Echo: Chapter 4

 

What I ended up asking Bjørn, however, was simply the complete opposite of a home: I asked about his oldest brother that he frequently calls an idiotic man-child: Didrik. I suppose I should actually use his name, the poor bastard.

The question was an innocent accident, I will maintain. He texted me after having had a football game with his mates, full of testosterone from making the game-winning goal, and, perhaps not quite knowing what to do with the extra hormones rampaging to about six feet from his personal space, he turned the joy of victory into the despair of aggression. The end result of doing this was as masterful as a Katana-kaji forging a Nihonto, and equally, if not more, deadly. It was quite a sight.

So intense was his aversion for everything that his brother is, and blatantly continues to be, that Bjørn, with the rare ability to sublimate a love for a game into a hatred for his brother, told me what Didrik told him once: that “football is the best metaphor for how evolution as a process is directional yet non-deterministic.”

I sat still there, still, unmoving, wordless, for about thirty seconds. What. In. Damned. Hell? This man, who she barely knew, almost begged for a swift judgment for uttering those mere fifteen words. Having immensely liked his own pronouncement; he plagiarized himself, onto Twitter this time, as surely as child with an accidental thesaurus would, or what the Infinite Monkey Theorem could never have come up with, even if you add a million more monkeys.

To my mind, if anything, this poor man got it wrong coming and going. Evolution is both deterministic and non-directional. The “both/and” is important, no less than the phrases it connects: For it is because there is not a telos to nature that it has rules. It cannot not have rules; what it lacks in overall design it makes up for by the structure of habitat cluster and of clades. Could he have picked a more inapt metaphor?

“Maybe he got it the other way around and didn’t edit his tweet?”, I asked, almost sorry for myself for making excuses for this intellectually-impoverished “armchair philosopher” (which he wrote as his bio in his profile).

“No. If I were a lesser man and could admit to these things, I think I became what I am in order to get as far away from him as was possible. He can’t swim. It’s for nerds, he said.”

Ah. Just then, I got a rare insight into what makes Bjørn himself: a man of both fundamental insecurity and extreme measures. Hence, a predictable, yet hard, man. Hm. Much like the ocean that he loves. 

Which generated, for me, an Ouroboros of a question: Did he become a king crab fisherman because of the way he is, rather like Odysseus finally coming home to Ithaca? Or did the ocean make him be the way he is, rather like Sisyphus rolling his rock? In other words, how is a king crab fisherman made?

I wanted to ask him that question, though I held it back just in time. I would have had to explain the context of my asking, and I wasn’t ready to do that just yet. I was not ready nor able to clothe in words the still-emaciated insight.

I was certain of one thing, though, and this certainty came like an intuition, quick, sure, and ultimately wordless: Bjørn does not think of a home: he never had one.