Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

Weak after such a long period of complete immobility, the effort made him giddy, and to collect himself he bent forward and rested his hands on his knees. For several seconds he remained like this, waiting for his respiration to return to normal and the faintness to recede, before he stood up and continued:

“The time has come, the day is near! He who buys shall not be content, and he who sells shall not be sorrowful. All hands will be weak, all knees like water. They will wrap themselves in mourning, their whole bodies will shake. All faces will blush with shame, and all heads be shaved bare. They will throw their silver in the streets, and their gold will be no more than scrap. Neither gold nor silver will save them from the wrath of the Lord. It will not assuage their hunger or fill their bellies. But it has caused them to fall into the ways of sin. They made disgusting idols out of them, and they were proud of their fine trinkets. And so I shall turn it all to rubbish for them. I will behave to them as they have behaved, and judge them as they themselves have judged. Then they will learn that I am the Lord.

“See, misfortune will follow misfortune! The end is near, indeed it is near. See, the end is close for you! Now it’s your turn, you who live here in this land. The time has come, the day is at hand! Fear and bewilderment reign, and not a sound of joy in the hills. Soon I shall visit my anger on you and execute my judgment of wrath on you. Then you will know that it is I, the Lord, who strikes.”

Exhausted, he turned away from the crowd that had gathered about him, and took a few tottering steps before he fell to the ground. Some of the onlookers cautiously approached the still body, but when it suddenly began to be racked with spasms, they backed away horrified. His arms and legs beat against the earth, his head turned from side to side, eyes open all the while, and was then thrust back with great force, as the nerves in the various parts of his anatomy seemed to become aware of each other, and in a common effort arched the body backward. When, the next moment, it fell back, blood was coming from a wound at the back of his head, and down his chin from his lower lip, which his teeth had bitten through.

For a long while the multitude stood motionless around him. A group of people in a semicircle around a prostrate man in the marketplace. The sky above them was clear, the sun high and scorching, the shadows they cast on the ground were short. The man they were staring at was emaciated, his open eyes lifeless, his mouth gaping open. But he wasn’t dead, the blood that ran from the corners of his lips was healthy and red, and the hand that for the past few seconds had lain clenched on the ground, covered in dust, was suddenly opened and pulled with a jerk to his side. At the same moment a breath of wind passed along the street from the far end. It swirled a thin layer of dust into the air as it reached the marketplace and made their clothes rustle gently as, the next second, it whisked past them. Then one of them knelt down before Ezekiel, and that peculiar immobility, which is so often found on the fringes of vehemence, dissolved as quickly as it had descended.

When he came to his senses again, it was dark outside. He realized he was lying in his own house. There were some others there, he noticed; they were standing in the darkness in front of the door, breathing. He thought it must be the people who’d carried him back in.

“Who’s there?” he asked.

They took a few steps into the room, and he saw it was the two brothers.

“Praise be to God and his prophet Ezekiel!” said one.

“Praise be to God’s prophet Ezekiel,” said the second.

Both made him a low bow. And then they left. Ezekiel heard how their steps in the street got fainter and fainter, until they disappeared altogether.

He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but it was no good, he was too restless. Up until then his longing for the divine revelation had been controlled by the strong will he’d been subject to, but now that he was no longer constrained by it, this yearning filled him. The awful thing was that there was no way he could satisfy it. After tossing about on his bed for several hours, he got dressed and went out. He stood for a long time staring up at the sky, but even though he told himself that that too was part of God, it didn’t help, the longing only grew worse and worse, and he walked out of the town and to the place where they had revealed themselves the first time. But even this landscape didn’t exude anything but itself. The water lay dark and still in the canal, the trees stood motionless on the bank, between their deep shadows the sand glimmered faintly in the moonlight.

Would he ever witness a divine revelation again?

He sank down and bent his head to the earth and prayed to his God. He half imagined they would come into view in the sky above him, but when he tilted back his head and looked up, he saw nothing but the glimmering stars, the ocean of darkness between them.

Taking into account that God’s words were physically part of him, Ezekiel’s life leaves very little impression. He spoke prophetic words to the people, but few of them listened to him, and even fewer took what he said to heart. He bore their sins by lying on a particular side of his body for a certain number of days, and by eating a particular amount of food at the same times each day, but without these actions leaving traces anywhere except in his own consciousness, and in what he was later to write. And he acted out God’s plans for the future in odd, pantomimic scenes, aided by the props he had to hand, without considering that the niggardly, improvised feel this gave them might possibly undermine the grand and frightening impression they were meant to convey.

Ezekiel was the Lord’s representative among men, he was the embodiment of the Lord’s will, but because Ezekiel was a man, this will was embodied in a human way, in short it was limited and helpless. Before Ezekiel, the Lord’s applications to mankind had always taken place out of bounds: the border between the Lord and the chosen one was absolute. With Ezekiel, this boundary was crossed for the first time. Ezekiel not only ate God’s words, making them a part of his own body, but God also took control of that body, directly, by paralyzing his tongue and thus controlling when he could speak and when he couldn’t, and indirectly, through his detailed commands and decrees. Moses, too, had received detailed commands, but in Ezekiel’s case, unlike in Moses’s, the Lord directed his commands toward his body , what he did , which was then to be interpreted by those about him. Moses’s commandments came from an absent God, written on tablets of stone, Ezekiel’s from a God that was present, embodied in his own frame. It was as if God used Ezekiel’s body as a means to get in among people. But even though he managed this, and moved among them through Ezekiel, there is something inadequate, yes, perhaps even something unsuccessful, about the attempt. What was great in God became small in Ezekiel, what was divine, human, and after that what remained? The actual message, one might perhaps say, the thing God wanted to express in the midst of humanity: his sorrow that they had deserted him, his fury at their worship of other gods, his threat to exterminate all living things, unless they followed the right path. But by being deployed through Ezekiel’s body, which could offer only the most limited means of expression, the depths of the sorrow, the violence of the anger, the irrevocability of the prophecies: all these were lost. All that was left was words, words, words.

This was something the Lord must have seen and understood. Just a year after he’d made him his chosen one, the spirit raised Ezekiel up again and took him to Jerusalem, where he witnessed a scene that had clear similarities with what he had mimed in front of his house only a year before. But what had been acted out in an abstract and narrow miniature world, with Ezekiel as a wildly staring giant outside the chalk-drawn city wall, now took place in the massive reality of Jerusalem, with all the concomitant fire and blood, maiming and death, doubtless to increase the power of the prophecies that Ezekiel’s helpless performances had weakened.