Condition of Secrecy

by Inger Christensen

  This blackness, this absolute night, is found at the boundaries of and beyond the reach of our senses. Black is certainly the sum of all the colors, but simultaneously it’s the absence of color. To speak of something stripped, harsh, desolate, empty would be far too human, far too white and hopeful. This black is blacker. “Like a nothing without possibilities, like a dead nothingness after the death of the sun, without a future, without even the hope of a future, that is what it is like inside blackness,” writes Kandinsky. And an artist ought to know.

  Another artist, who may not have philosophized quite so much about blackness, but who certainly knew that the background of all paintings is absolute night, is René Magritte, who again and again painted the double game that nothingness plays with the most everyday objects, letting absence and presence enter labyrinthically into each other.

  I’m looking now at one of Magritte’s paintings. In the foreground the blackest black earth, from which a tree, vaguely poplar-like, rises like an elongated sphere. In the middle distance, a row of three-story, shuttered houses, which would be as black as the foreground if they weren’t illuminated by an old-fashioned streetlight, just enough to let us see them as dark grayish blue-green structures that seem full of secrets. There are many sleeping secrets behind the closed shutters, and perhaps more disturbingly, waking secrets behind the last two windows, whose shutters still stand open. From those windows a golden light radiates, a light that could equally well be either sunrise or sunset. Behind the houses, another set of blackish bushes, like a berm along the sky.

  The whole painting breathes night. Not without anxieties, this night and more night. Yet Magritte has called it Empire of Light. And of course he has a right to that and is right about that. For the sky over the darkened earth and its poplar-like tree, over the ghostly houses with their contrived lighting, the sky over this whole nightful arrangement is a bright summer sky, pale, with drifting clouds, maybe sixteen or seventeen nearly identical, fluffy classic clouds like those we know from the artists of the Renaissance. So night notwithstanding, there’s daylight everywhere.

  This is a scene Magritte has painted in various versions, with greater or lesser degrees of night darkness combined with light implicitly created by human beings, but always with this prototypical European summer sky overhead. He writes that in Empire of Light he has “merely reproduced certain occurrences, or rather produced a specific night landscape, as well as a sky like the one we see during the day. The landscape makes us think of night, and the sky of day. This simultaneous evocation of night and day seems to me to have the power to surprise and enchant. I call this power poetry.”

  An artistic concept, then. One that is perhaps right here at hand, because in the real world as well, it’s true that the sky, especially at midsummer, can be surprisingly light-filled, over a landscape where it’s already twilight; in fact even on a moonlit winter night, the sky can arch like a peerless cupola of light over dusky streets where darkness gathers and deepens.

  But Magritte’s sky is brighter even than the sky on a midsummer night. It’s the sky of two o’clock in the afternoon, not two a.m., shining at its best. Magritte’s sky is a constant. It’s the brightest sky there is, and regardless of the time, it’s populated with clouds whose shapes we fondly recognize and study. Magritte’s sky is our own beloved summer sky, from when we as children lay on our backs in the grass, letting our thoughts roam, letting the clouds remind us of every conceivable thing between heaven and earth. The brightest of light, the endlessly open, but in Magritte’s version, something that happens at night, in degrees of darkness and unspecified destruction. A true chiller of a night, where anything at all can happen and may well be happening. It’s just that no one notices, because the sky is constantly, completely bright, keeping darkness and all the actions of darkness so constantly illuminated that they never can be evoked or seen.

  Magritte titled his painting Empire of Light, a paradox, because he himself, like the viewer, must have been thinking of night. Because of this paradox — night and day experienced simultaneously — Magritte’s paintings are generally labeled as surrealist, seldom anything else. But reality, from which surrealism arises and monitors its own foundation, does not disappear in that process. So when a daylight sky arches over an earthly, homestyle night, it may well clash a little with our senses, with the view we’ve come to consider the only one; but at night, between midnight and two a.m., when we close our eyes, we know perfectly well how natural it is for day to be right there with us.

  We know perfectly well how familiarly we move through the day, but at night the day moves just as familiarly through us. At night, when we settle down so confidently in the shadow of the earth, we’re confident only because we know it’s the light on the other side of the earth that gives us our familiar place in the shadow. Light and shadow inextricably bound in our form of night, in which we rest within what never rests.

  Basically we live in a kind of simultaneity of day and night. A simultaneity, or a poetry, that teaches us that we are immortal only as long as we’re alive. Of course our nightly sleep, in the shelter of the earth’s shadow, can be seen as practice for approaching absolute night. Between midnight and two a.m. we certainly think of death, without wanting to say so. Just as we think of war and know that it never will end until we bring enough of what we call night along with us during the day. How? Maybe we should always walk around casting a very long, oversized shadow on the sidewalk squares with every step we take, to remind us of nothingness. It’s said that we waken from sleep at the moment when we dream that we’re dreaming. Maybe we die at the moment when our shade becomes the shadow.

  (1993)

  The Seven Within the Die

  God is not dead, I tell myself. God is the conversation that humans carry on with the universe, or vice versa: the conversation that the universe carries on with humans, in order to become conscious of itself.

  I have to imagine (human that I am) that the universe wants to know something about itself.

  I have to imagine that the chemistry of the universe has somehow stumbled onto itself and has singled out biology as a specific area for experiments, ones that include human consciousness. It’s in this provisional biosphere that we walk around as the universe’s guinea pigs. We know what we know, and to us it’s priceless and vitally important, but I have to believe that ultimately it doesn’t matter one iota, and that what this is really about is the chemistry of the universe actualizing itself as human consciousness in order to “know” itself.

  I have to imagine that the universe is such a multifarious process that it couldn’t avoid having blind, random chance draft the vision that’s called humanity.

  This humanity — its people and its societies, all expressed as biology — nevertheless seems to differ from biology, or nature, by gathering its many efforts and offerings and trying to put them all into play at once. As if we know that we’ll only be in existence for a few seconds in the timescale of life’s evolution over billions of years.

  I have a calendar with an astonishing teaching tool, where four billion years of the planet’s history are compressed into one calendar year. If the earth’s crust hardens on January 1, then it’s not

  until March 15 that the earliest stirrings of life begin slowly becoming bacteria and blue-green algae, and we have to get all the way to November 21 before animals emerge on land as mites and millipedes. On December 14 pterosaurs appear, and around Christmas, the first simians begin to climb trees. Not until the last day of the year, around 4:30 in the afternoon, do hominids of our own species begin fighting with other hominids. It’s almost a quarter to midnight when we appear; it’s five minutes to midnight when we create the first cave paintings, and it’s one minute to midnight when we domesticate cattle. In this time frame, it’s been forty seconds since Chinese pictograms were invented. Twelve seconds since beech trees first appeared in Denmark. Three seconds since we started wiping ou
t other species.

  It’s inconceivable that this is happening, and it’s inconceivable that we know this is happening. For me there’s something enormously uplifting in the interplay between these two things that seem to mirror each other infinitely over a finite course of time.

  It’s the tension between what’s inevitable and what’s random, the juxtaposition of what I know and don’t know — what I call thought — that decides my concept of reality. This, I imagine, is what allows the world to see what it’s imagining.

  It’s these spiraling conclusions, and the way they never conclude, that make me think what I ultimately want to express is this: human beings have no choice but to imagine something more or less indefinite, as an expression of something definite that they can’t imagine.

  When I’m tossing a die that alternately rolls and stops, coming up as 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 in random order, I amuse myself by imagining the certainty that the die would never stop. Not on 1 or 6, or 2 or 5, or 3 or 4 . . . I imagine it eternally rolling those opposing numbers around their impossible conjunction, deep within the center of the die, a three-dimensional seven in perpetual flux.

  Why do I imagine things like that? Why do I keep playing with the thought that what’s impossible must be possible? That the inconceivable should be conceivable? That random chance could be caught in its own trap? It has to do with being a tiny part of a humanity that has desperately denied its own randomness. Denied its own randomness to such a degree that it has tirelessly built up enormous, all-inclusive traps, calling them god, where it has held fast and preserved the restive prey of random chance, without wanting to understand that the prey is humanity itself.

  No creature, no condition, no god can be held fast without dissolving. No consciousness, maybe no humanity, without being overtaken by other parts of the inconceivable process that keeps moving — not back and forth, but maybe in a kind of pulsation, corresponding to the interwoven, osmotic story the universe is telling itself in human beings’ consciousness.

  Merleau-Ponty writes so tenderly about the indescribable movements that must make up the dizzying underpinnings of what we, with growing hesitancy in recent centuries, have continued to call god, because “we have to conceive of a labyrinth of spontaneous steps which revive one another, sometimes cut across one another, and sometimes confirm one another — but across how many detours, and what tides of disorder! — and conceive of the whole undertaking as resting upon itself.”

  I can’t help imagining labyrinths and more labyrinths within that very large and constantly moving labyrinth. A labyrinth for music, for instance. And a special little labyrinth-labyrinth for mathematics. And language as a labyrinth whose passages keep collapsing because words construct them only in passing, on their endless way toward the things whose shadows are buried somewhere behind them in the collapsed passageways. And that all these labyrinths breathe, open and close, turn and reflect themselves and each other, and allow all reflections to seep in and out, through each other, as the breath of the gestalt.

  It’s a story being told. About the simultaneity of everything in a discrete second. As when Novalis writes that “natural history must no longer be treated in discrete chapters for each subject — it must be (a continuum) a story, an organic growth — a tree — or an animal — or a human.”

  We have been removing things from their contexts for so long, and have altered nature’s individual segments into arbitrary sequences, and are currently altering so many segments each day, that we have finally started to see that what we’re altering is the whole.

  We have finally started to see. Can we also understand and change and maybe learn to love our efforts again?

  Can we borrow the optimism of Novalis, who writes, “We shall understand the world when we understand ourselves, because we and it are integral halves. We are God’s children, divine seeds. One day we shall be what our Father is.” Or, as he elaborates farther on, “God wants there to be gods.”

  Not everything is allowed, I tell myself. But if god didn’t exist, then everything would, in principle, be allowed. The only exceptions would be the things that human society jointly agreed not to allow. But these things or laws are limited in advance by the workings of humanity. We mustn’t kill each other — except during wars. We mustn’t steal from each other — unless it’s joy that we steal, or our fellow humans’ self-worth.

  If we pay people a wage that might seem high, for slaving like animals in slaughterhouses or other industries involving piecework, it’s true that we’re paying them for their efforts, replacing with money the time they have spent, but simultaneously we’re stealing something irreplaceable, priceless: the quality of their working life, which is half of their entire self-concept as human beings.

  If god existed, that kind of thing wouldn’t be allowed. Not god as in religion, but god as in human tenderness toward all living things, including the air, the oceans, and the earth. Because all living creatures become earth and water and air when they die, so that the next living creatures can breathe and have enough food and water to form themselves into new life, maybe even new and better life.

  A tenderness that applies not only to humans, but also to all the substances that humans are made of.

  A tenderness that prohibits us from creating substances that threaten the substances humans are made of.

  A tenderness that we can’t afford to negate, not with money and not with arguments.

  A tenderness that applies to everything, from the smallest things to the largest, and to all the parts’ inconceivable, self-contained interconnections and balance.

  Here humans are neither the smallest nor the largest, the best nor the most important; in the furthest reaching sense, they distinguish themselves from the rest of nature only by their ability to use the word god. By letting nature’s many forms, including human forms of understanding, keep moving toward their shared incomprehensibility.

  Living entities can be defined as things that come with projects, activities they want to carry out, because the activities want to be carried out in them.

  In this way humans are creatures of myriad interpretations; it could be said that they come out in predetermined editions that remain unreadable along the way because they’re not written until they’ve already been interpreted by consciousness.

  This does not mean that humans can blindly follow their urges, their feelings, and their passions, and then excuse their actions by calling them fate.

  Knowing something leaves us responsible for what we don’t know. Making our lives readable leaves us responsible for what is in principle unreadable. Understanding certain parts of existence and of the world leaves us responsible for the myriad interpretations of the whole.

  To me, these myriad interpretations are as crucial as they are difficult to live with. Almost every day, as I walk along the street, on the firm earth holding still beneath my feet, I have to convince myself, my whole body, that the earth is spinning.

  When I board a train for somewhere far away, I often dream of an endless journey. I know I’m riding a train that runs on time, and I’ll arrive at my destination as scheduled, but I still indulge in the feeling of an ongoing endlessness, interrupted only when the train stops at, say, a station in a small town somewhere in Europe, where the fence is being painted as the stationmaster’s wife putters in her rose garden, and I think that it could be me puttering there in the sunshine and warmth amid the fiery colors. Or I could be standing in an old coat in pouring rain, digging potatoes in a vegetable patch somewhere in Germany. Or sitting for hours in a railway station restaurant, while my consciousness continued its interrupted journey into another endlessness.

  Somewhere Beckett writes, “Then I went back into the house and wrote: ‘It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows.’ It was not midnight. It was not raining.”

  It’s that simple to describe the first steps toward a life of du
alities, the starting point for a life of myriad interpretations.

  The problem is how to hold fast to a life of myriad interpretations inaccessible to our human systems, even though we’re the most willing creators of systems in the world.

  For the most part, we creep away from these myriad interpretations and their accompanying anxieties, creep into a more or less authoritative religion, a more or less obscure astrology, or a naive fascism, or else we put on superhero suits and try to plan things that have already happened, and call it politics.

  Maybe that’s the best we can do, when the facts we can convey to each other stay within the limited range of religious metaphors, or fascist advertising, or the equivocating language of political ideologies. To say nothing of the self-serving jargon of the sciences.

  When we read declarations of human rights and similarly encouraging global agreements, they’re good, and right, and hopeful, but one keeps wondering whether anything will come of them until we have the resources for them, given that most of the facts we exchange have to do with money and with control over specific materials (which actually belong to themselves and to the intrinsic balance).

  Where will the energy and strength come from to create not happy conditions, but humane or natural ones on earth? Financing, wisdom, and justice are necessary components. They can bring about provisional progress in certain areas, they can be available for spontaneous revolutions and improvements in the balance of power, but they’ll never be able to reveal that these improvements are a farce, because the ability to bring forth concepts of another kind of power lies beyond the scope of the language of financing, wisdom, and justice. We can’t even bring ourselves to say that it’s not humans who hold the power. Who would dare to say that for millennia now we’ve been fighting for a better distribution of power we don’t even have?