What is especially mysterious and inspirational about the image of a palace inside our minds is that we ourselves are the ones moving around from one of those endless halls to another – a sort of high priest or librarian, picking out memories from the past in accordance with our conscious desire.
During the night there are different librarians in action, more aggressive and anarchistic in their attitudes. I sometimes envisage them as a group of early surrealists or artists with tendencies towards Dadaism. They mix up memories and experiences in confusing combinations so that they are transformed into unrecognisable fragments of reality. These nocturnal figures conjure up absurdities, but also nightmares, often collected from the poison cupboard where they have been hidden away behind locked doors, which are broken open as the demon of the night rides past through the darkness.
What do these halls of forgetfulness look like? What happens as old age creeps up on us, bringing with it an increasingly bad memory, a furtive but growing senility which means that the contents of the palace are obliterated bit by bit? Or is everything in fact still there until our heart stops beating and the electric pulses that keep the brain alive have stopped circulating and providing the stream of constantly flowing energy we call life? Is it just a shadow that has enveloped the halls and rendered the contents invisible?
I imagine that forgetfulness has something to do with a sort of inner light – or rather, that the light is switched off in various halls and on various shelves. Bulbs are unscrewed by an invisible hand and never replaced.
Forgetfulness is darkness. We try to extinguish all the lamps of memory that can illuminate what we at some point buried – or hid away – so that future generations would know nothing about them, and would certainly not be able to track them down.
We locked up in underground rocky caverns a dangerous troll that would live for 100,000 years. But we didn’t write a saga about it: instead we did everything possible to ensure that the troll would be forgotten. We tried to create a Song of Songs dedicated to forgetfulness. But is that possible? Can we trick future generations into believing that there is nothing hidden away down there in underground caverns? Will human curiosity and the never-ending search for new truths eventually expose the troll hidden down there in its cave?
We don’t know. The most we can hope for is that it doesn’t happen before the time has run out.
There is of course a paradox here. We have always lived in order to create good memories, not to forget. All culture has to do with preserving and searching for images from the past, while at the same time creating new ones. Art works both backwards and forwards – so that we don’t forget what has happened in the past, but also to ensure that we tell stories about our own time for the benefit of those who will follow us.
The world of art often contains warnings about what has happened in order to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. What are Goya’s etchings about the horrific reality of war if not warnings to prevent the repetition of such barbarity?
It does happen again, of course, but his warnings also live on.
Memories are stories. Possibly cut up and reduced to fragments, but just as often whole stories. I envisage forgetfulness as a vacuum, our cold and empty inner universe. In forgetfulness humans become indifferent to themselves, to others, to what has been and what will come.
When we now try to deal with nuclear waste we are building a palace of forgetfulness. What is left after our civilisation will be forgetfulness and silence. And an insidious poison buried inside a cathedral blasted out of rock, into which no light will ever enter.
The first gods worshipped by human beings were almost always linked with the life-giving sun. The greatest miracle of all was that the sun reappeared each morning. In cultures that never had any contact with each other there are often similar stories about the origins of human beings. The sun was always involved. But in our civilisation, which has gone further than all previous highly developed civilisations, we are leaving behind us a final memory that comprises nothing but darkness.
15
A magician and an imposter
From a gallery in the palace that is my memory I produce a painting by Hieronymus Bosch from about 1475, depicting a magician or illusionist in action. A little monkey that seems to be wearing some kind of mask can be glimpsed in a basket by his feet. He himself is standing behind a table on which are the traditional three beakers and several small balls. On the other side of the table is a group of spectators, and in front of them is a man leaning over towards the beakers. It is not possible to make out if he is simply astonished and impressed, or if he is sceptical.
And the magician is smiling – up his sleeve, as they say. He is not smiling to provoke his audience: he is smiling to himself, as if he were thinking that he has yet again achieved an illusion, or managed to fool the spectators.
Magicians usually operate on the basis of extraordinary manual dexterity. Not long ago there was an Israeli called Uri Geller who in my view used trickery rather than psychic powers as he claimed. He travelled around and performed on television in several countries during the early 1970s, and would bend spoons as he held them between his thumb and index finger, using what he maintained were spiritual powers. He could also reveal the content of images drawn by other people in other rooms, where he was unable to see them. There were lively discussions about whether he was a skilled charlatan, or whether he really did possess spiritual powers that were beyond the comprehension of ordinary people.
By pure chance I happened to be present once when he performed on the Norwegian television channel NRK. I was among the people who answered incoming telephone calls, some of which were very lively – Geller’s performance was broadcast live, and the NRK telephone exchange was swamped with calls. People had been sitting in their cottages in remote areas of Norway and seen spoons beginning to bend in their kitchen drawers, or their wall clocks suddenly stopping. I recall particularly an old man who explained in a shaky voice that his wife had stumbled and broken her arm: was that also due to magic beams sent out by Uri Geller from their television screen?
I can’t remember what I said to him, but I never believed in Uri Geller. There always seemed to be something calculating about him, something that had more to do with cynical speculation than artistic skill. I broke out into angry laughter when the conversation with the old man was over.
Over the years Uri Geller has spent time suing some of his critics. As far as I know he has rarely won any of his cases, but perhaps litigation is what he was really cut out for?
It is not all that big a step from stage magicians to all the cynical speculators who subject people suffering from cancer to various useless therapies. I can understand the despair that drives sufferers into the arms of charlatans, but I don’t know how one can put a stop to it happening time after time.
On the other hand, of course, I am open to the argument that various homeopathic treatments should be respected and can be used alongside what we usually call ‘Western medicine’. But you can never treat cancer on the basis of illusions. I am convinced of that on the basis of my six months of regular orthodox treatment, and my reading up on as many relevant areas of medicine as I have been able to manage.
I have come to recognise what a human triumph cancer research is. Even if it happens long after I am no longer alive, I am absolutely convinced that cancer will be defeated one of these days.
16
A dream about a muddy trench in Flanders
It is about a month since I was informed that I was stricken with cancer. I am undergoing a period of varying treatments, but will soon start on chemotherapy and also radiotherapy aimed at the metastases that have formed at the back of my neck. If my understanding of the skeleton’s anatomy is correct, they are in the very vertebra that is broken when a person is hanged, in countries where ‘the long drop’ is still a legal punishment.
In my dreams I find myself actively involved in fighting during the First World War, at some poin
t between 1914 and 1918 – at least thirty years before I was born. I am lying hunched up at the bottom of a wet and muddy trench. I don’t know which country I’m fighting for. All around me are other soldiers, but nobody says anything. They are all silent. A grey, noiseless mist rolls over the deserted battlefields. In the distance I can make out a dead horse trapped in a dense thorn bush. It had been killed mid-jump, and one of its back legs has been torn off.
Silence reigns. There are no shots, no explosions. I turn to look at a soldier lying next to me. I notice that the nails on his fingers that are grasping the butt of his rifle are bitten away. I ask him what he thinks – when will the shells begin flying again?
He answers in a language I don’t understand. His eyes are gaping wide, and he looks at me as if I were his enemy – which I might be. Everybody is everybody else’s enemy in this waterlogged landscape.
In my dream I know that something is going to happen, but I don’t know what. Those of us lying there in the trench are waiting. We are waiting for death, if for nothing else.
The mist continues to creep over the brown muddy earth, which is full of craters caused by the exploding shells.
Suddenly the mist begins to change colour. It is no longer greyish-white. The change is slow at first, but becomes quicker and quicker. Now the mist is becoming a pale yellow colour. Too late those of us lying there in the trench realise that the mist is a new enemy creeping up on us. It is only when we breathe in the mist, which is comprised of poison gas, and feel the agony as our lungs and intestines are eaten away, that it dawns on us that the enemy is right next to us. And has even entered our bodies.
Then I wake up. For a brief moment I am totally confused. The pain has not stayed in the dream: it is still there in my memory.
Does it belong to the dream, or to my waking self?
Then I recall the bronchoscopy I had the day before. It was far from pleasant. After a local anaesthetic and sedative injected into my arm, a camera was thrust down my throat and into one of my lungs, where the primary tumour is located. It was followed by another thin tube which has a sort of knife attached to the end of it so that the surgeon can snip away at the tumour and extract pieces of tissue that can be extracted and sent for biopsy. Sister Marie says I will feel a little pain in my throat afterwards. She is right.
With all the tubes in my arm and in my woozy state, I am reminded of poison injections used to execute prisoners. But in my case it is a matter of attempting to save a life under threat by applying the best possible treatment.
In my dream the bronchoscopy has been transformed into mustard gas that seeps down like a yellowish mist into the unsuspecting soldiers’ eyes and throats. Many of them die, others become blind for life.
As in a painting by Bruegel, they lead one another away from the battlefield and into the realm of the blind.
But in the darkness of night it dawns on me that it’s not quite so straightforward as a real pain in my throat being transformed into a dream about a trench in Flanders. There is another dimension to it all. Now that I am awake I recall that mustard gas, so called because it could at times smell just like mustard, was not merely a ruthless weapon used in the First World War. The gas had not simply poisoned soldiers: it transpired later that it had a positive effect on soldiers suffering from leukaemia.
The deadly gas from the First World War, which was later forbidden by international conventions, also gave birth to a scientific development that eventually produced the cytotoxins used nowadays so effectively to fight cancer.
So that is why I had the dream. The thoughts and memories that raced through my sleeping brain were bearing a message for me. The trench was the waiting for the chemotherapy that I would soon be undergoing. The mustard gas would not kill or blind me, but would fight against my cancer. The yellow cloud would be transformed into a liquid that would drip slowly into one of my veins in the form of carefully selected cytotoxins, which with luck would attack my aggressive cancer cells.
Unfortunately my healthy cells will not be left in peace. In the worst-case scenario I could experience many side effects, of which the loss of hair from my head could be regarded as one of the least troublesome.
There will be periods when my immune defences are more or less totally ineffective, and my blood values could be so low that I shall need to be given blood transfusions.
My dream has become very clear. It has made me wide awake. I get up, despite the fact that it is only four o’clock, and go into the room where I keep my books. In one corner is the red armchair in which I often sit reading. I don’t switch on any lights. The beam from an outside light illuminates one of the bookcases. It is crowded with books. Lars Eriksson made all my oak bookshelves to order, and I am reminded, once again, that he must now make some more for me. I don’t have enough room for the piles of books that are growing higher and higher.
As long as I live those piles will carry on growing higher and higher.
17
The caves
There is a book illustration that I recall in detail, despite the fact that it is more than fifty years since I saw it for the first time. It occurs in Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island. The marooned engineers and their servants have been helped by an unknown benefactor when they most need it – among other things he has given them quinine when one of them was stricken by malaria.
In the end they manage to track down the mysterious man who has helped them; they descend into a cave where Captain Nemo is waiting for death in his submarine Nautilus. He is about to submerge it and turn it into his sarcophagus.
What has stuck in my memory above all else is the illustration of that cave.
One of my greatest obsessions when I was a child was looking for undiscovered caves. It started when I read about Captain Nemo’s scuttled submarine. However, the chances of my finding caves in Härjedalen were not all that good. The land that had been covered by ice during the ice age was made up of broken stones, gravel and occasional high cliffs. The endless plains were covered in forests and heathland. The bedrock was of a type that made it unlikely there were caves carved out deep down below it. Nevertheless, searching for hidden entrances to secret rooms in the underworld, where the rock had been hollowed out by mysterious rivers flowing silently along vast distances underneath my feet, was something that never lost its appeal. You could never know. Nature could be capricious. At least, that’s what I thought as a child.
Even now I sometimes feel, deep down inside myself, that I am still searching for caves. That there is an instinct – a lust – that I shall never be able to overcome. But nowadays actually finding that hidden rocky entrance is not so important. The most important thing is the lure, the searching.
In 1950, a few years after I was born, a group of boys discovered an opening in the Lummelunda Cave on the island of Gotland. The cave had been known about for several hundred years and people had been able to penetrate it for a short distance: but most of it was still unexplored. Three boys – Örjan Håkansson, Percy Nilsson and Lars Olsson – were convinced that there was another bigger cave system behind the opening section. Suddenly a large lump of rock shifted, and revealed an opening that had been hidden behind it. Now it would be possible to explore the whole cave system seriously. The boys must have been absolutely delighted by their discovery – I envy them that moment!
Nowadays that passage is called ‘The Boys’ Entrance’. And there are lots of similar boys’ – or girls’ – entrances. New caves are constantly being discovered, often by accident, despite the fact that speleologists – i.e. cave researchers – can now predict where the probabilities are greatest for finding cave systems that have remained hidden, or at least not been known about. Caves and hollowed-out caverns in rocky areas never occur by accident: there is always a cause, even if it can vary and be difficult to pin down.
Human beings found their way into caves in order to acquire shelter from the weather and protection from predators. Similarly, animals have also withdrawn i
nto caves, not least in order to protect themselves from hunters.
It is inside caves that we find the earliest attempts by people to express the human desire to leave artistic statements for future generations.
It is also in one of these caves – the Chauvet Cave in southern France – that we can find the signature of what we can safely call the first identifiable artist in the long history of mankind. He has decorated a large number of cave walls with pictures of animals. We know that he was a man because his signature indicates his sex. It is not written because there was no such thing as letters of the alphabet or a written language 30,000 years ago.
His signature is a number of strong imprints of his hands in among the animals. In similar fashion to the way we take fingerprints nowadays, he has coated his hands with pigments, the same coloured ‘paints’ that he used for the animal pictures. Then he has pressed them against the cave walls. He is not the only cave artist to do that, but what makes him unique, and also gives him a recognisable identity, is one of his fingers.
It is bent. We cannot know if it was an injury or if he was born like that, but doctors say it is very rare for a child to be born with a skeletal deformity affecting just one finger. So it is probably an injury he did to himself – or had done to him – later in life.
What is fascinating about this first identifiable artist is that his hand crops up in several different caves. All in the same part of France, to be sure; but it suggests that he might have been a peripatetic cave painter who was employed by various groups who lived peacefully side by side. When you examine the animal paintings he made, you can see that he was a great talent. His crooked finger did not prevent him from depicting animals and making them look uncannily true to life. Most impressive of all is his ability to depict their movement. You get the impression that the animals are actually jumping down from the cave wall. There is no doubt that an important element of his artistic talent is his ability to suggest that the four-legged animals are running away from or about to attack two-legged human beings.
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