"I have often wondered why,"
wrote suicidal artist Edvard Munch in his journal, "the art I'm most attracted
to is that which has been painted with someone's own blood."
Born the oldest son in a family of
five, Munch created his best known work before he turned twenty-nine. By that time, his mother had died of
tuberculosis, and his father had also died.
Munch's older sister had died as well, and so had his younger brother. By the time he finished The Scream in 1893,
the only remaining member of Edvard Munch's family was committed to an asylum
for "unnatural nervousness."
It was a time when child slavery was legal
in Norway. When young women were sold to
brothers that were sanctioned by the state.
When four out of nine workers at Norwegian matchstick factories could
expect to lose an average of two fingers on the job.
"I was walking along the road
with two good friends one day," he wrote. "The sun had just gone
down, the evening coming slowly. I felt
a heavy weight of sudden sadness in the sky: it had become a seething red. I stopped, leaned against a railing that was
bordering the harbor, and looked out at the flaming clouds that were hanging
there like swords, their blood-red blades reflected in the water. My friends had already passed. But I was frozen there. A loud and piercing scream was shaking through
the air."
--
In another 10,000 years, Vega, not
Polaris, will be our North Star. The
space satellite Voyager, which was launched in 1979, and which has since been
travelling 40,000 miles per hour, will be closer to the absolute emptiness of
space than it will be to our home. Even
the Earth's continents, which have been migrating slowly since they initially
were formed, will be 850 further feet apart.
There will also be a new axial tilt in
our planet. It will temporarily shift us
away from the Sun, lowering global temperatures by as much as 50 degrees.
Around Yucca at that time there will
be a grassy plain. Most of Russia won't
be inhabitable. Iran will be a ski
resort.
A new volcanic island will appear
beside Hawaii.
Plastic will be extinct because
petroleum will be too.
And while we won't be living longer
than we currently are living, Frank Tipler's book The Physics of Immortality
says that if we're wealthy we'll be able to buy the brains of younger body
donors, download our memories into their minds, and then live through them
vicariously until we need another donor.
We will be living underground. Or we will be living in giant domes. Or we will be living in a single networked
city that sprawls across the planet called "Ecumenopolis."
Physicist John Fremlin believes, in
fact, that the human population by the year 12,000 will be 61 trillion strong.
Our food will have to be harvested from algae and cadavers and pumped into our
homes as daily liquid rations.
Rodney Brooks, the director of MIT's
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, believes however that humans are going to
have such exquisite control over the genetics of living systems that instead of
growing a tree, cutting it down, and then building a table from it, we
ultimately will be able to just grow a table from scratch.
Yet as Warwick Collins explains in his
book Computer One, most of the work on the planet by the late twenty-first
century will be conducted by a giant global supercomputer that will regulate
humans to the role of papered pets. It
will control the water supply, the food supply, electricity,
transportation. It will be programmed
to repair itself and to anticipate situations that might necessitate more
repairs, and that is the reason why, 500 years after we invest in building it,
Computer One will calculate the chances that human beings might interfere with
the work it's programmed to do. It will
reason that interferences are a threat to its efficiency. And it will logically
conclude that it could raise its productivity if humans were not around.
It will be quiet on the Earth.
There will be a lot of wind.
From the ridgeline of Yucca Mountain
we might look down at "Black Hole," one of the designs for a warning
marker from the Expert Judgment Panel.
Ninety thousand square feet of black basalt stone irregularly carved and
cobbled onto the sandy ground.
"A crazy-quilt of parched
land," the panel describes it as. "Cracked, hard to walk on,
projecting the image of nothing, a void, uselessness, a place that would seem
unwelcoming and uninhabitable because the region will absorb so much heat
through these stones that an intruder will simply not be able to stand being
there."
Or we might stand on Yucca Mountain
and listen to "The Moans," an echoing aural effect from a series of
stone sculptures that would be carved to emit a single pitch in the wind.
"A Minor D," writes the
panel, "Because that note usually signals to our brains that it is
sad."
They will fill Yucca's basin with a mournful
constant cry, scaring off intruders through an effect that some theorize can be
supported by biology, since "pitch extraction from music is accomplished
in the inferior colliculus of the brain, which itself is situated in close
proximity to other midbrain centers known to be part of mammalian reward
systems," according to a study by neuroscientist Martin Braun entitled
"Inferior Colliculus as Candidate for Pitch Extraction." "The
pitches found in major chords may therefore have a direct or indirect influence
on these reward nuclei, which could be one of the reasons why music can have so
strong an emotional impact and why major chords are regarded as joyful and minor
chords as mournful."
Or we may see "Forbidding
Blocks." Or we may see "Rubble Landscape." We may see Irregular
Grid," "Spikes in a Field," "Landscape of Thorns,"
"Tall Leaning Stones." We may
see a whole catalogue of visceral warning markers, artificially built
environments we'll be meant to enter into to help make their warnings work.
But these will be environments, writes
the panel in its report, "that will exist without transmitting any gestalt
for the intruder," "without perceivable foci," "without the
possibility of being understood."
Why?
We must find ourselves, the panel
says, having an experience: an essaying into the purpose of what’s apparently purposeless,
an essaying that tries desperately to cull significance from the place, but an
essaying, says the panel that must ultimately fail.
"All human cultures," writes
the panel in its report, "have tried marking spaces that they have wanted
to call 'the center.' It is an impulse to create order out of the chaos that
surrounds us: the tribal fire, the village temple, the city's clock tower. But this is why we must invert the symbolic
logic of this site, establish a sense of
meaninglessness around the entire mountain, suggest that there is no single place of value at the site...that the
land itself is shunned...devastated by the Earth."
But what we are likely to see instead,
according to recent reports from the Department of Energy, is a small series of
twenty-foot-high monuments at the site.
They'll be carved in the shape of pyramids and made from local granite. On their surfaces will be inscriptions in
English about the site, plus the date the waste was buried, the date it will be
safe, and a small engraved image in the apex of each stone that reproduces the
anguished face of Edvard Munch's The Scream.
"It’s the most recognizable painting
in the world," said a Department of Energy spokesman when I called to ask
about it. "Human culture will probably change dramatically over the next
ten thousand years, but human emotions won't.
So anyone who comes into contact with this face over the next ten
millennia is going to understand what's up with this site, that there's
something about it that's dangerous, scary, and likely to make them sick. I like the idea of a design that just gives
the viewer a 'mood,' but we’re dealing with life and death here. The most responsible thing we can do in this
case is give easily interpretable information.
We're trying to help these people!"
What we know is that he probably left
his house by five o'clock. Down the
block on Pilestredet around the corner to the tram, or down the block on
Pilestredet by foot to Karl Johan, he would have passed the place that's now a
bar called "Edvard's Bar and Grille," and then the all day slices
shop called “Edvard's Oven Fresh," and then a store across the street called
"Scream if you like Sweets!"
He could have cut through Grazing
Place, where every citizen could keep cattle, and then walk across a bridge
that linked the city to its shore.
But Edvard says he liked to
walk--"I need to walk to think"--and knew a longer path up Ekeberg
Hill and through its forest.
This was 1883, and it was very likely
August.
Up the hill as Edvard walked he passed
couples stretched on blankets, dozens of slanting bodies on the city’s Lovers'
Lane. Then he reached the forest once the
meadow hillside leveled. And then he walked
inside the woods, despite his father's warnings.
"There is evil there," his
father said, "long forgotten curses from Norway's pagan past."
Edvard turned nineteen that year, and
was living still at home. He would have
needed his dad’s permission to have been out past six thirty. He would have needed to miss dinner, retired
early to his room, established two days earlier that he was feeling kind of
ill. He would have needed three years
earlier to have had rheumatic fever, and needed twelve years earlier to have
almost died on Christmas Day. And then
he would have needed a low window he could climb through.
There was a gray straw hat he wore
"every single day that I knew him, from the time that he was fifteen until
he left home for Berlin," according to a memoir by Edvard's closest
friend.
He would have needed that straw hat.
Some good walking shoes.
The light wool brown coat that all
middle-class boys wore. He would have
needed forty minutes to pass through
Ekeberg's forest, and would have needed to understand its ancient pagan
history, the 3,000-year-old practice of
bringing infants there to die, digging narrow graves over which boulders
were then laid so that the child didn't
suffocate, but rather starved to death--a practice that was so common by the early eleventh century that St. Olav,
the Christian bishop who arrived to baptize pagans, wrote a letter to Norwegians enforcing three new
Christian laws--
"There shall be no more folk
singing in God's northern kingdom, for these are not the sounds our Lord and
Savior wants to hear...
"There shall desist immediately
all the eating of horsemeat...
"And because all Christian lives
begin with Holy Baptism, no longer may any child be left exposed if it’s
unwanted"
--the last of which proved so
controversial for the pagans that one decade later, in the famous Gulathing's Law, a revision was applied in
which "no healthy child may be exposed if it's unwanted...except if his toes are in the
place of his knees, whose chin is turned around and connected to the shoulder, the neck upon his
breast...the skin on his legs turning scaley in complexion...his two eyes on the sides of the poor child's
head...or goat horns...a dog's tail....The child must be brought to the forest, therefore, and buried where
neither men nor cattle ever go," conditions which were apparently not uncommon at the time, for, as
Jenny Jochens explains in Women in Old Norse Society, the low-valleyed villages and high walls of
mountains confined the majority of Norwegians to their homes, "forcing upon the culture a certain
amount of inbreeding...and thus resulting in increasingly deformed infants at birth."
He would have needed to know the
phrase "I christen thee at random, Jon or Johanna," the spell St.
Olav wrote to ward off any utburd, the
wide-eyed, pale, and hairless ghosts of Norway's exposed children--the thin hairless shrieking souls who haunted Ekeberg's
forest, looking for their parents.
He would have needed to know that night,
if one mistook him for its father, clinging to his back with a black and gaping
jaw, that the only way to rid oneself at that point of an utburd is to convince
the child to kill itself, and then bury it again.
But what he wouldn't have ever known,
during his walk there as a teen, is that his childhood friend in fifteen years
would kill himself in Ekeberg.
Wouldn't have ever known, once he had
reached the other side, looking down the hill to the city’s ancient shore, that
his sister would be committed, that he would never visit her, and that eventually
she would die along the city's shoreline, through the forest, down the hill, in
a loud and red asylum, from which the screams that were heard were so consistently
high-pitched that local residents never forgot that it had been a slaughterhouse.
Wouldn't have ever known that this
view he now walked toward would eventually be the city's most famous for
postcards.
Most famous for drug arrests.
Most infamous for rape.
Wouldn't have ever seen, as he brushed
off the forest leaves, the stone marker that the city will never place upon
that spot, commemorating where Edvard first felt that he was hurt.
Won't see the bench that's there, the
one turned the wrong direction.
Wouldn't need to cross the highway,
where there is no crossing walk, approaching the metal guardrail, which no
longer is a railing.
Wouldn't need to glimpse below to
where the tracks are running now, to the service road, the power grid, the industry of concrete ports and forklift
trucks and corrugated terminals for Unocal and Exxon and BP and Shell.
Didn't have to reach the bottom of
that hill among the rocks.
Didn't need his parents dead, favorite
sister, younger brother, older sister to be dead.
To help bleach their bloody sheets to
light brown mottled spots with urine.
Didn't need to hate his father.
Love with fear his smiling mother.
Never needed to kiss a boy before he'd
ever kissed a girl, and then go on living without anyone to kiss.
Didn't need those critics saying that
he'd invent something brand-new, that he would feel an ancient emptiness at the
center of the world and then gather up that emptiness into something that had
borders, a face, the chance to see what's wrong. Never needed someone saying that God is not
in every detail, that God is sometimes
in experience, someone to write letters to, from which he could get letters
back, take train trips, and snuggle
with, and then never to have met.
He didn't need the Earth, 10 million
years ago, to rumble from the bottom of its ocean floor a mountain, a 4,000-acre island in Indonesia called
Rakata, one of 13,000 islands in the narrow Sunda Strait on which the fabled Krakatoa, a mountain on the
mountain--a volcano whose eruption in 1400 BCE is said to have caused tsunamis that were so big they
sank Atlantis, a volcano whose eruption in 537 CE is said to have clouded skies so thoroughly that summer
that it snowed in Rome in June, that crops in Europe failed, that floods appeared in deserts, that
wandering Mongolians, retreating from the weather, fled with tribal families west into Eurasia, ended
the Persian Empire, and started modern Islam--a volcano that locals called the "pulsing heart of
all the world," never needed to erupt with so much power once again on August 25, the week preceding
Edvard's walk, it practiced an eruption at 5:30 in the evening, then practiced at 6:40, then 8:21, then
10:00, 10:50, midnight, and 1:00, and then finally at 3:30 on August 26, it erupted with a force that razed
160 villages, killed 40,000 people, burst so loudly that radiometrists have called the mountain's
blast the second loudest noise ever heard by human beings, sending out concussive waves seven times
around the world, and exploding up a mile high, and then exploding out: blanketing the atmosphere with
227 million tons of new debris, over two thirds of the island's entire rocky mass, dust that drifted
across the Earth so thoroughly and fast that by August 28 British offices in Delhi were reporting
having seen a bank of yellow clouds at night, by August 29 they were orange in Madrid and by August 31 they
mixed with moisture over London from where a cold front pushed the dust and rain westward over
Norway, where the nights were very windy, and where light revealed that dust as red in skies that bled
already.
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