It may seem as if the neck, in the symbolic language of body parts, has assumed the place between humility and pride, self-surrender and self-righteousness, but in a most discrete, gray-eminence-like way, present only indirectly, as opposed to the more imposing organs and joints, like the brain, the symbol of intelligence, associated with a certain coldness and distance, but also with clarity and objectivity, not drowning in a heaving sea of vague emotions and sentimentality as one who thinks with the heart is.
In the metaphysics of the body, the neck forms the link between the reason of the mind and the light of the spirit, and the irrationality of the body and the darkness of desire. In other words, the neck is the place between and the place outside. To be stiff-necked, as opposed to cowed, refers not only to exposing your neck or not, appearing defenseless or not, for when you bow your head you also conceal your gaze from the other. To look into someone’s eyes is to signal that you are equals, while to look down is to subordinate yourself to the gaze of the other, to no longer be on the same footing. It can also mean keeping something hidden – one’s true self or something in it that one does not wish to be seen. The downturned gaze may contain hatred or shame or, as is often the case, both at once.
The primordial image of the bowed head and the downturned gaze is found in the Bible, in the story of Cain and Abel, where it is written about Cain that “his face fell.” Yahweh asks why Cain’s face has fallen, and continues: “If you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door, and its desire is for you, but you must master it.” This touches the very core of what it is to be human, as I see it, namely, that to be in yourself is inhuman, since that which is human is always something that becomes in relation to something else, yes, the human is this otherness that we become ourselves in and that we exist in. To bow down is to bow before something, to be stiff-necked is to be stiff-necked in the face of something, to worship is to worship something, and to look down is also to look away from something. This relativity, which is as complex as it is abstract and intangible, since it occurs in the spaces between, and has no object, no place of its own, never fixed, always in motion, turns the concept of biological man into a fiction, an image among images, nothing in itself, except in death, when for the first time the body no longer grasps at something, no longer seeks anything, and only then is it something in itself, that is to say, no longer human.
And perhaps this is the real and simple insight afforded by the sacrifice, that we are creatures of flesh, filled with blood, and that we are going to die. What sacrifice does is to penetrate every layer, every veil of culture, and, in a gesture devoid of meaning in any other sense than this, it reveals to us the otherwise always inaccessible truth about our existence, of what we are in the world.
Just a few days ago – sixteen, to be precise – I found myself in the middle of an existential situation of quite another order. It was in a hospital in Helsingborg, up on the second floor, from the window there was a view of a multistory parking lot, and behind that a residential area, whose myriad lamps drew an arc of light under the otherwise black sky. Not that I was thinking of this at the time. We were expecting our fourth child; the mother-to-be was lying in bed with an elastic strap around her huge belly, I was in a chair beneath the window, fiddling with my cell phone. Once in a while a midwife or a nurse would enter the room to see if anything was happening. The room was clinical and packed with technical equipment, I could see an oxygen tank, a defibrillator, and right next to me stood a monitor on which you could read the child’s heartbeat and the mother’s contractions as graphs and digits. The room was strongly lit, the metal beds adjustable, in front of the sink there was one dispenser for disinfectant and another one for soap. When, shortly after, the contractions began to quicken and the birth got under way, all of this vanished. The mother was on her knees, with her torso hanging over the end of the bed. Every time she had a contraction, she grabbed the mask dispensing laughing gas and inhaled deeply. From time to time she shouted into the mask. Waves seemed to ripple through her, and she fell into their rhythm as if into a trance, and the rhythm seemed to transport her to another place, of pain, body, darkness. Her shouts were hollow and seemingly endless, with no beginning nor end. They became darker, more animal, and contained a pain and a despair so great that whatever I did, whether wrapping my arms around her and pressing my cheek to hers, or rubbing her back, was no more than a feeble, futile ripple on the surface of the deep that engulfed her. She was in the middle of something, in a place I could never reach but only observe from the outside, and yet it changed everything for me too, it was like a tunnel, the sides of which dissolved the material world in dimness: emotions forced their way through and took over, my gaze was filtered through them. She turned over on her side and no longer breathed regularly, no longer removed the mask when the waves of pain withdrew, but lay there screaming at the top of her lungs until she had no more air left in her, then she drew a new breath and screamed again, a scream that, though it was partly swallowed up by the mask, was still piercing and unlike anything I had heard before. Shortly after, the child tumbled out onto the bed. It was purplish, the thick umbilical cord nearly blue. It was a girl, the head was compressed and glistening, the face wrinkled, the eyes closed. She lay quite motionless. I thought, she’s dead. Three midwives came running, they rubbed the slippery little body, and she emitted her first scream. It was a feeble scream, more than anything it sounded like the bleating of a lamb.
Up until that moment, no one and nothing had been able to reach her, she had lain surrounded by water in the middle of another body, and for a few seconds she remained untouched in the world, as she lay there, as if dead, shut up in herself, without breathing and with her eyes closed, but then hands reached out to touch her, and then she drew her first breath, not without pain, I assume, and the world flowed into her. I have never seen it so clearly before, how a new human being is literally lifted into the community by other people, that this is what happens. A newborn baby has no muscles in its neck, and its vulnerability and helplessness are absolute, it can’t move itself, or even raise its head, but has to be supported by the hands of others, lifted up to the faces of others, which are the first thing she sees as she opens her eyes. And then she enters the circle of faces, in which she will live out the rest of her life.
For quite a few years, I thought that being a child was like being a prisoner, at the mercy of adults’ favors and whims, and that to be a parent was to be a prison guard. Now I think maybe it is the other way around. That the child is the one who is free, the adults are the captives. Occasionally this thought extends as far as to consider that childhood is the true meaning of life, the apex of our existence, while all the rest of life is one slow journey away from it, where the main task is to be at the disposal of those who are now at the center of existence – the children. Perhaps this is why I have always liked Heraclitus’s image of the god as a child playing somewhat carelessly with pieces on a chessboard; I may have sensed somehow, as with so many other fragments of this pre-Socratic philosopher, that it was true.
This, you are probably thinking, says more about me than about childhood. For if childhood is supposed to be the zenith of life, what about sex? What about the desires of the flesh? What of ambition, zeal, heroics, career? What of insight, wisdom, experience, the accumulated weight of life? How about progress, conquest, riches and splendor? Politics, science, the project of the Enlightenment? To put children and childhood before all of this testifies not only to considerable regression, but to an enormous resignation. Knowledge increases pain, the Bible says, and surely only an immature person could opt for ignorance in order to evade pain. Being able to handle complexity is part of being an adult, and as for sex, which is the central obsession of our culture, and which, when all is said and done, may well be the most powerful force in our lives, to ignore it bears witness not only to puritanism and notions of purity, and not only to th
e fear of the body (which in my case must be understood as a fear of women) inherent in these two concepts, but to a longing for simplification which at its core is barren, unproductive, lifeless, even dead: the child does not create anything, it simply is.
The biggest difference between being a child and being an adult has to do with the lack of boundaries, that feeling of vastness that one has as a child, where time and the world appear infinite, and this infinity is taken for granted, since neither time nor the world is something you think about, but something you move within, and which keeps opening up, room after room, farther and farther in. The land of childhood, the expression goes, or the valley of childhood: portraying time as topography is a way of expressing that the divide between child and adult is too great or too comprehensive for it to be due simply to time. The world of childhood is radically different from that of the adult. To me, a summer day now is divided up into different tasks and has no weight of its own. I can make breakfast, I can pack swimming gear, drive to the beach, lie on a towel and keep an eye on the kids, feed them oranges or drinks, hand them towels when they emerge from the water, maybe check my cell phone from time to time. Drive home, cook dinner, eat, since the weather is nice we eat outside, in the shade of a tree. Wash the dishes, do a load of laundry. Maybe read a little as the day fades, hang up the washing, talk on the phone, put the kids to bed, smoke a last cigarette outside in the light of the summer evening, go to bed. Little of this has any intrinsic meaning, and all this time I have been observing it without entering into it, without losing myself in it. The boundary between myself and my surroundings has been sharp, and the day has been divided up into a sort of coordinate system, which in a similar way has kept me on the outside of it. I have been free, since I could just as easily have done something else entirely, stayed at home and worked in the garden, taken the kids for a drive into town, or for that matter just kept on driving south, into Denmark, through Germany and down to Munich, for example. If the children had protested, I could have employed some of the means at my disposal as an adult, ranging from outright bribes to force and gentle violence. Children are almost always subject to the appraisal and actions of adults, and in that sense they aren’t free. And when I spend my days with them in this way, I see them doing what they are doing based on my own approach to the world, where the days whirl away, as if down a drain, one after the other, without any one of the day’s events ever overwhelming me. This is time as quantity, this is life as matter. That it may be different for the children is hard to grasp, since we live side by side and share almost everything that happens. And yet I suspect that they do experience these days differently, for I can still remember what it was like to be a child, when the sun rose above the spruce trees to the east and filled the house with light, and I walked barefoot across the rust-colored wall-to-wall carpet, then over the golden parquet floor and finally the fractionally colder linoleum, on my way from the bedroom to the kitchen, where I would eat breakfast. The sun was like a person, or not like a person, more like a figure or creature with which I had a personal relationship, a kind of intimacy. There it was again, hazy, yellow, glowing. This intimacy, which did not just apply to the sun, but to all things and phenomena, is impossible to explain, I now find, for it appears to be a personification of the world, imbuing it with spirit, but it wasn’t, it was something else, a sort of interiorization, perhaps, as if I approached objects and phenomena in the world in the same way that I approached familiar faces, with the same trust, without ever having thought of the sun or all the rest of it as people, as being alive. It was rather that everything had a face – every tree, every hillock, every bicycle – and therefore was something I felt connected to, for I saw the tree, the hill, the bicycle, and I recognized them. This way of seeing is gone. The sun is the sun, a tree is a tree, a hill is a hill, a bike is a bike. I no longer regard the world the way I look at faces, it is as if the faces have turned away from me.
Back then, on those summer mornings when I sat eating my breakfast and gazing at the landscape outside, the dry asphalt road with sandy dust along the edge of the pavement, the houses, the spruce trees, and beyond the treetops, the sound, and on the other side of the sound, the forest and the big white tanks, containing I still don’t know what – gas, maybe? – all of this was connected to me by its appearing to me as something familiar. This familiarity or intimacy may seem like an addition, for now the world is just the world, but back then it was always something more, but it wasn’t an addition, it was just the reverse, it was that the object or the phenomenon was seen as something in itself, something in its own right, with an identity of its own, this is what created the intimacy that gave everything a face.
It’s easy to think that now I see the world as it really is, as faceless, blind and mute matter. Just as these photographs of necks allow me to see the human being as it really is, flesh and blood, cells and strings, biology. In everything I write, there is a longing for out there, to that which is real, outside the social realm, while at the same time I am aware that what is out there, beyond the light of the faces, and which we occasionally catch a glimpse of, through art, turns everything to nothing. That the experience of the sublime is the experience of nothing. That God is nothing, which we exist in spite of. And this is why the real is such a dangerous category. In ourselves, as bodies of flesh and blood, things growing somewhere in the world, we are nothing, and I think this is why I am so fearful of the cultivation of organs, the manipulation of genes, of the human machine on an operating table, since even though these save and prolong life, they also reduce it, bring it closer to nothing, a wire, a string, a tube, a gutter.
If that is true, what do we need truth for?
Back then, when the world was made up of faces, I didn’t know what went on, or why what happened happened, it just did. Why, for instance, was I so obsessed, at the age of seven or eight, with looking at myself in the mirror, not just frontally, but from the sides and even from the back? I stood there on the bathroom floor with a small round mirror in one hand and directed it toward the large bathroom mirror in front of me at ever-changing angles, so that I could see myself in varying forms of profile, and finally, from the back and from above, so that the back of my head and the nape of my neck became visible. What I saw made me very uncomfortable. So this is what I also looked like? I had got used to and accepted my face, but not this. But this is what other people saw, this is how I appeared to them, perhaps that is why I explored it. I felt a similar unease the first time I heard a recording of my own voice, and the first time I watched my own movements on a TV screen. It was alienating, I couldn’t possibly identify it with myself, the way I was, it made it seem as if I was suddenly also someone else. That it was this other person that everyone else saw and heard, bothered me. It still bothers me at times, the unease caused by nonidentity.
Now that I have children of my own, I look at the self-mirroring and the self-listening not as a result of narcissism or self-absorption (though it was that too), but as part of being socialized, becoming an independent individual. To be socialized is to learn to see yourself as you appear to others. To bring up a child is really nothing other than representing or personifying this, the gaze and the voices of others, for at the outset the child possesses only a sort of undifferentiated self, permeated by feelings and needs, which can be, as it were, lit or extinguished but not otherwise controlled. Since this is all, it is also nothing, that is to say unknown. Something is lit, something is extinguished. All the boundaries one gradually imposes as a parent, all the prohibitions and commands, not only have to do with teaching the child how to behave, are not just about making it function without friction in daily life, though that is perhaps often the motivation, it is also always a gaze, it is also always a place from which the child can see itself from the outside, from a place other than the self, which only then can emerge as its own, whole self. The child becomes an adult. One process is completed, and another sets in: slowly the world turns
its face away.
What applies to the identity of the individual also applies to that of a culture, if not in quite the same way, then in accordance with the same principle; it is continuously setting its own boundaries, and always seeks to see itself from the outside. If this is necessary, or why it is necessary, I don’t know; the answer to that is the same as the answer to the question of why we have art, or why art is necessary. We live in the social realm, which is sameness, the light of faces, but we exist in the nonidentical, in what is unknown to us, it is the other side of the face, that which turns away mutely, beyond the reach of language, just as the blood trickling through the tiny capillaries of the brain is beyond the reach of the thoughts thinking them, a few millimeters away, in that which upon closer inspection turns out to be nothing more than a chemical and electrical reaction in the sponge-like object that the neck holds aloft.
Translated by Ingvild Burkey
Life in the Sphere of Unending Resignation
In the Land of the Cyclops Page 24