Endless Dusk

Beneath Yggdrasil it’s a kind of endless dusk. Still, even in the low light I recognized Odin despite his disguise. I don’t know why he does it. Embarrassment, possibly. Love of theatre, or a desire to ask things as someone else. ‘Every I is a dramatic I’, as some academic will say in the future.

So he presented himself before me, trying to find me in the mirk of the well’s shadow.

‘What would you, All-Father?’ He looked disappointed that I had seen through the disguise – a tatty robe and a floppy hat. I had to remind myself that he hadn’t yet drunk from the well. It showed.

‘A drink from the well, Mimir.’ At least he didn’t pussyfoot around.

The virtue of remembering the future, as I do, is that nothing comes as a surprise. Still, for things to happen, everyone else has to reach a point where they act. Odin wanted wisdom – what the well offers is knowledge. Not the same thing at all.

‘Why?’

He hesitated and I understood the purpose of his disguise. Dress humbly and it’s easier to be humble. Wear a hat big enough to hide under and your need, your craving, seem less mortifying. Even if you look like a toadstool.

‘I must know it all – the becoming of things, the nature and design of it all, the ends to which actions tend. Without it I can’t rule.’

I will spare you the moment when he plucked out his left eye. ‘Plucked’ makes it sound like a harp string. In reality it was hours of poking, scratching, cutting away some bits, trying to leave others, shouting at me, weeping or making the sound of it because one tear duct had been dissected.

Eventually it was out. He was half-crazed with shock and disgust and had to recover himself by sitting among the roots for a while, washing off the blood and slime. Not once, however, did he seriously consider stopping.

At length he came back, his old-man mask still covering the immortal face. His left ocular cavity was a blank hole, reddened but otherwise healed. It was like the hole you dig to hide a treasure in. Well, you might.

Without a word, I gave him a hornful of well-water. He drank, his lips absolutely pale.

The future will call it the Placebo Effect. I’m not sure why. The word ‘Faith’ is very vulnerable to trends. Anyway, he jerked and spasmed, assumed expressions of pain, surprise, recognition, and eventually tranquillity.

As I said, a love of theatre. Every eye is a dramatic eye.

‘The runes,’ he said, ‘I want to understand the runes.’

I could have thrown in knowledge of the runs – which are very much more than just angular scratches symbolising vocal sounds, but cogs in the machine of a deep magic which creatures much worthier than Odin work hard to learn. They are called women, I’m told.

He didn’t blink when I explained the price of rune-lore. Well, he couldn’t, could he?

So he turned his walking staff back into Gungnir, the huge spear which never misses. He gazed at it for a moment, knowing what he had to do, and how much it would pain him, and asked me to hold it forward for him. I could have refused and enjoyed a few hours of watching him try to impale himself on a spear which kept falling sideways, but I can observe the solemnities when I have to.

It was an awful sight, and a worse sound. He really did weep, from his remaining eye. He suffered the fears and anticipation of all suicides, which is what seekers after wisdom really are. He dragged himself to the tree and made it to the first layer of branches, Gungnir sticking out of his chest. Yggdrasil, which knew as I had known, that this event had always been advancing upon it, curled around Odin’s arms, suspending him above the black-watered well, which reflected back to him his own agony.

Time is always a bit hypothetical to me. I see future and past equally, and in this tranquil retreat at the world-tree’s roots, it’s all much the same. Hanging on the tree, Odin learned about time, need, pain, life, death, sight, expansion, fulfilment, and price. He hung there in the branches’ grip for nine days and nights, watching the sight of his own suffering in the black mirror. His screams were terrible. His silence was worse.

Then the tree let him fall, and he picked himself up, and I saw that the old-man’s mask had ceased to be a mask and was the All-Father’s face now.

By experiencing the profound desire for knowledge, subjecting himself to self-mutilation, humility before another, the barely-endurable days of suffering, by sacrificing himself to himself, and being down among the suicides, Odin had gained knowledge – even, perhaps, wisdom.

He nodded to me, grasped Gungnir, and turned to the road. I let fall the horn into the well and it slipped beneath the surface of what was, and always had been, entirely ordinary water.