Winfried Sebald - After Nature

when, from the half-shadow

of the mustard tree by the aviary,

the Patriarch of Novgorod,

Archbishop Theophon, steps towards him

with a tiny yellow parakeet in his hand,

and in the course of a Latin conversation

tells him a legend from the region of Dolyi,

which relates that God quite suddenly

and as though out of the blue came

into being on a lungwort leaf.

For four years Steller remained

in Petersburg. The Primate, already

close to death, obtains for him the post

of an assistant in the Academy

and takes him into his own house

as a personal physician.

Under night’s biretta the old man

talks with his younger brother

of the winged end. To comfort him

Steller speaks of the light of nature.

But all things, Theophon says,

all things, my son, transmute

into old age, life diminishes,

everything declines,

the proliferation

of kinds is a mere

illusion, and no one

knows to what end.

The long Arctic journeys

had frayed the nerves of the

Academy member Daniel Messerschmidt.

Steller, who found Messerschmidt still living

in the summerhouse he occupied

with a baker’s daughter

from Sesslach, came too late

to get anything out of

the deeply melancholic man.

Instead, he now studies his papers.

He spends the whole summer

bent over the jumble of cards,

while the naturalist’s neglected

wife, gaudily dressed, sits

beside him and with her split

fin strokes the glans that throbs

like his heart. Steller feels science

shrinking to a single slightly

painful point. On the other hand

the foam bubbles, to him, are

a paradigm. Come, he whispers

into her ear in his desperation,

come with me to Siberia as

my true wife, and already hears

the answer: wherever

you go I will

go with you.

When in 1736 Steller did indeed

receive the longed-for appointment

to join the Bering expedition,

this enterprise, launched ten years previously,

consisting of an army of carpenters,

blacksmiths, grooms, mariners,

clerks, commissioned officers,

scientists and assistants,

and of not only building materials, tools, instruments,

an arsenal of weapons and many hundreds

of books, but also endless

forage trains for the team’s provision,

crockery and clothing and crates

of claret for the higher-ranking

Academy emissaries, to be dragged onwards,

no different from a glacier pushing

great heavy masses of scree in its passage,

arrived at Yakutsk on the one hundred and

twenty-ninth degree of longitude, east.

Steller mastered the five thousand miles

in the course of the three and a half years

which Vitus Bering still needed

to convey everything, down to the last nail,

with his little Siberian packhorses

over the Yablonovy Range to

the Sea of Okhotsk. In the process

he accustomed himself to endure

deprivation and loneliness for

the sake of the baker’s daughter,

whom, in the hope that

perhaps even in far-off places

one might feel at home and on the grounds

of her seemingly unconditional

promise to travel gladly with him

to any parts wheresoever, he’d made his wife,

but who in the end, naturally, had not been willing

to make that journey halfway round the globe

together with him. In place of her, Steller

now had two young ravens,

which in the evenings dictated

ominous sayings to him.

When he wrote these down

he felt some comfort, although he knew

that even with these he would not

arrest the slow corrosion

that had entered his soul.

On the twentieth of March, 1741,

Steller stepped into the long

blockhouse of the Petropavlovsk

command post on the eastern shore

of the Kamchatka Peninsula.

In a windowless recess, no larger

than six feet by six, at the far end

of the building’s interior,

in no other way subdivided, he finds,

at a table of planks nailed together,

covered by land maps

and sea charts showing

vast tracts of whiteness,

Bering, the Commandant-captain,

his fifty-nine-year-old

head supported by his

right hand tattooed

with a bird’s unfolded wings,

the left hand holding

a pair of dividers,

sitting motionless

in a flickering light.

It takes an uncannily

long time, Steller thinks,

for Bering to open

his eyes and look

at him. What is this

being called human?

A beast, shrouded

in deep mourning,

in a black coat

lined with

black fur.

For two weeks, with the wind fair,

the ships named after the saints

Peter and Paul had borne south

on the Arctic Ocean,

but the legendary land Gama entered

on Delisle’s map nowhere emerged

from the water’s waste. Only once on the

shimmering surface ahead did the watch

make out something black

covered with countless seabirds.

Plumbing the depth, they approached

till it was clear that the island rock

was no more than a dead whale many times magnified

by the mirage’s play, adrift belly up.

After that the course was set

to north-northeast. In the nights,

at times the sea lit up,

and to the sails splattered

by the crests of waves

sparks of that light adhered.

In a second mirage

one evening, across the horizon’s length

appeared a tract of land,

all crystalline marble,

but not until the morning of July 15th,

almost six weeks after setting sail

from the Bay of Avatsha,

did Steller, who always went on deck

in the early hours, truly see

between the low-drifting clouds

the feebly cross-hatched contour

of a mountain range.

In the evening of that day

the mist completely lifted.

A black sky

now overhung the sea and

the snow-covered, ragged merlons

of Alaska loomed “resplendent,”

the word that seemed right to Steller,

in rosy red and purple colours.

Vitus Bering, who throughout the voyage

had lain in his cabin staring

at the ceiling of beams above his head,

roused by the incessant jubilation

of the crew, for the first time came aloft

and contemplated the scene

in a fit of deepest depression.

Unending flights

of screeching birds, which skimmed

low over the water,

from afar resembled

drifting islands. Whales

rotated around the ship, emitting

water-spouts high into the air

in all directions of the compass.

Chamisso, who later marvelled at

the same spectacular sight

on the Romanzov expedition,

was led to think that perhaps

these animals could be tamed

and — no different from geese

on a stubble field — be herded

with a rod, as it were, on the sea.

Bring up the young in a fjord, he wrote,

fasten a spiked belt buoyed up by

air-bladders under their pectoral fins,

let them unlearn their submersions,

make experiments. Whether the whale is

then to draw or to carry,

whether and how it is harnessed

or laden, how it is bridled

or otherwise governed, and who is to be the

mahout of this water-elephant — all this

will settle itself in time. Chamisso,

it is true, also writes