The Morning Star

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  This is how inauthenticity came into the world. The truth of death, delivered to us by the Fall, is so terrible that we must live as though it did not exist.

  Yet God did not merely pronounce our punishment. He made coats of animal skins and clothed us in them, saying then: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.”

  With that, He drove man from Paradise to till the ground from whence he was taken. And east of the garden of Eden He placed Cherubim, and a flaming sword that turned this way and that, to keep the way to the tree of life.

  Was it to protect us that the way to eternal life was guarded thus? Or was eternal life a blessing our punishment was meant to deny us?

  And why coats of animal skins? It seems almost like an ironic reminder of our origins, as animals with unconcerned animal lives, origins now long since departed. Inauthenticity again.

  The myth of the Creation is ancient, and the figures that appear in it, including God, relate to a quite different reality from the one we inhabit today. But the yearning to live as one with nature, to be attached to it, rather than elevated above it, or removed from it, as the Paradise myth expresses to us, is still alive, and in rich measure. Søren Kierkegaard, that singular and inconceivably original Danish writer, sought God and the Divine in the moment, which to him was the very gateway into the kingdom of God. In one of his sermons, he takes as his point of departure a discourse given by Jesus concerning the birds of heaven and the lilies of the field, holding up their existence, so completely and so fully obtaining in the moment, as an ideal. Certainly, Kierkegaard’s treatise is not without irony, yet it seems quite as clear to the reader that he is indeed in search of paradise, considering that it may be found only in the event that we relinquish awareness of the self and all that belongs to it—a matter that requires insight into both past and future in order to be sustained—and give ourselves blindly up to the moment. Our every worry, our every trouble, our every anxiety will then fall away—what happens to the bird does not concern it, he wrote. Our burdens are given up to God. Such innocence, which is the innocence still of the animals and the smallest children, was torn from us by the awareness of death, which made us and our godless world.

  The biblical Creation narrative is a myth, but what it tells of happened in the real world too, for man did indeed appear in the animal, and although it happened unfathomably slowly, it nonetheless happened: we were animals, we inhabited a paradise, and we became humans who stepped from that paradise as we beheld the world and saw our place in it. The myth of the Creation, written down some three thousand years ago, though it undoubtedly existed much, much earlier than that in oral form, contains an insight into this, that we derive from the animals, or at least in some way must have lived as them, and that the revelation of death was a fall from that state, a fall that made us what we are now. Thus, the advances made by natural science in the mid-nineteenth century, with Darwin at the forefront, did not abandon the Bible, but picked it up anew. Tangible biological evidence was unearthed to substantiate what man had suspected since the dawn of time. We know little more about it today. We know approximately when it occurred—around three hundred thousand years ago—and we know that their numbers must have been small, perhaps only a few hundred.

  Oh, the gray zone when a new species appears on earth; the changes take place so gradually as to make it impossible to draw a clear dividing line between what it has emerged from and what it has become. And, we now know, a myriad of other, similar creatures have existed at the same time, they too difficult to bring into focus. Nonetheless, the first humans were a local occurrence, if not two individuals, as in the Creation myth, then certainly no more than a small number. They could have known each other, all of them.

  What did the world look like to them? Was it alien? Did they feel different, set apart from the life that surrounded them?

  The German philosopher Hans Jonas believed that to the first humans life was the given, the natural default, while death was the mystery. To them everything was living—the wind, the water, the forest, the mountain—and the dead had accordingly also to be living, only in another way, or in another place. To us the opposite holds, Jonas wrote, for now death is the given, and is everywhere around us, whereas life is the mystery. Death, that is, in the sense of the lifeless, the dead matter, the stones, the sand, the water, the air, the planets, the stars, the emptiness of space. And in the same way as the first humans considered the dead to be alive in another way, we consider the living to be dead in another way: the body is but body, matter, the heart a mechanical apparatus, the brain electrochemistry, and death is a switch by which life is shut down.

  * * *

  —

  The first humans came to Northern Europe some forty thousand years ago. While this may appear to be a huge span of time in view of the few decades over which our own lives extend, the span in culture is, if not negligible, then surely at least no greater than to allow us to understand each other. I once saw some of the objects they produced, and they were no more bewildering, in fact much less so, than many a work of contemporary art.

  They spoke to me.

  I happened upon them quite by chance, in a museum in Tübingen, where I had gone to see the tower where Hölderlin had lived the last forty years of his life, the time after he had gone mad, when he not only attributed his poems to “Scardanelli” or some other made-up name, but also post-dated some of them far into the future. I was staying at a small and very old hotel at the top of a steep hill, just beside the wall behind which the castle rises. The hotel went back, I think, to the sixteenth century, as many other buildings in that modest town. On the morning of the day when I was due to return home, I had an hour or two to pass before my train departed and wandered for the sake of diversion into the castle grounds. It transpired that there was a small museum there, where a number of artifacts from that time were on display, all recovered from a cave not far away. The most striking of these was the Lion-man, a figurine with the face of a lion and the body of a man, carved from the ivory of a mammoth. It was discovered a week before the outbreak of World War II. In the same cave were furthermore found a voluptuously shaped female figure, assumed to be a fertility symbol or goddess, a small, meticulously carved horse, a web-footed bird, and a number of whistles.

  They spoke to me, I wrote above—but of what?

  Attachment.

  The Lion-man ties the animal to the human, the web-footed bird connects the three elements of water, earth and air, while man by depicting them ties himself to them. And the whistles? What else would they be for but to bring together the humans?

  No animal makes sculptures or musical instruments. Why did the first humans do so? What was it that prompted them after they had left the paradise of the animals?

  The first thing that happened to Adam and Eve when they ate from the tree of knowledge was they became aware of each other. All animals think, of course, but what was new about humans was that they could think about thinking. It was as if a mirror had been held up before their thoughts. It is that mirror that makes awareness possible. Indeed, it is awareness itself. Prior to the mirror, attachment was not a thing, the animal was there and was what it was, bound to the context of its existence, doing whatever it did on that basis. The same applied to the amoeba as to the antelope. But the awareness of being, and of what one is, is meaningful only in relation to the other; on its own it is meaningless. The mirror, which is to say our human awareness, is the other. The fact is that we cannot think human thoughts alone, for to think human thoughts is merely a potential we possess, which cannot be realized anywhere else but within a culture. We think in our culture, and we think with our culture. That awareness brought us closer together, at the same time as it removed us from nature.

  Attachment as a phenomenon can only arise when it’s not a given, and thi
s occurs when thoughts are not only thought but also mirrored. Naturally, basic attachment existed before this too—a baby elephant having wandered away from its mother will look for something that was there before, which it hadn’t thought about then, but which now will be conspicuous in the form of longing: attachment. The apes already possessed considerable social skills long before man came along, establishing alliances and forging ties to one another, as they still do. But attachment to other animals? Attachment to the elements? Attachment to the world in itself? Such attachment came only with humans, because to them, as the first, due to the mirror, it was no longer a given.

  This is what the Lion-man, the fertility goddess, the horse, the web-footed bird and the whistles said to me there in the castle museum at Tübingen. Not immediately, not as I stood there looking at them in their glass cases, for in those moments I was simply filled with a strong sense of excitement: something immeasurably distant and unclear had shifted close to me.

  Emerging onto the castle forecourt, I decided to put off my return home for a day or two and see if I could make a trip to the cave where the discoveries had been made, the place those people had inhabited forty thousand years before.

  This was late autumn, in the middle of a cold spell, the low November sun barely scraping the tops of the buildings, and in the tiny streets the cobblestones were ice-covered and consigned to shadow. I sat down at a table outside a cafe in the lower town, only a short distance from the church, wrapping a blanket around my legs to drink a cup of piping hot cocoa and have a smoke while I observed the people who passed through the narrow street, my inner being still quivering with excitement.

  I had gone there because of Hölderlin, who had first studied theology at Tübingen along with Hegel and Schelling—a plaque on the wall of the pub just across from where I was seated said that Hegel used to drink there—and was later taken in by a carpenter after he went mad in middle age, lodging then for those forty years in the tower by the river. Much would indicate that he in fact simulated madness so as to escape life and other people, at least this is what I had held for some time, and seeing the tower and it surroundings to a certain extent only strengthened my view. Everything he needed was there. Behind him, the little town with its fond memories of his student days; in front of him the river—and Hölderlin loved rivers—the plains with their great deciduous trees beyond, and then the Swabian Alps rising up at the horizon. Hölderlin had written the most beautiful poems of all time, and was not the past in them, I had pondered as I stood in the tower looking out of the same window as he had done, quite as distant, quite as magnificent and impenetrable as the mountains I saw in the distance? With all their gods and heroes of mythology?

  But the Greek past stretched no more than three thousand years back at most, I thought now. The objects I had seen at the museum were thirty-seven thousand years older. And they made the remote, hazy-blue mountain range of history appear vividly before me, as if a curtain had been lifted on a stage.

  There they were!

  I went inside and paid for my cocoa, then proceeded down the hill along one of the narrow side streets until I found a bookshop I had noticed the evening before. There I purchased a book of Hölderlin’s poetry which I tucked into my shoulder bag before going back up to the hotel again to see if I could stay another night in my room. Regrettably, I could not, the receptionist informed me, for a chocolate festival was taking place and all the rooms had been booked for some time.

  Eventually, I managed to find another, at a hotel across the river, in a more modern and shabbier part of town, among multi-story parking facilities, shopping centers, businesses, supermarkets. I had a bath, for I was freezing cold, after which I lay down on the bed and began to read.

  How wrong I had been.

  There was no past in the poems, quite the contrary, everything was so very much the present, which the past suffused with its nearness, lending it fullness.

  Are not many of the living known to you?

  Does not your foot stride upon what is true, as upon carpets?

  Therefore, my genius, only step

  Naked into life, and have no care!

  With these words about stepping boldly into the thick of life swirling in my mind, I fell asleep there in that hotel bed. The next morning, I hired a car and drove out across the plain in the direction of the forest, a hoary mist suspended above the fields. The sun was as yet but a suggestion, a faintly brighter glow in a gray-white sky. I pulled up in a car park of stamped earth covered in frost, and followed the path. The forest was different from what I was used to, less substantial in a way, more open. The cave was at the bottom of the path, in a small clearing, the entrance was low and would have been hard to find had it not been fenced off. But there was no one around, and the fence was easily surmounted, and a few moments later I lowered my head and went inside. After only a few steps it opened up into what can only be described as a hall.

  Here, then, they had sat.

  A fire would surely have burned round the clock in winter, certainly if it had been as cold as it was now. But perhaps it had not?

  The entire continent lay empty around them, inhabited by barely a human soul. Germany, Poland, Russia, Scandinavia, nothing but forest and animals. Rivers and lakes. Plains and mountains.

  They were here, and elsewhere were but a few scattered groups of their kind.

  What was it like?

  Did they tell stories about the past, of hardships and heroic deeds?

  Yes, surely they did. Human beings cannot be envisaged without continuity, without a history.

  And they knew death. They killed animals, and were themselves, from time to time, killed by animals.

  How did they perceive it?

  If everything was living and possessed a soul, even the water and the forest, the mountain and the sky, the dead too would be living, albeit in another place.

  Life was everywhere. It was boundless. And presumably there were no boundaries within it either.

  Perhaps the Lion-man was not about attachment, a connection they made, but was an expression of what life was actually like to them? That the lion and the man were the same? That the humans here had yet to distinguish between themselves and the animals?

  The dead souls could be everywhere, including in the animals.

  I put my hand against the ice-cold wall, wanting to touch what they had touched.

  The cave was still, but its stillness was different from the stillness of the forest outside, which was open. The stillness of the cave was enclosed, kept in place.

  They had sat as if in the womb, I thought. Protected from the external world into which now and then they would venture out on their small expeditions.

  Children would have been born here, the space filled with groans and cries and howls, and then the sudden quiet when the child was expelled, a moment of silence before it gulped its first breath and began to wail. That joyous sound, of new life beginning. And here they would have died too, one after another, generation after generation. The expiration, the abruptly lifeless eyes, the body becoming motionless. The soul departing it.

  Where did the soul come from that revealed itself when the child opened its eyes for the first time and looked at the one who lifted it up, its gaze mild and serene and ancient, not new and frightened and wild, as one might expect of a soul that is but a few minutes old? And where did it go when it no longer revealed itself in those same eyes?

  * * *

  —

  The idea of the dead living on has accompanied man throughout human history; from the oldest times to the present day, it has existed in every culture, every religion known to us. None of us can know what conceptions were held by the first humans, but the artifacts they left behind give reason to believe they performed rituals we now call shamanistic and which exist to this day in cultures around the globe. In his seminal book on the phenomenon, the
historian of religion Mircea Eliade makes clear that shamanistic practice has essentially been the same wherever it has been recorded, whether in the indigenous peoples of North America, the Amazon region or Australia, or in the cultures of the many different ethnic groups of Northern Asia. This would suggest that the phenomenon is ancient indeed, and if the figures of the Lion-man or the web-footed bird seem so seamlessly to accord with shamanistic practice, it becomes difficult to imagine that such practice did not take place even then. The shaman was a nominated or self-nominated figure apprenticed by a predecessor, ensuring thereby that the requisite skills were handed down through the generations, and besides functioning as a healer, a medicine man or woman, it was the shaman who bound together what were perceived as the various stages of life, he or she traversing the axis mundi to visit the underworld or the heavens, either while asleep or in a trance, usually under the influence of hallucinogenic substances.

  The initiation of the shaman takes place almost invariably in the underworld, Eliade states, where dead shamans dismember the candidate’s body, removing and replacing every bone, every organ; occasionally, this takes place with the head of the candidate looking on from a stake on which it has been placed. Roberto Calasso points to the likeness between such treatment of the shaman’s body and that accorded to killed animals. The shaman thus connects with them too, not merely with the dead and the spirits.