Condition of Secrecy

by Inger Christensen

  But our incessant harping on necessity may be covering up nothing more than an attempt to eliminate chance. Why? Maybe just because we want to avoid feeling as random as we are. But maybe also for more complex reasons. Maybe because of a fear of writing without any guidance from the feeling of necessity, a fear of arriving at the point where the order experienced by writers as innate and at the same time painstakingly constructed must give way, because chance has implemented an order so different that writers’ hearts pound, they’re frightened, and they look with complete disbelief at what they’ve written, which seems, even there on the page in their own handwriting, like nothing they ever could have written, simply because for all their feeling of necessity, they never would have been able to conceive of it before they started writing. A pure and simple fear of arriving at the point where chance takes their work away from them, even before they’ve finished writing it.

  When we manage, in spite of everything, to control that fear, it can be because human beings aren’t the only things with a drive to produce orderly forms. We can observe these forms everywhere in nature, and we can see how easily all kinds of matter on earth — so why not human consciousness as well? — will yield to what I’m calling the regulating effect of chance. In this way we can find comfort in imagining that it’s possible to write as easily as frost creates its fernlike repetitions and variations on a windowpane, or as concisely as the flesh of a kiwifruit clings to the black cardinal points of its seeds, and even that it might be possible to write completely gray on gray, as when a large cloud, without edges or breaks, will very slowly, as it spreads, begin to reveal a consistency and a direction.

  Recognizable Images

  And the comfort doesn’t come from thinking of these natural phenomena as direct models for how a writer should write. They’re more like recognizable images of inner realities, so that what we see in the frost ferns, the kiwifruit, and the gray cloud immediately makes us exclaim, “Yes — that’s what it’s like to be a writer!” Or for that matter, “Yes — that’s what it’s like to be alive!”

  Novalis keeps coming back to these images, maybe especially to their similarities, as if they all had originated long ago from one and the same writing. In his beautiful introduction to The Novices of Sais he says:

  Various are the roads of man. He who follows and compares them will see strange figures emerge, figures which seem to belong to that great cipher which we discern written everywhere, in wings, eggshells, clouds, and snow, in crystals and in stone formations, on ice-covered waters, on the inside and the outside of mountains, of plants, beasts, and men, in the lights of heaven . . . or in iron filings around a magnet, and in strange conjunctures of chance. In them we suspect a key to the magic writing, even a grammar, but our surmise takes on no definite forms and seems unwilling to become a higher key.

  No, even when we suspect a key to the magic writing, it’s never easy to yield to the regulating effect of chance. No matter what perspective we use, it will never be as easy to write as to breathe. Even though writers, in rare moments, can feel that it is. Can feel themselves arrive, with their fear intact, at the point in the writing process where, for lack of a better expression, they can say that chance takes over, the point where language comes to life and produces itself, in the same sense that a sunflower seed produces a sunflower. And even though it may be only an illusion, they’ll swear that they actually feel writing merge with living. It’s this condition of absent presence, which can be either long- or short-lived, that writers fear from the outset, because they’re both afraid to attain it and afraid not to attain it. But when all is said and done, it’s probably also exactly this condition that writers hope, deep in their heart, to elicit and nurture, whatever the cost and whatever other reasons there may be for writing.

  So that’s actually what writers struggle toward: getting this longed-for condition to happen or, more accurately, getting themselves not to stand in the way of its happening. The Viennese satirist Karl Kraus sums up the struggle precisely and paradoxically: “Es genügt nicht, keine Einfälle zu haben, man muß auch unfähig sein, sie auszudrücken.” (“It’s not enough to have no ideas; one must also be incapable of expressing them.”)

  Ironically enough, when this condition does arrive, the struggle is rewarded in an unexpected and far from gentle way. As things unfold, it becomes abundantly clear that it’s no longer the writer arriving, it’s chance per se, which also makes the writer random and in fact ultimately makes the just-finished manuscript random as well. In this way, chance underscores emptiness. As if what was written had never been written. As if the act of writing could result only in an increase in what has not yet been written.

  Here the writer is left behind, since the work has long since slipped away from him, and he retains only the memory of a feeling that, as Novalis puts it, “seems unwilling to become a higher key.” And here the excerpt from The Novices of Sais continues:

  It is as though an alcahest [according to Paracelsus, an alcahest was a universal solvent, also called Menstruum Universale — I.C.] had been poured over the senses of men. Only at moments do their desires and thoughts seem to solidify. Thus arise their presentiments, but after a short time everything swims again before their eyes.

  So the writer is left directionless and forsaken, in something diffuse, indistinct; in something formless, random; in the exact shadow of the randomness in which he, throughout the course of his work, suspected connections. And now he must cope with a blindness, a confusion, and a feeling of loss that, with each of his attempts to transform them to plenitude, only deepen.

  Eventually, after we’ve been through this a few times, we might expect to adjust to these bizarre conditions. After all, we know perfectly well that at the moment we put pen to paper, the text is completely unpredictable, whereas at the other end of the process, when it’s finally written, it will seem very predictable.

  As the text is being written, it comes to seem more and more necessary, as it gradually develops rules, proportion, and order, while the finished text, laid out in final form, will appear random. Because it’s not until afterward, when the text is finished, that we can say with certainty that it could just as easily have been different. And to the degree that it could have been different, to that degree it is random.

  Everything that a writer writes could just as easily have been different — but not until it’s been written. As a life could have been different, but not until it’s been lived.

  The Amorphous

  So why put ourselves through it all again and again, only to achieve an ever-deepening feeling of loss? Of course it would be understandable to want to live our lives over again. But why put ourselves through any of the more possible things again, like writing, for example? Why attempt by that means to achieve something that in reality is impossible to achieve; why get into a game in which, despite exceptional opportunities, there is only one possible end result: you’re out.

  Maybe because it’s about a particular kind of intoxication of our consciousness, the feeling of ascending into formlessness without its really happening, the feeling of finding ourselves a part of the amorphous without needing to die; in fact, if religion didn’t hold a patent on God, including linguistically, I’d call it the feeling of being clay in God’s hands, as when giving birth and perhaps also when being born — always in situations where there is an apparent absence of differentiation between the body and its surroundings.

  And here we must not think of the amorphous as exclusively

  undifferentiated and immovable. Rather, we might conceive of it as a place of origin, unknown, nondescript, as long ago, when light broke and called forth the first microscopic independent movement in matter, still far from the complex organic forms we know today, and further yet from our indefatigable descriptions of them, and from these descriptions’ colder abstractions, such as geometry. Mandelbrot asks, “Why is geometry often seen as ‘cold’ and ‘dry’?
” and goes on to posit an answer:

  One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline, or a tree. Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line. . . . The existence of these patterns challenges us to study those forms that Euclid sets aside as being “formless,” to investigate the morphology of the “amorphous.”

  We’ll have to leave the direct study of the amorphous to fractal geometry. But we can still think about our own urge to seek out situations that resemble what we could call the amorphous. In intoxication, maybe; in love’s meeting; in the city’s stream of anonymous people; in a tropical climate; in the warmth of the body; here and in similar fascinations, from time to time we can experience an approximation to the amorphous, to an absence of differentiation, to being outside the world. But only an approximation. Any more would kill us. Experiencing a perceptible lack of differentiation between skin and air, between body and world, between human being and human being is idyllic, almost Edenic, but taken to its logical conclusion it would mean death: simply put, the eradication of the individual. This is no doubt the reason that we all long to see this experience simulated in art, and the reason that writers attempt to achieve a linguistic Eden, a paradise in which writer and language merge, even though time after time, the writer ends up banished from the very paradise that he feels that he, all on his own, has created.

  Paradise

  So it looks as if the writer’s drive to connect with the regulating effect of chance may — as it relates to our consciousness of our own and others’ mortality — also relate to our concept of paradise, a Garden of Eden, a mystical place where human beings exist undifferentiated from the world.

  The word paradise comes from Avestan, the language of ancient Persia, where it meant “a bounded, enclosed garden.” Outside this garden lies the desert of sand, where life has no possibilities. However, if the desert did not exist as an “anti-garden” (a term coined by Lebanese poet Salah Stétié in his Firdaws) — then the garden would not exist either, because it is defined by its boundary with the desert. Occasionally people in that part of the world used to go out into the desert for days and immerse themselves in prayer. Perhaps to become able to perceive garden and anti-garden as parts of the same secret.

  Back then, paradise and voluntary exile from paradise were still very real and everyday, but our concepts of the mystical gardens framing all of humanity’s life are not so very different from these first experiences of the relationship between an ordinary garden and an ordinary desert. They’re just played out on a grander scale, in which they become fictive, but not necessarily any less real for our purposes.

  Our mythological constructs include two gardens. One is the Garden of Eden, the first paradise, God’s earthly garden, where the first human beings were happy because they didn’t know that they were alive. And the other is a second paradise, human beings’ heavenly garden, where we will be happy some day because we won’t know that we’re dead. The first paradise, where human existence was part of nature, and the last, where human beings will be part of the same numinous light that created the first, exist in the same relationship to each other as the garden to the anti-garden, as the oasis to the desert, and, in the final analysis, as life to death.

  When Adam and Eve were banished from the first garden, from paradise, it happened because they had eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and had thus become witnesses to the world and to their own life. And maybe, in the process, had caught a hint of the regulating effect of chance. As they stood outside, with that hint as their only possession, there in the desert, they became witnesses not only to their life but also to the irreversible character of that life. And there on the spot they were forced to transform their immediate longing to return to paradise into a longing to move forward, a longing, greater than anything else in the world, to recreate the missing paradise, preferably of course before dying, but afterward if necessary, in a transfiguring light on which we, with perhaps better reason than we think, pin our faith that we have been part of it since the dawn of time and will therefore remain so until time ends.

  So we are banished, and at the same time obliged to live for an unknowable length of time with a longing for the first garden, which resembles the gardens of our childhood, and with a lack of longing, or at least an ambivalent longing, for the second garden, which, if we aren’t convinced of its literal existence, starts to resemble a cemetery. Garden and anti-garden, which can never become one, and which can be conceived of as one only in abstract visions.

  There is no doubt that our concepts of paradise express the fact that we as human beings are not only able to imagine a condition of ongoing want, but are also able to maintain this condition of want and moreover to call it life, as for example in literature, where writers repeatedly approach it in order to subdue it, but end up each time with a deeper sense of loss, more homeless and more firmly banished with every attempt.

  One could get the idea that we actually invented paradise in order to become homeless — and to remain homeless, since a paradise after death may not be a particularly tempting offer. So we prefer to seek out a paradise that we can continue to lose, time and again, so that our conversation about what we’ve lost, and about our feeling of unconditional want, can continue.

  About this conversation: maybe we could try altering the terms of what we call paradise. If paradise is not only missing, but also in an absolute sense nonexistent — because it’s not even we who will enter paradise, but only the dust that all of us, without exception, will some day become — then maybe, just by thinking differently, we could give paradise a new address.

  Anagram

  I have an anagram that might be useful here. If we take the Italian word for paradise — paradiso — and rearrange the letters, we get diaspora. Diaspora is the Greek word for “scattering” or “diffusion.” It can be used to refer to religious groups or believers in any set of ideas, who live, or are forced to live, dispersed in lands where beliefs are different from their own. One example is the Jewish people sometimes called Diaspora Jews.

  A whole new exercise could be inherent in this anagram, one that might slowly shift the address of paradise. All we have to do, each time we read the word paradise, is act as if we have become dyslexic enough to see it as diaspora. It’s true that we’re banished from paradise, but maybe we’ve brought it along, literally, in our diaspora. And considering how European history is going these days, it may not be such a bad idea for us to become able to see our diaspora as a mystical place of human beings’ undifferentiated existence in the world.

  Fragments and Roundabout Routes

  Among Leonardo da Vinci’s notes is a set of precepts for painters. They appear in a separate section of the Treatise on Painting, which we know was put into book form not by Leonardo himself but most likely by his close friend and student, Francesco Melzi. This section appears to include everything that wouldn’t quite fit in with the more practical advice in the other chapters, which consist primarily of detailed instructions for painting monsters, storms, night scenes, trees and smaller plants, morning sunlight, late afternoon sunlight, etc. etc. The various notes that couldn’t be included with those practical instructions are largely theoretical artistic considerations concerning artists’ relationship to their material as a whole, and the issue of beginning any specific work of art. For example:

  I cannot forbear to mention among these precepts a new device for study, which, although it may seem but trivial and almost ludicrous, is nevertheless exceedingly useful in arousing the mind to various inventions. And this is, when you look at a wall spotted with stains, or with a mixture of stones, if you have to devise some scene, you may discover a resemblance to various landscapes, beautified with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and hills in varied arrangement; or again you may see battles and figures in
action; or strange faces and costumes, and an endless variety of objects, which you could reduce to complete and well-drawn forms. And these appear on such walls confusedly, like the sound of bells in whose jangle you may find any name or word you choose to imagine.

  Here Leonardo da Vinci, in all innocence, says that random stains and similar things “arouse the mind to inventions.” And that may be all that’s needed: given enough fragments, the human brain may immediately start to organize and regulate and create meaning in anything at all.

  In what sense might Leonardo’s stained walls, or the wall outside my kitchen window, cobbled together using discarded bricks of various colors from periods of hasty industrialization during previous centuries, be this kind of fragment? It’s their history that marks the discolored yellowish, grayish, and reddish discarded bricks, once remnants of some construction or demolition project, as fragments, reused parts of an earlier whole. And their history also marks the possibility that the current whole may disintegrate, so that they might eventually become part of a different context, as yet unknown. But their journey from grand edifice to grand edifice, or from grand edifice to humble prefabricated house and maybe at last to some chance rubble pile dumped in a field — if we can see this journey only as a set of roundabout routes subordinate to various wholes, then we’ll never be able to see the fragments as things in themselves, detached from everything else; we’ll have to settle for seeing them as forgotten, remembered, or foreseen parts of a whole from which we can detach neither the bricks nor ourselves. Could it be that no matter what fragments we encounter, along the lines of the random stains on Leonardo’s walls, we’re not only able but actually forced to have them arouse our minds to invention? In other words, does our mental makeup condemn us to find meaning even where there is none? Or as Jean-François Lyotard phrases the question, “Why does something happen, instead of nothing?”