My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  “Because it wasn’t you!”

  “No, no, it wasn’t that. It was more that they’d overcome all this injustice in their lives and eventually succeeded in what they wanted to do. It would have been a lot sadder if they had died before achieving what they were meant to. Like Scott. Scott was bad, I was out of it for days.”

  “He probably wasn’t happy about it either.”

  “Whereas Amundsen’s death was a bit more ambivalent. He did what he set out to. And then there was something decent about him vanishing while trying to save someone else.”

  I stubbed out my cigarette and got up.

  “But what about Nansen, what did he actually do? I mean, what did he achieve? Were there any discoveries? Did he reach somewhere first? I never actually got what it was about him.”

  “You may as well ask,” he said, getting to his feet. “He crossed Greenland on skis, and was frozen in by the ice on board the Fram.”

  I opened the door and went inside.

  “I think I got frozen in one winter,” I said over my shoulder. “The house was like a fridge.”

  “Then there was all that stuff about his refugee passports,” Geir went on behind me. “And Quisling, of course.”

  “There we go again. Gunnar called me a quisling too.”

  “Who’s Nansen then?”

  “I suppose he is,” I said, and sat down again. “It can’t be my dad, anyway. He was useless on skis.”

  * * *

  When Bolibompa was finished, I moved the IKEA camp bed that Njaal had slept on the night before into the children’s room so we could sit in the living room in the evening and not have to worry about waking him up. After that I got started on the dinner while Linda and Christina put them all to bed and Geir sat on a chair in the kitchen so we could keep on gabbing. I put the prawns in a big green bowl, sliced the lemons, and laid them out on a green dish, cut the bread and arranged it in a basket, took four plates and four wineglasses out of the cupboard, got the butter and mayonnaise from the fridge, carried it all out onto the front balcony, where the sun was still shining in that hazily unreal way it does on a summer evening when the shadows grow long and the day draws to an end, yet the air is still warm. When people finish their jobs and turn toward home with the sun still blazing, yet slowly sinking in a great blue sky.

  The children’s voices drifted through the half-open window of their room and out onto the balcony. They were loud and giggling, as boisterous as they were only at bedtime. I set the table, then stood for a moment with my hands curled around the metal railing, looking down on the square below. The shadows of the buildings opposite almost covered the entire area. But the wall beneath me was lit up, the windows sparkling in the sun.

  In the kitchen I rinsed the strawberries and put them in a white bowl, and got the wine and mineral water out of the fridge.

  “That’s about it,” I said. “A glass of wine while we’re waiting?”

  Geir nodded and followed me out. As I opened the door and stepped out onto the balcony, a great big seagull took off from the table, twisting its body away as it flapped its wings, and the next second it was airborne and gone. In its beak was a prawn, and a few others lay scattered next to the bowl and on the wooden decking.

  “Did you see that?” I exclaimed.

  “How could I miss it?”

  “The cheeky bastard.”

  “What do you expect? A bowl of prawns left out on a deserted sixth-floor balcony. It’s an open invitation, isn’t it?”

  I sat down, pressed the corkscrew into the cork and twisted it a few times before pulling it toward me until it released from the neck of the bottle with a gentle thwop. The dark green glass misted. It was such a fine color. Cool green, bottle green, fjord green. And then the pale yellow of the wine in the shiny glass.

  “Skål,” said Geir.

  “Skål,” I said, taking a sip and lighting a cigarette. The taste that assailed my palate as I bent my head to the unmoving flame of the lighter reminded me of summer nights in Kristiansand when I was still a teenager and filled me with the urge to drink until I dropped.

  “Nice wine,” I said.

  “Lovely,” he said.

  That was one of the things Gunnar had accused me of, drinking and smoking dope when I was still at gymnas in Kristiansand. Partly, I supposed, he believed it to be a sign of poor character, meaning I was unreliable and possibly also deranged, certainly not a decent human being, and partly it was meant to explain why I apparently hated Grandma enough to write six books about her to tarnish her name. I understood what he’d written, it was all somehow within the bounds of a logic I knew, but he hadn’t written to me, he’d written to the publisher. Did he think they would pull the novel because its author had drunk beer in his youth, and maybe even smoked dope, and for that reason was surely a despicable person? It didn’t matter, I still felt that was what I was, a despicable person, but it was my emotions that hadn’t changed since I was sixteen, not my reasoning. My reasoning saw things differently. I knew who I was and what I was worth. I knew, too, that being human meant being inadequate, to be human was to err and never quite be good enough. When I looked around me, that was what I saw. Weakness everywhere, shortcomings and flaws, often congealed within a character in the form of self-righteousness, smugness, and conceit. Humility, a word so often bandied about in public contexts, was something hardly anyone knew the meaning of anymore. Only those who had every reason to be conceited, those of real caliber, showed no trace of conceit, only they were humble. Conceit and self-righteousness were part of a defense mechanism without which a person would be crushed under the weight of their own weaknesses, shortcomings, and flaws, and that fact underlay almost every discussion I witnessed, verbal as well as written, in newspapers and on television, but also in my immediate surroundings, in the private sphere. Such weakness could not be admitted, since so much would be lost, and the form of those discussions and the power of the media resolved it by endowing it with their strength. That was why opinions were so important in society, through opinions we appropriated a strength and supremacy we did not possess. That was the function of form here, to obscure the weakness of the individual. Any joining together, around a set of morals, a bureaucracy, an ideology, obscured the weakness of the individual. I knew this because it was what I saw, but when I encountered such things myself, that knowledge was preempted by my emotions, which mechanically fell in with them, slinging me off into the nightmare of feeling myself guilty or inferior. In my dealings with the tax authorities, the bank or credit companies, I was consumed with guilt. Sneaking around the subdivision gardens I was consumed with guilt. Dropping off and collecting the kids from nursery I was consumed with guilt. I knew that I was not inferior to anyone I met there, my weaknesses and shortcomings were no greater than theirs, but they weren’t representatives of themselves, they were representatives of a system in which there were rules, and those rules were very simple: if you followed them you were a good person, if you didn’t you were a bad person. I tried to follow them, but because I was undisciplined I often found myself breaking them. I knew the reason, it wasn’t because I was bad, sloppy, or lackadaisical, but knowing why could in no way make up for what the eyes of the system saw, which was someone who didn’t follow the rules, and this I incorporated into the person I was. Whenever I saw a real work of art or read real literature, all this was brutally shoved aside, for there was another dimension to being human, something quite different, of a different quality, dignity, and significance, it was what had inspired medieval man to build such enormous cathedrals against whose magnificence they became what they actually were: lowly, insignificant, and inconsiderable beings. Tiny little farts of life, one could say. Yet they had built them! They were creators of astonishing, otherworldly beauty, but they were farts too. This was the truth of being human. It was important and unimportant at the same time. Weakness was important, and greatness was important. But not what lay in between. The kind of weakness that hid away in the c
rowd and believed itself to be strength, that saw neither weakness nor greatness, was what I, driven from counter to counter, allowed myself to be intimidated by and to which I submitted. The yearning to drink until I dropped was the yearning to remove myself from it all, if only for a few hours, and the yearning to write something fantastic, something truly splendid and otherworldly, was part of the same thing. It wasn’t an escape from trivial everyday things, because life itself is trivial, but an escape from trivial life’s invasion of my self, which forced on me the idea that I wasn’t a good and decent person but a fool, conceited and inadequate, and which had been forcing that same idea on me ever since I was sixteen and started drinking in Kristiansand, under my uncle’s ever-watchful eye, or so it felt. What I yearned for and had been oblivious to at that time, but which twenty years later I had managed to identify and which was totally unrealizable, was what Hölderlin had expressed when he penned that simple plea: “Come out into the open, my friend.”

  What was “the open”?

  It was freedom, it was utopia.

  But what did it mean?

  Certainly not that we should talk about everything, account for everything, abolish the borders between ourselves, others, and the world, because that would only be to set up new borders somewhere else and to let the human prevail, and what would happen then, and happen soon, was that reality would be gone.

  What Hölderlin meant no one can know for sure anymore. Like all the other Romantics, Hölderlin was a child of the French Revolution, of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and that radical transformation of the old societal order must to them have seemed like a sudden opening through which a whole new potential was revealed. The prevailing order, society’s order or the world order, makes all other ways by which life might be organized seem threatening, dangerous, or corrosive, for which reason such possibilities are not real alternatives, until its own inconsistencies bring it toppling down, to be replaced by a new order, which then becomes the prevailing order that for all the world must not be tampered with. But reading Hölderlin it is difficult to understand “the open” as a political category, concerned with class, relations of production, or material conditions of life. No, the open as Hölderlin sees it was, I imagined, an existential category. Hölderlin was a poet, and what was utopian to a poet was a world without language. Poetry tried to enter into the space between language and the world so as to stand before the world just as it was in itself, but conveying that insight, which perhaps was the oldest of all insights, or committing it to paper, could only be done by the intervention of language, and what had been won was then Orpheus-like and instantly lost. In the world outside language, one could only ever be alone.

  But what kind of world was that?

  A world without language was a world without categories, where every single thing, no matter how modest, stood out in its own right. It was a world without history, in which only the moment existed. A pine tree in that world was not a “pine,” nor was it a “tree,” but a nameless phenomenon, something growing up out of the ground, which moved when the wind blew. Indeed, if one stood on top of a hill one could see how these living organisms swayed this way and that as the wind passed over the flat ground, and one could hear the rushing sound they made. This sight, and this sound, could not be conveyed. As such, it would be as if they didn’t exist. But they did, and do. All it takes is one step and the world is transformed. One step and you enter the world of no names. It is blind, and you see the blindness. It is chaotic, and you see the chaos. It is beautiful, and you see the beauty. It is open, this is the open, and it is meaningless, this is the meaningless. It is also divine, indeed this is the divine. The little blue box with its red sun and the coarsened black surface of its sides, inside, the white matchsticks with their red, bead-like heads of phosphorus rest as if in a bed, is divine as it lies there motionless on the kitchen shelf with its thin covering of dust, faintly illuminated by the light of day outside the window, which slowly darkens as a black blanket of cloud drifts in over the city, and the first electrical charges snap through it at hurtling speed, following their unpredictable paths, thunder rumbling heavily in the sky. The wind as it picks up, and the rain that begins to fall, this is the divine. The hand that grasps the box, pushing the tiny bed out with the tip of an index finger to extract a matchstick, is a divine hand, and the fiery flame that flares up as the hand strikes the red phosphorus bead against the coarse surface, becoming, in the space of a second, a steady, much gentler flame, is the flame of the divine. Yet it burns in the shelter of our language, it burns in the shelter of our categories, it burns in the shelter of all the relations and connections those categories establish. The thought that a state of human innocence once existed, an uncomplicated nearness to the world, in what mythology calls the Garden of Eden, the place from which we come and to which we long to return because there we were at one with our surroundings and with God in a kind of original state of nature, is treacherous in that it implies time, a before and a now, whereas in reality only the now exists, in reality there is but one time for everything: the flame of the divine is burning now, the Garden of Eden exists now, all it takes is one step and you are there. But that step is impossible for us to take, for we are humans, and it is a step that can lead us only into the inhuman.

  To be human is to be several. To be social. The social world is a community. The boundaries of the community are the boundaries of the language. When Hölderlin finally stepped into the open he vanished into madness. In his poems he is not mad, but nor are they in the open, they stand within the social world, looking in at the open. This is what religion has always done. Olav Nygaard called his collection of poetry Ved vedbande, which is to say at the boundary of the divine. Not within the divine, but at its edge. When religion is dismissed as superstition, and poetry becomes marginalized and no longer believes in its own significance, the open vanishes from the sphere of the human, which closes in on itself, since nothing outside it any longer exists.

  Is that a loss? As long as what is outside the human sphere remains impossible to reach, as long as the world in its essence can never manifest itself to us, but merely reveal itself in our language and categories, in other words as something within the human sphere, and the world without language, outside the sphere of the human, is a utopia in the actual sense of the world, a nonplace, why should we strive toward it? Why not simply turn away?

  The reason is that it is where we are from, and where we are destined to return. It is because the heart is a bird that flutters in the chest, it is because the lungs are two seals through which our air smoothly passes, it is because the hand is a crab and the hair a haystack, the arteries rivers, the nerves lightning. It is because the teeth are a stone wall and the eyes apples, the ears mussels, and the ribs a gate. It is because it is always dark inside the brain, and still. It is because we are earth. It is because we are blood. It is because we must die.

  Death, that great restorer of stillness, is outside the sphere of the human too and cannot manifest itself to us, for as it comes to us we cease to exist, much as language ceases to exist as it comes to that which is without language. Death is what the human sphere borders, the absence of language is what our human world borders, and it is against its darkness that we and the world shine. Death and the material world are the absolute, unattainable to us, for as we become them we cease to be ourselves. Our world, shining against the darkness of the it, is however not absolute, but relative and inconstant. Natural science is relative, morality is relative, social science, philosophy, and religion are relative, everything within the sphere of the human is relative. The distinction between discovery and invention is not great, and when it comes to their consequences is nonexistent. Did red and white blood cells exist in the seventeenth century? Yes, they did, but not to the human mind. They were in other words a part of the world but not of our reality. That reality is our world, and for that reason the world of the seventeenth century was different from the world of today, though
the sky and the earth and the twinkling stars are of the same nature and material now as then. Darwin wrote a book, and whereas biological nature before Darwin existed spatially, after Darwin it existed temporally. The world was the same, reality changed. To describe the world is to establish reality. This is the same thought Harold Bloom expresses when he writes that Shakespeare invented man. When Shakespeare’s characters step forward on the stage and reason with themselves, as if aside from the action yet still a part of it, haunted by doubt or stricken by love, at odds with themselves or astonished at themselves, man is then no longer merely a creature of action, a seat of emotions, but also a locus in which these emotions are confronted by a reflective self. It is the appearance of this self that arises from Shakespeare, in Bloom’s opinion, prompting him with some justification to claim that Shakespeare invented humanity, since only when something becomes visible to others besides the single individual does it become real. Reality, our human reality, consists of all that is visible and may be perceived within and between us. Whenever that changes, reality changes too. This is why Greek Antiquity has been such a point of reference in Western civilization for more than two thousand years, and continues to be; so many of our conceptions about the world and about humanity were founded in that culture. History, philosophy, politics, natural science; everything comes from there. The only aspects of our own culture that don’t come from there are religion, which is Jewish, and the machine, which is our own. That a culture as supreme as the Greek, with all its theoretical advances, looked on religion with such mild disdain is not surprising, though their dismissive attitude toward technology most certainly is, not least given their increasingly skilled craftsmanship. Yet if we accept Arendt’s idea that the ancient Greeks sought freedom in the public domain and found the essence of humanity to be there, in what could be laid out in front of everyone, whereas in everything concerning day-to-day subsistence, the material needs of human beings, they saw constraint and necessity, their lack of interest in mechanics and technology, in practical knowledge, becomes easier to understand. The Greeks invented democracy but were unable to conceive of the water closet. Quite as extraordinary is the fact that these people who invented history were unfamiliar with the diary. Still, it surely was not the case that everything to do with the home lay in shadow, a kind of unarticulated zone of reality, with only what went on in public having actual existence by virtue of being formulated there for all, because the private sphere too enjoyed its own stage in Ancient Greece, in drama, more precisely the comedies, which dealt with the less elevated stuff of life and were founded on recognition. The freedom that lies in laughter is quite different from that which lies in the expression of virtues, which is perhaps why Arendt doesn’t mention it, since it strives toward nothing, establishes nothing, changes nothing, distinguishes nothing, but exists simply for the moment, having no other purpose than to make it tolerable.