The Condition of Secrecy by Inger Christensen

Author:Inger Christensen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811228121
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2018-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

Fortuna

What’s starting to look interesting here is clearly not the extent to which chance prevails, but the ways that it prevails. Nor the extent to which we’re subject to the necessary order within nature, of which we’re a part, but the ways that the order within nature — which human beings observe and thus compound and magnify — relates to what I call the regulating effect of chance.

Fortuna, the Roman goddess of destiny, symbolizes the arbitrariness that rules the world. She’s unmoved by supplication, not because she’s evil or spiteful, but because she’s indifferent to the consequences of all the caprices of chance. She’s pictured with a steering oar, steering the voyage of life. But she’s simultaneously portrayed as a blind goddess, and over the years she came to be associated with all the previously existing goddesses of luck and happiness, so that eventually, besides the steering oar, she acquired a horn of plenty as an attribute. The whole figure presents an image of blind chance fostering fruitfulness, prosperity, and victory. As long as we understand how to navigate according to her conditions. And in terms of literature and writing, we can add: as long as we understand how to write according to those conditions.

In daily life, chance generally conceals its prima facie cruelty so well that we can play with the concept of chance. For example, we can think back over our lives and imagine how things might have been different. What if one had run away from home as a child and had never been found; what if one had been born in a completely different place, a cemetery in Cairo, maybe; what if one had become a pharmacist or a botanist, or had a church wedding with the baker’s son; what if one had never gone out on that rainy winter night when one fell in love with a footloose wanderer, or if on a completely different winter night, as a different traveler, one had stepped off the train at some random stop and walked into a random house — and above all, what if one had never begun to write poetry, or to write at all.

But what’s done is done. There’s no denying that way back when, I did begin to write, presumably due to a chance turn of events; but that chance turn and others like it not only led me to the situation in which I’m holding forth right now, they obviously also led me to hold forth on this subject of chance itself. And so, as if it weren’t enough to make a virtue of necessity, as the saying goes, they also led me to make a virtue of chance.

That’s how we can play with the idea of never having begun to write. But we can also be plagued by the idea that we did begin. I’ve heard many writers say that it was essentially by chance that they started to write, but then suddenly one day, they had to recognize that writing had become a necessity for them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.