RETURN TO THE FINDING
Awake by Harald Voetmann; translated by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen
Lolli EditionsAugust 2022Selected by Barbara Epler
Comic and wonderful, disgusting and enthralling, Awake tells the story of Pliny the Elder, sleepless during the long nights of the Roman Empire, dictating his Natural History to his slave Diocles. Bleeding from the nose, wheezing from his corpulence, Pliny’s no treat – yet his enthusiasm for the natural world is. A rose, a galaxy, an exotic plant, the moon: all enchant him. So enthralled is Pliny by nature that he rushes to observe the eruption of Mount Vesuvius – the only boat making its way toward the volcano. Voetmann has said that, “Awake began as a nightmare, the kind that lingers in the body for a while. The nightmare was not about Pliny the Elder, but the book turned out to be. He wrote an encyclopedia, Naturalis Historia, which was an effort to master nature through knowledge and the magic inherent in the naming of each of nature’s parts. His curiosity is well mixed with hate, self-pity, fear of the feminine and lust for power – in a sense characteristic of the Western history of ideas, although here taken to a rarely seen extreme. We talk about nature differently now, but a lot of us still live by Pliny’s manual. He would be proud of us and it seems fitting to let him speak again now that we have come so far with nature’s destruction.” – Barbara Epler
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 revitalisation 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 labour too. Sex can be either play or labour 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 labour, 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 realise 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 revitalisation. That category is labour. The body rests in preparation for labour, and rest can hereby be considered an activity in and of itself, which is to say part of the activity since only one activity, labour, exists. As labour 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. ◉
The volcanic explosion at Vesuvius in 79CE killed approximately 1,000 people. Violently explosive eruptions are often described as Plinian, as two letters from Pliny the Younger to the historian Tacitus are the only surviving eyewitness accounts of the event.
In Pliny’s Natural History, he describes gold washing as it took place at a Roman site in modern-day Spain. Pliny was scornful of the Roman desire for gold, seeing it as a morally unsound weakness for luxury, and he cast mining as a form of natural violation of our “holy parent”.