rat rabbit
mary martha
bathed in honeyed
milk sick
silk grenadine
cherry syrup
angel face
Nardostachys grandiflora
stored in alabaster
boxes marian
memorabilia
halo of aluminum
foil stars
fortune smiles
upon our bed when you
take me home on
saint valentine’s day
canopy beaming
christ’s radiant light
virgin wife
feet and hair and
love and service
have your cake and
eat it, too
candy hearts
prayer and worship
blessed is she,
amongst all the women
i was always giving myself
laundry to do

Reinhold Messner and his brother Günther reached the summit of Nanga Parbat in June 1970. They were the third mountaineering team ever to do so. Nanga Parbat, located in Northern Pakistan, is the ninth-highest mountain in the world, and the deadliest after Annapurna. On their ascent, the brothers climbed up the Rupal face, one of the highest mountain faces on earth. It rises 4,600 meters above its base, and its peak fades into cold, distant clouds. Reinhold Messner later wrote a novel about their fateful ascent, which he called *The Naked Mountain*. The title is a literal translation of Nanga Parbat, but it resonates on other levels, too—the climber is always defenseless, at the mercy of 8,000 meters. 



Nanga Parbat wasn’t merciful to the two brothers. Reinhold and Günther’s climb was tough and rushed. *The Naked Mountain* is taut, like traditional climbing narratives, but with one difference. Messner’s story ends with the loss of his brother.



Messner would go on to become one of the world’s most prolific climbers—arguably, the best climber of all time. In 1978, he was the first man to successfully reach Mount Everest’s summit without bottled oxygen. By 1986, he had scaled all of the world’s eight-thousanders. He is an advocate of climbing “by fair means,” that is, using minimal tools and equipment on extraordinarily dangerous climbs. This also means that Messner frequently faces death, yet has somehow emerged with only a few lost toes (six, frostbitten during his delirious descent of Nanga Parbat). 



Many years after climbing Nanga Parbat, Messner became friends with an Austrian named Christoph Ransmayr, and they began traveling and climbing together. Also an adventurer, Ransmayr harbors an inexplicable fascination for ice. He organizes expeditions to the Arctic Circle, as a leader for a company called Poseidon Arctic Voyages.  He is also one of Austria’s greatest living writers. Our path not only leads into foreign territory, but into the interior of the world itself, in a language that knows both the real *and *the possible, he writes. Storytelling is much like exploring. Ransmayr and Messner make a good team. They inhabit the realms of the real and the possible at once—Messner through climbing, Ransmayr through writing. They find foreign territory, then claim and change it through their journey.



 



Being from Austria means a couple of things—you are in a country so close to the Alps that mountains are inevitably on your mind. But Austria is also a nexus of European culture, a country marked by Enlightenment thinking and still pining for its lost empire. Ransmayr writes about the two side by side—what happens when exploration and conquest merge. Messner, who is from South Tyrol (technically a part of Italy), is a cultural Austrian. He climbs and conquers intuitively.



The two men recognize that mountaineering is a blatantly symbolic act. The ascent to the summit is a sign of triumph over the impassive world through reason and will. Alexander von Humboldt, the Enlightenment explorer who founded the field of biogeography, thought that “other laws of a more mysterious nature rule the higher spheres of the organic world. A physical delineation of nature terminates at the point where the sphere of intellect begins, and a new world of mind is opened to our view.” Mountain climbers struggle against nature, not for the sake of a world of mind, but to create a world of will. Yet this is not always a process of rational conquest. As the mountaineer climbs higher, moving away from the topography of the mountain and into his inner landscape, something surreal and indefinable happens to human and world. The climber passes into an intermediate space—neither wholly real nor imagined—in which man and nature are no longer at each other’s mercy. Each suspends the other in order to examine it, and in doing so, the boundaries of mind and world extend beyond the real, into the poetic. 



 



This poetic process is something Ransmayr intuitively grasps—he doesn’t put much stock in understanding the world through Enlightenment rationality. When Alexander von Humboldt traveled through South America, he did not expect to fully explain the world he was discovering, but allowed himself to be overwhelmed by forests, meteor showers, electric eels. Nature has to be given the opportunity to unfold to the explorer on its own terms. 



Messner believes in giving nature its due. In 1971, he wrote a manifesto on bare climbing entitled “The Murder of the Impossible.” In it, he rails against people who rely completely on their equipment to climb by drilling holes and rigging hooks into the mountainside. He flippantly writes, “‘Impossible’: it doesn’t exist anymore. The dragon is dead, poisoned, and the hero Siegfried is unemployed.” Others have killed the mythology of the mountain through technology—it is Messner’s job to return the impossible to the mountain. 



Yet because Messner believes that he alone can shoulder this task, he denies nature its necessary autonomy. He has instead distorted a philosophy into an ego-driven project of conquest. The moments of poetry that unfold in *The Naked Mountain* happen in spite of his intentions, not because of them. And there is no humanism in Messner’s thought. His brother Günther becomes a figure who trudges doggedly behind him, suffering from fever and delirium. When they reach the summit, the two men are stranded, and huddle together at the top of the mountain for the night. Messner does not speak to his brother, but retreats further into himself.



In his manifesto, Messner angrily writes, “the courage of those who still climb ‘free’ is derided as a manifestation of lack of conscientiousness.” These words come a few months after he has lost Günther to an avalanche, during their unplanned descent of Nanga Parbat without tools or rope.



 



Ransmayr must have heard the story of Günther’s death from Messner several times—maybe even while climbing the Himalayas with him. He probably read *The Naked Mountain*. Messner’s novel is an attempt to settle accounts with the leader of the expedition, Karl Maria Herrligkoffer. Herrligkoffer accused Reinhold of causing his brother’s death by attempting a climb that was foolhardy and dangerous, acting against explicit orders. But Herrligkoffer’s story is one of many different stories surrounding the Messners’ climb.



The narratives tend to splinter around one central event: the rocket flare that Herrligkoffer sent up from base camp. Messner and Herrligkoffer had come to a tacit understanding that Messner would be the first to reach the peak. The rocket was the signal to start the climb. It was to indicate the weather forecast—red for bad, blue for good. Messner was to set out immediately if a storm was approaching, for fear of wasting time. Herrligkoffer received the weather report, and ordered a blue flare to be sent up. Someone grabbed a flare wrapped in blue cloth and set it off, but it was red. Messner saw the signal, and knew that the time had come for him to begin the final push to the top. There were no more blue flares at base camp that could signal the mistake—according to Herrligkoffer, at least—so Messner set out on his own with minimal equipment, early in the morning. He crunched through the snow quickly, spiking the mountain’s side with his crampons. Günther followed him around midday, also without rope—he didn’t want his brother to attempt the climb alone.



Messner claims that this was how he and Günther found themselves on the summit with no means of climbing down the crevasse they had scaled on their ascent. Instead, they were forced into descending on the Diamir face—a route which they had memorized but were unprepared to take. Günther and Messner climbed down, their paths separating farther and farther, until they lost sight of each other. Günther never reappeared. 



Ransmayr added his story, “The Flying Mountain,” to the collection of tales about the Messners. But it is a completely fictional retelling of their climb of Nanga Parbat. Liam and Pàdraic are two Irish brothers who set out to climb a mountain in Tibet known as Phur-Ri. Messner, the stronger brother who lived, becomes Liam, the determined climber who dies. Pàdraic writes the novel as a prose poem that chronicles their journey to the summit, into blank space and suffocating whiteness. Ransmayr, who does not share Messner’s extreme drive or ego, realized that exploring demands humanism. And so his account of their climb is not a chronicle of challenging crevasses and strategies, but a story about the brothers themselves. When Liam and Pàdraic climb Nanga Parbat, they choose to climb with each other and in each other’s company. In this way, Ransmayr humanized Messner’s story, tempered and redeemed it through his writing. 



***



Liam and Pàdraic are quite close to the top. But Pàdraic has been feeling sick since the afternoon. They pitch their small tent in their final encampment and curl up for the night. But snow comes with darkness. Sheets of white pile themselves around the tent, on its roof, over its sides. Pàdraic is delirious, dizzy from the thin air and weak with fever. Liam makes him tea and sprinkles white powder into it. His brother daydreams until dusk, lulled by the opium. At night, he curls up, mistakes Liam for his Tibetan lover, and reaches towards his brother for an embrace. Liam pulls away, giggling sleepily. Pàdraic is embarrassed—he turns away, fervently hoping that Liam is still asleep. The two brothers stay in the tent for several days. Pàdraic moves in and out of delirium. Sometimes shapes become clearer in his mind, only to blur again. The snow continues to fall gently, trapping them in their fragile nylon canopy.



 



The two brothers have made it to Nanga Parbat’s summit. They have conquered the mountain, and are awash in triumph. But now, Reinhold and Günther can’t find their way downward. They can’t climb down the crevasse they scaled on their way up—it’s too dangerous to attempt without rope. It’s getting dark quickly—the sky is bleeding into a deep, ink-stained indigo. 



Reinhold finds a sheltered hollow in which they can rest overnight. The two men’s limbs are already bloodless and stiff. They take off their shoes. Reinhold unfolds a length of silver astronaut foil. It crinkles with the false promise of insulation. He wraps it around their aching, frozen feet. They huddle together on the ice shelf, immobile. They pick up the ends of the foil and wrap their entire bodies in it, spinning together a thin cocoon of silver. It reflects the stars back at the sky, small silver pinpricks on a fragile blanket. It is too cold to think now. The two brothers hug each other. They can feel their bodies freezing to death. They are together, but this does nothing to prevent them from slipping into hallucinations. Their heads poke out of the astronaut foil, exposed to the wind. They don’t speak, don’t move, simply endure. They wait for the grey of the morning sky. 



 



Günther and Reinhold have no choice but to take the Diamir face downward. They are weak. At least they know the topography of the area—they can map out its terrain in their minds. They are at the top of an enormous flank of ice and rock, and must move towards a ground they can’t see. The two brothers have almost no equipment with them apart from a few crampons, hooks and grips. They need to make their way mostly using bare hands and frozen feet.



They move towards an invisible abyss, flattening themselves against the snowy mountainside. As they descend, they look downwards at dark, seething clouds crackling with electricity. The clouds writhe, spitting out light that illuminates the path to the still-invisible ground.



It suddenly begins to hail. Bullets of ice pelt the brothers. The hail falls further into the turmoil of the thunderstorm. Reinhold looks up. The sky above him has thickened and grown as black as the roiling clouds below. He can barely see his hands and feet. Günther is close behind him, a presence in the dark. They move onward, hands and feet moving in tandem.



 



They climb downward, tracing a zigzag track on the shimmering blue slope. Reinhold leads, Günther follows. The rock they grip is barely visible beneath a thick layer of cloud. They trek onward wearily, signaling to each other. The air is very thin. Reinhold suddenly becomes aware of a third climber who is right next to him. The third climber is climbing alongside Reinhold, following his every move. He hears the ice crack beside him, feels certain that there is someone next to him. He later describes it as a ghost, or a palpable presence. “Its being is a returning of my being,” he writes.



 



This is another account of the climb—both Messner and Ransmayr’s, and yet neither. It seems to belong to the mountain, but it doesn’t. It belongs to the climb itself, which demands poeticism and expansiveness of its explorers. 



Towards the end of this account, Pàdraic is lying on the ground, surrounded by shallow snow-banks. His body carves out an icy hollow in the tightly packed ground. He can’t move, and feels incredibly tired. He wants nothing but to drift away in sleep and separate his fuzzy mind from the frozen, immobile body that traps it. A shape moves above him. He hears a murmur, a sound, finally a voice coming from the pale oval floating over his head. It’s Liam. He reels off a list of names, places, people they have traveled with, reciting their entire journey back at Pàdraic. 



“Try to remember! What do you remember? Remember the truck in China that drove us to Tibet? Remember the pass we just crossed?”



His story hangs in the frozen air like a thread that pulls Pàdraic back towards consciousness. Names summon up faces that had been submerged in the crystallizing webs of his mind. He opens his eyes again, and shapes suddenly sharpen—he can see Liam’s face now.



Then, he feels something fall from the sky. Many things. They hit his breast and spring apart. Liam stares upward. “They’re butterflies! Frozen butterflies.” Butterflies had been caught in a storm cloud during their flight over the mountain, and had frozen solid in mid-flight. They rain down on the brothers in a fragile shower of brilliant white wings encased in ice. Pàdraic feels sensation return to his limbs with every tap of a fresh butterfly shattering on his own body.

I. Destruction and Silence



 



*The accounts of individual eyewitnesses, therefore, are of only qualified value, and need to be supplemented by what a synoptic and artificial view reveals.*



 



In a series of lectures delivered in Zurich in 1997 (and later published in essay form as “Air War and Literature”), the late German novelist W.G. Sebald decries the “curious blindness” to, and willed ignorance of, the truths of destruction that by any logical reckoning should have come to define life in the fractured wasteland of postwar Germany.



Early in the essay he describes a live report, produced by the BBC Home Service, of an air raid conducted, in the midst of the war, on Berlin. The Lancaster bombers take off, soar in broad arcs over the North Sea; the target is reached, and the lethal cargo is dropped. The report, Sebald concludes ironically, “is rather a disappointment to anyone expecting…insight into the event from some superior viewpoint.”



The perfectly German joke, of course, is that the report, given from the vantage of an aeroplane in the sky, issues by necessity from a “superior viewpoint.” Given the purpose of the raid—to raze and reduce centuries of careful stonework, to ignite beams and plaster, to boil streets and the unfortunate traipsers upon them—there could not be a more ideal viewpoint than an aerial one, from which the extinguishing of human lives is made so morally and practically simple.



But Sebald’s real point is that the assumption that the ideal viewpoint for destruction is also the ideal viewpoint for interpretation—a belief deriving from the fallacious assertion that we will see what the aggressors saw, feel what the aggressors felt—is foolish and naïve. It is an approach that ignores the ineffable alchemy wrought by the act of observation.



For many years after the end of World War II, German writers avoided the war, and the Holocaust, as a subject. Of necessity, their moral culpability was likewise elided. As a result, Sebald asserts, they abetted the collective amnesia that had settled like a pall over the German people. Eventually, however, the pendulum swung the other way. The past was viewed with furious condemnation, and an aggressive push was made to view the facts of the war, and the Holocaust, with complete objectivity—as one would view the ground from an airplane. But for Sebald, this was merely another false step, a flight into rhetoric that, in the final analysis, was merely another facet of aesthetic exploitation of destruction.



Yet Sebald is not entirely immune to the temptation of the aerial view. Much of his fiction can be seen as an attempt to salvage it as a metaphor, as an oblique way of discussing historiography—an attempt, in other words, to determine its true applicability. Hence it’s not without reason that readers of Sebald’s fictions often report experiencing a floating sensation, as though they’re hovering above the events and stories described. The first chapter of *The Rings of Saturn* is largely taken up by an essay on the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, a 17th-century English writer that Sebald both admired and emulated. Browne, according to Sebald, “sought to look upon earthly existence, from the things that were closest to him to the spheres of the universe, with the eye of an outsider, one might even say of the creator.” To achieve these “sublime heights,” Browne employed a “parlous loftiness” in his language. Though his sentences are occasionally gummed up by his vast erudition and baroque style, when Browne “does succeed in rising higher and higher through the circles of his spiraling prose, borne aloft like a glider on warm currents of air,” Sebald writes, “even today the reader is overcome by a sense of levitation.”



For Browne, this aerial remove functions counter-intuitively: “the greater the distance, the clearer the view: one sees the tiniest of details with the utmost clarity.” When one is looking back at history—when the metaphor is horizontal—this functioning is a commonplace; historical hindsight, we believe, will eventually reveal the truth. But when one views the past aerially—when the metaphor assumes verticality—the paradox becomes clear. Sebald desires Browne’s preternatural magnification—which might constitute the “historical metaphysic” capable of “bringing remembered events back to life” that is sought after in all of his fiction—but it remains a pipe dream. The higher the viewpoint in Sebald’s fictions, the greater the sensation of nausea, of vertigo. All we see is flattened, and objects and structures are robbed of their discreteness: “Such is the dark backward and abysm of time,” Sebald writes. “Everything lies all jumbled up in it, and when you look down you feel dizzy and afraid.”



It is with this bevy of concerns that Sebald assumes the task of creating fictions, turning to the practice with a sigh of impotence. The impossibility of pure history, of the reconstitution of memory, is the dreadful and immanent nausea that suffuses his prose, that forces catalepsy upon his narrators and characters. And just as the constituents of time and history become jumbled together, so, too, do the elements of the work of fiction. In an essay on W.G. Sebald, James Wood writes that though “his deeply elegiac books are made out of the cinders of the real world, he makes facts fictive by binding them so deeply into the forms of their narratives that these facts seem never to have belonged to the actual world.” The warp of fiction is braced by the weft of fact, and the resulting tapestry is a talisman aimed at teasing, from the welter of an obliterated past, a representative view of history.



 



***



 



Memory is a human construction. The world (that is, the natural world) is destined and indeed designed to forget itself, and in the struggle against this constant ablation, as Sebald sees it, we have only the bluntest of reconstitutive tools at our disposal: a language whose inner cohesiveness and epistemological efficacy are to be doubted, and a smattering of vague and half-focused photographs that may depict, but more often seem merely to adumbrate.



It may seem strange to discuss the doubting of language with regard to an author such as Sebald, who incorporates antiquarian syntax into the elegant scaffolding of his prose, but aphasia in Sebald is reserved for very specific themes: language may dance around certain subjects, but it may not spring from them. “The construction of aesthetic or pseudo-aesthetic effects from the ruins of an annihilated world,” he writes, “is a process depriving literature of its right to exist.” As other writers and theorists have asserted, there is a moral obligation not to derive aesthetic effect from supreme destruction. As an extension of this claim, Sebald asserts as an epistemological reality that it is impossible to derive aesthetic effect from oblivion.



Despite this weakness, within Sebald’s fiction, language is still the master of appearances, of surfaces, of phenomena. It may be employed, with sufficient effect, to describe spaces, buildings, landscapes, to painstakingly limn their physical relations to one another. Hence there is little doubt embedded in the narrator’s description, in *Austerlitz*, of the Centraal Station in Antwerp; the spires and turrets and domes are presented as faits accomplis, real and ineffaceable, undoubtable. Otherwise, if uncertainty were allowed to creep into and compromise language’s simplest functions, Sebald’s magisterial descriptions of architectural oddities would collapse beneath an equally grandiose anxiety.



Sebald’s great skill in precisely delineating surfaces, and the power that the framework of his fiction grants to language in this endeavor, sometimes obscures a great, though intentional, failure of his language: It is very nearly incapable of elaboration, of developing images external to the source material or which are not, to some degree, a meditation on ineffability. The black hole of oblivion ever reigns in Sebald’s writing, drawing the fiction into itself and preventing the construction of complex aesthetic effects.



If the typical sentence of Proust—the master of elaboration—is meant to ambulate, to rise and fall in synoptic waves, flirting ever with the achievement of liftoff and gesturing, in these pendent moments, at images outside of the text, outside of language itself, the typical Sebaldian sentence is meant to incorporate and contain—it remains a self-sufficient, closed system. The uncertain tempo of a Proustian elaboration stands in stark contrast to the steady and unrelenting tempo of Sebald’s writing; Sebald’s sentences roll on, devouring details and preserving them in the process, embedding facts (real or fictive) in their elegant, multiclausal construction.



When memory seems merely a cancerous stimulation of oblivion, and language reigns supreme only in the realm of detail, then the main concern of language is clearly dictated. From *Austerlitz*:



*[T]he darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.*



Sebald has set himself the impossible task of the metaphysical documentarian, to collect and preserve the entirety of history via the “places and objects” that bear it, and to lathe it all into some manageable form of representation.



There is a very famous sentence in *Austerlitz* that runs for nine pages and contains an unbearable amount of information about the Theresienstadt concentration camp. What’s remarkable about it is that despite its length, it remains a completely flat sentence, unfolding in segmented regimentation, like a spider testing its limbs. Without devolving into nonsense, and without becoming a mere catalogue, the sentence functions as a precise historical record containing no aesthetic elaborations. It is a beautiful record, but a record still, one that does not attempt to derive aesthetic affect from oblivion, but merely places the reagents of the past in close proximity to one another, in the hopes that, by some obscure process of relation, they will generate an image of the past. The sentence does not so much limn the past as perform the ritual necessary for its appearance (unsurprising, then, that Sebald’s prose is frequently described as “processional”). When a reader of Sebald admits to a feeling of levitation, it is not because he or she has been “borne aloft” by aspiring helices of prose. It is because Sebald has done his best to write flat sentences, which we look down upon in more ways than one, sensing patterns and signs immured within the text.



 



II. Buildings in Time



 



*The noblest claim of modern historiography nowadays is that it is a mirror; it rejects all teleology; it no longer wishes to ‘prove’ anything. All this is to a high degree ascetic; but at the same time it is to an even higher degree nihilistic.*



 



History, perforce, is a function of time, and so it is only natural that the characters in, and narrators of, Sebald’s fictions frequently expatiate upon the nature of time. Given the force of materiality in Sebald’s fictions, and the supernatural tendencies ascribed to the agent of time, it’s unsurprising that these discursions typically aim at the wholesale reification of time—a fortiori, they are characterized by the attempt to convert time into a spatial phenomenon.



“I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all,” Austerlitz opines, “only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like.” Time is a wavering image shorn of one crucial dimension by the feeble reach of our minds; it is the projection into our reality of an ungraspable complex.



Thus Sebald’s abiding interest in architectural oddities, in structures that bear time—that manage, even, to function as time itself. Country homes and train stations and vast stone edifices (memorials, monuments, mausolea) abound in Sebald’s work. Oftentimes they are baroque and nearly illusionistic structures, full of sealed-off rooms and curlicue passages that defy our understanding. Always they have lapsed into desuetude: Windows are broken, and dust has settled in a gauzy integument on the inner districts of the home; hallways designed to channel crowds now abide in silence, bereft of the patter of crossing feet; creepers and liana crowd yards in vicious, encroaching skeins.



In a prosaic sense, as monuments, these structures are historical records, but in the Sebaldian sense, they function as structural allegories—they are physical manifestations of the abstruse calculus of time. In The Emigrants, the narrator inspects a country home designed so that “on every floor hidden passageways branched off, running behind walls in such a way that the servants…never had to cross the paths of their betters.” Like the eunomic reticulation of chambers and paths in a termite nest, these passageways go unnoticed by the average viewer. “Often,” the narrator continues, “I tried to imagine what went on inside the heads of people who led their lives knowing that, behind the walls of the rooms they were in, the shadows of the servants were perpetually flitting past.”



It is out of such “hidden passageways” and dim defiles that the past returns to us in Sebald. Conscious excavation is likely to yield no results because there is no precise point of oblivion around which to focus our work; there are no nodes or images that may be cajoled into revealing their essences. Rather, the return of the past functions by whimsy. It is like a door that swings open unexpectedly and beyond which lies a ramified series of hallways, through which images of the living and the dead flit, generating a wind that reaches outward past the threshold, and which alters our world in fey ways. Voluntary memory is incapable of revealing the past. It merely dredges up artifacts that, on their own, are speechless.



There are subtle instances of this phenomenon of whimsy to be found throughout Sebald’s work. In *The Emigrants*, the narrator reads a journal left by one of his deceased relatives that describes a journey to Jerusalem and the desolation he finds there; in *The Rings of Saturn*, the narrator describes an elaborate matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, a painstaking reconstruction of the vanished edifice. A quieter example: Austerlitz, who as an adult has studied the history of siegecraft, spies in a square “a peasant woman wearing several layers of coats, and waiting behind a makeshift stall for someone to think about buying one of the cabbages she had piled up into a mighty bulwark in front of her.”



Historical images, and those of our personal pasts, return to us, outsize or shrunken. To borrow Sebald’s description of Browne’s vision, “It is as if one were looking through a reversed opera glass and through a microscope at the same time.” It is to Sebald’s great credit that his fictions, and the sentences therein, function like architectural oddities, which, while not quite grasping the obscure infrastructure of time, manage to approximate it, and facilitate its functioning. Sebald’s sentences are themselves the blueprints of ramified hallways. Like intricate diagrams, they allow for the supernatural resonance of past and present, fact and fiction, memory and oblivion—a resonance that offers life, obliquely, to the misremembered shades of history.