Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

I reorganised the room. This time I hung the sheets in concentric rings. And the first time I sat down on a chair in the centre and scanned the headings of the subjects and the classes surrounding me, receding layers of script, words forming sentences of sorts, spokes radiating to an outer rim, I sensed what a tremendous boost this gave to my thinking. Everything seemed to explode. I saw patterns of breathtaking beauty. I glimpsed concepts, totally new sciences, with names as yet unuttered by any human being. I caught flashes of solutions in which everything interlocked — not by dint of thousands of tiny gear-wheels, but with all the categories mixed up in such a way that gear-wheels meshed with butterfly wings and crystals, the whole thing encircled by elementary particles. I was thrilled, but I was also startled. The plastic tablecloths seemed to glow. For some time I felt that I was on the threshold of a breakthrough which would have incalculable consequences, that I was all set to make a magnificent contribution to civilisation. There I was: friendless, gaunt, dead-beat, but I truly had created a chandelier of knowledge, three-dimensional, something that could be considered from all sides, with every piece hanging in its rightful place in relation to the others, not packed in boxes and tucked away singly on shelves. At my most audacious moments I felt I was on the scent of something comparable in importance to the alphabet, something which would enable us to form new concepts; an instrument by which mankind could steer, one which could give progress a hefty, and most timely, nudge.

During those first weeks, when we spent more time in bed than out of it, I told Margrete about my endeavours, about the project which I had, by then, abandoned. She got a big laugh out of my descriptions of this, laughed heartily and sincerely, as if it really was a priceless joke. But she caressed me too, as if to console me; she ran a finger wonderingly over the double scar I have over one eyebrow: ‘Hey … you’ve got an “X” on your forehead,’ she whispered. That was all she said, but I ought to have known what she meant.

And then I met my Silapulapu. Silapulapu was the chief of the natives who killed Magellan on the little island of Mactan. On the threshold of his great triumph, almost at the very moment of victory, Magellan was run through by spears. And that is pretty much what happened to me.

I woke one morning with an awful sinking feeling in my stomach and a bitter taste in my mouth. I leapt out of bed and ran, stark naked, straight into the centre of my circle. It was all just a blur. I stared at the transparent plastic sheets covered in writing, only once again to see nothing but chaos. I tried to regain my clarity of vision, but everything was just grey. Māyā , I murmured under my breath. Everything was māyā . I spent the whole day wandering around in a daze, staring, reading, thinking. My eyes hurt, my head hurt, I felt sick from exhaustion, from hunger, from lack of sleep. I was still naked when I climbed into bed that night.

I ought probably to repudiate my grotesque project, make fun of it. And yet I have to admit that I look back on those years with something akin to respect. It may have been a ridiculous venture, but it was beautiful. And who knows, maybe, for a second or two, I actually was only millimetres away from a Pacific Ocean discovery.

I stuck at it, almost in spite of myself, for another few weeks, hung up still more closely-written plastic sheets at different points around the circles. All in vain. Nor was my base at the College of Architecture of any use to me now, my studies of the construction and design of some of the world’s most audacious buildings: the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Opera House in Sydney, the Parliament Buildings in Brasilia. I had an idea that the problem lay in the number of main classes. I would have to prune them, single out those which I felt might function in the same way as the spider’s anchor points for the first foundation threads. I thought of Francis Bacon who had managed with just three categories: Memory, Imagination, Reason.

Eventually, almost dropping with exhaustion and possibly inspired by Uncle Melankton’s attempt to reduce the Encyclopedia Brittanica to a single word, I managed to gather everything under two headings: Matter and Mind. Then: Living and Dead. And finally just one: Storytelling. This single main class could thereafter be split up into subdivisions consisting of bigger and bigger lies.

I gave up. It was — and I say this even when looking at it with today’s eyes — the greatest defeat of my life. Or the second greatest. My only comfort was that my shipwreck had been a private affair. No one ever learned of it. I held my peace and went to work in television. I suppose I could say: with Storytelling. Lies. When they showed me the studio, the little cubicle from which I was to do my announcing, in my extraordinary naivety I thought to myself: this could be the perfect hiding place. I did not know that television was a medium within which a fool could be taken for a wonder.

I had one little ray of hope, though. On that day when I found Le petit prince by Saint-Exupéry on the Deichman’s well-organised shelves, Karen Mohr opened the book and read a sentence aloud to me in exquisite French and then translated it: ‘It is only with the heart that once can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.’ I did not think about it at the time, but I thought about it when I abandoned my Project X: maybe it was not my eyes, nor even my brain that I should be training, concentrating on, if I was to discover something new, but my heart.

I reached this insight at about the same time that I met Margrete again. All of the subject headings in the world, all of Melvil Dewey’s thousands of sections, flowed smoothly into one: Love. And who knows, perhaps it was those crazy hypotheses which gave wind to Margrete’s sails and caused her to set course for Norway once more. She certainly told me that for a long time she had considered settling down somewhere else. But then she had been overcome by an uncontrollable and inexplicable urge to go home.

And now, ten years later, I was standing facing this same woman. And yet even after ten years and thousands of experiences of love I could not understand why she should suddenly seem so hostile; why, towards the end of a confused conversation, she should have worried so much at the necklace that the string snapped.

Pearls sprayed everywhere, went tumbling to the floor. The sound triggered a memory from my childhood: I had knocked a bag of peas out of the cupboard as I tried to sneak a handful of raisins. They made an incredibly complex sound, those peas. A māyā sound if ever there was one, layer upon layer of the same sound, in different nuances of tone. I can still recall the sight of it too, how slowly the pearls, which had suddenly acquired an even deeper sheen, fell through the dim lamplight in the living room, as if they were not falling, but drifting, floating downwards. I noticed how Margrete seemed to be trying to follow each individual pearl with her eyes, the course of each one, at the same time. As if her eyes were doing the splits. And since I was watching her more than the pearls, I saw how she, too, positively fell apart and tumbled to the floor, shattering into pieces that rolled off in all directions. She muttered something which I only grasped after she had muttered it several times: ‘My life’s thread has snapped.’

Then she simply walked out. Or at least, she turned in the doorway and said goodnight. She paid no mind to the pearls, it was as if they were now worthless, a currency which had fallen disastrously in value after a terrible crash — of a moral, not an economic, nature.