Condition of Secrecy Read online

  This is just something I pretend. But I also feel that it’s something I need to do. I need to find meaning in the world, not because I’ve dedicated myself to doing it, maybe not even because I want to do it, but because I, like any of the world’s other native inhabitants, can’t help creating meaning, the meaning that is already there and that unceasingly manages its own transformation, in the process that we call survival.

  I can put it another way. My expressing myself here is no different in principle from a tree growing leaves. Self-producing, self-regulating biological systems are basically the same, whether they’re called trees or humans.

  As a human, naturally I have to admit that as I sit here by my window, I can see a tree, whereas the tree presumably can’t see me. But what does “see” mean? That’s human language. Of course it’s correct to say that the tree hasn’t seen anything, yet in its own way the tree has seen me, nevertheless. It has registered human presence, even if as nothing more than air pollution.

  Then we could say this basically just shows that humans are more fully developed than trees and have power over things; that we’re the ones who can decide whether trees will die, and not vice versa. But who knows how the transformation might best be managed? Maybe what looks like forest die-off is, more than anything else, a sign that we ourselves are in danger, that we ourselves could perish — after the forests do, of course.

  But whether it happens before or after is, for that matter, less relevant to the trees’ welfare than to our own. After all, we haven’t demonstrated any ability to rise again from the earth after we die, whereas seeds that have lain hidden in the Egyptian pyramids have been shown to be viable today. So we can assume that trees will just hide in the earth and come up again in due time, sometime when air pollution and humans are gone. The trees will survive, though in that event, more likely in the company of cockroaches than of us.

  Of course that’s no way to see it. And yet. Maybe it shows that in actuality, the world can both read and be read. That impressions can be harvested just as grapes can. That signs can be gathered just as nourishment can. That we as humans can read a multitude of signs, from the motions of the stars and the clouds, through the migrations of birds and shoals of fish, to the language of ants and of the swirling of water at home in the kitchen sink. Everything from astronomy and invisible chemistry to biology and its climates. But ants too read. Trees too read and know within seconds when they should let their leaves droop, if their blossoming is endangered.

  Still, we are, of course, unique. But only because the earth is unique. It’s the earth that has, in its biosphere, drafted the project called humanity, which is unique not so much because there are no others like us in our vicinity in space, and not so much because we can interpret sign systems and try to convert them to our own language, nor because we can read the natural and historical progression of readability itself — no, essentially we’re unique only because we use the word god.

  Because we have to imagine that we ourselves, after all our reading of ourselves and of everything else, ultimately will reach the boundary of readability. And it may be this boundary, perceived in advance, that makes us unique. It’s at this boundary, which actually lies deep within our own thoughts, that we in passing carry on the conversation between readability and unreadability that we provisionally call god.

  And we have been carrying on that conversation for a long time. Since before we ever had a written language. Maybe almost before we had a spoken language. In any case before we composed the first poem, oral or written, because we already were aligned with the poem that is the universe’s own.

  Along the way we’ve made various attempts to capture that poem, and we’ve called it everything from divine revelation to science. From the first holy scriptures that came into the world, such as the Bible, on through Novalis to Mallarmé, and in science on to the latest theories of the workings of the universe, a concept of the book of the world has existed, the book that expresses everything and thus halts the conversation between readability and unreadability within the word god. So to speak.

  A concept that has always drawn sustenance from its own impossibility. It’s true that the Bible is called divine revelation, but it is a revelation funneling into the provision that “now we see through a glass, darkly, but then we shall see face to face” — “then” meaning at some future time when the world being revealed no longer exists.

  And when Novalis searches for the all-encompassing fusion of words and phenomena — “Das Äussere ist ein in einen Geheimniszustand erhobenes Innere” (“The outer world is an inner world raised to a condition of secrecy”) — and works his way toward the formula for that archetypal book, the task grows like wild weeds, because of course the more he gathers of it all, or reads his way into it all, the more it seems to spread, just as, later, Mallarmé too begins to direct his attention more toward the emptiness between words than toward the words themselves.

  And when science tries to write the book of the world, its attempts on the whole consist of constantly revised theories about the origin of the universe, its inner design and workings, theories that arise right at that same boundary, where the conversation between readability and unreadability can be carried on perfectly well, using terms such as chaos theory, fractals, and superstrings — but only because the word god sounds too overbearing.

  But just as the letters within a book will never be able to read the book, we will never be able to read the world. Of course, the letters wouldn’t try. We, by contrast, are bound to keep reading. And for us it will always be like Borges’s famous story about the map of the world that’s constantly being enlarged and made more detailed, until ultimately it’s as big as the whole world and conceals what it was originally intended to reveal.

  In the human dimension the map must remain an abbreviation. And in the same way, language must remain an abbreviation for the world’s readability per se. A poetic abbreviation for all the sign systems in the universe, whose relationship and movements we can’t avoid reading. What Novalis calls “das seltsame Verhältnisspiel der Dinge” (“the strange interplay of things”) and all the relationships in the world. This interplay of relationships is expressed in all sorts of self-producing systems and the ways they’re interwoven. In the human world, first and foremost, in language and mathematics as they’re interwoven within us. Among other things, in the form of poems.

  If we provisionally pretend that the universe can read and write itself, we find ourselves in the middle of the poem called the Big Bang Theory. At the dawn of the universe, here’s what happened: everything, which at first was compressed into next to nothing (somewhere between 0 and 1), exploded and spread to all sides, a motion that will continue until everything is spread so very thin that it will seem to disappear and become nothing again, or next to nothing. An image. Or a poem situated far out in unreadability, at the same time that we with our human language suggest that it could be able to read itself.

  But whether poems are written in one way or the other — whether I pretend it’s me or language itself doing the writing, whether I straightforwardly read the world or say that I, reading the world, am part of the world, and thus it is reading itself — regardless, I am and will remain the naive reader, a native inhabitant, an insider who can never see her world from the outside. And my poem will relate to the universe in the same way the eye relates to its own retina. But still, it sees. And it keeps reading.

  (1991)

  The Regulating Effect of Chance

  Chance as Order’s Ally

  One day on the Copenhagen metro I heard the following exchange between two older women:

  “All those random possibilities — there shouldn’t be any need for that.”

  “No, there shouldn’t. They should put a stop to it. There’s way too much being left to chance.”

  I didn’t hear what they were talking about. It could have been anything. And the
exchange could have taken place between any two people. For despite its everyday tone, it encompasses basic truths about humans’ relationship to chance and necessity. This becomes more evident when we formulate the two abstract questions concealed beneath the women’s unsettling and testy remarks. First, is chance necessary? And second, is chance the prevailing force?

  To take the second question first: is chance the prevailing force? The answer, as far as it’s possible to know, has to be yes. The universe, which includes the earth and all life here on earth, exists under chance conditions, regardless of how necessary, orderly, and subject to natural laws everything around us seems, from the life cycles of plants to the orbit of the earth around the sun, aside from certain deviations such as volcanoes, human behavior, etc.

  What chance itself actually is, of course, we have no idea. We know only that there’s something we call chance. That there’s something we perceive as chance. So there might well also be things about chance that we don’t perceive. It may even be full of order, just an order that broadcasts on frequencies other than those our human senses can pick up.

  We’re living, then, under these remarkable, chance conditions, which Jacques Monod describes strikingly in his Chance & Necessity:

  Among all the occurrences possible in the universe, the a priori possibility of any particular one of them verges upon zero. Yet the universe exists; particular events must take place in it, the probability of which (before the event) was infinitesimal. At the present time we have no legitimate grounds for either asserting or denying that life got off to but a single start on earth, and that, as a consequence, before it appeared its chances of occurring were next to nil.

  Not only for scientific reasons do biologists recoil at this idea. It runs counter to our very human tendency to believe that behind everything real in the world stands a necessity rooted in the very beginning of things. Against this notion, this powerful feeling of destiny, we must be constantly on guard.

  The two women on the metro were not. They were not on guard against any feeling of destiny. They were just expressing the human tendency to believe in our own feeling that we are necessities, the feeling that leads us to try to combat, control, or subsume chance, perhaps in the hope of ultimately overpowering it and seeing it disappear.

  In this way, we admit that chance is indeed the prevailing force, but at the same time we experience an overwhelming need to eradicate it. In our daily lives we simply act as if we actually were necessities, and as if we dictated the conditions of chance, rather than vice versa.

  We might want to ask ourselves whether eradicating chance really is so crucial to our feeling of being necessary, even to our survival. Can’t we imagine feeling just as necessary if we face chance squarely? Maybe feeling even more necessary, if we dare to look directly at the ways that chance exerts its control?

  This is where I think the first of the two original questions comes in. The woman on the metro said “there shouldn’t be any need for” chance. The underlying message: it ought not to be necessary, but it apparently is. Formulated as a question — is chance necessary? — is it in reality a needed working partner, a kind of neutral helper that, if we gain insight into its essence, could change our thinking, and therefore our lives, for the better? Maybe we could conceive of it as a kind of inexhaustible layer of white noise from which, in principle, music can always be drawn, just not always exactly when the individual wants it or feels that it’s necessary — more likely when the individual dares to let go, for the briefest instant, of his own feeling of being necessary. Or we could imagine chance as a diffuse energy source, one that through the mere fact of its existence has a regulating effect, as a kind of complement to our own production of order. And we might imagine that through this complement, chance, we acquire a safeguard against our own overproduction of order.

  Spaces

  This reminds me of something I once read about weather modeling, which involves gathering all manner of meteorological information — measurements of temperature, pressure, humidity, etc., everything the meteorologists can come up with — via a network of specific geographic points. The article described meteorologists’ fondest dream: perfect measurements, using perfect instruments, so that they could predict a month ahead of time whether there would be sunshine or rain in any place on earth. The entire surface of the planet would be covered with sensors positioned at half-meter intervals, capable of gathering data from even the highest layers of the atmosphere, with all the data fed continuously into a supercomputer, so that for any day or time, right down to the minute, they could predict when and how it would rain, for instance, here in Copenhagen. But at almost the same instant that the computer began processing, tiny deviations would arise in the spaces between the sensors. At first these would create only very small errors in the computer’s calculations, but the errors would quickly grow and spread, ultimately becoming global.

  I noted that this phenomenon was called “the butterfly effect,” a term taken from a paper by E. N. Lorenz titled “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” What this hypothetical scenario may be telling us, if anything, is that the overproduction of order, or the production of absolute order, is desirable, at least for meteorologists and the weather-dependent industries they serve. But luckily the scenario is impossible, since it’s impossible to create a grid the size of the whole planet. Luckily, because who would ever set foot outdoors if we were never to be surprised by a cloudburst, never to have an unexpected gust of wind sting our eyes to tears, and never able to yearn for the first really springlike day because we already knew down to the minute when it would arrive — say, on March 8th at 12:07 p.m.?

  The absurdity of this kind of wishful thinking, this urge to map out, pin down, and add up, may be easier to grasp if we imagine an analogous ongoing measurement of bodily functions, tracking every minuscule movement and change in all our physical processes, until the computer suddenly started beeping away and spit out its result in the form of a message telling us when, down to the second, we would die. Better to call chance an ally, and hope to trump the computer by getting run over by a truck.

  And better to have the butterfly effect. All the little spaces where chance comes in. The little spaces between our senses, the spaces between awareness and unawareness, those between words on paper, the unfathomable space of the blank page, the spaces in sleep, in formlessness, the spaces in the desolate stretches where we’re outside of everything, until we’re inside again. All the places where consciousness gives way to the play of chance. Better to have the butterfly effect than total order. Better to let the least little speck of randomness spread to become a sea of chance in which consciousness drowns, than to let consciousness cling to its own bounded and therefore fictive order.

  Fortuna

  What’s starting to look interesting here is clearly not the extent to which chance prevails, but the ways that it prevails. Nor the extent to which we’re subject to the necessary order within nature, of which we’re a part, but the ways that the order within nature — which human beings observe and thus compound and magnify — relates to what I call the regulating effect of chance.

  Fortuna, the Roman goddess of destiny, symbolizes the arbitrariness that rules the world. She’s unmoved by supplication, not because she’s evil or spiteful, but because she’s indifferent to the consequences of all the caprices of chance. She’s pictured with a steering oar, steering the voyage of life. But she’s simultaneously portrayed as a blind goddess, and over the years she came to be associated with all the previously existing goddesses of luck and happiness, so that eventually, besides the steering oar, she acquired a horn of plenty as an attribute. The whole figure presents an image of blind chance fostering fruitfulness, prosperity, and victory. As long as we understand how to navigate according to her conditions. And in terms of literature and writing, we can add: as long as we understand how to write according to those co
nditions.

  In daily life, chance generally conceals its prima facie cruelty so well that we can play with the concept of chance. For example, we can think back over our lives and imagine how things might have been different. What if one had run away from home as a child and had never been found; what if one had been born in a completely different place, a cemetery in Cairo, maybe; what if one had become a pharmacist or a botanist, or had a church wedding with the baker’s son; what if one had never gone out on that rainy winter night when one fell in love with a footloose wanderer, or if on a completely different winter night, as a different traveler, one had stepped off the train at some random stop and walked into a random house — and above all, what if one had never begun to write poetry, or to write at all.

  But what’s done is done. There’s no denying that way back when, I did begin to write, presumably due to a chance turn of events; but that chance turn and others like it not only led me to the situation in which I’m holding forth right now, they obviously also led me to hold forth on this subject of chance itself. And so, as if it weren’t enough to make a virtue of necessity, as the saying goes, they also led me to make a virtue of chance.

  That’s how we can play with the idea of never having begun to write. But we can also be plagued by the idea that we did begin. I’ve heard many writers say that it was essentially by chance that they started to write, but then suddenly one day, they had to recognize that writing had become a necessity for them. And even if that feeling of necessity may initially take writers by surprise, as a rule they don’t have a very hard time believing in it and then going on to believe that the feeling of chance was just a stage that they’ve now moved past. For by writing, we produce order, maybe in our own lives as well, and maybe to a point where the project of living and the project of writing blend, so that writing and living no longer can be separated, but become parts of the same necessity. And that may sound like a very good thing. Almost as if it could resolve the old dilemma of integrating the course of our writing with the course of our life, by invoking a higher necessity — or destiny.