I have to imagine that it’s the earth that holds the power. I have to imagine that it brought its physical and chemical underpinnings into balance before it started creating what it continues to create, namely products that reproduce what has produced them, such as chestnut trees or human beings.
I have to imagine that humanity tends toward a shared imagery for expressing this power and its natural balances. That the individual person, left undisturbed, is a reflection of the condition of the earth, and that humans as a group are a chemical poem in praise of the earth and its sun.
We’re becoming frightened now, when we see how nature is being ruined. But nature can still manage to heal our dreams; it will give us images and inspiration and lend joy and style to our love and our work.
We have not been sentenced to freedom, I tell myself. It’s said we have been, because we haven’t created ourselves and haven’t had any part in deciding whether or not we’re here; and it’s said that we’re sentenced to freedom because we alone, without god, bear responsibility for all our actions.
In keeping with this imagery, I experience us more as a group that has been reprieved, and that, through various lifetimes, moves about within an unmanageable prison.
Given our knowledge of the universe’s chemical and electrical workings, it’s a wonder that I’m not a stone, and it’s pure chance that I’m not a mackerel having to reproduce somewhere beneath an oil-drilling platform in the North Sea.
In the circle game called “I Wonder,” I’m “it.” There I sit, like a little child, saying, “I’m a stone,” or “I’m a fish swimming side by side with thousands of other fish.” Even though everyone can see that I look like a human, am a human. But everything can be “I.” That’s our primary characteristic.
We can gather knowledge of stones, of fish, of ourselves. And we can make use of that knowledge.
With that knowledge we can actually deepen the sovereign knowledge we already have when we say “I’m a stone.” “I’m a fish.” “I’m a human.”
I don’t experience this “I” as something created. What I experience is the world, second by second, undertaking a division of its expressions, with the specific expression we humans call “the population of the earth” characterized by its millions of ways of saying “I,” all with their foundations in a single way to say “god.”
I don’t experience this “I” as something whose presence I haven’t had any part in deciding or defining. I don’t experience myself as either definite or indefinite.
What I experience is that all that counts, by nature’s reckoning, is whether we reproduce in the same way as jellyfish and ospreys and all the other phenomena that come slipping out of everything that already exists, grow, and become more numerous, and keep each other company for a while before we slip back again into everything that already exists.
What I experience is that the question of meaning and deciding can’t be posed about existence. Existence is its own meaning. It’s beyond discussion, because it is what is posing the question.
It poses the question by letting a part of its reproduction plan fit into the specific mental state called “I.” It asks consciousness if it’s possible, with the perpetually changing structures that have developed it (which human beings call “brains”), to achieve a complete reflection of the meaning that’s already there.
I don’t experience this “I” as something flung into freedom with an accompanying, enormous responsibility.
What I experience is that we have degrees of freedom of movement, expressed via style. In forms, also forms of relationship, where consciousness describes itself or its own structure.
I instinctively gravitate toward those forms. Like a bird building a nest in its natural environment. It’s the beauty and truth in these forms that lets me feel responsible for my actions.
While chance does reign supreme, and I might just as easily have been a stone, a fish, or something else, what I can’t escape is ultimately the something else that I might just as easily have been. It’s not about freedom; it’s about broadening our understanding of our connection to the other, to the other human or humans in the world. Its ultimate consequence has to do with broadening our responsibility to what seems an absurdity: that each and every one of us personally bears responsibility for every wrong action, even if it is committed by someone completely unknown to us.
This kind of thing is neither theory nor practice. It’s magic. Or, to use a less loaded term, it’s style. It has something to do with the following: Because humans use the word god (or have used it in the past), god exists (is still in existence) as the concept that corresponds to our sense of interrelatedness among all the atoms in the universe. (And so it’s quite possible that god is a loaded word.)
I feel that what we call style is the closest we come to expressing that inconceivable concept. Style, with all its shifts in tempo, its areas of emphasis and its always surprising quantum ambiguities, which we find in music, for example, or in our social forms and their architectures.
The more or less overarching systems we build, which we call
social order or universal order, have come into being as shields against the chaos that we believe is raging beyond what we’ve been able to organize and manage. Because we’re afraid of death, of silence, and of darkness, yet also afraid of storms, volcanoes, and all sorts of earthly disturbances, we transfer our fear to our image of nature as a whole and place it in opposition to the human longing for order, cultivation, mastery, and development.
As a species we invariably adopt an arrogant attitude in our conversation with nature. The order we’ve imposed is the best, simply because it’s our own, when in reality it’s so poor that it can be maintained only because we ourselves have set up the caricature we’re conversing with. But nature, the conversant whose expressible language is incorporated into us (as if we could play chess with ourselves without going insane), nature, which encompasses us and which we simultaneously encompass, is wholly an expression of the freedom that actually reigns supreme. Nature in itself bears no resemblance to the distortion resulting from what we, misguided by our fear and trembling, are trying to control.
Birds sing, springtime overwhelms us, hyenas devour carcasses, and the stars move along as if there were nothing to change. Star time is so enormously slow and has such extremes of tempo that there will have to be many more humanities before we comprehend the working processes of the universe as music. Bird space, especially songbird space, is so short and deep and inaccessibly lovely that we’re delighted, but our pure delight, which I think relates to the electrochemical modulations of our biology, is drowned in our internal metronome, the heartbeat that binds our experience of tempo, weight, and value. Hyena space, which is close to the places where worms whisper and rustle about our bodies, spreads its near-inaudibilities, as if the haze over the savannas could be picked up as widespread sound, or as if the deepest processes of transformation, the processes of decay that await us, could be felt as carpets of sound, woven from time, spreading and vanishing.
Humans do not invent humans, I tell myself.
I do not believe that a particular freedom applies to humans. That’s something we deceive ourselves about because we generally look at our lives as a series of private states of consciousness.
If I limit my view to the time that has passed in my life up to now, and, with my pulse rate as a fear meter, see death coming nearer, then I have to conceive of my life as an isolated travesty.
But if I experience, feel, my life as an example of something that stays alive no matter what, something that occasionally attains expression in me as in others, then I experience life as an anonymous drawing in which only the human characteristics shift.
If my child presses me, in all possible ways, to demonstrate my love and care, even though I may already be flooding him or her with love and care, then I take it primarily not as the chil
d’s desire to be in control and gain power, but rather as a need to confirm the reality of love in the world, from long before we met. Ego and love combined, because what is being expressed is a state of belonging, an interdependency in the world.
A world where it’s not possible to invent oneself as a human, free and self-sufficient and pulled from thin air; it’s possible only to follow and in that way illustrate the traces of humanness that we’re drawn toward, in the truth that we’re born into.
It’s the same with what I’ve written here. To myself, as much as to anyone else. I write in the certainty that this has already been written before, in all possible ways, and that all its wild self-contradictions are a part of that reassuring form. It should have been a lullaby, like the one that waves write on water:
Humans are not abandoned and alone, it tells itself.
(1977)
Snow
January 1981
It’s snowing. I’m thinking back to January of 1979, when I received a letter whose writer told of his sudden fear of snow; for an instant the snow floating down to earth had been a poison that smothered all life.
It’s snowing. I’m remembering the farmer on TV who told of walking out into his fields in early November, and the snow, the first very sparse and fine snow, burned like fire. But now, so much later, nobody would believe it. Even though practically every child knows that snow and fire are no longer opposites. Not in a radioactive world.
So. It’s snowing. The snow is no longer snow, but it’s still snowing.
We’re now so fearful that we’re not even fearful anymore, but the fear is spreading anyway, and the closest word for it is sorrow.
We see what’s happening, and we’re happy about what’s not happening. We compare what’s terrifying with what’s even more terrifying. We compare limited nuclear war with total nuclear war, and the comparison deprives us of the last remnant of our natural horror.
We see thousands of dead birds, thousands of dead and maimed soldiers, thousands of death wishes and their violent expressions, but as long as we see all this annihilation in all its well-known forms, at least we’re seeing something, and as long as we see something, total annihilation hasn’t happened yet.
So fear has become a strangely useless feeling, discarded and purposeless, and over these chaotic fragments of a fear that once had a social purpose, sorrow has spread. The future is dead and buried, and the work of transforming ourselves from mourners to survivors, or at least to people capable of surviving, has barely begun.
At night we sit frozen to the TV screen, and night after night, the same thing happens: first President Reagan comes on and then General Haig comes on, and night after night Reagan says we’re optimistic, and night after night Haig says that no one, and he means no one, has a monopoly on virtue.
No, we’re not really afraid anymore.
It’s true that we have a map of Denmark where someone has shown what will happen when, in due course, an atomic bomb falls on Copenhagen. What will happen is that Copenhagen will turn completely red, and the redness won’t pale to gentle, pink radioactive fallout until way out in western Jutland.
But we don’t react anymore. We don’t pack any little brown suitcases with the things we’d need if we were trying to escape, and we don’t pile up any sandbags, either, in the bedroom or by the front door. We see what’s happening. We can’t get alerts, and we don’t want any. But occasionally, in the best Jules Verne fashion, in a dream of getting through all dangers, we set out and arrive safely at our destination, where we dig ourselves down into a mountain cave deep under the Siberian snows.
January 1982
It’s snowing. It keeps on snowing. The radio broadcasts music and weather reports, music and weather reports, and the call goes out for all civilians to refrain from driving, making unnecessary telephone calls, or contributing to the chaos with their usual defiant attitude toward the weather gods, but to get themselves home, before the roads close, before one part of the country after another shuts down, and the whole country ends up paralyzed. At that point, military tractor-tread vehicles will be the only things capable of moving the immovable snow around, the only ones bringing food out to the stricken families, the only ones providing fodder for the radio’s spirited accounts of birth and death in the drifting snow.
And meanwhile Haig appears on the screen. I’ve said before, he says, and I’ll say again, he says, that no one has a monopoly on virtue. If the USSR thinks they have a monopoly on virtue, the USA knows how to break that monopoly. And that goes for every bit of virtue in the world: if it threatens our American direct and swift access to virtue, then the US has the power and the ability and the will to use its power to defend that virtue. Virtue is certainly not an inalienable commodity. It must be fought for and won again and again; this means that a great country certainly can lose its virtue, but not without fighting, for a great country can never lose its greatness or allow itself to lose face.
We talk about the commission that’s been set up. It would be very good if we were less vulnerable, especially during snowstorms. It would be very good if we were less dependent on General Haig’s attempt to make a virtue of necessity or vice versa. It would be very good if we were better at survival, on the day or night when, under cover of the first, the best, round of snow, we were invaded by Russian polar commandos, while all the Danish tractor-tread vehicles are on their way out to assist all the Danish motorists. All in all, it would be very good if there were a meaning to it all.
January 1983
It’s snowing, but it doesn’t matter.
General Haig is being interviewed by Secretary of State Haig, or vice versa, but it doesn’t matter.
The neutron bomb has been put into production, but meanwhile we’re using our time as wisely as we can; we insulate our life with a vengeance, shut out everything that can possibly be shut out, and give ourselves over to living in house slippers in the living room; and when the pot of potatoes is taken out of its haybox it coincides exactly with the beginning of “War Games in Denmark” on TV. “When the war comes, I’m going to hide in the haybox,” says the youngest child. “It’s so nice and warm in there.”
The neutron bomb has been put into production, but there do seem to be plans to examine the civic bomb shelters. We’re not sure if we’d need to bring water along.
I’m sitting here thinking about why it’s only greed and fear that motivate us toward these sensible pursuits that, to put it bluntly, are sensible only because everything everywhere is so senseless. Why we don’t use all our sense to establish peace, or use all our instincts to maintain life. Human beings’ peace needn’t be as different as we think it is from birds’ peace; their musical division of the country — so that each individual can take care of itself and thus help to further the entire race — is all in all a better idea than our economic division.
But that’s ludicrous; it’s a false analogy; human beings aren’t birds, and if they are, most of them are raptors.
But that’s precisely the point. All human beings are actually sparrows, songbirds, siskins, parrots, and the like. They’re prey to chance. And as prey, they aren’t guaranteed a long and fruitful life, not without implementing a comprehensive warning system, a meticulous knowledge of the area, and a network of hiding places.
January 1984
It’s snowing. Visibility is sharply reduced.
Whereas in earlier wars it was soldiers who died by the hundreds of thousands and civilians who mourned their deaths, it’s now probable that if war breaks out it will be civilians who will die by the millions, with soldiers the ones left to mourn them.
How else could it be? Considering that the home front will either quickly dissolve or be directly wiped out, so that the soldiers will have nothing left to defend, then it will be the soldiers themselves who will have to try to survive at all costs, and to dig themselves down, as many as possible, into t
heir underground command centers.
In any case, they have gas masks and radiation detectors, and they most likely have protective suits and food as well. I’m not sure if they thought about bringing water along. But of course they must have; maybe they even have machines that can melt the poisonous snow into something whose effect resembles that of water.
January 1985
It’s snowing, and the snow obliterates all traces.
We steal around taking classes on securing everything and everyone against everything and everyone. Classes in defense against everyone and solidarity with everyone. Classes in obstruction, sabotage, and icy courtesy. As it snows, and the snow obliterates all traces. And as the atomic procession winds through a snow-covered Europe, we sit frozen in front of our TV screens and watch the snow keep snowing, obliterating all traces.
It’s snowing; visibility is sharply reduced. We don’t dare leave the TV off. Since the atomic bomb was dropped on the mountains of Iran, and since parliament voted to dissolve Denmark’s ties to NATO (Haig in passing pushed the press aside and said it was impossible for NATO to pay attention to “a small country’s one-sided decision”), and since the Strait of Hormuz was closed, since the oil stopped coming, since we started to get cold, we’ve kept the TV on. It gives off warmth, and at least it feels like an alarm system. As long as we can see an atomic bomb exploding on-screen, at least we know that we ourselves haven’t been hit. As long as we still have hope that the gas masks we’ve saved up for will be delivered. As long as we can say that where there’s life, there’s hope. Maybe we can manage to figure something out. Because no one has a monopoly on death.
(1981)
Condition of Secrecy Page 13