My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  “How much farther, Daddy?”

  “It won’t be long now. Just be patient!”

  “I’m bored!”

  “Look over there, look! A waterfall on the other side!”

  “I know, I can see.”

  “Do you want some music on?”

  “Yes.”

  I put Dennis Wilson on. Vanja calls it car music when we listen to it at home. In the mirror I could see her lean back in her seat and stare out with an empty look in her eyes. John was fast asleep next to her.

  We came down into Dale, its two gas stations making it a metropolis in this scarcely populated wide-open place where I had spent so many weeks of summer when I was growing up. On the other side of the town a minute later, the steeply sloping ridge of the esker rose up to our right, crowned by Kjellaug and Magne’s farm. Shortly after, as we got out of the car at Jon Olav’s place, everything was still. I heard bees, a busy hum wafting back and forth, rising and falling in the quiet air. I opened the door on Vanja’s side and unfastened her seat belt, she climbed out and looked up at me. John was still asleep and started to cry when I bent over him and began to extricate him from his belts and buckles, but when I lifted him out he hushed and put his head against my shoulder. The house was set back from the road at the top of a steep meadow running down to the deep-blue fjord, whose waters lapped lazily against the shore. The trees on the other side shimmered.

  We were there all day. I dived into the fjord in my underpants as Vanja and Heidi stood and watched me from the rocks, we rowed out in a little boat with Johannes, Jon Olav’s eldest son, guiding us, and when the afternoon came I took Vanja fishing with a rod we borrowed. Vanja had never been fishing before, now I had to teach her, and so that she wouldn’t be disappointed, neither the weather nor the time of day being especially suited for fishing, I kept telling her we probably weren’t going to catch anything. As long as you know, I said. Yes, I know, she said. We pushed through some bushes, picked our way over the rocks, and came onto a little point of land that jutted out into the water, where I cast the spinner. It glittered in the sunlight as it arced through the air and landed with a little splash, and as it sank I handed the rod to Vanja so she could reel it in. Is this right, Daddy? she asked. Yes, that’s fine, I said. I’ve got one! she said. You’re joking, I said. A moment later a fine codfish lay flapping at our feet. Your very first cast! I exclaimed, and she beamed with pride. It was the only bite of the day. Back at the house, Linda took a picture of her with the fish in her hands. For once I felt like a real dad. Liv and Jon Olav were busy making dinner, his whole family was coming, Ann Kristin with her two girls, and Magne and Kjellaug. An hour later, as the sun nestled on the treetops to the west, we numbered eight children, five parents, and three grandparents, all of us seated on the slope, each with a plate in our lap, eating sausage stew and rice. On the outside it was just like any other cozy family get-together, but beneath the surface it was a different story. Magne, whom I had known all my life, was terminally ill. He had always been a strong and vigorous man, a focal point in any gathering, a man of immense charisma, impossible to ignore. Sitting there now he was hardly recognizable. Physically he wasn’t much changed, but his presence had gone. He was hardly there, and it pained me the whole time, even when he was out of sight, I couldn’t grasp it, that such a total transformation could be possible, I’d always equated his presence with him, the person he was, to me they were the same. Now he was a shadow of himself. He chatted a bit, ate a little, occasionally gazing out over the fjord, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, on what was perhaps the most beautiful day of that whole summer.

  Everything he saw would soon be gone to him, and would never come back.

  Not just his family, whose fates and destinies he would never know, but also the fjord and the fell, the grass and the humming insects. And the sun. He would never see the sun again.

  These thoughts tainted everything I saw that day. The beauty of the world became enhanced, and yet it seemed crueler too, for one day it would be gone to me too, and continue to exist for those who remained, as it had done since the beginning of time. How many people had sat where we were sitting and looked at the same view? Generation after generation stretching back in time, all here once, all gone now.

  When evening came and it was time to go home, Vanja wanted to go with Heidi and Linda, so I drove with John, who slept, an hour and a half beneath the towering fells, through the valleys where the shadows of approaching night grew long, past the racing rivers and gushing waterfalls, and all the time I sang out loud, drunk on the sun and death.

  What else could I do? I was so happy.

  * * *

  It was the same sun Broch had written about in the thirties, the same sun that sank into the sea off Brundisium that evening in the year 19 BC. And it was the same sun Turner let shine upon his picture of an ancient harbor, painted some hundred years before. Turner found his motif in Virgil’s epic Aeneid, more specifically in the story of Dido, who falls in love with Aeneas and takes her own life when he parts from her. However, it is not so much the drama of the events Turner is interested in as the place in which they unfold. His painting depicts the harbor at Carthage on the northern coast of Africa and appears markedly Romantic in both its exoticism and its rubble-strewn ruin lust, the many monumental, half-collapsed buildings that fill its canvas. At least this was what I thought the first time I saw it. On closer inspection though, I realized these were not ruins at all, but the opposite. The great chalk-white buildings of Antiquity were actually under construction, and what the painting shows is a city rising rather than falling. It’s a splendid painting. On the right of the picture a cliff thick with vegetation drops steeply away to a river, which then opens out into a harbor. On the other side of the river, in the left of the picture, a building is under construction, and below it are some people, figures made small by the imposing cliff and the buildings. A woman in white, Dido, stands in the midst of a group of men, one of whom, seemingly a soldier, is turned away from the beholder, and most likely this is Aeneas. Building materials lie scattered about, and in the background a number of men seem to be at work, hauling something ashore from a boat. A cluster of boys, almost detached from all this activity, are gathered at the water’s edge, they are naked and have either just climbed out of the water or are about to jump in. While they may be detached from the goings-on at the riverside, they are not detached from their surroundings, on the contrary, the feeling I get when I look at the picture is that everything seems to hang together, the boys are in some way joined up with the vegetation and the water, with the people behind them and the mighty buildings, and the masts of the boats in the background seem almost to melt into the haze that pervades the activity taking place at the river on this particular day.

  While cold light makes everything sharp and separates things out, warm light blurs contours and makes the elements of the scene seep into each other. This was primarily what Turner was interested in, I imagine, since so many of his paintings display this feature, the one of the train, for instance, almost completely blotted out by the snowstorm, hardly a definite line or contour in the picture, everything a blur, everything in flux. Seeing in color, this is what we see, the objects vanishing, or their functions, and the eye that puts aside all it knows, that puts aside all preexisting insight, is the eye that can see the world anew, as if it were emerging before it for the very first time. Turner was interested in the relationship between the inconstant and the immutable, the solid and the fluid, and in that way the train becomes an expression not of anything else, one of the many categories into which it might be placed to do with modernity, industrialism, civilization, and the man-made, but only of what it is in itself, in pure physical terms, an enormous iron object proceeding along an iron track, almost obliterated by the snow, which would obliterate almost any other object in the same way: a sailing ship, a horse-drawn carriage, a funeral procession, a bear. When it comes to Dido Building Carthage, his interest lie
s similarly in the near endless ways in which light alters the landscape, from its shimmering in the river to the haze that absorbs it into the horizon, and this focus naturally affects the scene unfolding there. Dido is perhaps seeing Aeneas for the first time, something is beginning there, yet something is coming to an end too, for what she sees will soon lead her into death. The fact of there being so little difference between what is built up and what comes crashing down, the fact that the buildings under construction could just as well be ruins, compounds this impression. The tropical vegetation also plays a part, growing so wildly, so blindly and with such vigor as to pose a threat to the civilized world, which by comparison is so neat and orderly as to be reminiscent of death. All this exists in Turner’s painting, and yet none of it is central, for its principal motif is the sun.

  The first time I saw the painting, which hangs in the National Gallery in London, I was filled with a sense of welling emotion, it was all I could do to remain standing in front of it, so huge was the impression it made on me. This was of course down to its sheer beauty, but also to the way in which the sun is presented, the way it actually dazzles the beholder. The sun is the primary subject, suspended high above the scene, its rays pervading everything, illuminating all surfaces, either directly or indirectly, conjuring forth all colors, warming the air, making it thick and consuming all distinctions, in a way tying the various elements of the scene together, though without any of the people present even being aware of it. How can this be possible, I thought to myself as I stood there. How can they go about beneath something as mighty and immense, such an insanely creative principle, this enormous sphere of gas aflame in the sky, and yet ignore it so completely? They do not see the sun, but Turner did and, thanks to him, we do too. The sun in this painting is so predominant it is hard not to think of it as holy, and that Turner was worshipping it. Indeed, he valued this particular canvas highly, so highly that an early version of his will declared that he wanted to be buried with it. Later he abandoned this bizarre wish, donating it instead to the National Gallery on condition that it be displayed next to a painting by Claude Lorrain, also of an ancient seaport, a picture he greatly admired and on which his own canvas can be taken to comment. And so it came to pass: in Room 15 of the National Gallery, Turner’s painting now hangs next to Lorrain’s. The similiarities between the two are striking. Both motifs are classical and centered around a female figure – in Lorrain’s instance the Queen of Sheba – both are set in a port lined by ancient buildings, far below that which so dominates both canvases: the sun and the sky. But this similarity serves only to make their differences all the more marked and significant. The most obvious of these is that Lorrain’s harbor opens out on the sea, whereas in Turner’s painting the sea is not visible at all, the harbor all but enclosing the river. And whereas the light in Lorrain’s painting is sharp and clear, in Turner’s it is thick and always somewhat hazy. This makes the effect of the two canvases quite different. In Turner’s, life is hemmed in, there is an inertia about it, in the sense that it rises and falls in the same place, with no way out. This is emphasized by the motif, which on the one hand is death – Dido burying her husband – and on the other, life: Aeneas, the great survivor, has come, and with him love, which is to say the vital force of life and the future, which for Dido, bereaved and emotional as she stands there at the river, is to be her death.

  This claustrophobic sense of being hemmed in is essential to the feeling or understanding of life the painting manifests or explores. The sun too is part of this, its static aspect being likewise compounded, and while it may give life to everything, it precipitates decay too. In Lorrain’s seaport, depicted some hours later, at evening, the breezy air of passing day blowing in from the sea, everything by contrast appears wide open and in motion. The motif here is the Queen of Sheba’s embarkation, but around this event all sorts of other things are going on too, boats putting in and rowing away, sailors clambering up a ship’s rigging or leaning against the gunwales, people going about the quayside, pausing to chat, gazing out at the royal vessel or keeping an eye on a scampering child at the water’s edge, and all of this with the open, sun-drenched sea stretching out toward the horizon. The majestic pseudoantique buildings, the finely dressed people and the many boats in the harbor in front of them are clear and distinct. This has a particular effect on the main event, the embarkation of the queen, which becomes just one of several things going on, significant to those who are a part of it in that precise location, but nowhere else, paling as one shifts one’s gaze outward to the sea or inward to the town. Entities that vanish in the open, existing only locally, are a frequent phenomenon in Lorrain’s work.

  Recently I visited the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and there was a painting by him entitled The Trojan Women Setting Fire to Their Fleet, another scene from the Aeneid, where this very aspect is perhaps even more pronounced. It shows a war fleet at anchor near the shore, some women are standing with flaming torches, some are in a boat on their way out to the ships, but the intense drama of the scene, its momentousness, seems to be taking place among these people only, while the landscape stretches out beyond, unmarked by these events, submerged in the deep slumber of uneventfulness, and above them is the immutable sky with its still-burning sun. Was it viewed in that way when it was painted, four hundred years ago, in Lorrain’s own time? To us the local aspect of any major event is hardly ever present, both because every part of it is focalized and because it is made to exist in all places at once.

  No matter where we happened to be on September 11, 2001, we heard about or saw the same thing, the two planes crashing into the twin towers. This event was in all our minds, there was no outside – apart from the place one happened to be, physically, wherever in the world. This bipartite operation, so characteristic of our age, where something is on the one hand almost completely focalized, and on the other almost completely spread out in all directions, was of course unknown in Lorrain’s day, the technologically unsophisticated seventeenth century, when an event was for those who happened to be there when it took place. When Lorrain interprets a scene from the Aeneid, he brings it across to us in a way not unlike that of a news photographer in our day and age, as a kind of witness – the fact of the former being a fictive witness, and the latter being an actual witness, makes no difference to the form – but he shows us something more besides, which has to do with the time and space in which the event took place. The great, eventless landscape that surrounds what is going on makes it so obvious to us that it is going on only in the scene’s here and now, and that this is the most important, essential, aspect of any event. Oh, how simple and plain an insight, yet it is one thing to know the nature of something, quite another to feel and experience it. How hidden the actual nature of events has become to us is something we understand only when we see something unexpected happen in front of our own eyes. Only then, at such a moment, do we realize how unimaginably few unexpected events unfold in our world, how incredibly systematized and regulated our every movement, even in our largest cities, and, moreover, and this is perhaps the most shocking aspect, the way such an event vanishes again the same moment it occurs.

  * * *

  Some years ago, when we were living in Stockholm and I kept an office on Dalagatan, I was out walking with Linda, we had eaten lunch together, she was on her way home, I wanted to stop at a record store before getting back to work. It was snowing, the street was full of slush, the sky above us gray and leaden. The cars with their yellow headlights and red taillights, their growling engines and swishing wiper blades, the people on the street with their heads bowed to the sidewalk, beneath the vertical faces of the buildings, made the moment a cacophony without my thinking of it in that way, everything was simply how it was supposed to be. Suddenly, something happened, there was a thud, my eyes were drawn to the middle of the road. A car braked, and a man flew through the air above it. He landed heavily on the road surface, and a short distance away a bicycle hit the ground the sa
me moment the car jerked to a halt. The other cars behind it stopped. On both sides of the street pedestrians stood motionless on the sidewalks, eyes fixed on the middle of the road. The man, wearing a thick blue down jacket, sat up slowly. He had a big, bald head. He sat there, looking emptily into space. Blood trickled from his forehead and down his nose. Great flakes of snow whirled in the air around him. The thought occurred to me that I should do something, and I opened my bag to get my phone, but then I saw a young man just in front of us with his own phone pressed to his ear, I heard him say there’d been an accident, so I put mine away again just as the car door opened and a man got out. He crouched down in front of the cyclist, said something to him, gripped him under his arms, helped him up, put him in the front seat of the car, clicked the seat belt into place, slammed the door shut, climbed in behind the wheel, shut his own door, and drove off.

  The street had opened like a flower, now it closed again. Apart from the bike, which was still lying there on the road, everything was exactly as before.

  The young man on the phone said there was no need for an ambulance after all.

  I looked at Linda.