Borderliners (36 page)

For this, various explanations are
given. It is said that time ap
pears with the desire of the middle classes, together with science, to
liberate themselves from the
aristocracy and religion.

That, of course, is how it must
have been, that must be a key
element in the explanation.
Whatever an explanation
might be.
But
it
is as though there is something else.

Reading Newton—not so much the
Principia Mathematica,
be
cause in that he has so far
removed man that even he, the author,
is hardly there; as though the objective laws of nature,
writing them
selves,
have produced the book—but in the letters, I think how
much he has resembled Biehl.
Their strictness, their need to remove
all doubt, their ruthlessness.
As though they
are the same person,
the same schoolmaster
spanning three hundred years.
As though time did not matter very
much.

There must be something deeper and greater than the
historical
explanation.
It is as though these scientists and philosophers, people with power and
knowledge in Western civilization, all have something in common. As though none
of them could stand the darkness,
did not want to know doubt and uncertainty.
Were, within them
selves, unable
to cope with unresolved contradictions.
And so they
have tried to eliminate them.

Then, sooner or
later, it has resulted in a breakdown.

We had been told that, at the school, we should look upon Karin
y£r0—our class teacher—as our
mother, and Biehl as our father.

That must have been why the
department had asked her. They
had asked her to explain the school's point of view regarding the
character of the relationship between Katarina and myself. August was not
mentioned, but you understood what they were getting at.
They had the idea that, somehow
or other, we had driven him to
it.

Karin y£r0 had prepared a
checklist of what they knew: a list of
all the times we had been seen together, from when we
were found,
that
first time, in the library during a period, to when we had at
tempted to exchange information
that did not concern us during

the
Advent church service, and on until, on the night
August died,
we had been discovered locked
in an embrace in the staff room.

She made no comment on the part
about being locked in an em
brace. But, when she said it, her voice changed. It was obvious that
this was serious.

They knew so many things.
Where and
when we had been in contact with each other.
Times and
places.
But of what mattered
they
knew nothing.

There were two from the
department, a man and a woman. The
woman
asked what we had to say to this. She addressed herself to
Katarina, but I was the one who said something. I
spoke to Biehl.

"What
happened to August?" I said.

They tried to stop me, but I did not look at them, it was
all I
could do to
keep my attention on Biehl. The only way of coping
with so many people was to imagine
a tunnel: I was at one end, Biehl was at the other, outside there was nothing.

"How did you
get out?" I said.

He gave an answer I had trouble hearing. I would have
gone
down to him but I was attached to
something—the policeman be
hind me, I had
forgotten about him. I indicated to him that I needed
my hands free, to
demonstrate something. In the air I showed how
one hand had a tight grip on the other.

"That's the kind of hold he had," I said,
"you can't ever get out
of that."

August
had broken his
fingers,
such pain is too great for
anyone
to get away from. They did not
understand me.
Just Biehl.

"He let me
go," he said.

"How did you
get out?"

"By
the door."

"It has a
latch on the inside."

He stopped, and looked down at his hands. There was
still some
thing not quite right about two
of the fingers, he was wearing his wedding ring on the other hand,
the
knuckles had become gnarled.

It was as though he was having
difficulty remembering. Maybe
he had needed to forget. So the memory had lodged in his hands.
When he looked up, his face was
naked, as you had never seen it

before
. As though he was surprised and shaken by the question
and,
also, by the
answer he had to give me.

"He opened it
for me," he said. "He must have repented."

I had asked something that touched
very closely upon him and
he had
answered. That was the only time ever that such a thing
occurred.

"He did not
burn to death," said Katarina.

Just as she said it I thought that now she was going to
trot out
the same story she had given
about her parents. That her shell had
not
been thick enough after all, and now it was crushed.

"I spoke to the doctor," she said. "It was
blisters on the inside
of the windpipe."

There
were three tunnels.
Between her and Biehl and me.
Everyone else was on the outside.

"He could have thrown it at you," she said
to Biehl, "the bottle.
But he let you
go, he let you out. Then he threw it inside the room.
And then he walked into the fire himself, and
breathed in the flames.
The blisters
closed off his windpipe and he suffocated."

Everyone was very
quiet. But I do not think they understood.

"It is as though time had
gone backward for him.
Or as though
the past had returned.
He could have done it again.
Killed some
one."

She pointed at
Biehl.

"But he didn't do it. He let
you go. And then did away with
himself
.
As though he had been given yet
another chance."

FOUR

J
akob von
Uexküll, a difficult name.
Although it
feels good to write it.
I write in longhand, quite
slowly.

I have a picture of him, taken from a newspaper. The face
is a
little heavy, very grave, and yet
somehow gentle.

Biehl had an M.A.
in biology, yet he never mentioned Jakob von Uexküll, I do not think he had
heard of him.

Uexküll was a professor of biology in Germany. During
the 1920s
and 1930s
he wrote books and articles about the way in which
living creatures perceived their
surroundings, and particularly about
their perception of time and space.

It is not difficult to read what he has written, not compared to some
of the other books you fight your way through in your
lifetime. At
all times he has endeavored to
be very clear. And he has had nothing
to
hide, and if he has been in doubt then he has said so, straight
out.
At
the same time he is, in a way, humble. So humble that he

believes
that what he does is not so very different from what
others
before him
have done. In the foreword to his book
Theoretical Bi
ology,
he wrote that he was following
the trail blazed by Helmholtz
and Kant. They had insisted that it is impossible to perceive the
reality that surrounds us—or to
perceive ourselves—any way other
than through the senses. And the senses are not passive
receivers of
reality,
they process it. That which we perceive is heavily processed.
So there is no point in talking
about an actual reality, outside of
ourselves.
That we have no knowledge of.
What we know is an edited version. Biology can concentrate on studying the way
in
which our sensory apparatus is
constructed, how it edits.
And how
the consciousness of other living creatures operates as compared to
our own.

Reading this for the first time, I thought that Uexküll
must have
stumbled
upon the same thing as us, as Katarina and August and
me, although in a better, more
intelligent, way.

First
we realized that there was a plan, later we came to under
stand it, just before everything fell apart.

Biehl's and
Fredhøj
's
plan, covert though it might
have been, was consciously acknowledged, they had defined it in their
applications,
it could be put into words.
This was the plan for the grand inte
gration,
for the abolition of the darkness.

But behind this there was another purpose, greater, of
which they
knew
nothing.

Never did we ask them about this
purpose, not even Katarina.
But if we had done, they would have replied that, beyond the
school, beyond their plan, there
was time. There was God.

They believed
that, beyond the school, there was reality.

This cannot be true, even back
then we sensed this. In what lay
beyond
the school, beyond their plan—especially time, which we
felt flowing around us and saturating everything—there was a pur
pose. And in this greater purpose and plan we
were, all of us, ac
complices. In an
absolutely inexplicable way, we were all working
to create and maintain time at the school.

It
was this that Jakob von Uexküll had written, in his own hum
ble way, in the mid-1920s. We are not simply left
to time. One way

or
another, it is also something we are constantly involved in
creating.

Like a work of
art.

If that really is the way of it, then it is important that people enter
the laboratory every now and
then, and
ask
questions of a different kind from those
that are otherwise asked. If we are all maintaining
time, then you have a place of
your own, then it matters that you
do something slowly, then even an experiment as
transitory as this
one
can serve to touch time, in such a way that it will change.

How has time become like barbed wire? If we ourselves share the
responsibility, how is it that it
has closed in around us?

For this, Uexküll has no explanation, nor could anyone
expect
one. He wrote
about what he believed had to be the simplest build
ing bricks of the sense of
time—tempo, rhythm, and the relationship
between muscular action and sense of time. To study this
was what
he saw as
his task, this was what he worked on in the laboratory.
You can tell, from reading the
very first pages, that he has done his
best.

Even so, you could not stay with him all the way. For that, people
in his world are too alone.

Once you have realized that there is no objective external
world
to be found,
that what you know is only a filtered and processed version, then it is a short
step to the thought that, in that case, other
people, too, are nothing but a processed shadow,
and but a short
step
more to the belief that every person must somehow be shut
away, isolated behind their own
unreliable sensory apparatus. And
then the thought springs easily to mind that man is,
fundamentally, alone. That the world is made up of disconnected
consciousnesses,
each
isolated within the illusion created by its own senses, floating in a
featureless vacuum.