Awake Read online

  Awake

  Copyright © 2010 by Harald Voetmann

  Translation copyright © 2021 by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen

  Appendix translation copyright © 1963, 1969 by Betty Radice

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Originally published in Danish by Gyldendal in 2010

  New Directions gratefully acknowledges the support

  of the Danish Arts Foundation.

  The two letters in the appendix are drawn from The Letters of Pliny the Younger, translated by Betty Radice and published by Penguin Classics. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Limited

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First published in 2021 as New Directions Paperbook 1511

  Design by Erik Rieselbach

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Voetmann, Harald, 1978– author. | Ottosen, Johanne Sorgenfri, 1986– translator.

  Title: Awake / Harald Voetmann ; translated from the Danish by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen.

  Other titles: Vågen. English

  Description: New York : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021022110 | ISBN 9780811230810 (paperback) | ISBN 9780811230827 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Pliny, the Elder—Fiction. | LCGFT: Biographical fiction. | Novels.

  Classification: LCC PT8177.32.O38 V3413 2021 | DDC 839.813/8—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022110

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

  1

  It is the same to me where I begin for I shall go back there again.

  — Parmenides of Elea

  It is the same to me where I begin for I shall go back there again. I shall go back to where I began. To the finding, in this case. I shall return to the finding that it is of no relevance where we begin. Though it must be said that this particular beginning—the moment when we first noted that we can begin anywhere, in turn granting each beginning its own irrelevance, yes, its very own —is more striking than others after all because it springs from a truth despite landing in falsehood. When I return to the point where we established the irrelevance of beginnings, the point is no longer a beginning. It is no longer subjected to the irrelevance of beginnings, but to the more general irrelevance of the whole, which naturally includes the point of beginning itself, which thereby loses all, or part, of its distinction. Wherefrom holds no more meaning than whereto, wherefore, where. “To,” indeed, “to” is the purest expression of irrelevance— to all this I shall return. Look around. There’s room here, and opportunity, you need only crane your neck to see what’s on offer. What it all comes down to is glimpsing something worth craning your neck for. Preferably far enough that if the head was severed from the outstretched and so proffered neck there would be ample time to marvel at it spinning toward the desired object. The animals here refuse to let my body sleep off the wine and my work suffers for it. At dawn, the cocks on the mountainside crow, then the cocks by the coast respond, and soon after the birds initiate their trilling in the sky before, worst of all, the dogs launch into rabid barking. By noon I am too drained to continue my work. I will have a bite of bread, perhaps an egg, then at least no cock will hatch from it, and drink the day’s first cup of wine. Otherwise any attempt at sleep is futile. At about this point human noises intrude. All human acts can be sorted into three groups: work, play, and sex. Apart from that there is only rest, which includes any revitalization of the body such as bathing and supping, but rest, as we know, is not an act. Upon further scrutiny we may narrow down the three categories. Play is training and education, and a child’s play is in large measure serious. Play is labor too. Sex can be either play or labor depending on the participant’s role and reasons for taking part, but as we have eliminated the category of play, there is only one option left. Sexual activity can only be defined as a kind of labor, and all participants would do well to strive for the superior work ethic of the slaves who know they must endure it. You won’t hear them cursing and fuming and acting out while others are trying to nap — trouble springs from the perceived masters of the situation who trust that their ejaculation, under the right circumstances, is for pleasure, and never realize that their urge is but earthly slavery imposed on them. I shall come back to this. Presently we are left with one category that encompasses all human activity not counting the body’s revitalization. That category is labor. The body rests in preparation for labor, and rest can hereby be considered an activity in and of itself, which is to say part of the activity since only one activity, labor, exists. As labor goes, rest is no more passive than whatever else is imposed on us to endure, i.e. toiling at the grain mill, or being mounted by one’s owner. Let the toiling take solace in the fact that the world only has one ruler, and tyrants and cutthroats are governed by it too. And by this force, the cock crows, the prick throbs, the dog barks. I don’t know this despot’s name, but I curse it day in and day out. I rarely get my afternoon nap, even after drinking wine. Instead, I toss and turn for hours, and once roused only wine can lift the headache of prior consumption. By evening I don’t always succeed in making meaningful conversation. When I arrived in this town my reputation of wisdom gained abroad preceded me. The reputation still holds though it is wearing thin. Now, right now, as I was dictating this, a bird shat on my hand. My cue, perhaps. Perhaps some authority is attempting to impart how meaningless it is to curse it. But why would it bother? Better to establish irrelevance and to incessantly classify it until your tissue has hornified from inside out, than to curse and fume. From this point on you may be considered wise, but don’t get overexcited. The bird’s dropping is yellow and thin with a dense white lump at the center, which, upon closer inspection, will probably turn out to contain a sort of kernel. A seed. By way of a bird’s behind a berry has ejaculated on me. But the seed has fallen on barren ground. My hand will not sprout. My hand shall not make anything sprout.

  The little houses and tombs by the coast are indistinguishable from up here on the mountainside. Little red-tiled blocks all. The necropolis lies closer to the sea whereas the living have settled up the incline. For that reason alone, I can tell them apart. Each morning the fishermen pass through the city of the dead with their nets. And the children scramble by naked on their way to bathe in the sea. At night a few come out to make bonfires for their dead and the beggars stand by to partake of the sacrifice along with the basest of whores, those who sleep in the houses of the dead by day and come out at dusk to mate with the living for a slab of the deads’ food. I can’t sleep off the wine for all the shrieking animals between the small, dense olive trees on the slope. Tonight, it was the dogs. The black bitch who roams the hills with her extensive litter, the offspring of at least two fathers by the looks of them, howled louder than I could stand. I sent Hermeros out with an oar to chase her away. His arm was bleeding when he returned, she’d sunk her teeth deep in him. He said the bitch had been howling over a pup crushed by the children with their clubs, and now she wouldn’t be chased off. Pound as he might with his oar, in her grief she took the beating but refused to let him shove her down the slope and away from the remains of her pup. Hermeros looks pleased as he writes this, as if putting his name in writing has now absolved him of all mortality. When I arrived here by ship, the first sight I encountered was the necropolis, the town’s face. Stelas inscribed with the names of those who couldn’t come to greet me. By each stela a signpost warns not to defecate near this tomb, that ghosts and furies and fiends of the underworld will surely beleaguer the one who parts his cheeks and ejects the modest portion of death stored in his guts among the dead. The innards of the dead are different, crawling with life for as long as it survives. The only sacrifice I will ask for myself is the death amassed throughout the day. Bequeath it to my grave, with my compliments, if you wish. The hiss of the cicadas is in the air. I’ve come to drink and impress the crowd, not to think, that’s impossible, nothing will come of it. Thought separates the living from the dead. All life bred in the heat of the earth under the dense olive trees. Death is cold, it’s the result of thought, one might regard it as the sigil of experience. One should never end an address to other people, written or spoken, with allusions to death. It’s implicit, it makes itself known once the mouth has shut. It ought to be enough to point out the trivial and let its opposite speak. The more chatter about trifles, the more violent the contrast. Through speech, death bemoans its lack of trivialities. Infernal cicadas, i.e.

  2

  Voices

  Quotes from Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia

  Pliny the Elder

  Pliny the Younger

  Diocles, a slave

  Quote, Naturalis Historia by Pliny the Elder

  I simply wish to remind the reader that I am in a rush to describe the world in detail.

  Scene I

  Plinius has a nosebleed. He’s lying on his back in bed, staring into the dark. Diocles stuffs his nostrils with wool soaked in rose oil. Plinius breathes heavily, his throat wheezes at each inhalatio
n. The light is too dim to reach the ceiling. Diocles wipes his oiled fingers against his tunic and returns to the desk with the lamp, the tablets and the stylus. Punic beeswax is superior, snorts Plinius, and the stylus scratches in the tablet’s wax, which is inferior; dingy and grimy, worn by countless smudgings. Diocles has taught his scribing hand to listen, only fragments of the world catch his mind. In the gloom it’s impossible to gauge how high the ceiling is. To Plinius it feels as though it heaves above him in accordance with his troubled breathing. He is lying flat on his back with a pillow supporting his neck. His hands are resting to either side. On the matter of beeswax, one must pursue the deepest yellow of color, the kind that smells most intensely honeyed, he says. The final syllable of each sentence is extracted and rounded perfectly as it slowly transforms into a moan. Painfully and peepingly, the world is wrung from Plinius’ fat neck in the dark. Now he lifts his left hand and puts his palm against the wall, which is cool and smooth, perfectly motionless.

  Quote, Naturalis Historia

  The sun’s rising and setting leave no doubt that our orb-shaped world rotates in an eternal circuit, and at inconceivable speed, completing each trip within twenty-four hours. I can hardly guess whether the whir of so great a mass transcends the faculty of human hearing, nor do I know, by Hercules, if the stars that are swept along and revolve in their own orbits produce a timbre, and if so, whether it is a harmony of indescribable beauty. To us who live inside it, the world appears to glide in silence day and night.

  Pliny the Elder

  On the great construction site where my father built the new theater, treadmill cranes abounded. An especially squalid kind of slave worked in the treadmills. They spoke neither Greek nor Latin, not a word, and they would never know what a theater is. It wasn’t so much the sight of the naked, sweaty bodies thrusting themselves forward and up incessantly, caught in the spinning wheel that transmitted their motions to the large stones waiting to be hoisted up. It was the sounds; the smacks of their flesh slapping the boards moment after moment, their moans and wails and incomprehensible muttered curses. That is precisely how I imagine the noise of the universe. The planets and stars lashed to their orbits while the ropes and coils and pulleys creak. Pythagoras must be mad to speak of cosmic harmonies. The noise of the universe to me has always been the sound of something heavy and solid, hauled by Germanic and Numidian treadmill slaves. A constant sound of strain only surpassed occasionally by the lash of the whip. The pure, exalted ether that grudgingly turns to befouled air, and then to water, before with utter abandon it becomes earth, clay, flesh, and stone till it has squashed itself so compact, kneaded its own material so massively, that the spirit seeps from it and, as ether, ascends again to the sky with a sigh of relief. From the colonnade in the square where I received my lessons, I could observe the slaves work and hear it all. It was the habitual background noise as I sat in the shade and studied Greek verse on the creation of the gods and the siege of Troy. I only toiled with clusters of word and thought held together by my breath, by pure spirit. Homer’s and Hesiod’s knobbly and duly suckled immortalities on my tongue, in the shade, in the colonnade, in the square in Novum Comum. Just as with the slaves’ labor in the treadmills, the purpose of my labor was to give life and motion to the dead; dead spirit in my case, dead matter in theirs. On a late summer afternoon a slave died in a treadmill, he breathed the spirit from its vessel, was refined and ascended, commingled with the luminous ether above us. He was dead midway through a motion intended for the stone, and some time passed before it was noticed. The other two slaves in the treadmill continued their crawling forth and up and nowhere. The deceased, who had been worming away in the same manner, was turned on his back, boards pounded against the base of his head where the skull and spine adjoin. He did not react. His body was cast from the treadmill and another slave was undressed and inserted. The corpse remained there the entire afternoon, in the sun, right in the middle of the construction site. On its back, its torso twisted. One eye shut, the other open, dark blue, Germanic, turned to the sky. The strain and the complete stillness, the strain’s result. The wheel kept spinning next to the corpse, transmitting the motions of the living onto dead matter. I dare say that the theater, upon its completion, never staged a production as significant.

  Quote, Naturalis Historia

  The tallest man of our time was Gabbara, brought here from Arabia during the reign of the Divine Claudius — he stood nine foot and nine inches tall. In the reign of Augustus there were two who exceeded him by half a foot, Pusio and Secundilla, their remarkable bodies preserved as objects of curiosity in a tomb in the Gardens of Sallust.

  Pliny the Elder

  It was before I had seen anyone die or anyone kill. It was before I had slipped from the hands of my mother and my wet nurse to my father and his peers in the square. It was summer, choking heat, and I clung to my mother’s skirts. We strolled the long avenues in the Gardens of Sallust, newly opened to the public, and greeted the other mothers and children politely. A couple of shy toddlers meeting each other for the first time hide behind their mothers, clutching their dresses and peeking behind their thighs. The looks two such children will give each other. Were it in their power to kill, they would. Pine, poplar, platanus. Cool marble benches in the shade where the old women with their impatient grandchildren paused to catch breath. The narrow, steep paths between the levels of landscaping, the umber dust whirling and settling on sandals and feet and in the pleat of a toga’s hem. The street vendors and trinket sellers hawking: Salvé, domina! My mother bought me a little donkey made of red clay. The donkey dangled on a leather strap, it was meant as a necklace. My mother tightened the strap so that I might wear it around my wrist instead where it wouldn’t eclipse the golden orb on my chest that marked my class. The trinket seller’s skin was dark and blotchy from exposure to sun and dust. His accent was Greek, his copper hoops were green with verdigris. He bent down toward me with some difficulty, rested his hands on his knees and said: “The donkey is a diligent animal, let it serve to remind you of the virtue of diligence, my friend. Toil, little donkey, it shall serve you well.” From a breast pocket in his tunic, he produced a fig and gave it to me with a stiff smile. The fig was bruised. “Say thank you to the gentleman,” said my mother. But he was no gentleman. And the donkey he had sold us was shaped by children’s hands, not by this Greek’s clumsy, dirty fingers. You could see the unsmoothed dents left by small fingertips in the clay. Toil, little donkey. The Greek sold clay figures in the Gardens of Sallust all day, every day, and somewhere his children were manufacturing them in heaps. The small animal had been crafted without love or curiosity, and although I’d pleaded with my mother to have it only minutes prior, I suddenly wanted to smash it. It looked nothing like a donkey. The neck was too short and fat. The legs were crooked and uneven, it wouldn’t even be able to stand upright. The eyes were off. It had no nostrils. “How can this inspire diligence? It is so poorly done,” I said. The columns, nailed full of bulletins; acta diurna; gossip, weddings and divorces, the size of someone’s dowry, what does he see in her, finally a decent drinking fountain in Subura, have you heard whose husband has been elected tribune; prophecies and interpretations of the night sky, good news for anyone with husbands and sons in Germania, news bulletins nailed to thick trunks along the avenues, esteemed ladies, wigmaker Marius Scorius on Esquiline will gladly compensate you for your locks of hair, make a little extra for the household, real Egyptian cosmetics, stimulate your husband with Nubian drum dancing, performed at the court to great applause, hair removal, cheap and painless, undesirable bodily circumstances treated at no health risk, blood curses purged, bring a cock or a black puppy for sacrificing, would you happen to know the best fish sauce in town, hire a choir to lament your dead, gemstones and paintings, the most beautiful ivory miniatures in walnut shells, have your ancestral history written in Greek or Latin. So was the world of women that I was steered through. I’d barely learned how to read but with each sign I exercised my new skill. What more? Everywhere, muddy puddles and hosts of insects. Flies, midges, mosquitoes, wasps, but also dragonflies. I remember one dragonfly mounting another’s back. They buzzed around in this formation for a distance, lazily keeping to a somewhat wobbly course. I imagined they were mating, I suppose they were. But suddenly the top dragonfly lifted while the other dropped limply to the ground in a straight line. I collected it in my hand, it filled my palm. I could see a puncture on its neck. I shuddered more profoundly at the sight than I would at any of the later battles of beasts or gladiators my father and his peers let me watch from the equestrian seats. Never, not among the Greeks nor our own writers, have I stumbled upon a piece that told of the dragonfly’s mating ritual. Was the murder an expression of the male’s arousal? Or was it that, during copulation, he deemed the female unworthy of his brood? Or was she punished for resisting? I find it hard to believe that the Greeks should not have observed the phenomenon, and it isn’t unreasonable to suggest the following explanation, that the Greek dragonflies would simply never kill during mating, that this is only seen in Italy. A group of pavilions concluded the Gardens’ broadest avenue, they were built by Julia, granddaughter of Augustus, before she fell from grace. Here lay dead monstrosities of the court, on display to throngs of women and children, embalmed and stuffed with scented textiles, sandalwood, cloves and nard. The pavilions formed a circle with the largest at the center, inside the bodies of Pusio and Secundilla hung from hooks in the ceiling. It defies all probability that these two giants should have emerged from different corners of the Earth and not be related by blood, but it is said that Secundilla was from Thrace while Pusio came from Ethiopia. They were the same height, and their hanging bodies spanned the length of the pavilion, floor to ceiling. Their forms were thin, their skin dark purple and crinkled like the bruised fig the salesman had given me, and which I would not eat but was afraid to discard fearing a slap from my mother for my ingratitude. Though Pusio’s skin must have been black when he was alive, he was now no darker than Secundilla. Because of the hooks in their necks they both hung with their faces down and their arms flaccid along their sides as though they were ashamed. The look of shame was enhanced by the stare in their painted glass eyes, at once dead and panic-stricken. Both had arms too short for their long bodies, making it look as though they were grasping for their genitals, but could not quite reach. Pusio gave the impression of wishing to cover his purple and unevenly stuffed penis while Secundilla looked to be grasping indecently for her crotch, an obscene gesture. Secundilla’s thighs and buttocks were very full and round but otherwise the bodies were like sticks, and I believe that any roundness may have been artificial, manufactured postmortem so the observer could discern, closely and from a distance, which one of these desiccated creatures had been a woman. Their wretched postures instilled in me the thought that their contortion might be a conscious act — that these creatures were willfully contorted: one wishing to conceal his shame, the other trying to expose it fully. My mother put her hand on my hair and bent over me. She laughed, she probably found the sight amusing. “Can you believe a person can grow that big, Gaius,” she whispered in my ear, and all around the pavilion women stood and whispered like that into the ears of their children or grandchildren. But I didn’t find it funny. My mother’s laugh mirrored another laughter. Through her, nature mocked these freaks created for the purpose of ridicule and ghastly deformity. That day I had my fill of the women’s world.