In Praise of ‘Ecstatic Truth’

Werner Herzog on Werner Herzog.

Werner Herzog at a press conference in Brussels, May 11, 2007. Photo by erinc salor.

By Michael Judge

Iowa City, Iowa

I’m writing this piece in the voice of Werner Herzog because—like a wandering albatross caught in Midwestern tornadic winds—I can’t escape it. 

The albatross, as we learn from Wikipedia and generations of determined ornithologists, belongs to the biological family Diomedeidae—large, tube-nosed seabirds that range widely in the Southern Ocean and the North Pacific. They are not to be found in the North Atlantic, although fossil remains show they once soared there and occasional vagrants are found.

Wikipedia and Coleridge notwithstanding, I am a wanderer become a vagrant, my vision and desire blurred with fever dreams of the Antarctic and its downward sloping katabatic winds, while in my line of sight I see only a spotlight, high on the horizon like the midday Kalahari sun, and the vague outline of Midwesterners clapping enthusiastically at my every quip, a phenomenon peculia…