“What happened?” I said.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “It all went so fast. I suppose he took him off to the hospital?”
“I suppose so,” I said.
The young man swiveled to face us.
“He drove off with him,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“I called an ambulance. No need now, though.”
“No,” I said.
“He drove straight into him. It was the driver’s fault. He might not be taking him to the hospital. He could just leave him somewhere and clear off.”
“No, I can’t imagine that,” I said.
“Why else would he be in such a hurry?” he said, then walked over to the bike and leaned it up against a lamppost, raised his hand to Linda and me in a wave and went off toward the center while we ambled away in the opposite direction. Linda went home, I turned around and went back to the office.
I felt shaken. But why, exactly? There was nothing puzzling about what I had seen, and it was hardly spectacular either. It was a minor accident, that was all, a motorist knocking a cyclist off his bike in busy lunchtime traffic. The next day I checked the paper to see if there was anything about it. There wasn’t. Of course there wasn’t. Not a word. But still I felt shaken. It wasn’t because I felt for him, or because there had been blood, it was something else, something to do with the very nature of the occurrence. Fifty meters away no one knew what had happened, and to the few people who were there it was all over and done with as quickly as it took place. Had there been some mention in the paper, I would probably have calmed back down, order would have been restored. The newspapers are full of that kind of thing, events deviating in some way from the norm, and our reading about them there lends them a kind of fixedness they don’t have in real life, where they are over the moment they occur and no one who witnesses them can quite grasp what actually happened. That fixedness is a fiction, but we understand it to be reality, and thereby the real world remains under our control, and this is our haven. The event is lifted out of its physical environment and its particular moment and goes from being without continuity to becoming a part of an ongoing system, so-called news. Anything that cannot be explained, any unexpected accident or catastrophe, any instance of sudden death or incomprehensible malice is gathered here in the form of small narratives, and the mere fact of their being told is sufficient to put us at ease, to assure us that order exists. This system is completely irrational, such order being but fiction, and in this it resembles other systems people have seemingly always sought to establish. Order operates in the social domain but relates to what lies outside that domain. The fear of natural forces, inorganic as well as organic, has always needed to be assuaged, and since the human is what is known to us, and such forces are alien to us, they have been incorporated into the human sphere, still as alien, yet alien within our own domain. The classic trope here is the ghost, death in human form. One of the places where this aspect of the relationship between man and nature is clearest is in the work of the author Olav Duun. One of his most important books is called Menneske og maktene (published in English as Floodtide of Fate), the original Norwegian title evoking the human struggle against the tide of inhuman forces, a theme that runs throughout his work. His masterpiece, the six-volume saga The People of Juvik, is steeped in it. Though Duun was only ten years older than Broch and they wrote and published their novels during the same period, The People of Juvik is so unlike The Death of Virgil that they could be attributed to different civilizations if one did not know any better. Broch’s opening scene, with its Imperial Adriatic squadron and the dying Virgil, is worlds away from this:
The first Juviking they can tell us about came from the south, from Sparbu or Stod or wherever it was. His name was Per. He had been married, it was said, and had had house and land, and he brought his mother with him. What had driven him out the Lord only knew. He leased a piece of land from Lines.
Whereas Broch’s novel takes place in the very epicenter of power, with the empire’s greatest poet as its main character, and explores the relationships between ethics and aesthetics, politics and literature, Duun’s novel is set in the very margins of civilization, a tiny and in every respect insignificant village community on the coast of Nord-Trøndelag in preindustrial Norway, with a family of uneducated farmers and fishermen as its main characters, the political upheavals and transformational occurrences that might take place in the wider world washing up onto their shores only in the aftermath, like historical driftwood. Naturally, this is not the way they see things themselves, to them this is the center of the world, and so closely does Duun zoom in on them that the reader feels this too, following the family’s tale as individual existences are established and eked out, a society formed and maintained. Land is cleared and cultivated, houses are built, children are born. This is the foundation of their lives, on which they could stand so firmly if not for the crackling force field that exists between them, the invisible sphere of emotions, jealousy and resentment, love and benevolence, greed and arrogance, suspicion and fathomless naïvety that drives them here and there, lumping together in great knots, dissolving, lumping together, dissolving, and lumping together again. The narrow horizon within which this takes place and the long period of time the saga covers make it seem like it’s the place itself that finds expression in its people, as if they are their place more than they are themselves, in contrast to Hamsun – probably the most obvious writer to compare with Duun – in whose work such an idea could never arise. Hamsun’s characters are alien, belonging to no place, they are tourists of the mind, somehow, without a past, without origin. Hamsun’s characters come barging in. Emotions occur within rather than between individuals, in contrast to Duun. The difference reveals itself too in their understandings of irrationality. Both Duun and Hamsun are interested in the notion. In Hamsun the irrational is often fine and delicate, a reflection of the nobility of the nerves, romantically maniacal, as rich as it is a thing of beauty. In Duun the irrational is bound up with popular belief, superstition, misunderstanding, and darkness, a thing that occurs between people, often helpless and impoverished. When Per Anders, the first of the saga’s series of protagonists, dies, Duun describes it like this:
The maids dared not lie down to sleep that night. They sat downstairs in the parlor and slept. For they heard a braying outside. They heard queer noises in the old house. Ane sat half-covered up in her shawl. She was reading a hymn, or perhaps the Lord’s Prayer itself.
Then he jumps to his feet and listens out: “Hear, the buck!,” only to lie down again smiling: “Oh, never mind, it’s only the ladder and the birch. They don’t frighten me.”
There was something terrible outside the house, this they felt. There sat an evil spirit, riding on the roof. It was a night of ill fortune.
Per Anders had a dire fit of coughing and rattling of the throat. Then he said: “Come now, Ane. Give me the staff.”
“Pray to the Lord, pray to the Lord!” she whispered anxiously.
“M-m. If I have never prayed to him before, why – ”
It was the last he said. Ane opened the door, that the soul might depart, and then she laid out the body the way it was supposed to be done. She noticed little Anders standing in the doorway. At the same moment, Valborg saw him too, and both of them asked him: “What are you standing there staring at, Anders?”
The boy pointed to the foot of the bed. “Who was that man there?”
“There?” They looked at each other. Their knees trembled. Valborg took the boy and put him to bed.
Death in Duun’s writing is shrouded in terror and superstition. They open the door to let out the soul of the deceased, they see a ghost sitting at the foot of the deceased’s bed, or perhaps it is the devil himself come to collect him. The next morning they burn the likhalm, the straw on which the corpse has lain on the bier, and when the wind blows the smoke back toward the farmhouse they are gripped with fear, taking it to be an omen of impending death
. When the son rings the church bell for the deceased, it feels unusually heavy and sluggish, a bad sign, he lies and tells his mother all went well. The corpse is laid out on straw inside the farmhouse, his hymnbook under his chin and a coin on each eye, one of which slips from its place, the deceased staring at them all, a couple of the women gasping in fear. He lies there a week before the wake and the burial. “The women dared hardly go outside after dusk, they thought they had a white one at their heels wherever they went; and all sorts of ugly noises were to be heard in the evenings.” On the day of the wake a crow settles on the roof of the farm, they chase it away, but it keeps coming back; again they take it to be a sign that someone else is soon to die. Yet the deceased makes them think of other things too besides ghosts and spirits. Per Anders’s son Per visits the corpse daily.
It seemed to him like it wanted to tell him something. But when he was there it told him nothing: it slept as before.
Ay, he thought, here lies the last. Of them.
And when he came out, he said out loud to himself: “And so the fell ends at the sea. It wants no further. And as death has drawn this face, so does evening lift hills and fells toward the sky: still and stone-dead, so far removed from life and all that lives and moves.”
It is the sunset Duun is describing, when evening rises in the landscape and all becomes still and dark. The foreboding of death Broch invests in his glittering sea is effectuated here to the full, though without the landscape losing its beauty. “So does evening lift hills and fells toward the sky.” That we are bound up with stillness and the dark, and seemingly become one with them when we die, is the oldest mystery of all, for we are here one moment and gone the next, never to return, but to remain there, blind and still, for all time. The endeavor of Duun’s characters is to give voice to this blindness, this stillness, thereby drawing the unknown into the known. The smoke of the likhalm is a sign, it tells them something, The sluggish church bell tells them something. The black crow tells them something. And the corpse, when the coin slips from its eye, tells them something. When this dark and silent world speaks, a path is opened between the living and the dead, which in itself is meaningful. The inexplicable, such as a person in the prime of life, wholly involved in human reality, suddenly being struck down without anyone being able to do anything about it, snatched by death or else spared to recover, makes any occurrence a meaningful sign: the smoke blowing back to the farm, the omen of what was to come. Order exists, nothing in the world is arbitrary. The order Duun describes is a blend of Christianity, paganism, and homespun fatalism, and much of the story’s value lies in the way he shows how the great superstructures that exist independently of the people there are adapted to the real-world lives they live, hauled down into praxis, a day-to-day existence of plows, fishing nets, livestock, and outhouses, by which they are changed. In their pure form myths are complete depictions of reality, closed upon themselves, yet the way they work, what they do, resembles what Duun’s characters do. Myth lends a face to the unknown, giving it body, place, and time, establishing connections between the human world and nature, between death and life, between past and future, creation and destruction. When a figure such as Odin dangles from the branches of Yggdrasil, half dead and half alive, to obtain its knowledge, or when Eve is coaxed into eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, thereby becoming mortal, in both cases a connection is established between the tree, death, and knowledge. Of what does that connection consist? The roots in the ground, the branches in the sky, these are the world and life, which is endless, forever sprouting anew from dead stubs. Knowledge comes from the dead, everything we know we have learned from them. Life is the life of the one and the life of us all. Death is the death of the one and the death of us all. The sun is forever being seen for the first time, always a new pair of eyes squinting up at it, and forever being seen for the last time, other eyes closing, losing sight of it once and for all. These connections are what our myths and rituals manage and administer, and the same applies to them, they are already there for us. They are a language, a different language, and what they communicate can be communicated in no other way. In this respect the Enlightenment, resting on the idea that myth, ritual, and religion were a form of superstition, represented decay. We call the mythological view of the world unenlightened, and obviously, four hundred years after the beginning of the Enlightenment, we now know more about the material world and how it works than those who lived before that time. And not just more, but unimaginably more. But what is knowing? Throughout the Völuspá, the völva’s questions are repeated in what seems like a refrain of reluctance: Do you know enough yet, or what? Knowledge is concealed, connected to Hel, the dead and the past, out of sight, and access to it comes at a price. “Do you know enough yet, or what?” says the völva, and in that lies an evaluation of those listening in, their thirst for knowledge, at which she sneers. To drink from Mimir’s Well, Odin sacrifices an eye, quite unthinkably to us, since what we know is so bound up with what we see. For us knowledge comes from sight, this was the essence of the revolution that was the Enlightenment, no longer were we to be tied to the authority of religion’s ancient scriptures, the texts of philosophy. In myth this is not the case, in fact the opposite holds, for in myth knowledge is bound up with what we cannot see, that which is secret and concealed. Moreover, the price to be paid for it is great. In the Bible’s creation myth the fall of man is down to Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. “The oldest of our religious traditions considered knowledge to be guilty; we had thought it to be innocent,” writes the French philosopher Michel Serres. The rituals, myths, and folktales that have been handed down through the generations, as far back as our collective memory can reach into the dark depths of history, of whose lives we are unknowing, are referred to by Serres as social or cultural technologies, industries that worked to “secrete time,” as he puts it, “from whose compost the different traditions appeared.” Language, which we take for granted, came once from nothing. The insight that the community lives on even when the individual dies, which we take for granted, came only gradually. Responsibility toward the future, of which they themselves were not a part, was not given but was won. There is a light in this, but it is directed toward what it means to be human, rather than toward the components of the human and how they work together. Our myths see us in terms of time, the Enlightenment sees us in terms of space.
Our world is very much about the space we inhabit, practically all our technology, industry, and science is organized according to its principles. The space we inhabit is seen, mapped, and explained, and subjugated at an increasing rate. The space we used to inhabit, and which Duun describes, characterized by repetition through generations, where people toiled by the sweat of their brows, made love, gave birth to children, and died, in other words the space in which they felt themselves at home, but which they also feared, surrounded as it was by the darkness of ignorance, no remoter to us in time than to be inhabited by the parents of my own grandparents in Vestland, who were fishermen and farmers, is now gone. We do not believe in omens, we do not believe in God, in fact we believe in nothing; instead we know. We know the wind’s direction is determined by meteorological phenomena, and that smoke blowing toward a house means nothing other than that, a movement of air caused by differences of atmospheric pressure. We know the soul dies when we die, so we no longer open the door to let it out. We know there are no such things as ghosts, and that devils do not exist either; if a boy sees a figure in the half-light at the foot of the bed, it is a product of his imagination. We know that a sluggish bell cannot determine how the year will proceed. We know birds are not omens; a crow settling on the roof of a house where a person lies dead is a matter of coincidence, the whim of a bird; perhaps the roof gave it a better view of what it was after? Everything has a sensible, rational explanation, we know this and live our lives according to that knowledge. For that reason, we are not afraid of the dark and not afraid of death.
But
what do we actually know?
In Duun’s world everyone believed in God, this was a matter of course, anything else was unthinkable. But few had any real idea of what it was they actually believed in, few had anything more than a superficial knowledge of religion, that was what the priests were there for, they knew everything there was to know about the Scriptures. For ordinary people it was sufficient to know there was a god, and a son of that god, who took all their sins upon himself, and that there was a life after death. This applies to us too. We know how everything works and hangs together, nothing remains unexplained. Yet few of us know exactly what it is that we know, few are in any way genuinely familiar with the sciences. We know about atoms and electrons, we know about the theory of evolution and the big bang, yet would be hard put to explain any of these things ourselves; as long as we know someone else knows, we trust in that knowledge, that the world is organized in that way, and this puts our minds at ease and makes us feel secure. Duun’s world revolved around repetition, time was mythical and static, whereas our world revolves around the new changing times, progress. The new is in everything; the things we use, for example, are continually being redesigned, cutlery made in the eighties is different from cutlery now, a house built in the 1950s is different from a house built in our day, but such change is for the eye only, visual rather than functional: a knife has a handle and a blade in 2010 as it had a handle and a blade in 1710 or 1310. In any mythological understanding of reality the eye does not count, meaning resides in what the eye cannot see, whereas any rational understanding of reality is visual, and that shift, which occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, comprises the very nucleus of the revolution that was the Enlightenment. The most important technologies developed in that age were the telescope and the microscope, without these two optical instruments the gradual insights of science would have been inconceivable. And perhaps the emphasis placed on design in our own age should be understood on that basis? Time is invisible, time can be neither enlarged nor diminished, evading all spatial technologies by virtue of that invisibility, but in design it is captured, in design it appears to us: the seventies looked like this, the eighties looked like this, the nineties looked like this. The old becomes the new in a system that in principle is the same as that of our former rituals, where each spring was a new beginning, though with the important difference that what we see is not the same, we do not see the repetition, only the new. The same is true of news, which removes events from their original time and their original place, inserting them into a flow of other events, the same from one day to the next, from one month to the next, from one year to the next, in that planes will continue to crash, people will continue getting killed, workers will always be on strike somewhere, there will always be car accidents, maritime disasters, elections, famines, and within this continuity, in which individual events are different but the form always the same, time is again static and mythical. Oh, our world is indeed a mythological world, above us a sky of images in which nothing ever changes and everything is the same. We have made a myth of reality, but unlike the people whose lives were determined by a mythological understanding of the world, we are unaware of it, thinking what we see and relate to to be reality itself, the world the way it really is. It is in this light that I understand the experience of the sublime, or the epiphanic, more particularly that something in the world emerges before us, passes through our conception of it and for a brief moment reveals itself the way it is. The things themselves are the same, only our perception of them changes, because in being unusually grand, unexpected, or in some other way departing from the norm, for a few seconds they contrive to put our expectations out of action. This is why Turner’s sun, or the event depicted by Lorrain, or the sea and the harbor in Broch’s opening passage, appear so intense and awaken such vigorous emotion. This is the truth of art. The truth of science is of a different nature, quite differently bound by time; practically all scientific research of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is unreadable today, certainly it has lost most of its relevance, whereas the art of that period still speaks to us and is laden with meaning. Indeed, across the chasm of familiar and unfamiliar time it speaks to us; a cave of paintings tens of thousands of years old leaves an impression on us and in a certain respect cannot be surpassed, the same is true of the first creation narratives, even though we know little if anything about those who wrote them or how they lived. Compared to the swell of generations who lived through the hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of Enlightenment philosophy, the ensuing four hundred years of rationality are but a ripple on the surface, a scratch on the rock of a fell, and from such a perspective concepts like “rational” and “irrational” are not particularly fruitful. It is all a matter of different ways of relating to the unknown. We have succeeded in exorcising the unknown, and we are at ease and secure, the first culture in history not to tremble in the face of our circumstances, life is under our control. But the price of such security is high, for it is a presence in our lives. And it reveals itself in death. We are no longer afraid of death, having lifted everything to do with it into the sky of images above us, because if one thing is prevalent there it is the image of people dying. In the world of images people die all the time, they are shot in the head or in the chest, they plunge from cliffs and waterfalls, they drown or crash in their cars, they perish in air disasters, they die on the battlefield, or fall victim to a suicide bomber at a checkpoint in the Middle East or Iraq, they are hacked to death with ice picks, slashed by knives, run through by swords or pierced by lances, they are gassed to death, they freeze to death and are incinerated in fires. They stumble and crack their heads open on the edges of bathtubs and doors, they fall on the steepest ski slopes and bleed to death when their arteries are severed, they die in childbirth, in their sickbeds, of cancer and plague, brain hemorrhages and heart attacks. They die on the cross, in the electric chair, on the gallows, and strapped to a table with poison injected into their blood. This death, which is visual and unattached in time or place, floating freely and weightlessly in our sky of images, is a surrogate, a substitute for real death, absorbing our fear and anxiety, while real death, the physical death of the body, the way it occurs in a certain place at a certain time, is hidden away as much as possible. And when it occurs, when we encounter it in the real world, the way it really is, when it descends from heaven to earth in all its chthonic longing, its lust for mull and humus, darkness and damp, and the corpse lies there in front of our eyes, stiff and dead, it is as if a veil is drawn aside, for we are not modern at all, we are old as the dolmens and barrows, kin to the grass and trees, the worms and snails that slither as best they can, one day simply to lie there, immovable beneath the sky, to disintegrate and be gone, a speck in all the world’s jagged edges and swirling forms, made from dust, returned to dust, earthly in marrow and bone, hands and feet bound to the now that we today, despite all promises to the contrary, depart. But we cannot part from death, death will never betray us, death comes to us always, and with it life.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 75