Condition of Secrecy

by Inger Christensen

The Miracle Play of Reality

  I’m sitting here writing. (Language.) I’m writing this newspaper column and will receive money for it. (Work.) A column about my philosophy of life. (Feelings.) I (I), who once was born and immediately found myself among my fellow creatures (Humans), am sitting here writing in a Copenhagen apartment. Someone must have built it at some time (Social System). It has a history. A life span, one of many on the earth (Nature). Earth, which we can now see from space. There it hangs. That’s where I live (Universe).

  (The universe with nature with the social system with humans with me with my feelings, my work, my language, and more — all these and their mutual interrelationships are incorporated into my concept of the world, which is in constant flux, but on which I base everything anyway, as if it were what we call a philosophy of life — one that’s a process, where seeing can’t be separated from a life that both sees and can be seen, and that, when it expresses what it sees, demonstrates its innate inexpressibility.)

  (The universe.) A wonder. That the sun, a roaring ball, destroying itself over the course of millions of years, creates life. For what we call eternity sunlight will arrive with exactly the delay needed to create life on earth and to maintain it. Not as eternal life for the individual. But eternal life for the integrated whole, in a kind of equilibrium between life and death. In terms of the whole, eternal. Until the sun burns out. So we live in a world where creation and destruction pulse as aspects of each other in vast natural surroundings. And we have to believe that, aside from the animals that see us, we are alone in our knowledge that we are here.

  (Nature.) There too, wonder. Daily wonder. For example, when I watch the weather report on TV and learn not only what the weather will be like tomorrow, but also what the earth looks like right now. There it floats. Illuminated by the sun.

  From a distance, so peaceful and lovely. The familiar shapes of the continents. The expanses of green, the blue of oceans. Here and there the glint of snow and the darker clusters of mountains, the branching rivers. Now and then wrapped in swirling clouds.

  And up close, seen from human eye level, still peaceful and lovely. But simultaneously roiling and unlovely. Continuous repetition of forms and patterns. Comforting. But at the same time: unnerving progressions toward the catastrophic, toward stages of breakdown and decomposition. Unthinkable decay.

  Case in point: the loveliness of everything we know about the natural world. The loveliness in the periodic table of the elements, for example, and in the mathematical attributes of plants and the symmetries of animals. But at the same time, the horror of what else we know. Of the doom of that loveliness, a downward spiral, uncontrollable and ruinous.

  Placed in this precarious situation: the whole conglomeration of living creatures, including humans. Why are we here? In among all the nonhuman creatures, which simply exist. Beyond good and evil.

  (The Social System.) Again wonder. The image of any one of the world’s metropolises, seen from a plane gliding in for a landing: the city as a repetition of nature’s patterns, a pulsating organism whose metabolic shifts between order and disorder are maintained by nature’s most restless creators of social systems — namely us, humans, who, like ants, for example, move the world’s materials around, but who, unlike ants with their meticulous consumption, seem to be transforming more and more of the rich and generous world of nature into an exclusively human world.

  In this human world we don’t leave scent tracks to regulate our shared behavior.

  We are a part of nature, but at the same time we’re the one part that can reflect on nature and in that way reflect on ourselves.

  This duality — the fact that we not only are both evil and good, but also can see that we’re both evil and good — is of course something special, but it wouldn’t be worth anything at all if not accompanied by wonder, recognition, hope, compassion, love, forgiveness . . . by everything in us that’s human.

  In this humanness, we can’t settle for letting things happen as they will, for being alternately evil or good, or both at once — and then assume that problems will work themselves out, if we’re lucky.

  Precisely because we can see that the forces of nature (also those within us) are beyond good and evil — because nature always does only what’s possible — we must do the impossible. Not do away with evil, since we can’t do away with part of our own nature, but love the good. Love.

  That’s why we can’t just shout freedom, equality, brotherhood, and then think that evil has been done away with.

  Being free and being bound, being equal and different from each other, living in brotherhood and being on our own are all sides of the same humanity.

  This humanity is a process, an ongoing relationship. We have to be free, yet bound together as much as possible. We have to be equal, alike, yet as different from each other as possible. We have to be on our own, self-sufficient, yet share as much as possible.

  The poverty that undoubtedly made socialism’s narrow slogans necessary has been turned into prosperity, but it’s a generalized prosperity, which doesn’t include everyone; this means it’s a prosperity that reveals that freedom, equality, and fraternity are only one side of the coin. The other side — being bound, also to our place in nature; having differences, diversity, which we also find in nature; and living our individual lives, which we borrow from nature — this other side can ensure that we don’t trade freedom for greed, equality for envy, and brotherhood for sanctioned surveillance.

  We do have a tendency to stay passive. “Whatever works,” we say. As long as we agree and share equally, then we feel free to acquire as much of everything as we want and, just by labeling the earth’s matter as “raw materials,” to convert it into a man-made world. But it becomes a world with an entirely different kind of poverty. A world devoid of mercy.

  (Humans.) So just what is the mercy in the world? Might it lie somewhere between wonder and forgiveness? We can see, hear, smell, taste, feel. We can move, eat, sleep, reproduce. And we can speak, dream, play, work. But can we also, by recognizing the miracle play of reality in one another, forgive and be forgiven?

  Can the earth forgive us? The earth that, with its opportune relationship to the sun, took millions of years to create a foundation of nature where we, one completely arbitrary day in the timescale of the universe, could come into being? But we had been here for barely a few millennia before we put this foundation of nature in danger. The balance of creation and destruction as two aspects of the same thing — we’re disrupting it. The whole nonhuman world, beyond good and evil, which we must both use and defend ourselves against — we’re intervening in it, transforming it, changing its composition (also biologically), so that it’s gradually becoming so much a man-made world that it’s no longer beyond good and evil. It’s becoming a play devoid of miracles, where the natural progression from destruction toward renewed creation is beginning to seem almost impossible. For example, in Chernobyl.

  Can the people who live there — or more accurately, who now must live everywhere else except there — forgive. Can the people living in impoverished countries forgive. Can we forgive ourselves? I don’t think forgiveness is something we can work to achieve. But I do think that work in itself can lead to forgiveness. Not work for the sake of money. But for the sake of our shared survival, along with work for its own sake. Not work to gain control over things and existence and the world, but work that’s part of the process of creation that work itself provides insight into. And there is no work that doesn’t do that, whether it’s housecleaning, manufacturing, customer service, art, garbage collection, caring for others, or whatever it might be. Degrees of play — which always is deeply serious, when we devote ourselves to it.

  (I.) I’m still sitting here writing. (Language.) I’m writing this newspaper column and will receive money for it. (Work.) A newspaper column about my philosophy of life. (Feelings.) “I” can step back a bit. I can let ev
erything arbitrary, personal, everything that wants power over things recede a little within me, so things can come into their own. Love. I can act as if what I see, can see me. I can examine humanness by revealing it through my way of examining things. Poetry.

  (1990)

  “There is the landscape’s time . . .”

  There is the landscape’s time.

  Hour after hour the landscape lies

  watching us, dreaming up its own ideas,

  usually in the form of grass. Now and then it puts

  a humanity into the world, probably in hopes of being

  able to speak. Then the marshes keep waiting, supplying

  the willow thicket with water, and the flowers flock through one

  century after another, and the mountains hold themselves up a little

  longer. Surely you remember the landscape in a certain place on earth

  in the morning, maybe on a Sunday, when the fish hung motionless in

  the water, and the only sound was a single loud unanswered cry. In the

  same way, one morning you’re suddenly stopped by a flower that looks

  at you searchingly. The whole surrounding landscape holds its breath.

  But all you can do is long for rain. And so we keep being a random,

  passing humanness, overcome by love and made mute. Then

  the grass starts over. And the plants, which are God’s affair.

  The palm trees placed in the former factory building.

  The wooden houses we can put on like coats. The

  stones walking on like shoes. Infinitely slowly.

  The landscape that heals all wounds.

  Long after you are dead.

  (1976)

  Inger Christensen and I collaborated on the poster announcing my 1976 exhibition in Copenhagen. I gave Inger some drawings to write from, and she ended up with “There is the landscape’s time . . .”

  Inger wrote her text by hand on plastic foil, and I inserted parts of the drawings into the circle that we decided should be on the poster. I remember what a puzzle it was to compose all the circle’s parts. In the printing office, drawings and text were transferred to a lithographic metal sheet and printed on brown deckle-edged paper.

  —Johanne Foss

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