Werner Herzog: on reading and JA Baker’s The Peregrine

‘Those who read own the world. Those who immerse themselves in the internet or watch too much television lose it. Our civilisation is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.’ (Werner Herzog)

Above is Werner Herzog in conversation with Robert Harrison asserting that artists – of all kinds, writers, painters, film-makers, architects and so on – if they want to produce good art, art beyond the mediocre, should read books.

As a film-maker, Herzog says, he maybe watches only three to four films a year, but he reads incessantly. Indeed, as a writer himself, of prose and poetry, he expects that his writings will outlive his films, of which he’s made more than 50.

However, for Herzog, it’s not just that aspiring artists should read, it’s that they should read the most serious and challenging literature.

Thus, Herzog starts off talking about Livy’s account of the Second Punic War, in which Herzog identifies as one of his all-time heroes the figure of Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (Cunctator) who defeated Hannibal and, according to Herzog, saved Occidental civilisation. Despite all the ridicule and opprobrium he received for refusing to engage the North African invaders in pitched battle, suffering slanders of cowardice and hesitation, preferring instead hit-and-run, guerrilla tactics, Fabius’ steadfastness, certainty in his tactics, stubborn solitariness, disdain for demagogic opinion, appeals to Herzog, who sees making films as a similar war of attrition.

Herzog goes on to praise Virgil but not for The Aeneid, which he disparages as a nationalist tract celebrating the Julio-Claudian dynasty, but for the Georgics, Virgil’s depiction of life on a Roman country estate and the struggles of man against nature, a work Herzog admires for its knowledge of rural life and powers of observation and precision.

Herzog proceeds to talk about travelling on foot – ‘the world reveals itself to those who travel on foot’ – and his love of Hölderlin, who travelled by foot and whose poetry records his solitude and creeping insanity.

To the Fates
Grant me just one summer, powerful ones,
And just one more autumn for ripe songs,
That my heart, filled with that sweet
Music, may more willingly die within me.
The soul, denied its divine right in life,
Won’t find rest down in Hades either.
But if what is holy to me, the poem
That rests in my heart, succeeds –
Then welcome, silent world of shadows!
I’ll be content, even if it's not my own lyre
That leads me downwards. Once I’ll have
Lived like the gods, and more isn’t necessary.

But at the heart of Herzog’s discussion with Harrison is JA Baker’s The Peregrine.

Herzog says the book suggests to film-makers how they should see reality – in loneliness, enthusiasm, rapture and passion – and describes a world of poetry, dreams, ecstasy and illumination – which, Herzog says, is what films should try to convey.

There are moments, Herzog notes, ‘where you can tell that [Baker] has completely entered into the existence of a falcon. And this is what I do when I make a film: I step outside of myself into an ekstasis; in Greek, to step outside of your own body’.

Herzog maintains that The Peregrine contains the greatest prose since Joesph Conrad and writers should learn the book by heart.

‘I shall try to make plain the bloodiness of killing. Too often this has been slurred over by those who defend hawks. Flesh-eating man is in no way superior. It is so easy to love the dead. The word ‘predator’ is baggy with misuse. All birds eat living flesh at some time in their lives. Consider the cold-eyed thrush, that springy carnivore of lawns, worm stabber, basher to death of snails. We should not sentimentalise his song, and forget the killing that sustains it.’ (JA Baker, The Peregrine).

Herzog concludes his book recommendations by asserting the importance of the Poetic Edda, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain and the Warren report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy – ‘a wonderful crime story, which has a logical conclusiveness that is staggering’.

Werner Herzog, Cormac McCarthy: art, science and the end of the human race

This is a discussion from National Public Radio involving legendary film-director Werner Herzog, renowned novelist Cormac McCarthy and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss on the intersection of art and science, the origins of civilisation and the end of the human race.

 

Krauss begins the discussion by echoing Professor Richard Feynman – on whom Krauss has written a major biography Quantum Man – that ‘science takes a lot of imagination’. Its origins is the desire to know how things work. This is the breakthrough in human civilisation that returns us to the pre-Socratic philosophers, who were the first to abandon magical or supernatural explanations for natural phenomenon and sought instead rational – or scientific – causes. Their determination to sideline the role of the gods had the profoundest consequences, not only in attempts to explain natural phenomenon but also how men and women organised their societies, i.e. in the realm of politics, ethics, history and so on.

 

Imagination, of course, is also what we associate with art. Art starts with a tabula rasa, a blank canvas or a blank piece of paper on which the artist, using their imagination, then turns into a cultural artefact.

 

Thus, for Krauss art and science ask the same questions. What is our place in the cosmos? Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? If science is interested in the mystery of nature, then art, literature and music (at its best) is interested in the mystery of the human experience and the human soul. If, according to Feynman, the theoretical physicist, ‘the world is a mess of jiggling things’, then for the great artist, ‘being is chaos’ and it is on this unstable, unpredictable ground that human endeavour and human thinking takes place.

 

Krauss, Herzog and McCarthy all agree, therefore, that when we accept that the universe is an unfriendly and hostile place we are forced to confront our own insignificance. For Krauss, the scientist, following on from Richard Dawkins-inspired Atheist Bus Campaign, in which the message ‘There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy life’, was plastered on the side of London buses and driven around the capital, the realisation of our own insignificance should be a source of liberation, enabling us to appreciate the universe and imagine it not just as it is but as it might be for the betterment of humanity.

 

However, the artist McCarthy isn’t so keen on these optimistic views. By all means, take god out of natural and human affairs, but what remains won’t be enlightenment and happiness but tragedy. Indeed, is this not what we were taught 2500 years ago?

 

As McCarthy says: ‘If you look at classical literature, the core of literature is the idea of tragedy. You don’t really learn much from the good things that happen to you. Tragedy is at the core of human experience. It’s what we have to deal with. That’s what makes life difficult and that’s what we want to know about, what we want to know how to deal with. It’s unavoidable. There’s nothing you can do to forestall it; so how do you deal with it? All classical literature has to do with things that happen to people they really rather hadn’t.’

 

Herzog, the student of Greek civilisation, agrees with McCarthy that happiness won’t be the result of more rational explanations of the universe and human nature. Indeed, if science and art tells us anything about the long-term prospects of humanity, it isn’t that human beings will become increasingly perfect but that they will be wiped out. It might take 2000 years or 200,000 years, it might be the result of self-destruction or evolution, but soon there will be a planet with no human beings. 

 

Not quite ready to give up his optimistic scientist’s outlook, Krauss, while accepting McCarthy’s and Herzog’s assertion that the human species is, one way or another, destined for extinction, and agreeing that our demise might not be such a bad thing and that we shouldn’t be depressed if we disappear, still wants to accentuate the positive. Thus, Krauss says, doomed as the human species is, ‘we should be thrilled that we're here right now and make the most of our brief moment in the sun.’