If we do believe this, then what is it we believe? That there must be two levels of reality, one we see with the naked eye and move around in, and another, behind the first as it were, invisible but somehow acting in or on it. This other level is the beyond, the hereafter, the grave, the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God, the divine. The idea of a level of reality we cannot see is an archaic one, and this idea, as much as language, makes us human creatures radically different from animals, which, without that idea and what it represents, have an entirely different way of being bound to the moment, chained to the body, caught in matter. The beyond is invisible, but now and then it can break through, either when something from over there suddenly appears here, for example the way angels do in the Old Testament, or else when channels are opened up between the two realities: by speaking in tongues, when it is something from the other reality that is expressing itself, or by seeing visions, seemingly seeing into the other reality, when it is something from the other reality that is showing itself.
In the Old Testament, which is a group of stories about the divine interacting with the human, the divine reveals itself in all these ways. It can show itself physically and concretely, as when two angels come walking across the plain to Abraham and Sarah and share a meal with them before continuing on to Sodom and Gomorrah to look for Lot, and a crowd gathers outside Lot’s house because of their visit; or as a burning bush in the desert, the way it shows itself to Moses; or as a pillar of fire in the sky that leads the Jews out of Egypt. But it can also show itself in immaterial images, in the form of visions or dreams, as when Jacob, on the way from Beersheba to Haran, lies down on the ground and sleeps and dreams about a ladder or stairway from earth to heaven. Angels ascend and descend on it, and God appears above them; he blesses Jacob and says that it will go well for him and his descendants. Jacob wakes up full of fear, and he says, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” It is in a dream that he saw it: the gateway between this side and the beyond. For Jacob’s distant descendant Joseph, dreams are an absolutely essential part of life, and the whole long story about him revolves around them. Joseph’s dreams come true, but he also interprets other people’s dreams. And in this world, where there are two levels of reality, to interpret dreams is the same thing as translating them, explaining the images of the beyond with the logic of this side, starting from the following premise: dreams are stories about the future.
The dreams in the Old Testament have this in common. And that fact – that we can get access to the future on this side by means of visions from the other side – can mean only that what happens here has already been decided there.
The word for that is fate.
The dream I had almost fifteen years ago was simple. A bull was buried in the sand up to its chest; it was struggling to get out. It was menacing. I stood just a few yards away; the bull and I were connected, and I knew that it was me its aggression was directed at. I had a sword and I took a few steps toward the bull and cut off its head. But the body continued to struggle to get free of the sand, and it managed to get free, and I woke up.
There was no one in the house. The woman I was married to at the time was at work, and I stayed in bed waiting for the panic from the dream to fade. It was winter; outside was a clear blue sky, sunny and icy cold. I knew that something terrible was going to happen that day. The dream had been an omen. Something out there was coming to get me. But what, how, why? I got up, got dressed, ate breakfast, and went into the room where I used to sit and write, read, smoke, and listen to music. I went through every possible threat in my head. We had a lodger staying on the floor above us, a girl in her late teens, and sometimes I stole a look at her when we ran into each other on the stairs or in the hall, the way men steal looks at women, and I wouldn’t have thought twice about it except for the fact that she was so young, that made me feel guilty, and now I got it into my head that maybe she had been so upset by these glances, and maybe was so unstable (even though there had not been any sign of that) that she might be capable of making up a story that I had forced myself on her and molested her. That this was extremely unlikely and that there was no indication anything like this might happen did not stop me from thinking about it for a long time. It was the dream that had led me there, to something I felt guilty about even if I was innocent, but neither in the dream itself nor in my relationship with dreams in general was there anything to indicate that its threat was real and might have any effect outside the dream’s domain.
But one way or another, I must have somehow believed in omens, because it was obvious to me that this dream was a warning of something about to happen. This again suggested that, one way or another, I believed in fate, since the only way the dream could say anything about the future was if what would happen in the future had already been decided. If it was already on its way toward me.
For someone who had grown up in a secularized part of the world in the 70s and 80s, this was a strange idea. Dreams are a nightly release of visual energy, or a subconscious processing of the day’s impressions; God and the divine are not literal entities, they are just the target at which our yearning for the best in human existence aims, or a feeling of affinity with the universe. A man like Ezekiel, if he appeared today with his wild and powerful visions of the divine, would be seen not as a prophet but as a psychotic with a distorted sense of reality. If a prime minister consulted a dream interpreter on questions about the future of the country, the way the pharaohs of Egypt did once upon a time, we would call it the greatest political scandal of our time. When it comes to our own life, the idea that it is in someone else’s hands, outside our control, and somehow predetermined is no longer acceptable except in popular culture, where it can still be the case that the bullet was meant for him or that he and she were meant for each other and were brought together by forces beyond their control. These forces, deprived of the other level of reality, seem more than anything like a temporary suspension of chance, or else random chance that brings bits of reality together in a meaningful way for a moment: when he goes and thinks of her as intensely as possible in the stream of people outside a train station in a large European city, suddenly there she is. What are the chances of that? What is it that has brought them together? It is fate, but what controls fate?
In a rational world, the role of fate in human life, what Olav Duun once called the relationship between “man and higher powers,” is not acknowledged, and the deterministic aspect of life is understood in sociological terms, statistically. Random chance, bringing bits of reality together in a meaningful way, is at work everywhere, even in the greatest narratives, such as that of the emergence of life. Certain specific preconditions were present and then, through a kind of chain of coincidences, what was dead and inorganic crossed the threshold to organic life, after which, through a new series of coincidences and conditions, it was driven onward into ever greater complexity, eventually culminating in human beings, who developed their humanity through the emergence and evolution of abstract thought, which freed them from the chains of the moment and made it possible for them to plan for the future. The very existence of the future, the knowledge that something is going to happen even if we cannot know what, and that death is always there as a possibility, not only for ourselves but also for our loved ones, makes us different from animals and is probably what made human undertakings consist not just of acting but also of mapping. Making a map is about eliminating the unpredictable. In mapping out what has happened, in other words thinking historically, we look for patterns and connections; the same is true for mapping out nature, landscapes, the starry sky, the human soul. Science is a way to master our surroundings by identifying the structures that determine them, and ideally this removes anything unpredictable about what will happen in the future, since the patterns things follow exist outside of time. This was also the function of religions of God and belief in fate: if what happened to people w
as unpredictable, that didn’t mean it was arbitrary or random, just that it had been decided somewhere else.
I am writing this in a little house in Österlen, in southern Sweden. It is the height of summer, the golden fields of wheat are undulating endlessly inward everywhere, interrupted only by islands of trees that have been planted around farms as protection against the wind blowing in almost always from the sea, all of it bathed in sunlight every single day this time of year. The soil here is some of the most fertile in Europe and the climate is favorable too; people must have lived here for as long as there has been anyone living in Scandinavia.
A couple of miles east of here, past a little village called Kåseberga, are Ale’s Stones, a kind of monument from the late Iron Age: a group of two-ton stones laid out in the shape of a ship, around two hundred feet long and sixty feet across. Even without the stones, it is a magical place. It is located on a plateau about ninety feet above sea level, from which you can see the horizon all the way around: the flat, cultivated landscape from the south to the west up to the north, and the sea from the south to the east up to the north. At night, when the sky is clear and full of stars, it is as if you could jump right into it. No one knows the true meaning of the stones, but they are commonly assumed to have been a burial monument, which may also have had an astronomical function. The stones were probably carried there and set up sometime between AD 400 and 700, but there are also traces of earlier presences there, so presumably this place has held very special meaning since time immemorial.
A couple of miles north is Valleberga Church, from the twelfth century, which has gravestones with inscriptions in runes, the Vikings’ written language. A little farther west, still within walking distance of where I am now, is Tosterup Castle, built probably in the early fourteenth century, about when Dante was writing the Divine Comedy, which I try to think about whenever I stand looking at it in an effort to grasp the temporal distance, which spatial proximity always interferes with. The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe lived there as a child, since his uncle owned the castle: that was in the mid-sixteenth century. Within a radius of a few miles, in other words, there are traces of Nordic culture from the Viking Age, and of the transitional period that followed when Christianity came here, and of a central figure of the Renaissance.
When I drive between these places, or think about them, I have no sense of continuity or verticality, the way I usually do when I read history; maybe it is simply because these places are so concrete and are located in a horizontal relationship with each other. The idea that the people who lived here before me and felt the wind from the sea on their faces, the heat from the sun burning their necks and shoulders, and saw the dark blue strip of the ocean as a boundary past the cliffs draped in yellow, under the bright sky, where ever-new cloud formations hang seemingly motionless in the distance – that all of those who saw and moved through this landscape before me would have had a radically different experience and understanding of themselves and their world than I have of myself and mine is hard, in fact impossible, to grasp. Maybe because it isn’t true? Because the distances that separate the Viking-Age people who carried out their rituals up on the plateau and Tycho Brahe and the people of the Renaissance and us who are alive now are insignificant, even though the differences in our knowledge of the world, our insight into its workings, seem so great?
I drove to the beach with the children yesterday, and on the way there, passing through the area called Sandskogen, where Carl Linnaeus planted trees to stabilize the sand sometime in the eighteenth century, we talked about school. I said to my daughter, who is ten, that in school they don’t teach you anything about what really matters in life. She asked what I meant. I said, How to raise children, for example. What to do when a child hits someone. Whether it’s good for children to sit inside playing on their iPads all day, and if not, then what we should do about it. You have to figure all of that out for yourself, I said. And then there are all the other important things in life. You don’t learn about death at school, do you? Or about time? Or about dreams?
“You’re saying dreams should be a subject in school?”
“Why not?”
“You’re nuts, Dad.”
School is a place where we teach our children how things are. It creates a common understanding of how society, nature, and culture work, and a common sense of trust in the world. It makes the world self-explanatory and easy to operate in, not random. Doubt, wonder, the sudden abyss that opens up when we learn that we actually don’t know anything, come much later, if at all. But having a child, which is also something completely self-explanatory until it happens, or losing a loved one and seeing his or her dead body, which is also something self-explanatory until you’re standing there facing the abyss – this void that children come from and that the dead have disappeared into – is an unlearning. In these zones between life and death, what is self-evident has no power; in them there is no certainty. And it has always been this way, because death and birth have always been with us. Everyone who has seen a child being born, everyone who has seen a person lying dead, has been at a place where all knowledge, all insight, is invalidated. It is the place of the beginning of life, the place of the end of life; it is life’s borderland, where no other knowledge exists except the simplest: we all come from, and we all return to, this shell of flesh that is like us but no longer is us.
Is it possible to stand before this – life that becomes and life that was – without thinking of fate? I don’t think so. When you’re faced with a dead person, their life is over, nothing more can happen to them, and the question of why that life was what it was, why it went the way it did, what steered it in the right direction and what didn’t, suggests itself as naturally as the opposite questions do when you’re faced with a newborn child: How will it go, what will happen, what will its life be like? I have found myself in both of those rooms, and I have never thought that the life that had ended was arbitrary, the result of free will, meaning that the dead person could have chosen to live his or her life in a radically different way and had a radically different life. Never once have I thought that a life could be chosen. Nor have I ever thought that what awaits the newborn child is completely open and unknown, that anything can happen to it. No one can know what will happen to this child, how its life will be; still, I doubt anyone thinks that anything can happen. It will follow a logic, it will form a pattern, it will acquire a fate. The life of the dead person laid out on the table followed a logic, formed a pattern, acquired a fate. In retrospect, we can see the connections, can think that one thing led to another, everything smooth and predictable, even if these connections were unknown to them while they were alive. But we cannot know whether this form of causality belongs to our way of thinking or to the life itself.
Thus it may well be that the Vikings’ belief in fate as connecting crucial events in our lives with unknown forces from alien powers was a kind of surrender, a way of saying it’s all out of our hands, and that the three Norns who sit under the tree of life, Yggdrasil, as described in the poem “Völuspá” in the Poetic Edda, making as many notches in a stick as the number of years allotted to a human being, are a way of giving shape to that fact, so that our powerlessness over the desolate void of life can be represented too, in this archaic, beautiful, powerful poem that cuts to the innermost essence of things. It may also be that this image, in its concentration and clarity, is superior to our image of random chance bringing bits of reality together in a meaningful way.
The Poetic Edda is a collection of mythical and heroic poems, probably written down in Iceland around the year 1200 but with a long life in oral tradition before that. It was sunk in oblivion for a long time and rediscovered in 1643 by an Icelandic bishop, Brynjólfur Sveinsson. “Völuspá” is the most famous of the Edda poems, its title meaning something like “The Prophecy of the Seeress.” The Seeress, a kind of oracle with insight into both the world of the gods and the future, is the speaker.
It is her voice we hear. Her refrain, a line that returns again and again, is “Do you know enough now, do you?” She is speaking these words to human beings, those who live without insight into the ultimate questions, and we can feel them and their lust for knowledge in her question. “Do you know enough now, do you?”
As in so many mythological cycles, the Norse one too presents knowledge as an equivocal thing that comes at a high price: Odin forfeits his eye for it, he hangs himself on a tree and is dead nine days for it. In the poem itself, human beings are almost entirely absent; the poem is about the higher powers in the world. The world’s creation, its continuance and its destruction. The poem ends with some of the most beautiful lines I know of in all of literature, describing the world that rises again after Ragnarok.
In the Land of the Cyclops Page 7