Winfried Sebald - After Nature

the kettle drummer of Niklashausen

had roused the people with promises

of earthly happiness for the poor.

Fifty thousand daily had thronged to him,

his prayer chapel filled with precious

donations and this had gone on for a while,

but then as a spectacle to the rabble

he had been roasted in Würzburg.

Already I can see, he resumed,

under the rainbow arching

over the land, the horsemen

advance from their camp.

Brothers, he said, when they were walking

along the Windsheim woods,

I know that the old coat is tearing

and I am afraid

of the ending of time.

In mid-May, when Grünewald

with his carved altarpiece had

returned to Frankfurt, the grain

whitening at harvest-time,

the whetted sickle passed

through the life of an army of five thousand

in the curious battle of Frankenhausen

in which hardly one horse soldier fell

but the bodies of peasants piled up

into a hecatomb, because,

as though they were mad,

they neither put up any resistance

nor took to their heels.

When Grünewald got news of this

on the 18th of May

he ceased to leave his house.

Yet he could hear the gouging out

of eyes that long continued

between Lake Constance and

the Thuringian Forest.

For weeks at that time he wore

a dark bandage over his face.

With the painter on horseback,

sometimes, too, high up on the cart

sits a nine-year-old child,

his own, as he ponders in disbelief,

conceived in his marriage to Anna.

It is a most beautiful ride, this last

in September 1527, along the riverside

through the valleys. The air stirs the light

between the leafage of trees, and from the hillsides

they look down on the land extending around them.

At rest, leaning against a rock, Grünewald

feels inside himself his misfortune

and that of the water artist in Halle.

The wind drives us into flight

like starlings at the hour when

the shadows fall. What remains to the last

is the work undertaken. In the service of

the family Erbach at Erbach, Grünewald devotes

the remaining years to an altar work.

Crucifixion again, and the lamentation,

the deformation of life slowly proceeds, and

always between the eye’s glance

and the raising of his brush

Grünewald now covers a long journey,

much more often than he used to

interrupts the execution of his art

for the apprenticing of his child

both in the workplace and outside in the green country.

What he himself learned from this is nowhere reported,

only that the child at the age of fourteen

for no known reason suddenly died

and that the painter did not outlive him

for any great length of time. Peer ahead sharply,

there you see in the greying of nightfall

the distant windmills turn.

The forest recedes, truly,

so far that one cannot tell

where it once lay, and the ice-house

opens, and rime, on to the field, traces

a colourless image of Earth.

So, when the optic nerve

tears, in the still space of the air

all turns as white as

the snow on the Alps.

Georg Wilhelm Steller

born at Windsheim, in Franconia,

while pursuing his studies

at the University of Halle

repeatedly came across news

items in journals

that the Russian Czarina,

in the course of her empire’s expansion,

was preparing an expedition on an unprecedented scale

under the supreme command of Vitus Bering

to the Pacific coast, so that

the sea route from there to America

should become known.

Visions of this voyage of discovery,

Steller later recorded, had so seized

his imagination that he, the son

of a cantor, gifted with a

fine tenor voice and furnished

with a bursary for true Christians,

having abandoned Wittenberg and

theology for natural science,

could now, during his doctoral

disputations, which he passed

with the highest distinction,

think of nothing other than

the shapes of the fauna and

flora of that distant region

where East and West and North

converge, and of the art and skill

required for their description.

Although it was said that the authorities

would appoint him in the near future

to the Chair of Botany and so

accredit him to society,

Steller, without means though he was,

and with scarcely more than his notebooks

in his pocket, on the very day

after the Rigorosum set out in the

mail coach to the city of Danzig,

then occupied by Russian troops,

where he signed on as a medical assistant

on a packet-boat that was

to carry some hundreds

of invalids back to Russia.

When the ship sailed out of Danzig Bay,

Steller, who had never yet confronted

the sea, stood on the deck for a while,

wondering at the passage

over water, at power and weight,

at the salt in the air and

the darkness pushed down to the deep

under the keel. To the left,

the outermost point of the Putzig spit,

to the right, the headland

fronting the Frische Haff,

a pale grey streak endlessly

merging into a still paler grey.

This behind him had been Germany,

it occurred to him, his childhood,

the woods of Windsheim;

the learning of ancient languages,

protracted throughout his youth

perscrutamini scripturas,

shouldn’t that read,

perscrutamini naturas rerum?

Kronstadt, Oranienbaum, Peterhof

and last in the Torricellian void,

a thirty-four-year-old bastard,

marooned on the Neva’s marsh delta,

St. Petersburg under the fortress,

the new Russian capital,

uncanny to a stranger,

no more than a chaos erupting,

buildings that began to subside

as soon as erected, and nowhere

a vista quite straight. The streets

and squares laid out according

to the Golden Section, jetty walls and bridges,

alignments, façades and rows of windows—

these only slowly come towards us

out of the future’s resounding emptiness,

so as to bring the plan of eternity into the city

born of the terror of the vastness of space,

overpopulated with Armenians, Turks, Tatars,

Kalmucks, immigrant Swedes,

Germans, French and the tortured-to-death,

mutilated corpses of criminals hung

all down the avenue on exhibition.

On the other side of the river, in the famous

botanical gardens of the Marine Hospital

Steller escapes the city’s bustle.

Neatly he walks the paths

between the flowerbeds, marvels at

the hothouses, filled with tropical plants,

learns one new name after another

and is almost beside himself

with so much hope