After Nature

 I just finished reading W.G. Sebald's first work—After Nature—and I find, curiously, that it contains all his later work in condensed form. An extraordinary and enviable coherency of vision this discloses—to have his themes and aesthetic worked out from the first book on. 

This first book of his—really, a poem (but a poem on the model of his unclassifiable later prose works)—fills me—as does every work of Sebald's—with an utterly sui generis sensation: a kind of gentle melancholy, a quiet nostalgic yearning and sadness—much like the grey Norfolk seascapes and landscapes he describes. 

After Nature ends in such a place—where Sebald lived and ended his life. Here, in the first book, is already the theme of the English North Sea coast as the end of the world—the coastline that was literally eroding into the sea, much like the gradual process of radioactive decay of an unstable atom (an image in Sebald's poem). 

It's a place that can only seem evocative of our own fate today—as much of the low-lying world faces the prospect likewise of being gradually absorbed into a rising ocean. Sebald strikes us now as—among other things—an early prophet of climate destruction. 

But it's not just the setting that is consistent across his work. There are also flashes in this long poem of the obsessions and motifs of his later career. 

There are repeated images. Sebald's visit to an optometrist, for instance—who lays her fingers to his temple, and in so doing—awakens in him what we might now describe as an "ASMR" response. The episode appears here, in this poem—as well as in his later work, Vertigo (I think it was).

He writes in After Nature, likewise, of how his parents would never speak to him about the firebombing of Germany they witnessed during the war—not because they were shy about it, but because it seemingly left no conscious trace in their memory. 

It's the same collective amnesia that he would later diagnose and try to explain in his nonfiction piece, On the Natural History of Destruction—Sebald's account of how and why the Germans came to forget the firebombing that leveled much of their society; and of why so few of them had ever learned to describe it. 

And it is here, in this poem, that he finds his most evocative image of the phenomenon—that of Lot fleeing Sodom. The Germans—like Lot and his daughters—knew better than to look back at the burning cities; the burning wreckage. The trauma of what they had done and what they had endured during the war (which they had started) was too raw. 

So they are content to spawn in incestuous union and forget the past. In a painting depicting Lot's family, Sebald slyly notes: "closest to the beholder's eye / the new generation of / Moabites is conceived." (Hamburger trans.)

But Sebald is a kind of Lot's wife, and thus a pillar of salt—just as Anna Akhmatova declared herself to be in a poem on the same subject. Sebald insists on looking back to the wreckage of the human past, even if it means he becomes rooted to the spot.  

Because most of all what is so quintessentially Sebald in this early work is that unmistakeable Sebaldian humane-ness; that absolute repugnance for cruelty; that automatic and axiomatic fellow-feeling with the victims throughout history of torture, burning, persecution, and violence—whether they be animal or human. 

Sebald's poem is populated with images of ghetto repression, peasant leaders burned at the stake, condemned prisoners drawn and quartered—and even the noble Georg Steller; hero of the poem's second section; the man of science who advocates at personal peril for the Indigenous people against the abuses of the state—becomes the unwitting instrument by which human hands learned to hunt to extinction the innocent sea creatures he found and was the first to describe. 

Sebald is the master of the fleeting, macabre detail that suddenly renders human history visible in all its ghastly evil—

—not to mention that pitch-perfect ear he had for the eerie, bureaucratic euphemism, by which power seeks to obscure it. 

There is even a reference in this poem to star-shaped fortresses (see Austerlitz). 

The long poem ends where Sebald lived: the grey English coastline that is the end of the British mainland and also, for Sebald, the end of the world.

In orange jackets you see

the inmates labour 

lined up across the moor. 

Behind that the end 

of the world, the five 

cold houses of Shingle Street. 

Inconsolable a woman 

stands at the window,

a children's swing

rusts in the wind

[...]

Tell me, child,

is your heart as heavy as 

mine is [Hamburger trans.]

"The end/ of the world"—it was the end of Sebald's world too. It was in this Norfolk setting that he died too soon.

As he describes in greater detail in his later works—it is a seascape that is literally crumbling by inches, year after year, into the grey ocean.  So, it's the end of the world in that sense too—the end of our would, which is likewise crumbling into the ocean due to human-caused climate change. (And which politicians are now doing all in their power to help send there by pointlessly penalizing renewable energy.)

In a world where all coastal communities are now so eroding—where Indigenous Alaskan communities of the kind Georg Steller encountered are finding that their homes and villages are collapsing into the melting permafrost because of the actions of the same industrial states whose abuses Steller condemned (only to have the Russian government retaliate against him)—

It's a world where we too are truly "After Nature." An eroding world. A corroding world. A world we squandered through human cruelty and stupidity. Sebald's world.