Strangely, I have never been afraid to die. Not because I am particularly brave, but because I have yet to fully comprehend that it will in fact happen to me.
Intellectually, yes. Intellectually, I fully comprehend that one day will be my last on this earth.
But I do not believe it, not properly.
At the end of the day, this is perhaps hardly surprising—existence is of such unprecedented substance, and that substance, which is my presence on earth, is experienced not simply as a material reality, is perceived not merely as the result of chemical/electrical impulses in a physical mass, but as having quite another nature altogether, and, perhaps most significantly, quite another duration.
Yes, I know that death will one day come to me. (Not from without, but from within; for whatever form death takes, the result is always the same: the body is starved of oxygen and breaks down.) It happens to everyone. Not simultaneously, but one by one, as the pieces in a game of chess are dismissed from the board. A classmate of mine from school, Ernest, was taken at an early age, drowning while on holiday in France when he was twelve years old. Another, Osvald, died in a car crash on his way to work one morning, his skull crushed when his car ran into a brick wall. My mother had a congenital heart defect that was discovered only after it was too late: she was spooning ground coffee beans into the coffee maker one afternoon in winter when suddenly she lost control of her movements, tossing the coffee into the air before falling to the floor, and in the hospital two days later she died. I saw her fall, it was I who called the ambulance, and I saw her again an hour after death had occurred. She was a stranger then, which is to say that what had been her was there no more; only the body which had housed her remained.
These are the dead in my life. While I have been living, hundreds of thousands of others around me have died without me having seen or even thought about it. So yes, I know what awaits me—if not exactly the form in which it will come.
And yet.
Am I really to die?
My body will, yes. The sheath, the casing, the cocoon, yes.
But that inside of me which is?
Relating to death is a bit like relating to God, only the other way round: intellectually, I understand that God and the Divine do not exist, but I believe nevertheless that they do. In other words: I believe that I am not to die, and that God exists, at the same time as I know the opposite to be the case.
What does it mean to know?
What does it mean to believe?
I once asked God to deliver me a sign, and a raven came. It looked at me, squawked three times and then flew away.
This was in winter and I was walking in the forest during a storm; there were no other birds there.
It proves nothing, it was a chance occurrence.
I dreamed one night about my brother, he came into the room where I was sleeping, and bent over me. The next day, my father rang and told me my brother had been involved in a motorcycle accident in Vietnam, he had been close to death, but would survive.
I never dream about my brother otherwise, and am not close to him.
It proves nothing, it was a chance occurrence.
During the summer of my thirteenth birthday, I was staying with my maternal grandmother for a week. Her house was situated on high ground above a river. One day I helped her make a bonfire of some cardboard boxes. It started to rain and we went inside. When I came out again, I saw a figure standing by the fire. It was my grandfather. He had been dead for three years.
I missed him and had been thinking about him that day, which was why I saw him; he was conjured by my longing.
To entertain any other explanation is inadmissible. To entertain the notion that the dead live on is inadmissible. To entertain the notion that souls may inhabit our dreams is inadmissible.
The intelligent, reasonable, rational reader will no doubt already have put this essay aside, certain of its direction. Ghosts. The undead. Heaven and hell. Oh, the abomination of such conceptions, how they smack of blindness and dim-witted desperation. We know them to be folly. For the boundary between the rational and the irrational is almost as absolute as that between life and death. The rational perspective rejects all that is not rational, it is unable to absorb it, and thus in the rational perspective the irrational quite simply does not exist. Death is the cessation of life, and life is biological/material, so when the material heart ceases to beat and the material brain shuts down, life is over and only the body’s biological decomposition in the grave or its destruction in the crematory oven remains.
A rational perspective can entertain nothing else, for then it would cease to be rational, which is to say true, and would become the opposite, irrational, which is to say untrue.
But since so many people view the world irrationally even so—believing for instance in God, a power that cannot be observed, measured or weighed, or believing that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, which of course by all known parameters is impossible—all that is irrational has been allocated its own designated sphere, a bit like a children’s table at a family celebration, where belief rather than knowledge dictates the truth, which everyone else knows is not true at all, and this is the place of religion. It is where the children sit, with their children’s food, indulging in their children’s matters, while the grown-ups run the world.
Yet once, the opposite held. Then, what now is irrational—belief in God and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and other miracles besides—was truth, whereas what now is rational was untruth.
By this I seek to say, not that truth is relative, but merely that reality is a complex phenomenon that never appears alone, in isolation, but always in interplay with the person who perceives and experiences it, and this is something that science has never been very good at taking into account. It is never the case that we know what we see, but rather the other way round: we see what we know. This explains, for example, how in the Middle Ages miracles were observed in abundance, whereas today none are observed at all. I recall reading a book containing accounts recorded at the actual time of such miracles and visions. One in particular was arresting: a woman on a donkey appeared in a church, floating in the air, not before a single person, but before a whole congregation, and not just for a brief moment, but for several minutes. People in those days knew that miracles were a part of life, and they saw them, whereas we today know that miracles are not a part of life, and we see them not.
But this of course says nothing about whether miracles occur or do not occur, only that we can never be certain that what we see in fact exists outside our minds, or exists in the way that we see it.
In Jakob von Uexküll’s classic study of animal behavior, an almost Copernican turn in biology, in which animals are viewed as subjects rather than objects, it becomes evident how differently reality appears to different species according to what aspects of the world their senses perceive. All that lies beyond the scope of the sensory apparatus does not exist to it, and therefore accordingly does not exist in the world. Little thought is required to understand that the same must apply to us and the world that is ours. That aspects of reality indeed exist beyond our scope, unseen and unperceived, remains, however, a thesis that cannot be substantiated, to the extent that if something exists beyond our scope, then of course it cannot ever, in any way, be captured.
I shall always remember my mother’s final movements on earth, tossing ground coffee beans into the air in the kitchen that day in winter before slowly sinking to her knees and collapsing forward onto the floor. Nor shall I ever forget the compelling mood in the church on the day of Osvald’s funeral. He was so young, just eighteen years old, and the grief that was felt, especially by the girls from our class, was so hysterical in its expression as to occasionally mutate into laughter. But although on both occasions death came close to me, and overwhelmingly so, in the first instance in its coldness, in the second in its detestable fullness, the feeling that I cannot die was not altered by it in the slightest. I know that my body will die, however hard that may be to believe—but equally I know that the part of me that is will never die.
Life after death cannot be proven—but neither can it be disproved. No scientist can with any certainty say that life after death does not occur. He may say that much would suggest it does not, and substantiate his claim with reference to the logic of matter and the physical world. But logical parameters will naturally capture only what is logical; the non-logical slips through its mesh.
Does the non-logical exist?
If we stand at the boundary of the logical, is there anything beyond? Anything we might sense or discern?
Let us proceed step by step.
What is death?
What is the body?
What are dreams?
As we know, death is not necessary. Thus wrote Georges Bataille in 1949, and ever since I read that sentence for the first time, it has lived inside me. We are socialized into a world of circumstances we learn to accept: a ball kicked into the air will drop to the ground; water begins to bubble when it reaches a certain temperature; things happen and are consigned to the past, never to happen again; all that lives, dies. These circumstances are insurmountable; impervious to challenge, they are as invisible walls against which we collide, and we learn to live with them: that’s life. We shall never know why the ball we kick into the air must drop to the ground, why water has its boiling point, why things that happen cannot happen again, or why death exists, for such circumstances are determined in a place that is unknown to us, by means that shall forever be beyond our insight. All we can relate to are the ways in which they manifest themselves to us, and the consequences they entail. We don’t know why gravity exists, but we know what it is and how it impacts.
The same is true of death.
The best way of exploring the nature of death, or the way it works, is perhaps to imagine what life would be like if death did not occur. In such circumstances, life would be able to derive energy only from non-organic sources such as water and sunlight, and since there would be no death it would continue to spread until there was no more space left in the oceans in which it arose. Its expansion would then cease or continue on land. Before long, there would be no space on the land either and life would be compelled into the air—one can imagine great piles of primitive life in strange, fan-shaped formations extending stepwise into the skies—but eventually there would be no space left there either. Water and land would then be but a rather sticky, presumably green substance unable to develop in any direction, forever to remain in the same state, with no prospect of further reproduction.
But death does occur, and it clears space and makes room for new life, and besides perpetuating the processes of reproduction in this way, death also allows such life as becomes non-life to be consumed, which naturally further enhances the opportunities for life, and, together with the various climatic and geological circumstances that pertain, this creates a constant imbalance in life, which cannot stagnate, but only be propelled onwards in the manic slow-dance that is evolution.
Death patently makes room for more life, but the reasoning comes to a halt there, for a deeper rationale for its occurrence, other than ensuring that life does not merely pile up and stagnate, is unavailable to us—just as a rationale for life occurring at all is unavailable to us. If it were a random occurrence, something that happened simply because the conditions were right, why then does it not continue to occur? Why do new forms of life not continue to arise all around us, in their beginnings, evolving in their own directions, either more or less remote from the tree of life to which we ourselves belong? Is it the case that the prerequisites for life remain open and available only for a short period of time, then close again? Or is it the case that new life is continually arising, only to find no room because of the life that already exists? This may be so, and the theory that life’s inception and evolution is haphazard, occurring without plan, which is a truth questioned by no one but a small number of religious fanatics in the USA, is of course by no means implausible. But the idea that death arose quite as haphazardly at the same time is something I have more difficulty believing. I can accept one random occurrence with consequences of that magnitude, but two? And at the same time? That smacks too much of a plan. And the doubt to which that suspicion gives rise gnaws at the very theory of evolution itself, which is unthinkable without death.
The problem with all thinking about death, as I see it, is that it takes death for granted. Death is an absolute circumstance to us, and therefore we have great difficulty thinking, as Bataille did, that death may be unnecessary. But if that is so, the question then becomes one of what death adds to life, of what it is good for, and what it does. If the answer to that question is that death makes room for more life, the question then becomes one of what that might be good for. Certainly, more life opens up the possibility of new life, and new life alters the balance of existing conditions, creating challenges to which they must adapt, which is to say yet more change. Death is what makes evolution possible. And evolution is what made us possible. We are just as unnecessary as death, and however odd it may sound, our presence here is more closely attached to death than to life.
Death created us.
The idea that death created us is made plain too in the biblical myth of the Fall of Man, albeit rather differently so. The narrative begins with the serpent asking the woman if it is true that God has told them not to eat of the fruit of any tree in the garden. The woman says that they may eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden but for one. Of its fruit God has said: “Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.” The serpent tells her they will surely not die, for God knows that the day they eat of the fruit their eyes will be opened and they will become as God, knowing good and evil. The woman eats of the fruit, as does the man. The first thing that happens is that they discover themselves to be naked, whereafter they hide themselves from God, who, on finding them and realizing what has happened, banishes them from Paradise.
This of course concerns not the introduction of death into the world, but the introduction of awareness as to its existence. There, at the moment in which we are made aware of death, we become human. It is what sets us apart from the animals, and sets us apart from the moment. In God’s eyes, this is a punishment. But to the serpent—who is often understood to be the Devil—the awareness of death is something to be coveted, and knowledge a blessing. At least, this is the way he presents it. And strangely, of course, the serpent was right: they did not die, as God had told them they would. On the contrary, they became aware of who they were, and what kind of position they had in life. This was an awakening, not death. Not many of us would consider knowledge to be an evil. So, did God lie to them? And if so, what kind of a God is that?
It is quite as hard to imagine existence without knowledge of death as it is to imagine existence without death itself. Animals are presumably unknowing of the fact that they must die, for although they may be gripped by the fear of death, as for instance occurs when cattle are taken to the slaughter and smell the blood of their fellows, or when the gazelle, with a pounding heart and drumming hooves, is chased by the leopard, there is little reason to believe that they know their life is about to end, much less what that might entail. Death belongs to the future—perhaps it even establishes the future—and can be perceived only as a future occurrence, for when death comes, the conscious mind, and its consciousness of death, ceases to exist. Death is our temporal horizon, unseen by the animals. They, on the other hand, are more closely bound to the moment, and in the Bible’s account of the Creation that state is paradisiacal. Knowledge, including the knowledge of death, is considered a fall.
Could that be what God meant when He said they would die if they ate of the fruit from the tree of knowledge? That the paradisiacal would be lost to them? And that such a death was a punishment, the world into which they fell, the world we continue to inhabit, was thereby almost to be perceived as hell itself?
Much would suggest it. Before God banishes them from the garden, He says to the woman: “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” And to the man: “Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
It is a strange myth, for if the life into which man was thrust, in which we live still, is a punishment, it would seem to be the case that sin, the very reason we were ejected from Paradise, the acquisition of knowledge, at the same time proves to be our salvation. Certainly as far as the material aspect of that punishment is concerned. We were able to shape tools and implements, manufacture plows and carts, build houses and towns, thereby at first to loosen, then, at least ostensibly, to release ourselves from the bonds that bound us to the earth. We established a buffer zone between ourselves and the pressures of nature, as Peter Sloterdijk once put it. When it comes to the immaterial aspect, the awareness that we are to die, our acquisition of knowledge has spawned great philosophical and religious systems, of which science is one, which serve as it were to spin a net to cover over death’s abyss, so that we see it not, being attentive only to the threads we follow. When death comes and someone we are close to is plunged into its darkness, the net, spun only from thought, comes apart and we despair without hope, racked with pain and grief, until it passes and the abyss is covered over once more.
This is how inauthenticity came into the world. The truth of death, delivered to us by the Fall, is so terrible that we must live as though it did not exist.
Yet God did not merely pronounce our punishment. He made coats of animal skins and clothed us in them, saying then: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.”
With that, He drove man from Paradise to till the ground from whence he was taken. And east of the garden of Eden He placed Cherubim, and a flaming sword that turned this way and that, to keep the way to the tree of life.
Was it to protect us that the way to eternal life was guarded thus? Or was eternal life a blessing our punishment was meant to deny us?
And why coats of animal skins? It seems almost like an ironic reminder of our origins, as animals with unconcerned animal lives, origins now long since departed. Inauthenticity again.
The myth of the Creation is ancient, and the figures that appear in it, including God, relate to a quite different reality from the one we inhabit today. But the yearning to live as one with nature, to be attached to it, rather than elevated above it, or removed from it, as the Paradise myth expresses to us, is still alive, and in rich measure. Søren Kierkegaard, that singular and inconceivably original Danish writer, sought God and the Divine in the moment, which to him was the very gateway into the kingdom of God. In one of his sermons, he takes as his point of departure a discourse given by Jesus concerning the birds of heaven and the lilies of the field, holding up their existence, so completely and so fully obtaining in the moment, as an ideal. Certainly, Kierkegaard’s treatise is not without irony, yet it seems quite as clear to the reader that he is indeed in search of paradise, considering that it may be found only in the event that we relinquish awareness of the self and all that belongs to it—a matter that requires insight into both past and future in order to be sustained—and give ourselves blindly up to the moment. Our every worry, our every trouble, our every anxiety will then fall away—what happens to the bird does not concern it, he wrote. Our burdens are given up to God. Such innocence, which is the innocence still of the animals and the smallest children, was torn from us by the awareness of death, which made us and our godless world.
The biblical Creation narrative is a myth, but what it tells of happened in the real world too, for man did indeed appear in the animal, and although it happened unfathomably slowly, it nonetheless happened: we were animals, we inhabited a paradise, and we became humans who stepped from that paradise as we beheld the world and saw our place in it. The myth of the Creation, written down some three thousand years ago, though it undoubtedly existed much, much earlier than that in oral form, contains an insight into this, that we derive from the animals, or at least in some way must have lived as them, and that the revelation of death was a fall from that state, a fall that made us what we are now. Thus, the advances made by natural science in the mid-nineteenth century, with Darwin at the forefront, did not abandon the Bible, but picked it up anew. Tangible biological evidence was unearthed to substantiate what man had suspected since the dawn of time. We know little more about it today. We know approximately when it occurred—around three hundred thousand years ago—and we know that their numbers must have been small, perhaps only a few hundred.
Oh, the gray zone when a new species appears on earth; the changes take place so gradually as to make it impossible to draw a clear dividing line between what it has emerged from and what it has become. And, we now know, a myriad of other, similar creatures have existed at the same time, they too difficult to bring into focus. Nonetheless, the first humans were a local occurrence, if not two individuals, as in the Creation myth, then certainly no more than a small number. They could have known each other, all of them.
What did the world look like to them? Was it alien? Did they feel different, set apart from the life that surrounded them?
The German philosopher Hans Jonas believed that to the first humans life was the given, the natural default, while death was the mystery. To them everything was living—the wind, the water, the forest, the mountain—and the dead had accordingly also to be living, only in another way, or in another place. To us the opposite holds, Jonas wrote, for now death is the given, and is everywhere around us, whereas life is the mystery. Death, that is, in the sense of the lifeless, the dead matter, the stones, the sand, the water, the air, the planets, the stars, the emptiness of space. And in the same way as the first humans considered the dead to be alive in another way, we consider the living to be dead in another way: the body is but body, matter, the heart a mechanical apparatus, the brain electrochemistry, and death is a switch by which life is shut down.
The first humans came to Northern Europe some forty thousand years ago. While this may appear to be a huge span of time in view of the few decades over which our own lives extend, the span in culture is, if not negligible, then surely at least no greater than to allow us to understand each other. I once saw some of the objects they produced, and they were no more bewildering, in fact much less so, than many a work of contemporary art.
They spoke to me.
I happened upon them quite by chance, in a museum in Tübingen, where I had gone to see the tower where Hölderlin had lived the last forty years of his life, the time after he had gone mad, when he not only attributed his poems to “Scardanelli” or some other made-up name, but also post-dated some of them far into the future. I was staying at a small and very old hotel at the top of a steep hill, just beside the wall behind which the castle rises. The hotel went back, I think, to the sixteenth century, as many other buildings in that modest town. On the morning of the day when I was due to return home, I had an hour or two to pass before my train departed and wandered for the sake of diversion into the castle grounds. It transpired that there was a small museum there, where a number of artifacts from that time were on display, all recovered from a cave not far away. The most striking of these was the Lion-man, a figurine with the face of a lion and the body of a man, carved from the ivory of a mammoth. It was discovered a week before the outbreak of World War II. In the same cave were furthermore found a voluptuously shaped female figure, assumed to be a fertility symbol or goddess, a small, meticulously carved horse, a web-footed bird, and a number of whistles.
They spoke to me, I wrote above—but of what?
Attachment.
The Lion-man ties the animal to the human, the web-footed bird connects the three elements of water, earth and air, while man by depicting them ties himself to them. And the whistles? What else would they be for but to bring together the humans?
No animal makes sculptures or musical instruments. Why did the first humans do so? What was it that prompted them after they had left the paradise of the animals?
The first thing that happened to Adam and Eve when they ate from the tree of knowledge was they became aware of each other. All animals think, of course, but what was new about humans was that they could think about thinking. It was as if a mirror had been held up before their thoughts. It is that mirror that makes awareness possible. Indeed, it is awareness itself. Prior to the mirror, attachment was not a thing, the animal was there and was what it was, bound to the context of its existence, doing whatever it did on that basis. The same applied to the amoeba as to the antelope. But the awareness of being, and of what one is, is meaningful only in relation to the other; on its own it is meaningless. The mirror, which is to say our human awareness, is the other. The fact is that we cannot think human thoughts alone, for to think human thoughts is merely a potential we possess, which cannot be realized anywhere else but within a culture. We think in our culture, and we think with our culture. That awareness brought us closer together, at the same time as it removed us from nature.
Attachment as a phenomenon can only arise when it’s not a given, and this occurs when thoughts are not only thought but also mirrored. Naturally, basic attachment existed before this too—a baby elephant having wandered away from its mother will look for something that was there before, which it hadn’t thought about then, but which now will be conspicuous in the form of longing: attachment. The apes already possessed considerable social skills long before man came along, establishing alliances and forging ties to one another, as they still do. But attachment to other animals? Attachment to the elements? Attachment to the world in itself? Such attachment came only with humans, because to them, as the first, due to the mirror, it was no longer a given.
This is what the Lion-man, the fertility goddess, the horse, the web-footed bird and the whistles said to me there in the castle museum at Tübingen. Not immediately, not as I stood there looking at them in their glass cases, for in those moments I was simply filled with a strong sense of excitement: something immeasurably distant and unclear had shifted close to me.
Emerging onto the castle forecourt, I decided to put off my return home for a day or two and see if I could make a trip to the cave where the discoveries had been made, the place those people had inhabited forty thousand years before.
This was late autumn, in the middle of a cold spell, the low November sun barely scraping the tops of the buildings, and in the tiny streets the cobblestones were ice-covered and consigned to shadow. I sat down at a table outside a cafe in the lower town, only a short distance from the church, wrapping a blanket around my legs to drink a cup of piping hot cocoa and have a smoke while I observed the people who passed through the narrow street, my inner being still quivering with excitement.
I had gone there because of Hölderlin, who had first studied theology at Tübingen along with Hegel and Schelling—a plaque on the wall of the pub just across from where I was seated said that Hegel used to drink there—and was later taken in by a carpenter after he went mad in middle age, lodging then for those forty years in the tower by the river. Much would indicate that he in fact simulated madness so as to escape life and other people, at least this is what I had held for some time, and seeing the tower and it surroundings to a certain extent only strengthened my view. Everything he needed was there. Behind him, the little town with its fond memories of his student days; in front of him the river—and Hölderlin loved rivers—the plains with their great deciduous trees beyond, and then the Swabian Alps rising up at the horizon. Hölderlin had written the most beautiful poems of all time, and was not the past in them, I had pondered as I stood in the tower looking out of the same window as he had done, quite as distant, quite as magnificent and impenetrable as the mountains I saw in the distance? With all their gods and heroes of mythology?
But the Greek past stretched no more than three thousand years back at most, I thought now. The objects I had seen at the museum were thirty-seven thousand years older. And they made the remote, hazy-blue mountain range of history appear vividly before me, as if a curtain had been lifted on a stage.
There they were!
I went inside and paid for my cocoa, then proceeded down the hill along one of the narrow side streets until I found a bookshop I had noticed the evening before. There I purchased a book of Hölderlin’s poetry which I tucked into my shoulder bag before going back up to the hotel again to see if I could stay another night in my room. Regrettably, I could not, the receptionist informed me, for a chocolate festival was taking place and all the rooms had been booked for some time.
Eventually, I managed to find another, at a hotel across the river, in a more modern and shabbier part of town, among multi-story parking facilities, shopping centers, businesses, supermarkets. I had a bath, for I was freezing cold, after which I lay down on the bed and began to read.
How wrong I had been.
There was no past in the poems, quite the contrary, everything was so very much the present, which the past suffused with its nearness, lending it fullness.
Are not many of the living known to you?
Does not your foot stride upon what is true, as upon carpets?
Therefore, my genius, only step
Naked into life, and have no care!
With these words about stepping boldly into the thick of life swirling in my mind, I fell asleep there in that hotel bed. The next morning, I hired a car and drove out across the plain in the direction of the forest, a hoary mist suspended above the fields. The sun was as yet but a suggestion, a faintly brighter glow in a gray-white sky. I pulled up in a car park of stamped earth covered in frost, and followed the path. The forest was different from what I was used to, less substantial in a way, more open. The cave was at the bottom of the path, in a small clearing, the entrance was low and would have been hard to find had it not been fenced off. But there was no one around, and the fence was easily surmounted, and a few moments later I lowered my head and went inside. After only a few steps it opened up into what can only be described as a hall.
Here, then, they had sat.
A fire would surely have burned round the clock in winter, certainly if it had been as cold as it was now. But perhaps it had not?
The entire continent lay empty around them, inhabited by barely a human soul. Germany, Poland, Russia, Scandinavia, nothing but forest and animals. Rivers and lakes. Plains and mountains.
They were here, and elsewhere were but a few scattered groups of their kind.
What was it like?
Did they tell stories about the past, of hardships and heroic deeds?
Yes, surely they did. Human beings cannot be envisaged without continuity, without a history.
And they knew death. They killed animals, and were themselves, from time to time, killed by animals.
How did they perceive it?
If everything was living and possessed a soul, even the water and the forest, the mountain and the sky, the dead too would be living, albeit in another place.
Life was everywhere. It was boundless. And presumably there were no boundaries within it either.
Perhaps the Lion-man was not about attachment, a connection they made, but was an expression of what life was actually like to them? That the lion and the man were the same? That the humans here had yet to distinguish between themselves and the animals?
The dead souls could be everywhere, including in the animals.
I put my hand against the ice-cold wall, wanting to touch what they had touched.
The cave was still, but its stillness was different from the stillness of the forest outside, which was open. The stillness of the cave was enclosed, kept in place.
They had sat as if in the womb, I thought. Protected from the external world into which now and then they would venture out on their small expeditions.
Children would have been born here, the space filled with groans and cries and howls, and then the sudden quiet when the child was expelled, a moment of silence before it gulped its first breath and began to wail. That joyous sound, of new life beginning. And here they would have died too, one after another, generation after generation. The expiration, the abruptly lifeless eyes, the body becoming motionless. The soul departing it.
Where did the soul come from that revealed itself when the child opened its eyes for the first time and looked at the one who lifted it up, its gaze mild and serene and ancient, not new and frightened and wild, as one might expect of a soul that is but a few minutes old? And where did it go when it no longer revealed itself in those same eyes?
The idea of the dead living on has accompanied man throughout human history; from the oldest times to the present day, it has existed in every culture, every religion known to us. None of us can know what conceptions were held by the first humans, but the artifacts they left behind give reason to believe they performed rituals we now call shamanistic and which exist to this day in cultures around the globe. In his seminal book on the phenomenon, the historian of religion Mircea Eliade makes clear that shamanistic practice has essentially been the same wherever it has been recorded, whether in the indigenous peoples of North America, the Amazon region or Australia, or in the cultures of the many different ethnic groups of Northern Asia. This would suggest that the phenomenon is ancient indeed, and if the figures of the Lion-man or the web-footed bird seem so seamlessly to accord with shamanistic practice, it becomes difficult to imagine that such practice did not take place even then. The shaman was a nominated or self-nominated figure apprenticed by a predecessor, ensuring thereby that the requisite skills were handed down through the generations, and besides functioning as a healer, a medicine man or woman, it was the shaman who bound together what were perceived as the various stages of life, he or she traversing the axis mundi to visit the underworld or the heavens, either while asleep or in a trance, usually under the influence of hallucinogenic substances.
The initiation of the shaman takes place almost invariably in the underworld, Eliade states, where dead shamans dismember the candidate’s body, removing and replacing every bone, every organ; occasionally, this takes place with the head of the candidate looking on from a stake on which it has been placed. Roberto Calasso points to the likeness between such treatment of the shaman’s body and that accorded to killed animals. The shaman thus connects with them too, not merely with the dead and the spirits.
Now, most people would be inclined to believe that the shaman’s “traveling” to other realities is an inward occurrence, in dreams or feverish fantasies, and that whatever the shaman claims to experience takes place nowhere but in his or her mind. So: no underworld, no heaven, no dead souls, only artificially provoked hallucinations.
This, however, presupposes not only a clear and conspicuous division between internal and external, but also that everything in a human being, which is the human being, exists internally. This internal world may—indeed will—be imbued with impressions, images, thoughts and conceptions hailing from its interface with the world without, and the individual may themselves infuse the external world with elements from within, though only by severing themselves from them, without leaving the internal world themselves.
I am thinking, as I write these words, about a great oak tree that stands in the woods behind the house in which I sit. A remarkable number of birds inhabit it, and I commit this thought to the typewriter. The thought has now left my inner being and become manifest on the sheet of paper in front of me, though I myself remain here: no part of me any longer exists in it. I am, and will always be, enclosed within my mind and body. When I dream, it feels as if I am removed to other places, but this is not the case, for I lie in my bed and the dream is merely a series of random images released by my brain without my conscious self—the mirror referred to above—being present to tell me that what I am seeing is not reality, but images dislodged from the bark of my mind.
But what if the human entity is not stable? What if there is no clear and conspicuous division between what is inside a person and what is outside? What if the two domains exist in constant flux? What if the bear is like us, and the wolf, the fox, the lynx, the owl? What if the soul can pass in and out of the body, in dreams, in ecstasies, in death? Hamgjenga, hamhleypa, hamrammr are the Old Norse words for shape-shifters capable of taking on animal form, figures such as Kveldulf or Odin, who, while their bodies stayed put, flew as a bird or swam as a fish in other places.
To us, for whom “human” is such a definitive category and the boundaries of each individual are set so absolutely by the body, the container as it were of our personal existence, such a fluid conception and experience of reality can only be rejected. Any phenomenon that transcends the division between what is within a person and what is without—the vardøger of Scandinavian folklore, for instance, spirits delivering the sound or sight of a person before he or she actually arrives, or the glimpse we might have of a ghost, something that has left this life, but which yet remains in our world—is referred to under the heading of superstition. We see or hear something that is not found other than in the mind, and which, as the shaman, we confuse with some real phenomenon in the outside world.
That human beings have always seen ghosts, even in cultures and religions that reject such notions, does not of course mean that ghosts exist, only that belief in them exists, at least in folklore, and that such belief would seem to be unshakable.
If we see what we know, and if what we know colors or even determines what exists to us, then knowledge stands in our way, and, as the Fall narrative tells us, knowledge came into the world simultaneously with the awareness of death. If, further, knowledge must be dismissed in order for us to see death, then we must at the same time dismiss awareness of death, in which instance death is eliminated and there is no more to see.
This paradox is what occurs in the myth of Orpheus when he descends into the underworld to bring back Eurydice, and Hades tells him he may take her on one condition: that he should not look at her before coming out into the light of the overworld again. She is there only when he does not see her. If he sees her, she is not there.
In ancient Greece, death and sleep were related phenomena, in the mythology they were siblings, and in the Iliad even twins—Thanatos and Hypnos, charged with carrying the slain into the realm of the dead. Rationally, they are of course separated: sleep is the state into which we drift and drift out of again, whereas death is absolute. The question the Greek myths raise is whether the boundary between death and life too is fluid, a shifting state as between sleep and wakefulness, or whether it is, as we take it to be, absolute, a matter of either/or? Put differently: is the boundary between life and death a product of our limited senses, or is it real?
Another definitive category in our lives that raises the same question is time. Are the boundaries of time absolute? We live in the moment, and what we call the past and the future are found nowhere but in our minds, in the form of memories on the one hand and expectations on the other. The moment dissolves and is renewed with seeming constancy; we may sit quietly in a room and yet still be moving in time, in the sense that the moment at once is lost and replaced by another. Following Einstein, we know that time is relative, that it moves faster or slower according to where we are, and in what state, and that there is no such thing as simultaneity.
A British soldier, J. W. Dunne, who was also an outstanding aeronautical engineer, published in 1927 a book entitled An Experiment with Time, in which he proposed a theory to the effect that the past, the present and the future exist in parallel, but that limitations in our sensory apparatus and consciousness mean that we can exist only in the present. Linear time is an illusion. The source of Dunne’s interest in such matters was his realization, as a young man at the end of the nineteenth century, that he possessed precognitive abilities. On numerous occasions he dreamed things that later occurred. Dreams that took place in the future possessed the same characteristics as those that took place in the past, what happened in them was quite as distorted, and they were at once as clear as they were mysterious. Dunne’s theory was that our dreaming consciousness was not bound to the moment in the same way as our wakeful consciousness, which filtered time as linear progression, but instead was open toward actual time. His book and the theory it contained created a stir in its day, and even the normally sober-minded Vladimir Nabokov repeated its experiment, writing down his dreams and comparing them to subsequent events.
Dreams belong to the sphere of the irrational, and any claim that they are what give us access to reality is of course inadmissible to the rational mind.
Oddly, though, our conception of time has also been challenged on the rational side of the fence; the further science has penetrated into its mysteries, the less apparent its divisions have become, a physicist such as Carlo Rovelli even ending up in the same place as Dunne—albeit on the basis of wildly different premises—positing that time does not exist and that we experience it only by virtue of constraints on our sensory apparatus.
Time and death are of course not the same. But they are related phenomena—the moment that seamlessly dissolves and is renewed resembles to no small degree the life that expires and at the same time goes on, and time passes quite as irretrievably as life comes to an end: the boundaries are in both cases absolute. In his belief that time was nullified in dreams, Dunne was merely repeating what Aristotle had written in the lost work of his youth, On Philosophy, that “when the soul gets by itself in sleep, it then assumes its nature and foresees and foretells the future.” But where Dunne stopped at time, Aristotle continued toward death: “The soul is also in such a condition when it is severed from the body at death.”
Aristotle is saying three things here: sleep nullifies time, sleep and death are related states, and the soul lives on after the body is dead.
But how? And where? For if the dead live on, if only as unembodied souls, they must exist somewhere?
In a society where the human is as yet unestablished and no boundaries exist to enclose the soul, death will accordingly be but provisionally defined, its nature too, alongside life and all its metamorphoses, fleeting and changeable. In the same way, when that which is human becomes established—and this happens presumably when humans become sedentary, settle into communities and develop written languages—death, and the dead too, become quite as fixed. All the great archaic civilizations, such as the Babylonian or the Egyptian, had richly developed conceptions as to the realm of the dead, its nature and geography.
The richest of these may undoubtedly be found in the ancient Egyptian culture, whose people thought more about death and exhibited greater solicitude for the dead than perhaps any other culture before or since, and this was so because to them the difference between the living and the dead was a matter of degree. Death did not entail the end of existence, but merely heralded another phase of life. An epitaph from the Fifth Dynasty contains the following phrase:
ba ár pet sat ár ta
where ba means soul, pet heaven, sat body, ta earth, thus: soul to heaven, body to earth. Straightforward enough, on the face of it, yet the relation between soul and body was infinitely complex in the Egyptian culture, and in ways quite mystifying to us, whose understanding of man is so grounded in the realms of biopsychology. Indeed, it may seem as if they were dealing with a completely different creature altogether. The physical body, referred to as khat, could attain new states subsequent to death, providing it underwent mummification so as to halt the processes of decomposition, at which stage it took on a physical/spiritual nature and was referred to as sahu. This was not the same as the soul, for the soul was termed ba, and sahu could communicate with ba. Both sahu and ba could ascend to heaven after death. Moreover, the physical/spiritual body and the soul were supplemented in each individual by a kind of abstract personality which existed freely and independently, able to move at will from place to place, removing itself from the body and rejoining it again as it pleased. This personality—which seems to have been perceived as a kind of doppelgänger—was referred to as ka, again distinct from the soul itself, ba. Ba was non-physical, spiritual, its hieroglyph a stork. In addition came an individual’s shadow, khaibit, likewise independent, though always in the vicinity of the soul. And then there was khu, which was a person’s spirit, sekhem, translatable as a person’s form or power, and finally ren, a person’s name, which lived also in heaven.
This, then, was what constituted a human in ancient Egypt, a composite of independent parts: a physical body, a spiritual body, a heart, a doppelgänger, a soul, a shadow, a spirit, a form, a name.
Apart from the body, all these components lived on after death. The living, the dead and the gods were closely connected, and the land of the dead was to be found in the Eastern firmament, though in other epochs (and we must remember that the culture stretched across several thousand years) the dead, like the sun, descended in the west, the land of the dead being referred to accordingly as “the West,” the dead as “Westerners.”
The ancient Egyptians did not fear death, but their souls were not necessarily immortal, for in the land of the dead, where they lived on, there existed something called “the other death,” which occurred when a person died in that place, and this was indeed a death to be feared: when it struck, existence was definitively brought to an end.
Although we have access to a large number of extant texts from the Egyptian high culture, as well as many artifacts and construction works, there remains something very alien about what they express, something so remote that one can barely relate to it other than intellectually, which is to say in ways that are non-intimate, abstract, non-emotional—it is as if their very dimensions are different from ours, that what they express is so great and at the same time so very far away from us as to appear almost un-human. Yet naturally they were humans—naturally they fell in love, naturally they hugged their children, naturally they spat out the milk if it had soured, naturally they enjoyed the hours when the sun had gone down after a hot day and shadows filled the streets around them. A shout, a smile, a warm twinkle of an eye: someone they know, and they stop and chat.
But no such things are represented in the texts they left behind, which contain only the sun and the gods, and a mechanics of the afterlife so detailed it brings to mind an instruction manual for some strange and intricate machine no longer to be found. What it all means remains unclear, at least to me, as too does the bearing it all had on those ancient lives.
Against this vague and cloudy background we have the first extant works of literature of the ancient Greeks, from around the eighth century BC—the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Theogony, the Works and Days—a veritable revelation of human life. They come as if sailing out of the darkness, not unlike the way the first humans stepped from the darkness of the animals some hundreds of thousands of years earlier, we can imagine, though the darkness from which these Greek figures emerge so clearly belonged to culture, not to nature.
They came with emotion. The Iliad begins with the anger of Achilles and continues with an argument between Achilles and Agamemnon. They are heroes, sons of gods or kings, and yet they allow themselves to be offended, they sulk and are incendiary and domineering. The gamut of their emotions is run in the shadow of death—not an Egyptian sun-death, which was merely an extension in another place of life itself, but physical death, the death of slaughter in battle, the death of plagues. The Iliad is all about bodies and the emotions that stream through them, and it ends where it begins, with the anger of Achilles. Hector, the great Trojan warrior, kills Achilles’ friend Patroclus, and in an act of vengeance Achilles kills Hector, though the deed is not enough for him: beside himself with grief and rage he drags Hector’s body behind his chariot, three times around Patroclus’ grave, and when he returns to his tent and lies down to sleep, he leaves the body in a heap on the ground. This he does every day for twelve days. The city to which Achilles’ soldiers have laid seige, Troy, resounds with wailing and lamentation at the loss of Hector. Hector’s father, King Priam, writhes with despair, we learn, filthy and unkempt. The impression we have is that the desecration of Hector’s body is perhaps even more terrible than his death itself. In a magnificent closing scene, the aging king, aided by the gods, sets out to the Achaean ships to retrieve the body of his son. Both Achilles and Priam weep, and Priam carries Hector’s body back to Troy. Having mourned Hector for nine days under the agreement of a truce, Priam cremates the body on the tenth day, and the fire is put out with wine. Hector’s bones are gathered up and Priam places them in a golden chest which is committed to the ground and covered over with a barrow of stones, before a funeral feast is held in Hector’s honor, and the epic poem thus concluded.
It is easy to think that with the Greeks everything was suddenly brought close to us, the Divine and the human, life and death, but this is so only because it was they who laid the foundation of the reality in which we live today. If the first humans left the animals gradually, turning their backs on them, then the Greeks established a space for the new human experience. Sciences and societal systems were founded, the physical world explored, and what lay between people was mapped. We can still identify with Achilles and with Priam; we can still follow the adventures of Odysseus and read our own times into the episodes involving Cyclopes or Sirens; we can peer into the depths of our own minds by viewing the Greek tragedies, which to this day continue to be staged by theaters across the globe, and if we wish to consider the nature of the world and our own circumstances in it, we begin with Plato or Aristotle, or perhaps even earlier, with the pre-Socratic philosophers. Even Christianity stems from the ancient Greek world, the old monotheistic Jewish religion first melding together with the extremely radical sect that had been established by Jesus, the resulting amalgamation subsequently being exploded into a system, first by neo-Platonism, then neo-Aristotelianism, to which large swathes of the world submitted.
But this Greek space with which we are so familiar has another side to it, one that has remained as if in shadow, closely connected with that age, though seen as irrelevant to our own, no longer referenced, barely mentioned at all other than as a curiosity, which is the relation between the classical world and death. To the ancient Greeks, life after death was not just an abstract fact, it was also a part of their physical reality. The literature of ancient Greece is full of encounters between the living and the dead, not only in the epic works, the poems and the dramas, but also in the histories, biographies and accounts of journeys. Common to all these instances is that the dead are awoken or summoned, normally at the grave to which the body was committed.
The most usual way of making contact with the dead was to offer something to the deceased at the site of his or her grave: honey, for instance, or wine, oil, milk or blood (in the latter case there was a name for it, haimakouria, or the moistening by blood). On a grave discovered at Mycenae there was an altar through which ran a duct, allowing blood to be poured directly into the mouth of the corpse. After the offering, it was customary to lie down to sleep on the grave, and the dead would then appear in dreams. The Greeks consulted the dead because they could see into the future, presumably on account of their existing beyond time.
Many accounts exist of the dead being unable to find peace for not having received a proper funeral—this occurs in particular after military battles such as the one that took place at Troy, where slain warriors were seen in the night on the plains outside the city, in the full armor of war, such sightings occurring as late as in the second century after the birth of Christ, according to Philostratus. By then, Homer’s epic poem of that war, the Iliad, and his Odyssey, about the returning home of one of the Greek warriors, were already a thousand years old.
At the grave and on the battlefield, the dead came to meet the living. But the literature of the classical age is full also of descriptions of the reverse phenomenon, termed catabasis, in which the living descend into the realm of the dead. Such accounts belong to the myths, an example being the eleventh book of the Odyssey in which Odysseus travels to the land of the dead to consult Tiresias. They sail far to the south, to a land on the other side of the sea, barren and sunless, the sky there forever concealed by cloud and fog. On the shore, Odysseus digs a small trench in the ground, pouring into it first honey, then wine and water, and sprinkling white barley meal over the whole, before slaughtering a black sheep and letting the blood run down into the trench. At once, the dead come trooping up, wishing to drink of the blood. He holds them at bay, for the blood is for Tiresias. They pay him no heed, barely seeing him, their interest being only in the blood, and they are quite encapsulated in themselves. They are clad in the clothing they wore when they died. Odysseus sees teenagers, girls and boys, women who have perished in labor, warriors slain in battle. He sees also his mother, Anticlea, and realizes she has died while he has been away. She does not recognize him. Only when the dead drink of the blood are they able to see him and talk to him. Tiresias does so, and Anticlea does so, and a number of women, daughters or wives of famous warriors, and eventually Agamemnon and Achilles.
In Hesiod, who was writing at the same time as Homer penned his Odyssey, the land of the dead is underground and is called Tartarus. He writes thus:
For a brazen anvil falling down from heaven nine nights and days would reach the earth upon the tenth; and again, a brazen anvil falling from earth nine nights and days would reach Tartarus upon the tenth.
Tartarus is of course not an actual but a mythological place: down there, in a dungeon-like abyss in the underworld, behind an enormous wall of bronze, the first gods, the primordial Chaos deities, are held captive. There also, Night and Day cross each other’s paths—when one goes in, the other goes out, and never are they home at the same time, Hesiod writes—and the children of Night, who are Sleep and Death, live there too.
The Odyssey, naturally, does not describe an actual place either, but the ritual Odysseus performs is realistic, it was how the dead were summoned, and the obscurity with which the journey to Hades is described—as if they sail into an eternal night—is supplanted by clarity when considered from a different angle: the encounter between the dead and the living takes place in a borderland, neither here nor there, in a kind of non-place, at the very periphery of existence.
But these mythological descents into the land of the dead could in fact be traced back to existing places in the actual geography of reality. Orpheus, depicted in Greek tradition as a factual historical figure, was said to have descended into the land of the dead through a cave close to what was then Taenarum, now Cape Matapan, the southernmost tip of mainland Greece. Anyone so inclined can go there today and see the cave for themselves. I have done so, though without feeling able to connect the glittering sea and the crystal-clear waters of the cave, shimmering now blue, now green beneath the little boat in which we tourists were sailed into the grotto, with the darkness and eternal night I associate with the land of the dead.
There are many such places that were connected with the underworld, usually caves and other subterranean areas, some of which even emitted poisonous vapors, though four in particular were central, these being, besides Cape Matapan, the Acheron in Thesprotia, Lake Avernus in Campania and Heraclea Pontica on the southern shore of the Black Sea. These were real places, not mythological, often with incumbent oracles, and the dead would be summoned there too. Since the caves did not in fact open out to the underworld, there is no reason to think that the Greeks believed descent into the land of the dead to be a physical journey: the cave was the land of the dead. The dead were also invoked in crypt-like chambers where the oracles went into states of trance.
The question to which all this leads concerns not so much where the dead existed, where Hades and Tartarus were actually sited and what they looked like, nor how the dead souls could appear in the bodily forms from which they hailed, at the moment of death, at the same time as their physical bodies in fact lay on the battlefield or in the grave. No, the question is why we, who have adopted so much of ancient Greece, and who continue to look toward it, have ceased to believe in life after death.
From where we stand, more than two thousand years on, it would seem that the world of the Greeks, illuminated by all its Apollonian sun, contained a remnant of something very ancient of which it never quite managed to divest itself. The Greeks constructed a space for rational thought, but were unable to rationalize death, which remained as ancient and mysterious as the forest, a place of unceasing metamorphosis, where the living became dead and the dead became living, animals became men and men became animals. Pan was the figure of this, the god with the human torso and the legs and horns of a goat, the man-animal, wild and unpredictable, but the mythology teems with other half-human, half-animal creatures, among them the Centaurs with their equine bodies and human heads, Medusa with her snake hair, the winged Erinyes, the Minotaur with the head of a bull and the body of a man, and above them all was Dionysus, the god of trangression. Homer referred to Dionysus as mad, and Walter Otto, who called him the god of “ecstasy and terror,” believed madness was Dionysus’ very nature, while Nietzsche described him as follows: “Dionysus is the frenzy which circles round wherever there is conception and birth and which in its wildness is always ready to thrust forward into destruction and death. It is life.”
In one of the Dionysian rituals, reminiscent of cult orgies in which wine would be poured from the heads of animals and all boundaries were upheaved, the maenads according to tradition set about Orpheus, tearing him apart, limb from limb, as if he were an animal, his head then being tossed into the river. Yet the head lived on, carried to the sea as it sang, to be washed ashore on an island where it was found and buried, though remained articulate, for as Philostratus writes, the head “took up residence in a cleft in Lesbos and gave out oracles from a hollow in the earth.” The Orphic oracle continued its prophesying there until Apollo bade it stop.
Mircea Eliade places the myth of Orpheus in a shamanistic tradition on account of the descent into the underworld as well as the dismemberment and the singing head (as noted above, the head of the shaman was often placed on a stake during the initiation rituals in the underworld, from which vantage point it could look on as its own body was taken apart). But the head of Orpheus was not the only one to give out oracles in the classical age—the head of Trophonius too lay in a hole in the ground, delivering prophecies of its own, visitors climbing down a ladder to ask the head whatever they wished to know, while Cleomenes I of Sparta cut off the head of his friend Archonides, keeping it thereafter in a honey pot and regularly asking its advice. Aristotle writes that when a priest of Zeus, Hoplosmios in Arcadia, had been decapitated by a person unknown, the head would sing, “Cercidas killed man upon man”—a local man answering to the name was subsequently arrested and tried. And the Greek magical papyri cite several methods by which heads detached from their bodies may be made articulate.
Alongside the naissance of natural science and philosophy, then, we find severed heads predicting the future, corpses receiving fresh blood and coming to life again, dead souls unable to find rest, descending to the land of the dead, some (including one reported by Plato in his Republic) returning to tell of what they had seen there, oracles in caves, man-animals, animal-men, transformations, metamorphoses, transgression. There was something great and unfathomably ancient that could not be put to rest by the New. Or at least not at first, for they existed side by side, in the darkness of the cave and in the light outside it. But gradually, immeasurably slowly, albeit not as slowly as man had left the animals, it was indeed put to rest, and those ancient beliefs lie now inert and fossilized in our present day.
The animals were taken from the forest, some to industrial meat and milk factories to become producers of consumer goods, consigned to their designated places in the biological systems which define them, to be seen only in the highest definition and without ambiguity on the screens of our TVs, laptops and mobile devices, much as the lion and the web-footed bird, for instance. They may still be found in the wild (though the forest shrinks by the day) but what they have become to us are images, finally and totally disconnected from the human.
Death similarly was taken from the cave and out into the forest, out of the darkness and into the light, where it appears to us as it is: a slight fissure in a blood vessel in the brain, a few microscopic bacteria in the bloodstream, a tiny cell beginning to multiply in the pancreas.
What is happening here is death is becoming smaller and smaller, and so compelling has this development been that it is no longer inconceivable that death at some point will reach its nadir and vanish.
In this vision, science and religion strangely come together. Not only because medical science is now able to open our bodies, remove our inner organs—heart, lungs, kidneys—and replace them with new ones, the way shamans down the ages have described their initiation rites, but also because this, coupled with all our efforts in the field of genetics, where the cultivation of body parts and the manipulation of cells is no longer a Utopian notion but reality, allows our lives to be prolonged, and one might speculate, to the extent that aging and all its processes are genetically determined, given to us at birth, that they might one day not only be delayed, but halted, and what we shall have then, eternal life, is, and always has been of course, principally a religious conception, as such connected with mysticism, transgression, transformation and the irrational—and until now accordingly deemed to be claptrap.
Christ emerged from the ancient world, and the story of his life contains a number of shamanistic elements, both his driving out of demons and his bringing the dead to life, but first and foremost his descending into the realm of the dead, like the shamans, like Hector, Orpheus, Odysseus and Aeneas, from where he returned and ascended into heaven. But oddly the sense of the irrational seems not to have stuck as strongly to the narrative of Jesus rousing the dead as it has to the myriad tales we know from classical antiquity that concern the same phenomenon. The madness and derangement surrounding Dionysus is completely absent when it comes to Jesus. And it is absent too in the case of the man who, from the depths of the ancient past and its reality of visions and prophecies from grottos and caves, wrote one of the most important books of the New Testament, the Revelation to John. In a grotto on the Greek island of Patmos he lay in a deep, hallucinatory sleep or trance, artificially induced or perhaps merely frothing forth from within him, and stared into the future.
John was one of many oracles of the time, but whereas the heathen visions of his peers have been lost, his own Christian ones remain: he saw the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, he saw the sea colored red with blood, he saw the fire out of heaven—and he saw death be gone, writing: “And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.”
This is not the same as the idea of eternal life, which came with Christianity and is related to Plato’s theory of the soul; it is something different, concerning not a promised paradise, but reality. They shall seek death, he wrote, and death shall flee from them.
I believe “those days” to be near. I believe “them” to be us. But if it is the case that death one day will be gone, what then of the already dead?
Only a few weeks ago, I took the sleeper train across the country from Oslo. Excited about my impending journey, I arrived early at the station. There are few things I like better than traveling, and best of all is to go by train. The atmosphere of the station before the night train leaves, that childhood feeling of forbidden adventure that I always get from a late-evening departure. The passengers arriving late and scampering along the platform with their trolley suitcases trundling behind them, past those who came in good time and have already found their compartments, who are now making their farewells to people or who stand on their own and rather at a loss, heads bowed to gaze at their mobile phones. Old and young, men and women. The beautiful and the not-so-beautiful, the well dressed and the scruffy. Coarse hands ingrained with building dust, dainty unblemished hands that have only pattered the keyboard of a computer. A swish of hair and overcoat: a mother bends down to kiss the cheek of a child; next to them a man in a suit, his hands hanging awkwardly at his side as he watches. Three young men and two young women standing in a circle; one wears a backpack, a holdall clamped between her feet. A tall man with long white hair and a long nose, in a long coat, comes striding in a hurry; a musician, I think to myself, jazz, perhaps, or left-behind indie.
I had booked a double compartment and been allocated the top bunk. It was empty when I went in, and I turned on the light, put my suitcase down on the floor, took off my jacket and hung it on the hook behind the door. Although I don’t usually care to install myself when I know someone else will be coming, especially a stranger, I nonetheless climbed the little ladder into my bunk and lay down to read as the sounds outside gradually seemed to converge toward departure.
Two minutes before the train was due to leave, my fellow passenger entered the compartment. He was holding his ticket in one hand, a small suitcase in the other, and stared, first at the ticket, then at the bunk number. Satisfied that they tallied, he looked up at me.
“Hello there,” he said.
“Hello,” I said.
His fleshy, suntanned face glistened in the ceiling light, while his frame was short and rather slight. He was formally dressed for the journey, I considered, in a dark suit and white shirt.
“Are you going all the way?”
“Yes,” I said. “And you?”
He nodded and sat down on his bunk, bent forward and opened his suitcase.
“Beer?” he said.
“No, thanks,” I said. “It’s very kind of you, all the same.”
He produced a bottle from the suitcase. I did quite fancy one, but I didn’t want to get too friendly with him and perhaps be compelled to talk for hours. I wanted to read for a bit, and then sleep.
“Are you scared of flying?” he said.
“No,” I said as he levered the top off with a bottle opener he apparently kept on his key ring. “Why do you ask?”
“Not so many our age who take the sleeper across,” he said.
I turned onto my side to face the wall, making it plain that I perhaps wasn’t that interested in chatting.
A whistle sounded outside and the train gradually pulled away, into the tunnel that would take us underground and lead us through the city.
He remained silent as he sat reading a magazine that lay open on his lap, taking a swig now and again from the bottle he held in his hand.
After a time, when we had left the city far behind and my book had begun slowly to slip from my hands, he spoke to me again.
“Academic, are you?” he said.
“Me? No,” I said. “Not at all.”
“Perpetual student, then?” he said.
“I’m not sure about that,” I said.
“That book you’re reading,” he said. “It’s not for the casual reader, more for people working in the field. Wouldn’t you say?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Come on!” he said. “I’m trying to start a conversation here!”
Why hadn’t I paid the extra few hundred for a single compartment?
I’d have preferred to ignore him completely, but something in me was averse to it, and I closed my book and sat up. I’d have to climb down to brush my teeth anyway.
“No need to stop reading on my account,” he said. “Sorry to have bothered you. Go on with your book, by all means. It’s late.”
“How come you know Lucius Accius?” I said.
He glanced up at me with a smile on his face.
“You sure you don’t want that beer?”
“I suppose it won’t do any harm,” I said.
He put his empty down on the floor, produced two more bottles, opened them and handed me one.
“I’ve read him,” he said. “Only not in translation like you.”
“So you read Latin?” I said obligingly, before taking a good swig of the delicious golden-brown, bitter ale.
He nodded, clearly pleased with himself.
For some time, the only light outside had been the gray-white evening sky that was so typical of summer, the landscape occasionally opening out to accommodate a wide and gently flowing river, but now the lights of houses and buildings began flashing by.
“How come?” I said.
“My studies required so much Latin, I thought I might as well learn it properly. So I did a course in it at the same time. Has it been any use to me? No. Has it given me great pleasure? Yes.”
“So you’re a doctor, then?” I said.
He nodded deliberately, scrutinizing me like a teacher who had posed a difficult question and received a clever answer.
“And you are . . . ?”
“I make documentary films,” I said.
“Really,” he said. “Any I might have seen?”
“I shouldn’t think so,” I said.
“No need to be modest,” he said. “Give me some titles.”
I’d oblige him as far as that went, I decided, then make my apologies, brush my teeth, turn the light off and sleep all the way across the fells.
“One’s called Friends for Life,” I said.
“Oh?” he said. “What’s it about?”
“Have you heard of Smith’s Friends?”
“The sect, you mean? Of course I have.”
He picked up his phone from where it lay on the bunk beside him. I realized he was googling. A moment later he looked up at me.
“Cheers, Egil,” he said, and raised his bottle. “I’m Frank.”
The train slowed down and drew into a station. A few figures moved toward the door of our carriage. The sounds of railway travel—footsteps in the corridor, doors opening and banging shut, the rumble of the engine, muffled voices—amplified the stillness of impending night that had settled over the town and the fells that were visible beyond it.
“Are you a Christian?” he said.
I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to answer.
“I mean, since you made a documentary about them? They think Jesus was born human, don’t they? That he didn’t become divine until later. Through his deeds. Is that right?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What do you think, then?” he said.
“About what?”
“Was he born human, or was he born divine?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said.
He laughed.
“Of course not! But what do you think?”
I didn’t reply. The train started moving again. Lights flicked by as we picked up speed. A car waited for green at a lonely junction. An empty room with all the lights on stood out in an office building, its furniture crying out in the glare. Then, almost abruptly, all that was to be seen were trees, pale beneath the balmy night sky.
“I’m an anesthetist,” he said. “For some years now, I’ve worked the air ambulance helicopter. It’s one of the toughest jobs there is, inasmuch as we only fly out to the most serious incidents. Traffic accidents. Drownings. Strokes. Heart attacks. We go where normal ambulances can’t reach. Remote villages and farms, islands far from the mainland. But I like it. It’s a very special feeling, landing by a fjord in the middle of the night or early morning, descending into a drama of life and death. Because that’s what it is, nearly every time.”
He fell silent.
After a moment, he looked up at me.
“How about another?”
“Go on, then. It’ll have to be the last, though,” I said. “I need to sleep before we get there.”
“Sleep’s not that important,” he said.
The train was climbing, but so slowly that I only noticed when occasionally we reached a point where we could see into the valley below us.
“You mustn’t think I’m mad,” he said. “Because I’m not. But this spring just gone, some funny things started happening.”
“While you were on call?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m not mad,” he said. “But sometime during the winter I started seeing people who weren’t there. Do you understand what I mean?”
“Not really,” I said.
“I was seeing more people at the scenes than the colleagues I was on the job with could see,” he said. “It was a while before I realized. But when we talked about the calls we answered afterward, I would suddenly refer to someone, an old man who’d been staring at us from the sofa in the living room, for example, or the woman who’d been standing watching the helicopter when we landed, and my colleagues wouldn’t know what I was talking about. They hadn’t noticed these people. And when I realized this, I understood that it wasn’t a matter of them not having noticed, but that they simply couldn’t see them. It was as if they weren’t there.”
“What was it you saw?” I said, though I knew the answer.
“The dead,” he said. “I saw the dead who were there when the helicopter came.”
He paused.
“I’ve never told anyone before,” he said. “I don’t want to be the guy who believes in ghosts. But you and I aren’t likely to see each other again.”
“What do you think they wanted?” I said.
“They didn’t seem to want anything at all,” he said. “They were just there. A bit like animals, watching what was going on around them. And in every case, it was people who had died only recently. At least, that was the feeling I got.”
“And no one else could see them?”
“Not that I know of,” he said. “And that’s what I don’t like about it. How come I could see them and nobody else could? And why, all of a sudden?”
He fell silent again.
I leaned back against the wall and looked at the pale, rocky landscape outside with its radiant white birch under a sky that seemed oddly bright.
“But that’s not all,” he said. “One of them spoke to me. We were in the parlor of a farmhouse. The man of the house, a big, old fellow, had suffered a heart attack, and on the sofa opposite us this young lad is sitting who no one else sees but me. Our eyes met. It’s never happened before, they usually just go about in their own world. But this lad he looked at me. And then he got up and pointed straight at me, and said, You are doomed.”
“You are doomed?”
“That’s right. Nothing else. We were just on our way out, but I noticed there was a picture of him on the wall. A portrait from his confirmation. You know, taken in a studio.”
For a while, the noises of the train were all that was heard. The wheels clacking along the tracks beneath us, the rattle and sigh of the couplings, the faint whistle of the wind bearing down on the carriages.
“You don’t believe me,” he said.
“Of course I don’t believe you,” I said. “Or rather, I believe that you saw what you saw. But I don’t believe that what you saw was an accurate representation of reality.”
“An accurate representation of reality?” he said rather derisively. “You’d have made a good academic. But what you’re saying is that what I saw existed only inside my head?”
“Something like that. I saw a dead person too once, my grandfather. He was as plain to me as you are now. But he wasn’t there. He was in my mind.”
“What was he doing there?” said Frank, and laughed.
I smiled and lay back, and turned off the little night lamp next to my pillow.
“Do you mind switching the ceiling light off?” I said.
He stood up without a word and did so, then lay down as I had done, on top of his duvet.
“Would you believe me if I said the lad was right? That I was doomed?”
I didn’t reply.
“My daughter died,” he said. “She was six years old. Hit by a truck on the road outside our house. She’d just learned to ride a bike and had only gone out to pedal about a bit in the drive. She wasn’t wearing a helmet.”
My eyes filled with tears.
He couldn’t be making that up.
“Do you see now?” he said. “It wasn’t just inside my head. It really was the dead I saw.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said.
He laughed.
“I believe you!”
I couldn’t go to sleep and leave him dangling like that. He was on the edge of an abyss.
But what could I say?
Nothing I said would be any help.
If I asked him about his daughter, it would allow him to talk about her, but then most likely he would break down. And if I didn’t ask about her, any conversation that followed would feel inauthentic and wrong.
Someone opened the door between the carriages and the noise of the train rose abruptly, as if the door led out into a busy factory hall. When it closed again, voices were heard, passing along the corridor.
Frank got up from his bed and stepped toward the window.
“Do you mind if I open it just a crack?” he said.
“Not at all,” I said.
“It’s the hottest summer on record, they say.”
“So I’ve heard,” I said.
He drew the top part of the window down a measure, and a draft came flapping in.
“Are you married?” he said, pressing his brow to the pane.
“Divorced,” I said.
“Why?”
None of your business, I thought. But I couldn’t snub him now.
I drew myself up onto my elbows.
“I couldn’t stick it.”
“Simple as that!” he said with a laugh, and then turned to face me. “What was she like?”
“There were different sides to her.”
“Too much for you?”
“No, it wasn’t that. At least, I don’t think so. But she was always looking for an argument.”
“And you weren’t?”
“No.”
“You’d rather sit in a chair and read Lucius Accius?”
He was mocking me, and a shadow fell over me. He must have realized, for his tone changed immediately.
“I’m divorced as well,” he said. “Twice, actually. Officially because I spend too much time working. Unofficially because I couldn’t keep my hands to myself.”
He sat down on his bunk again.
“But it goes deeper than that, of course.”
“Of course,” I said.
He was quiet for some time. I lay down again and closed my eyes. I heard him settle too.
“I’ve not been a particularly good person,” he said then. “Not that I failed, because I never set out to be one either. Why should I? We’re here for a while, then when we die it’s all forgotten. Including what was good about us. Do you know what I’m saying? We might as well live. Go your own way, that’s what I’ve always thought. Or perhaps not thought as such, but it’s certainly how I’ve lived.”
“And now you’ve stopped?” I said.
He didn’t reply at first, and I imagined him shaking his head down there in the dark.
“I no longer know what I think,” he said after a moment. “I don’t know anything anymore.”
Another pause.
“How about you?” he said. “Are you a good person?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It depends on what you mean by good, I suppose.”
“What was your wife’s name?”
“Camilla.”
“Like the girl in When the Robbers Came to Cardamom Town?”
“I think that was Camomilla,” I said.
“You’re right,” he said, and laughed again. “But were you good to her? Did you care about her? I mean genuinely care? Did you think about what it was like to be her? What she wanted? What she wanted you to do? Did you turn yourself toward her, fully and with all your heart? At least occasionally?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know? Well, I’ll tell you. You didn’t. Am I right?”
“Perhaps,” I said. “But there are two in a relationship.”
“That’s where you’re wrong! A good person gives without expecting anything in return. You’ve got to be unselfish.”
“But that’s canceling yourself out,” I said.
“To you, yes. But not necessarily to her. Anyway, I’m speculating now. I never did myself. Care like that. Which is fair enough. But what gets me now is that I didn’t care about Emma either. Not properly. I thought she was lovely and all that, and she gave me joy. But I didn’t really care.”
“Emma? That was your daughter?”
“That’s right. With emphasis on the was.”
Again, he paused.
“What do you think about that?” he said then.
“About how you related to her?”
“Yes.”
“I think it was enough that she gave you joy and that she knew that.”
“That’s not what you think at all,” he said. “You’re just saying that because you think it suits me. But we don’t know each other. And we’re never going to see each other again. We might as well be honest.”
“But it is what I think,” I said.
“Have you got kids?”
“Yes. A boy aged ten. He lives with his mother.”
“Right, so you’re most probably talking about yourself. Listen, I’ve got a bottle of cognac here too. How about we have some of that?”
We sat there and drank through the night, talking about our lives as we crossed the fells, their wild, faintly illuminated expanses, before descending into the valley, following a river that hurtled over its rapids and gleamed in the sun of morning below green hillsides. Gradually, I let go of myself completely, saying things I’d never said to anyone, he likewise, though the whole time I felt a nagging doubt as to whether what he was telling me was in fact true, or whether he was making things up, or at least embellishing the truth, wishing primarily to be distracted from his own thoughts. At one point I even wondered if his daughter really was dead. At the same time, I found it so edifying to talk to someone in such a way, quite freely, that sometimes I was convinced he’d been sent to me. That he brought with him a message, to me.
I was drunk by the time the train pulled into the station, though in full control of myself and with the strong feeling that the alcohol had lit a flame inside me that now burned brightly and would consume my every problem. It was as if anything were possible all of a sudden.
I stood on the platform outside the carriage and waited for Frank.
“I suppose this is where we say our good-byes?” I said when he emerged.
“That would be a waste of good cognac,” he said, extending the handle of his trolley suitcase. “Have you got any plans for the morning? Meeting anyone?”
I shook my head and we went toward the exit. Sunlight flooded the old station building, flashing in every surface of metal and glass.
“The funeral doesn’t start until eleven,” he said without looking at me. “How about keeping me company until then?”
“The funeral?” I said. “You mean your daughter’s?”
He nodded.
My blood ran cold.
Wasn’t she even buried yet?
Oh, no, no, no.
“Of course,” I said. “Where do you want to go?”
“I’m booked into the Hotel Norge. We can have a drink there. You don’t have to stay that long. Only I don’t feel like being on my own just for the moment.”
“I quite understand,” I said. “No problem.”
“Where are you staying?”
“A hotel on the Torgellmenningen. I can’t remember what it’s called.”
“The Norge will be posher, then,” he said. “How come the son of a wealthy man like your father doesn’t stay at the best hotels?”
“It doesn’t matter to me,” I said, and he glanced at me skeptically.
I bought some cigarettes at the Narvesen and smoked one as we walked past the pond in the center of town, another before we reached the hotel.
I sat down in reception while he checked in.
“We can stay down here,” he said. “It’s a bit more adult than drinking in the room, don’t you think?”
“Yes, fine,” I said. A wave of fatigue came over me, so if I was going to stay upright, I’d need something more to drink.
“I don’t know about you, but I could do with some breakfast,” he said after popping up to the room to dump his suitcase.
The change of environment had altered everything, it was as if we had nothing left to talk about, didn’t know each other at all, and were as different as two people could be, I thought in the silence as we ate.
Afterward, we downed a few beers. I’d just started wondering how I was going to get away without him feeling offended, when he asked if I would go with him to the funeral.
“Would that be appropriate?” I said. “I didn’t know Emma.”
“You know me.”
“In a way,” I said.
“You know me better than anyone, I can assure you. Say you will, and I’ll stop pestering you.”
“Of course I’ll go with you,” I said. “I haven’t got any suitable clothes, though.”
“For crying out loud, man,” he said. “It’s a funeral. Everything’s over. It’s all darkness and misery. Who the hell cares about clothes?”
Afew minutes before half past ten, we got into a taxi up at Teaterbakken. Frank was drunk, his face stiff and inscrutable, his movements as if incomplete. I was drunk too, though not as conspicuously as he was; a person would have to know me in order to tell.
There were a lot of people outside the church, women in black dresses, men in black suits, many wearing sunglasses, most relatively young, many in their thirties. The mood was restless and uncertain in the way that is characteristic of those moments that precede the security of the ritual. Nervous smiles, awkward glances. Someone crying.
“Give me a smoke,” said Frank, stopping at the gate.
I handed him the packet and my lighter.
He lit up and inhaled deeply.
“Do I look drunk?” he said.
“A bit,” I said.
“I’m drunk for her,” he said. “Nothing means anything anymore now that she’s dead.”
“I understand,” I said.
“I’m honoring her memory,” he said, and peered at me with narrow eyes, swaying slightly on his feet.
The church bells began to ring.
“It’s time,” he said, dropping his cigarette to the ground and stepping on it. I touched his shoulder.
“My deepest regrets,” I said.
He looked at me and laughed.
“Yes, it is certainly regretful. Come on, let’s go inside!”
Everyone stared at us as we crossed the open area in front of the church. Frank did not return their looks, his eyes fixed ahead as he propelled himself forward in the stiff and measured manner of the inebriated. But people weren’t just looking at us, they were looking at each other too, and whispers were heard.
“I’ll just sit at the back here,” I said when we entered and I saw the white coffin in front of the altar, so very small. The coffin and the floor surrounding it were awash with floral tributes.
“No, come and sit with me at the front,” he said.
“I can’t,” I said. “That’s only for the family.”
I slipped into the nearest row. He nodded to himself and carried on down the aisle to the front pews. No one seated there acknowledged him. They made room without a word.
What had he done?
What was his sin?
The church filled up in the silence of all funerals, heard in the rustle of clothing, the cautious whisper, the clacking heels of best shoes on the stone floor.
The priest appeared from the sacristy, and I was stunned. I’d known her once, we’d been in the same class at gymnasium school.
I had even loved her.
Kathrine, I said to myself. So this is where you are.
She halted in front of the coffin and lowered her head as the organist struck up the prelude of the first hymn. I picked up the hymnbook from the back of the bench in front of me, opened it and followed the words without joining in, listening as she led the mourners in song, her voice confident and comforting, and rather splendid in an unadorned kind of way.
A flower so fine in the forest I see
’Neath the pines which tower so high
Lo, from the moss there and heather doth peep
A bloom so delicate and shy!
O, art thou afraid to be thus so concealed
Where shadows must darken thy light?
—No, for the Lord is my meadow and field
His sunshine from Heaven so bright!
But wouldst thou not in a garden grow tall
Where folk would come and behold thee?
—O, no, for I thrive with the little and small
A flower of the forest is me!
And though I am little the Lord holds me dear
He makes me so happy of heart
Each morning I pray to Heaven sincere
And with prayer to sleep I depart!
As flowers in winter I must wither and die
Yet death with but joy I shall meet
For my body at peace in God’s earth shall lie
And my soul shall be God’s to greet!
When the music faded away, sobbing broke out here and there. Even I, who had not known the girl whose funeral it was, had tears in my eyes. There was so much pain in the church that it was almost unbearable.
“Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,” said Kathrine. Her voice was warm and relaxed. She directed her gaze at the first rows of benches, as if to make contact with someone there. I liked the calmness of her manner, and her face was as beautiful as I remembered it, though with more of an edge about it now, a severity even, as if she had been sharpened by life.
“We are gathered here today to say a last farewell to Emma Johansen,” she said. “Together, we will surrender her into God’s hands and follow her to her final resting place. For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. Let us pray.”
She bowed her head. I bowed mine, and folded my hands together.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest. But you, Lord, do not be far from me. You are my strength; come quickly to help me!”
I looked up and saw Kathrine ascend to the pulpit, where she placed a hand on the rail on each side and looked out over the gathering of mourners. It was as if the air trembled, sniffles and sobs could be heard, and occasional whimpering.
“Emma is dead,” she said. “Emma, so dearly cherished by so many, has been taken from us. And Emma was only six years old. There is no greater grief. There is no deeper despair. The death of a child is the night of life. Today, we shall say our farewell to Emma, and we shall share our memories of her—and those memories are bright. Emma was a tiny star. She was born on the sixth of October, two weeks overdue, her two brothers, Emil and Noa, having waited so patiently for her to arrive. She smiled for the first time when she was ten days old, began to walk at eleven months, and spoke her first word at the age of one. Emma was a happy, giddy little girl who loved animals, especially dogs, and there was nothing she liked better than to go for walks with her mummy Monica and Kasper the golden retriever. Emma was kind and considerate, she had a big heart for others, and filled the house with joy. Her laughter was infectious, she could make everyone laugh. Emma was a master of the jigsaw puzzle. She enjoyed drawing and painting, and loved to wear clothes with unicorn designs.”
It was insufferable to listen to. But I could hardly get up and leave, not during the memorial tributes, nor after them either.
I looked at the coffin as Kathrine held forth about the girl inside it.
A deluge of flowers.
This was God. A deluge of life. A deluge of death. White flowers with green leaves. It wasn’t about our individual destinies and fates, but rather the inevitable lifeslide of which we all were a part.
No one was to blame for the child’s death. No one to whom one’s anger and grief could be directed.
No one was God.
“Emma was a tiny flower in the great forest,” said Kathrine. “Now, Emma is a light in the darkness. Those who were closest to her will remember and miss her always.”
God was no one.
In the first row of benches, someone rose abruptly. It was Frank. He forged a path into the aisle on unsteady legs, his eyes fixed harshly on the floor in front of him.
A faint gasp went through the great space. His face was inscrutable, but as he looked up on his way down the aisle, I saw his eyes were filled with rage.
Kathrine was no longer speaking.
Frank paused at the row where I was seated.
“Are you coming?” he said, and smiled.
The rest of the day and evening were terrible. I couldn’t leave him on his own in the state he was in, but I couldn’t help him either, other than by staying with him and offering my company, which wasn’t really worth much, as he and I both knew, since I was not a proper friend, but someone he had met on a train and was now hanging out with.
“Why did you get up and go?” I said, when half an hour later we sat drinking beer outside a cafe on the Bryggen quayside.
“I couldn’t bear to share her with everyone,” he said, staring out across the harbor, Vågen, whose dark blue waters lay heavy and still against the quays.
“The priest was talking as if she knew her. She didn’t. And hardly anyone else there did either.”
He looked at me.
“What do I do now, Egil? I’ve got maybe forty years left to live. And nothing to live for.”
I swallowed a mouthful of beer and wiped the froth from my lips.
I could say he had to accept his loss and live on with the memories, and that one day perhaps they would be less painful. But it would just be words, unfounded in experience, worthless.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“No, I don’t suppose you do,” he said. “But do you at least believe what I told you on the train?”
“About the dead people you saw?”
“Yes. In particular the one who told me I was doomed.”
“Something in you saw them. I believe that.”
He stared at me for a long time. His gaze was like the ones you can encounter in clubs and bars late at night when someone has decided they’re looking for trouble. But then he let it drop, leaned back in his chair and looked out across the water again.
High above us in the sky, some gulls circled. Their occasional cries were distant.
“I’m sorry I can’t be more of a help,” I said.
“You’ve been a great help,” he said without looking at me. “I just need to get through today, that’s all. And tomorrow. My problem is that I don’t know why. And don’t tell me to get counseling, please!”
He laughed bleakly.
A gaggle of tourists straggled past, trailing a guide who was wearing shorts and holding a stick in the air with a little red pennant on top. He was in his mid-twenties, the tourists all pensioners, but it still looked like a nursery school outing.
“Are you having another?” I said.
“That’s the cleverest thing you’ve said all day,” he said.
We drank another couple of beers there on the Bryggen before going into town and finding a restaurant for something to eat. I ordered a chateaubriand with fried potatoes, starving as always after a funeral. The first time was when my grandfather died and they had served soup in the community hall afterward. The salty meat and the vegetables had tasted so good, and my hunger was so insatiable that three portions had been barely enough. Since then I’ve found it to be the case on every occasion, including the one I describe here, where I sat next to the wall in a French restaurant in the company of a man I didn’t know, who had just buried his daughter.
I knew the situation required restraint, but he had himself overstepped just about every imaginable boundary that day, so I considered a good meal to be admissible once the chance came round.
We hardly spoke, immersed in our own thoughts at the table—or rather, I don’t suppose Frank had that many thoughts, for he was in thrall to his emotions, held captive in their darkness. Now and again, he would glance up at me, often smiling faintly.
“You’re hungry, I see,” he said eventually.
My mouth was full of food, and all I could do was nod.
“Funerals do that to people,” he said. “Give them an appetite for life.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It must seem incredibly insensitive of me. But all that drinking has made me ravenous.”
“Worse things have happened today,” he said. “And a lining on your stomach helps with the booze.”
We enjoyed a few glasses of cognac after the meal, a 1973 vintage, its taste unruly and wild, which was only natural, for it had lived an entire life sealed from the world, only then to be released inside us.
“I know you want to go now,” he said as we waited for the bill. “And I understand that. But I’d like you to hang around if possible, until this day’s over. I’ll be fine in the morning. But I can’t cope today if I’m on my own. I know it’s a big ask. Perhaps you could think of it as a good deed?”
“Thou art my neighbor,” I said. “I’ll see you all the way to the door.”
“You are a Christian!” he said. “I knew you were!”
I said nothing. “Christian” seemed so rigid; that wasn’t what I was.
The sun was still high in the sky when we emerged onto the square and found it teeming with life. Again, I found myself thinking of deluge: a deluge of people, a deluge of events, a deluge of movements great and small. Heads bending toward the ground, turning this way and that; hands waving in the air, gripping carrier bags, lifting glasses, tying shoelaces; glances here, glances there; loud voices, low voices; laughter, deep and rumbling, or shrill in the register’s upper reaches.
All that appeared before the eyes disappeared again in the very next instant.
That too was a form of death, was it not?
But what then was fate? Fate, which connected the one with the other and allowed it to prevail?
Kathrine had not disappeared, she had come back.
Was that why Frank had been delivered to me?
Or was it to teach me about death and the dead?
“Where do you fancy going?” Frank said. “Maybe you know of a good cafe somewhere?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I haven’t been here for years. Last time I was here, there was a kind of arts venue farther along by the water. It was a good place to sit.”
“I know where it is,” he said. “The walk will do us good, too.”
We stopped for a beer in a place down the hill from the theater, it was packed with punters, and then we had another, with a Fernet-Branca chaser, even though we both agreed it wasn’t a drink for hot weather. Frank seemed to have gained some equilibrium, but still barely spoke, so it was hard to tell what was going on inside him.
On our way along the Nordnes point, passing through an avenue of chestnut trees where there were no more shops or restaurants, he started talking again.
“Monica turned the kids against me. She was so angry about the divorce, you’ve no idea. And since this happened, the reason you’re walking here with me now, she’s shut me out completely. Won’t let me see the boys, or the house we lived in together. She’s taken my grief away from me too.”
He glanced at me with drunken eyes.
“Which is only to be expected, I suppose. I wasn’t that bothered. They were all right, I was all right. It was an OK deal. Only now Emma’s in the ground, and it’s so terrible. It’s so terrible.”
He shook his head in despair, and I put my hand on his shoulder. He looked at me as if I’d gone mad, and I withdrew it again.
“In the ground,” he said. “She can’t talk. Do you understand what I’m saying? She can’t move. She can’t even think! She’s lying there completely still and alone. It’s so terrible. And then that cunt of a priest with her hymn about the little flower in the forest. And what else did she say, that Emma was a star in the sky? She’s nothing! Nothing! Nothing!”
He swiped the air in front of him, once for every “nothing.”
And after that he looked at me and smiled.
“I’m really sorry to have dragged you into this. But there’s a good chance you’ll remember this day for a while. And that’s something, I suppose.”
“Yes,” I said, not knowing what else to say.
He blew out some air.
“Let’s find that place you were talking about and get drunk,” he said.
“Sounds like a good plan,” I said.
We followed the road along, but we must have made a wrong turn at some point because all of a sudden we found ourselves at the aquarium instead. The car park was packed with tourist buses and there was a long queue to get in.
“There’s bound to be a restaurant inside where we can get a beer,” said Frank.
“We’ll have to queue up though,” I said.
“True,” he said. “Anyway, they’ve probably only got bottled. No time for that. Maybe if we go that way instead?”
He nodded toward a narrow road on the other side of the point. I lit a cigarette and smoked it as we went. The rush I’d felt from the alcohol was beginning to subside, an enormous fatigue taking its place.
The road we followed took us down toward the fjord. After a bit, an outdoor swimming baths appeared just below us. It had a white-painted pool with a diving tower and springboards, and beside it was a children’s pool. The grassy areas surrounding it, leading up to where we stood, were brimful of people sitting around on rugs and towels with their picnic baskets and whatnot, children running about in trunks and bathing suits.
“We used to come here,” said Frank.
“You and . . . ?”
“Me and the kids, yes,” he said. “You don’t have to be so afraid of mentioning them, by the way.”
He put his hands on the railing and stood looking down on the life that abounded there. Against the great blue sky, the still blue of the fjord, with the green fells and hills in the background, the bathers with all their paraphernalia were a patchwork of color.
Suddenly, he raised his arm and pointed. His mouth opened, though without a word escaping.
“What?” I said.
“Over there,” he said. “Can you see her? Under that tree. By that yellow mountain bike?”
I looked. A little girl was sitting with her arms folded around her knees.
“I can see a girl?” I said, immediately feeling the urge to move on before the situation escalated, realizing straightaway what he was thinking. That it was Emma.
“It’s Emma,” he said. “It’s my little Emma.”
He started toward the entrance, breaking into a run.
“Frank,” I said. “It’s not her. It’s just someone who looks like her.”
He wasn’t listening. I hurried after him. I had to make sure he didn’t make a scene in there.
I caught up with him as he reached the lawns. He moved as quickly as he could among the sunbathers, the towels that were spread out on the grass.
“Frank,” I said as gently as I could. “You don’t know what you’re doing anymore. Come with me instead. Leave her alone.”
He halted and looked at me. His eyes flashed.
“You shut it!” he hissed.
“All right, all right,” I said.
He walked toward her, slowing as he came closer. The girl did not look at us, but sat unmoving under the tree, gazing in the direction of the swimming pool. Frank crouched down in front of her. I pulled up a few paces behind him.
“Emma,” he said, “I’m so sorry. I’m so terribly sorry. You’re the most precious little girl in all the world. Do you know that?”
She gave no indication of even noticing he was there. All she did was stare into space.
A sliver of doubt crept into my mind as I noticed that her T-shirt was flecked with what appeared to be blood.
“Say something to me, Emma. Anything at all. I love you. I love you, my petal.”
She stood up, and a chill went through me. The right side of her head was crushed.
“Don’t go,” said Frank. “Not now that I’ve found you again.”
She walked up the slope toward the fence where there was some thick shrubbery, and then she was gone.
Frank put his head in his hands. I turned round. Everyone looked away abruptly, as people do when caught staring.
It couldn’t be true.
It could only be a hallucination.
But we’d both seen her.
Was I now so completely on Frank’s wavelength as to have been induced to see the same as him?
He straightened up and without looking at me began to walk back. I followed him. People had lost their inhibitions now and watched us as we wove our way between them.
Why had no one else seen the girl?
And why had I seen her?
Emerging onto the road again, Frank walked faster than before.
“Now do you believe me?” he said as I caught up. His face was wet with tears.
I nodded.
“I don’t want to believe you, but I believe you,” I said.
“Now let’s get drunk and forget all about it,” he said, and looked at me with what I understood was supposed to be a smile, but which in fact was a grimace, his upper lip twisted and trembling.
“Sounds good,” I said.
I left Frank at around nine that evening, at which point he was slumped on his hotel bed asleep, and have not seen him since. I have thought about him a great deal and have on a couple of occasions visited the library in the town closest to where I live to look him up on the internet, though he never told me his surname and all I have to go on is his daughter’s surname, which I now assume was not his own. He knows my name though, so if he wished to make contact all he needed to do was phone.
The image of the girl in the shade beneath the tree is something I have seen every day since.
I saw her, and she was dead.
It could not be explained.
And yet it was the case.
The first thing I did when I returned to the summer house in which I live was to take from the shelf a three-volume work I have owned ever since I was a student, though without having read it, which is The Realm of the Dead: A World History. Its author is one Olav O. Aukrust, and the reason I bought it all those years ago was that I thought it to be by the great poet Olav Aukrust, which of course it is not—how could I ever have thought that he had written a major treatise on death without my having heard of it?—but all of a sudden my mistake stood me in good stead. I read about how the Babylonians, the Egyptians and the Greeks perceived death, as well as about various Gnostic conceptions, and how the death realm was imagined in the Viking Age, in the medieval period, in Indian, Tibetan and Chinese cultures, and of more modern takes such as are found in parapsychology and spiritism.
I traveled to London and visited my father, though not because I had read Swedenborg, who of course postulates a London beneath London, for his visions were, I believe, the result of pathological delusions combined with megalomania. No, I spent my time browsing the new and second-hand bookshops in search of books concerning the dead. There was no shortage of literature on the subject, for life after death has been a keen interest of all cultures. As far back as we can see, to the very origins of written language, man has concerned himself with what occurs following death. The written language forms the horizon of our cultures, as death forms the horizon of our lives, and that we should turn so immediately to address death in our writing may be as strange as it is understandable. But whereas the visible, tangible world has been explored and charted through centuries, meaning ostensibly that no mysteries remain to us, only facts that continue to slot into place in our constantly modified theories of reality, our insight into death has not changed. Einstein knew as little about death as did the first cave dwellers. In the slow process by which natural science over centuries has diminished the size of truth so considerably in its quest to discover the smallest possible entity, which is the particle of the atom, thereby to explain the world from that vantage point, death has been given no place. In earlier models of explanation such as those obtaining in classical antiquity or in the European Middle Ages, truth was sought in the antipole of the particle, which is to say in the world’s very complexity, and from such a holistic perspective, however incorrect it may seem from our own vantage point, death was accorded an important place.
What do we do about what we can sense, but cannot know?
We close our eyes to it.
We are rather like the drunk standing under the lamppost late at night, staring at the illuminated ground at his feet when a passerby stops to inquire if he is looking for something. He nods and says he is looking for his key. The passerby helps him search, but the key is nowhere to be found. Is he sure he lost it just there? No, says the drunk, pointing away into the darkness, I lost it over there. But I’m never going to find it there, so I’m looking here in the light.
I returned from London with my suitcase filled with books, and more on their way in the post. I could not forget that I had seen a dead girl sitting by an outdoor swimming pool, silent and withdrawn, dressed in the clothes she had been wearing when she died, nor could I pretend not to have seen her. So I began to write about it, and about what it could mean. And as I wrote, it was as if something opened up inside me, I began to understand to what great extent our language constrains the world, arranging it and placing its various elements in logical systems that are of such nature that we see neither the system nor the logic, only the world it presents to us. I saw the gulls sailing high under the blue sky, I heard their cries and understood that they, as us, were living creatures, without name, boundless, free. Their soul was something that lifted in the world, opening wide to become a presence, and it was unthinkable, unthinkable to them that such presence could ever cease. I saw the oak trees in the woods behind the house, so ponderous and calm, and I saw that they too, as us, were living things, without name, boundless and free. In glimpses I saw the world behind language, a world of transformation and mystery, and one night I saw my mother, Torill, in a dream. Which is to say that I was asleep and images filled my mind, but the nature of those images seemed in no way random as is the case with most dreams, or at least mine. No, it was as if Torill had been waiting for me in that dream, and was already there when I came. I walked toward the jetty, the sea was gray and made choppy by the wind, the waves were topped with white, and I saw that someone was there, someone in a yellow waterproof, and as I stepped out onto the jetty, the figure turned and it was her.
“Egil,” she said. “My child.”
I said nothing.
“I never understood who you were. I’m sorry if it made things difficult for you.”
“Not at all,” I said.
“I was not a good mother to you. To your brothers, yes, but not to you.”
“You were a fine mother, of course you were,” I said.
She stepped toward me and zipped up my anorak, as she always used to.
The next thing I knew, I was staring at the ceiling in my bedroom. I got up and pulled the curtains open. The sea was gray and choppy, the waves topped with white. The jetty slippery-looking with rain.
But there was no woman there in a yellow waterproof.
Foxes emerged, and deer in the fields beyond the road. The weather grew warmer. One morning, an enormous flock of black birds settled on the rocks at the shore. I have never seen anything quite like it, there must have been thousands. They remained there, huddled together for several hours, before taking off all at once, a gigantic black cloud rising into the sky, a shifting curtain of flesh, almost as one, to disappear over the trees across the inlet.
And last night a new star appeared in the sky.
It shines above me now.
The Morning Star.
I know what it means.
It means that it has begun.