Whether traveling to a springtime pool near Hurricane Deck or hiking around war-scarred Europe, it might be said we observe the natural history of destruction.
The narrator in W.G. Sebald’s powerful novel “The Rings of Saturn” — both Sebald and not Sebald — suffers a paralyzing horror that overtakes him like the wind as he travels. He’s overwhelmed when confronted with the traces of destruction that he finds everywhere during his peregrinations in postwar western Europe.
These vivid mental shocks occur at various times as he/Sebald rambles in Britain and other places on the continent, but they often reach far back into the past as he explores other worlds.
While I’ve spent decades hiking and backpacking our local backcountry, forms of “travel” indeed, this wanderlust began with traveling around in western Europe in the 1970s, including rambles in Bavaria’s Steinwald (Stone Forest).
My original intent in those long-ago days exploring “other worlds” was to use my German to interview older Bavarians about their experiences under the Third Reich, and here 50 years later we still struggle with anti-Semitism and war.
The real Sebald, born in Germany in 1944, traveled throughout Europe himself beginning in the 1970s (he died in 2000). He describes decadence and destruction from western industrialization and imperialistic warfare.
He eloquently recounts experiences with freshly remembered horrors such as the Holocaust and destruction of German cities in another major work, “On the Natural History of Destruction.“
While visiting Germany this summer, I, too, seemed to awaken suddenly from an imprisoning stupor brought on by insulated living in our stupefying post-human American hegemony, just as the West German Sebald grew up amid razed buildings in the heavily-defeated former Third Reich empire that had lasted 12 years (instead of a thousand).
After returning from Germany this August after a month in München (Munich), I occasionally felt I was re-enacting major Sebald characters from both “Rings” and “Austerlitz”: Somehow memory strangely intertwined with local topography as I began rambling through nature. (Sebald’s first book was a verse epic titled “After Nature.”)
Sebald writes, “It takes just one awful second, I often think, and an entire epoch passes.” The transitional worlds from Manifest Destiny, British Empire, Nazi Third Reich propaganda and Vladimir Putin’s twisted Mother Russia dreams pass by in seconds, indeed.
Ghostlike, I’ve shifted between concentric layers of culture-bound temporal realities, some recognizable “western” varieties, but other worlds wholly weird and new. Like using an EpiPen against a migraine hunched over in a Munich burrito bar’s basement bathroom.
Or revisiting images from 1970s West Germany, like Munich’s Siegestor (Victory Gate) near the notorious Schwabing district, or memories hiking and tripping in the vast green Englischer Garten along the foaming Isar River. These events resonated within recollection since my partner and I had lived for a few years in Bavaria during the early 1970s.
Visions of another “world” also swarmed over me the night we returned to Santa Barbara’s Westside after that month living in Munich (Bavaria), the main city bisected by the Isar River.
Santa Barbara is coastal, a lot smaller, has only Mission Creek and resounds with mellifluous Spanish language, not Germanic phrases; Santa Barbara felt infused by another reality when we arrived back home on a Tuesday evening following 23 hours in transit (4.1.1.).
Sebald likewise mulls over Flaubert’s famous quote about “the relentless spread of stupidity, which he had observed everywhere” in France during the 19th century when Flaubert wrote his many novels.
One finds examples of this national stupidity in Bavaria, in California, and in the sclerotic and aging leadership of both American political parties. Cancel culture everywhere, identity politics gone wild. Did the U.S. Supreme Court really try to ban women’s rights to reproductive freedom?
Exhausted and loopy at 10 that night, I staggered down Micheltorena Street toward Highway 101, and hobbled through the little shopping center to Foodland Market on San Andres Street. Dim and pleasantly jungle-like within, I immediately spotted aloe plants, yucca root, other fresh vegetables, and plenty of refried beans (cans) and rice — scattered fragrances including fresh oregano and vaguely-Greek-like odors that pleased the nostrils.
I could overhear melodious Spanish and felt home again, far from the clear German phrases I always interpreted in the tidy Edeka Market in Munich’s Giesing district where we lived those 28 days.
I felt radically stoned in Foodland Market, although exhaustion had been my only elixir, and then blearily noticed the six-packs of cerveza and omnipresent fruits and vegetables. Feeling full-on ripped, I roamed about the gritty Westside — yet, I don’t drink, and there had been no marijuana stores in Germany.
It was spooky and lurid with imperial Californios strolling about, as well as a huge “super moon” rising on another hot summer’s night near the brooding southern sea.
Munich lies at north latitude 59 degrees, whereas Santa Barbara sits on the north latitude parallel 34 degrees. So, basically, Santa Barbara is on the same line as the Mediterranean island of Crete, whereas Munich is in northern Canada near Hudson’s Bay.
Somehow, my higher awareness “knew” these other-worldly feelings were part of the drop from European 60-degrees north to North American latitude 34-degrees north, where the oscillating ocean laps at the base of local mountains.
These feelings also stemmed from horrid jet lag, the seven forms of transport, the interminable waiting, sleep deprivation, and the baby screaming two rows in front of us on the big jet for 11 hours sitting masked over the Atlantic.
Therefore, the minuscule eight-minute amble on my weary feet made heavenly emotions flow, mixing relief, gratitude and sorrow. The two feet shuffling along dusty Micheltorena Street over to San Andres and aptly named Foodland Market: These ramblings accentuated the division into two worlds such as Bavaria-California, or like EU-USA, Russian Federation-Ukraine and even nature-cities. Sebald writes that Sir Thomas Browne agrees with him that, “On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation.”
On the ruins of the USSR rose the RU just as the Nazis surged up out of the collapse of the Treaty of Versailles. The vivid blue pool in my photo is now emptied and matted with grasses.
The dizzy mind sliding sleep-stricken toward Foodland also imagined the divisions between democracy and dictatorship, and even more fancifully between Putin and #46, but these dreams became absurd and part of a subtle veil masking yonder worlds.
My partner and I knew somehow that the jet lag and exhaustion were huge parts of our somnolent dreams and fuzzy images that Tuesday night, Aug. 9, when we finally reached Santa Barbara’s Westside, shivering and replete with weird images and misplaced luggage.
The human friendliness I encountered at the taco stand outside Foodland Market marked a contrast, however, and felt like yet another chunk of the multiverse. Workers hungrily wolfing down flautas and carne asada in the parking lot next to the bright food truck, a couple of guys desultorily slugging each other over some issue near the laundromat, a muffler-less motorcycle roaring through, and people laughing aloud.
These vignettes felt like a transition into a deeper California lifestyle, and after all perhaps not so far from the Bavarian friendliness and warmth we had enjoyed abroad.
The USA has traditionally seen itself as more egalitarian, more for individual freedoms (e.g, the first Ten Amendments to the U.S. Constitution); yet at the end of 2022, it doesn’t feel that way so much given our endless wrangling, cultural wars and political infighting.
Bavarians and Germans seem both more united and friendlier than most folks here until one slouches deeper into our so-called underclass, the true proletariat in Santa Barbara — what Maxim Gorky called the lower depths.
It truly was warm and friendly in the multi-ethnic Foodland Market on San Andres, and in the adjacent parking lot that Tuesday night, eating with la gente and the amiable working class that keep urban Santa Barbara and imperial USA running.
The actual presence of these “other worlds” has often been depicted in fiction, and the early 20th century produced H.G. Wells’ “Time Machine,” E.M Forster’s novella “The Machine Stops,” Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger series, Hermann Hesse’s “Journey to the East” — and a multitude of other books readers surely recall. Dystopian films like “Interstellar” and “The Matrix” have always been highly popular.
This basic human need to have a faith or belief in the existence of realms we cannot see explains the mystical awe Americans felt when TV (screens) first moved into American households in the 1950s, just as organized religion began its drastic decline (by 1960, 90% of American households had a TV set).
Hippie love fests, New Age practices, right-wing extremism, splinter religions (Ba’hai, anyone?), DIY spiritual practices and the rise of Christian nationalism are partly explained by the “far-seeing” nature of images on screens (and via Internet).
The German term for TV is “Fernseher” — far-seer. It is a kind of magic whereby electricity and invisible waves morph into visible screen figures, which seem more compelling to some than next-door neighbors. Marshall McLuhan was correct in asserting that the medium really is the message. What matters too often is the platform (medium) utilized for the message, and not the information contained in the message itself.
For Sebald and many of us, actual three-dimensional travel to other lands and foreign cultures rocks our memories and intrigues our imaginations more than a lush National Geographic TV special on, say, the last orangutans in Borneo.
In Sebald’s “Natural History of Destruction,” we learn about his fascination with the suppression of open discussion concerning the obliteration of German cities in 1944-45. Deliberate “cultural amnesia” blocked understanding of these war crimes, but Sebald also seems obsessed by the fleeting nature of things and the vivid reality of remembered “worlds” that he no longer can reach in either space or time.
Americans today keep trying to find those “other worlds” of an imagined golden past only to confront present realities as disappointing as the obviously depressed Sebald found his post-1970 European travels.
Myself, I try to keep vivid the memories of the remote blue pool near Hurricane Deck and remember Sebald’s conclusion that, “There is no antidote against the opium of time.”
4.1.1.
W.G. Sebald, “Rings of Saturn” (1995), originally in German, Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wahlfahrt (translated by Michael Hulse, 1998); Sebald, “After Nature” (translated by M. Hamburger, 2002; originally in German, 1988); Austerlitz (translated by A. Bell, 2000); “On The Natural History of Destruction” (2003); Christopher White, “Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Other Dimensions” (Harvard University Press, 2018).
Aug. 9 travel — Munich to Santa Barbara’s Westside using seven modes in 23 hours: elevator, car, tram at Munich Airport, huge plane for 12 hours, wheelchair (for partner), Santa Barbara Airbus and a Santa Barbara cab.
— Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity and has written extensively about the local backcountry. His latest book, Autobiography in the Anthropocene, is available at Lulu.com. He serves as an archaeological site steward for the U.S. Forest Service in Los Padres National Forest. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at cazmania3@gmail.com. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
