Dunwich Beach, 2019 (Mark Fisher’s Agon with W. G. Sebald) — J.M. Tyree

After 'Dunwich Beach, 1960' by Brian Eno

We wandered from Southwold to the National Trust property at Dunwich Heath and back, a loop of some twenty miles, taking the route along the cliffs on our way South and returning via the beach in the late afternoon and evening ocean light. Emily and I were marking eleven years of marriage—the steel anniversary, apparently—with a week in East Anglia, on a literary pilgrimage retracing some of the routes of W. G. Sebald in The Rings of Saturn (1995, published in English in 1998). We'd become intrigued to visit Suffolk after reading Sebald and arguing over the late Mark Fisher's political critique of Sebald's methods. Emily was a Fisher diehard and Brian Eno fan—she also wanted to find some of the coastal locations from Eno's Ambient 4: On Land, which was one of Fisher's subjects in his 2016 book The Weird and the Eerie, published just before his death. I hadn’t planned to write about The Rings of Saturn, considering the sheer number of retracing projects that had made it almost a cottage industry. But Emily convinced me that there was more here than met the eye.

From The Ship hotel, in Woodbridge, the town where Sebald (or his narrator) had stayed during his journey, we walked out to Sutton Hoo, another of Fisher's points of interest in the same book. We spent our anniversary at Orford Ness, having taken the last remaining public transportation to Orford from Woodbridge, which turned out to be a bus line that looked like some dude’s van. The abandoned military installations had been transformed into a bird sanctuary overlooking Doggerland and the German Sea, at a point of land almost directly across from The Hague, where, in prehistory, a land-bridge had connected England and Europe and where the Rhine and the Thames had once flowed together in one of the planet's great confluences of river waters. Orford Ness formed a point of overlap between the travels of Eno, Sebald, Fisher, and the ubiquitous Robert Macfarlane, whose 2020 book Ghostways included Ness, his prose-poem about the area. This was well-trodden ground, in other words, where Eno's 'Lantern Marsh' collided with Sebald's rings, Fisher's account of the eerie, and Macfarlane's belated attempt to reconcile these ghosts within a mushily alliterative and commercially acceptable ecopoetics. We went out there to look at birds and eat smoked fish at the Butley Oysterage restaurant and from the store down at Pinney's, where the pier at sunset opened out to the peculiar temple-like buildings on Orford Ness, with mysterious nuclear-era weapons tests sites and decrepit radar stations rotting under the rain.

It’s in Orford Ness that Sebald’s narrator experiences a haunting, of a kind common to crucial passages in almost all of his books, where time past seems to puncture the veil of the present (Note - 1). As he surveys the abandoned bunkers on the island, a site of radar stations during WWII and bomb testing for various mechanisms of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, the narrator has the dissociative experience of becoming unstuck in time. “Where and in what time I truly was that day at Orfordness I cannot say,” Sebald writes in The Rings of Saturn, "even as I write these words” (translated by Michael Hulse, 237 [Sebald uses the spelling “Ordfordness” in his book]). Looking back at the shoreline of Orford from the Ness, Sebald writes: “The roofs and towers of Orford showed among the tree tops, seeming so close that I could touch them. There, I thought, I was once at home. And then, through the growing dazzle of the light in my eyes, I suddenly saw, amidst the darkening colours, the sails of the long-vanished windmills turning heavily in the wind” (237). Sebald’s “home,” as described here, lies in the past. It is a fictional place that also reveals the place of fiction in narratives where the voice that’s speaking is both Sebald and another, where ghosts speak through a process of melancholy. This home is not nonexistent but rather more like the “baseless fabric of this vision” of art described by Shakespeare in The Tempest.

The vision of the sails arguably lies somewhere between fiction and nonfiction, just as it seems to bind a Netherlandish image to the Anglo-Saxon land of an expatriate emigrant European. This true falseness or false trueness of this vision of an adopted “home”—like the position of the Ness as a “false island” between the land and the sea connected by the River Alde to the mainland—seems to stand at the center of Sebald’s book. It also gets at something about travel writing, since the feeling of false home feels true to the experience of the pilgrim who seeks to unlock something in themselves by going away. Although the rest of the narrative of The Rings of Saturn takes up important territory, as the narrator loops back to his “real” home near Norwich, the meaning of the journey coheres in this passage. “Where” does this vision take place? Sebald’s subtle hint—“even as I write these words”—deliberately confuses the issue. His entire account of his travels is told in retrospect from a point that happens afterwards. Sebald has fictionalized Orford Ness into a kind of private Santiago de Compostela, and made of the footpaths and bus-routes of Suffolk his narrator’s holy road. And this transpires in an encounter with an abandoned area where “for most of my lifetime hundreds of boffins had been at work devising new weapons system,” but now, in its derelict state, had taken on the triumph of the ruined, its buildings looking like “the tumuli in which the mighty and powerful were buried in prehistoric times with all their tools and utensils, silver and gold,” giving the place the feeling of “ground intended for purposes transcending the profane” (236). The spot where Sebald projects his narrator’s strongest home feeling is also a location where destruction has finally been destroyed. 

***

The nature of this haunting and the role of the ghosts of the past in Sebald’s and Fisher’s writing was our topic of discussion during our anniversary outing in Orford Ness, and it carried over into our walk along Dunwich beach a few days later. I had never met Fisher but we both worked as writers-at-large for Film Quarterly around the same time, and I had become an admirer. Although doubtless unaware of my existence, Fisher had remained in my mind's eye as a gracious lighthouse keeper who I had always hoped to encounter one day, a figure by whom one might navigate, in order to determine one's own position in the darkness by relation to their blazing light, even if one were traveling in another direction entirely. But then he was gone, an absence where something should be, as he himself had described the effect of the eerie. I respected but did not agree with Fisher's view of popular films like The Road (2009) and The Hunger Games (2012), which he had praised for their societal critiques but which I found redolent of the survivalist American mentality of doomsday preppers whose contempt for decadent city life and obsession with rural purity and family ties formed part of the reactionary waves that, in time, eventually would gather and subsume my country. Fisher's frustration with Sebald intrigued me more because it unfolded against the backdrop of his own home ground, places that he knew well and had written about poignantly in his account of the Suffolk coast in The Weird and the Eerie. He was at home where I was a day-tripper and Sebald had been a tourist, passing through, writing of things with an inevitable superficiality, or, at best, the alien viewpoint of a foreign visitor.

Fisher's death had shaken me and Emily. Like so many others we knew who had been called to a life in the arts, we both knew depression, and found in art, and in each other, the best means we knew for staving it off. We had followed each of Fisher publications avidly and argued over them, productively, at our table. (I can think of no greater compliment to give.) For all of Fisher’s annoyance with Sebald, both of them had a somewhat similar effect on their readers. There was an invitation to join their projects. People wanted to continue or complete their fragmentary works, to seek a wholeness just beyond the horizon of where their essays and books might lead to some synthesis that they had not been able to reach before their respective sudden deaths, Sebald in a car accident caused by a stroke or heart attack, Fisher's by suicide. The paradoxical impression of togetherness and loneliness they radiated had only been reinforced by their premature deaths. The emotions they elicit, in turn, could be transformed by public rituals of grieving for figures the mourners never knew, such as walking to Sutton Hoo in honor of Fisher, or sauntering around Orford Ness as a gesture of respect for Sebald. What I learned from Emily on our walk was that mourning and melancholy was not sufficient and in fact could be toxic. Fisher had written as much himself in Ghosts of My Life (2014), which contains a strong hint that his life-or-death struggle with depression was by no means over.

Emily and I had sustained our friendship as a very long conversation, begun in London in our early twenties over claret, in the late 1990s, at the basement tables of Gordon's Wine Bar in Charing Cross, and continued in middle age on our endless walks downriver on the Thames Path from the city center to Erith. In between, we had lived together in New York City during 9/11, where we watched the remains of the Towers being dismantled by crews of ironworkers flashing acetylene torches like bright constellations of stars in the night, and, later, in San Francisco, where I had fallen into the great good fortune of four funded years studying and teaching creative writing at Stanford, during which time I had published my first book and written the second. We had spent the first two years of our marriage living apart in order to secure employment after the Crash of 2008, during the Long Recession. We’d managed to stick together through all of it, and, for my part, I regarded this as my greatest accomplishment. But our years apart had opened a chapter of sadness in my life, one that seemed ready to subsume me whenever it felt like it, a seemingly unshakeable demonic weight of around thirty pounds that seemed to have taken up residence in my spine for good.

Less than a year after our walk in Suffolk, the pandemic swept away anything that remained of normal life. In retrospect, this day out seemed like a glimmer of hope to which we desperately clung, both as a remembered oasis in wretched times and as a buoy guiding us to some future port beyond the seemingly endless isolation of the present. As a generation we had seen the proverbial hundred year flood every decade, so to speak. In an historical arc that might be charted from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when we were coming of age in high school, to the storming of the U.S. Capitol in 2021, in middle age, we had witnessed the latest stages of the ascendance and implosion of America as a world power within a span of four decades that coincided with our lives. Emily remained a London child of the 1980s, anti-Thatcher and pro-social democracy. All the music Fisher wrote about was in her blood, since she had raved through the 1980s at places like the Four Aces Club in Dalston at its peak. I had grown up amidst the cows and beer of rural and suburban Wisconsin, an area where German was still taught as an elective in the schools (I failed to take it up, foolishly) and a landscape with  a few uncanny resemblances to Sebald’s Wertach. (The Germans who built Milwaukee said that Wisconsin recalled the forests—though not the mountains—of southern Germany.) And I had spent three years living in East Anglia as a scholarship student at a certain well-known college in a certain well-known university where I was utterly out of place in the rigidities of the English class system. In our conversations about her home country, which she disliked and I adored, it was easy enough for us to fall into dialectical roles.  

“I love Sebald,” Emily said. “But isn’t he basically saying that the best we can do is wander around in circles forever through some blighted landscape?”

She was happy enough to take up Fisher's part in a debate about The Rings of Saturn, which Fisher had burned for its “Mittel-brow miserablism and stock disdain.”

Fisher's agon with Sebald informed our long looping walk out of and back again to Southwold, taking a route that enabled us to visit the ruins of the medieval port city, now above the beach, and to walk back along the shoreline, looking out to sea on our right and up on our left at the cliffs, which were said to discharge human bones from the ancient cemetery  from time to time as the ground eroded. In the twenty-first century, the cult of walkers who busied themselves retracing Sebald's steps had reframed the story of the lost city of Dunwich as one of rising seas and the climate crisis. This was almost certainly the longest walk I have ever taken, and one of our happiest days. We would inhabit the place forever, talking about literature in some enchanted elven forest by the sea, and the place would haunt a corner of our minds, providing sustenance and a way outside of ourselves during our year of isolation to come.

There's something wounded and open about the Suffolk Coast that drives you on, compelling you to continue tracing its edges, astonished by the next encounter or point of interest along the way, in an endless calm uncanny fascination, where the ocean's negative ions tend to lift one's mood out of the troughs into which one falls whenever, as Melville's Ishmael in Moby-Dick puts it, “it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet.” Emily and I had reached the so-called “last grave”— that spot on the coastal cliffs above Dunwich Beach where the boneyard of a ruined church stood, waiting to fall into the sea. This vantage point, with its visible remnants of what had once been a thriving port that communicated directly with the Netherlands across a shallow but dangerous stretch of ocean, was best for conveying the sense of what had been lost. The area was said to be haunted by the sound of the church bells from the parishes that now lay under the waves. How best to be haunted by places like Dunwich and Sutton Hoo was, in a sense, the essence of the one-sided contretemps between Fisher and Sebald. Was this about the place or the traveler, England or Europe, history or politics, the collective or the individual, the impersonal or the personal, the past or the future?

***

Fisher's frustration with Sebald is expressed in his 2011 commentary for Sight & Sound on Grant Gee's film Patience (After Sebald), which he had seen at a screening event and discussion in Snape Maltings before its theatrical release in 2012 (Note - 2). To my way of thinking, his critical notes serve to disguise a common feature between their books, a perception-warping clinical depression that clouds everything in view. But it would be cheap and ungenerous to insinuate that in Sebald Fisher found a distorted mirror, or that Fisher's review of Gee's film resembles the “sneering voice” that he described hearing in his head (Note - 3). Although the essay is sour at some points and refreshingly combative at others, it ends on a characteristically generous note:

Patience (After Sebald) could appeal to a Sebald sceptic like me because—in spite of Sebald—it reaches the wilds of Suffolk. At the same time, Gee’s quietly powerful film caused me to doubt my own scepticism, sending me back to Sebald’s books in search of what others had found in them.

Fisher’s critique targeted the “solemn cult that settled suspiciously quickly around Sebald and his books.” These disciples were sometime obnoxious, and, what was worse, I had found myself becoming one of them, though not through The Rings of Saturn—my own compulsive travels were centered on Vertigo (Prague, Wertach, St. Gallen, Heidelberg, London). As for the books themselves, Fisher accused Sebald of ersatz modernism, recapitulating Fredric Jameson’s diss-track on postmodernism as a recycling process with little that is new to say. “With his well-wrought sentences,” Fisher writes, “Sebald offered a rather easy sort of difficulty—an anachronistic, antiqued model of ‘good literature’ that acted as if many of the developments in 20th-century experimental fiction and popular culture had never happened.” Fisher takes this line of thinking to a dark place:

It’s not hard to see why a German writer would want to blank out the middle part of the 20th century; and many of the formal anachronisms of Sebald’s writing—its strange sense that this is the modern world seen through the restrained yet ornate prose of an early 20th-century essayist—perhaps arise from this desire, just as his books themselves are about the various, ultimately failed ruses, conscious and unconscious, that damaged psyches deploy to erase traumas and construct new identities.

This is a somewhat paranoid reading, to be sure, and it’s one that elides much of what’s of value in Sebald’s writing, which always tends toward a specific historical abyss that is so lightless and nightmarish that his characters, including his narrator, often fail to speak of it directly. Judging by the evidence in Vertigo alone, it’s clear that Sebald’s life’s work involved a deep (if admittedly digressive) confrontation with the fact of his narrator’s father’s military career in the Third Reich, and the lived experience of thinking through the collective and familial responsibility for his country’s crimes. Far from blanking out history or attempting to erase trauma with failed ruses, Sebald spilled his ink spiraling around what the Letter of St. Jude calls the “wandering stars, for whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.” The problem for Sebald was too much history, then, not an attempt to hide from it (which is impossible in any event). One question that Fisher did not consider was whether this sense of failed ruses and revenant trauma applied to Sebald’s narrator or to Sebald himself, and what value might be contained in that all-important, yet not easily discerned distinction.

Emily understood my viewpoint but chalked up the flaws in Fisher’s Sebald essay to what she called Fisher’s “blind spots.” She preferred to emphasize Fisher’s core project of recovering the mid-century aesthetics of what he called “popular modernism” and the politics of postwar Britain, in which government-funded art sometimes produced genuinely experimental art. In Ghosts of My Life, Fisher wrote:

What should haunt us is not the no longer of actually existing social democracy, but the not yet of the futures that popular modernism trained us to expect, but which never materialized. These spectres—the spectres of lost futures—reproach the formal nostalgia of the capitalist realist world. (27)

Fisher developed his theory of hauntology as an alternative to nostalgic mourning in the introductory essays to Ghosts of My Life:

Haunting, then, can be construed as a failed mourning. It is about refusing to give up the ghost or—and this can sometimes amount to the same thing—the refusal of the ghost to give up on us. The spectre will not allow us to settle into/for the mediocre satisfactions one can glean in a world governed by capitalist realism. (22)

What Fisher calls “haunto-logical melancholy” is about vindicating the “elitist project” of modernism “retrospectively” while “coming to terms with the disappearance of the conditions which allowed it to exist” (22). He distinguishes it from “left melancholy,” Wendy Brown’s term for over-attachment to failure, inactivity, and the impossibility of returning to a “dead past” (23). In the place of this, Fisher offers a melancholy that is more productive by refusing to relinquish the dream of genuine experimentation in art that reaches a large audience. So Fisher’s proposal for a more active and positive melancholy generates resistance to a realm of imagination that seems closed, as well as a “refusal to adjust to what current conditions call ‘reality’—even if the cost of that refusal is that you feel like an outcast in your own time…” (23)

“Fisher wants us to remember what was once considered possible and which is now supposedly impossible because these public goods cannot be generated by market forces or the profit motive,” Emily said. “Sebald…? Isn’t he too depressed and withdrawn into his own head to take up this banner?”

“Ah,” I said, mentally crumpling up half of the pages of a manuscript I had in mind to write. “Well…”

“Mourning,” Emily asked, “It can go wrong and trap us in its rings and spirals. We’re paralyzed.”

“Wandering the blighted land,” I said.

“You like that line,” Emily said. “You enjoy that idea a bit too much. You’re a bit…”

“Don’t say it!”

“I still love you,” she said.

My protestations reminded me of a well-worn phrase from Faulkner: “I don’t hate The South!”

Fisher sought to challenge what he saw as the ideology of the supposedly apolitical 1990s, with its disengagement with the idea of the experimental future, and its tendency to hide out in the tired forms of the past. We might extrapolate a little bit further by suggesting that Fisher distrusted how easily writers and readers fell into this orbit, disavowing the modernist project and abandoning its difficulties. He had identified and diagnosed a central feature of 21st century life, in which what he called “capitalist realism”—the idea that there were no viable alternatives to market logic—had extended its stranglehold far beyond economics and politics and also had become a keynote of cultural production as well. The cultural industry wanted art that went down smooth, but this facet of things wasn’t acknowledged or recognized as an historical construct, it was taken as given and natural, in ways used to dismiss anything that challenged its domination of what it might be possible to imagine. And it was the work of artists to resist that drift into easily digestible “content.” More challenging forms were required to disrupt the seamless dreams of the end of history. This gave film, literature, art, and music an outsized importance, perhaps, but for this very reason Fisher’s work inspired artists to create things that were genuinely different.

***

In fact, Sebald has something more complex and troubling to say on the subject of melancholy than Fisher could account for. Sebald’s essay, “Constructs of Mourning,” expands on the theory of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, published in 1967, that Germany’s “inability to mourn” after the catastrophe of the war had created a sort of pathological collective mental state in West Germany (Campo Santo, translated by Anthea Bell, 97). The suppression of the past had had the effect of avoiding “collective melancholy” at the expense of the truth and in avoidance of collective complicity. The Mitscherlichs argued that “there was no proper mourning for our fellow human beings, killed in such great numbers by our own deeds” (99). Things shifted, Sebald argued, from the disavowal of the 1950s to a 1960s openness about the necessity for “auditing the balance sheet of German guilt” (102). This happened in tandem with (and also as a consequence of) the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1963-5, in which some measure of public accountability for lower-level officials at the death camp, while considered unsuccessful in many ways by the prosecutor, Fritz Bauer, did have the knock-on effect of loosening tongues among the literati in the generation previous to Sebald’s, including the work of Günter Grass, Alexander Kluge, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, and others. While Sebald’s own books often rely on various kinds of narrative ellipsis, where gaps open up in the text at crucial points and require its reader to fill in the blanks, they provide enough threads to complete the pattern of the carpet he found in dialogue with these writers. This, in turn, also helps to explain what Sebald meant when, in his “Acceptance Speech to the Collegium of the German Academy,” he related a Kafka-like dream in which “I was unmasked as a traitor to my country and a fraud” (208).

The question that’s not addressed here, though, is what happens when there is too much mourning rather than not enough. This question might have seemed absurd or even offensive to Sebald when he wrote his essay, since it could be (wrongly) mistaken as a justification for postwar silence. But pathological grief can be another way of abandoning the future for a past whose ghosts hold us in endless thrall. This melancholic condition resides in the splintering experience of the past described, for example, in Eliot’s The Waste Land, in which someone is confronted by an old wartime comrade who demands to know if “the corpse you planted last year in your garden’ has begun to ‘sprout’ or ‘bloom.” (Note - 4) This speaker goes on to twist a quote from John Webster’s Jacobean drama, The White Devil, about the “wolf that’s foe to man,” who digs up corpses and unearths buried crimes. Eliot turns this passage inside out and instead presents “the Dog” that’s “friend to man” who “with his nails he’ll dig it up again!” This sense of threat from the past has been reframed by Eliot as the modern work of the well-meaning helper who uncovers the crimes of his master. In Eliot’s attempt to shore “fragments” against “my ruins,” the speaker’s wish, to “set my lands in order,” is one in which memory plays a dubious role, threatening the sanity of the person haunted by the unquiet graves of historical nightmares and the revenant forces of the dead. At a journey’s end at the seaside in Margate at another point in the poem, someone relates the experience of an utter breakdown of meaning: “I can connect / Nothing with nothing.”

Another expatriate wandering England and contemplating the aftermath of war, Sebald generates the antithesis of Eliot’s modus operandi, almost. Here, everything connects with everything, and melancholy, particularly in The Rings of Saturn, is framed as an aspect of a recuperative process. In the book’s opening pages, a sleight-of-hand is at play. Sebald’s recounting of his narrator’s journey takes the form of remembering the trip as he assembles his notes into the book the reader is holding, not a simple account of the tour itself. Life’s “road” has a more coherent narrative that allows for a more resilient modern self to emerge from the ruins and for us to retain more than Eliotic “fragments” of our experience. In this sense it’s important that Sebald’s narrator is looking backwards at his trip into Suffolk, which he emphasizes was undertaken under the Dog Star that he associates with “certain ailments of the spirit”:

At all events, in retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place. Perhaps it was because of this that, a year to the day after I began my tour, I was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility. (3)

Sebald’s trickery with time here represents a kind of implicit challenge to Eliot’s impression of fragmentation beyond the possibility of holistic repair (one which nevertheless remains a wished-for outcome, albeit one presented under the ironic aegis of its final invocation, “shantih shantih shantih”) in The Waste Land. Eliot’s own reversal of this sensibility in a confidently asserted faith is expressed in Four Quartets:

Time present and time past 

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past. (Note - 5)

Sebald limns something of this tension regarding memory and melancholy without settling in to either a Proustian impression of recollection and remembering as a positive capacity to gain lost time or an Eliotic bipolarity between his frantic splintering of sensibility between the “mad” modernity of The Waste Land or the stately religious calm of Four Quartets, in which a more clearly articulated Christian hope in an eternal time under which past, present, and future may be viewed sub specie aeternitatis. Sebald’s writing also exists in conversation with these big modernist ghosts, not just the postwar German writers, but his response is critical, denying the closure offered in the later works of Proust and Eliot. To grapple with Sebald’s writing it is necessary to understand why he writes fiction into his travel narratives.

Sebald always plays a double game, according to which the reader is never entirely certain where the narrator ends and the author begins, and where the quasi-frame-story of the composition of the book The Rings of Saturn becomes part of a narrative of a person healing from a stay in the hospital. Is Sebald proposing some role in his narrator’s recuperation for the creative process itself? The question smacks over-much of the rhetoric of self-help, yet something of this healing process remains as a ghost in the text, haunting the reader who, in the future, perhaps after Sebald’s own death, reads this account of the book’s origins in his hospital stay. Yet because this frame-story is left hanging, creating the impression of the book as a parenthesis that opens but never closes, a certain uncertainty about the ability of modern art to move through (never mind beyond) a melancholic position emerges. The Rings of Saturn ends, formally, with an account of funeral garb, as described by Sir Thomas Browne, and a phrase about how the dead proceed on their “final journey,” their view shielded from “the land now being lost for ever” (296). But these final words are not, strictly speaking, the chronological endpoint of the narrative, in the strict sense that the events on the Suffolk journey to which they refer happened before the events described at the beginning of the book. So what reads like melancholy pure and simple may be, in fact, part of a more complex process, the one identified in the opening pages as the weaving of the notes, images, and memories of the book itself.

All this, in turn, helps to explain why Sebald places an account of mourning near the start of the book. Using the present tense, as “I begin to assemble my notes” (5), he remembers a friend and colleague, Michael Parkinson, whose life seemed to crystallize an ideal of finding “happiness” through a combination of scholarly dedication, personal generosity, and walking holidays. (In other words, by following a path not wholly dissimilar from the narrator’s own, yet one that seemed to dwell in the realms of sweetness and light, as opposed to the narrator’s own circling endlessly around death and destruction. A good joke, then, at Sebald’s own expense.) Yet this picture is disturbed by Parkinson’s sudden death, from “unknown causes” when he is discovered in his bed with his face “curiously mottled with red blotches” (6). Sebald’s merging with his narrator is difficult to resist at this point, especially when he feels obliged to add words to the report of the inquest that these “unknown causes” occurred in “the deep and dark hours of the night” (6-7). Parkinson’s “positivity,” for lack of a better word, fails him, while the melancholic narrator, who idolizes his friend’s blithe spirits in a sense, survives. He then describes how Parkinson’s death affects another colleague, Janine Dakyns, who died only a few weeks later from a “disease that swiftly consumed her body,” but which the narrator ascribes in part to Dakyns being “unable to bear the loss of the ingenuous, almost childlike friendship they had shared” (7). Here, in a somewhat clearer divergence between the narrator and Sebald, lies a sort of parable about mourning and melancholy which might represent a mortal threat to one’s health.

Sebald achieves this effect, which moves beyond trickery and gamesmanship into a realm of poignant double eulogy for two deceased friends, by comparing Dakyns with the figure of the angel in Albrecht Dürer's 1514 engraving Melencolia I. Sebald recollects:

Once when I remarked that sitting there amidst her papers she resembled the angel in Dürer’s Melancholia, steadfast among the instruments of destruction, her response was that the apparent chaos surrounding her represented in reality a perfect kind of order, or an order which at least tended towards perfection. (9)

This equivocation, between a “perfect” order and one that “tended” towards perfection, seems important. The chaos of modern life is, from this perspective, only “apparent.” Yet a tendency does not represent a completion. 

His narrator’s story about Dakyns’s mourning of Parkinson presents the dangers of mourning, while his story about his own mourning for Parkinson encompasses both Dakyns’s mourning and his own projection of the “deep and dark hours of the night” into the “unknown causes” of his death. Did his seemingly sunny friend—one of those very game English joiners who rarely appears prey to gloom—suffer in secret from melancholy? Did mourning Parkinson really kill Dakyns? How might all this relate to what Sebald elsewhere calls “the positive potential of melancholy”? This ambiguous (and notably non-Freudian) view of melancholy as risk, necessity, and potential expression of futurity or element of recuperation introduces an intriguing tension or connectivity between the views of art expressed more directly in his essays and the impression generated by his quasi-fictionalized travelogues and memoirs. Perhaps his characters yearn in secret for a future that they may feel they have no right to discuss openly, promise, or enjoy?

To invoke Hamlet, one of Sebald’s touchstones in his discussion of mourning, the Prince of Denmark needs to marinate in his grief rather than “moving on,” as they say, in order to find out what actually happened. At stake is that hideous contemporary term, “closure.” Yet once Hamlet does find out, he must contemplate what to do about it. What never seems to occur to him as a serious option is choosing another path than the marching orders given to him by his father’s ghost that tend toward violence - destruction and self-destruction, murder and suicide. Everything depends on how we go about confronting our ghosts, just as they confront us, demanding something of us, some completion of tasks left undone by the dead. Sebald, in assembling his notes for The Rings of Saturn, and sending his narrator out on his knight-errancy in Suffolk, is attempting to honor and continue the work of the dead, especially Parkinson and Dakyns, but also a number of other ghosts that might include Thomas Browne and Shakespeare, not to mention his own father. (Note - 6) But this sense of continuity allows for a potential future beyond a process of melancholy that traps one entirely in the past. Or does it? At the end of The Rings of Saturn, the narrator appears stuck within his meditations on Browne’s notes on death and mourning garb. But this is not the end of the story, as one recognizes if one loops back around to the beginning of the book.

“Now you’re being interesting,” Emily said. “The future is not something I normally associate with Sebald.”

“You have to read between the lines,” I said.

“How do you know it’s there at all?” she asked.

“Isn’t continuing to write an act of faith in the future?”

“We need to let in all the ghosts,” she said.

***

Fisher believed that the conditions for his concept of “popular modernism” had vanished almost entirely in the 21st century. He bolstered his case by limiting it to a very specific milieu, a “cultural ecology” including “the music press and the more challenging parts of public service broadcasting” (22). This distinction also clarifies Fisher’s entire project as a response to the stranglehold of Thatcherism and its aftermath on the public imagination of “Great” Britain, making it more difficult to apply outside of the UK with exactitude. A critical response to our time requires a blending of the personal with the political (easily mocked, but unavoidable) and combines individual and collective depression in order to seek out the “traces of other possibilities” embedded in an otherwise bleak era. So Fisher writes in a heartbreaking passage:

It’s no accident that my (so far successful) escape from depression coincided with a certain externalisation of negativity: the problem wasn’t (just) me but the culture around me. It’s clear to me that now the period from roughly 2003 to the present [2013] will be recognised—not in the distant future, but very soon—as the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s. (Ghosts of My Life, 28)

But even if one limits the discussion just to film, this depressive position elides too much interesting work by figures like Alfred Hitchcock, in in the 1950s, and David Lynch, Lynne Ramsay, and Steve McQueen, in the present. Actually, my overall impression was the opposite of Fisher’s: I think we have a lot of interesting stuff being created now, although, admittedly, some of what I admire most, like Twin Peaks: The Return, You Were Never Really Here, and Small Axe, had been produced after Fisher’s death in 2016. But this hardly stole fire from Fisher’s main point, since “popular modernism” was supposed to be experimental, state-funded, art capable of reaching wider audiences.

Where Fisher’s remarks hit home was with writers, artists, and musicians we knew personally, who continued to create brilliant work on top of job-jobs that were full-time or worse, often in precarious or poorly paid teaching positions. Their time was pulverized and their music, poems, essays, and short stories often appear in small-scale or non-paying outlets. This shared condition is both deeply bleak and absolutely heartening at one and the same time, since it emphasizes artistic invisibility while simultaneously demonstrating, beyond a shadow of doubt, that making art and criticism are human projects which can never be rationalized away or turned entirely into forms of entrepreneurship, contrary to the impression generated on social media. Here, again, it seemed that I demurred from Fisher, or at least was attuning myself to different things.

In any event, Fisher’s critique of Sebald is not only about the content of his books but also their form, which in his view is too easy to digest. This drift leads him, almost of necessity, to claim that Sebald, while popular, is insufficiently modernist:

But my suspicion is that misremembering of a different kind contributes to the Rings of Saturn cult. The book induces its readers to hallucinate a text that is not there, but which meets their desires—for a kind of modernist travelogue, a novel that would do justice to the Suffolk landscape—better than Sebald’s book actually does.

Did Fisher read Sebald’s Vertigo? In some ways that enigmatic book was the kind of writing that Fisher described as a “modernist travelogue,” fragmented, replete with jagged edges and crossed wires, a genuinely difficult patchwork of genres, not easy to assemble into a whole, a little bit like the puzzle with the missing piece. I had to admit that I preferred Vertigo over The Rings of Saturn for some of the reasons that Fisher noted, which, in turn, allowed me to appreciate better what he was saying, especially when I viewed the matter through Emily’s generous, intelligent kaleidoscope eyes. That sense of lost experimentation plagued so many writers who had lived through the ideological onslaught of the 1980s and the 1990s and what often seemed like the triumph of corporate conglomeration in publishing and media.

Emily and I watched Ken McMullen’s 1983 film Ghost Dance later on, marveling at its broken edges and its strange yet refreshing lack of sheen. In Ghosts of My Life, where he builds on Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology for his own, Fisher describes splashing cold water on his face to stay up late and watch McMullen’s movie on Channel 4 because his family had no VCR. In the film, Derrida outlines his theory of ghosts in a few brief and informal sketches, noting that by playing himself in these semi-improvised scenes he has become his own ghost. This is easier to understand as time passes and the viewer today witnesses a dead man return to life through the medium of film (as transferred to the digital afterlife of the internet, etc.), all of which developments had been pre-analyzed and in some sense predicted by Derrida, of course. Claiming that “Cinema plus psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts,” Derrida remarks in the film that “I believe that ghosts are part of the future, and that the modern technology of images, like cinematography and telecommunication, enhances the power of ghosts and their ability to haunt us.” The film also links ghosts to Freud’s (and Derrida’s) theories of mourning. According to the film’s framing of Freud, in “normal” mourning, we incorporate the dead but when mourning becomes a problem and goes awry, we become “a sort of graveyard for ghosts” that “haunt our body and ventriloquise our speech.” For Freud, mourning is temporary and normal while melancholy can be dangerous and pathological because it fails to end properly and sometimes results in self-destruction.

The film looked a little bit crummy, in the most pleasing possible way, but then again the dubious copy we found somewhere on YouTube didn’t look like it had been authorized by the director. In the movie, two women, played by Leonie Mellinger and Pascale Ogier, discuss all manner of things—philosophy, psychoanalysis, ghosts, mourning, and so on—at first in Paris and then, later, in various broken down postindustrial settings in England. Robbie Coltrane does a weird dance at one point, and, at the end of the film, a man writhes artistically through standing pools of filthy looking water.

“He’s going to get tetanus!” I said.

“It’s a beautiful passage of pure cinema,” Emily said.

“They’re all dead,” I said.

“What?” she said. “No, they’re not. Robbie Coltrane was in the Harry Potter films. Mellinger wrote for The Guardian a few years ago about her parents being on the Kindertransports.”

“I meant Sebald and Fisher. And Derrida. Everyone’s dying.”

“That’s stating the obvious,” she said.

“It just struck me that they’re haunting us.”

“This struck you just now?” she said, but she was smiling.

“Maybe just the scale of the haunting,” I said. “My brain is alive with ghosts.”

“Being alive can be nice,” Emily said.

“Yes,” I said. “Asterisk. Dagger. Footnote. Parenthesis.”

“Fisher was right,” Emily said. “Films like this aren’t made anymore.”

“Fisher was right,” I said.

“Well, it could be made in a university for a small audience,” Emily said. “But not by Channel 4. Which the UK government is currently planning to sell off to private investors, by the way. Q.E.D.”

“Call the exorcist!” I said.

***

Fisher’s narrative contribution to his soundscape collaboration with Justin Barton, On Vanishing Land (exhibited in 2013 and more widely released as a recording in 2019) revealed that he had put his chips down and produced a creative hybrid work that fulfilled the modernist promises he felt Sebald had broken. To American ears, the idea of Sebald as overly palatable might sound inherently amusing, but only in a way that reinforces Fisher’s larger claim that experimentalism was in bad decline across the board in Ye Olde Anglosphere. By the time of our walk in 2019, the safe ground of middlebrow travel writing belonged to the soft-food popularizers like Macfarlane, not Sebald. Vertigo would have been ignored had it been published now, and it may not have been published at all. An agent in London or New York today probably would demand that Vertigo be retitled Ghosts of War: A Confrontation with My Nazi Father, and that Sebald scrap all the chapters except the one about his family history, in preparation for radio interviewers to fasten on to the autobiographical elements of what today would have to be rewritten either as a memoir or as historical fiction—as a narrative, in other words, safely ensconced in the marketable past.

Fisher’s concern with the local and with the Suffolkness of Suffolk—a work that would “do justice to the Suffolk landscape”—accurately describes his own work but accounts for Sebald's less clearly. At the end of the day, Fisher has discovered that Sebald is an alien visitor to his own beloved ground, and that he doesn’t know his way around. As Jarvis Cocker sang in Pulp’s “Common People” (1995), “Everybody hates a tourist.” Here, a certain turfiness rears its head, ascribed by Fisher to Robert Mabey, who had spoken critically of Sebald at the screening of Gee’s film at Snapes Malting in 2011. When Mabey read The Rings of Saturn, Fisher said, “he felt as if a very close friend had been belittled; although he had walked the Suffolk coast countless times, he couldn’t recognise it from Sebald’s descriptions.” Fisher takes this one step further, making a claim that is more interesting when read against its own intended meaning: “it was not necessary for Sebald to have taken the walk at all—that, far from being a close engagement with the Suffolk terrain, The Rings of Saturn could have been written if Sebald had never set foot in Suffolk.” This is supposed to be devastating. In fact, Fisher is correct, but not in the way he intends.

Sebald was a tourist in Suffolk—and a foreigner. He might not have returned again to the particular hotel in Lowestoft that served him a memorably vile meal of limp and tasteless fish, or he might have invented this incident altogether in order to juxtapose the proximity of the sea to the strange things done to seafood in British cuisine of the 1980s, meals which would have shocked anyone from the Continent. So the mistake that everyone (including me) was making by retracing Sebald’s steps, and attempting to connect his writing to real places, and screening films about these derivations in those very same places, was all of a piece. His books are not about those places at all. They are about an internal diagram of European horrors that the writer carried within him wherever he went and found projected on the map of each new place he encountered. It was a fault of misreading Sebald to think that it would mean anything much to go to the places he described. (I, too, heard the sound of German being spoken in the ornate maze at Somerleyton Hall on a summer afternoon—it was fun, but, then again, so what?) It was obvious to me that I had fallen into a trap as soon as I compared the text to the landscape. There was room for many others to cover that ground as local guides, genii locorum  that help to unlock the wonders of their patch. This important work was, in actuality, not related to Sebald’s, except by the most tenuous threads. If what bothered them was Sebald’s celebrity, that was a petty grievance against a dead man. If it was Sebald’s foreignness, that was worse in a way. What did it really matter to them what Sebald wrote? He didn’t own Suffolk and never pretended it was his private property.

True, it was amusing to be able to report back about the liberties Sebald took with facticity, but this was the pretty detail-work and filigree of pseudo-scholarly annotation, not any sortie into the true spirit of the place as it is felt and inhabited by locals. For example, Sebald’s narrator describes a spot where, “between Southwold and Walberswick, a narrow iron bridge crosses the river Blyth,” a place where “a long time ago ships heavily laden with wool made their way seaward” (137). From this point in the narrative, Sebald proceeds to unfold a fifteen-page excursion into events in China, describing a Dowager Empress’s love of silkworms, all of which is capped off by a retelling of Borges’s story “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” about how alternate realities and timelines might operate. Sebald is having fun with us now, in multiple senses, while hinting at the presence of fictionalized episodes here. Mabey and Fisher are annoyed that the book fails to engage with what’s actually on the ground. Their critique is strictly accurate in a factual sense but not really on point, I had put it to Emily as we’d walked the footbridge. Work that Fisher had described as “po-faced” seemed deeply ironic to me, but not in the manner of shallow gamesmanship. Such digressions struck me as more than “moves”; they were a kind of continual fending off of bone-deep psychic agony, often with droll humor. Sebald’s notes on silk, for example, return at key points in the book, as when he links the fabric with mourning, in his description of the Duchess of Teck’s “breathtaking gown with billowing veils,” created by the Norwich silk weavers Willett & Nephew, and worn to Queen Victoria’s funeral (293). At another point, he sews together the lives of weavers and writers, who “had much in common” and “tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it” (283). Sad and funny stuff.

In fact, this railway described in The Rings of Saturn, according to the placards presenting Sebald’s photographs in the 2019 exhibition at Norwich Castle, was closed in the late 1920s. The image of the bridge that appears in the book was torn from a newspaper article and carefully creased and distressed by Sebald before it was inserted into the book. Deliberate falsification, but not done with harmful intent. While the current footbridge was designed to resemble the rail bridge visually, the image in Sebald’s book has no referent in the real world at the present time. It exists in a Tlon state, one might say. And the long digression into China that occurs here serves to disguise a very simple historical fact, which is that the rail bridge was removed during WWII as an anti-invasion measure against the Germans. Is the Borges riff just another “ruse” deployed by a damaged psyche in order to erase trauma, or is it a red herring designed to drive a sleuthing reader to discover what really happened, and how the narrator finds that, wherever he might go in England, he discovers clues leading back into the maze of his birth country’s (and his family’s) crimes? Does this really represent a failed attempt to blank out history?

“Made your point, love,” Emily would say at this point in my ramblings, affecting an accent in a vain effort to get me to shut up. But that outcome would only happen when I had the bulk of an absurdly priced but delicious ploughman’s lunch in front of me at a garden table at The Ship in Dunwich. I thought back to what I had perhaps wrongly interpreted as the cross looks we’d received at the Southwold Sailors Reading Room, when we had dodged in during a squall. This was one of the spots Sebald reserved for his praise as a calm oasis (“my favorite haunt”), in which it was possible to read about local maritime history and the horrors of world war: “devastation, mutilation, desecration, starvation, conflagration, and freezing cold” (93, 94). Ah, yes, the bracing air of Sebald’s seaside R&R.

The Reading Room today combines everything that’s a problem about tourism in the south of England in the seaside towns where it sometimes feels as if half the real estate belongs to investors who live away from their empty homes and the public transport networks have evaporated to skeletons of their former vitality. The Reading Room is simply too small for its inevitable crowds and probably should be closed to the public aside from guided fundraising tours. It’s impossible to enjoy browsing a charming jumble of nautical knick-knacks and curios while you feel you’re under surveillance—had there been thefts by roving bands of Sebaldeans? I didn’t wish to be petty so I put five quid in the tin for the historical pamphlet published in 2013 recounting “the first 150 years” of the Room’s existence, in which I learned that the Molly Dancers who performed at the town’s Christmas Lights Switch-On night had presented their charity check to the Room while painted in blackface. There was a photo of this ritual reproduced in the booklet.

“There’s this relentless element of insufferable allotment parochialism and charmless xenophobia in areas of southern England that’s served cold like nowhere else,” I might have commented, gracelessly, in a cranky whisper in The Ship before my lime cordial had restored the proper balance to my blood sugar levels.

“Now you sound like me!” Emily said. “Here, nourish thyself with this pickled onion.”

***

At the heart of Fisher’s essay on Sebald was a yearning for some deeper engagement with the eeriness of the landscapes of Suffolk, rather than a withdrawal into interior reflection or digressions on other places and times. The line of thought had led Fisher to his own beautiful work about the coast but it didn’t do justice to Sebald’s writing. If, as criticism, it feels impatient, it's nevertheless illuminating and generative in a deeper creative sense. The battle was over the meaning of travel writing, in one sense, which, at its best, contains openness to encounters between the alien and the local rather than dwelling in lopsided exclusiveness on either side of this polarity. Fisher’s frustration, seen in a more charitable light, derived from his deep care over places that contained wonders which had been neglected and abused. Sebald, viewed from this angle, was too lost in himself to really see the world around him, the lens was not so much wrapped in gauze as closed with a watertight plastic cap. He’d brought Europa with him on his shoulders (in a way the writer attempted to deflect with multiple layers of irony from its unavoidable pretentiousness or profundity, depending on your point of view).This weight proved so heavy that he sometimes forgot to look up and look around him.

Part of Fisher’s disappointment stems from the event of the film screening itself, which had been part of a symposium entitled “Towards Re-enchantment.” The Rings of Saturn follows another direction entirely:

But Sebald’s books fit only awkwardly into a discussion of place and enchantment—his work is more about displacement and disenchantment. In [Gee’s film] Patience (After Sebald), the artist Tacita Dean observes that only children have a real sense of home; adults are always aware of the transitoriness of their dwelling-place—none more so than Sebald, a German writer who spent most of his life in Norfolk.

Fisher, by contrast, wants Sebald to see Suffolk as he sees it. He writes:

The first time I saw Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker—when it was broadcast by Channel 4 in the early 1980s—I was reminded of the Suffolk landscapes where I had holidayed as a child. The overgrown pillboxes, the squat Martello towers, the rusting groynes that resembled gravestones: they all added up to a ready-made science-fiction scene. [...] When I read The Rings of Saturn, I was hoping that it would be an exploration of these eerily numinous spaces. Yet what I found was something rather different: a book that, it seemed to me at least, morosely trudged through the Suffolk spaces without really looking at them. 

He hints further about what subjects he would cover later in The Weird and the Eerie and in his audio contribution to On Vanishing Land, by describing images from Gee’s film such as “the heathland over which you can walk for miles without seeing a soul; the crumbling cliffs of the lost city of Dunwich; the enigma of Orford Ness.”

Sebald is perhaps not so much disenchanted as he is depressed, liable to fall into circles of repetition haunted by the past and spirals of vertigo that pull one down beneath the surface of the world, disabling perception and dwelling within a psyche beyond the pleasure principle. Fisher, perhaps, recognizes this gravitational pull as a mortal threat, to which he, in his writing, refuses to succumb. Sebald’s endless melancholy raises his hackles - and maybe also scares him a little bit? He chose instead to be haunted by the future, in particular the idea of lost futures that are endemic to science fiction, whereby the possibilities for alternative ways of life impinge on the present, even in works created in the past. 

Tarkovsky, in some ways a complex reactionary whose film is a parable about faith, provides an opening, in Fisher’s imagination, for reconnection with the otherworldliness of Suffolk by proposing that one must believe in something, if only in the power of belief in belief itself (whether in Christ or communism, one might say). Belief in a future was necessary, in Fisher’s view, to break the logjam of the forces of pessimism, cynicism, systems analysis, and managerial operationalism—capitalist realism, neoliberalism, name your preferred term - that the ruling class had embraced in the 1980s and 1990s and which in the 21st century remained active as a zombie ideology. This was a system in which nobody believed and yet regarding which nobody had generated any really compelling or even plausible alternatives (beyond warmed over fake pasts offered by authoritarian mutations of religious life or obsolete versions of a vanished liberal humanist consensus). Fisher's extraordinary countercultural vision of “acid communism” had not been articulated fully before his death. It was a pleasing idea to think that he could help us even from beyond. As for myself, I had no clue about a way of life to recommend to others, so I would continue writing about going nowhere.

“But mourning cannot go on forever,” Emily said. “Or - what I mean is, is that it shouldn’t.”

“Oh, shit,” I said, recognizing the signs of this greater collective condition of paralysis in myself. But I was smiling, sheepishly, and so was she, in mild triumph.

“Now read me the final lines of The Rings of Saturn,” she said. “About mourning and traveling and all that stuff we’ve been talking about. It’s all in there.”

“...it was customary, in a home where there had been a death, to drape black mourning ribbons over all the mirrors…”

“That’s the stuff.”

“...and all the canvases depicting landscapes…”

“See?”

“...or people…”

“Ha!”

“...or the fruits of the field, so that the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of the land now being lost for ever.”

“Any questions, comments, concerns, or criticisms?” Emily said.

***

To get to grips with Fisher’s impatience with Sebald, it’s also probably necessary to uncover all the mirrors, so to speak, and to absorb at skin level just how deeply he loved Suffolk. “He didn’t grow up in Suffolk, he grew up in Leicestershire, but Mark’s favourite place was here,” Fisher’s widow Zoe reported to the Ipswich Star some months after his death. “Mark’s dream was to live in Felixstowe. A huge part of being away from London was about being able to work from home and be supported by the landscape and go on walks.” (Note - 7) Rereading this passage during the pandemic hurt in a different way, since it made me wonder if lockdown might have provided him with his wish. When Fisher reported that Mabey “felt as if a very close friend had been belittled” when reading Sebald, Fisher expressed something close to his own view. Zoe’s brilliant way of phrasing how Fisher felt “supported by the landscape” goes to the root of things insofar as Suffolk was a help and a friend. This is the clear sense that one gets from the text of On Vanishing Land: Chapter One, with its extraordinary invocation of Felixstowe and its expression of a “half-aware affinity” with the “spiny tenacity of coastal plants” in the area around Cobbald’s Point, Landguard, and environs, “an affinity with beings who are living on almost nothing” amidst the ghosts of disused piers, military exercises involving explosives shot into the ocean, and the contemporary “nerve-ganglion of capitalism” at the Felixstowe Container Terminal. “What is out there is capitalism, the latest form of capitulation, whatever you call it.” But these forces, with their “reality-blocking addictions,” do not have the final word. Appreciations of BBC adaptations of M. R. James’s ghost stories set in the area, and of Brian Eno’s On Land do have this effect, however, along with the idea of “an incursion from the unknown” that Fisher relates to Eno’s ambient music.

What I missed on my first few listens to On Vanishing Land is that the project’s resistance to individualism goes all the way down to the artists’ use of pronouns. It’s not an “I” (like Sebald’s narrator) or even a “we” that goes forth on these excursions with Fisher and Barton, it’s a “they.” This “they” remains ambiguous and mysterious, part of the incursions of the unknown, perhaps. This “they” might be a “me” who is also multiple. “They” also might invoke how Fisher carries Eno within him. “They” could be the writer and the musician who collaborated on this project, viewed from a distanced perspective. This is the gloss given by Fisher in The Weird and the Eerie, which uses a “we” to describe his coastal walks with Barton: “We were supposed to be scouting locations for another project, but the landscape demanded to be engaged with on its own terms” (76). Fisher’s account of the eerie here threads together two fascinating “incursions of the unknown” that, at first glance, seem utterly unrelated, the Container Terminal and Sutton Hoo. The port is “the eerie underside of contemporary capital’s mundane gloss,” in particular its mechanized sounds devoid of human noise (77). Sutton Hoo, with its mysterious burial ship laden with Anglo-Saxon jewelry, represents the double eeriness of a “gap in knowledge” as well as a “desolate, atmospheric, solitary” site (77). These two containers laden with treasure on the shores of Suffolk make for an odd yet fitting contrast illuminating Fisher’s concept of the eerie as one marked by an absence where something should be.

Fisher’s quasi-travel narrative in The Weird and the Eerie moves rapidly from Felixstowe to Woodbridge before shifting scenes to Eno’s upbringing in the area and his recordings referencing the area for On Land (after which On Vanishing Land is obviously modeled). In his notes on Eno, and in On Vanishing Land, Fisher pursues the mode of critical writing that blends “a kind of modernist travelogue [...] that would do justice to the Suffolk landscape,” which he’d called for in his critique of Sebald. It also combines well with his intriguing claim in Ghosts of My Life that the “most productive way of reading the ‘personal is political’ is to interpret it as saying: the personal is impersonal (28).” That is another possible reading of the use of “they” rather than “I” or “we.” What Fisher admires about Eno’s album is that it lacks “psychological interiority” and instead focuses on “suggestions of nonorganic sentience” in its evocations of the landscape and its blend of electronic and natural sounds (80). 

Discarding the individual, rather than the personal, makes the personal impersonal, one might suggest. This idea invokes an almost Buddhist form of emptiness around the conventional boundaries of the self, in a process that we might relate to the erosion of the boundaries of the coast of Suffolk, at the littoral level of the “self” of East Anglia, in particular those places between the land and the sea which, it is commonly held, nobody can own. Fisher remarks of Eno:

There is no doubt a sense of solitude, a withdrawal from the hubbub of banal sociality in On Land but this emerges as a precondition for openness to the outside, where the outside designates, at one level, a radically depastoralised nature, and, at the outer limits, a different, heightened encounter with the Real. (80)

This feeling also represents a recognizable release from depression that is not religious per se but is grounded in contact with absences that should be there—ghosts or aliens, as it were, understood perhaps as alternate versions of ourselves, past and future. As the sci-fi genre cliche has it, we are not alone. There’s a they that’s I and we and them combined, where selfishness and greed dissolves at the limits of the self in its encounter with the shoreline of things, and we want to live again, if we’re lucky. Fisher puts things more enigmatically vis-a-vis Eno, remarking that for him it suggests “an outside that—pulsing beyond the confines of the mundane—is achingly alluring even as it is disconcertingly alien” (81). All of this means going outside (in a figurative sense) in ways that Sebald, in his obsessive interiority and endlessly melancholy grieving of history, isn’t ready to countenance.

There’s yet another “they” (one among many) that’s worth considering, that of beloved friends or partners who might keep one another company in their shared joy and distress, walking the coast arm in arm or side by side. Here, too, Sebald, with his mocking simulation of the first-person travelogue, does not tread, unless his relationship with his narrator might be considered an act of multiplication of selves. He’s not always solitary and his encounters with people inform his travels but he remains so deeply buried in his thoughts that he’s always alone in a meaningful sense. I think Fisher fought against what he believed was the pull of despair in Sebald’s work. That he lost didn’t alter the necessity of his resistance.

There we’d found ourselves on this lost day out, at Dunwich Heath, which commanded the Sizewell nuclear power sites to the south, where one power station was slated for demolition (projected target date, 2098, according to one web site), another reactor (the nuclear “island” at Sizewell B) remains in operation, and a third station (Sizewell C) is in the process of licensing and fundraising. Emily and I both wanted to keep going, and trek all the way to Felixstowe, but it was already late in the afternoon, and Google Maps declared that we had nearly ten miles and around three and half hours left to return to our hotel.

“Would you mind carrying me back?” I asked, gnawing on a Cornetto.

We walked down to the beach and had a look. It seemed safe enough, in terms of the tides, to ignore the map entirely and instead shamble through the stones and sand north along the shore the entire way. The map didn’t understand what we wanted to do and kept rerouting us inland, away from the shoreline that. In a final nod to Sebald, the phone signal shifted suddenly at certain points on that trip back to Southwold, welcoming me to The Netherlands, where I wasn’t. The Southwold Lighthouse would guide us home, its growing size bringing us good cheer. It was time to stop speaking and just listen to Emily’s voice and her silences, the subtleties of the waves, the surf, and the wind, walking hand in hand at some points and drifting away into our own private orbits at others. Some places exist in the world where there’s nothing to do but breathe and contemplate time. We’d left the routes of Sebald and Fisher behind, and now it was just us and the beach, with nothing marked on the map until the holiday park, and, a ways beyond that, Dunwich Beach. When we reached the spot where, earlier in the day, we’d looked down at the ocean from the cliffs at the “last grave,” I pointed out the place to Emily. I pressed play on the final track of Eno’s album, and “Dunwich Beach, 1960” played, as loud as I could make it, while we passed through his territory, paying our respects.

“I wonder why you put up with me,” I said to Emily.

Eno’s notes on the 1986 release of On Land connected his creative process to an attempt at evoking memories while at the same time conjuring alternate timelines. His liner notes sound like they were co-authored by some mediating spirit:

What qualified a piece for inclusion on the record was that it took me somewhere, but this might be somewhere that I'd never been before, or somewhere I'd only imagined going to. Lantern Marsh, for example, is a place only a few miles from where I grew up in East Anglia, but my experience of it derives not from having visited it (although I almost certainly did) but from having subsequently seen it on a map and imagining where and what it might be. We feel affinities not only with the past, but also with the futures that didn't materialize, and with the other variations of the present that we suspect run parallel to the one we have agreed to live in. The choice of sonic elements in these places arose less from listening to music than from listening to the world in a musical way. (Note - 8)

Weren’t all of us trying out something similar, each in our own way? Emily had her own approach—she wrote historical fiction and science fiction, two ways of approaching time that seemed to me both more noble and more difficult than my own essays and criticism. The date on Eno’s Dunwich track placed the artist there as a twelve-year-old, suggesting some encounter of importance that might have happened here on the cusp of a postwar adolescence. Now, nearly four decades later, this future that didn’t materialize took the form of listening to the world in a musical way. It’s 1960. It’s 2019. It’s 1982. It’s 2021. For Sebald’s solitary games of patience it might be possible to exchange Eno’s collaborative method of Oblique Strategies (designed with Peter Schmidt), notecards with messages designed to break through creative and personal obstacles. Later, I dialed one up randomly on my phone: QUESTION THE HEROIC APPROACH (122). And then another: WHAT MISTAKES DID YOU MAKE LAST TIME? (90). And finally: JUST CARRY ON (81).

1. Compare the narrator’s chronologically impossible ‘meeting’ with Elizabeth Stuart, The Winter Queen of Bohemia (1596-1662), in Vertigo (translated by Michael Hulse, 254-6), which occurs just after the culminating chapter concerning his confrontation with his family’s and his home town’s embrace of National Socialism. In these strange pockets of time, the narrator is able to travel “vertically” in time in  tandem with his “horizontal” travels in space.

2. Mark Fisher, “Patience (After Sebald): under the sign of Saturn,” Sight & Sound (April, 2011,https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/patience-after-sebald-under-sign-saturn). The essay is also included in Ghosts of My Life as “Postmodern Antiques,” 202-207.

3. Micah Uetricht, “The Beginning of the End of Capitalist Realism,” Jacobin (30 January 2019, https://jacobinmag.com/2019/01/capitalist-realism-mark-fisher-k-punk-depression). 

4. Eliot, T. S., The Waste Land (1922, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land).

5. T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in Four Quartets (1936), 3.

6. Having already sorely tried the patience of the reader with these various digressions, I probably should not add more here about Grass’s interest in Melencolia I in From the Diary of a Snail, Hildesheimer’s meditations on Hamlet’s father in Tynset, and Fisher’s inheritance and critique of Jacques Derrida, as well as Derrida’s own notes on Hamlet, in Specters of Marx. Suffice to say that many ghosts are pouring out of these texts.

7. Adam Howlett, “Renowned writer and K-Punk blogger Mark Fisher from Felixstowe took own life after battle with depression” (Ipswich Star, July 18, 2017).

8. The text is available at the enoweb site: http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/onland-txt.html. 

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J. M. Tyree works as an editor at New England Review and teaches at VCUarts. His coauthored books include Our Secret Life in the Movies (with poet Michael McGriff, from A Strange Object and Deep Vellum), an NPR Best Books selection.