Deathward We Ride, and: [Ceaseless This Wandering Epic]

147 JON THOMPSON DEATHWARD WE RIDE In Memoriam W. G. Sebald “Deathward we ride in the boat” improvising our way but the white door that opens history opens onto wetlands flooded with dreams of floods handwritten fragments from a forgotten past the lost manuscripts of simple hopes the revelation that “this happened and this happened” & then death—it’s as if the photograph of that time was overexposed but instead of sepia-yellow an unearthly pink tints the image of ruins rising barely above the water strange that the village on the coastline would be rebuilt again and again across the centuries after being swallowed up again and again the ocean that crashes onto the beach at night is terribly black but the surf is white brilliant deathly white a surging that takes itself closer and closer to the dim low white settlement in the distance 148 JON THOMPSON [CEASELESS THIS WANDERING EPIC] (Birth of a Nation) Ceaseless this wandering epic. Flickering black-and-white figures frame the collective fever dream. The smoke that clears from barren hills & burning towns is the pastoral laid to waste. What is the smoke that billows across the screen but the beginning of “the modern spectacle”? The beginning of “the ascendancy of the image” over human suffering? Innocence like a darkening sky, like a city in ruin, like the avid edge of a blade . . . O what do we want to be? All the bodies holding clasping, embracing other bodies— with the dead on the ground no longer whispering names. “So much ash to be blessed.” ...