The Morning Star

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I remember seeing something about it. One of those satanic rock bands, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  He shook his head.

  “So much has happened these last two weeks that I’m not sure anyone cares anymore. I wouldn’t worry about it. Another day here will do you a world of good.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “What’s happened that could possibly be bigger than that?”

  On Death and the Dead

  AN ESSAY BY EGIL STRAY

  Strangely, I have never been afraid to die. Not because I am particularly brave, but because I have yet to fully comprehend that it will in fact happen to me.

  Intellectually, yes. Intellectually, I fully comprehend that one day will be my last on this earth.

  But I do not believe it, not properly.

  At the end of the day, this is perhaps hardly surprising—existence is of such unprecedented substance, and that substance, which is my presence on earth, is experienced not simply as a material reality, is perceived not merely as the result of chemical/electrical impulses in a physical mass, but as having quite another nature altogether, and, perhaps most significantly, quite another duration.

  Yes, I know that death will one day come to me. (Not from without, but from within; for whatever form death takes, the result is always the same: the body is starved of oxygen and breaks down.) It happens to everyone. Not simultaneously, but one by one, as the pieces in a game of chess are dismissed from the board. A classmate of mine from school, Ernest, was taken at an early age, drowning while on holiday in France when he was twelve years old. Another, Osvald, died in a car crash on his way to work one morning, his skull crushed when his car ran into a brick wall. My mother had a congenital heart defect that was discovered only after it was too late: she was spooning ground coffee beans into the coffee maker one afternoon in winter when suddenly she lost control of her movements, tossing the coffee into the air before falling to the floor, and in the hospital two days later she died. I saw her fall, it was I who called the ambulance, and I saw her again an hour after death had occurred. She was a stranger then, which is to say that what had been her was there no more; only the body which had housed her remained.

  These are the dead in my life. While I have been living, hundreds of thousands of others around me have died without me having seen or even thought about it. So yes, I know what awaits me—if not exactly the form in which it will come.

  And yet.

  Am I really to die?

  My body will, yes. The sheath, the casing, the cocoon, yes.

  But that inside of me which is?

  Relating to death is a bit like relating to God, only the other way round: intellectually, I understand that God and the Divine do not exist, but I believe nevertheless that they do. In other words: I believe that I am not to die, and that God exists, at the same time as I know the opposite to be the case.

  What does it mean to know?

  What does it mean to believe?

  I once asked God to deliver me a sign, and a raven came. It looked at me, squawked three times and then flew away.

  This was in winter and I was walking in the forest during a storm; there were no other birds there.

  It proves nothing, it was a chance occurrence.

  I dreamed one night about my brother, he came into the room where I was sleeping, and bent over me. The next day, my father rang and told me my brother had been involved in a motorcycle accident in Vietnam, he had been close to death, but would survive.

  I never dream about my brother otherwise, and am not close to him.

  It proves nothing, it was a chance occurrence.

  During the summer of my thirteenth birthday, I was staying with my maternal grandmother for a week. Her house was situated on high ground above a river. One day I helped her make a bonfire of some cardboard boxes. It started to rain and we went inside. When I came out again, I saw a figure standing by the fire. It was my grandfather. He had been dead for three years.

  I missed him and had been thinking about him that day, which was why I saw him; he was conjured by my longing.

  To entertain any other explanation is inadmissible. To entertain the notion that the dead live on is inadmissible. To entertain the notion that souls may inhabit our dreams is inadmissible.

  The intelligent, reasonable, rational reader will no doubt already have put this essay aside, certain of its direction. Ghosts. The undead. Heaven and hell. Oh, the abomination of such conceptions, how they smack of blindness and dim-witted desperation. We know them to be folly. For the boundary between the rational and the irrational is almost as absolute as that between life and death. The rational perspective rejects all that is not rational, it is unable to absorb it, and thus in the rational perspective the irrational quite simply does not exist. Death is the cessation of life, and life is biological/material, so when the material heart ceases to beat and the material brain shuts down, life is over and only the body’s biological decomposition in the grave or its destruction in the crematory oven remains.

  A rational perspective can entertain nothing else, for then it would cease to be rational, which is to say true, and would become the opposite, irrational, which is to say untrue.

  But since so many people view the world irrationally even so—believing for instance in God, a power that cannot be observed, measured or weighed, or believing that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, which of course by all known parameters is impossible—all that is irrational has been allocated its own designated sphere, a bit like a children’s table at a family celebration, where belief rather than knowledge dictates the truth, which everyone else knows is not true at all, and this is the place of religion. It is where the children sit, with their children’s food, indulging in their children’s matters, while the grown-ups run the world.

  Yet once, the opposite held. Then, what now is irrational—belief in God and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and other miracles besides—was truth, whereas what now is rational was untruth.

  By this I seek to say, not that truth is relative, but merely that reality is a complex phenomenon that never appears alone, in isolation, but always in interplay with the person who perceives and experiences it, and this is something that science has never been very good at taking into account. It is never the case that we know what we see, but rather the other way round: we see what we know. This explains, for example, how in the Middle Ages miracles were observed in abundance, whereas today none are observed at all. I recall reading a book containing accounts recorded at the actual time of such miracles and visions. One in particular was arresting: a woman on a donkey appeared in a church, floating in the air, not before a single person, but before a whole congregation, and not just for a brief moment, but for several minutes. People in those days knew that miracles were a part of life, and they saw them, whereas we today know that miracles are not a part of life, and we see them not.

  But this of course says nothing about whether miracles occur or do not occur, only that we can never be certain that what we see in fact exists outside our minds, or exists in the way that we see it.

  In Jakob von Uexküll’s classic study of animal behavior, an almost Copernican turn in biology, in which animals are viewed as subjects rather than objects, it becomes evident how differently reality appears to different species according to what aspects of the world their senses perceive. All that lies beyond the scope of the sensory apparatus does not exist to it, and therefore accordingly does not exist in the world. Little thought is required to understand that the same must apply to us and the world that is ours. That aspects of reality indeed exist beyond our scope, unseen and unperceived, remains, however, a thesis that cannot be substantiated, to the extent that if something exists beyond our scope, then of course it cannot ever, in any way, be captured.

  I shall always remember my mother’s fi
nal movements on earth, tossing ground coffee beans into the air in the kitchen that day in winter before slowly sinking to her knees and collapsing forward onto the floor. Nor shall I ever forget the compelling mood in the church on the day of Osvald’s funeral. He was so young, just eighteen years old, and the grief that was felt, especially by the girls from our class, was so hysterical in its expression as to occasionally mutate into laughter. But although on both occasions death came close to me, and overwhelmingly so, in the first instance in its coldness, in the second in its detestable fullness, the feeling that I cannot die was not altered by it in the slightest. I know that my body will die, however hard that may be to believe—but equally I know that the part of me that is will never die.

  Life after death cannot be proven—but neither can it be disproved. No scientist can with any certainty say that life after death does not occur. He may say that much would suggest it does not, and substantiate his claim with reference to the logic of matter and the physical world. But logical parameters will naturally capture only what is logical; the non-logical slips through its mesh.

  Does the non-logical exist?

  If we stand at the boundary of the logical, is there anything beyond? Anything we might sense or discern?

  Let us proceed step by step.

  What is death?

  What is the body?

  What are dreams?

  * * *

  —

  As we know, death is not necessary. Thus wrote Georges Bataille in 1949, and ever since I read that sentence for the first time, it has lived inside me. We are socialized into a world of circumstances we learn to accept: a ball kicked into the air will drop to the ground; water begins to bubble when it reaches a certain temperature; things happen and are consigned to the past, never to happen again; all that lives, dies. These circumstances are insurmountable; impervious to challenge, they are as invisible walls against which we collide, and we learn to live with them: that’s life. We shall never know why the ball we kick into the air must drop to the ground, why water has its boiling point, why things that happen cannot happen again, or why death exists, for such circumstances are determined in a place that is unknown to us, by means that shall forever be beyond our insight. All we can relate to are the ways in which they manifest themselves to us, and the consequences they entail. We don’t know why gravity exists, but we know what it is and how it impacts.

  The same is true of death.

  The best way of exploring the nature of death, or the way it works, is perhaps to imagine what life would be like if death did not occur. In such circumstances, life would be able to derive energy only from non-organic sources such as water and sunlight, and since there would be no death it would continue to spread until there was no more space left in the oceans in which it arose. Its expansion would then cease or continue on land. Before long, there would be no space on the land either and life would be compelled into the air—one can imagine great piles of primitive life in strange, fan-shaped formations extending stepwise into the skies—but eventually there would be no space left there either. Water and land would then be but a rather sticky, presumably green substance unable to develop in any direction, forever to remain in the same state, with no prospect of further reproduction.

  But death does occur, and it clears space and makes room for new life, and besides perpetuating the processes of reproduction in this way, death also allows such life as becomes non-life to be consumed, which naturally further enhances the opportunities for life, and, together with the various climatic and geological circumstances that pertain, this creates a constant imbalance in life, which cannot stagnate, but only be propelled onwards in the manic slow-dance that is evolution.

  Death patently makes room for more life, but the reasoning comes to a halt there, for a deeper rationale for its occurrence, other than ensuring that life does not merely pile up and stagnate, is unavailable to us—just as a rationale for life occurring at all is unavailable to us. If it were a random occurrence, something that happened simply because the conditions were right, why then does it not continue to occur? Why do new forms of life not continue to arise all around us, in their beginnings, evolving in their own directions, either more or less remote from the tree of life to which we ourselves belong? Is it the case that the prerequisites for life remain open and available only for a short period of time, then close again? Or is it the case that new life is continually arising, only to find no room because of the life that already exists? This may be so, and the theory that life’s inception and evolution is haphazard, occurring without plan, which is a truth questioned by no one but a small number of religious fanatics in the USA, is of course by no means implausible. But the idea that death arose quite as haphazardly at the same time is something I have more difficulty believing. I can accept one random occurrence with consequences of that magnitude, but two? And at the same time? That smacks too much of a plan. And the doubt to which that suspicion gives rise gnaws at the very theory of evolution itself, which is unthinkable without death.

  The problem with all thinking about death, as I see it, is that it takes death for granted. Death is an absolute circumstance to us, and therefore we have great difficulty thinking, as Bataille did, that death may be unnecessary. But if that is so, the question then becomes one of what death adds to life, of what it is good for, and what it does. If the answer to that question is that death makes room for more life, the question then becomes one of what that might be good for. Certainly, more life opens up the possibility of new life, and new life alters the balance of existing conditions, creating challenges to which they must adapt, which is to say yet more change. Death is what makes evolution possible. And evolution is what made us possible. We are just as unnecessary as death, and however odd it may sound, our presence here is more closely attached to death than to life.

  Death created us.

  * * *

  —

  The idea that death created us is made plain too in the biblical myth of the Fall of Man, albeit rather differently so. The narrative begins with the serpent asking the woman if it is true that God has told them not to eat of the fruit of any tree in the garden. The woman says that they may eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden but for one. Of its fruit God has said: “Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.” The serpent tells her they will surely not die, for God knows that the day they eat of the fruit their eyes will be opened and they will become as God, knowing good and evil. The woman eats of the fruit, as does the man. The first thing that happens is that they discover themselves to be naked, whereafter they hide themselves from God, who, on finding them and realizing what has happened, banishes them from Paradise.

  This of course concerns not the introduction of death into the world, but the introduction of awareness as to its existence. There, at the moment in which we are made aware of death, we become human. It is what sets us apart from the animals, and sets us apart from the moment. In God’s eyes, this is a punishment. But to the serpent—who is often understood to be the Devil—the awareness of death is something to be coveted, and knowledge a blessing. At least, this is the way he presents it. And strangely, of course, the serpent was right: they did not die, as God had told them they would. On the contrary, they became aware of who they were, and what kind of position they had in life. This was an awakening, not death. Not many of us would consider knowledge to be an evil. So, did God lie to them? And if so, what kind of a God is that?

  It is quite as hard to imagine existence without knowledge of death as it is to imagine existence without death itself. Animals are presumably unknowing of the fact that they must die, for although they may be gripped by the fear of death, as for instance occurs when cattle are taken to the slaughter and smell the blood of their fellows, or when the gazelle, with a pounding heart and drumming hooves, is chased by the leopard, there is little reason to believe that they know their life is about to end, m
uch less what that might entail. Death belongs to the future—perhaps it even establishes the future—and can be perceived only as a future occurrence, for when death comes, the conscious mind, and its consciousness of death, ceases to exist. Death is our temporal horizon, unseen by the animals. They, on the other hand, are more closely bound to the moment, and in the Bible’s account of the Creation that state is paradisiacal. Knowledge, including the knowledge of death, is considered a fall.

  Could that be what God meant when He said they would die if they ate of the fruit from the tree of knowledge? That the paradisiacal would be lost to them? And that such a death was a punishment, the world into which they fell, the world we continue to inhabit, was thereby almost to be perceived as hell itself?

  Much would suggest it. Before God banishes them from the garden, He says to the woman: “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” And to the man: “Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

  It is a strange myth, for if the life into which man was thrust, in which we live still, is a punishment, it would seem to be the case that sin, the very reason we were ejected from Paradise, the acquisition of knowledge, at the same time proves to be our salvation. Certainly as far as the material aspect of that punishment is concerned. We were able to shape tools and implements, manufacture plows and carts, build houses and towns, thereby at first to loosen, then, at least ostensibly, to release ourselves from the bonds that bound us to the earth. We established a buffer zone between ourselves and the pressures of nature, as Peter Sloterdijk once put it. When it comes to the immaterial aspect, the awareness that we are to die, our acquisition of knowledge has spawned great philosophical and religious systems, of which science is one, which serve as it were to spin a net to cover over death’s abyss, so that we see it not, being attentive only to the threads we follow. When death comes and someone we are close to is plunged into its darkness, the net, spun only from thought, comes apart and we despair without hope, racked with pain and grief, until it passes and the abyss is covered over once more.