist and Nazi atrocities were the sophisticated measures undertaken to deprive both ordinary citizens and the persecuted of their identity, their sense of connection to the past. The real meaning behind revolution is more than the assumption of power: it is the placement of a caesura, the cutting of the ties to the past. Doctoring photographs, making new calendars, razing buildings, dispossessing business owners, evicting minorities: it is not mere symbolism.

The destruction of culture, of history, and of human beings for the perfecting of scientifically inarguable ideologies went on quite apart from the “chronic dysfunction” of such systems: further evidence that it is the assertion of “being undeniably right,” rather than the quality of being right or wrong, that permits authoritarianism. Error and futility define us.

Milan Kundera famously said that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Inside of a society with sufficiently ambitious control systems, whether it is Marxist-Leninist or National Socialist or Wahhabist or otherwise in possession of absolute truth and an eschatological sense of its inevitability, this is a struggle most lose. They are erased and forgotten, or reduced to figures in textbooks which recount only the “chronic dysfunction” of failed movements without illuminating how it is that, again and again, we rationally conclude that we must kill in pursuit of an “absolute perfection” as elusive as memory; I think it is because, like memory, it is integral to our identity, and for that we will kill readily.

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz. Related to myths surrounding reason are myths surrounding the will. Nothing is more illusory than the notion of cognitive self-determination; not only is reason generally a pretext for decisions made and preferences harbored beneath our consciousness awareness, but when applied willfully reason just barely affects us: hence failed diets, lapsed promises, submission to temptations, unresisted compulsions, and the years of therapy one needs to accomplish the smallest change.

False fiction in all media often relies on epiphanic character development: in a moment of awareness, someone changes deeply. Yet it is only the harshest traumas and the most transformative immersions that change us. In real life, the moment of change is often followed by something less examined: the gradual attenuation of the epiphany, the diminution of the decision, the regression to what came before. One thinks, “I am changed! Never again!” Or: “From now on!” But one remains the same.

(In instances where a dramatic break seems to have happened –a shooting, perhaps- one often discovers on investigation something more like the slow removal of a bandage, tearing at a wound’s edges as it comes off: at some recent point in the shooter’s life, the failed effort at healing was abandoned and the damage was now exposed to the world. But the sore was always there. It is perhaps our guilt or embarrassment at not seeing it –or worse, at seeing it and looking away in the hope that it would scar over- that drive us to say: “He just snapped.”).

A probably controversial illustration of the difference between true and false character development in this respect: Dostoevsky’s manifestly false idea-based caricatures deciding to murder one another based on ideas they develop in libraries and Tolstoy’s unforgettably real characters, whose actions are often comically dressed in ornate rationalizations but whose true motives we see in the structure of their personalities.

One might say that reason is just a pretext used by the darker, deeper parts of the psyche, like a toy steering wheel attached to a missile following its own trajectory, or -if one wants to concede that it has some effect- one could describe it as a tiny rudder on an enormous ocean liner, steaming ahead towards whatever its likes as its captain self-assuredly turns his massive, useless wooden wheel.

W.G. Sebald in Austerlitz. This ties in directly to what I wrote about yesterday, and strikes me as one of the sadder sentences I’ve read in a while: “…lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life.”

Think just of your grandparents, their lives and loves and the things they saw and felt, now gone.