[Music]
This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
[Music]
For a million notes from that glass wave album you've come to love for hate over the years,
a thumping beat to announce the start of a new season of Gaudium and Festa here on entitled opinions.
Where we give you the best of what we can rest from the minds of our motley guests,
and where wins from the west touch the headdress of that tribal chief who presides
over our infinite jest and turns our disbelief into an unlikely treasure horde.
Welcome back to our minefest friends.
Welcome to our readers' digest, our pilgrims' progress,
and to that inquest of ideas that comes to you from a recess of the Stanford campus called KZSU.
Where thinking takes shelter from the bellows of angry wind that swirl all around us,
all around this threshing floor, a stanticled art planet,
looking down on it from afar, from the sparkling sphere of the fixed stars,
crime real estate indeed.
[Music]
We start off the spring season of 2016 with something special.
This past February, I conducted a public conversation with filmmaker Werner Herzog,
director of legendary movies like Aguere, the Wrath of God,
Fitzcaraldo, Nosferatu, as well as documentaries like Grizzlyman,
the Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and Into the Abyss.
That conversation didn't take place in the intimate environment of KZSU,
but in a big auditorium on the Stanford campus with over 600 people in attendance.
It took place under the Aegis of a book club called Another Look,
sponsored by Stanford's Continuing Studies program.
Another look was started four years ago by a novelist Tobias Wolf,
who was my guest on entitled Opinions a few years back,
and I recently took over from him as director.
The book club gets together three times a year to discuss books that merit
another look, either because they faded from memory somewhat,
or because they never got the attention they deserved when they were first published.
I invited Werner Herzog to Stanford to discuss a relatively unknown masterpiece,
published in 1967, called The Paragrene,
by an obscure British individual named J.A. Baker,
about whom we know hardly anything,
except that he authored one of the most extraordinary pieces of nature writing of the 20th century.
The Paragrene is one of Herzog's favorite books,
and it's one of mine as well,
and that's why I invited him to come to Stanford to discuss it with me.
It turned out that Herzog ended up speaking mostly about his devotion to books in general,
and his belief that reading is the best and perhaps even only way to take possession of the world,
and we're all with him on that, all fascinating stuff as you'll hear.
So what we're going to do today is air the audio recording of that conversation,
which took place in Dinkleshville Auditorium on February 2nd of this year.
And by the way, there is also a video recording of the event,
which if you're interested, you can watch in its entirety on YouTube.
Let me just mention one other thing that I will be following up today's show with another one devoted solely to Baker's book,
The Paragrene, about which there's a lot more to say than Herzog and I got around to discussing on February 2nd.
My colleague Andrea Nightingale will be joining me for that upcoming show.
Andrea loves the Paragrene as much as I do and it should be a fascinating conversation.
But for today, we give the floor to Werner Herzog.
The following recording begins with a brief introduction by my friend and colleague Charlie Yungkerman,
who is the head of Stanford's Continuing Studies program.
One last item, if any of you would like to become a member of another look, please go to its website,
anotherlook.stanford.edu, and you can register there for free.
It's well worth it, even if you don't live anywhere near the Bay Area.
So here we go with Werner Herzog.
[applause]
So good evening.
I'm Charlie Yungkerman, I'm the Dean of Continuing Studies, and it's my pleasure to welcome you tonight
to the winter quarter gathering of another look, the Stanford Book Club, that's dedicated to reading short literary masterpieces
that have either been overlooked, or those that we've read so long ago that they deserve to have another look.
Tonight we take on the Paragrene by the relatively little known British author, J.A., John Alec Baker, published in 1967
and brought out again in 2008 by New York Review books publishing in a nice edition.
We are here to talk about J.A. Baker, and we have the extraordinary privilege of being in the company of two extraordinary, remarkable
seers and tellers in many media, in fact.
Robert Koeharrison is the Rossina Pirotti professor in Italian literature at Stanford.
So a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and I think he does in mind that I say this in the lead-off sentence, lead guitarist for the cerebral rock band Glass Wave,
which we had the privilege of, was it here we did that, Robert?
I think it was a couple of years.
No, it wasn't.
We actually had Glass Wave perform. We'll do it again sometime.
He's the author of dozens of books and scholarly articles, including the body of Beatrice,
Forrest, the shadow of civilization, the dominion of the dead and gardens, and essay on the human condition.
And I know many of you in the audience share my appreciation for his remarkable broadcast and podcast.
Now it's an 11th season entitled opinions.
Werner Herzog-Hartelini is an introduction.
He is known to all of us as one of the master filmmakers of the 20th and 21st centuries.
He's also an internationally celebrated screenwriter, producer, author, actor, and opera director.
In a career that spans more than 50 years, he's given us some of the most influential films of our time, including a gerry wrath of God, the enigma of Casper Hauser,
Fitz Corraldo, Grizzly Man, and Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
He's just come from this year's Sundance Film Festival, where his latest film, Low and Behold, was screened to wide acclaim,
and even newer film, Salt and Fire, is finished and two more are in the works.
So please join me in welcoming to the stage for a conversation about J.A. Baker's, the Paragon, Robert Harrison, and Werner Herzog.
[applause]
Thank you very much Charlie. Thank you all for coming.
Werner Herzog, welcome to Stanford.
In 2014, a remarkable book was published that I've been reading for the last two weeks.
It's called Werner Herzog, a guide for the perplexed conversations with Paul Cronin.
And I'd just like to quote something from the conversation with Paul Cronin.
You write, "Those who read own the world, those who immerse themselves in the internet or watch too much television lose it.
Our civilization is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.
And here in this auditorium, the majority of the people here, most of them are readers, and know what the value of reading is all about.
Could you share with us some of your thoughts about your relationship to reading books and the value of the literary?
In a way, it has been one of the things that is guiding me throughout my life.
And I have the feeling, I mean beyond this auditorium here.
There are many more students here at Stanford University, and many of them do not really read.
And including, I see that including film students.
They do read a book about editing, but nobody has read, let's say, books or dramas of Greek integrity or God knows what.
And I keep saying to them, you have to read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read.
If you do not read, you will become a mediocre filmmaker at best.
But you will never make a real good film.
And almost everyone that I know who has made very strong, very good substantial films are people who are reading.
Really reading all the time.
And I see hardly any films.
I see three or four films a year.
Maybe sometimes a little bit more during the festival.
But I do read.
And of course, I have written myself a prose in some poetry.
And I am fairly certain that my written work will outlive my films.
It is very, very clearly.
There is no doubt what I say in me.
Why is that?
Because the substance of books has nothing in between.
You see when you make a film you have cameras in production money and actors, psychology, lab or post-production, editing.
You just name it.
Many, many layers of very vulnerable elements.
And when you write, you just write in this nothing else.
It is a direct form, a completely direct form of expressing something.
Well, we are going to talk about some of the books that you have written in a bit.
But I am curious about some of your favorite books that have become really a part of you and your psyche.
You mentioned in the perplexed that whenever you go on a film set, you bring two books with you in particular.
One is Luther's translation of the Bible where you need to read the book of Job for your constellations for all of you.
It is a 1546 edition in the language of that time in the original Luther and language.
Which was an enormous cultural event because German language somehow started with Martin Luther the common language,
Horkdoych, High German before that there were only dialects.
And I grew up my first language was Bavarian.
So my own father, whom I met fairly late in my life, had needed translation from my mother what I tried to ask him.
So it is such a difference.
But Luther, yes, book of Job, consolation.
Yes, I have it on me or Psalms.
Sometimes I love to read it.
Yes.
The other book that intrigued me greatly is the Second Punic Wars where it is a story of Hannibal's invasion and the war with Carthage.
Fabius Maximus, who is the Roman general who refused to engage Hannibal directly and got actually derided by his fellow generals as human accused of cowardice.
You say that he's a history, history derided him.
History derided him.
But you think that we still owe a huge debt to that man because he is the one who saved Rome.
Exactly, not only Rome, it's an oxidant.
It's a Western world that somehow was at stake at the time of Rome in a very, very deep crisis.
Hannibal, coming with the motley army across the Alps with elephants and defeated Rome twice at the Trazimini lake in Cunne.
And it was the most devastating defeats Rome ever suffered.
Rome was at the verge of collapse.
And they voted in Cunne to Savius Maximus, Cunne Tatar.
It's his epithet on Ornam's, his cognomen, his kind of deriding attribute.
The cowardly hesitant one, Cunne Tatar is one, Cunne Tatar means to hesitate to not be bold enough to take steps in because he was the one who said to everyone, if Rome continues to encounter Hannibal in open field combat, we will perish completely and we will be extinguished.
He started a war of attrition, always moving away, always retreating, always being hesitant, never offering an open field battle and attacking the retroguard or the foraging parties.
It was some sort of attrition.
And he was the one who saved Rome.
He was the one because we would be, our civilization would be more dominated if the Mediterranean world had really become that important under cartage which I kind of doubt.
We would be more than North African, Punic, kind of ideas and culture more than anything else.
And he being derided and he being the solitary one, the solitude of the man, is something which is so totally intriguing for me.
And you read in Latin, you read Libyan Latin?
Yes, I do.
I had to learn Latin and Greek, ancient Greek in school and I hated it and only now much later I started to appreciate it.
I do read.
And another classic that you read in Latin that you love dearly is Virgil's Georgics.
Yes.
And for those who don't know about Virgil's Georgics, why don't you mention some of the stuff that I run my own film school, the so-called rogue film school.
It's really wild stuff.
A few things I teach students like opening, breaking, safety locks, foraging documents and doing criminal things for the sake of making a film.
But they have a mandatory reading list among them is Virgil's Georgics.
And I prefer the Georgics when you look at the innate, it's more the programmatic sort of writing, celebrating the achievements of the Augustoian realm.
And of course, there's a clear ideology and a sheer celebration of Rome.
But the Georgics Virgil grew up as a farm boy near Mantova in northern Italy.
And of course he knows exactly what he's observed.
And it all, of course, there's also some programmatic, half of it is about the world of gods who somehow interfere in two things.
But the real, real incredible thing is the knowledge about what he's writing, the observation, the precision of observation.
And that's in a way quite close to Jay Baker.
Something similar I'd like to read one brief passage.
There's over horse how a plague invades the stables.
And it's something which really has something totally illuminating.
The caliber of language, the caliber of observation is just unbelievable.
And I love his writing.
Here it is.
Then everywhere in the joyous Burgen in fields, the young cow's die, or in their pens, in the very presence of their mangas full of food, give up sweet life,
fawning dogs go mad. The six swine ceased with wretching, cuffing choke on their own swan throats.
The horse that was once victorious, now miserably sinks as he tries to arise for getting what he has been for getting his pasture with its lush green grass,
averting his face from the waters of the trough, over and over again pounding the earth with a disconsulate hoof.
His ears laid back, fitfully sweating.
The sweat turns cold, a steth, a steth draws near.
His skin is dry and hard, insensible to the touch of the stroking hand.
These are the sides you witness in the first days of the coming of the death, on on of death.
But as the suffering moves into its final face, his eyes clear bright with a brightness of the fever.
The horse is groaning, breathing drags itself forth from deep inside, and the whole length of the body labors and strains,
with drawn out-shuttering sobbing, black blood pours out from the nose, and the creature's throat is utterly blocked up and choked by its tongue.
There are those who have thought the only possible hope was to use a fawnal to pour in a little wine, but this itself facilitated death, revived, they raged with weird,
new desperate strength, and in the final crisis, God grants such madness not to ourselves, but to our enemies, they tore their own flesh with their own bare teeth.
Right.
So it's just too good, and you see, that there are also moments in it, which I love, for example in a guide for the perplexed,
there's a summing up of some advice, and I say, "Yeah, guerrilla tactics are best take revenge if need be."
Get used to the bear behind you, actually, there's a photo with a bear right behind me, and it is not photoshopped by wife made it, and there was a real bear, but it was a set up.
The bear was kind of not completely docile, but didn't do any harm, but betrayed it to humans.
Well, this might be an occasion for one of the questions from an audience member, because the difference between the georgics and the annea, both by Virgil is at the annea, it's about history, the founding of Rome.
Whereas the georgics about the earth, it's about cultivating the earth care for the earth, and here Valerie Kinsey asks the following question, based upon your documentary films, like happy people, grizzly man encounters, and your admiration for the paragrean,
you seem to have a deep interest in exploring the need of some individuals, mainly men, to reconnect with the earth in a primordial way.
What does where does this interest come from? Is it an elegyic homage to an interconnection between man and earth that is all but disappeared among suburban contemporary populations, or is it a diagnostic of our present alienation from the status quo?
Well, that sounds too complicated, but to academic, but I understand the core of the question.
Yeah, you seem to have that there seems to have been interest on your apartment people who have this nostalgia to reconnect with the earth.
No, I have no nostalgia, I'm not a nostalgic person, I live in the world.
No, not you, but here in drought, yeah, maybe it's floating around, and you see it all over the place.
I would say some of it comes because how I grew up in the mountains, very secluded in the mountains of the barrier, and had no real technology around, and of course I was connected to the mountains, and then more than anything else travelling on foot.
And I did travelling on foot, but not with a backpack, not with my household, attend in the sleeping bag or so on my back, and I would walk a thousand kilometres or so for a very existentially important reasons.
And then I would travel on foot, but I have understood one thing, number one, it's a solitude that is unimaginable for anyone who hasn't done that.
And secondly, and I can say it as a dictum, the world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.
And that's where you see, for example, a connection with the German poet, Haldaline, whom I really love more than anyone else.
He was somebody who travelled on foot, actually became insane when he travelled from Bordeaux to Tubing, you know, Frankfurt, arrived, start mad.
But he's the one who had a premonition, the premonition of this, of something coming insanity, coming at him creeping up at him, and he describes it in some of his poems in a very secretive form, a very, very tragic man, and he understood the outer fringes of our language.
And I understood the essence of being solitary, of solitude.
And those things I can give you one very brief excerpt of my book of walking in ice.
I walked from Munich to Paris when Lottie Isner, who was sort of a mentor of mine, was dying, she was 80 years old.
And I heard over the phone from a friend come quickly, Lottie is dying. And I said she will not die, I will not allow it.
She must not die, we still need her. And when I walk, I rise and walks, and when I repose, when I rest a mountain repose, that's how I came and she was out of hospital.
And then she, eight years later, when she was some 88 or so years old, she said, please come again and I visited her and she said, there's still this spell upon me that I must not die. Can you lift it? And I said, Lottie, yes. Yes, yes. It's okay now if you die, because she complained, it was almost blind, couldn't read us. He movies, she could not walk anymore, a little bit on crutches.
And she said, I'm saturated with life, biblical sleep and sat in German, it's a very beautiful expression. And I said, yeah, it's lifted eight days later, she died and it was fine, it was good.
And just the kind of touching things and connecting to the ground and connecting to the things around you and the solitude is something which is really something you experience when you are foot on foot.
And much of it, much of this essence is seeping into my films or into what I write. It is Sunday, the 8th of December. In Shashi, a truck sucks milk from cans into its tank. A great lucid decisiveness about my fate surged up inside me.
While we reach the river marin today, Serfanten is dying away abandoned houses. A big tree has fallen across a roof a long time ago. Jack does inhabit the village. Two horses are feeding on the bark of a tree.
The tree is a tree. One of the trees seemed from afar like the only tree left with any leaves, apples hanging mysterious clusters close to one another.
The tree left on the wet tree just wet apples refusing to fall. I picked one, it tasted pretty sour but the truth in it quenched my thirst. I threw the apple core against the tree and the apples fell like rain.
The apples had grown still again, restful on the ground. I thought to myself that no one could imagine such human loneliness. It is a loneliness day, the most isolated of all.
I went in shock the tree until it was utterly bare. In the midst of the stillness, the apples pummeled the ground. When it was over, a haunting stillness grabbed me and I glanced around but no one was there. I was alone.
I was an abandoned laundry. I drank some water but that was later. Those are the elements that somehow are the bottom line of what I do. The bottom line of my films, the bottom line also of what I try to pass on.
The paragrina keeps saying to the rogue film students, that is a book which is more the absolute must read piece of literature because that is how a filmmaker should see things in loneliness. He should see it in our he or she or it should see the world with this incredible amount of human loneliness.
And some of it is really moving into human extracies. He sees an extracier in such a rapture in such enthusiasm with such passion.
The way a filmmaker should see the real world and people and everything around us is enormous amount of passion. But that is not all anyone can have this passion but he writes in a language which we have not seen since caliber of prose which we have not seen since Joseph Conrad's short stories.
That is why I find this very decisive book for anyone who wants to make films. By the way, for anyone who is becoming a writer, you have to read it. Learn the whole book by heart.
I agree and I find that speaking of the paragrina, when you open that book and you ask, what is going on, what passion is he bringing the bear? I think he falls in love with a paragrina and is infatuated.
On page 12, when he describes his first encounter with the paragrina, it is a language of rapture.
He says, this was my first paragrina. I have seen many since then, but none has excelled at for speed and fire of spirit.
For 10 years, I spent all my winter searching for that restless brilliance, for the sudden passion and violence that paragrina's flush from the sky.
For 10 years, I have been looking upward for that cloud biting anchor shape that crossbow flinging through the air. The eye becomes insatiable for hawks. It clicks toward them with ecstatic fury.
It is ecstasy also. That is one of the things that really caught my attention because there is always a question of infill making, particularly in documentary filmmaking, what constitutes a deeper truth.
Sometimes in poetry, you have the instant sense that there is a deep truth. Don't analyze it and be dissected in academic terms and with the tools of literary theory. Just don't do that.
Same thing with films because today what you see and what I hear constantly at any festival with all colleagues, they do believe wrongfully that facts constitute truth.
They do not face at best create norms. They have this power, but only truth is something that illuminates us, that carries us into some sort of an ecstasy.
That is something which I find every second page in the paragrina. There is an equality, a religious, quasi-religious quality of an incontation, invocation of a demon brother that is a paragrina falcon.
I really like a ritual in the question of course is how much is factual.
We have been having this long debate that Charlie Eungkerman referred to also with Hans Peter who is going to be speaking next week and professional ornithologists and falconers.
I try to defend Baker on factual grounds, but I don't have the competence or authority to do that. The question is if the book is full of factual inaccuracies.
It is full of maybe a few. You see that that is what I keep saying in movie making. It is the accountants truth you are after.
You get a straight A, you idiot. You see the book, the paragrina and the foreword, a very intelligent, beautiful foreword. It says irrelevant for the paragrina is not a book about watching a bird. It is a book about becoming a bird.
You see quite often in the book he writes how the paragrina is soaring higher and higher and becomes a dot and this incredible sky.
Then we swooped down, we swooped down, as if he had become a paragrina himself and next to the paragrina he is swooping down.
That is an actual inaccuracy. Yes, go and become an accountant. That is where you should be.
You should be this ornithologist should be denied to read this.
Let me make a case for facts.
Henry David Thoreau, one passage from Walden. He says if you stand right fronting and face to face with a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces as if it were a similar or a sword.
You can feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow.
You will happily conclude your mortal career, be it life or death we crave only reality.
I crave many other things beyond reality. It is a very impoverished life if we go only for that.
Even if a good stake is a form of ecstasy sometimes you shouldn't dismiss that the primitive things of real everyday life can acquire different quality.
When can you find an ecstasy go together? No, they do not marry.
It is true that gives you illumination and transports you into a state where you step outside of own existence in an ecstasy.
It is a little bit like you can, for example, find it in the writings of late medieval mystics, the kind of ecstasy.
That is a beauty of this book and that is a beauty of other books that I have here.
Do you find a strange that Baker, when he was queried after the book came out and there were many people who were calling attention to misrepresentation.
He received a letter from an author and he received a phone call from Baker and he asked Baker if he took any poetic license in writing this book and Baker said none.
I think probably all these reports that you have here are made up things like in the internet.
People start to make up things because I do believe until recently we didn't even know who Jay A Baker, what did Jay and A stand, I still do not know it.
We probably know that he may have worked in a library sometime in his life and he may have been carrying some illness.
That is all we know. If somebody comes and reports what he said in the letter and so I think we know not a single letter of him.
Let me quote this to you.
Maybe this can shed some light. He says everything I described took place while I was watching it.
I do not believe that honest observation is enough. The emotions and behavior of the watcher are also facts and they must truthfully be recorded.
Yes, that is beautiful. I hope that he really wrote it in not somebody on the internet in poster.
Yes, it is a strange thing that is happening to us and it is not happening to the observer alone.
It happens to the memory of the observer. I give you a strange example which is very puzzling for me.
Recently you see I do sometimes things in documentaries. I start a film, lessons of darkness.
It is about the fires in Kuwait. Which is a film where for 60 minutes there is not a single image which belongs to our planet anymore.
You do not recognize our planet anymore. I start the film with a caption and it reads and it is a very beautiful tool liner.
It says the collapse of the stellar universe will occur like creation in grandiose splendor.
It is by a place. Some people who asked me where can I find it. I do not find it in his aphorisms. I do not find it in pore seas.
I put Pascal under it. Besides I do not find it that funny because Pascal could not have written it better.
It takes audience right into a quasi-extricity or a very sublime elevated position.
Then the film begins and I never let them down from that.
The most mysterious now has just happened to me in the lower and behold about the internet.
There is one question I am posing in the question is the Christian...
The Russian war theory or the British in the Napoleonic times once famously said war sometimes dreams of itself.
It is really a deep and very puzzling question for very intelligent people.
Now what happened is I tried to find this quote in clouds of its and I do not find it.
It may happen that in my memory I think it was clouds of its but maybe I have made it up myself.
I do not know it. It is a very blurred thing but the question itself in the way I quote clouds of its has such a formal clarity in it.
It does not matter whether it was clouds of its me making it up.
I am not remembering it whether I made it up.
It is a very disturbing moment.
That is why if it is true that the emotions and behavior of the water are also facts and must be truthfully recorded then there could be an exact truth that has to do with the subjectivity of the water.
The behavior of the watch of behavior when he becomes more and more the hawk in fact is quite remarkable.
The further he gets on in his diary and he is inspecting these kills there is a suggestion that he ends up also actually tasting.
I have a quote here right away. I found myself crouching over the kill like a manting hawk.
My eyes turned quickly about alert for the walking heads of men and consciously I was imitating the movements of a hawk as in some primitive ritual.
The hunter becoming the thing he hunts. We live in these days in the open the same ecstatic fearful life.
We shall mend. We.
While he writes these five lines he morphs into a falcon.
A hundred pages later he says what was left of the kill, smelt fresh and sweet like a mash of raw beef and pineapple.
It was an appetizing smell. Not the least bit rancher or fishy I could have eaten it myself had I been hungry.
One has a sense that he might have every now and then even tasted some of the.
But I think this wouldn't be anything wrong.
Don't to eat a bird. The carcass of a bird raw.
It's not perfectly understand.
Here it's the.
I suppose. My interpretation of.
It's not so much that Baker is.
Desiring to become the hawk.
He does have flight envy and he does have this aerial envy he must fly.
And so do I. I wanted to fly all my life.
Unfortunately the only way he can do it is in prose and there are moments in this book where he is really soaring as high as any writer consore in the sentences in the ways writing and in that
kind of static.
Passion that transports him and therefore as a writer he does become like a hawk but the raptor has another myth associated with it which is goes back to the Greek mythology of Ganymede.
Which is the young boy the most beautiful of all mortals.
Who's father was troasts after whom Troy was named.
Ganymede on Mount Ida.
Zeus takes the form of an eagle and wraps him.
Caesar's him captures him, rapes him in a certain sense.
Bear some up into the heavens and he becomes the cup bearer of the gods and he becomes immortal.
And there are moments in the paragrene where one has a distinct sense that Baker is just waiting to be wrapped in a rapture by the hawk.
By his own writing.
I think his own life watching the birds.
Yes.
But if I can find here the passage.
I have it down here.
154.
55.
He describes the following.
After two minutes of uneasy glaring he the falcon flew straight at me though intending as though intending to attack.
He swept up into the wind before he reached me and hovered twenty feet above me.
My head looking down I felt as a mouse must feel crouching, unconcealed in shallow grass, cringing and hoping.
The hawk's keen bladed face seemed horribly close.
The in glazed human eyes so far and remote I could not look away from the crushing light of those eyes.
From the impaling horn of that curved build many birds are snared in the tightening loop of his gaze.
They turn their heads toward him as they die.
It's almost as if he would the fantasy would be just to be born up into the sky like Ganymede.
So we could call it again.
I don't know to call it again in the complex would trivialize everything.
But it's something there.
He wants to leave the earth and he can't leave the earth.
But at the same time he has this very warm heart it almost look of humor.
It's something that in it's a tiny one.
So a couple of times it describes the rest of the earth.
And they really touch his heart very deeply and I have a few lines of flat land.
Land was booming void when nothing lived.
Under the wind a wend in sunlight among fallen leaves in a dry ditch seemed suddenly divine.
Like a small brown priest in a parish of dead leaves and wintry hedges devoted till death.
I mean it can't get any better.
He writes another time about a rain.
Turning through a hedge gap as surprised a rain.
It trembled on its perch in an agony of hesitation not knowing whether to fly or not.
It's mined in a stutter splitting up with fear.
I went quickly past and it relaxed and sang.
So it's just wonderful.
So there's the elements are very present in this book.
And we can talk about the four elements.
Fire is not technically an element.
But there's the earth, water, air obviously.
And then the circle of fire.
That would be where the rapture, if you would go to the sphere of the fire.
And the sun really represents the fire.
It can't cause us with too many cultural references.
I think he's not reconciled with the world.
He's not reconciled with absolutely nothing in the share.
I share this kind of anger against the mess out there when you look at it.
There's no glorious harmonies of the spheres.
It's a stupid concept which is not completely over.
It still pops up in Walt Disney sort of movies sometimes.
And I think this absence of reconciliation with what's out there.
And he's not reconciled with human beings.
And he's not reconciled with creation.
But he speaks of the Falcon in terms of fire.
He speaks of the heart of fire that it has.
He sees a flying.
He calls it a burning brand.
And yet he is earthbound.
And there's one passage with your permission.
I'll read it.
It's about the mouse.
You read the one on the run.
This is very unlike all the descriptions of the birds.
Because I think those of you who read the book have noticed that
Baker takes a perspective of a bird's eye view.
He describes a valley, estuary, sea.
It's from great distances.
All this changes when he's speaking about a little mouse who is an
earthbound creature.
I'm reading from page 45.
Let me read the whole paragraph.
He says, "At the side of the lane to the forward, I found a
long tail field mouse feeding on a slope of grass.
He was eating the grass seeds, holding the blade securely
between his skinny white front paws.
So small blown over by the breath of passing cars,
with a soft moss of green brown fur.
Yet his back was hard and solid to the touch.
His long, delicate ears were like hands unfolding.
His huge, night seeing eyes were opaque and dark.
He was unaware of my touch, of my face, a foot above him.
And he bent the treetops, grasses down to his nibbling teeth.
I was like a galaxy to him too big to be seen.
I could have picked him up, but it seemed wrong to separate him
now from the surface he would never leave until he died.
I gave him an acorn.
He carried it up the slope in his mouth, stopped, and turned it
round against his teeth, flicked it round with his hands like a
potter spinning.
His life is eating to live, to catch up, to keep up.
Never getting ahead, moving always in the narrow way between
a death and a death between stokes and weasels, foxes and owls by
night, between cars and cestrals and herons by day.
This is the fate of those who are earthbound.
It's also the fate of Baker himself, who is -- he can get that close
to the mouse because they share at least this earthbound
and we know that Baker was in the grip of a very serious
one of the things he was out there recording, the things he was seeing.
And perhaps there was some kind of promise of transcendence if you
could somehow take to the sky and free yourself from living between
a death and a death on earth.
Yeah, I think that's something that pervades a whole book.
And you sense it.
It's not just observations of natural creatures out there.
It's much more.
And you see the observation about the mouse.
I remember when I traveled on foot to Paris in snow storms and
snow and rain storms.
And you see so many mice.
It's astonishing how many mice there are.
And you -- in the -- in the -- of walking in ice, I think there's
once a sentence, "Yes, friendship with mice is possible."
It's very strange, they have something which is very -- has a strong
elua to those who are the solitary, wondrous out there.
It's a remarkable passage about the mouse because later in the
book, I don't know if you remember, he says that creatures, even
when they're dying and if a human being approaches them, they
will do anything desperately to get away because their fear and
phobia of the humans is such that you can never get near them.
And yet this mouse, either because Baker is too near the mouse, he
can actually stroke it.
I wanted to tell our audience that this book that Werner
Herzog's referring to of walking in ice came out in English
translation, this -- in 2015, I believe, no.
Well, no, it was a newly revised translation in it.
And the version that is known was published in London,
Bertrand, and Cape, but they thought they would somehow
condense it into a more popular sort of writing.
And they would write, there's a strange sentence in the book,
because it's half Bavarian, a very strange expression.
In the Jonathan Cape translation, it says something, the
goon comes on the same to the future.
The translation now was meant to be -- and it's a very strange
expression.
Instead of the goon, it says, the business that stalk is about in
the dark comes on, say, never more day.
And all each word with a capital beginning, business, capital
be, the business that stalk is about in the dark.
And I think this is -- this is back now in the new translation
here of walking in ice.
And I had the feeling, yes, we should go back to the courageous
sort of translation and the work courageous wording of
things.
We should do that.
And I actually have this passage that you mentioned about the
paragreener and human beings who are somehow the fearful,
frightful sort of creatures.
As I approached, I could see its whole body craving into
flight, actually what happens.
He sees -- it's like in a recreum, he sees, he finds a
hair and nearly dead, lying in a stubble field.
It swings a frozen into the ground, but in a ghastly
thwarted mime of escape, it tries to fly off in the wings of
frozen to the ground.
As I approached, I could see its whole body craving into
flight, but it could not fly.
I gave it peace and saw the agonized sunlight of its ice,
slowly healed with cloud.
No pain, no death is more terrible to a wild creature than
its fear of man.
A poisoned crow gaping and helplessly floundering in the grass,
bright yellow foam bubbling from its throat will dash itself
up again and again onto the descending wall of air if you try to
catch it.
A rabbit inflated and foul with mixed maltosis will feel the
vibration of your footsteps and will look for you with bulging
sightless eyes.
We are the killers.
We stink of death.
We carry it with us.
It sticks to us like frost.
We cannot carry the way.
That is strong.
This is strong.
This is how prose should be written.
This is how we should observe birds and humans.
We have a question from Mark Brosommer.
He says in part three of the paragrina begins,
"Wherever he goes, this winter I will follow him," the
falcon.
"I will share the fear and the exaltation and the boredom of
the hunting life."
Do you feel this way as a documentary filmmaker that you are
on a quest without knowing where it will lead you or do you have
a clearer idea of what you will find when you begin?
That is a deep question because I do have a focus.
I do know basically what I am out for.
Of course, I have a surprise on root.
I follow the surprises and I follow my instincts.
It is like a little bit like hunting.
But it also in documentaries, you should not underestimate the
amount of casting that I do.
And I am speaking of casting the same way you cast a feature
film with actors.
And I look around who could be really good for saying or for
introducing me in this or that phenomenon.
And I think casting somehow narrows the possibilities of course,
but it intensifies the possibilities at the same time.
So yes, it is wonderful where you are ending up in one signal
that I know what I am doing is that I end up with very little
footage.
I made a film into the abyss on death row in mates.
The main character in the film, Triple Murderer, was executed eight days
after I spoke with him on camera.
And all in all, the film is almost two hours long.
All in all are shot six or eight hours of footage.
And when you look at the young film makers here on campus,
they both are, we shot 350 hours of footage.
And my heart sinks, they didn't know what they were doing.
And it is awful.
I really do not, I do not commiserate them.
I just try them to tell them, just do what you do something
that you really have a vision of, go and focus and contain
work as if you had only one memory stick that would contain 40
minutes of footage.
That is all I give you.
Make a movie.
And the movie should be 20 minutes long.
And that would be quite good to have this very clear focus.
But I do incorporate things that are completely out of the
ordinary, out of what is going on into the abyss, starts with
some prologue, the chaplain of the death chamber agreed to film
with me.
And he rushes in a newer head three or four hours, and then he
would have to attend an execution.
And he's with an inmate, and normally holds, he asked for
permission, and would hold the ankle and have physical touch
with a dying man.
And he came and rushing, knocking at his watch, and he says,
"Quick, quick, I have to be in the death house in 40 minutes.
We have 15, 20 minutes."
And I barely introduced myself, said, "Is it okay to have you
here behind your crosses made out of cement, of concrete, of
inmates that were not claimed by any family, they were buried by
the state?"
Okay, and he starts to speak really not really asked for all this, all of
a sudden he volunteers about the beauty of God's creation, and how
glorious and wonderful God was, and the kind of redemption
that he gave to everyone.
Of course, God doesn't give redemption to everyone.
We have some miserable ends as well that end up in perpetual
misery if you are in Christianity.
And he says, "Yeah, sometimes I have this great wonder of God's
creationism, his golf cart, and in the morning when nobody is
saying that you in the grass, and sometimes dear look at him with
big eyes, and he sees a horse and I stop him.
It's this kind of rap of a phony TV preacher, and I stop him,
and I quietly ask him, "Tell me about an encounter with a
squirrel," and he unravels.
Because he actually had an encounter with two squirrels barely
breaking his golf cart in front of them, and not running over
them, and then he comes, moves over to the idea, "Now I'm going to
be in the death chamber, and I cannot stop what is going to
happen. I cannot stop this." And he almost cries, and all of a
sudden he becomes a human being. And there's a question that I
asked him. Out of nowhere, it was completely unprepared for me
unprepared for him. And it's a question you do not learn in film
school, where you do not learn it in where the school of journalism,
you just don't learn it. You have to have a world view of
it allows you to jump in with something like this. Was that the same
thing with the albino alligators?
The albino, yeah, the radio.
The radioactive mutant albino.
The crocodile.
Yes, this is one of the things I take in after I did the film in the
cave, Paleolithic cave, 2000 years back in time with the
most exquisite, incredible paintings on the walls. And I had heard
from somebody that only half an hour away from us, the
Rhone River near a nuclear plant. There was some sort of
amusement park, which was warmed up by steam from the
nuclear plant. I don't know, 350, 400 crocodiles. I want to see
this. But didn't unpack the camera anything. I walk in and I see
two small albino crocodiles. And I said, I must film this film.
I must. So I went in and we filmed. And I had no clear idea. It was so
incredible. This albino crocodiles. And I made it up into a
postscript. And it is so wild in its fantasy and so strange in its
imagery that I had the feeling at the end of the film. I want to
take the audience with me, taking them under the arm and take off
sore with them into pure poetry and into pure illumination.
That's what I want to do here. Of course, the albino crocodiles, the
albino crocodiles, were staring at you. Of course, it was all made up.
They were not radioactive. They were not mutants. And there were
not even crocodiles. I came. They were bought in Louisiana.
They were cayman or something. They were not even crocodiles.
Anyway, and they looked at you with this very strange gaze. And for
the film, we threw out the film on the cave. There was this big
question. How did they see these images, those who painted them?
What was their perception? What was it? And we do not
receive it, of course, with our eyes. Although we know 32,000 years
at Sho'vi' Cave, that was the awakening of the modern human
soul. We know that. It's no doubt about it. And it was about
perception. These crocodiles will eventually multiply and they will
break out and they will make it to the Sho'vi' Cave. And now, how will they see
the paintings? And the funny thing is that only five
months later, actually six crocodiles, escaped. And there was a big
helicopter hunt. And five of them were captured. One is still
the other is the two years later. Two years later, probably perished
somewhere. But I find it very beautiful. And you see you have to
have it in you to take the audience with you and lift them away.
Lift them into the world of poetry, of dreams, of ecstasy of
illumination. And that's exactly what Baker does. And he gives me
courage to do these things. And what you say about perception is completely
pertinent for the Baker book in the sense that Baker may well have
seen things that were true from him to him inside of his
his own. And it's almost as if he were to, when my brother and I was 14, my brother was 13,
our older sister had a boyfriend who had tickets to go to a
Jimmy Hendrix concert. We never heard of who was Jimmy Hendrix. And it was
in Rome, Italy. We were young enough that we could come right up to the
stage. We did not see a six foot tall man with velvet bell bottoms and
a colorful wheat saw, we saw Volcano. We saw a pagan God of Fire. We saw some kind of
vision that could never correspond to the factual, as you say, the account
description of it. And when Baker describes the way a Falcon can
errows the whole avian world in the countryside of Essex, where they all kind of fly in the air.
It might be quite contrary to their behavior as a survivalist, but nevertheless, it
probably has to do with the way he perceived poetically something that he takes to be
absolutely, literally true. But of course it's colored the way.
And it doesn't matter at all. It doesn't matter at all. The book is the book as it is.
And do not try to verify every single observation. Can it be possible that he touches a mouse in the mouse?
Does not somehow sense him? We do not know. Maybe he only wanted to stroke it in, but describes.
It does not matter. That's a beauty of poetry. That's a beauty of the books.
Yes. Although on the other, to make the point for those who have devoted decades of their lives to a kind of scientific study of
could be a bird or some other aspect of nature and go to the labor and careful analysis of getting the facts correct.
That's also a form of devotion. That also has its own -- it's not poetry as such, but it is a love
that takes a different form. Yes. And that's what scientists, for example, do.
That's a charm of what they do. And it takes sometimes even by complete accident into discoveries that decide our shape of our civilization, the tools that we use, the inventions,
or the insights that they have. And of course we change because of these loans and insights.
And that's a beauty of it. And it transforms society, transforms how we behave as human beings, the internet, how our humanness, all of a sudden changes,
because we are using cell phones and Facebook and the idea of self, which is shifting and changing. And the ambiguity of human exchange, all of a sudden, becomes so clearly visible.
Can I ask about some of the one or two more books that you ask your students at the Rogue Film School to read?
Yeah, for example, I brought with me the poetic eda, but I also, for example, have in it the very, very fine book by Bernal di Estel Castillo, the conquest of New Spain.
He was a 19-year-old footman of the conquest of Cortes and late in his life. He wrote down a very, very, very detailed account of the much better than any other source of their time.
It is a phenomenal book where you would rush home, but I would also have in this list and recommend to all of you read the Warren Commission report on the assassination of Kennedy.
Everybody puts it down and nobody has read it here. And it has a number one, it's a wonderful incredible crime story, and it has a logical, conclusive, necessary staggering.
It's a truly wonderful, wonderful piece of reading and the poetic eda, for example. And I was somebody who has held the Codex Reggios in my hands twice in my life already.
It's a little crumpled parchment text, which is a little bit like the Dead Sea Scrolls for Israel. That's a book for Iceland.
It goes into this mythological life and description of the creation of the world. And it's very, very strong, and I always try to tell people who make documentaries.
Go read the eda, read the depths, and miss the myth that can all of a sudden come out of very simple things that you do not notice unless you have a sensory organ for the mythological.
He says, "Will you spot eda, the creation of the world?" And here, in earliest times did Emir live, was Norasino-Aland, Noras Salty-Waves. Neither earth was nora-appe-heaven, but a gaping nothing, and green things nowhere, was the land and lifted, a loft by Burs' sons, who made mitt guards.
The michlash-less earth, the michlash-less earth is just very, very beautiful.
Shown from the south, the Sun on dry land on the ground, then grew the Greens' war it's soft. And on it, on it, the few stanzas later, in the text, there is about the creation of dwarfs.
And all of a sudden, the text about the creation of the world rattles down 84 names of dwarfs. And it's more beautiful than any rapper from the inner cities, the kind of rhythm and the kind of beauty of it, and it was taken this idiot's scholars believe that it is an interpolation of later times, which probably it was.
It doesn't matter in the Codex Reigios, it is an integral part, and here they hide it in an appendix in a footnote.
And it's just really, really beautiful. I read a little bit into it, if I don't bore you, with names of dwarfs.
Then gathered together the gods for counsel, the Holy House, and held converse, who the deep dwelling dwarfs was to make of premius blood and blinds bones.
But for sogeneer rose, mighty as ruler of the kin of dwarfs, but to renext molded many men, like bodies of dwarfs and the earth, a story in beta.
The Nithi, North Korean, so three, Austry, Vestry, Aulti of Tvalin, Nar and Nai, Nipping Dain, Bifur, Pombur, Nori, and O'nar, I mute Vittnir, Viking and Gandalf, Windalf tried to take in Torrin, Torvit and Glitt Nar and the dragon, near at in the rutswit.
Now is the rutswit, the rostwift dwarfs.
That was the first 40.
But, so, and you see this kind of love for these things, I cannot describe it.
You see, reading this, these things have not changed my life, but they have made it better.
They have not changed the course of my life, but it has made it better.
And I've never made a pilgrimage to a filmmaker, but I did make a pilgrimage to Salt Lake City, to the University of Utah.
And one of the texts, which is not only my list, is one of the greatest books, most intense and most beautiful texts, the Florentine Codex, collected by...
It's coming in a moment, but that doesn't matter. It was a collection by monks who accompanied the next wave, next generation of conquistadoris brought in the abstract.
And they collected voices from Aztecs about child rearing, about botanic knowledge, about military things, about history, about religion, about human sacrifice and so on.
And it is a text which is so stunning because the Aztecs in the shock of the conquest of utter destruction tried to regain their speech.
And they tried to describe simple things. A cave is a place of darkness. It is full of fear. It is dark. Yes, very dark.
And it is fear looms there and do with there to enter because the cave is big and it is dark. And it continues like this. Somehow trying to grasp the world by newly trying to name it, just to name it.
And the translation was done by some scholars of the University of Utah because the Mormons believed that the Aztecs were one of the lost tribes of Israel.
So they have the best, probably the best pre-Columbian studies in the world.
And two professors translated the text which is in Nahuatl and in Spanish translation in parallel text in the Codex flogantino. They translated it into English.
Over 25 years I released a bit by bit in scholarly editions. Now you can buy it. It is a book which unfortunately has very few copies.
And I think I had to pay $1,200 as well for 14 volumes.
And the translation has such a power of language. It is like the Old Testament in the King James Bible translation. Something which happens only once in a few centuries.
And it was translated by two wonderful scholars, Professor Anderson and Professor Dibble. And Anderson had died. And I learned that Dibble, Professor Dibble was still alive, Professor Emeritus at the University of Utah and I went to Salt Lake.
And I asked him if I could see him and I visited him and made a little pilgrimage to him. And he was completely astonished at a filmmaker would come and visit him. Nobody has ever visited him.
And he had no real help and I cooked tea for him. He didn't know how to ignite his gas stove anymore.
It was really a great wonderful tragic man with an incredible achievement in language. And for him I made a pilgrimage. I visited him. I would never do that for a filmmaker.
So, to wind down, you are persuaded that you will be remembered more for your books and your films.
And I would not remember that I would not be remembered. I would not be remembered.
No, no, no. I mean something different. They would outlive the films. Whether anyone cared who the person was, what my name was.
You cannot become completely anonymous in our time, in our century.
But there is another book that maybe you could read from which is conquest of the useless.
This is a conquest of the useless sounds familiar to those of you who have seen feats get out of my exposed.
It was written during the time when I did Fitska Raludu and of course lots of catastrophes.
My handwriting I wrote whenever I had a moment I would write and my handwriting shrank to miniature microscopic size in my life.
When I actually said to me, you have to address it. I sat on it for 26 years and could not dare to look into it.
And then I did it. Because some idiot at some time would publish it. But I deleted things.
I deleted an entire year that was so terrifying that I cannot even read it myself.
But it has this kind of strange prose in it which just comes at me here.
I read something from the prologue. A vision had seized hold of me. Like the demented fury of a hound that has sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass.
And it's shaking and tugging at the downed game so frantically that a hunter gives up trying to calm him.
It was a vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape.
Which shed us a week and a strong with equal ferocity, source, the voice of Caruso silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong.
To be more precise, bird cries. For in this setting left unfinished and abandoned by God in wrath, the birds do not sing.
They shriek in pain and confused trees tangled with one another like battling titans from horizon to horizon in a steaming creation still being formed.
Fork panting and exhausted. They stand in this unreal world in unreal misery and I like a stanza in a poem written in an unknown foreign language, am shaking to the core.
So it's this kind of stuff that comes you when you're battling in the forest and in this case it was more not others would seek consolational, seek refuge in drugs or in alcohol or in religion or in whatever.
I, my last resort is language. It's the last resort and it is boiling inside of me and I sometimes like a tune that you cannot get out for weeks and weeks out of your head.
Words and things are spinning in your head and it was very strange because I returned later to the site where I moved the ship over the mountain and there was hardly anything that you could see that no trace is
left. And I noticed a hostility among people in a native village which I had not really noticed before but it was evidently there and I describe it in it was midday and very still.
I looked around because everything was so motionless. I recognized the jungle as something familiar, something I had inside me and I knew that I loved it yet against my
better judgment. Then words came back to me that had been circling swirling inside me through all those years.
Harken, heifer, hoa frost, denizens of the crack will know the wisp, hogwash, uncouth, float some fiend.
Only now did I see this though I could escape from the vortex of words. Something struck me. A change that actually was no change at all. I had simply not noticed it when I was working there.
There had been an odd tension hovering over the huts, a brooding hostility. The native families hardly had any contact with each other as if a few drained among them but I had always overlooked that somehow or denied it.
Only the children had played together. Now as I made my way past the huts and asked for direction it was hardly possible to get one family to acknowledge another.
The leading hatred was undeniable as if something like a climate of vengeance prevailed from huts to hut, from family to family, from clan to clan. I looked around and there was a jungle manifesting the same seeding hatred, wrathful and steaming while the river flowed by a majestic indifference and scornful condescension.
Ignoring everything, the plight of men, the burden of dreams and the torments of time.
That's how I see nature. That's where...
That's where...
Trowse, if not going to die.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Well, our time has come to an end. I want to thank Werner Herzog for his visit to Stanford. Thank all of you and another look.
Thank you.
[applause]
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