For instance, if I am walking through the city and look into one of those quiet courtyards where nothing has changed for decades, I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion. It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time. And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?

— W.G. Sebald, from "Austerlitz"

An innate desire to “arrest the passage of time”.

The micro-poems of W.G. Sebald, from Unrecounted (translated by Michael Hamburger)

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[...] quello strano disturbo del comportamento che costringe a trasformare tutti i sentimenti in parole scritte e che, pur mirando alla vita, riesce sempre con sorprendente precisione a mancare il centro.

W. G. Sebald, [Logis in einem Landhaus, 1998], Soggiorno in una casa di campagna, Milano, Adelphi, ebook, 2014 [Trad. A. Vigliani]

Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 9)

Part 8 Souvenirs The past is dangerously addictive. Nostalgia, especially second-hand nostalgia such as mine, often threatens to become an endless placebo in place of living. How alluring the past seems when we convince ourselves of having experienced it for a brief moment through culture and art. The ghost story writer M.R. James lived with this addiction to the past more than most. James…

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Johann Peter Hebel (1811), via A Place in the Country by W. G. Sebald

Todo cabe en un libro. W.G. Sebald

Todo cabe en un libro. Escribir es como pasear por la historia y por la biblioteca de la vida. Ambas realidades son una sola cosa para mí. Trato de vivir rodeado de las cosas que me gustan y considero natural incorporarlas a mi escritura. Todo forma parte de lo mismo. Escribir y vivir. Sólo entiendo la escritura como reflejo de un mundo interior, privado. No me interesa el pasado por sí mismo…

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Dziś po raz pierwszy zrobiłam rysunek do powieści wędrowczej W. G. Sebalda. Pierścienie Saturna.

Polecam przejść się z nim po wschodniej Anglii.

W. G. Sebald em 2001 foto de Anita Schiffer-Fuchs

Waiting to go to an art show. #sanfrancisco #artshow #books #booklover #bookstagram #riotgrams #sebald #essays #coffee #coffeealfresco @waterfrontcafe (at San Francisco, California) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cdq5hiXJO0g/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

You are taken out of time, and that is in a sense a form of redemption, if you can release yourself from the passage of time. And the photographs can also do this—they act like barriers or weirs which stem the flow.

— W.G. Sebald, on what draws us to “certain forms” of visual art

they have escaped the weight of darkness

Lisitsa the little wolf dog with wise eyes is waiting by the door, at the bottom of the dimly lit staircase. She knows that the museum is about to close, that it is time for her walk. 

As I’m leaving the museum, I hear Valuska’s voice coming from the Borzoi Kabinet Theater, the sound of Vig Mihály’s beautiful piano music, from the opening scene of Béla Tarr’s Werkmeister Harmonies. I peak into the curtains. The music is playing over 3D footage of a plain in Wyoming, the place my father first landed when he immigrated from Taiwan to the United States. Could not place the music at first, that song I love so dearly, what song are you? But then Valuska’s soliloquy resumes, he is talking about the eclipse of the sun, how the people watched, wondering if the sky would fall in on them. 

unexpectedly … within a few minutes … the air about us cools … Can you feel it? … The sky darkens … and then … grows perfectly black! Guard dogs howl! The frightened rabbit flattens itself against the grass! Herds of deer are startled into a mad stampede! And in this terrible and incomprehensible twilight … even the birds (‘The birds!’ cried Valuska, in rapture, throwing his arms up to the sky, his ample postman’s cloak flapping open like bat’s wings) … ‘the very birds are confused and settle on their nests! And then … silence … And every living thing is still … and we too, for whole minutes, are incapable of speech … Are the hills on the march? Will heaven fall in on us? Will earth open under our feet and swallow us? We cannot tell. It is a total eclipse of the sun.

But then the sun returns—life is breathed back into the world.

But... but no need to fear. It's not over. For across the sun's glowing sphere, slowly, the Moon swims away. And the sun once again bursts forth, and to the Earth slowly there comes again light, and warmth again floods the Earth. Deep emotion pierces everyone. They have escaped the weight of darkness

Mr. Hagelmayer: That's enough! Out of here, you tubs of beer!

János Valuska: But Mr. Hagelmayer. It's still not over.

A line from Cixous echoes in my head: she sees, she is once again turned toward the inaccessible sun. 

I did not bring my notes about the museum to the cafe, knowing how easily I am led astray by wonder, so I must draw on my memories of the monastery reflected in the water, the rose engine, the white moths bursting out of the bottomless urn whose diminutive outer appearance conceals the impossible scale of its interior. Somewhere the night-flying white moths billow forth, they are the dead taking leave of this earth. Woolf: she is to finally let the last great moth in. Shall I consider you an entomologist of the spirit world? 

I remember my dream:

Would I die? Now in the church a sensitive pothead improvises a requiem. Thousands of murmuring moths fly in and die on the floor.

Do you hear me?

There’s the diorama of the living room with the mirror covered with the yellow sheet. In the miniature room of the dying, it is night. Outside a storm rages. Lightning outside makes the window flicker. 

WG Sebald: it was customary, in a home where there had been a death, to drape black mourning ribbons over all the mirrors and all canvasses depicting landscapes or people or the fruits of the field, so that the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of the land now being lost forever

Sometimes when I hear a great roar, I feel the world careening toward disaster, something inside me is turning, as cold and constant as the orbit of celestial bodies, a mechanical model of the movement of the planets, observed beneath glass. I think about the ashes of my grandfather, sitting in my parents’ bathroom, which my father never brought to scatter in Taiwan, as my grandfather requested. My father never went back. This must be it, I won’t ever go back to mainland China, as I always thought I would. I feel the world careening, just as I felt it leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. My heart still breaks thinking about Ukraine. Did I, perhaps, take the equilibrium of weather and geopolitics for granted? The supply of semiconductors. Now I know: the world cannot be counted on to continue. 

That’s the world of the dead, isn’t it? Says the YouTube woman. Come rejoin the world of the living, she says. We’re not boring, I promise.

There are things I cannot mourn. But sometimes the clouds appear to me in the shape of the Garganta del Diablo, the Devil’s throat waterfall of Iguazú Falls, between Brazil and Argentina. The preoccupations of my imagination are reflected everywhere in the world: the shot of Katia touching the yellow sulfur in the film Fire of Love (on the same day I had typed the note: “Flowers of sulfur: It is known as flores sulphuris by apothecaries in older scientific works”), Maurice floating on a dinghy in a lake of sulfuric acid, the way you retreat into the mysteries of nature out of disillusionment with the world of the living. I bike along The Strand, between Venice and Santa Monica Pier, listening to Gillian Welch’s I Dream a Highway. The music algorithm must know something of my preoccupations, I think, with dreams, with sunflowers. There’s a peace that descends that feels like a premonition of death. I’m calmer now. Is it peace or resignation? I remember reading Alix Cléo Roubaud’s diary over a decade ago, remembered the equanimity of her last entries, right before her untimely death from a pulmonary embolism at the age of 31. There’s a peace that eases you into acceptance of your absence. Listening to the song, watching the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, I am drafting my will. Give all my assets to my little brother, etch my books onto stone and metal, deposit me in the sea. Sometimes when I hear a great roar, I see the hour of my death. Every sunset I have ever seen will flash in my head. Beams of light are coming through a v-shaped opening in the clouds. River of lava, the memory of every volcano I have ever seen: hiking Mount Pelée in Martinique with Joohyun and Doc. Did I see a second of footage in Fire of Love of the sparkling black volcanic ash beach of Grand'Rivière? I remember Vesuvius, how I went as a teen and saw the petrified people of Pompeii, how I returned a decade later with a lover and came home with a lava rock shaped like an egg. We hike to the summit for a view of the mouth.

This is where the mind goes. 

Who knows why some are comforted by a confrontation with nature’s magnificent forces, two lovers dying instantly in a 1800 degree cloud of roaring pyroclastic, holding each other, a watch eternally frozen at the moment of their obliteration. 

Why do I cry so easily now? Claustrophobia in the crowd of tourists on the pier, the water at night, the whirling lights on the Ferris wheel. Back on the bike trail, through my music I hear the screams of the people on the rollercoaster in the distance. There’s the leaden horizon, the black syrup of the night ocean. Aim the arrow of your focus, this being-toward-death. 

There are people for whom coincidence has a special status. Dreamers.

How strange, given her cleverness, that she mistakes the world seen through wound-colored glasses for meaning that is immanent in the world, as though she were the “receiver” of externally produced signs and not the producer of the “meaning” of indifferent bits of data. Perception is hallucinatory. The constellation is not a picture. 

There are people for whom coincidence has a special status.

quick little thing of the main characters of my flatland/gravity falls fic in the style of my old flatland short film, since i was thinking about it