From time to time I cross paths with someone who knew me as a child but never expected to meet me as an adult. Out of common courtesy, they are usually able to conceal their surprise at seeing me out in the world until an opening, a gap in the conversation, allows them the space to articulate their initial reaction: So, you’re still alive?
My junior high ethics teacher once told a story. When her husband died, she cut off her long hair. Afterward, she sank beneath the water in her bathtub. This she experienced as a purification. She was interested in rituals, and she brought a measure of gravity to her class that I valued, as an extremely grave fourteen-year-old. I wanted to learn as much as possible. Time, it seemed, was running out.
My ethics teacher taught me the term liminal phase. It describes the most vulnerable part of a rite of passage, the point at which one finds oneself between worlds. It is the period in which a young person is no longer a child, though not yet an adult, or when the dead have abandoned the world of the living but cannot yet be counted as ancestors. During these phases, things can go drastically wrong. But they are also where transformation takes place. We come into being in these phases. Without them, the world could not go on.
I progressed from junior high to high school and then on to university. And then, one day, I ran into my old teacher again, at a conference. She had gone to graduate school, her master’s thesis was on Norse mythology, on the Jotuns, symbolic of the dark and treacherous aspects of human existence. I was a doctoral student in linguistics. I had begun an in-depth study of rhetoric, and how reality may be altered through language. She had written a history of mentalities, about modes of thinking that we can no longer fathom. Our worlds had reconvened, in a sense.
My old teacher wasn’t surprised to hear that I was pursuing my doctorate. The junior high school was a ten-minute walk from the university library, where I once used my mother’s card to borrow books on the shamanism of indigenous Siberian tribes. I was familiar with academia from childhood, and it showed, it shaped others’ impressions of me. It promised a particular kind of future, in the same way that the opening sentence of a book points to how the story is going to unfold.
She was, however, surprised at how good I looked. This was the other narrative of the future, the one that didn’t have to do with my language, but with my body.
This phrase makes me feel uncertain: You look so good. Yes, don’t I? I dress nicely. I’ve spent time educating myself about cut, about style. I got a tailored coat when I was eighteen. I like coats with cuffs that can be unbuttoned, and oxford shirts with collars that roll the right way.
But that wasn’t what she meant.
* * *
What lies beneath—the surprise that I am still alive—surfaces only later in the conversation. Or at least this is what happened with an author I knew from high school. Ten years later we stood together in the grand ballroom of Oslo’s Hotel Bristol. With a blend of melancholy and reluctance, her eyes mild, she remarked that it was something they all knew back then, the fact that I was not going to live for very long.
Something they all knew? This wasn’t something I knew. And since I certainly was not the person who had put this idea in their heads, where did it come from? The author I knew from high school couldn’t say. The notion had simply existed. It was a shadow cast by nothing. The only substantial point of reference was my body. In those days, I often rode in a wheelchair, but I had also frequently crossed the schoolyard on foot. I used to go out during breaks and stand around with everyone else in a circle. We would talk about our teachers, we would talk about Ulysses too, and joust over who had read the furthest in that book, that’s the kind of school it was. I thought I was just one among many. I didn’t know that I was projecting a particularly tragic aura.
I did know. I didn’t have the words to express it. I am trying, now, to find them.
I follow a timeline that others might have followed. I live in the same city where I grew up. I am an academic, a child of academics. I live a life like theirs. I am married and have a child with Ida, who is a woman who writes. My son has my eyes, which are my mother’s eyes, his face has features reminiscent of childhood photographs of his grandfather. These are the threads that hold my life together. This is the fabric.
Whenever I am recognized by someone who recalls the child I once was, a rift occurs, a rupture. The image is jarred. The life I live is displaced, briefly, by a reality that never happened, it glides past like a specter, depicting opaque but familiar images, phantom images of an alternate future that followed me until I became an adult.
The recognition is followed up by the same compliment—You look so good—and it is that word so, two letters at the center of a polite phrase, that carries everything within it, that which could have been, that which never was.
Did you get better?
No, I say, I am more or less in the same shape that I used to be in, the way I was back then. My wheelchair is the same, I sometimes walk, my health is fine.
But you look like you’re better!
Memory plays tricks on us, never more so than when it teams up with our expectations. The past is not what happened then, it is what we are speaking about now.
Shouldn’t you be dead?
I have surpassed expectations, I’ve come out on top, allied with nothing other than my own body, which has lived its life, on its own premises. My body does not know which diagnoses it has been given, what kind of prognoses it has received, and this is good.
Never tell me the odds, as Han Solo once said.
This is me as an adult. This is me as a father. This is my son. He has my eyes, but not my diagnosis. He is also, in more than one way, a result of everything that never happened.
* * *
Into the unknown; we do not know where we are headed.
We sail in a leaking vessel, aware we are dying animals.
We dream of Byzantium, bailing with all our strength, we sail together.
We are argonauts, cosmonauts, adventurers, explorers. We are on a journey.
* * *
Toward the end of high school and at the start of my twenties, I lived through films.
I went to the cinema on Dronningens gate, summers as well as winters. Once a month, on a Sunday evening, the movie was a surprise—no one knew what was going to be screened until the lights were dimmed. I stood waiting in line with friends. Weekday mornings were for press screenings; I sat alone in the half-empty cinema.
I watched my way through history, from the silent film era on. I wanted to know who all the pivotal directors were, what was important.
After a while, I arrived at Wim Wenders. In Wings of Desire, Bruno Ganz plays an angel (sporting a worn dark coat and a ponytail) wandering around Berlin. No one can see him, but he observes, he listens. He places an invisible hand on a shoulder, he is present. The screenplay was written by Peter Handke, I didn’t know that back then. An old, blind man is named in the credits as Homer; I also didn’t notice that back then.
What I did notice was this: the angel becomes human. He falls in love, but it is both easier and more complicated than that. He steps out of eternity and into the moment. The Greeks had two words for time: kronos denotes the cosmic sense of time while kairos signifies the here and now. It is within kairos that we live, and it is into kairos that the angel falls. He wants to have everything that exists there, that exists here, the sounds and smells and tastes. A cup of coffee, a cigarette, complements to his suit and ponytail; angels who are affixed in film are always affixed in time.
The angel asks, and the angel receives. He becomes human. Now he is mortal. And I knew: This is true.
* * *
Ida and I are in California, this is just before we travel on to Hawaii. We are as far west as it’s possible to get in the world, but now we are going to go even farther west. Five hours by plane out into the middle of the Pacific Ocean, to the group of islands that are more remote than any other, where there are skyscrapers and trafficked streets, but where, when the plane approaches at nighttime, all we see are lights and large dark fields that represent dormant volcanoes.
Our time spent together in California is leisurely. I take time to read books about the place where we are and the place where we are going. I tell Ida about what I have been reading. We tell each other about the books we read. We both want to know what the other is thinking, but we also like hearing ourselves doing the telling. Each new book is an exploration, and through the telling we reinforce the feeling of having traveled some distance, of having gained new land.
We are not going to settle here, we know this. We are in San Francisco for a brief month and have digital return tickets in our email in-boxes. Hawaii is an added luxury before our return. Planning this out-of-the-way detour is my initiative, an extravagant gesture in honor of our first long trip together. At the same time, I print out the return tickets and keep them in my bag because I like the feeling of security it provides.
Our journey has safely defined parameters, but when we return home, we have a decision to make. We’ve been together for half a year and we’ve reached a turning point of sorts. We have spent more nights together than apart; increasingly, Ida has left more of her things behind in my apartment. We are in the process of becoming interwoven. If we don’t move in together after our return, there will be no going back, only forward, each person for themselves. We have a choice. There are no imperatives. We are free to do whatever we want.
* * *
I have a literary idiosyncrasy: I don’t like overexplaining. I don’t want to expose my references. It’s an idiotic attitude, but changing it now would be painful. It is not something I wish to give up. I don’t want to be easily approachable; I want to be understood intuitively. These are two very different things.
Sometimes I go about imagining that I take an aristocratic approach to life. In Hawaii, Ida and I walk past the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, in the middle of Waikiki Beach, with its coral-pink walls, where Joan Didion used to stay and where none of the rooms are under five hundred dollars a night. I feel strongly that that is where we actually should be staying, in the lap of luxury, on this our first vacation together. Ever since we found each other, practical questions have begun to seem unreasonable—the cost of something, for instance, or whether or not a place is wheelchair accessible.
My first time in Hawaii, I went with friends from my university. We stayed four people in one room, and my strongest memory of the trip is of trying not to fall over in the shower, taking extreme care walking from the shower to the bedroom in a squeaky pair of Crocs. I remember that I traveled with a manual wheelchair that could only be propelled by one’s own strength, so that when the others went outside—for a walk, to go for a swim in the ocean—all I could do was wait politely, in the room or in the run-down hotel restaurant. The air that streamed through the building, which was a pavilion with no clear boundary between indoors and out, was mild like an embrace; it was unlike anything I’d experienced before.
The aristocratic element is characterized by not needing to explain oneself. It is to write, as Didion did about California and Hawaii, as if one has always been at home there, as if one knows all there is to know, as if history and the world are self-evidently one’s own, a familiar heirloom, an art object that’s been in the family for as far back as anyone can recall. Stephen Fry said that Diana Mosley once told him: Of course, you never knew Hitler, did you?
Ida and I travel together, we are newly in love and together we fall in love with the places we visit. Many of them are places I have been to before and I want to tell Ida everything I know about my earlier visits so she can know it too, but I also want not to tell her, not to say anything, so that we can discover it together. Abstractions tell us nothing, old references tell us nothing, if we do not recognize their weight in flesh. Word must become body. We must find out who we are in the world and what the world is to us.
* * *
This book is about becoming human. For a while, this was my working title, for the angel who becomes human—Wim Wenders’s and Peter Handke’s angel—who has stood for a long time on my shoulder.
Yet it was a title that I had to give up. It doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to the poet Mark O’Brien. He titled his book How I Became a Human Being, he earned it in a different way than me. I must give him precedence.
If anyone is my shadow, in the Jungian sense, it is O’Brien. I am weak, he was weaker. I weigh one hundred twenty pounds; he weighed half that. My muscles are small; his were barely visible. My big electric wheelchair grants me a freedom he never had; he was too vulnerable, too fragile.
The angel from Wings of Desire becomes human by falling down and in, he goes from black-and-white to color, and in falling he injures himself, the first color he sees is that of his own red human blood.
It’s different for O’Brien, in his book, he becomes human by rising up and out, even if the movement from the monochromatic to the colorful is present in his story too, the same longing for sensuality, for corporeal presence.
I can’t decide. Is mine a story about falling or rising? Or, is it about going inward—about realizing that I always already was human? I am uncomfortable with O’Brien’s title; I will let him keep it for himself. I understand his demons, but they are not my own.
Still, while he lived, we had several things in common, one of which is an intimate relationship with machines, a different understanding of physical limitations and physical rhythms than most people have.
O’Brien wrote poems. I write prose. I write on a keyboard, and the words flow, they come out quickly. My greatest challenge is that Latinate words flow too freely, too manically, that the words lose their foothold in the body. I need another foreign word, logorrhea, to describe this state.
O’Brien was not plagued by logorrhea. His challenges were quite the opposite of mine. If one is unable to use a keyboard, if breathing is so difficult that much of life must be lived in an iron lung, then each phrase must be as valuable as it is costly, then it is necessary to switch to poetry, where the words are few and the meanings condensed, and where a well-turned expression can house a world. This is what I strive for, as we can strive even for what feels the least natural.
Mark O’Brien, “The Man in the Iron Lung”
I scream
The body electric,
This yellow, metal, pulsing cylinder
Whooshing all day, all night
In its repetitive dumb mechanical rhythm.
Rudely, it inserts itself in the map of my body,
Which my midnight mind,
Dream-drenched cartographer of terra incognita,
Draws upon the dark parchment of sleep.
I scream
In my body electric;
A dream snake bites my left leg.
Indignant, I shake the gods by their abrupt shoulders,
Demanding to know how such a vile slitherer
Could enter my serene metal shell.
The snake is punished with death,
The specialty of the gods.
Clamp-jawed still in my leg,
It must be removed;
The dream of the snake
Must be removed,
While I am restored
By Consciousness, that cruelest of gods,
In metal hard reluctance
To my limited, awkward, déclassé
Body electric,
As it whispers promises of health,
Whooshes beautiful lies of invulnerability,
Sighs sibilantly, seraphically, relentlessly:
It is me,
It is me.
Copyright © 2018 by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag AS, Oslo
Translation copyright © 2021 by B. L. Crook