My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  The first word was “Driven.”

  Driven into

  the terrain

  with the unmistakable track:

  grass, written asunder.

  Aside from its everyday, transportational sense, “drive” means to propel, to force to go into or penetrate. It suggests the existence of an outside, a place from where what is propelled comes. The German original has “verbracht,” and that contains the same element of force. Another English translation has “deported,” suggesting forcible removal from one place to another.

  Something is driven in from outside, not tenderly and with caution, but firmly, without consideration, harshly and mechanically even; this seemed like a plausible interpretation. But driven into where? Into “the terrain with the unmistakable track.” This could be the poem’s own terrain, the place established by its very designation, and yet that place seems to exist already, whatever is driven in is already driven, now an element of that terrain.

  The terrain is characterized by way of “the unmistakable track.” Like “driven,” “unmistakable” has something unaccommodating about it, something firm and incontestable. The unmistakable is hard fact, something a person can do nothing about. If “driven” and “unmistakable” are words suggestive of disregard or lack of consideration, carrying with them a more or less direct sense of power or enforcement, then “asunder” is more manifestly suggestive of this in that something is patently said to have been damaged. Yet we understand that this is not a physical force, but a force inflicted by language, the grass being “written” asunder. So it is the way the grass is considered that is damaged, rather than the grass itself.

  This damaged way of considering is driven into a preexisting terrain characterized by an unmistakable track, and, one might suppose, damages the way of considering that terrain; this is what is driven.

  * * *

  The first three lines are not just nameless, they are also lacking in pronouns. Only actions are described, as if they occur on their own, at the same time as the element of force attaching to the words “driven” and “asunder” associates them with a will, a certain origin, something not arbitrary. Actions without agents often relate to weather. “It’s raining,” we say, “it’s blowing” or “it’s snowing,” but what exactly is doing the “raining,” the “blowing,” the “snowing”? The rain is, the wind is, the snow is; the actions are their own agents, conflated with the subject, and to denote that we use the pronoun “it.” “It” points toward a force that exists outside of us and over which we have no control. When actions in the human domain are described without pronouns, as in this case, those actions share that same meaning, it is as if they stem from some force we cannot control, the impersonal and nameless itself: “driven,” “written.”

  grass, written asunder. The stones, white,

  with the shadows of grassblades:

  Do not read any more – look!

  Do not look any more – go!

  The next entity, the white stones with the shadows of grassblades, belong either to what has been driven or to the terrain as it was before; presumably the former, since a connection exists between the two, grass and grassblades are much the same thing, and the writing and the shadows are also connected, because what would constitute a shadow of grassblades if not the word “grassblades”?

  The first six lines establish an ambivalent space in that they contain elements that simultaneously establish the space and undermine that of which it consists, which is language.

  Into what kind of terrain may “grass, written asunder” be driven? No truly tangible one, the way terrain is in the real world with its concrete objects and physical materiality, in such terrain the asunder-written grass would likewise be an object, characters on a page. But it can be driven into the consideration of that terrain, into that which goes before the gaze of the eye that sees it and colors its perception of it. The terrain as it is considered, into this the asunder-written grass may be driven, and into its recollection. In the poem the terrain exists as a terrain prior to the writing asunder of the grass, and as a terrain after the writing asunder of the grass. At the same time the poem is itself writing, thereby itself carrying that which inflicts the damage. Yet only the grass is written asunder. And only in this terrain, which the poem opens before us, does the written-asunder grass, the damaged way of considering, obtain. It is not driven into all terrrains, but into this one, characterized by the unmistakable track. So what kind of a terrain is it? Where is the poem?

  The opening sets out a terrain and a situation, and leads into a plea. Do not read any more, it says. Why? Because what we read, writing, writes the world asunder? Look instead, we are told. But then the plea is expanded: we are not to look either. Why? Perhaps because looking and reading are so closely connected. In characters on the page and in the gaze of our eye the world may emerge to us. To the eye the world exists merely in the fleeting now of the moment. What the eye sees is unique and can never return. Language ties the moment down and turns it into something else. Language is not, and can never be, the same as what it represents, but will always comprise its own shadow world pointing toward the real one, so what we see when we read is language, not the world itself. The question is whether language colors our vision and thereby our perception of the world. The grass being written asunder does not necessarily mean that the grass is damaged only in the writing, but also when we lift our gaze from the writing to look at the world. Therefore the plea goes on. Do not read, do not look, but go. To read and to look are in a certain sense passive actions by which we perceive the world; to go, however, is to actively perform, to penetrate into the world. We must not contemplate the world, but act within it. We must not read, and we must not look; instead we must go. Go toward something, perhaps; something whose nature is as yet unknown to us.

  Go, your hour

  has no sisters, you are –

  are at home. A wheel, slow,

  rolls out of itself, the spokes

  climb,

  climb on a blackish field, the night

  needs no stars, nowhere

  does anyone ask after you.

  “Your hour has no sisters.” What does that mean? Perhaps that every moment is unique and stands alone, or that only this hour does? This hour, which thereby is the last? It says “your” hour, rather than any hour in general, not time as such, but your time, it belongs to you and has no sisters. It stands alone and is unique. Perhaps it is the hour of death, though this could also be marked out in some other way.

  “You are –,” it goes on, the dash a slight hesitation or uncertainty, as if something as yet were being kept open. “Are” as in existing? Yes, but something has to follow. If the hour that has no sisters is your last, then what lies in the “are” is death, this is the conclusion: your hour has no sisters, you are dead; this is the eventuality the dash suspends in the air. And yet you are not dead, you are at home. It is as if that assertion is postponed, by means of the dash and by the repetition of “are.” You are – you are at home. Is saying you are at home the same as saying you are dead? That death is a coming home to the darkness from which we once arose? Why not just say it outright, you are dead, you are home? Is the poem unable to say “dead”? If so, why? Because no one knows what death “is”? Because it “is” not, whereas the act of naming it, death, turns it into “something”? Or are you simply at home? Where, in that case, is that? In memory, its own memory, or in language, this language?

  The lines that follow add depth to the terrain. In the terrain is a wheel, it “rolls out of itself,” which is to say turns slowly of its own accord, its spokes climb up a blackish hill. The night needs no stars, it says; does that mean the stars are there but superfluous, since the night in question is deeper and of another nature than any through which light might penetrate, or does it mean that there are no stars at all in this night, but simply darkness?

  After the wheel and the night, it says: nowhere does anyone ask after you. You are eit
her forgotten or someone who cannot be asked after. Because you are dead? Because they who do not ask want to forget you? Or because they are dead?

  Nowhere does anyone ask after you.

  Who are you then, when you are absent in the minds of others? In your own eyes you are alone, in the eyes of others you are no one. But why “nowhere,” why not just “nobody”? “Nowhere does anyone ask after you” – in this no person is mentioned, no name, simply the absence of any place in which someone asks after you. And what is required when someone asks after someone else? A name; there is no other way of asking after someone other than by a name. That name is not asked after. The object of the asking after is unnamed.

  Until now the poem has been without human presence, apart from the “you” who “goes” – we have been given a track, grass written asunder, white stones with shadows of grassblades, a turning wheel, a blackish field, a night that needs no stars, places in which no one asks after you – yet people are there nonetheless, the agents behind the act of driving, the writing asunder, the not asking after you. Such is the home of the “you.”

  * * *

  In such an unwordy poem, in which almost nothing of the world is named, each word and each named element is lent extraordinary weight. A wheel mentioned in Ulysses means practically nothing. A wheel mentioned in this poem insists on meaning. But how is it to be understood? The wheel is one of the oldest symbols known to us. It is the sun, it is repetition, it is the serpent that bites its tail, it is time, cyclical and repeating of ages, it is eternity. Here the wheel is mentioned immediately following the hour, yet the two are unconnected, they are next to each other, the wheel turning on its own, of itself, climbing on the blackish field. What makes this image of the wheel remarkable is that the wheel is in motion, in a particular terrain, seen in the now and in a particular space, seen here. As a symbol or an allegory, the wheel represents something else, and it is this other to which the wheel refers that then becomes primary, that which the wheel “is.” The more tangible and specific the wheel, the weaker its symbolic force, since being made concrete individualizes it, until eventually the realism becomes consummate and the wheel becomes merely this wheel, the way it is here and now, without any other meaning than its own. The wheel in this poem exists between the all of symbolism and the one of realism. It is not a purely symbolic wheel because it turns on its own in the field at night, nor is it a realistic wheel because no real wheel can ever turn on its own in the field at night.

  How are we to understand it?

  The wheel is apparently something other than a real wheel, it carries more meaning than its own self, and perhaps the concretization of it, which gathers the meaning closer around this particular wheel in this particular poem, in a way individualizes its symbolic meaning, making it an idiosyncratic symbol, something valid only here, in this poem, whose meaning in that case arises in relation to, and is regulated by, the context in which it appears, the other words and images in the poem.

  But the space opened by the ambivalence between realistic and symbolic has been opened before, often in works of literature from ages of crisis caught between two different worldviews or two different aesthetic paradigms, frequently two sides of the same coin. An immediate example here would be the Book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament, its depiction of the revelation of the divine.

  Ezekiel first sees a burning cloud in the sky above; in it he sees four creatures, each with human form, each with wings, each with feet hooved like a calf’s, and each with four faces: a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle. Fire blazes among them, and lightning flashes from the flames. I beheld the living creatures, he writes, and behold, by each was a wheel upon the ground.

  Until this point the creatures have been in the sky above him, but now they are next to wheels on the ground. The wheels are tall and terrifying and rimmed with eyes. They looked like they were made of golden beryl, he writes, and whenever they moved, no matter in which direction, they moved without turning. Above these mysterious wheels is a canopy, above the canopy something reminiscent of a throne that seems to be made of sapphire, and on it a figure resembling a human being, immersed in fire and with a radiant light surrounding him. The figure is God. But what are the wheels? Clearly, they are allegorical, rimmed with eyes, yet also tangible, moving this way and that on the ground as though of their own accord.

  In the oldest Scriptures of the Old Testament, God’s appearance to man is always in the guise of some external phenomenon. God appears as a burning bush, a whirlwind, a pillar of fire, and as a man who comes wandering across the plain outside Abraham’s tent. Ezekiel’s revelation too is described in terms of an external phenomenon, something in the sky above him, but what he sees is not merely a medium by which the divine reveals itself, as in the instance of the burning bush, but the divine itself; moreover, other revelations follow, clearly visions: lying on the ground with eyes closed he is transported to the temple of Jerusalem, where he sees the same four figures and the same four wheels. This is what makes Ezekiel’s revelations so odd and so ambivalent: what he sees is not simply inside or outside his own being, it is at the same time the divine itself. Ezekiel found himself caught between two different modes of perception of the religious, where in the former a chasm existed between the human and the divine, while in what was to come there was a connection between them, by way of man’s inner experience, which is to say the mystical. Midway between them are the wheels with all their eyes, moving this way and that on the ground beneath the throne of God.