Winfried Sebald - After Nature

brings mushrooms, berries and leaves,

makes fire and tea.

Throughout the winter

the German doctor teaches

Koryak children in a tiny

wooden school, writes

when the ice breaks

memoranda in defence

of the indigenous people maltreated

and deprived of their rights by

the Naval Command at Bolsheretsk—

with the consequence that a letter against him

is despatched, that interrogations take place,

that misunderstandings arise,

that arrests follow and that Steller

now wholly grasps the difference

between nature and society.

Westward, stage after stage he covers

fleeing back, and it seems as though

everything now were going downhill.

Only in Tara does the message reach him

that by any route possible

he may now set out for his home.

Steller hires three horses,

drives to Tobolsk,

and there he,

who never drank, drinks

for three whole days.

Then comes the fever,

he creeps into the sledge,

tells the Tatar to drive on southward,

the hundred and seventy miles to Tyumen.

This is infirmitas, the breaking

of time from day to day

and from hour to hour,

it is rust and fire

and the salt of the planets

darkness even at noon and

luminaries absent from heaven.

Manuscripts written at the end of his life,

on an island in the glacial sea,

with scratching goose-quill in bilious ink,

lists of two hundred and eleven

different plants, tales of white ravens,

unknown cormorants and sea-cows,

gathered into the dust

of an endless inventory,

his zoological masterpiece

De Bestiis Marinis,

travel chart for hunters,

blueprint for the counting of pelts-

no, not steep enough

was the north.

At Tyumen they carry him out of the sledge,

drag his half-petrified body

out of the ice into the fire,

into a furnace house.

Now begins alchimia,

Steller recognises the mortem improvisam,

the stroke and all its appendage,

sees his death, how it is mirrored

in the field-surgeon’s monocle.

Such are you, doctores,

spilt lamps,

thus nature has her way

with a godless

Lutheran from Germany.

Pallas tells how Steller, whom he revered,

the next day,

wrapped in his red cloak,

a good distance outside the place of rest

of the believers was laid in a narrow ditch

high up above the Tura’s banks,

how they heaped up a mound

of frozen sods. Pallas

writes too that the dead man

was dreaming still of the grazing

mammoth across the river

until in the night someone came

and took his cloak

and left him to lie in the snow

like a fox beaten to death.

For it is hard to discover

the winged vertebrates of prehistory

embedded in tablets of slate.

But if I see before me

the nervature of past life

in one image, I always think

that this has something to do

with truth. Our brains, after all,

are always at work on some quivers

of self-organisation, however faint,

and it is from this that an order

arises, in places beautiful

and comforting, though more cruel, too,

than the previous state of ignorance.

How far, in any case, must one go back

to find the beginning? Perhaps

to that morning of January 9th, 1905,

on which Grandfather and Grandmother

in ringing cold drove in an open

landau from Kloster Lechfeld

to Obermeitingen, to be married.

Grandmother in a black taffeta dress

with a bunch of paper flowers, Grandfather

in his uniform, the brass-embellished

helmet on his head. What was in their minds

when, the horse blanket over their knees,

they sat side by side in the carriage and

heard the hoofbeats echo

in the bare avenue?

What was in the minds

of their children later, one of whom

stares out fearfully from

a class photograph taken

in the war year 1917

at Allarzried? Forty-eight

pitiable coevals,

the schoolmistress on the right,

on the left the myopic

chaplain and as a caption

on the reverse of the

spotted grey cardboard mount

the words “in the future

death lies at our feet,”

one of those obscure oracular sayings

one never again forgets. On another

photograph of which I possess an enlarged

copy, a swan and its reflection

on the water’s black surface,

a perfect emblem of peace.

The botanical garden around the pond,

to my knowledge, is situated

on the bank of the Regnitz at Bamberg

and I believe that a road

runs through it today.

The whole leaves an impression

that is somehow un-German,

the elms, the hornbeams and densely green

conifers in the background, the small

pagoda-like building, the finely raked

gravel, the hortensias, flag-iris,

aloes, ostrich-plume ferns and

the giant-leaved ornamental rhubarb.

Astonishing, to me, the persons

also to be seen in the picture:

Mother in her open coat,

with a lightness she was

later to lose; Father,

a little aside, hands in his pockets,

he too, it seems, with no cares.

The date is August 26th, 1943.

On the 27th Father’s departure for Dresden,

of whose beauty his memory, as he

remarks when I question him,

retains no trace.

During the night of the 28th

582 aircraft flew in

to attack Nürnberg. Mother,

who on the next day planned

to return to her parents’

home in the Alps,

got no further than

Fürth. From there she

saw Nürnberg in flames,

but cannot recall now

what the burning town looked like

or what her feelings were

at this sight.

On the same day, she told me recently,

from Fürth she had travelled on

to Windsheim and an acquaintance

at whose house she waited until

the worst was over, and realized

that she was with child.

As for the burning city,

in the Vienna Art-Historical Museum

there hangs a painting

by Altdorfer depicting Lot

with his daughters. On the horizon

a terrible conflagration blazes

devouring a large city.

Smoke ascends from the site,

the flames rise to the sky and

in the blood-red reflection

one sees the blackened

façades of houses.

In the middle ground there is a strip

of idyllic green landscape,

and closest to the beholder’s eye

the new generation of

Moabites is conceived.

When for the first time I saw

this picture the year before last,

I had the strange feeling

of having seen all of it

before, and a little later,

crossing to Floridsdorf

on the Bridge of Peace,

I nearly went out of my mind.

At the moment on Ascension Day

of the year ’forty-four when I was born,

the procession for the blessing of the fields

was just passing our house to the sounds

of the fire brigade band, on its way out

to the flowering May meadows. Mother

at first took this as a happy sign, unaware

that the cold planet Saturn ruled this hour’s