botanizing

Reading Sebald

Debbie, Peter, and I read recently W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and met this week for dinner to discuss the book.  I had first read the book, along with Sebald’s Austerlitz and The Natural History of Destruction, about four years ago as I explored relationships between stories and photographs.  The Rings of Saturn interested me as I thought about ways to write about travel, especially the way that stories could emerge from walking.

The Rings of Saturn has a setting—a walking trip taken by the author through the English countryside in Suffolk—but it does not have a theme.  The book has been compared to a collage—it is an assembly of stories that on the whole create an impression, but collectively the stories provide no narrative arc.  The walk, which could provide the basis of a narrative, provides only as disjointed locales of reference that serve as points of departure for the stories.  Sebald’s landscape is minimally described, but the independent stories that have tenuous roots in or wildly twining tendrils that grasp for the places Sebald visits are vividly told.

Near the beginning of The Rings of Saturn, where he writes of the author Thomas Browne, Sebald suggests (p. 18) that the earlier author saw the world as “no more than a shadow image of another one far beyond.”  This serves also as an excellent description of The Rings of Saturn in which the villages and landscape of Suffolk are little more than umbral shadows cast for stories caught from the past.

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Photo by DL

Foot slapping music

We have gone to see the wonderful, vibrant St. Lawrence String Quartet.  It was one of those unusual concerts in which I was fully engaged throughout in the music.  The Quartet played music by Haydn, Ravel, and John Adams.  I had looked forward especially to hearing Adams’s “String Quartet,” which was composed for the St. Lawrence String Quartet.  The Adams piece began with minimalist repetition, progressed to throbbing rock and roll, and by the end of the first movement seemed to have included every other style of music and several appliance sounds, including gurgles of the kitchen sink.   I enjoyed the Adams, and his “String Quartet” pleased my desire for new music, but it was the Haydn string quartet—or maybe the second movement of the Ravel “String Quartet in F major—that pleased me the most.

During the concert, I thought about the music of Glenn Gould, whose humming as he plays Bach one can hear on his recordings.  For Gould, I think the performance—even existing as it was as a recording—was an all-encompassing experience and less about perfection than it was about expression of artistry, which included humming the tune.   The St. Lawrence String Quartet, whose violinists tapped their toes and periodically slapped their soles to the tunes, also vividly and bodily expressed the music.

Fire

White trees stand on a ridgetop.  For a moment I think the trees and surrounding ground are covered in fresh snow.   The fall days have, however, been far too warm and dry for snow.  It must, I think, be the light—which is now growing low beyond the hills—that has made the trees white.  As I look at the trees, I realize they are neither ‘full’ nor conical as I would expect for spruce and Douglas fir.  The white trees are thin trunks.  They are skeletons stripped of foliage and branches.

 After we round a bend in the river, we see smoke rise from the forested flank of the hill at the end of the river’s reach.  There is a forest fire.  I realize that the white trees on the ridge top have been burned—their lightness and high albedo is surely a consequence of having their bark burned away to reveal the more reflective surface of pale wood.

We stop opposite where the fire burns on a hillside across the river.  Much of the hill’s high flank has burned.  Most of the trees in the burn are now boughless and consist only of trunk.  The high, burned flank looks open and airy even in the obscuring smoke.   The active core of fire, which is neither broad nor raging, is about halfway down the hill.  We cannot see flames, although the smoke that rises from the core glows orange.  Even though the fire is across the river from us, we can hear, above the sound of the water, the pop of resinous wood as trees burn.

 Fires in forests of the Selway drainage must occur almost annually.  Perhaps most years many start.  Most of these must be small—limited in acreage and days—and very few must be large.  Few stretches of forest along the river, where I have walked, lack signs of fire.  Blackened scars are common on the trunks of living trees and hollow bowls of burned-out trunks are hardly less common.  Some drainages above the river consist of old black snags of trees and remain largely barren of undergrowth.  These most devastating burns are startling.  They demonstrate the awesome subtractive power of forest fires, but they provide also ecological opportunity. 

 I do not think about the ecology of fire in these natural communities as either good or bad; I can do that only when I add humans to the communities or to the broader set of ecological relationships.  As I stand across the river from the fire today, I can feel safe from it—at least in a cautious manner.  Yet I can also look responsibly ahead to realize the potential danger and force of a fire in a forest.  I think of that danger sometimes when I travel deeply into a forest along some narrow, rocky road in the dry days of August.

We might have camped today at the end of the Selway road, but the smoke from the forest fire blows upriver through the campsite.  Instead of remaining close to the fire, we drive back down the river a few miles, where we expect to be well beyond the reach of smoke and fire, even if the winds this night should shift.