“But it takes a while sometimes.”
“All artists are aware of that. But then suddenly it’s as if all doors and all drawers fly open. Everything comes tumbling out by itself, and we can find all the words and images we need. This is when we have ‘lifted the lid’ of the unconscious. We can call it inspiration, Sophie. It feels as if what we are drawing or writing is coming from some outside source.”
“It must be a wonderful feeling.”
“But you must have experienced it yourself. You can frequently observe inspiration at work in children who are overtired. They are sometimes so extremely overtired that they seem to be wide awake. Suddenly they start telling a story—as if they are finding words they haven’t yet learned. They have, though; the words and the ideas have lain ‘latent’ in their consciousness, but now, when all caution and all censorship have let go, they are surfacing. It can also be important for an artist not to let reason and reflection control a more or less unconscious expression. Shall I tell you a little story to illustrate this?”
“Sure.”
“It’s a very serious and a very sad story.”
“Okay.”
“Once upon a time there was a centipede that was amazingly good at dancing with all hundred legs. All the creatures of the forest gathered to watch every time the centipede danced, and they were all duly impressed by the exquisite dance. But there was one creature that didn’t like watching the centipede dance—that was a tortoise.”
“It was probably just envious.”
“How can I get the centipede to stop dancing? thought the tortoise. He couldn’t just say he didn’t like the dance. Neither could he say he danced better himself, that would obviously be untrue. So he devised a fiendish plan.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“He sat down and wrote a letter to the centipede. ‘O incomparable centipede,’ he wrote, ‘I am a devoted admirer of your exquisite dancing. I must know how you go about it when you dance. Is it that you lift your left leg number 28 and then your right leg number 39? Or do you begin by lifting your right leg number 17 before you lift your left leg number 44? I await your answer in breathless anticipation. Yours truly, Tortoise.”
“How mean!”
“When the centipede read the letter, she immediately began to think about what she actually did when she danced. Which leg did she lift first? And which leg next? What do you think happened in the end?”
“The centipede never danced again?”
“That’s exactly what happened. And that’s the way it goes when imagination gets strangled by reasoned deliberation.”
“That was a sad story.”
“It is important for an artist to be able to ‘let go.’ The surrealists tried to exploit this by putting themselves into a state where things just happened by themselves. They had a sheet of white paper in front of them and they began to write without thinking about what they wrote. They called it automatic writing. The expression originally comes from spiritualism, where a medium believed that a departed spirit was guiding the pen. But I thought we would talk more about that kind of thing tomorrow.”
“I’d like that.”
“In one sense, the surrealist artist is also a medium, that is to say, a means or a link. He is a medium of his own unconscious. But perhaps there is an element of the unconscious in every creative process, for what do we actually mean by creativity?”
“I’ve no idea. Isn’t it when you create something?”
“Fair enough, and that happens in a delicate interplay between imagination and reason. But all too frequently, reason throttles the imagination, and that’s serious because without imagination, nothing really new will ever be created. I believe imagination is like a Darwinian system.”
“I’m sorry, but that I didn’t get.”
“Well, Darwinism holds that nature’s mutants arise one after the other, but only a few of them can be used. Only some of them get the right to live.”
“So?”
“That’s how it is when we have an inspiration and get masses of new ideas. Thought-mutants occur in the consciousness one after the other, at least if we refrain from censoring ourselves too much. But only some of these thoughts can be used. Here, reason comes into its own.
It, too, has a vital function. When the day’s catch is laid on the table we must not forget to be selective.”
“That’s not a bad comparison.”
“Imagine if everything that ‘strikes us’ were allowed to pass our lips! Not to speak of jumping off our notepads out of our desk drawers! The world would sink under the weight of casual impulses and no selection would have taken place.”
“So it’s reason that chooses between all these ideas?”
“Yes, don’t you think so? Maybe the imagination creates what is new, but the imagination does not make the actual selection. The imagination does not ‘compose.’ A composition—and every work of art is one—is created in a wondrous interplay between imagination and reason, or between mind and reflection. For there will always be an element of chance in the creative process. You have to turn the sheep loose before you can start to herd them.”
Alberto sat quite still, staring out of the window. While he sat there, Sophie suddenly noticed a crowd of brightly colored Disney figures down by the lake.
“There’s Goofy,” she exclaimed, “and Donald Duck and his nephews ... Look, Alberto. There’s Mickey Mouse and . . .”
He turned toward her: “Yes, it’s very sad, child.”
“What do you mean?”
“Here we are being made the helpless victims of the major’s flock of sheep. But it’s my own fault, of course. I was the one who started talking about free association of ideas.”
“You certainly don’t have to blame yourself...”
“I was going to say something about the importance of imagination to us philosophers. In order to think new thoughts, we must be bold enough to let ourselves go. But right now, he’s going a bit far.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I was about to mention the importance of reflection, and here we are, presented with this lurid imbecility. He should be ashamed of himself!”
“Are you being ironic now?”
“It’s he who is ironic, not me. But I have one comfort—and that is the whole cornerstone of my plan.”
“Now I’m really confused.”
“We have talked about dreams. There’s a touch of irony about that too. For what are we but the major’s dream images?”
“Ah!”
“But there is still one thing he hasn’t counted on.”
“What’s that?”
“Maybe he is embarrassingly aware of his own dream. He is aware of everything we say and do—just as the dreamer remembers the dream’s manifest dream aspect. It is he who wields it with his pen. But even if he remembers everything we say to each other, he is still not quite awake.”
“What do you mean?”
“He does not know the latent dream thoughts, Sophie. He forgets that this too is a disguised dream.”
“You are talking so strangely.”
“The major thinks so too. That is because he does not understand his own dream language. Let us be thankful for that. That gives us a tiny bit of elbow room, you see. And with this elbow room we shall soon fight our way out of his muddy consciousness like water voles frisking about in the sun on a summer’s day.”
“Do you think we’ll make it?”
“We must. Within a couple of days I shall give you a new horizon. Then the major will no longer know where the water voles are or where they will pop up next time.”
“But even if we are only dream images, I am still my mother’s daughter. And it’s five o’clock. I have to go home to Captain’s Bend and prepare for the garden party.”
“Hmm ... can you do me a small favor on the way home?”
“What?”
“Try to attract a little extra attention. Try to get the major to keep his eye on you al
l the way home. Try and think about him when you get home—and he’ll think about you too.”
“What good will that do?”
“Then I can carry on undisturbed with my work on the secret plan. I’m going to dive down into the major’s unconscious. That’s where I’ll be until we meet again.”
Our Own Time
... man is condemned to be free…
The alarm clock showed 11:55 p.m. Hilde lay staring at the ceiling. She tried to let her associations flow freely. Each time she finished a chain of thoughts, she tried to ask herself why.
Could there be something she was trying to repress?
If only she could have set aside all censorship, she might have slid into a waking dream. A bit scary, she thought.
The more she relaxed and opened herself to random thoughts and images, the more she felt as if she was in the major’s cabin by the little lake in the woods.
What could Alberto be planning? Of course, it was Hilde’s father planning that Alberto was planning something. Did he already know what Alberto would do? Perhaps he was trying to give himself free rein, so that whatever happened in the end would come as a surprise to him too.
There were not many pages left now. Should she take a peek at the last page? No, that would be cheating. And besides, Hilde was convinced that it was far from decided what was to happen on the last page.
Wasn’t that a curious thought? The ring binder was right here and her father could not possibly get back in time to add anything to it. Not unless Alberto did something on his own. A surprise ...
Hilde had a few surprises up her own sleeve, in any case. Her father did not control her. But was she in full control of herself?
What was consciousness? Wasn’t it one of the greatest riddles of the universe? What was memory? What made us “remember” everything we had seen and experienced?
What kind of mechanism made us create fabulous dreams night after night?
She closed her eyes from time to time. Then she opened them and stared at the ceiling again. At last she forgot to open them.
She was asleep.
When the raucous scream of a seagull woke her, Hilde got out of bed. As usual, she crossed the room to the window and stood looking out across the bay. It had gotten to be a habit, summer and winter.
As she stood there, she suddenly felt a myriad of colors exploding in her head. She remembered what she had dreamt. But it felt like more than an ordinary dream, with its vivid colors and shapes ...
She had dreamt that her father came home from Lebanon, and the whole dream was an extension of Sophie’s dream when she found the gold crucifix on the dock.
Hilde was sitting on the edge of the dock—exactly as in Sophie’s dream. Then she heard a very soft voice whispering, “My name is Sophie!” Hilde had stayed where she was, sitting very still, trying to hear where the voice was coming from. It continued, an almost inaudible rustling, as if an insect were speaking to her: “You must be both deaf and blind!” Just then her father had come into the garden in his UN uniform. “Hilde!” he shouted. Hilde ran up to him and threw her arms around his neck. That’s where the dream ended.
She remembered some lines of a poem by Arnulf 0verland:
Wakened one night by a curious dream
and a voice that seemed to be speaking to me
like a far-off subterranean stream,
I rose and asked: What do you want of me?
She was still standing at the window when her mother came in.
“Hi there! Are you already awake?”
“I’m not sure...”
“I’ll be home around four, as usual.”
“Okay, Mom.”
“Have a nice vacation day, Hilde!”
“You have a good day too.”
When she heard her mother slam the front door, she slipped back into bed with the ring binder.
“I’m going to dive down into the major’s unconscious. That’s where I’ll be until we meet again.”
There, yes. Hilde started reading again. She could feel under her right index finger that there were only a few pages left.
When Sophie left the major’s cabin, she could still see some of the Disney figures at the water’s edge, but they seemed to dissolve as she approached them. By the time she reached the boat they had all disappeared.
While she was rowing she made faces, and after she had pulled the boat up into the reeds on the other side she waved her arms about. She was working desperately to hold the major’s attention so that Alberto could sit undisturbed in the cabin.
She danced along the path, hopping and skipping. Then she tried walking like a mechanical doll. To keep the major interested she began to sing as well. At one point she stood still, pondering what Alberta’s plan could be. Catching herself, she got such a bad conscience that she started to climb a tree.
Sophie climbed as high as she could. When she was nearly at the top, she realized she could not get down. She decided to wait a little before trying again. But meanwhile she could not just stay quietly where she was. Then the major would get tired of watching her and would begin to interest himself in what Alberto was doing.
Sophie waved her arms, tried to crow like a rooster a couple of times, and finally began to yodel. It was the first time in her fifteen-year-old life that Sophie had yodeled.
All things considered, she was quite pleased with the result.
She tried once more to climb down but she was truly stuck. Suddenly a huge goose landed on one of the branches Sophie was clinging to. Having recently seen a whole swarm of Disney figures, Sophie was not in the least surprised when the goose began to speak.
“My name is Morten,” said the goose. “Actually, I’m a tame goose, but on this special occasion I have flown up from Lebanon with the wild geese. You look as if you could use some help getting down from this tree.”
“You are much too small to help me,” said Sophie.
“You are jumping to conclusions, young lady. It is you who are too big.”
“It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”
“I would have you know I carried a peasant boy exactly your age all over Sweden. His name was Nils Hol-gersson.”
“I am fifteen.”
“And Nils was fourteen. A year one way or the other makes no difference to the freight.”
“How did you manage to lift him?”
“I gave him a little slap and he passed out. When he woke up, he was no bigger than a thumb.”
“Perhaps you could give me a little slap too, because I can’t sit up here forever. And I’m giving a philosophical garden party on Saturday.”
“That’s interesting. I presume this is a philosophy book, then. When I was flying over Sweden with Nils Holgers-son, we touched down on Marbacka in Varmland, where Nils met an old woman who was planning to write a book about Sweden for schoolchildren. It was to be both instructive and true, she said. When she heard about Nils’s adventures, she decided to write a book about all the things he had seen on gooseback.”
“That was very strange.”
“To tell you the truth it was rather ironic, because we were already in that book.”
Suddenly Sophie felt something slap her cheek and the next minute she had become no bigger than a thumb. The tree was like a whole forest and the goose was as big as a horse.
“Come on, then,” said the goose.
Sophie walked along the branch and climbed up on the goose’s back. Its feathers were soft, but now that she was so small, they pricked her more than they tickled.
As soon as she had settled comfortably the goose took off. They flew high above the treetops. Sophie looked down at the lake and the major’s cabin. Inside sat Al-berto, laying his devious plans.
“A short sightseeing tour will have to be sufficient today,” said the goose, flapping its wings again and again.
With that, it flew in to land at the foot of the tree which Sophie had so recently begun to climb. As the goose touched down Sophie tumbled onto t
he ground. After rolling around in the heather a few times, she sat up. She realized with amazement that she was her full size again.
The goose waddled around her a few times.
“Thanks a lot for your help,” said Sophie.
“It was a mere bagatelle. Did you say this was a philosophy book?”
“No, that’s what you said.”
“Oh well, it’s all the same. If it had been up to me, I would have liked to fly you through the whole history of philosophy just as I flew Nils Holgersson through Sweden. We could have circled over Miletus and Athens, Jerusalem and Alexandria, Rome and Florence, London and Paris, Jena and Heidelberg, Berlin and Copenhagen . . .”
“Thanks, that’s enough.”
“But flying across the centuries would have been a hefty job even for a very ironic goose. Crossing the Swedish provinces is far easier.”
So saying, the goose ran a few steps and flapped itself into the air.
Sophie was exhausted, but when she crawled out of the den into the garden a little later she thought Alberto would have been well pleased with her diversionary maneuvers. The major could not have thought much about Alberto during the past hour. If he did, he had to have a severe case of split personality.
Sophie had just walked in the front door when her mother came home from work. That saved her having to describe her rescue from a tall tree by a tame goose.
After dinner they began to get everything ready for the garden party. They brought a four-meter-long table top and trestles from the attic and carried it into the garden.
They had planned to set out the long table under the fruit trees. The last time they had used the trestle table had been on Sophie’s parents’ tenth anniversary. Sophie was only eight years old at the time, but she clearly remembered the big outdoor party with all their friends and relatives.
The weather report was as good as it could be. There had not been as much as a drop of rain since that horrid thunderstorm the day before Sophie’s birthday. Nevertheless they decided to leave the actual table setting and decorating until Saturday morning.