But if it’s true that events in the past open and close and constantly form new associations with what’s happening in the present, where does the notion that the past is fixed and finished come from? Nothing is ever finished, everything just goes on and on, there are no boundaries, not even between the living and the dead, even that zone is quivering and unclear.
Some years ago I read an article about a woman who lived in the United States in the 1950s, who’d fallen ill with cancer. Biopsies were taken, and these were kept alive and experimented with, until a clumsy laboratory assistant somehow managed to drop them on the floor, from where they spread into the outside world, and still exist to this day. These organisms proved themselves to be exceptionally viable. They are everywhere, even here, around me, fifty years later. That woman is long since dead, but her body lives on, and is constantly expanding. I find this terrifying.
What is manifesting itself here?
From experience, I always trust blindly in intuition. The fact that it always gets to the scene of the crime before my thoughts must mean either that it’s more observant, and gets a head start that way, or that it’s simply faster. It gets there first anyway. While thoughts, those slothful constables of the consciousness, have barely got moving, intuition is already at work examining what is going on. And whereas thoughts, when they finally do show up, can rely only on other thoughts in their gathering of information, and are therefore often left moving in circles, or end up in mutual antagonism, intuition has access to the subconscious, those depths where material from the outside world constantly pours in through the sluices of emotion and the senses, right down to minute shifts in surroundings that the thoughts never pick up, and whose consequences therefore are apparent to me only when I dream, or when a seemingly insignificant feeling interposes itself between me and the situation I’m in.
What is the scary thing about this expansion?
And why are the limited, the closed-off, and the local synonymous with sterility and narrow-mindedness, while the open and boundless are everywhere seen as absolute good, as fruitful, as broad-minded? There are countless people who refuse to be labeled, who energetically work to open the moment, stretch out the now in all directions, a contemporaneousness that takes up ever more room. There is more of that. But this expansion, acting within culture, is only illusory, opening up is only another way of closing off. The expansion is serial, the pattern that of the tree: the increase is more of the same, copied, and copied again. It’s inhuman.
Or perhaps not?
Perhaps that’s precisely what it isn’t. For if you shut your eyes and let your thoughts relax as your body gradually liberates itself from its many links with the outside world, and you follow your intuition into the bounded landscape that is yourself, what is it you see?
At first the familiar things — the old prejudices, the long-deserted thoughts, the oldest memories, which, forever congealed and divorced from their surroundings, exist inside you rather like stuffed animals do in natural history museums, forever caught in their own characteristic pose — but then, gradually, as you near the walls through which blood streams, things will become stranger and stranger, and by the time you are taken up by and enter the red, soft, evenly flowing river to be carried slowly down through the offshoots toward the heart, and hear for the first time that quiet rush, which is there every day, and for the first time see the myriad of blood corpuscles, those beautiful disc-shaped organisms that, after a short maturing process, leave the marrow and float out into the blood, where they work in gigantic swarms until after four months in the service of the blood they return to the marrow to be destroyed, it’s clear that you are a system you can’t control, and what is you is also outside you.
The heart beats, the lungs breathe, the blood flows.
But for whom?
That, you see, is the question.
Right now they’re doing it to maintain what you call you, but if you were in an accident, your heart might be surgically removed from your body and put into someone else, where it would continue to beat as if nothing had happened. As far as the heart is concerned, everyone is the same. All it wants to do, all it knows how to do, all it can do, is beat. Like some small, smooth, shiny beast, bathed in blood, it lies inside the chest and opens, closes, opens, closes. First the blood comes into the auricle as into a sluice, until it’s full up and the valve closes. Then it rushes on into the ventricle, which the following instant is compressed by its lateral muscles, so that the blood is practically crushed out into the arteries, whose elastic walls first swell with the pressure and then contract again in a way that keeps the blood flowing forward all the time. Warm and soft and calm, it flows on into the body’s darkness, up the aorta ascendens, past those dirty gray twins the lungs, through the arteries of the throat and into the brain, where it branches out into ever-narrower galleries and shafts, a chaos of needle-thin capillaries so constricted that even the microscopic blood corpuscles are distorted as they glide along them. It’s here that gases and materials are exchanged with the surrounding tissue fluids. Molecules are detached, seep through membranes, become part of new compounds on the other side, and are taken from there on into the landscape of the brain, which is irrigated with nutrition. The body may be sleeping, but the activity is just as great. Electrons fly up and down the nerve paths, the blood throbs at the temples, cells are activated and deactivated, all according to the pictures the current dream demands. Respiration is maintained, digestion is maintained, the separation of waste products is maintained, as well as the distribution of nutrients; new cells are produced, old ones are destroyed, a watch on the surroundings is always kept: a sudden noise, a hard touch, a bright light, and the eyes open right away.
But for the moment all is calm. An electric impulse fires down a nerve fiber, is deflected, and sets off a chemical process as it touches a cell, which interacts with its neighboring cells, and an image of a spruce forest is brought to life. Heavy branches, green pine needles, black trunks, wet earth. From there a link is made to the smell of pine branches and soil and rotting leaves. A hand pushes a branch aside, back there is a mountain, bare and glistening gray in the dull rainy light. It’s completely quiet. Suddenly there’s the feeling that others are present. The head is raised, the eyes lifted: up in the tree sits a crow. It makes no move to fly away, just perches there with its claws around the branch and its gaze on the forest. The black eyes are shiny and still as two stones. Then, far up the mountainside, the foot is lifted toward a fissure, gets a hold, the weight is transferred, the other foot follows, but just then the hand loses its grip and a great fear spreads, but without being followed by any pain, just a new picture, this time of being inside a lifeless body at the bottom of a kind of shaft, and being lifted up by two men, and feeling one’s neck hanging and lolling, and knowing that one’s eyes are dead and that all one’s organs are dead, but still being there, inside the dead body, mad with fear, and then screaming.
I started awake and stared out into the room in front of me. It felt as if I’d occupied an empty body, for a scream died out just as I opened my eyes, and I realized that it had done all this without me: sat up in bed, clenched its fists, tilted its head back, opened its mouth, and screamed. All the time its eyes had been closed, turned inward on the brain’s terrible imaginings, which disappeared the moment I awoke. But it remained under their influence for a few seconds more, gasping for breath, beating its heart, working on the theory that something terrible had happened, without realizing that it lay alone in a peaceful bedroom on an island far out to sea.