We're all gulls

February 24, 2011
We're all gulls

In the “Coda” to Karl Knausgaard’s A Time for Everything, the narrator (Henrik Vankel) is on a crab-fishing expedition with his brother and sad misfit father. It is then and there the father shows him the tiny angel hands under the wings of the gulls.

          The angels were marooned on earth when God died; for when God dies, heaven shrivels into nothing.  Then, the angels have no home; moreover, they are homeless in a place, the earth, they care nothing about. Their connection to the earth and its inhabitants was only in the tasks God gave them to perform here.  With no Task-giver, there is for them only drifting − nothing else, except survival. That is the why of their mutation from seraphim to cherubim to gulls − to survive. (It is unclear why survival is so important, except that there may be no choice: if they are eternal in or under the heavens, they must survive.)

          It is on this crab-fishing trip with brother and father, too, that Vankel admits that there is no one he loves sufficiently that he couldn’t contemplate his or her death with detachment. He has become an observer, a watcher. He considers, he categorizes, he draws hypotheses. He wonders about things, but the wonder never becomes wonderment; more accurately, he speculates. Dispassionately. Detached. He collects stories; but all the stories collects are as specimens; none has any meaning beyond itself. At home, he’ll empty his pockets and put the specimens into their proper places on certain shelves or in particular drawers in the correct cabinet. There are no stories, only these specimens; there is no story, only taxonomy. As the angels have become gulls, there is left only the reasons that reason knows.

Or something like that. I could be wrong.

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Hear Edwin Morgan read his poem at poetryarchive.org.

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