Condition of Secrecy

by Inger Christensen

  Edenkoben

  I’d like to turn for a moment to the enduring ways of depicting paradise. The first paradise, the Garden of Eden, is always subtropical. A lush garden with palm trees, grapevines, etc. A continuous profusion of abundant nourishment. Always set in countries with subtropical climates, this illusion of happiness.

  Last fall I visited the German town of Edenkoben, in Rheinland-Pfalz. It’s not subtropical. But even in the fall, and even without palm trees, the illusion of paradise is perfect, at least for someone from northern lands. The name alone: Edenkoben. I ask people what Edenkoben means. No one knows. Edenkoben is just Edenkoben in Rheinland-Pfalz. Vineyards everywhere. Everywhere the exacting process of preparing intoxication. So why ask what Edenkoben means, any more than we would ask why we’re alive.

  The window in my room, with its broad view over the rolling landscape, shows a modern image of paradise. Model towns like those on Christmas cards. Factories that seem to sail like old-fashioned ships through forest seas. And although they’re undoubtedly polluting and ruining everything for miles around, you think you can hear the rustling of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Even though you know that it must be only the tree of recognition.

  One morning the window and the whole landscape, including the house, are swathed in a kind of cloud, in something unconditional and unreserved, a kind of primordial soup. Thousands of birds, starlings, I think at first — but they’re not metallic black like starlings, maybe redwing thrushes, which I’ve seen only once in my life, a small flock in Jutland, so I’m not really familiar with them, these birds, which I’m now thinking of as redwing thrushes — fill the air over Edenkoben and make it into a kind of earth. Grapevines and thrushes become one cohesive phenomenon. Earth and air are no longer two separate elements, but one, as when all becomes one. So where shall we breathe? Where shall we die? Where shall we even ask questions?

  That morning I look through the postcards I’ve brought with me. They include one with Goethe’s aquarellierte Federzeichnung: Farbenkreis zur Symbolisierung des menschlichen Geistes- und Seelenlebens (pen-and-ink drawing with watercolor: colored circles to symbolize the life of the human spirit and soul); one with a pen-and-ink sketch by Hans Christian Andersen, of cypresses in an Italian landscape; and one with a photograph of a mummy from the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. All three are actually fragments of paradise. Maybe especially the mummy: a woman who has already been dead for 2,500 years, and who can be seen now only because part of her coffin has been lifted off. The lid over her bears her portrait carved in wood, probably more regular in form than her real face, just as the hair is probably blacker and the makeup more precise; at any rate the smile is more enigmatic than the usual dead person’s smile. Maybe the painter knew how long people have to wait to enter paradise.

  These more or less idyllic musings are interrupted when small automatic rockets suddenly begin going off in the vineyard in front of the house, with loud bangs and flashing sparks, to scare away the birds. The birds fly around for a bit, making the air currents over the landscape visible. Then all at once they’re gone, and paradise looks completely desolate and forsaken.

  The redwing thrushes should have been birds of paradise. The bird of paradise family, related to swallows, includes 32 genera and 129 species. They’re native to New Guinea and the surrounding islands. Europeans first learned of birds of paradise after Magellan’s voyage around the world. From that trip, in 1522, he brought back stuffed birds of paradise. Their beauty and unusual appearance awakened great wonder. They were given the name Manucodiata, which means “birds of God,” and soon countless stories about them began circulating. People claimed, among other things, that the birds lived in heaven, and that their feet were missing because they spent their entire lives in the air, existing on dew. It was true that their feet were missing, but that was just because the hunters who gave the dead birds to Magellan had cut off the feet to make the carcasses look more beautiful. This was neither the first nor the last time that fragmentation has been turned into a beautiful explanation.

  Around noon I visit the Altdeutsche Weinstube in Edenkoben. Nine tables, including the one for regulars, where a group of workmen sits. An old man walking around seeing to everything quietly and calmly, as if all the guests were his own family, who may make things a little difficult now and then, in their way, but they’re here now, and they’ve come to stay.

  “May I see a menu?” I ask.

  “Here you eat what’s being served,” he says, echoing the words of my mother when I was a child: “Here you eat what’s put in front of you.” The others at the table nod. There’s no reason to discuss the food. And they’re right: it’s always good.

  Later, after everyone has finished and the old man himself has eaten, I ask him what Edenkoben means.

  It means nothing, he says, nothing at all. Then he adds, “But Eden means ‘Eden,’ like the Garden of Eden. And Koben is the old word for ‘stable.’ Stable,” he repeats. “This restaurant is like a stable. The people who come here are like horses; they can’t go any farther without food and drink. But why go any farther anyhow.” And he looks as if he’s found his own way to cope with a world where much is missing.

  A world where paradise is missing, but now and then we find a stable that lets us remember what is missing. A place where we’re strangers, yet at home, where we’re alone, yet together. A place where we’re nothing, yet still something. Dust, yet still, for a while, human beings. But fundamentally it remains a place that tells us paradise is missing, because it is not we who will enter paradise; it is dust. Dust, because it is undifferentiated enough to assume a form of existence outside the world.

  To Act As If

  Of course, as long as we’re alive, we’ll never become so fragmentary that we’re able to exist outside the world. But is it possible, amid the productions of our consciousness, to imagine a fragmentary existence? Are we at least able to think our way out of the world we live in?

  Don’t we tend to see a literary fragment, for example, as a concentrated text whose concentration stems from the hidden whole that it’s a part of? Or we see the opposite: we see the fragment as trying to distance itself from the hidden whole, from the development of any whole at all. Regardless, it doesn’t manage to establish any relationships that aren’t involved with a whole in one way or another. Maurice Blanchot, in his L’entretien infini, renders this issue as a postulate: “Le fragmentaire ne précède pas le tout, mais se dit en dehors du tout et après lui.” (The fragmentary does not precede the whole, but says itself outside the whole and after it.)

  We should probably always expect a postulate to be an impossible blend of question and answer. For of course we can’t say anything outside the whole or after it, as long as we’re inside it. But are there any roundabout routes that would let us escape not only the order built into our nature and culture, but also its remnants in any fragment we run across? Or at least, is it possible for us to act as if we can see ourselves from outside, and to say or write something that’s outside everything and after everything?

  Of course it’s possible to act as if. We definitely have as part of our intellect, for better or for worse, the strange ability to act as if things are completely different from what they are — or from what we see them as. A burning bush can speak, the Spirit of God can move upon the face of the waters, a little prince can run around on a planet that he himself has discovered, a whole country can be populated by talking trees, and there’s nothing to hinder dust from talking too: all these manipulative, seductive productions are familiar from literature, and not only from literature, because they’re also familiar from our daily social interactions. However, there the seduction tends in large part to develop into demagoguery, fairly harmless as a rule, because it’s easy to see through. But occasionally it becomes chillingly harmful, as when we find that some people are able to convince themselves that the concentration camps of World War II never
existed, and we see that it might not take much more for these people’s story to erase every trace, if in no other way than by wiping out the remnants of shared memory that we’re trying to maintain.

  In a way, I think we should try to live with a reduction of meaning. To get rid of the idea that there is any meaning beyond what we’ve always been able to recognize, to reflect, and to simulate — an ability stemming from our existence as precisely that part of meaning that’s able to see its own meaning — no more, no less. Applied to literature, this would still let a writer do things like using a distant planet as a vantage point to observe the teeming of life on earth, but his description would never give it any meaning beyond the meaning that it already has on earth. Would writers stop writing because of that? Probably not. Just as scientists don’t stop pondering relationships among phenomena, but ultimately must accept that the earth is held in place by what we call gravity, even though they would prefer a different, more comprehensive explanation, which they can only entrust, for the time being, to meaninglessness.

  It’s nothing new for art and science to operate at the boundary between meaning and meaninglessness. But the boundary may be more fluid than we generally believe. Many things suggest that it’s no longer unequivocally what it once was: a boundary that progress is forcing ever further forward, into the unknown, the open and boundless realm of possibility. It’s more as if the boundary has shifted into the middle of our closed system. And here, for the first time, paradise truly has become lost. We could call it paradise re-lost. With the result that we have to begin dreaming our way inward, instead of forward or back.

  The Frog in the Spaceship

  It’s hard to imagine how we might dream our way inward. We’re so used to dreaming our way outward, away from our little life, out toward distant horizons, whether on the other side of the earth or far off in other nebulae where there may be other planets that could support human existence.

  As a small attempt to dream my way inward, I might picture myself living inside a sunflower seed, as an entirely miniaturized human essence in there, a sunflower creature, looking up toward a sky that may be black in my mind now, as I think about it from out here, but from in there — who knows, maybe it is white or a dazzling spectrum of colors — I might picture myself conceptually unable to get out of the seed or move upward, it would be impossible: with no idea that it could be possible to rise with the stem, as it sprouted leaves and a big round flower with flame-shaped yellow petals, like a corona around the sun-core with its new seeds, much less with any idea that this sunflower with its core and corona would turn, day by day, tilting, seeking, the heavy sun-head following a sun incomprehensibly larger than itself. And it’s fine that I can picture things like that. But how, or in relationship to what, my mental pictures are outside or inside the world — I’m beginning to question whether that ultimately makes any difference.

  As I began writing this, I read in the Neue Kronen Zeitung (September, 1992) that an American space shuttle had been launched with seven astronauts on board. The shuttle was to orbit the earth for seven days, almost like a symbolic week of creation, with the seven astronauts devoting their time to scientific studies. They were going to conduct biology experiments with four frogs, one hundred eighty hornets, two carp, and two hundred fruit flies. I don’t know the results. But later, as I watched on TV, a smiling Japanese astronaut amid the space shuttle’s vast array of instruments and equipment was trying to get one of the four frogs to jump normally despite the absence of gravity. To no avail. The frog would only float belly up, legs splayed out on all sides, like a bloated corpse. In a way the scene began to look like a random fragment from Noah’s Ark. A little pilot project for our diffuse strivings to move beyond the earth. As if, basically, we just wanted to get out of this solar system in time, before our sun burns out, and land on any other planet that’s even remotely habitable, as long as it’s orbiting a sun longer-lived than our own.

  All the confusion and uncertainty around that fragment, and around our own fragmented position and its shift relative to the world around us, is magnified by our ambivalent attitude toward the relationship between nature and culture; that is, between nature and what is created by human beings. In one way we have a primitive longing to get back to nature, a sentimental nostalgia, whereas in another way we have eyes for absolutely nothing but the man-made world around us. And that man-made world is certainly taking up so much room now that it’s starting to scare even us. But instead of investigating the intimate relationships between the productions of human beings and those of nature — from which we do, after all, originate — we often regard nature and the man-made world as two separate entities, irreconcilable and even inimical to each other.

  Fantasy Images

  The grotesqueness of a purely man-made world becomes evident in these fantasy images from The Painted Room, a novel I wrote in the 1970s about the artist Andrea Mantegna, who lived in Mantua in the late 1400s. In this passage, Mantegna’s ten-year-old son Bernardino describes the landscape he imagines exploring whenever he looks at a certain painting by his father. What becomes clear before his astonished eyes is the relationship between nature and artifice, or the frightening aspect of artifice.

  I set out right away. It is peaceful and green on all sides and I climb up toward the high town with great expectation. But I am not very high up before I realize something or other is different, something that cannot be made out because I have never seen it before. Now I come to the forked tree and climb up and sit in it: I have to find out what is wrong. But I cannot see anything. The trees are all the usual trees I know so well; the houses are houses like those in Mantua or like those the architects draw or like the ones we found in the spring when the school was out on a dig; the fields are green, the sky is blue, and the rocks have the usual brownish, bluish or greenish colors; even the tiny people, whom I hope to meet, look completely natural. Yet I cannot get away from the thought that something is wrong. The atmosphere is wrong, as when you kill a chicken and it runs around without its head.

  I climb down and move on. When I am up the road over the largest quarry, I stop. At this point I have already passed quite a few smaller quarries and underground shafts, but it is not until I reach this place close to the rocks and have a view of the whole area where the stonemasons have worked their way into the wonderful marble, that I realize what it is that is different:

  The mountain has been made by people. Not only the town up on the very top, with its walls and forts and everything which is normally built by people, but the whole enormous mountain that lifts the town up into the light, it is all made by people, from the ground up, foot by foot, so the stones look almost real, they almost have the same odd shapes, almost the same sheen as real stone, or natural stone.

  It is beyond me. Have these stonemasons’ forefathers taken thousands of years to build up this mountain, only for their descendants to open it up and mine the stone again?

  And where did they get the stone from? Did they fetch it from another place? Or did they also make the stone themselves? If the stone we usually call stone is the real stone, then this stone is not real and natural or divine. The stone I am now touching is a human stone. At one time there were people, here on this spot, who not only produced the mountain, but also produced the stone that the mountain is made of.

  I walk up to the red gate-tower to ask to go in past the sloping wall between the captain’s fortress and the city wall itself. To the left of the tower a ruin has been built with short columns and low arches of rough-hewn stones. I do not think the rest of this building has ever existed. I am sure it was built as a ruin by people who knew that ruins should remind them of something, but did not know what they should remind them of. To the right there is a steep slope planted with trees, with five or six large blocks of marble, columns, pyramids, and vats, all made of the same man-made marble as what I am walking on. It occurs to me that these people must have known what is need
ed to create history, but they have forgotten the history itself, or never had any idea about its existence.

  A vision of human beings as manipulators of layer upon layer of fragments, whose origins have long since been forgotten. A caricature of human beings’ ability to convince themselves that everything they’ve invented and placed in the world is just as unique and magnificent as what nature has developed on its own. A basic insistence that history belongs to us, even though we have forgotten the foundation that it’s built on. And although we may be able to see perfectly well that Mt. Everest, the Alps, and all the rest came into being without human assistance, still it’s not beyond us to think that if they ever disappeared, and we wanted them to exist again, then it would be within our power to reinvent and rebuild them; in fact, that we could create the originals themselves just as well as any god could. This arrogance arises because for so long we’ve been setting up our human world as if it were the whole world, as if our human takeover of nature would take the old-fashioned longing for paradise and transform it to eternal security in an artificial paradise. And now that we’re living in that artificial paradise, at least in certain parts of the planet, we realize that we’ve cut ourselves off from nature, rather than bringing it along into our world and managing it. We’ve actually done the furthest thing from bringing it along: we’ve made our culture dependent on power sources, like nuclear fission and fusion, which function in a natural cycle entirely different from the one we function in as human beings — if we can say that radioactive materials function in any type of cycle related to what we know as nature. Their half-lives, which are the lengths of time that they can poison us, range from around one hundred to one thousand years. Instead of supplementing human energy with these antihuman substances, we should be keeping ourselves warm by taking the most roundabout possible route to the goal, creating images of a more symbiotic relationship with nature, which we do certainly need to control, but not to such a degree that we become victims of our control.