Condition of Secrecy Read online

  It was, to put it briefly, as if my cells had been divided into two types, as if a membrane had been lowered between “me” and “my space”, and the cells on one side could see the cells on the other side. Could press up against them, so that pressure and counterpressure arose. Osmosis was needed, and so it began.

  Like a battle between an anonymous body and an official person (between a body in space, in nature, and a person in time, in culture).

  Like an exchange between a space that gradually became captivity, and a time that could gradually become freedom.

  What had previously been a neutral relationship was suddenly transformed into a weighted interplay.

  Interplay: between being simultaneously captive and free. The first time I experienced that was May 4, 1945, when I was ten years old and heard a loudspeaker announce that World War II had ended, or more accurately that Denmark had been liberated. My heart pounded, and at the same time I felt embarrassment. But embarrassment is too strong a word. Or too early a word. More accurately, what happened was that my heart pounded and the other parts of my body were immediately mobilized to bring my heart and body into equilibrium again. As if my heart, which at once had been attracted toward the world and toward freedom, was quickly reminded of its place, certainly in that same world, but as a captive. So now it’s not too early to say that I felt embarrassment. It’s always embarrassing to be a captive. So embarrassing that we stealthily turn it around, so it almost looks like we are embarrassed about being free. Motions that are too big and too sentimental are used to cover up the embarrassment. Later we’re embarrassed about the sentimental motions. And so on. We remain captive, exactly when we are most free.

  That May 4 went on to include a rite that made my heart pound again, even more powerfully and for more diverse reasons. The church held a service of thanksgiving, where I stood among a thousand other children and belted out “O Great King of Kings, You Alone Can” so loudly that Jesus, floating there on the frescoed wall with his rainbow, had to be able to hear and ultimately free me to come up between the goats — which he gently pushed behind him into the alcove arch with one hand, as if he were sending them to stand in a corner, a captivity — and the sheep, which with the other lightly outstretched hand he beckoned through space toward light and freedom. There I stood with my pounding heart, maintaining my righteousness. But at the same time I knew how shameful it was to put myself first like that, even if only in a flash of thought, so I hurried, stealthy as I apparently was by nature, into a flash of a different thought that included simultaneously the prayer I was singing to high heaven. In a very primitive way an individual experience had led to something not individual — in this interplay that’s built into human beings, one that, when a person dares to sidestep it, forces that person to return to it, even if she doesn’t know why she’s doing so and even if she always comes up with other, more primitive reasons for doing so. For instance, she can think she’s afraid of her own pridefulness. But why is she afraid? Why is it inappropriate to pray for our own sake alone, to pray not to land among the goats? It’s because by doing so, we are betraying the substance we are made of, the substance we have in common with the world and thus with other people. But betraying is already saying too much. The word betraying implies that it’s possible to betray. As if there were a difference between what we’re made of and how we act. There is not. The physical world and the inner world are one, indivisible. Our physical interplay with each other is a reality. So our inner interplay is also a reality. The body and the inner self, the inner image, follow the same inexplicable principles. And our only consolation for the lack of an explanation is that we share an inability to explain it. It’s our intersubjective will, our collective psyche or psychosis, our shared captivity. It’s within this captivity that our shared freedom must be sought.

  So there’s also no reason to cultivate individual experience, individual psychology. It’s a fiction, because it suggests that there’s a kind of freedom beyond the purely physical freedom that we own only in our interplay with the world and with each other. For that reason I consider it more important to posit an incorrect explanation of the world than to present an explanation of an individual self that may well be correct. And more important to posit the reality of the image than to refer to the existence of the body. More important to further conscious control over that invisible interplay than to cultivate conscious control over a fictive entity, the individual.

  The second time I experienced the interplay between freedom and captivity, it was on a more commonly discussed and definitely no less physical plane. It was the springtime when I started to notice myself as I ran. When I realized that I was no longer running just to run; I was also running to be seen as someone who ran, who could run faster than anyone else on the block (because the boys were growing so slowly), and who would never, under any circumstances, start running like those young wives with their odd, coquettish gait who zigzagged up the street at five minutes to noon because they’d forgotten to buy salt for the potatoes. The springtime when I suddenly discovered that my heart would pound, that I would get a stitch in my side and taste blood in my mouth, and that of course I was running to the finish, but not only to run; also to be caught. By a boy.

  Here for the first time I experienced the triumph of freedom within captivity. As if the mortal humiliation of being caught were transformed from the inside and became the highest honor. Captivity and freedom were part of each other. And they knew it. Because a perfect interplay existed between the two states of consciousness in that little scene. Posit: that this interplay exists among us all.

  (1970)

  The Dream of a City

  Dreams are like poems and other ways of interacting: before we know it, they’ve dug their way in and brought forth a string of particularly enduring clichés. If you’ve ever dreamed, as Freud says we all must, then you can do it again and again, and if you’ve ever seen something repeat itself, then you can see it again and again — and pretty soon you don’t see anything else: Poetic Customs and Practices #64, a ghost in full armor.

  It’s with that kind of tangible windmill that a writer does battle when he critiques his work and thus his life. A few years ago the Swedish writer and critic Göran Palm said something like this: “Why write about horses, when we know that most farmers have tractors?” Many writers, both before and since that came up, have changed their approaches after that kind of response. In today’s poetry there are numerous chromed elements gleaming with the same light as the shining horses of the past — it’s only natural. But why not carry the question to its logical extreme, ride a bit further out, and shift poetic strategies: why write about nature at all, when most people live in cities?

  If I may: that, of course, is nonsense. And: there is, of course, something in it worth discussing.

  A couple of years ago I was living in Knebel, down by Mols. My window had a view of trees, a field, and sky. I carried on long conversations with that view, and I continued them when I went for walks in the countryside, where there was always some far-flung comment to find along the beach, up in the hills, or among the clusters of houses and farms. A conversation that had been carried on for centuries, one that I more or less patiently continued weaving — almost as patiently as the farmer with his plow, regardless of whether he was using a horse or a tractor. One day he said, “The rewards aren’t worth the effort; it’d be better to live in town.” This classic reason for flight from country to city suited me perfectly; I packed up my pen and paper and left. And though it wasn’t exactly that simple, today I think it’s simple enough; no other explanation fits any better.

  Ironically, now that I live in Copenhagen I have the same view I had before: trees, a field, and sky. But for many reasons the conversations we carry on are far from the same. For me there’s one overarching reason: so many people.

  A statement like that might be interpreted as a terse and provincial expression marvelin
g at a metropolis and all its inhabitants, a cliché dragged out of some secretary of tourism’s suitcase and slightly revised, a dream of heady action and sweet lives in abundance.

  But not all dreams are clichés. In any case, more than once, at irregular intervals, I’ve had a dream that can’t be packed into my private cliché case, at least not yet. It just won’t shrink enough. Over time, its theme and main features have become increasingly specific and clear; only the details change. It may begin with me walking into a tiled bathroom with all sorts of fixtures. That doesn’t surprise me, even though I had no intention of walking into it. With utter trust, I then see that it’s no longer a bathroom; it’s now a bakery, a dairy, a butcher shop, or a public swimming pool, and as the rooms freely change, and I walk on through long corridors with decorative ponds, through offices and royal chambers with smoky glass, through parlors to hallways to rooms with government officials, to communal kitchens, through trolley cars, etc., I understand that I’ve come into a city, the only way a person can come into it: from inside. And when I finally stand looking out over the square or the park, and then stroll across the green lawns, I feel perfectly happy. Not so much because of the city itself, but because of the infinite number of people who, wherever I go, are in the middle of some task or other, and who are also in the middle of tasks there in the park. Some of them I recognize from other places and times in my life; others — possibly most of them — I don’t; but still, without amazement, I find it perfectly natural that there’s no difference in my relationship to the known people and the unknown ones. That’s what makes me happy. Only one thing bothers me: that I can’t talk with all these people. But I reassure myself that it’s because they exist only in my consciousness. Then I wake up.

  Of course one of those cities is a dream, the other a reality — or are they? In the real world, too, it’s clear to me that my consciousness has become like a city, and that the rewards of my move to this new work environment are, so far, more than worth the effort. From a reasonable degree of manageability, with a more or less fixed number of possibilities for encounters, and an accordingly calm pulse rate, I’ve now settled myself in a place where the feeling of unmanageability is impossible to ignore, where my consciousness is detached from my environment, and above all, where anonymity is a fact of life.

  I want to live as centrally as possible in this anonymity. I’d like to live in the town hall square, in keeping with the image of a city as a view to hold a conversation with. I often peacefully nurture fantasies about a city nearly the size of Denmark. In brief: I want to feel that I live in the mass society I really do live in. And it’s that unmanageable and anonymous mass society that I’m referring to now, when I say that a writer has a duty to seek out a work environment.

  Naturally, there are good reasons for fearing anonymity. It means that the individual is vulnerable, lonely, and in the long run superfluous — there are so many other people anyway. And if we turn for a minute to the dynamics that all these people set in motion in our societies, then the anonymity almost does induce fear: unforeseen production leads to new unforseen production, on and on, with a blind hope that the multitude of byproducts will be useful. A powerful experience of this anonymity and of the apparently sovereign acceleration of this social mechanism can easily give rise to the well-known feeling of “everyone for himself.” And when the first steps are taken in that direction, then there is a real danger that mass society will move toward mass annihilation, either physical or psychological.

  But another mass society, with exactly the same conditions, can do the opposite: it can invite us to take part in aspects of humanity that we haven’t known about; it can awaken our curiosity, our urge to see what is actually going on. And really: isn’t this an excellent work environment for a writer? Politicians put their best efforts into coordinating and finding connections between what has happened and what is going to happen. I believe that’s a job that must be tackled on many different fronts; and without being either overly ambitious or overly modest I feel that writers represent one of those fronts. The concept of living in a city — an environment not having what we usually think of as an “environment,” without borders, with a feeling that supports that social order — that concept is what I want to see used as a foundation for critiquing writers’ work.

  I think that too much weight is laid on self-realization. I think that, as a counterweight to the unmanageability of the world, a cult of the individual springs up, maybe even of the unmanageability of the individual — as an attempt to create balance, but on a shaky foundation. If we writers can’t work things out by any other means, we can always stake out a single area, act as if we’re documenting it, and thus provisionally legitimize the structures of this false environment. Or we can stake out strangeness, crawl down into cellar doors and through sewer systems, turn our souls inside out or hide in attics.

  Maybe it can’t be any other way. But I’m not so sure.

  Jens Ørnsbo, in the most recent issue of Vindrosen, writes, “Increasingly, literature in peaceable societies has to live on more or less inflated crises or situations of conflict.” He adds, “This last problem, a lack of problems, is becoming apparent.”

  I don’t believe that.

  Can writers write only if they’re provoked by crises, conflicts, and problems? And if so, how about using the following problem: what is it, actually, that we’re taking part in? What is a mass society? What is this city: a work of art, a mobile, a set of building blocks — or what? It must be possible to write our way into these questions.

  The day we can put mass society into the cliché case will be the day we’ve found a new name for it. We dream, despite everything, of a more human way of expressing what we are now living.

  (1964)

  To Talk, To See, To Do

  What We Don’t Talk About

  There are a few, very few, things worth talking about — and we don’t talk about them. We can’t talk about them. For instance life, death, and love. We give them big, expensive names, something like a dress so good that we’re not comfortable wearing it. We’re shy. We’re afraid. So we don’t mention it. That kind of word is left hanging in the closet, while we use all the nice, ordinary, and undeniably practical words in our daily dealings with each other.

  We’re afraid. But we manage. We’re afraid to be alone and afraid to be with others; afraid of what’s finished, at a standstill, too orderly; and afraid of what’s unfinished, messy, and disorderly — and we’re afraid of sex, afraid of death. But we manage. Or do we? Could it be that the reason we’re still having wars is that we’re afraid to tell each other that we’re afraid of each other, and of everything else? To me it’s as if we keep going out in the rain — and keep refusing to invent raincoats and galoshes.

  What We Don’t See

  We don’t talk about the things we don’t know anything about, the things we can’t do anything about, the things we can’t see. But those are the things that fascinate us. If a person seems attractive, ultimately it’s not because of this or that external feature; it’s because of the internal interplay among those features. And that interplay is invisible. We’d like to be able to guess one another’s thoughts, put ourselves in one another’s place — you just can’t tell what’s going on in people’s minds, we say. All we know is that there’s something else, something more than what we see.

  This recalls a Baroque anecdote (related by Saint-Simon): One winter a set of wax masks had been made to look like all the people of the court. At a ball the wax masks were worn under other, ordinary ball masks, and when the ordinary masks were taken off, everyone was fooled and thought they were standing with the real person, but they were really standing with a wax mask of one of the other people there. Underneath, there was someone entirely different. Everyone was greatly amused by this joke.

  What We Don’t Do

  Underneath, there’s someone entirely different. That’s certainl
y worth talking about: how to get this other, fearful, helpless person out, so he’s no longer so afraid of being helpless that he has to wage wars to battle his own fear. One of Gunnar Ekelöf’s notations:

  I have, in imagination, lived through all the shamelessness and corruptibility of which the first half of the twentieth century consists. I have also, at a much earlier age, seen people pale, in shock, along Unter den Linden, and during that same year I saw battlefields with not a house left standing, not a tree. That was in 1920. And then the war in Spain. And then World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and racism on all fronts, lust for power on all fronts. I want to serve. . . . But I will never forget what I have seen, and I think about it constantly. How shall human beings be good. At times I think that human beings are evil animals; at times I think I glimpse a solution, perhaps when I’m in a woman’s arms.