Leaving Sweden

a fever, apocalypses, and white

I am packed but I am not ready. I had the morning planned; I would wake, I would walk in the forest, I would finish a piece of work, I would walk to the lake and then the labyrinth, I would pack and sit for a while, and then I would say goodbye.

But when I wake, it’s a Scottish kind of day. The sort of temperamental late winter day we are often besieged by, a good for very little outside day, a dreich day, a grotty day. I walk in the forest, the pines keeping the rain out, mostly. I wear the type of sensible raincoat I have never been in possession of and now love. After, I go back to the cabin, and make coffee and settle down to work. I put the lake and the labyrinth out my mind. They aren’t going anywhere, it’s only me who is. I think of this refusal to visit - and it is, the weather is an easy scapegoat - as a promise I will return.

I pack. I wait. If I waited until I was ready I wouldn’t leave. Maybe that’s the plan. I would stay all winter as it became colder, more difficult, less endurable, and I would discover exactly what I am made of.

I fear I have already discovered this. I am only deferring, delaying.

At some point in the forest I became unwell. A flu type thing. A vicious bone squeezing thing. To be fevered in the frost, the snow, the very low temperatures outside the covers is a new thing. I take a great interest in it. As the fever abates before returning, a friend sends a message asking if I am the Snow Queen or the White Witch. I am not sure where this message comes from, if it is a response to the photos of the ice and the snow I’ve sent them, or if it is something they have wondered for a long time. It is a strange question but does not seem like a strange question while fevered. I take it very seriously. I take it so seriously I re-read The Snow Queen. I take re-reading The Snow Queen so seriously it creeps into the novel I am writing.

During these fevered times, I begin to write again about a previous search for white. For a time I became possessed by the idea of finding white. I wanted a monotonous white. The kind of white the tulips look too excitable against. A white that could obliviate everything. A white that would absolve me of the need to do the obliviating. It is perhaps only when away from yourself, in a forest, or beset by fever, or preferably both, that you can see what it was you were doing.

While I write about this search and what it led me to, it continues to snow outside. I write about becoming snow-blind with my son one winter solstice when he was very small. I think of how snow affects depth perception; perhaps I wanted this white to do the same. I think of Odin, blind in one eye; it is beautiful to have a flawed God. It think of price we pay for knowledge and how it transforms us. It is this cost of knowledge that lies at the root of our fears, and maybe it is because of this we write stories about it, the Bible doesn’t just end with an apocalypse, it begins with one.

Before the fever, I spent a happy morning wandering the six floors of Gothenburg’s Konstmuseum. If you want to discover the preoccupations of another country, visit their art galleries. By coincidence their show APOKALPS was on, which made me think again of the apocalypse (as if I am not most of the time), and one of the best essays I’ve ever read and return to often by Ben Mauk in The Paris Review . During the fever, all this combines in the alchemic way that happens with fever, making me think how the Bible contains three distinct apocalypses, which isn’t just theologically satisfying but narratively a thing of great wonder. If the apocalypse is the veil between one world and the next, it is knowledge that unveils and also rends the veil, making the previous world not just untenable but uninhabitable. We see this when Adam and Eve eat the fruit, not of the tree of life, but of the knowledge of good and evil - God hoped us ignorant of both, why, we never find out (the play of concealing and revealing is also excellent here). Immediately after this action, they set out to cover themselves in animal skin, as if hoping to reconstitute the veil they have just broken. As if too to make a distinction between themselves and animals, look, they are saying, our skin is worth more than theirs, ours must be covered, theirs must be co-opted to do the covering. This is an attempt, not born out of shame at their nakedness as the simplest and most common readings would have it, but rather caused by the new knowledge they have accrued. It is also an attempt at time travel, to go into the pre-lapsarian past. It marks an attempt to unknow. The consequence of this first apocalypse is their world is barred to them; it does not cease to exist, instead a home once known is now inaccessible. A special type of torture. Perhaps the true cost of knowledge is they lose their perfection but gain their humanity.

The second apocalypse comes at the moment of Jesus’s death when the temple curtain, or veil, is torn from top to bottom. This rupture marking the moment the scriptures split too: old into new, the passage from Judaism to Christianity. It is a capricious God who tears the curtain top to bottom in this fashion, not out of grief but in declaration. He has abandoned one people and from now on will confer his knowledge on another people. The first are not and never were, good enough for him, he thinks. Only a God who believes himself all seeing is capable of this. A God who does not realise his need for ravens say.

And the third apocalypse, past, present or future tense, or all three as these stories of the apocalypse show us - it is always happening, always will happen, has already happened; every reaching towards new knowledge presenting an apocalypse of its own - is John’s at the end, creating a satisfying circulatory to the whole text.

During the fever, I read myths and fairy-tales, and one night, I wake, sometime around two, with the sky clear and bright. The cold outside the covers seems to have returned to a natural cold. My skin is no longer clammy. I sit up, forgetting the low ceiling and bang my head. I pull thick socks on, tuck my pyjamas into them, push my feet into my boots, I put on two jumpers, my hat, a borrowed coat. I walk out into the night and see constellations I didn’t know the existence of and cannot hope to name; there are familiar ones too: the plough, Orion’s Belt, the north star. Planets too, more, surely than we have ever discovered.

I walk further into the night, no longer scared of the dark or the forest, thinking still of the Snow Queen, White Witch question. I don’t know the answer. I do know more snow is in the air.

The fever having left, I finish writing my novel which turns into a fairy-tale - do not mistake this for meaning it is only beautiful. Fairy-tales are still the darkest stories we have at our disposal. I continue to read myths, I keep going until I am packed but not ready.

I am packed but not ready and I am facing away from the window. I am looking at the cabin, returned to the form it was before me. I have finished the lemons and clementines I put in bowls, the postcards I picked up are packed, the books are gone, the coloured post its, the collection of notebooks, the assortment of pens, charcoal, chalk and pencils, also packed. It is bones again for someone else to inhabit. And then there is a feeling I must turn around. I must turn around now.

I turn around and there, swooping right past the window, is a raven, wings stretched wide; right there, and then it is gone. A-ha, I think. I had been looking for an a-ha. I had decided that on the last day I would find an elk. Yes, the elk would suddenly be there, I decided, and I would have my a-ha. Only we do not get to decide our signs, you cannot cheat your way to meaning. I see it, and I want to take to my knees in the same way I did in churches across Italy all summer. I want to cross myself, because in the absence of anything else, it is sometimes these human-made gestures we fall back on, hoping they can speak of a sense that can’t be named. Sometimes it is only right to not have the words for things.

Standing there, I know the answer to the Snow Queen, White Witch question. It is time to get going.