Conjuring the Myth in a Holographic Flash:

A Response to Two Quests:

W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and Peter O’Leary’s The Sampo

I’ve often thought of responding in writing to Austerlitz. I’ve dreamed of conjuring before a mirror—the page—what eludes me each time I read it. I’m attracted to the book like a moth to a flame, and like the moth flickering in the flame’s light I leave “merely phantom traces created by the sluggish reaction of the human eye, appearing to see a certain afterglow in the place from which the insect itself, shining for only the fraction of a second in the lamplight, had already gone.”1 Like the elusive nature of the narrative itself, I had each time already gone. Any tangible response, aside from my light penciling in the margins of the beloved book, has been repeatedly lost to me since I first drew down the hardback copy from a high shelf in a lovely, if pricey, bookshop in Belfast, Maine, its cover now devotedly soiled and torn. I’ve felt similarly silenced in regard to a few other texts, my responses to which never seem to get written. But perhaps they do—get written—write themselves—in the margins—unwittingly—somehow—like a moth’s flickering presence before a flame: whether secretly, magically inlaid in a poem or secretly, magically threaded through the devotional, palimpsestic, architectural act of reading. What’s written is marked in some kind of code for some kind of time prior to the instant of the holographic flash—when discrete, interrelated images emerge as a full-bodied tale from the developing bath, folklore requesting repurposed clothing from the alterations workshop of a descendant.

*

Architectural detail builds up in the mind of the elusive titular character. In quest of his own obscure chamber, Austerlitz, obsessed by architecture, has visions of a highly structural nature—

From time to time, and just for a split second, I saw huge halls open up, with rows of pillars and colonnades leading far into the distance, with vaults and brickwork arches bearing on them many-storied structures, with flights of stone steps, wooden stairways and ladders, all leading the eye on and on.2

Peter O’Leary was reading a dome when: “I had a holographic flash, seeing as a sudden whole a poem I could write.” The Sampo, based on the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, appeared to him in the National Museum in Helsinki while gazing at Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s frescos depicting scenes from the epic quest.3 Sometime later, images from the world of O’Leary’s tale are book bound: the particular color and texture of Väinämöinen’s felt cap; the smokehouse of Ilmarinen’s woolen vest in the snow-covered forest; tears larger than cranberries, larger even than a swallow’s head, shed for an instrument of pike bones blown back into the sea; Louhi’s remaining talon clinging to a remnant; the wizard on his workbench finally fashioning his lasting harp of birch. It occurs to me on a second or third reading of The Sampo that the folklore upon which the poem is based is drawn into the foreground. Too obvious to mention? What I mean is that the original body of Finnish lore is conjured again and again to the fore in the re-telling, the selfsame myth never not becoming. (Austerlitz is stuck on a painting in the foreground of which a woman in canary-yellow is never not falling.) O’Leary makes frequent use of repetition to (p)re-figure the beloved lore: “I feel like the whole poem is wrought in terms of repeated phrasing, repeated emphasis, repeated magic.”4 A holographic interference pattern could mean foreseeing the whole of the story from its Finnish beginnings to O’Leary’s, a descendant’s, English quest. (The poet notes in the Afterword to his poem that he is Finnish on his mother’s side; the book is dedicated to his mother; his ancestors settled in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; and in a poem: “It’s my Finno-Ugric roots that ensnare my limbic system in shamanism.”5) Mythical characters are conjured to their actions, repeatedly, with a full stop. The effect is highly anticipatory. Names are highly anticipatory. And Väinämöinen. And Ilmarinen. And Lemminkainen. They’re a source of wizardry. If we’re hearing them for the first time, the poet is sure to anchor us in the name of lore, his emphasis on the well-wrought epithet. Epic smith. Wizard singer. Rune lord…

Jacques Austerlitz learned his own name late. For all he knew, as Dafydd Elias, he was Welsh.

*

Bala, the little country town in Wales where Austerlitz was raised after fleeing from the Shoah on a kindertransport. A book already strange makes my hometown even stranger. I, too, was raised as a Jew in Bala—Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, that is, settled by Welsh Quakers in the 1680s and named for the town and village from which they came. Land of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape people—Bala, where Austerlitz and I were raised. What to say about the obscure chambers of those four familiar letters on the tongue? My ancestors were not indigenous to the place overwritten Bala Cynwyd; neither were they Welsh. Half of me arrived from Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Germany on my mother’s side, and half of me from Jewish communities in Poland and Galicia on my father’s side. Oddly, I’ve inherited my maternal grandmother’s book of Welsh grammar, which I’ve lately taken to carrying around—it fits in the large pocket of the brown canvas coat I wear for foraging mushrooms or for sitting in a cottonwood while I watch my husband fish the river, a few flies fixed for convenience and flair to the felt of his hat, wild herbs and owl feathers furnishing his hatband—the magic cast. I don’t study the Welsh myself while attempting to blend into the wet spring earth: it’s just the feel of the book in my pocket, the frontispiece of her signature and the year 1969, the inscrutability of her, a few matrilineal epithets furnishing my otherwise empty pocket. An autodidact, a linguist, my Christian grandmother studied several languages, including Welsh and Hebrew. I’ve also inherited her aleph-bet chart with her tiny meticulous notes scrawled beneath each letter. The dark, obscure chamber of her basement apartment was piled high with books. The way I remember her, she barely surfaced in the midst of all those books.

Oddly familiar moments in Austerlitz like: “throughout my childhood in Bala”; or “It is a fact that through all the years I spent at the manse in Bala I never shook off the feeling that something very obvious, very manifest in itself was hidden from me.” Austerlitz is referring to his hidden Jewish identity, his lost parents, his home country, his nearly extinguished memories. For a large portion of his life he doesn’t remember he’s a Jew. So Austerlitz wanders, and wanders, and conjures endless wandering, the titular character feeling almost folkloric to himself.

*

Reading several books at once, the reader situates herself in a curious constellation of languages. By “at once” I mean both side-by-side and along an extended holographic flash of “mythical foretime.”6 Along, too, a flash of latetime, when stories seemingly disconnected slowly-suddenly surface wholly bound. When I encounter a beloved book, such as The Sampo, such as Austerlitz, I long to respond, to craft an arc or dome of my reading, to develop some many-storied thing in my writing. It seems to me utterly bizarre that I wake every morning to myself as myself. That for awhile we retain some composite sense of identity, appearing to see ourselves in a sort of afterglow in a place from which we’d already gone. Somehow we remember; in a holographic flash we remember, a moth or a myth in light of the book. O’Leary wrote his as frescos imagined off a dome in Finland. Austerlitz shifted photographs around on a table in England for some clue. What are the heroes of the Finnish epic ultimately after? The highly desirable yet rather unknowable Sampo. How figure the titular character? By repeating its elusive identity to itself. For this the poet conjures and conjectures a refrain: “Its intricate, interlocking lid. Its image of the starry sphere. Its mirror of the underworld channels. Its forest of root systems. Its agarical jewels.” The adventure hinges on folkloric guesswork; the foreknowledge of the wizard and the workings of the smith are rhythmically twined. There is always foreknowledge and “there is only the work,” says the poet.7 America is a many-storied thing. America is a myth. Bala is the land of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation. Bala is where I sometimes imagine I am from. Oddly familiar four fraught letters on the tongue. Cynwyd pronounced, at least in Pennsylvania, “kin-wood.” Sebald’s images appear in uncanny fashion as kin to uncanny text, “in an order depending on their family resemblances.”9 O’Leary’s ancestral epic begins by conjuring and connoting kinships in a mycelium-threaded, richly regenerative forest: “To forge. To forage. To forge. The boreal forest—” Seeing as a sudden whole a poem I could write.

Endnotes

1 W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, translated by Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 93.

2 Ibid, p. 135.

3 “Interview with Peter O’Leary on The Sampo” in Stray Horn. April 3, 2016. http://stray-horn.blogspot.com/2016/04/noticing-6-interview-with-peter-oleary.html?m=1

4 Ibid.

5 Peter O’Leary, “What Could Be More Valuable than the Facts?” in Luminous Epinoia (Cultural Society, 2010), p. 18.

6 “Interview with Peter O’Leary on The Sampo.”

7 William Bronk, “Of Poetry” in Bursts of Light: The Collected Later Poems, edited by David Clippinger (Greenfield: Talisman House, 2012), p. 54.

9 Austerlitz, p. 119.