At some point, we came across an abandoned farm. It was on Paradisvej—Paradise Way—yet despite the promising address, the place seemed about to be swallowed up by nature again. The letter box in the driveway had been wound in gaffer tape, presumably to signal that no one expected any post. In the yard, objects were strewn about as if someone had thrown a hand grenade: toilets and sinks overgrown with algae, a bathtub, sawn-off tree stumps, logs, children’s bikes, toys, a machine saw, clothes, garden chairs and tools, all of it lying jumbled on the ground. The doors to the stable building stood wide open, and you could sense that the chaos only continued inside. A silver-grey Audi A4 without number plates was parked in the middle of the yard. Grass had grown up around its wheels and, all in all, it seemed to have been there for some time, yet for one reason or another it was difficult to say precisely how long. A month? A week? I stood for a while and took in my surroundings. Had somebody parked it there earlier that day? Inside me, something froze. I walked round to the back garden and towards an enormous greenhouse. This too was in a state of decay: most of the glass was smashed and several metre-long plant stems had sprouted up through the roof. Neglect, I thought, and thought the same as I peered in through the windows of the house: there was a thick, grey carpet on the laminate floor, a mattress without sheets. The room gave off a grim glow in the afternoon light. I shuddered and hurried back to the path.
We never did see any wolves at Stråsø Plantage near Ulfborg. I don’t really know what I’d expected. There wasn’t a trace of them. No paw prints in the dirt, no howling, no scat, no fleeting shadow of a lean, canine creature in amongst the trees. Wolves seem to be put on edge by the presence of humans. Not that I know that from experience. I read it somewhere, just like everything else I know about the world.
Everything in the universe decays. Slowly and inevitably, in line with the laws of nature. If you don’t put in the work every day to maintain a given order, it will break down over time. This is true of houses, gardens and cars. It is also true of human relationships. It is a logic which seems to run through everything, and science even has a name for it—entropy. Each day is brimming with small hints of it: one evening, you go to recline at the dinner table, part of your chair comes loose, and you tumble backwards. The cardboard boxes left out on the patio slowly start to soften in the afternoon rain until they eventually dissolve. You come home late one evening to find a picture has fallen down from the wall. It never happens the other way around. Chairs don’t just fix themselves if you wait around long enough. Breakdown and decay are unavoidable natural processes, a fundamental and unfaltering rule. Living room floors get dusty if you don’t clean them. Suddenly, one day, there’s a crack in the wall and some months later, it splits into two. Damp sets in, the bickering begins, unnoticed through the repetitions and day-to-day life, at a speed beyond human understanding, perhaps more geological. Take the silver-grey Audi in front of that bleak farmyard: bird excrement will cover the roof and bonnet within a few short years. The air will seep out of its tires and they’ll go flat. An autumn will pass, a winter, a spring, a summer and yet another autumn. The planet sweeps its orbit around the Sun, again and again, whilst the car turns green with algae and moss, its seats long since destroyed by the changing seasons. A beech sapling shoots out through the windscreen, soon a little tree with roots dangling out of the hollowed windows. A thousand years from now. There is nothing. Ten thousand years, a hundred thousand. A hundred thousand years isn’t even that many. But the car will have vanished. A blink of the eye in planetary time.
For me, the meaning of human life isn’t hard to pin down. It is to maintain habitable worlds. Contribute to their sustainability. It must be worked at daily. The meaning of life isn’t grand; on the contrary, it is rather small. In my case: to maintain order in a flat in Nørrebro. A holiday house on Møn. Relationships with friends, family, partners. My body, my empathy. My curiosity, open-mindedness and tolerance, all of the social ecosystems I exist within, and which would decay if I stopped putting in the work. I don’t know if I’m any good at it. I’m not always sure that I am.
Humans are destructive. Yes. But we are also an organising phenomenon in the cosmos. We construct things, gather and build them, and deliver them into a higher sense of order. We were already at it at the dawn of time when we founded the first civilisations. The birth of agriculture in Mesopotamia ten thousand years ago. The fencing in of a fixed space, an area, fields and houses, the drawing of borders. The domestication of plants and animals. And out in the distance lay the mountains. Or the forest. A natural landscape which with time, I imagine, seemed increasingly unknown. In this regard, civilisation began with the delineation of a garden. The world of the human being became a demarcated space which, in all of its order, grew to be in starker and starker opposition to the dark, chaotic landscape beyond its walls. In our day and age, human culture is primarily a garden in the symbolic sense, as civilisation has long since expanded beyond its geographical limits. The age of capitalism has influenced and altered every inch of planet Earth—there is no longer any nature “out there”. So why do we still believe in it? Why does nature continue to exist out there in our minds? Dark, chaotic, destructive and untamed nature, at a necessary distance from our cultured civilisation?
When I’m cycling through the streets of Copenhagen, I often ponder the fact that there are no physical dangers in Danish society. You can get knocked out on a Friday night, of course, or run over by a bus if you’re particularly unlucky, but there are no serious threats to the privileged Dane of late modernity. I am top of the food chain. There are no dangerous animals, no snakes, lions or polar bears. There’s no war. No dictator, no German occupation, no suicide bombers, no natural catastrophes, no volcanoes, tsunamis or earthquakes. In my opinion, this gives life a brush of the inauthentic. I long for something real, something down to earth, to physically commune with the material world. And it doesn’t help that the city is full of luxury fudge boutiques and organic marshmallow shops. Marshmallow shops—for grown adults? How low can we stoop? I cycle on through town past flashing traffic lights: red, yellow, green. Those childish colours. Everyone stuffed into a bike helmet and bicycle lights, even the little dogs on the pavement glow in the winter gloom, and if the temperature drops below zero by so much as a degree, an army of salt spreaders comes trundling to our rescue and grits the city roads. It wouldn’t do for people to slip and hurt themselves.
Just a few centuries ago, Scandinavia was full of threats. Things you could really be afraid of. There were marauders in the forests, for example, and it was only sensible to be frightened of them when you ventured out to visit a neighbouring village. There was a relatively high chance of being attacked by someone who wished you ill. So you were scared. I don’t think many people in Denmark are terrified in that way nowadays. On the other hand, we are anxious. Anxious about what? We have no idea because there aren’t any marauders any more. Once, a dictator was a man of flesh and blood—now those days are over, now they are blown to atoms. You might be tempted to think that we are anxious because we have nothing to fear, for anxiety lives in the abstract, the symbolic, the immaterial and the invisible—that is why it thrives in our high-tech, virtual world, where the sunlight we work by is electric blue and shines from behind a screen, and where our bodies only get used when running on the spot on a machine at the gym.
Anxiety flourishes in these ecosystems. The conditions are ideal. It thrives like bacteria in an open wound. Personally, I reckon that just a few hundred years ago, most people on this planet were too busy surviving to go around and develop anxiety. Back then, you were bound to one place, a farmstead, an occupation, the daily toil of producing food, harvesting crops, taking care of the animals, keeping an eye on your many children, fighting diseases, cold weather, friends and foes. You still lived in the world. You were integrated and tethered to it. Anxiety is surplus, a force that is unleashed when life tears itself away from the material world. Life in the Neolithic period, I imagine, was first and foremost a daily struggle, something that had to be overcome without too much accident or injury. It wasn’t presented to you as some particularly wonderful gift, as some spectacular adventure full of experiences and individuality. Freedom is poison to humanity. Last winter, when I was hiking in the mountains of Ethiopia, we would frequently pass some little boy or girl out tending cattle. They would often just be sitting on a rock, a scarf wrapped around their heads and crooks over their shoulders as they eyed us trudging by. The sun shone mercilessly over the dry, desert landscape, and there wasn’t much to do aside from go out and watch over the animals. Some of the children ran after us. It wasn’t every day that you saw white people in those parts. I think they were probably the poorest people I have ever seen. And maybe I’m wrong, and I can’t say they looked particularly happy, but they didn’t seem as if they were struggling with anxiety, personality disorders or depression.
(We saw wolves in Ethiopia. One early morning in the mountains, Thomas woke me up in the tent, I fumbled my way out and followed him over to the ridge where we could look down over the valley. And there, fifty metres below us, they ran past in the golden morning light. Mother and father in front. Cubs fanned out behind them.)
It is said that the wolf is a creature of mythology. Human history intertwines with that of the wolf somewhere back in the primordial mists of time. Most paleoanthropologists, as far as I have read, think that humans first domesticated wolves around fifteen thousand years ago, at the end of the Stone Age. Back then, the wolf must have been a concrete threat. It slunk around in the darkness beyond the firelight, and humans took to hurling a chunk of meat out from the animal roasting over the fire to prevent it from snatching a child. Bit by bit, this ecological peace treaty integrated the ways of the wolf with those of homo sapiens, until the evolution of a whole new species was realised, and this new creature now lived at our side, hunted, howled and stood watch for us at night. In return, the wolf-hound would never again have to scavenge or kill its own food; it had got another species to see to that. This is how the wolf migrated from the natural world and into civilisation, from the unknown to the familiar, and became the dog. An ingenious, evolutionary symbiosis had taken place.
What is the familiar? The familiar is everything within. Things that live in our garden—the plants, animals and people inside those walls. That’s the familiar. And outside lives the unknown. Wolves, for example. The original, undomesticated wolf that remained out there in the darkness, outside of time like some predatory stray in the mythological murk. Perhaps that is why Nazi Germany became the first state in Europe to protect them after they had been hunted to the brink of extinction since the Middle Ages. Perhaps the wolf represented strength and primeval power, a symbol of the expansive, dark and unruly natural world.
Myths are born when the origins of a given phenomenon are lost. How did the Earth come into being, for example? We don’t know, but the myths about it are plentiful. Most recently, we’ve been told the creation story of the Big Bang, which, with its great, cosmic flash, formed light and time and in many ways imitates the Christian story of creation. What is the opposite of mythology? The everyday. Everyday life with its hundreds of banal micro-events: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, 2018 and 2019, sunshine and snowstorms, comings and goings. In all of these scenarios, the mythological glimmers in its very absence. Or does it? It’s all in the eye of the beholder. I walk around the supermarket, doing the shopping. It’s early evening in Nørrebro. People are dragging their red trolleys around, popping things into them: shampoo and peanut butter, organic semi-skimmed milk. At the same time, just beneath the surface of the everyday, it’s a primeval situation. Shhh, watch: a group of apes move about their habitat in search of food. A woman, who on this Wednesday evening in September is giving birth at the nearby hospital, cries out on Maternity Ward C, her clothes branded with the municipality logo. Tubes and drips snake into her and digital numbers flash on a monitor beside the bed. At the same time, it’s a primeval situation: a female delivers her young. Discharge, blood, faeces and fluids, hastily mopped from sight in every culture across the globe, suddenly come gushing in . . .
I go down into London’s Underground or New York’s Subway. A warm gust hits me as the train stops and the doors open. Above my head, the air is full of digital display boards and tannoy voices announcing delays or platform changes. At the same time, I’m in the Underworld. It is Hades, Hel, Hell. The trains are white worms that writhe their way through the tunnels. I traverse the city’s subterranean passageways, past roots and rivers, until a few minutes later, I get off at another station, make my way upwards on the escalators, seemingly several hundred metres, and step out into the inferno of city lights. I cross the street; it’s got dark. A prostitute calls to me from an alleyway. She is a siren. A siren seducing me from the days of old.
That’s just what I’m like. A glance at the everyday world is always twofold. It is concrete and material, void of hidden mysteries. At the same time, it is mythical. Incomprehensible as a dream you’ve always dreamed.
Wolves can be described from varying perspectives, too. Lexically and physiologically, the wolf is eight hundred thousand years old, having originated in the Mid-Pleistocene period. It can grow to a body weight of thirty-six to forty-five kilos and lives in packs throughout its life. There are three hundred thousand of them in the wild, all of which are typically top of their food chains, except where they live close to tigers or humans. I could also describe them as a cultural symbol. The wolf appears in a wealth of different belief systems spread across the globe, from the Eurasian to the American and Scandinavian, and in all of these places, it represents roughly the same things: evil, danger, destruction. We all know the stories of the Big Bad Wolf, Peter and the Wolf, the Three Little Pigs, Little Red Riding Hood and countless other versions of tales with origins we cannot place. It also appears in the Bible, where we learn of wolves in sheep’s clothing. At the coming of Ragnarök in Norse mythology, it is the wolf Sköll who will swallow the Sun, whilst his brother, Hati, consumes the Moon and the Fenris Wolf devours Odin. This is quite some power to bestow upon wolves: to feast on light itself and the highest of all the gods. Even in our days of Late Modernity, the wolf is laden with symbolism. Seldom has an animal received so much attention as when the wolf officially migrated back to the heathlands of Western Jutland. So what does it represent in the modern age? Presumably the same as it always has. The symbolic world is somehow timeless and eternal—wolves are the animal, the unknown, chaos, sexuality, the Other, the force that will destroy civilisation, the uncultivated and untamed, the unspeakable, the shape which looms just beyond the walls of Paradise, the dark stain on the map. Even now, we are convinced that the unknown exists somewhere out there.
What if, for a moment, we turned our attention inwards instead? Inwards, to the familiar. Towards the human body, for example. There isn’t much we’re more familiar with than our own bodies. The bodies of citizens. For above all else, isn’t that what we are—citizens? We are first and foremost citizens of a society. That is what we are when we open our eyes each morning—a member of Danish society. It is only some way further down the list of things you wake up as that it says you are human. And even further still, that you are an animal. An animal that lives on a planet, that is circling around a burning ball of light in an endlessly enormous universe, and it’s funny how it only hits you every now and again, when your thoughts have a moment to drift. Just think, you’re an animal! On a planet! With the Sun shining down on it! It doesn’t just shine, it’s really a ball of fire!
Yeah, yeah. That’s all very strange, you think, but above all you are a citizen. All the rest of it, that stuff with animals and burning fireballs, that’s just something weird that pops up now and again in your train of thought. It’s not something to dwell on as you climb out of bed and go out to the bathroom to pee. It’s a citizen who is standing here, peeing. Suddenly you remember that you’d seen someone on the television one evening yelping with excitement, we’re aliens! We’re aliens, for crying out loud! And you thought about it a little and had to admit, it was amusing. Because they were right, of course. But it doesn’t mean much more than that, just a funny little anomaly, not something to spend too much time thinking about. Because it’s first and foremost a citizen, not an alien, who is standing here, peeing.
If, on your hunt for the mythological and unfamiliar, you take a trip around the body of that citizen, rather than out into the forest or to a foreign land, you will eventually come to the heart. What is the heart? A pulsating clump of flesh that pumps a reddish liquid around a living organism’s circulatory system. But why does it beat at all, that heart? What kind of power drives it, what makes it all work, what is life? Nobody knows. And if you travel further inwards, at some point you will arrive at uncountable colonies of microbes and bacteria. Millions upon millions of bacteria. Whole worlds of them. We know next to nothing about these life forms. Apart from that we are made of them. We are walking arrangements of bacteria, molecules and cells. And inside our cells are worlds of DNA. Long, helix-shaped ladders of mathematics. Haha, we’re made of them, are we? Of endless, twisting threads of numbers and code? Yes, that’s right. And we have no idea where they come from. We are walking, talking enigmas made up of coiled ladders of super-mathematics. Denmark’s Minister for the Environment—when, presumably not too long from now, he gets up to speak in Parliament and presents some law against the wolf—will himself be a world of murkiness and mystery. He himself is the animal, the unknown, the subconscious, the murderous, the biological. Everything unknown and unfamiliar is right there inside his head. He is bacteria and double helices of genetic code. Francis Crick and James Watson, who discovered DNA, didn’t have a clue where it came from. Their best guess was outer space.
So why are we afraid of the wolf? Is it because we need somewhere to place the unknown, somewhere outside of ourselves? Is it because it can kill our children? Because it takes our livestock? Is it the yellow eyes, the predator’s ferocious gaze that has been passed down within me, a biological memory of vulnerability? You can ponder the possibilities and perhaps find fragments of the truth here and there. Typically, that’s how it goes. You can also consider the wolf a messenger. A messenger or a warning. In the same way that Donald Trump was a messenger or a warning. Trump is the trickster, an archetype that springs out of its box in uncertain times. We are the ones who produced him. We can loathe and scorn him as much as we like—we good, righteous people—but he is merely a reflection of ourselves and our civilisation. As if from some monstrous funhouse mirror, he leaps forth with the joker’s clownish hair and with a humour that bubbles directly up from our collective subconscious. He holds up the mirror and shows the West its own face. Trump is an element of chaos. I despise him and I despise his politics. But I have a certain soft spot for elements of chaos. Like the wolf. Watch how it wanders into cosy little Denmark’s tilled topography, utterly indifferent to the fact that there is a country here. It’s like a mirror for us.
Now the mirror is held up. What does it show?
A young father from West Jutland.
According to the Danish news, he wants “to be able to take a picnic in peace without risk of wolves.”
But, dear friend, that is worthless. That is beneath human dignity. For the world is wild and vast and violent and it wasn’t made so that you can take a picnic in it. The wolf is a messenger, and it howls:
Remember, human! The universe wasn’t created for your sake. Remember that, or it will be your downfall. I will swallow your sun and kill your god. Have you forgotten yin and yang? Your days in Paradise, as you knew it, are over. New worlds will be born. Act smart if you want to help build them. There is no order without chaos, no safety without the untamed, no peace without war. You must work every day to maintain the balance. To maintain habitable worlds.
Watch out on the roads, dear people—they are more dangerous than a wolf. Watch out for stressed parents who come thundering along the lakeside on their tank of an electric cargo bike—they are more dangerous than a wolf. Watch out when you pop a luxury chocolate in your mouth—they are more dangerous than a wolf. Watch out in love—that is more dangerous than a wolf. Watch out with your selfie stick up on the cliff edge—that is more dangerous than a wolf.
