Condition of Secrecy

by Inger Christensen

  The Triumph of Vanity

  What’s important, maybe, is to avoid creating sharp divisions between nature and human culture, and instead to try seeing our own productions more as part of a natural process. Here again I want to use an excerpt from The Painted Room, this time a description of Mantegna’s approach to establishing himself in the world and building a house, as told by an initially disconcerted but later admiring and perceptive administrator attached to the Ducal court.

  It is very likely that the house will never be finished.

  The plan has been to have an arched dome over the atrium, but Andrea has at last given up that project and instead let someone carve a marble basin to collect rainwater and snow.

  Of the fifteen rooms, only a couple are completed with walls and doors. The housekeeper lives in one of the rooms. And the other, for the most part, is left empty. In the rest of the house there are only hints where one has to imagine boundaries for the individual rooms, sometimes with unfinished brickwork, sometimes with a pair of columns, but in most cases, with a pile of sculptures, antiques, and plants.

  The plants grow almost better here indoors than outside. During the summer they press their way in through the outer wall of the garden unrestrictedly, seeking shade and coolness from the whitewashed room.

  All the same, Mantegna works tirelessly on this artistic building and spends all of what he owns on marble, on color samples, on firing and glazing, on fusing and chasing, and on the cleverest and most expressive artisans. This patience costs him dear.

  I am not saying that I hope the house is never finished. I am not saying that, but deep down, it is exactly what I hope for. I am attracted to the ill-defined transitions between Art and Nature, and when I see the way the young apprentices who come here to learn drawing and perspective fare better in depicting the leafy vines that wind around the base of a column than they do with the column itself, then I am deeply delighted. And if I see them mistake flowers and fruit for different sorts of colored stones, I am more delighted than ever. Then I see how strong the physical world is when it reveals itself obliquely to artists’ educated perceptions.

  It’s starting to look like the dream is about building a ruin in advance. About setting up a paradise we can’t lose, because it’s lost from the start. About seeing a paradise in any diaspora at all. As if it could be possible to delay irreversible time, put off the inevitable, by setting up images of the triumph of the transitory, of vanity, in everyday life.

  The Domain of Contingency

  In this everyday life, we live in a domain of contingency. Here nothing in existence relates exclusively to itself. Here everything always relates to something else, and on and on. The apple is green, we say, but there would be no need to call the apple green if the apple were the only green thing in the world. The apple is green only because in the domain of contingency so many other green things exist that we’re forced to invent the word green to keep ourselves oriented — in other words, to show comparisons.

  In the same way, the apple is round like all the other round things in our experience: the moon, the earth, the sun. And not even the sun — which otherwise serves so much as a point of reference in the domain of contingency — not even the sun has roundness to itself; even the sun is round only by comparison to everything else that’s round: apples, pupils of eyes, jellyfish, etc.

  Because of this, in the domain of contingency there are only roundabout routes. Endless motion from green to green, from round to round, etc., that can never provide a full overview of roundness itself, for example, or greenness.

  Yet we humans are put together in such a way that we would lay down our very lives to bring all that motion to a temporary standstill, so that we could get a comprehensive view of those unsettling roundabout routes. This tends not to work out so well for people who do come close to the truth. It works out better for people who, in response to whatever specific truth they think is coming close, gather up so much data that the truth moves further away again. Ultimately, of course, that just makes life in the domain of contingency richer.

  Occasionally we hear that history is at an end. But maybe it’s only moving into a new domain. Maybe we can pleat history back onto itself to see whether, in its labyrinthine passages, there are repetitions suggesting that even history unfolds in terms of contingency. If that is the case, then not only will it have to be rewritten, but the rewriting will have to be continuous. This means that history can never come to an end. History itself will enter, once and for all, into the domain of contingency.

  (1994)

  I Think, Therefore I Am Part of the Labyrinth

  Baroque refers to the period from 1600 to 1700, or, in all time periods, to a thing that doesn’t reveal its overarching similarities until it has overwhelmed us with differences. In Portuguese, il barocco means an irregular pearl. And the Baroque is just such an irregular pearl: a magnificent, odd, preposterous, downright tasteless distorted pearl, not at all perfect, but perfectly different.

  Or rather: it’s not satisfied with being perfect; it also wants to reveal perfection as an irregularity in the way people create their concepts of the world.

  On one of the first days of the year 1600, Giordano Bruno is burned at the stake because he believes in more than one concept of the world. He believes in Christianity among people, and between people and God, and he believes that there are many worlds in the universe. He himself is not troubled by this, delighting in these contradictory and apparently irreconcilable concepts. But the medieval guardians of perfection consider it madness if things don’t all fit into the same order. And Bruno is burned at the stake.

  At the same time, Shakespeare is writing about Hamlet, about how the world order Prince Hamlet lives in has collapsed, and how he has to feign madness to conceal that he has perceived that collapse.

  This play, about which of those two conditions is madness, is running everywhere, in winter or spring. In reality it’s the time of all seasons; but parents are devouring their own children in an attempt to get the world to stand still, so they can keep up and forget that they themselves are the ones who have to die.

  Bonfires are burning everywhere in Europe, and the spectators are streaming out to rejoice and to learn from their rejoicing.

  Those in power put on their latest play, and the spectators assent to it. This play has power over their minds. The spectators themselves have no power; their contribution to power is the malice they can produce.

  As long as they assent to one another’s joy at the violence striking the individual, they are demonstrating that they have no intention of conducting themselves as individuals.

  Oppression is a bargain that most people accept because it’s their only safe hiding place.

  On one of the first days of the century, then, a bonfire is burning in the Piazza del Campo de’ Fiori in Rome. The man dying in the flames is Giordano Bruno. He stands naked, chained to an iron post; his mouth is gagged.

  If he had been able to call out to the spectators, he undoubtedly would have tried once more to get them to delight in the universe, in the thought that the earth orbits the sun; and not only that, he would have spoken to them of the fixed stars as an infinite number of suns, each surrounded by its own solar system.

  Who knows, maybe it could have consoled the oppressed people to hear that they had fellow sufferers in distant worlds.

  Or rather: it could have incited them to rebellion to hear and believe that “the play” that those in power had assigned them to go along with was the wrong one. Wrong, not because it didn’t really exist, but because it wasn’t the only right one.

  That another play, another world order existed, or several, and somewhere in there perhaps a few in which they themselves could have a say in the action.

  That there might even exist a world where an infinite number of people had power, simply by virtue of moving along in the right way.


  That justice on earth may have consisted in something as simple as moving along in the right way, in a kind of human imitation of the fixed stars’ and planets’ way of moving.

  Before Bruno’s mouth was closed, he’d managed to formulate the following, among other things, and write it down in a dialogue with himself: “Continue to further our recognition of what, in truth, the heavens, the planets, and stars are, of how each of these infinitely many worlds is different from each other, of how it is, in infinite space, not only possible but also necessary that an infinite cause has an infinite result. Teach us what true substance, material, and creation are, who is the creator of it all, how each sentient creature is composed of the same elements and beginnings! Convince us of the doctrine of this infinite cosmos! Destroy those delusional vaults and crystalline spheres said to encompass so and so many heavens and elements! Throw open the portal, so that we can gaze out upon the immense starry universe.”

  Bruno wrote that in a dialogue with himself. Who read it? Of Europe’s fifty million inhabitants, eighty percent were illiterate.

  Only a few decades later, in the 1660s, the Danish noblewoman Leonora Christina, imprisoned in Copenhagen’s Blue Tower, writes of her female guard:

  I made offer to instruct her in Reading, were she but to secure an ABC. At that she laughed scornfully and said, “Folk would think that I were daft, that I now would learn to read.” I made to persuade her with Raison, to have a Pastime to while away the Hours withal, but she would have none of it: for she did know already, all that of which she had Need.

  Most people were sure they knew everything they needed to know. It often felt like more than enough. And those who knew more, or knew better, were persecuted, and unhappy because knowledge without possibility of acting on that knowledge engenders insanity.

  “O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams,” says Hamlet.

  People have always built up their concept of the world around their own consciousness, in much the same way that an oyster builds up a pearl around a grain of sand.

  In the Middle Ages all people participated in singling out one and the same perfect pearl, and consciousness was firmly enclosed within the holy dome of the church and all its crystalline heavens, as if within a nutshell.

  In the Renaissance more and more people shifted their consciousness out of that system. Grains of sand and foreign bodies were floating around freely, and the pearl that was built up then was the human body, the divine human, prepared to swallow God and install itself within the void as king of infinite space.

  The Baroque was forced to exist in both places at once and thus found itself betwixt and between, in the abyss with bad dreams. Caught between these two giant oyster shells, the image of the world took on the form of an irregular pearl, and people survived, with a kind of fictive value intact, only by taking up residence in the vertigo and regarding existence as a kind of conjured chaos.

  It looked more like nothingness. The heavens were not heavens but a void, and humans were not reborn but left to their own devices.

  For now, when the universe had lifted the veil covering its infinite riches and mirror effects, it also had to speak when spoken to.

  When humans had lost their identity in God, the universe had to compensate them with as many identities as there are stars in the sky.

  These theatrical visions gradually changed the whole European world into a stage on which the gap between fiction and reality was obliterated as far as the masses were concerned. They were never anything but stagehands and set pieces; even as the audience they were set pieces, and in broader format they were soldiers, vagabonds, and witches — all sorts of victims of the violent grinding of the stage mechanisms.

  With the witch hunts an actual drop in population could be detected. A law professor in Leipzig, Benedikt Carpzow, congratulated himself for having signed twenty thousand death warrants, the highest number in all the witch trials.

  For the more economically refined, the gap between reality and fiction became a permanent stopping place, where people practiced forgetting that the basic steps of existence — its masks and hidden ambitions — could reveal themselves in the bloodiest seriousness.

  Saint-Simon tells, in his memoirs from the close of the century, about the masked ball at the court of the Sun King, where wax masks of the courtiers had been created. These masks were completely true to life, and at the ball they were worn beneath the conventional masks.

  At the moment when the masks were dropped, everyone thought that it was people’s real faces that became visible. But in reality it was the wax masks, and the person beneath each one was someone completely different.

  At the moment of truth, truth shows itself to be a true-to-life lie.

  Nature, the universe if we will, had thrown people a curve by being different, and in all childishness people were trying to live up to the adult world and its inexplicable rules.

  In 1605 Cervantes sends his knight Don Quixote forth to take the world’s lies at their word. He will let words create what they name, recreate reality as fiction, which means recreating the world around his own mind.

  So he sallies forth with his pasteboard helmet and his rusty weapons, which he believes to be a wonderful arsenal, and the public gives him a glowing welcome. Laughter bubbles up around these absurd illusions, the same laughter that a century later boils over on the occasion of the burial of Louis XIV. Stones were thrown at his coffin, bonfires were lit in the streets, so that people could dimly begin to glimpse the path toward revolution.

  One evening in May of 1968 I stood in a deserted and dark street in Paris. The streetlights were almost hidden by trees in full leaf. A man came hurrying by and asked in passing, “C’est par là, la révolution?” as he eagerly pointed in the direction he was going. “Is this the way to the revolution?” I didn’t have a chance to answer, and now in 1978, I’m reminding myself that the word révolution in French literally means “a circular motion by means of which a moving body returns to its original position.” For example, the revolution of a planet.

  If the moving body is a human, I would add that it returns to its original position, but changed, always changed.

  For that matter, why wouldn’t that be true of planets as well? They return changed. We have not yet arrived at an understanding of the justice of the motions of the planets. Regarding human courses of motion we still behave as if the world were flat.

  Kepler published his two first laws of planetary motion in 1609. It had already been quite a while since the world was flat. But even if Kepler’s laws had been completely unknown, and even if people had known nothing and pursued nothing but hearsay, they already quite literally felt as if they no longer had solid ground beneath their feet.

  Still, if the world itself couldn’t be firm, at least one could make a model world that had the desired firmness. The world became a stage where people of all kinds, pressured by the fear of losing either their power or their lives, had to act according to specific stage directions.

  The ceremonies on the occasion of the wedding of Leopold I in Vienna were on the surface an appealing demonstration of the magic of power. It was as if all the elements had been called forth, but in reality it was all the royal subjects, dressed as elements. If you retreat at my bidding, then the waters will also retreat, and the world will stay firm.

  The festivities lasted for more than a year, and “the great equestrian ball” in 1667 was the pinnacle of the ceremonies. Here, whole regiments of cavalry performed, horses and riders clad in all sorts of costly finery, to illustrate the four elements: air, fire, earth, and water.

  From a contemporary account:

  The elements now take up ceremonial positions, cast themselves into violent dispute, and at a whole new flourish of trumpets, draw their weapons. In the form of an equestrian ballet in elaborate format
ions they conduct various skirmishes, without any victories being won. At the height of the hostilities, a dazzling light suddenly radiates above the forces and a voice commands, “Halt in the heat of battle!”

  After this all the equestrians stand as if enchanted . . . and behold, at the same moment the clouds part and completely unexpectedly, the Temple of Immortality floats down over the skirmishing elements, and the emperor is revealed in the doorway of the temple, mounted on horseback. He rides around the entire arena and halts before his bride to make obeisance. To conclude, the emperor conducts yet another mighty equestrian ballet!

  It is really the absolute monarchy ruling the elements of the people by disciplining their fury, so that they think they’re protected from all forms of rage.

  But in the great theaters of the world — where the palaces naturally functioned as hugely proportioned set pieces — the rage was real and lethal enough.

  Mass executions were orchestrated and presented as works of art, the condemned were led in procession, barefoot and in penitents’ gowns with pointed hoods, and if any of the condemned had fled, their portraits were carried in the procession, and if they had died, their coffins were carried, and all the coffins, portraits, and barefoot penitents were executed en masse.