What I think is interesting is not so much the form of the dream or what happens in it, but in the quality of mind. Sometimes I know I’m dreaming, or maybe I have a sense that something’s just not right here, but it was only in the daytime recollection that I realized it had been a dream. At the outset, I was worried about other cars and the trouble I’d be in if I hit any of them. Then I feared for my own, still new, car and the damage that it would sustain. As I went over the hill, I had to shift from fearing that my car might get wrecked to thinking about my own safety, and that I might not get out in one piece. At that point, all I could do was hold on to something and hope that I wouldn’t get crushed, thrown out or die in a fireball—oh, wait, that only happens in the movies… doesn’t it? Even in a dream it is hard to appreciate the seriousness of a changing situation and realize the extent of the danger that one might be in.

My mother once told me about her recurring dream, in which she was always trying to get away from something that was chasing her. She would be running desperately, as fast as she could, but the nameless terror would always catch up with her. Just as she thought it would get her, she would suddenly be able to rise up and fly. Then, when she thought she was getting ahead of her pursuer, she’d lose altitude and drift back down to the ground and the thing would start gaining on her again. She told me that she would wake in a cold sweat with her heart pounding. Given the traumatic nature of her particular childhood experiences, this dream made perfect sense, to her and me both.

When I was younger I had falling dreams where, for who knows what reason, I’d be climbing up some impossible structure. It might start out to be quite simple but would get increasingly complicated, until I came to an overhang or barrier that would require me to let go of something. Try as I might to stay glued to the outside of a building—it was usually some piece of architecture—the fall would be inevitable and I would wake up with a thump as though I really had hit the ground.

I knew the night when I had my last falling dream. I didn’t fall. Instead, as I was climbing up the outside of the banisters and railings of an internal wooden staircase, at the point where I would know that my efforts were futile and that all I could do was fall, a thin ribbon like the plastic Hotwheels toy car racer tracks we built in my childhood, appeared at the top of the staircase to nowhere. Instead of falling from its flexing, unstable walkway, I grabbed hold as I toppled and swung underneath it, holding on with my hands and wrapping my legs over it. Thus I progressed across the chasm to the solid landing on the other side. Even in my dream, although I didn’t know I was asleep, I knew I would now never fall again, (although I did once or twice have a falling up dream.)

I conquered my waking feelings of hopeless futility in that sleeping decision not to let the same thing happen again and again. Some twenty-five years later, I think of myself as being quite a capable person. However, on a personal, national and global level, I feel that I am being overtaken by events that are out of my control. Perhaps this is why my anxiety takes the form of a machine that I can normally control, running amok, and taking me with it.

Austerlitz

The narrative itself wanders and it is sometimes hard for me to remember what I last read when I pick up the book again. The style of writing emulates the both the physical wandering of the character, Jacques Austerlitz, and the diffuse wandering structure of his thoughts as he relates them to the narrator. There are two voices in this book: the third person Austerlitz speaks through an un-named first person (Sebald himself perhaps) who is telling the story, and who repeats them without adding more than his own reactions. I have yet to work out what his part will be in the arc of the book; at the moment, he seems to be a device to make Austerlitz more removed and cryptic, filtered and edited as he is through another’s interpretation.

The story, if that indeed is what it is, is a series of impressions and explanations; “a kind of meditative interior monologue.” Austerlitz, retired from his teaching position, appears to be wandering, as a kind of flâneur, except that there is nothing idle about him or any suggestion that he is doing anything for the sake of a detached and indolent pleasure-seeking. Rather, he seems restlessly driven by what is not accessible in himself and a need to make sense of the world. He is not detached, he is isolated by the rift in his own history. I know generally where the book is going (in fact that is the reason why I picked it up) but I find that I have only the sketchiest sense of all that went before the part that I am reading, in the same way that one remembers only the barest skeleton of the thoughts of a week ago. I feel embedded in an all-encompassing present, where anything before now is a dubious proposition and where the uncontrollable future could go anywhere or nowhere.

This is an intensely visual book: a lot of the text is explanation of the appearance of the places that Austerlitz travels through. There are images dotted through the text, which are themselves a collection of fragments that reinforce the passage where they appear, although they are without captions that would document them as any kind of corroborating “evidence”. Most of them are photographs and I find myself wondering if Sebald collected them from left behind albums, flea-market stalls and newspaper clippings, stuffing them into a file until the time when he tipped them all out and started configuring them in groups to begin his tale. This visuality is signaled in the first chapter by four tightly cropped pairs of eyes, those of a bush-baby, an owl, and two middle-aged male humans who, with the suggestion in the text that they are painters or philosophers, I feel I recognize but can’t place.

I have just read a section where Austerlitz, through the narrator, has described the area of London around Liverpool Street Station and just like Grass, in The Flounder, he never places it in any one time but layers one over another by describing the archeological excavation of a section of once marshland that was later the bleaching fields for weavers and then the burial grounds for paupers, later to become the foundations for one of the great cathedral stations of the Victorian railway system. This interests me: the shared desire to fix human existence in its trace on the physical surfaces of place.

It is unsurprising that Austerlitz’ life’s work has been engaged in writing for a book on architecture and civilization, whose fragments never resolve themselves, perhaps because they revolve around the void in his own history (and that of twentieth-century Europe) that, in as far as I have read,  he is yet to resolve.

So, I’ve given up on The Flounder, for the moment anyway.

However, having a bit more time to myself this summer, I promised myself I would read The Time Traveler’s Wife as part of my ‘research’ for the project/lecture that is formulating itself in the back of my head. (It is related to my rescuing all sorts of normally inconsequential fragments from my dad’s house while getting it ready to sell.)

The sadness, and the joy, of the book’s narrative is the very conscious knowledge that life is finite. The manner of Henry’s death slowly unfolds to him, as he gets closer in chronological age to the time when it will overtake him. He is the time traveler, and the frequency of his visits to the young Clare (at a period of her life before she meets him) increase as though he is trying to soak up as much as he can before he goes. The joy that permeates the narrative, in tandem with a pervading sense of calamity coming, is that in spite of his knowing that he is going to have a short life, he is able to be in the moment and completely enjoy these times with her.

I forget where I read or heard it, but some philosopher said that a person could only be truly happy when he knows the time and the manner of his own death.

I can’t imagine that; my first thought is that I would not like to know–for goodness sake, it might be tomorrow. Even worse, it might be in a year’s time: not long enough to finish anything but long enough to get depressed about my own demise. However, if one could get used to the idea, I could see how there might be all sorts of things that would seem unimportant and not worth thinking about. So, perhaps I would do the best work of my life.

In the book, that terrible finality of a loved one’s death, and the numbing void that they leave behind them, is mitigated by the time travel. Henry leaves so many times, and Clare is  bereft of him so often never knowing how long he will be away, that the long absence after his death is just more of the same, although much more heavily weighted. She knows that the thread has finally unwound to its very end but she doesn’t know how much of its looping in time she will encounter along the length of her own life.

Henry tells her that he will see her again at least once; I choose to believe that his one and only reconnection with her, when she is 82, is in order to be with her when she dies. At the point where he experiences this in his own life Clare is well, he finds out that she will live a long life after him, and he is not unduly saddened because it isn’t happening yet. When she sees him, she has already lost him and has lived through that grief, and now she gets to see him again. In between is the waiting; something which was part of her relationship with him when he was alive and, consequently, the thing that maintains their relationship for her, after he is dead.

The Flounder

So, what to do now, now that I have packed up his belongings, sold his car, repaired his house and have an offer from a young (or that’s what I choose to believe) couple? His pictures and his ashes sit on his desk in my office, and that blasted book is still lying on the floor beside my bed. I have picked it up a few times and read pages, going back to try to work out where I was. The idea of re-reading it was a co-incidence of unrelated events and ideas that I thought I would sort out as I went along.

There is still a thing that endures, and that is the exploration of the existential question of what it all means, this living and dying business. It is the ineffable, and we can’t see it by looking at it directly. Like Plato’s prisoners in the cave, we have to puzzle at the shades cast on the wall.

It turned out that he had been sicker, for far longer, than any of us knew. Even the stroke, that precipitated the fall that took him into hospital, had happened four or five weeks before and was old news by then. As he had always feared, the investigation into what ailed him did not stop there. It took three weeks to get a confirmed diagnosis and then a week later–to the hour–his body gave up the struggle, although I am sure that his spirit had not.

I know that some day I will feel blessed to have been there with him when he died but for now I can only feel the trauma of witnessing.

My staunchest supporter, my mentor and my friend, I miss you.

After a dizzying rush through the Dark Ages and the early medieval period, the chapter briefly alights in the twentieth century, during the post-war re-construction Danzig/Gdansk. The narrator is watching the filming of a TV program in the restored treasure room of the Charter City Rathaus. Grass writes: “While waiting for the right electrician—and because television filming involves so many timeless interruptions—I toddled off down the stairs of history… until in the fourth decade of the seventeenth century, I saw town painter Möller’s kitchenmaid, then pregnant, coming towards me across the Long Market.”

As the Conservator talks to camera about rebuilding in the Baroque style, Grass’ time-traveling protagonist is looking at a painting from 1602 and remembering the street during the plague of the following year, when the winding sheets hung from the windows, straw burned in the streets and carts, overloaded with corpses, trundled. Then he flits back another 200 years to the end of the fourteenth century, when as a sword-maker, he went unpaid for a cross-bow ordered by an English nobleman. All the while he is seeing his women, the cooks of his story: one walking barefoot and pregnant down a snowy street with an un-plucked chicken; another, penitent among the lepers outside one of the city gates.

This dense layering of history is so much part of European culture and so familiar to me: the buildings in any town or city sink their foundations deep into the compacted remains of myriad former existences. Even in my own English home city—a recent occurrence in comparison with Rome, Athens or Istanbul—a thousand years of history are ingrained in the fabric of the city. The crazy street pattern is only slightly modified from the lanes and wharves of the medieval port which themselves follow the walls of the original fortified city, nestled in the crook of the river. One summer, I worked on an archeological dig, in the foundation hole of yet another new tower. On the site they found a leather shoe and remains of a wooden jetty, anaerobically preserved in the buried silt. On my way there I used to walk through the city center, past Mamon’s skyscrapers cynically named for the impoverished inhabitants of the pre-Reformation religious houses that once crowded the muddy banks, thinking about that once surging tidal river now piped in and paved over beneath my feet, and made sluggish by downstream lock gates.

I am fascinated by the traces, not the least because they inspire Flounderian reveries. On a trip through western Nebraska, some fifteen years ago, I was awed to see the still quite visible double tracks of the ’49-er wagon wheels, etched into the slope from the high plain plateau to the Platte basin. These grooves, made by dozens of iron-clad wooden wheels over a brief period, nonetheless still persist, reaching forward through 150 years of freeze and thaw, wind and rain, and cattle hooves. Just like the Flounder’s narrator, standing there in the prairie wind, I could almost see the dust, the panic and the strenuous effort of letting wagons with their rudimentary brakes safely down Windlass Hill.

Butt uber Land (flounder above country), Günter Grass, 1978

Ok, so Mestwina, the third cook and high priestess, killed Bishop Adalbert in the Pomorshian marshes sometime around 997CE. She cooked for him, inflaming his passions with fish soup into which seven, five or nine (depending which re-telling you refer to) pieces of amber fell from her necklace and took him to her bed. Then later, she dispatched him with a blow to the head from a cast-iron spoon; no doubt a big one. (Excuse me, I have to look up what he did to provoke this powerful statement of disapproval—ah, yes, in a righteously Christian rage, he desecrated the fish heads mounted on willow withies, sacred of Ryb, the flounder deity.)

I was thinking this morning about the intertwining, in Grass’ writing, of food, cooking, sex and death, as though they were all part of the same skein, which I suppose they are. The delectable fish soups are always studded with the creatures’ eyes; round and milky, balefull reminders of the disintegrated heads. In one of my English radio podcasts, Farming Today, an oysterman described the process of shucking. He was asked whether the freshly opened oyster was still alive when swallowed. He said that he believed that it dies when the knife separates it from the shell; I thought that this was a moot point. If one eats something that was living, I don’t think you can get squeamish about whether it is still living when it enters your body, but we do.

So I’ve started taking in home-cooked food. Fish, lots of fish, good for the brain, easily digestible and tasty. Since the first reading of The Flounder, I’ve given up eating anything with fur or feathers. Nominally, I’m a vegetarian but that doesn’t seem an exactly honest description; I got down the food chain as far as fish and there I stopped so now, if I’m going to be pedantic, I am a “avgo-lacto-pisco-vegetarian”.

The first dish I took in was blue fish stewed in tomato. This is a fish that tastes like a fish. Lovely east coast fillets thrown in the pan, face down in hot olive oil and fresh garlic then turned over onto the skin and left to simmer with chopped up fresh tomatoes. All they needed was a tiny pinch of salt and some pepper, the lid put on and the ring turned down low. Dad ate every shred. Tonight’s fish was Bourbon Salmon from the local supermarket. It comes in a reddish marinade that smells interesting when it’s cooking. I thinly sliced a Hungarian black hot pepper, that I picked while it was red (forgot they were supposed to be the black ones) and sautéd that in the hot oil first.

It’s hard to think about cooking after coming back from the hospital at 9.30 or 1opm but once I start, there’s something soothing about it, and life-affirming. We may not know what the tests are going to show but today the appetite’s good. This evening, after finding myself locked out of the house and waiting for the spare key to be brought, I set to making soup with a butternut squash I brought 300 miles, from my garden. This is a recipe from Nigella Lawson, who is my kind of cook; she calls it

Happiness Soup (from Forever Summer):

1 decent-sized butternut squash, peeled, de-seeded and diced

zest and juice of 1 (organic–who wants to eat pesticides and wax?) lemon

teaspoon of turmeric

half cup of white rice–I used Italian round rice

cup and a half of stock (my favourite is Marigold Vegetarian gluten-free)

couple of tablespoons of olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

Heat the oil and in it, soften the diced squash with the lemon zest. Add the turmeric, stock and rice, turn down the heat and simmer until the squash starts to break down and the rice is done. Season. Eat some, freeze some, reheat it later. Whatever you want, it’s very tolerant.

The Flounder

I tell people that this book taught me to cook. It taught me how to dream tastes and textures together in my mind and in my mouth. I was inspired into the kitchen by enticing descriptions of simple things like succulent golden potatoes dug from heavy black Baltic soil, peppery lamb’s tongues with broad beans, and rich fragrant soups made of cod’s heads with “the hell boiled out of them.”

But at the time the book meant more to me than that; it was also tied up with ‘seventies feminism and an expansive cartwheeling through history, pre-history, culture and the grainy, mucky stuff of life. I couldn’t decide then if Grass was acknowledging the strength and character of womankind or was actually laughing up his sleeve, getting ready to administer the coup de grace in the final pages. So I kept reading with a suspicious and watchful eye. I can’t remember if I ever decided, but the experience of reading my way through the book and cooking courageously has become sedimented in the foundation of my adult self.

So, here I am, thirty years on, at another tipping point in my life. Instead of hovering on the threshold of an unfathomable and mostly invisible future, I am fully in the midst of the pattern of my life, witnessing and attempting to help my parent transition into his uncharted next stage, whatever that may be. Life, after being very cerebrally creative for a number of years, is taking a Rabelaisian turn and becoming about a living body going about its day-to-day processes of aging.

My project, during this time, will be to re-read The Flounder and see what I think of it now, to remember my youthful ideas about life and living, and to try to find balance through these changing times.  I apologize to anyone who thinks they have found a cooking blog: I’m liable, like Grass’ prose, to wander much further afield.