Moving through time is a tricky business, whether you’re searching for the origins of porcelain, the evolution of a moth, or your memory. You follow ephemeral trails laid down in a grainy photograph, a frayed ticket stub, a piece of jewelry. You search family records dating back centuries; travel on foot along overgrown pathways leading nowhere; reread old letters searching for who you once were. Sometimes you sense you are getting closer, to what you are uncertain. What are you looking for? What have you lost? There’s a compulsion to keep walking, to take another airplane, to publish another book, to sit down again at the potter’s wheel, to exhibit in yet another gallery, to keep writing until you think you know how to write.
The work of both W. G. Sebald and Edmund de Waal is the result of a never-ending curiosity, steeped in years of craft, whether (for de Waal) at the potter’s wheel making porcelain vessels, or (for Sebald) pen to paper endlessly revising paragraphs. Both strike a similar chord; one of tenderness, of loss, estrangement and displacement. They know the language of heritage. They search for the truth, exploring back in time for the ones that have done the work before, paving the way—poets, troubadours, potters, actors, researchers, scientists, distant relatives: the lost ones.
De Waal’s hand-crafted sculptures are cylindrical vessels and tiles made of porcelain, marble, platinum, steel, plexiglass, silver, aluminum, gold-flecked, sometimes glass. The black or white groupings stand leaning together, as if in in conversation or solitary, in freestanding vitrines. The sophisticated simplicity feels ancient. De Waal goes inside an object to find its lineage, whether it is his own or in Imperial Chinese porcelain thousands of years old. He travels in search of porcelain’s origins to China and to his family’s ransacked home by the Nazis in Vienna. Sebald also sifts through war and exile in search of inheritance. In his novel Austerlitz, he writes, “if I am walking through the city and look into one of those quiet courtyards where nothing has changed for decades, I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion… as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them.” His books are harrowing in their consideration of trauma and loss: “lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard.” Just as de Waal writes letters to his ancestor, Count Moïse de Camondo, as to a friend, even though they have never met, an entire book of letters.
De Waal’s journey to find ancient porcelain documented in his book, The White Road, and Sebald ’s penetrating journey into herring and sugar in his novel The Rings of Saturn are both about returning to the source. In de Waal’s recent book, an Archive, he writes, “the reality is that I can’t let anything go… the archive is only a work in progress because it is an iterative conversation….” Theirs is a steady, resolute rhythm, undaunted by time or repetition, moving between worlds: Sebald’s childhood radio, “turned down very low and listened to a language I did not understand drifting in the air from a great distance.” (Austerlitz); de Waal’s inheritance of a collection of small, carved Japanese netsuke from his great uncle, that took him searching through five generations for the history of his Jewish family, making him “someone who is constantly tabulating the meaning of memory through their fingertips.” (The White Road). They share a sensibility that is melancholic, tender, and astute. A refined frequency, delicate like porcelain, fragile like the wings of a moth and the pearl-grey haze on Barmouth Bay, hovering between sea and land: “There were no contrasts, no shadows anymore, only flowing transitions with the light throbbing through them, a single blur from which only the most fleeting of visions emerged…it was the very evanescence of these visions that gave me, at the time, something like a sense of eternity.” (Austerlitz). Porcelain too is like that haze: worked too long it evaporates between your fingers, but if made by de Waal the pottery could last for centuries.
Color or absence of color is explored by both artists. De Waal is searching for white porcelain, the purest, climbing up three white hills in China. “I know the dangers of white… the pull towards something so pure, so total in its immersive possibility that you are transfigured.” (The White Book). Like Ahab’s obsession with the white whale, the elusiveness of white, “which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any other object in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds.” (Moby Dick). Melville goes on to talk about the white bear and the white shark, their “ghastly whiteness.” Is there something in white, just as there is with black, that compels de Waal to make hundreds of vessels in those colors? The ineffable white, held in your hands. White and black are not ends but openings to reveal what lies beyond. The void, a doorway, light, nighttime, shadows—they give dimension, perspective. De Waal uses both, standing in erect stillness within the vitrines. Thomas Mann writes for two hundred pages about Hans Castrop getting lost in a blizzard: “the few paths still passable were like tunnels, with snow piles man-high on both sides, forming walls like alabaster…the white darkness…” (The Magic Mountain). The terror and compulsion of white.
Sebald writes about color, the moonless night, the mysterious world of moths with names like “China Marks, Dark Porcelains, Marbled Beauties, White Plumes, Light Arches, Ghost Moths,” which Austerlitz’s Great-Uncle Alphonso provides shelter for in egg boxes. Alphonso tells Sebald that he climbed a rocky slope and saw dozens of them where underneath their wings were “oblique and wavy lines, shadows, freckles, zigzag bands, fringes and veining” like one of de Waal’s unsuccessful firings. Sebald goes on to describe the colors “moss green shot with blue, fox brown saffron, lime yellow, satiny white….” (Austerlitz). De Waal, like Sebald, is continually taking inventory, researching, following trails that sometimes are dead ends. Like Sebald describing the moths, de Waal meticulously describes porcelain. “Pinch a walnut-sized piece between thumb and forefinger until it is as thin as paper, until the whorls of your fingers emerge. Keep pinching. It feels endless. You feel it get thinner and thinner…. It feels white.” (The White Book).
De Waal, age sixty-one, born in London, has been fashioning his delicate vessels for fifty-five years, exhibiting in galleries and museums all over the world, and has written many books. Sebald, dying at fifty-seven, born in Bavaria, wrote four novels, as well as nonfiction and poetry. The two men came from displacement, war in their genes, with a penchant for inventorying death. Sebald often writes about fire, and de Waal fires his work. A fiery, silent duo, ricocheting off one another in my mind. It’s easy to become obsessed with their obsessions.
Dian Parker has been published in New Critique, Yolk, Amsterdam Review, 3:AM Magazine, Assay, The Rupture,Anomaly, Epiphany, Tiny Molecules, Event, among others, and nominated for a number of Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. She also writes about art for Observer, Art & Object, Brooklyn Rail, and other arts publications. www.dianparker.com
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