Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

At the sight of the objects on the floor and Bo’s nimble fingers quickly gathering them up, as if he were anxious to hide something, Jonas felt another niggle of suspicion — he could not have said why — and decided that the time had come: ‘Bo, there’s something I need to ask you …’

‘Have you seen these?’ And all of a sudden Bo became a whirlwind, roiling around in another suitcase. ‘American comics!’ And Jonas forgot all else. For a while.

But he never forgot the revelation he had had when Bo was juggling. So powerful was this lesson that years later Jonas would lay it like a keel under his ambitious television series. And it was the threat to this essential premise which Jonas had in mind as he sat opposite Marie H. — looking, you might say, down the barrels of the guns on a battleship — in a café on the Rossio in Lisbon. He had all twenty-odd programmes planned out in minutest detail, not least the links between them, the wide-ranging network of cross-references. If the NRK management, which is to say: Marie H., ordered him to call a halt now, halfway, it would not only mean that the series as a whole would be ruined, that viewers would miss experiencing the magical effect produced when snippets from all of the programmes were borne in mind at the same time — it would also cause the twelve partially completed programmes to fall out of Jonas’s hands. The management did not understand the motivation behind his concept, the truly original, challenging aspect of it. They simply could not grasp the idea of a unified whole. Nor that the potential existed for unimagined wholes. Loose, crazy, tentative, but intriguing schemes. Jonas was afraid that no one today appreciated the idea of an alternative whole. But that was what he had to offer — to offer NRK and the viewers. A whole that only art could produce. A whole so valuable that it could not be measured in terms of money. Half the programmes would only give half a whole. It would be like seeing only one side of the disc on Bo Wang Lee’s chain. A lot of meaningless symbols spinning in mid-air.

Jonas was exaggerating. He knew that a few of the individual programmes would be good. And it was not as if they could be sure of selling the entire series to every foreign television station that had expressed an interest. But the main endeavour, the possibly quite brilliant concept behind the work would come to nothing. The result would not be revolutionary television, in the sense that it changed lives, changed people, opened them out. No one can blame Jonas Wergeland for feeling frustrated. It was tough, it was unbearable to think that this magnificent and utterly original project was in danger of being cancelled by blinkered bureaucrats who did nothing but count the money and pore over administrative jigsaw puzzles; people who lacked the ability to see that, strange though it seemed, it was even possible for out-and-out ‘individualists’ to break onto the scene in Norway, and who were therefore also incapable of cutting the crap, making an exception, investing , in order to ensure a fertile environment for such rare individuals. There was — there is no getting away from it — also a Festung Norwegen within the arts, a cultural Norway which preferred to remain isolated, in all ways.

Jonas knew, however, that despite her battleship bearing, Marie H. was not an anti-visionary bureaucrat, she was among other things a poet. Therein lay his hope. Only she had the power to quash all the other second-rate and to some extent envious programming controllers. Jonas searched frantically for words, for arguments, that might sway the woman sitting across from him, almost wished he had a bowl of oranges handy; he sat at a café table on the Rossio and knew that he had come to a milestone in his life — whatever the outcome. She did not seem all that interested, did not even look at him, but began to leaf absent-mindedly through her book. For Jonas this was an intolerable situation. Like having to turn back just as one sighted a cape, the sea route to a new continent. He had written a long and impassioned report to Marie H., explained the grand artistic concept, the overall structure and the threads linking the programmes to one another. His appeal was turned down. And as if that wasn’t enough, when he looked across the desk in her office at Marienlyst, he noticed that she had also corrected his language, that several sentences were marred by red squiggles. It was like writing an ardent love letter in which you bared your soul, only to have the recipient proceed to correct your spelling.

Jonas looked up at the forest of television aerials rising over the jumble of tiled roofs on the hillside behind the theatre. Not that long ago Norway too had been covered with aerials like that. This sight was a comfort to him, an indication of the many people who were waiting to receive his signals, his series. All the more reason then that the project should not be amputated, left half-done, like so much else in Norway.

‘Did you really come all this way to try to make me change my mind?’ She glanced up from her book. In her eyes he saw laughter and disbelief.

‘I honestly had no idea you were here,’ Jonas said. Then said it again. He may have said it once too often. She was still eyeing him doubtfully. ‘I’m here on holiday. Or rather, ever since I studied architecture I’ve wanted to have a look at the weird Manueline architecture. I often visit cities to look at the buildings.’

She picked up his yellow notebook, as if thinking to catch him in a lie. She studied the sketch of the ornate fountain in the square in front of them. He knew it was good. She raised her eyebrows, genuinely impressed. Or as a sign that he had been accepted.

‘You’ll be going to see the Hieronymite Monastery and the Tower of Belém, then?’ she said. ‘We could go together if you like?’

He nodded, inwardly exulting, but managing to keep a straight face. She was going out to dinner, had to take a train to Sintra from the Rossio station, just around the corner. She had friends who lived out there among the eucalyptus trees, the ruins of Moorish castles and old palaces. But she would be back the following day. They arranged to meet outside the monastery, fixed a time.

That evening he roamed desultorily through the narrow streets of the Bairro Alto, one of Lisbon’s two hills. The strains of commercialised, almost caricatured versions of wistful fado songs drifted out of doorways here and there, but could not entice him in. In any case he was not feeling at all melancholy, he felt hopeful. He ran his fingers over the glazed ceramic tiles on the walls of the houses. He liked this proof that by repeating the pattern in one tile you could turn a large flat surface into a work of wonder. While at the same time nullifying the flatness. Now that, that was how he envisaged his television series: as a string of almost identical programmes which, when set side by side, would create an optical illusion. A form of infinity. Māyā .

He rounded off his stroll with a trip on the old street lifts, the mini Eiffel Towers in the Chiado district. Rode up and down like a kid. He thought about the next day. Things could go up or down. He wondered — possibly because she was a poet — whether there had been a message in the last thing she had said before leaving the café: ‘Remember, television is bad for you.’

After a period of youthful scepticism, Jonas had gradually come to accept the more dubious aspects of television. But only after his own television career was at an end did he find conclusive proof, in the strange story of Viktor Harlem, that TV viewing, even when taken to the extreme, was not necessarily the evil which certain prophets of doom made it out to be.