the danish “it” girl
by Douglas Messerli
Inger Christensen det (Copenhagen: Gyldendahl, 1969),
translated into English from the Danish by Susanna Nied as it (New York: New Directions, 2006)
Furthermore, coming as it did at the end of a decade known for its
social, political, and sexual changes, Christensen’s work was very much about
love—and a great many other things; Anne Carson, writing in her introduction to
the new English language translation of it,
suggests one must understand this work within the context of figures such as
John Lennon and Yoko Ono, James Brown, Allen Ginsberg, and Valerie Solanas (of the
“scum manifesto” and the attack on Andy Warhol). Translator Susanna Nied writes
of its immediate and later effects:
On its publication in 1969, det took Denmark by storm. It won
critical praise
and became at the same time a huge
popular favorite. It was quoted by polit-
ical protesters and politicians
alike; lines from it appeared as graffiti around
Copenhagen; some parts were set to
rock music and became esoteric hits.
When portions were translated into
German, det brought Christensen
inter-
national critical acclaim. Today,
over thirty years later, det is
considered a sem-
inal work of modern Scandinavian
poetry. Some of its lines are so familiar to
Danes that they have slipped into
conversational use. For example, the journal
of Denmark’s city planners took its
title, Soft City, from a line in det.
Of equal fascination is that this popular and moving document depicts
the beginning of life grown out of nothingness, is a kind of cosmology of life
on earth that is structured, as are many of Christensen’s works [see My Year 2004], according to systematic
numeric units that could only be matched by the Oulipo writers of France. The
work overall is divided into three sections: Prologos, Logos, and Epilogos. The
Prologos is broken down into eight sections, the first consisting of one poem
with 66 lines, the second of two poems of 33 lines each, the third of three
poems with 22 lines each, the fourth of six poems of 11 lines each, the fifth
of 11 poems of 6 lines each, the sixth of 22 poems of three lines each, the
seventh of 33 poems of two lines each, and the final of 66 poems of one line;
each line in the original Danish publication represents 66 characters. In
short, as the number of poems in each section increases so does the number of
lines decrease, creating a kind of double helix pattern, the very essence of
DNA or life itself.
The central portion of the work, “Logos,” is organized into three
sections, each with eight subsections of eight poems, the eight poems in each
section titled “symmetries,” “transitivities,” “continuities,” “variablilites,”
“extensions,” “integrities,” and “universalities”—grammatical categories
philosopher Viggo Brøndal (in his A
Theory of Prepositions) explores, among others, that express the various
“network of relationships that writing builds up as it goes along,” “terms that
could stay in a state of flux and at the same time give order to the
indistinctness that a state of flux necessarily produces” (statements in
quotations represent the words of the poet).
The final “Epilogos” is a long scree of 515 lines, a language after
language, that alternates between a sense of despair—
losing your strength
your mind
your dreams
and of ecstasy
tremors
and emptiness
of vestiges
of dissolution
death
and
transformation
Fear of death
Fear of death
—and what might be described as the
ecstasy of conquering those fears—
to conquer the fear
of informing others of
your conquered fear
it’s theirs
Eccentric
attempts
when a man
steps out of
himself
steps out of
his daily life
his function
his situation
steps out of
his habits
his peaceful
condition
we call the
process
ecstasy
….
when he says
that he is
dancing
with the Earth
hanging limp
between his
legs
and when he
summons
the sea
to rise up
and spurt from
his organ
It is indeed this alternating pattern, the wonderment of life itself—the
fact that our being has come out of nothingness and the recognition “it” will
return to nothingness—that functions as Christensen’s engine for meaning in the
poem. The bleak reality she expresses at the very beginning of “Prologos"
It’s burning. It’s the sun
burning. For as long as it takes to burn a sun. As
long before and as long after
times measurable in terms of life or death. The
sun burns itself up. Will burn
up. Some day. Someday. Intervals to whose
lengths there is no
sensitivity. Not even a tenderness. When the sun goes out,
life (death) will long have
been the same as it ever was. It. When the sun goes
out, the sun will be free of it
all. It. That’s it.—
is juxtaposed with a stunningly
lyrical and joyful cataloging of the human race and their various activities as
they wait for the inevitable death. And although Christensen’s humans are
presented abstractly as “they” and “someone,” we begin to sense by the end of
“Prologos” their possible interconnectedness with one another.
They wait in incubators, beds,
baby carriages, nurseries, orphanages, preschools.
In schools, jails, homes,
reception centers. Institutions for wayward youths,
disturbed adolescents, and
higher education.
They wait in gymnasiums, riding
schools, public pools. Wait in cars and ambu-
lances, emergency rooms. Wait
and wait in operating rooms and on respirators,
in deeper chemical sleep
oblivion hushed.
They wait in barracks for
draftees and conscientious objectors, contagious
illness and poverty. In control
towers, on permanent commissions, in supersonic
transports. On security
councils. Launch pads.
…….
They wait in places where they
live while they wait. Wait to live while they
wait.
Live to live. While they wait.
Live to live. While they live. While they wait.
Live.
Despite her obvious fears Christensen bravely moves forward with the
flow of these beings, transforming the general fears she has for the human race
to very personal admissions, a sudden first-person expression of her own fears
and loves. By the time she reaches the
fourth section of “Stage” in “Logos,” the abstract pronouns have switched from
the general to the specific as she admits her own methods and the fears behind
them:
I’ve tried to keep the world at
a distance. It’s been easy.
I’m used to keeping the world
at a distance. I’m alien.
I’m most comfortable being
alien. That way I forget the
world. That way I stop crying
and raging. That way the world
becomes white and
inconsequential.
And I wander where I will. And
I stand completely still.
That way I get used to being
dead.
It is this utter honesty, her
willingness to face the “dog’s bray,” that ultimately makes it such a glorious work. Her need to
reach out to her fellow beings, to convert her fear to happiness (“Happiness is
the change that comes over me / when I’m afraid”), leads her into the social,
political, and sexual spheres of experience. Throughout Christensen’s career
she has been notably anti-war, and in det
she vents her angers and frustrations concerning the “stone-hard” society that
sends soldiers to “improbable places,” to “further the interests of wealthy
cartels,” in the process mutating human genes—the helix structure with which
she has begun her poem—by converting “their semen” to “superheated TNT.”
Obviously, given these concerns, Christensen is quite politically
sensitive, and although she does not bog down her poem in events current to the
time of its creation, she does make references to the Viet Nam War (“napalm is
merely America’s trademark”), to incidents in Chile, Italy (which she refers to
as Mafia), Romania and elsewhere, and to other occurrences of the 1960s (“They
dance in the streets. They have flowers in their mouths.” “Naked as John and
Yoko Ono.”). In a section of “Text” and elsewhere, moreover, Christensen
describes various normal and abnormal sexual actions (“They masturbate their
skeletons.” “The orgasm makes normal cities quiver.”).
Such hyper-sensitivity to life, combined with her self-acknowledged
fears and her sense of being “alien” all lead the author to speak throughout
much of the poem—particularly in the “continuities” section of “Text”—about the
psychological conditions of people institutionalized—patients in mental
hospitals, workers in factories, as well as soldiers in barracks. The repeated
phrase “So I don’t think he understood me” serves almost as a talisman to make
sense of a mad world that often points to its prophets as being insane. And it
is here in particular that Christensen reveals a wry sense of humor:
Today all the patients agreed to
say it was snowing. We all took our places by
the windows and pressed our
faces to the glass and exclaimed joyously over
the snow and described it and
dreamed about how wonderful it would be to
play in it. Meanwhile the sun
was shining away and the doctors got confused
by our total agreement and
couldn’t figure out if they should act like they
were crazy and say it was
snowing or act like they were crazy and say it wasn’t
snowing. …But it really doesn’t
matter. Because the press showed up and took
pictures of the employees
running around and throwing snowballs and sledding
and making snowmen and rolling
each other in the snow. In the newspapers
it said that all the employees
had gone crazy....
It is this kind of craziness,
Christensen makes clear, that is necessary to save the world. For these are the
lovers, “any and all / generously spreading their virus around / persisting in
their fear / even when those in power kiss them…so it catches / fire throughout
the world / so it heals all / who catch it / any and all / all who / are
enthroned on the pillar of despair why
not.” It is only through a parallel, non-rational language, the poet
argues, that one can tell how to “waken the dead,”
to let this
parallel language
grow
how
to let
the cells
in it
proliferate
find their way
to the parallel mouth
lips that speak
as they never
have spoken
as they always
have spoken
Given the fact that the original “It Girl” spent most of her later life
in mental institutions suffering from schizophrenia, a situation so
well-portrayed in det, perhaps the
distance between this Danish “it”
girl and the sexy silent film star is not as vast as one might have thought.
Naples, July 8, 2007
Reprinted from Rain Taxi, Winter 2007/2008.
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