Two weeks after leaving Rochefort, La Méduse runs aground off the coast of Africa. The area has many dangerous, shifting sandbanks that have never been properly mapped. La Méduse is stranded on a reef called Banc d’Arguin.
The vessel is well and truly stuck. On the captain’s orders everything loose is thrown overboard in the hope of making the ship lighter so that it can glide away from the sandbank. But without success. Captain de Chaumareys then gives the order ‘abandon ship’. As there are not enough lifeboats for the number of people on board, a large raft is constructed. The three tall masts are cut down in order to make the base of the raft in the shape of a square. The lifeboats will then tow the raft behind them as they head for the African coast, which is hidden in the mist to the east.
But the towing doesn’t work; the hawsers are cut and the raft, with its 150 passengers, is abandoned – Captain de Chaumareys commits one of the most cowardly and dastardly acts of which human beings are capable.
The situation on board the raft soon shifts from restrained order to brutal chaos. The strongest throw the injured and weak overboard, food and water eventually run out and cannibalism begins. Survivors use cutlasses to carve up the dead bodies and eat the raw meat. The raft becomes a human slaughterhouse.
After fifteen days the raft is spotted by its sister ship, The Argus. Only fifteen of those on board have survived, and several of them die soon afterwards as a result of their trials and tribulations. In the end only three sailors from the raft survive and can return to France.
One of those survivors is the ship’s doctor, Henri Savigny. When he gets back to France he hands in a report on what happened to the French Admiralty. Its contents leak out, and the incident becomes a major scandal.
The artist Théodore Géricault is about twenty-five years old when the catastrophe involving La Méduse takes place. In 1812 he had attracted a lot of attention when his painting of a cavalry officer on a bucking horse was exhibited at the Salon in Paris, and now he starts work on a big painting of the raft on which people lie dying after the shipwreck of La Méduse.
At first he concentrates on trying to create the atmosphere of horror on board: cannibalism, the throwing overboard of weak but still living sailors, the sea where there are no other vessels in sight, the hopelessness that is eventually the only remaining emotion.
He imagines a raft drifting around on a sea where no God displays any interest in the suffering of the castaways. When there is no hope, there is no God either.
The heavens are as empty as the sea.
Barely six kilometres away is the African coast, invisible because of the mist. But it cannot provide salvation; it might just as well be hell lying in wait for them.
Géricault starts to doubt. He makes an endless number of sketches but eventually begins to tone down the catastrophe. He seems to be asking himself the following question: what happens to human beings when they have lost all hope? When there is nothing left?
He provides no answer to that question. It is quite simply the wrong question to ask.
There is always something left.
The painting he eventually produces depicts the human hope that still exists even after everything seems to be finished. At the back of the painting, in the far distance, we can glimpse The Argus: but we can’t make out whether the sailors on board the ship have noticed the raft.
The painting is on display at the Louvre in Paris. When I stand looking at it I get the feeling that it is a meeting place for the old and the new. Géricault studied both Rubens and Caravaggio when he was working on his raft; but with the same intensity he also studied dead and dying patients at the Beaujon hospital. It is said that he even took parts of dead bodies to his studio in order to examine the process of decay in more detail.
Most works of art are something one looks at or listens to. I myself sometimes find that I also sense a pleasant smell. Very occasionally I have stood in front of a work of art and experienced an unusually nice taste.
Géricault has succeeded in doing something for me that few artists have managed to do. Munch and Bacon are other examples. And of course Caravaggio and Rembrandt. When I stand in front of Géricault’s painting I can detect a stench of dying human bodies.
There is a remarkable contrast in the picture. Despite the fact that the people lying there are starving and half dead thanks to hunger and thirst, Géricault depicts them with almost athletic-looking bodies. He is bold enough to combine realism with the ideals that characterise classical art. By distancing himself from maintaining a purely realistic approach, he persuades those of us who view his painting to take our place on board the raft.
What really impresses me is Géricault’s attempt to depict hope that doesn’t really exist. I know of no other work of art that is as successful in expressing what one has to call a philosophical challenge.
After my visit to the Louvre I sit down in a nearby cafe. It is autumn, chilly, with a wind blowing in from the north-west. I have travelled to Paris in order to talk about my books.
I observe the people sitting at the other tables and think that all of them possess some kind of hope. The hope that something will succeed, that something will pass over, that something will be explained, that something painful will turn out to be a misconception.
All the time we need to ensure that our hopefulness is stronger than our hopelessness. Without hope it is basically impossible to survive. That applies to those of us who have cancer just as much as to others.
After I leave the cafe it starts drizzling. I walk towards the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
It takes me some time to find Géricault’s mausoleum. He lived to be only thirty-two years old; on one occasion he injured himself so badly falling off one of his horses that it helped to shorten his life. But he also suffered from tuberculosis. He knew early on that his days were numbered.
The monument attached to the grave itself was made by the now forgotten sculptor Antoine Étex. It is sentimental and shocking, depicting Géricault dying and slowly dropping the paintbrush he is holding in his hand.
The Raft of the Medusa depicts the hope that still exists when all other hope has vanished. We cling on to the rafts despite the fact that we have no strength left.
But hope is always there. Maybe as no more than a shadow. But still…
21
All this forgotten love
Death and oblivion belong together, in the same way as cancer and existential fear.
Many years ago, during the 1960s, I was visiting an old house in Bastugatan in Stockholm that was undergoing renovation work. By pure chance my visit coincided with some of the men working on the house’s foundations making a discovery. They found an empty Pilsner bottle containing a sealed message. Using a blunt carpenter’s pencil, somebody had written: ‘I sat here with my beloved one beautiful summer’s evening in 1868.’
No names, no signatures; just this euphorically happy message to an unknown future.
Everybody I know has at some point carved their name onto a tree in the woods, or scratched their signature onto a cliff by the sea. Nobody wants to be forgotten. But nearly everybody is.
How many authors do we remember and still read today? I’m not only thinking about those who wrote hundreds of years ago, but also those whose books we bought and read in libraries who died maybe twenty or thirty years ago. How many of Ivar Lo-Johansson’s remarkable novels are borrowed from libraries today? Strindberg is still going strong – but will he be a hundred years from now?
How many artists have disappeared altogether from our consciousness? How many scientists, engineers, inventors? And most important of all, how many ‘ordinary’ people?
Many people are not at all worried about this. Once you’re dead, you’re dead. While you remain in somebody’s memory, you still have your identity. But eventually that fades away as well.
I admit that I am occasionally put out by the thought of being forgotten about altogether a few years from now. The feeling is just as muc
h an expression of embarrassing vanity as it is a human craving. But I think I usually cope successfully with it.
How many of the 107 billion people who have lived on this earth hitherto do we remember today? Their names, their achievements? An increasingly small number. It is man’s fate to be forgotten. Not even those people who have made themselves renowned in various ways will live on in people’s memories for ever. How many people alive today will still be remembered five hundred years from now? Not many. Nowadays the human memory is if anything shorter that at any time in our history. We are constantly being bombarded with a never-ending flow of information, but we know and remember less and less. Our minds are being metaphorically blown apart. As new information comes storming in, earlier memories are consigned to mental rubbish dumps. If our memory palace was real, the level of water in the many halls would have been very high indeed as a result of this rainfall of data.
Those people who are working today on the storage of atomic waste know one thing for certain about their work: it will never be finished in their lifetime. In Sweden it will be another sixty years before the waste is buried in its capsules so that the rocky caverns can be sealed and never opened again. Vegetation will take over. Buildings will be demolished and a collective loss of memory will flourish. When the last of those involved in arranging the permanent storage of the waste dies, all direct memories will have vanished.
Demolishing the creations of human beings can also be a very rapid process. What happens to the world’s highest bridges if they are not constantly maintained? They turn rusty and after a few years lose their ability to contribute to the safe transport of goods and people over inlets of the sea or ravines. Within ten or fifteen years the bridge will collapse. After another ten years there will be nothing left but the crumbling concrete foundations. And a few generations later the bridge will have disappeared forever from the human memory.
But in the primary rock selected for the storage of nuclear waste nothing will rust, nothing will decay. The only thing that will happen will be an invisible process – the gradual fading away of the radioactivity until it finally ceases to be dangerous for people and animals.
The people I have met who are devoting their lives to this work will never live to see it completed. Most of them are aware that they are part of a tradition. They belong to those who spent all their lives building something without seeing it in its finished state.
The Great Wall of China was started as a defensive construction by China’s first emperor, Shi Huangdi, about 200 BC. Work was still taking place on the wall as late as the seventeenth century – so by then work on it had continued for 1,800 years. If you think of the work being handed down from father to son that means there were over sixty generations who never saw the end of the work they and their forefathers had been engaged on. The final stone was never put in place.
Nor did the master stonemasons who began work on Notre-Dame in Paris see the mighty cathedral in all its magnificence on the on the Ȋle de la Cité. It was built between 1163 and 1345, and needed five generations to complete it.
Cologne Cathedral took even longer to complete: 653 years from the laying of the first foundation stone until the building was finished.
Many other monumental edifices got no further than the planning stage. When Hitler was resting, or at least taking time out after another bout of horrific murdering, he would contact the architect Albert Speer and pore over plans and models of what was to become the new Berlin, capital of the world. Hitler wanted to adorn his thousand-year Reich with a city that outclassed Paris, London and Rome. He wanted to build higher, bigger and longer than anything else in existence. But nothing came of it.
The people responsible for arranging the permanent storage of nuclear waste in Sweden are certainly not sentimental or unrealistic individuals. They are also well aware of the true humanity in working for the future, even though they might not complete the task on which they have embarked. They are forging their link in the long chain of human history.
But even so, I wonder. What do those with the responsibilities actually think? The ones who create the final links in the chain and are present when the tunnel opening is closed – and all being well will never again be opened. Have we done everything we could? Have we overlooked anything? Is there a dimension in this whole business that we have not been aware of?
What is involved in living with questions that simply don’t have any answers? How can one calculate something that is impossible to calculate?
A few years ago a 45-metre-long asteroid raced past the earth at very high speed. It was 30,000 kilometres away from the earth and was never sucked into its gravitational field, but only a few days ago a meteor exploded inside the earth’s atmosphere and bits of it were scattered over a Russian village, injuring many people.
Contemporary science has discovered about 10,000 asteroids whirling around in the section of the universe that we can observe, but there are millions out there. If one of them, perhaps several kilometres in diameter, were to crash into the earth within the next few thousand years, we cannot possibly know what the consequences would be. This is just one of the kind of things that we usually see in the doomsday films that are being made all the time because they sell so many tickets.
The truth about our environment is always provisional. What we knew yesterday is changed and replaced by what we know today. For most people life is something that is constantly developing.
I once had a good friend who was a farmer. He died many years ago. In the beginning of our long friendship he showed me his photograph album: he had collected pictures of his harvests and his livestock for each year he had worked on his farm. He never thought about an ultimate goal: as far as he was concerned farming was a continuous activity.
Perhaps nuclear power and the waste it produces is something that breaks all existing fundamental patterns? There has been nothing like it throughout the history of mankind.
22
Timbuktu
I spent over fifty years dreaming about one day visiting the desert town of Timbuktu about which so many sagas are told. Nowadays it is in the country of Mali. I can’t have been more than ten years old when I first came upon the name in a travelogue, and immediately had the feeling that it must be a town at the very end of the world. For me, being a child meant that I was always looking for something that had a specific beginning and an end. I imagined that there was a place beyond which it was impossible to go.
The road always came to an end somewhere. Just as one’s life always ended in death.
The end of the world existed. And it was in Timbuktu.
I spent a lot of time drawing archipelagos when I was a child. I spent every summer on an island in the Östergötland archipelago, a long way away from inland Norrland where I was at home. The island was surrounded by an apparently endless mass of other islands, so drawing them was a natural thing to do. It was a flippant but fantasy-invoking journey into my creative instincts. I used to draw islands with strange shapes, secret inlets, narrow but very deep creeks, treacherous underwater sandbanks, and not least systems of caves which connected the islands by underwater passages.
Even today, when I am taking part in a boring telephone conversation or even simply sitting in a chair and thinking about nothing in particular, I discover afterwards that I have filled a sheet of paper with a new variation of the archipelago I used to create as a child.
Anyway, I did get to Timbuktu in the end. It was between forty and fifty degrees when the car I was travelling in crossed the River Niger by ferry, and the town lay stretched out in front of me in the heat haze, dusty, parched, and with sand constantly being blown along the streets.
I had gone to Timbuktu for two reasons: partly just to see it and to realise that the end of the world did not exist, even though Timbuktu did. In other words, I hadn’t been completely wrong.
The other reason – the most important one now that I was an adult – was to view the treasure-filled archives ove
rflowing with old manuscripts. At other times of unrest, the people of Timbuktu had hidden the manuscripts under the sand. Thanks to the hot and dry desert climate the thousand-year-old documents had survived. They were now kept in archives and libraries overseen with pride by the locals. Many manuscripts were still privately owned by people in Timbuktu, but they seemed to be regarded with such reverence that nobody sold them, despite the fact that cynical speculators were prepared to pay huge sums for the most attractive ones.
The two days I spent in those archives felt like the culmination of a fifty-year-long pilgrimage. Not only did I see proof of what I had always believed, namely that claims to the effect that the African continent had no written history were completely false, but I could even hold these manuscripts in my hands and think how, a thousand years ago, this desert town had been one of the world’s most important intellectual centres. People had travelled long distances to get here – Arabs, Africans, Europeans – long before such places as the Sorbonne in Paris had even been thought of. For centuries learned discussions had taken place here, not only about theological texts – mainly Muslim, of course – but also in such widely differing fields as geography, astronomy and medicine. For the first time I understood properly the intrinsic importance an archive could have. Here was a place recording thoughts emanating from discussions and disagreements that led to the culmination of human learning.
It was as if Timbuktu was a town in which the Enlightenment was still alive.
Today, just a few years after my visit to Timbuktu, we know that for a time the town was occupied by Islamic jihadis who burnt a lot of manuscripts because they considered them to be blasphemous.
I was extremely angry when I realised what had happened; but I also discovered that a lot of manuscripts had been rescued and once again buried in the dry desert sand, despite the fact that doing so could cost people their lives. Most documents seem to have been preserved. But I hardly need to express my opinion of the people who destroy human scholarship in the name of their god.
Quicksand Page 8