u/charlesportishead

I don’t have the book in front of me but I was always struck by Joe Chip’s loyalty to Runciter.

First, Runciter recognizes that predators are necessary for his operation. The psis are good for business. He has zero incentive to fix the problem; in fact, their sudden disappearance (great for humanity, bad for business) is the catalyst for his visit to Ella. While there, she attempts to disclose something of divinity to him at which point he abruptly switches the subject to the worldly concern that totally preoccupied him. This to a dead woman on the verge of rebirth. That life continues beyond death, and not just in the cryo-bardo-whatever, is small potatoes to a man with money on the mind. Incidentally, the same thing happens with Pat. After demonstrating her power, some of Runciter’s ‘Associates’ are understandably given to metaphysical speculation. Chip says something like, ‘Yep, that’s Pat’ putting an end to further discussion. Again and again the miraculous is ignored for the mundane.

Second, his employees are largely disgruntled. I can’t remember the exact figures but he secures somewhere in the order of billions of dollars from Mick’s agent while paying his employees a pittance to undertake a mission from which they very well might not return. He doesn’t even seem too concerned about his lapdog, Joe Chip. What is the general economy like in this world? Pat ostensibly repaired telephone lines for better wages, but that was on a kibbutz.

Runciter is a vicious profiteer, but what were Mick and Stanton really up to? I assume they wanted to destroy their chief rivals so that Stanton could freely employ Hollis’ psis to gather information for future speculative investments. Presumably, Mick and Stanton would then control the world.

And even less relatedly, when Pat is reordering the past, where is she in time? While she is authoring, is she moving forward in time? I got the sense that she was evil, certainly, but also that she was ancient. That she had lived many and perhaps all possible lives and emerged utterly corrupted, never tired of playing. Did she fail to react in time to the explosion? Or was she compelled by sheer curiosity to experience the freshness of death?

The Dog of the South is, in my opinion, the finest novel ever written. It’s a frequent favorite among Portisheads and there’s a laugh a minute, particularly at Midge’s expense. But Ray is more than a hapless foil, and his self-hatred is unjustified, for he has the spark.

For those of us fortunate enough to live among them, there is no denying the loathsomeness of the midge; the slightest hint of their presence would send anyone running. So it goes with Ray. He is pedantic in the extreme. He owns sixty-six lineal feet of military history. He loathes fiction. He lives with his wife at his father’s expense. He is stingy in the extreme. He is a failed journalist. He is a permanent undergrad. He is vanilla. Though he has much to share, he is barely capable of getting in a word edgewise except for one notable occasion when he is approaching blackout. He is often spoken over and summarily dismissed. He does not allow his wife to play music after nine. She rebuffs his weekly embraces.

And yet he has powers of observation in the extreme. He knows that he is the cause of his wife’s affair. He is not bitter. He is not Dupree, whose ‘idleness and solitude led to these dramatics: an ordinary turd indulging himself as the chief of sinners.’ He is interested in almost everything that is real, and would gladly expatiate on the Civil War, or the constellations, or the tectonic formations, were he not surrounded by swine. He notices and listens and remembers. He observes: ‘I ordered a glass of beer and arranged my coins before me on the bar in columns according to value. When the beer came, I dipped a finger in it and wet down each corner of the paper napkin to anchor it, so it would not come up with the mug each time and make me appear ridiculous. I drank from the side of the mug that a left handed person would use, in the belief that fewer mouths had been on that side. That is also my policy with cups, any vessel with a handle, although you can usually count on cups getting a more thorough washing than bar glasses. A quick slosh here and there and those babies are right back on the shelf!’

He writes an entire novel, non-fiction, to give voice to people that nobody cares about or finds remarkable save he.

Unfortunately, the only place where I see Portis discussed is on Goodreads, where people seem to miss the point of his novels entirely. Midge is dismissed as a fool at best and redneck at worst; he who owns sixty-six lineal feet of military history, for God’s sake! Midge is remarkably tolerant given the situation (his wife absconding with her ex-husband), and largely takes responsibility for the affair. We learn that he is incapable of love (‘I had read things and heard many songs about people being poleaxed by love and brought quivering to their knees and I thought it was just something people said.’ - what a fucking sentence!), and that his mother died when he was young. When his wife ultimately leaves him, he accepts it with a sad, dignified grace. It is a mistake to believe that he is indifferent. He both knows and accepts who he is. And through all of his defeats he retains an interest in the people, places and things of this world.

Portis writes sentences that nobody else can; I dare not quote further, such are his riches. The Dog of South is a supremely unaffected, subtle, hilarious, and sad novel. He captures something of the reality of what it is like to be an American for whom conventional victory is unattainable but puny victory remains. He captures something of the abounding obsessiveness driving some to worship, others to apathy, and others still to the notion that it is what it means to be. To see Portis dismissed as a humorist; or worse, a ‘Southern writer’ (how unbelievably condescending) pains me. So it goes.

In the dog days of August 1992, Sebald set out on a walk across Suffolk hoping to dispel a feeling of unease accompanying the conclusion of a long stint of work. Under the influence of the Dog Star, he finds himself brooding on the ‘traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place.’ One year later, he finds himself totally immobilized, lying uneasily in a hospital bed across from a window shrouded by black netting (to what end? to prevent jumping?) opening on a  monotonous blue sky. He fears that the world has been ‘shrunk once and for all to a single, blind, insensate spot.’ And what is the world other than time, monument, things preserved, things obscured, and the perspective of he who levels his gaze and cleaves to all that is seen? Some things pass to memory but most lie forgotten like the ruins once serving some inscrutable purpose.

Gazing out of the inhospitable window draped with black pall (I take liberty here), he witnesses a maze of buildings and stone and tenebrous multi-story carparks; where are the people? Emerging from the fog of wonderful influence of painkillers coursing through him, likened to Thomas Browne’s Great London Fog of 1674, or to the mist that is said to rise from a freshly dissected corpse, he spots a vapor trail but not the plane (nor the passengers) which, he offhandedly remarks, ‘marked the beginning of a fissure that has since riven my life.’ In classic Sebald fashion, no explanation is given. What was it that tore at him so? Was it the fear of being slowly subsumed? And if so, by what? By our creations, by time, by oblivion itself? Perhaps his thought cannot be made explicit. Perhaps it is of ‘the invisibility and intangibility of that which moves us,’ a preoccupation shared by Thomas Browne.

For Browne, writes Sebald, the world is a shadow in which the totality of perception is ‘no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance… We study the order of things, says Browne, but we cannot grasp their innermost essence. And because it is so, **it befits our philosophy to be writ small, using the shorthand and contracted forms of transient Nature, which alone are a reflection of eternity.’** It befit Rings to be writ small – while I cannot accept that destruction is its innermost essence, nor can I positively nor concisely state what it might be. Sebald accepts Browne’s premise, and offers neither solution nor prescription; his anecdotes often lead one to muse on the perpetually changing, overlapping, often grotesque aspect of order. Like Borges, who famously translated Browne for his own amusement, Browne and Sebald are obsessed with transience, symbolized by Borges’ description of Baldanders (translated as Soon-Another), who represents ‘the endless mutations of Nature, which go beyond any rational limit…’ a limitlessness that disturbed Browne, who took it upon himself to delimit the real from the chimerical. Sebald does not shy from the imaginary, representing as he does the ‘…continuous process of consuming and being consumed, \[in which\] nothing endures…’ so that it must be created. Such is Sebald’s task, whose knowledge of which confines him to the hospital bed wherein he imagines the novel.

I return for a moment to Sebald’s ‘single, blind, insensate spot’ symbolized by the hospital window obscured by the black netting. I can’t help but see a book, the great flattener of memory. In Rings, Sebald is free to regale, recall, embellish and invent as he so chooses. The novel is a tiny aperture opening onto a too-broad sky that can only be hinted at discursively; any attempt to distill it, as I attempt, is folly. Sebald is far from the first to comment on the futility of preservation, or the first to suggest its essentiality. Considering the burial urns which have survived the centuries only three meters below the turmoil of sword and plowshare that constitute the history of all lands, Sebald, through Browne, catalogues many wondrous things. It is a mystery, and perhaps a miracle, that anything survives at all, even for a day.

‘… how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Orisis in the Dog Star.’

The survival of these artifacts is, to Browne, analogous to the soul’s indestructibility (if not the transmigration so frequently observed in moths and caterpillars; a transmigration sought for by our cocooned author at the novels’ beginning). Again I circle back, for the final time, God willing, to the hospital bed and the window: the single, blind, insensate spot. Sebald hazily gropes through the fog for the book to be born. Considering Suffolk, he is called to act as psychopomp. But before leading us up sprawling hill, down dale; through once-prosperous towns and forlorn coasts, he reflects on the memory of two estimable colleagues: Michael Parkinson and Janine Dakyns. Sebald’s Parkinson; academic, bachelor and frugal to the point of eccentricity, ‘troubled \[by\] the dire responsibility of performing his duties under increasingly adverse conditions… I marveled at the degree of dedication he always brought to his work, that in his own way, he had found happiness, in a modest form scarcely conceivable nowadays.’  What happiness had he found? Parkinson’s work is surely entombed in some inaccessible East Anglian mausoleum. The work itself, the attempt to preserve Ramuz’ work, the solitary joy of contemplation, was this the source of his happiness? And of Janine Dakyns, Sebald writes that she was a scholar who ‘had taken an intense personal interest in the scruples which dogged Flaubert’s writing, that fear of the false which kept him confined to his couch for weeks or months… Janine mentioned that the source of Flaubert’s scruples was to be found in the relentless spread of **stupidity** which he had observed everywhere… as if one were sinking in sand… Sand conquered all… vast clouds drifted through Flaubert’s dreams by day and by night… In a grain of sand in the hem of Emma Bovary’s winter gown, said Janine, Flaubert saw the whole of the Sahara.’ And against the relentless spread, Janine constructed a mountain of papers, a bulwark against the conquering sands, ‘the apparent chaos surrounding her represented in reality a perfect kind of order, or an order which at least tended towards perfection.’ Janine and Michael apparently enjoyed a friendship whose intensity and innocence is rarely seen outside of those belonging to children. Michael died at 47 of an apparent heart attack and Janine was soon after ravaged by disease. Here, in memory which would come to form the opening chapter of The Rings of Saturn, these relatively obscure academics are preserved just as Patroclus’ purple cloth in Browne’s urn. Michael and Janine are dead, their works unknown to all save the most diligent academics, but their devotion and the generosity of their spirit are preserved for as long as Sebald remains read. Their memory offers those of us who find ourselves perplexed by ‘the only serious philosophical problem’ (ugh) – how to spend our days - firm ground to stand on. Here I recall, as Sebald will later, Borges’ ‘Quevedien’ translation of Urn Burial, written in total obscurity, as the known world is consumed by Tlon. What is the end to he? To me?

Sebald leaves us at the close of the first chapter with a single word, near the end of the final sentence, *transmigration.* Immobilized in his hospital bed, he settles on his next novel. Is he the same man as the one who walked Suffolk? Who will he become in the consumption of his greatest novel? As we consume, so will we be consumed. Nothing endures. All our works and days are doomed to memory until they too vanish without a trace. And yet there is some small hope that something long-buried may once again be excavated amidst the all-conquering sands.