The apology that opens Clemens Setz’s Ted talk is affected; that he has not done anything as remarkable as the other speakers at TEDxGraz, among them a humanitarian, a computer graphics pioneer, and the first American to be made a Master of Buddhism, is obvious. He knows full well that his talk will clash with the pop science and lifestyle hacks of the internet pulpit, it’s why he’s there, drawn to be the freak at the show. Setz the cartoon eccentric, heavily bearded and gangly, in flat cap, scarf, and graphic t-shirt, author of several mammoth novels, two short story collections, plays, screenplays, poetry, and a long-form essay on invented languages; on twitter and Instagram and host of a podcast with compatriot Barbara Zeman, discussions of the books they like in faintly self-conscious whispers, there to ramble through anecdote and obscure history, “Time-ladies and Alien Autopsies”. It might grate if he weren’t so good.
Start with the short stories: two collections, the first published in 2012, the second eight years later. They worry at you, pick at the wallpaper. What if you were to approach an unknown house and request entry on the claim you’d grown up there? What if you wrote your phone number on a strip club toilet door? He ranges, from offbeat sci-fi to lengthy Sebald pastiches full of found photos to half page descriptions of creatures that could have walked out of Kafka’s head. The characters are knowingly cruel but unable or unwilling to limit their cruelty. In die Blitzableiterin (The Lightning Rod), a story about a couple whose divorce catalyses their ever more extreme acts of sadism: “I imagined sticking a finger in Jasmin’s eye until the eyeball burst, leaking clear liquid.”1 Setz makes the world unfamiliar, waves a hand over its everyday catastrophes. In a distorted memoir, the author returns home from the airport after a cancelled flight finds his partner has filled their house with homeless people, tending to them as if in a trance. Like Ballard, Setz understands that sometimes all it takes is a small push.
That Setz writes at all he claims is down to a series of migraines in his youth, the fear that something was very wrong with his health driving him from his computer screen to a collection of Ernst Jandl poems. Opening it at random, he lands on die Morgenfeier, nonsense verse in jumbled German about waking to the remains of a fly crushed in sleep. He reads and bursts into tears. The Clemens J Setz origin story, likely exaggerated to make the myth, but fitting.
Die Bienen und das Unsichtbare (The Bees and the Invisible) is the closest he gets to a manifesto.2 An extended essay on invented languages, Esperanto, blisssymbols, through Láadan and Samuel R Delany’s Babel-17, but with frequent diversions, shifting in and out of form until it envelopes you, Setz in your head, moving the furniture. One chapter made up of diary extracts tracking his nervous breakdown, another a travelogue of blind Esperantist Vasily Eroshenko’s travels. In and amongst it Setz unfolds his argument.
Easy to assume that efforts to invent a universal language have failed, were perhaps doomed from the start, grand ambitions for universal acceptance ending in obscurity, spoken only by enthusiasts, whether Esperanto, with its aspirations to universal brotherhood and world peace, or blissymbols, an attempt to reprogramme thought. A history of a wrong turn, a curious enough subject fit for a diversion, but nothing more. For Setz, who over the course of the book tracks his own attempts to learn many of these languages, this is to miss the point. A new way of speaking is the entry into the world of something new, the expression that the languages permit is novel, that shape the world into a better one than the one we’ve ended up with.
His subjects are outsiders, the sick, the deranged, and the disabled; the crooked communication of the crooked. Setz’s point is that the errors, accidents, and long-winded modifications of those who talk despite their obstacles can hold more than conventional speech. Like Beckett, Setz recognises such speakers’ nobility, aware of our frailties, able, from aslant, to see things differently. He lauds the art and poetry of three men incubated in an Austrian asylum, August Walla, Edmund Mach, and Ernst Herbeck, whose nonsense words and symbols are somehow imbued with meaning through the art of the sound alone.3 Through his studies he comes across Mustafa Ahmed Jama, a Somalian poet with severe cerebral palsy who writes in blisssymbols, the invention of austro-hungarian Jew Charles Bliss, and now a means for the disabled to communicate intuitively.4 Jama writes dark poems about his disability by pointing an antenna attached to his forehead at a blissymbol keyboard, inventing his own characters to adapt and expand the language. Setz lays out the originals and his own translations, inviting us to see the extra something in the hieroglyphics.
The attempt to express is no more important than for those for whom expression is difficult. Setz’s attempts to learn are frustrating, and he makes faltering progress with Láadan, Esperanto and blisssymbols, but they make a demand of us to make a duty of empathy. He describes a day spent in in a wheelchair rolling through dog dirt and failing to enter buildings. It’s a fitting metaphor for trying an invented language on for size, a means to alter perspective. New, living, expanding languages, that most would consider a stopgap for the unable or an imperfect simulacrum of conventional, unencumbered speech are for Setz miraculous. The people who make themselves understood despite the heaviest obstacles are those who really understand what it is to communicate, while we muddle around with cliché.
Despite his own efforts, Setz is not so much of a fool to assume we have much to offer each other but wilful misunderstanding, indifference, or hatred. His characters struggle with the requirement that they ought to love that which they don’t understand, or try to understand that which they at first can’t. A headteacher confronts the parent refusing to order his daughter’s class photo because of a critically-injured child in shot, fully enclosed in its life support machine, not obviously human any more, therefore undeserving of humanity. Others try: a mother hires an escort so that she can sleep with him in front of her heavily disabled and immobile son, that he might experience something powerful and loving. Understanding the many touching and beautiful ways we distort images in order to communicate is an imperative, and those who close their minds throw aside their humanity.
We’re tested in Monde vor der Landung (Moons Before the Landing), an account of Peter Bender, hollow-earth theorist from Worms, WWI pilot, smuggler, and victim of the Nazis who wrote and lectured between the wars. Setz’s novels are long, with enough room for diversions, and Moons, a fictionalised biography, advances through the episodes of Bender’s life with enough structure to allow us some grip. Bender existed, staring out from Sebaldian photographs that dot the book, a 20th century eccentric like the utopians Bliss and Eroshenko, his ideas formed in the turmoil of the 20s and 30s.5 It’s both an examination of divergent thought and a vehicle for Setz to reckon with the frailties and madnesses of his own advancing middle age.
Bender’s believes the earth is hollow and we live on the inside of its concave surface, overlooked by a tiny sun suspended; new life forms emerge from the moons that form at the world’s centre that slowly descend the planet’s surface, each harbouring new life forms, the species that have populated the earth ever since. These revelations naturally demand a new way of living, free love, autonomous communities led by priest-couples. Bender is duty bound to spread the word and grow a community, holding lectures in guesthouses and pubs, publishing tracts, corresponding with the hollow-earth movement’s leading thinkers.
Bender is an uncomfortable and frustrating character who justifies his self indulgences with his theories. Time and again he makes ruinous decisions for his family, taking part in an abortive Rhenish revolution, refusing to stop writing, and sent to prison, leaving his young family to fend for themselves. He tries to keep his endlessly resourceful Jewish wife from her paid work, beneath her station as the other half of his priest-couple, and spends their limited resources to commission artworks of them both. He preaches polygamy to his lovers but keeps his affairs from his wife; later, he spends his meagre savings on accompanying his mistress to the German south, instead of funding his family’s escape from an ever more anti-semitic Nazi regime. The story starts to run out of air: we know where this will end, but hope regardless that Bender comes to his senses and finally does the right thing by his wife, who stays, despite it all, waiting for him to wake up.
Setz plays his own frailties through Bender. The paralysis of Bender’s time in prison and his abortive attempts to write, lurid descriptions of breakdown. These Setz had already set out as autobiography in Bees, a shocking, flailing account on online dating sites, stalking, driven into deep and ruinous moods. But the most lurid passages are of the milestones of early middle age: Bender is handed his first child, the touch of his tiny toes uncorking floods of tears. You sense these are moments that upended Setz.
Ultimately though this is an exploration of invention, how our imaginations salve the accumulated wounds of difficult lives. Bender serves as a reconnaissance pilot on the eastern front in the first world war, stationed in marshland, beset by midges, under fire and at risk of death. Initially, his hollow world theories are jokes, tools to cheer his shellshocked colleagues, “the poor Sonnleithner”, distant, unworldly, and doomed. With Sonnleithner fading in the field hospital, Bender is urged to cheer him with one of the nonsense theories he’d enjoyed earlier. Confronted with his wounded comrade, Bender thinks up a world in which energy and activity are conserved, held rather than lost, trapped in a concave earth. We are not finite and, even in the meatgrinder of WWI, our lives are not wasted.
‘An image of the world of endless emptiness, blackness and far-flung globes moving senselessly through space – that was all inhuman nonsense.’6
That the opposite is true is of course the irony. But the effort of imagination is the only rebuttal, that we think up things beyond ourselves, attempt to placate, and reason with the inevitable, is the only thing that can save us. This is the origin of Setz’s fascination. What if there are things we can do to transcend despite all the violence and misunderstanding? Speaking despite the near impossibility of communication.
At some point Bender starts to believe his own fantasies, driven by the war’s horrors to seek refuge in his more benevolent world. One of his reconnaissance photographs shows a building, its roof painted with giant letters labelled Spital (hospital). His superiors wonder whether this is a genuine field hospital, or a ruse to preserve an ammo dump. One of them writes apple on an apple: it immediately looks suspicious. They bomb it anyway, Bender never finds out if it was really a hospital or not. It’s all too much. He loses track of the origins of his theories, this desire to preserve his friends, to prove to himself that their deaths on the eastern front aren’t a waste, but a preservation of material, and becomes a fanatic, driven to ever more twisted variations of that central theory, disputing and losing friends who diverge from his divine truths.
This gives Setz an opening to confront Nazism, like most writers of German do eventually. Bender’s fanaticism dovetailes with Germany’s, and as the narrative makes its painful descent into the thirties, as the children Bender teaches spoil, beating his elderly Jewish neighbour into cleaning the streets, abandoning his lessons because of his Jewish wife, Setz asks whether Bender’s madness is any worse than those others that consume us. Bender is a heel, mistreating his wife and missing every opportunity to get her and his family out of Germany but in parallel to the Nazis, the meaninglessness of their cruelty, his madness maintains a moral purpose. Whatever we think of Bender, we all rely on the comfort of theories; worse still, most of ours have none of his ideas’ nobility but all of their self-destructive power. Bender reveres the figures of German history as the Nazis do, but these heroes aren’t excuses to parade racial superiority and instead attempts to find a spirit and meaning in the everyday. Madness is unavoidable, every life shaped by flawed and distorted stories that we need to make our way through the day. But unlike the decrepit fictions of national socialism, Bender’s are salves: life is conserved; we aren’t circling alone in cold space.
On occasion, we all wake up? On one of his later reconnaissance flights, Bender sees the curvature of the earth and is met with an unwelcome revelation:
‘Then, at some point in the morning, something like death stepped up to his side: the sudden realisation that the world actually looked like everyone had always claimed. A round planet, an apple with crisp skin, and on all sides an endless universe full of other similar spheres. And nothing besides. The planet circled a burning ball of gas fixed in space. That was it. The curvature of the earth was the truth. All his arguments had been nonsense.’7
Not quite: there are so many ideas that we dismiss out of hand that have something to teach us anyway, theories and perspectives that open different and better things to us. Setz’s second apology in his Ted Talk comes in English: he will switch to German now because ‘he lives mainly in the past’. That’s not really his point. It’s that are too quick to forget the beautiful contortions we’ve left by the wayside, that studying the obscure isn’t time wasted, but where beauty really resides. Setz asks that we uncover what we don’t know and seek to understand it, at the very least enjoy it. His talk covers the Greenwich Time Lady, Ruth Belville, who took her precise watch called Arnold to subscribers to reset their clocks to GMT until 1943. Setz describes her, in the usual Ted Talk style, as one of his idols. Like Ruth Belville, it’s becoming harder and harder to make a living from being an author. But like her, he holds his own Arnold in his pocket, selling the time to an ever smaller group of those who will listen. There are a thousand futures lost in every moment; many of them are wonderful, we ought to remember them. Setz is not enough of a fool to think we have much hope, but it would be wrong not to mourn them, to delight in those things not so readily comprehensible, to set puzzles of our own for those who come after.
As he writes at the end of Bees, the world is still largely undiscovered. Stray from the path, look a bit harder, value the ephemeral, make some effort to understand the complex and the odd, and above all remember what we’ve lost, and that we’re always losing it. There are still songs on the other side of barrier. We should pay attention to the quiet withering of beautiful things.
1 ,,Ich stellte mir vor, einen Finger in das Auge von Jasmin zu stecken, so lange, bis der Augapfel platzte und klare Flüssigkeit herausquoll. Womit war ein Augapfel eigentlich gefüllt?, fragte ich mich.“ Die Liebe zur Zeit des Mahlstädter Kindes, 2012.
2 It won Setz the Büchner prize in 2021. Here is his acceptance lecture.
3 The former Lower Austrian Nerve-Clinic, run by Dr Leo Navratil, run, so Setz, as an artists’ colony. Now the Gugging Museum.
4 Motivated, among other things to develop a language made only of symbols by the horrors of the Holocaust.
5 It’s likely that Setz encountered him in his research for Bees.
6 Das Weltbild der endlosen Leere, der Schwärze und der weit entfernt sinnlos herumschwebenden Kugeln – das sei alles entmenschlicher Unfug. Monde vor der Landung, 2023.
7 ,,Einmal, irgendwann gegen Morgen, trat etwas wie der Tod an seine Seite: die plӧtzliche Gewissheit, dass die Welt doch so aussah, wie alle immer behaupteten. Sie war: ein runder Planet, ein Apfel mit harter Schale, und drum rum ein endloses Universum aus lauter ähnlichen Kugeln. Und sonst nichts. Der Planet kreiste um eine im Raum befestigte Gasexplosion. Fertig. Die Krümmung der Erde war die Wahrheit. Alle seine Raden waren Unsinn gewesen.” Monde vor der Landung, 2023.