Winfried Sebald - After Nature

seeks to get out, was assembled,

Grünewald, who in any case must have tended

towards an extremist view of the world,

will have come to see the redemption of the

living as one from life itself.

Now life as such, as it unfolds, dreadfully,

everywhere and at all times,

is not to be seen on the altar panels

whose figures have passed beyond

the miseries of existence, unless it be

in that unreal and demented thronging

which Grünewald has developed around

St. Anthony of the temptation:

dragged by his hair over the ground

by a gruesome monster.

Low down in the bottom-left corner

cowers the body, covered with

syphilitic chancres, of an inmate

of the Isenheim hospital. Above it

rises a two-headed and manyarmed

androgynous creature

about to finish off the saint

with a brandished jaw-bone.

On the right, a stilt-legged bird-like beast

which, with human arms,

holds a cudgel raised up. Behind

and beside this, towards the picture’s centre,

crab-clawed together, shark- and dragon-like

maws, rows of teeth, pug noses

from which snot flows, fin-shaped

clammy limp wings, hair and horns,

skin like entrails turned outwards,

excrescences of an entire life,

in the air, on land and in water.

To him, the painter, this is creation,

image of our insane presence

on the surface of the earth,

the regeneration proceeding

in downward orbits

whose parasitical shapes

intertwine, and, growing into

and out of one another, surge

as a demonic swarm

into the hermit’s quietude.

In this fashion Grünewald,

silently wielding his paintbrush,

rendered the scream, the wailing, the gurgling

and the shrieking of a pathological spectacle

to which he and his art, as he must have known,

themselves belong. The panic-stricken

kink in the neck to be seen

in all of Grünewald’s subjects,

exposing the throat and often turning

the face towards a blinding light,

is the extreme response of our bodies

to the absence of balance in nature

which blindly makes one experiment after another

and like a senseless botcher

undoes the thing it has only just achieved.

To try out how far it can go

is the sole aim of this sprouting,

perpetuation and proliferation

inside us also and through us and through

the machines sprung from our heads,

all in a single jumble,

while behind us already the green

trees are leaving their leaves and

bare, as often they appear in Grünewald’s

pictures, loom up into the sky,

the dead branches overlaid

with a moss-like glutinous substance.

The black bird that in its beak

carries a break-time meal

to St. Anthony on his site

in the desert may be the one with

the heart of glass, the bird

flying ever closer to us,

of which another prophet

of the last days announces

that it will shit into the sea

so that the water boils itself out,

that the earth trembles and the great city

with the iron tower stands in flames,

whilst the Pope squats in a barge

and darkness comes and

with it a yellow dust

that covers the land.

On the Basel Crucifixion of 1505

behind the group of mourners

a landscape reaches so far into the depth

that our eyes cannot see its limits.

A patch of brown scorched earth

whose contour like the head of a whale

or an open-mouthed leviathan

devours the pale green meadow plains,

and the marshily shining stretches

of water. Above it, pushed off

to behind the horizon, which step

by step grows darker, more glowering,

rise the hills of the prehistory

of the Passion.We see the gate

of the Garden of Gethsemane, the approach

of the henchmen and the kneeling figure of Christ

so reduced in size that in the

receding space the rushing

away of time can be sensed.

Most probably Grünewald painted

and recalled the catastrophic incursion

of darkness, the last trace of light

flickering from beyond, after nature,

for in the year 1502, when he was working

at Bindlach, below the Fichtelgebirge,

on the creation of the Lindenhardt altar,

on the first of October the moon’s shadow

slid over Eastern Europe from Mecklenburg

over Bohemia and the Lausitz to southern Poland,

and Grünewald, who repeatedly was in touch

with the Aschaffenburg Court Astrologer Johann Indagine,

will have travelled to see this event of the century,

awaited with great terror, the eclipse of the sun,

so will have become a witness to

the secret sickening away of the world,

in which a phantasmal encroachment of dusk

in the midst of daytime like a fainting fit

poured through the vault of the sky,

while over the banks of mist and the cold

heavy blues of the clouds

a fiery red arose, and colours

such as his eyes had not known

radiantly wandered about, never again to be

driven out of the painter’s memory.

These colours unfold as the reverse of

the spectrum in a different consistency

of the air, whose deoxygenated void

in the gasping breath of the figures

on the central Isenheim panel is enough

to portend our death by asphyxiation; after which

comes the mountain landscape of weeping

in which Grünewald with a pathetic gaze

into the future has prefigured

a planet utterly strange, chalk-coloured

behind the blackish-blue river.

Here in an evil state of erosion

and desolation the heritage of the ruining

of life that in the end will consume

even the stones has been depicted.

In view of this it seems to me

that the ice age, the glaringly white

towering of the summits in

the upper realm of the Temptation,

is the construction of a metaphysic

and a miracle like the one

in the year 352, when

at the height of the summer

snow fell

on the Esquiline

Hill in Rome.

In the spring of 1525 Grünewald

rode through April light and showers

to Windsheim, where from the workshop

of Jakob Seckler he had ordered

the crowning piece for an altar,

an intricate carving of finials

and figures, vine leaves and

various birds.While Seckler

put the last touch to his work,

Grünewald fell into conversation

with Barthel and Sebald Beham,

etchers and draughtsmen from Nürnberg who,

seized on January 12th as godless painters

and driven out of their native city for heresy,

were lodging provisionally at the Windsheim master’s.

The brothers, on walks out into the still

discoloured fields and till late into the night,

told of Thomas Münzer, at one time in Nürnberg,

now gone through Swabia to Alsace,

to Switzerland and into the Black Forest

to raise the insurrection. For the sixth

trumpet was about to sound and the poor

letter must be released from its prison.

With clangour a great

pentecost was to begin,

the filling of the waters well nigh

completed, the seething

planets gathered in

the house of Pisces. The red

star was drawing into conjunction

with Saturn, the sign

of the peasants, and a fantastic

fire would flare up when,

in the imminent future,

a needy wretch would be revealed

as the Messiah Septentrionalis.

Grünewald said that once, in his childhood,

he must have been six or seven,