Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

When I got home I got out the tapes of Dad’s — or no, I had better maintain, still, the distance I have tried to observe throughout: Jonas Wergeland’s — television series. I kept them on the same shelf as Knut Hamsun’s collected works, since I happen to believe that this series ranks alongside the great works of Norwegian literature. I drove into the city, back to the club. As soon as I set foot in that vast, empty space and saw the television sets scattered about like basic forms of basalt or black marble I knew I was on the right track.

The smell of the party still hung over the barren, black-painted hall: cigars and booze, the whiff of expensive perfumes mingled with the indeterminate, aromatic odour of the somewhat disappointing food we had had. There were still a few bottles sitting about. The floor was sticky. Purely by chance I was dressed all in black and for a moment I had the feeling that I was merging with the room, that the massive hall was going to swallow me up. I shrugged it off and began to arrange the trolleys holding the TV sets and video recorders in a big circle. I thought of Stonehenge, that enigmatic arrangement of megaliths in England. On reflection, I seem to remember a newspaper photograph from the time when the Thinking Big series was first shown on NRK TV: a pensive-looking Jonas Wergeland pictured in his office, like an inventor in his laboratory. My eye had been caught not so much by his facial expression as by the screens in the background, flat panels arranged in a semi-circle. On them one could see large sheets of paper covered in writing, squares with lines running between them. It looked as though he was standing in a many-sided room packed with ideas.

I slotted one tape, one programme from the series, into each video recorder. The machines were all of the same make and hooked up to one another in such a way that I could start them all at the same time with just one remote control. I pressed the button and there I stood, all at once, in the centre of a vast hall, in the centre of a circle of television screens, each showing a programme from Jonas Wergeland’s television series. The sets seemed almost to form an electronic membrane around me, as if I were inside a massive, life-giving organ, a breathing entity. Let me put it this way: I would not have missed it for the world. It was like being touched, caressed almost, by something, a quality, which was light-years away from the universe I ordinarily inhabited and by which I was surrounded in this room, in the shape of mementos of a meaningless party: the dregs of wine in plastic cups and the reek of stale smoke, a slip of paper scrawled with headings for a pretentious speech tramped into some sticky gunge on the floor.

I tried to take in as much as I could, but at one point, possibly because I found it so overwhelming and needed to rest my eyes, I stood and watched the programme on Harald Hardråde, the king who had tried to do the unthinkable, to conquer England. I remembered my reaction, one time when the programme was being repeated, to the final scene: the bloody battle of Stamford Bridge represented solely by Harald himself, a king fighting an army which we could not see, yet did see. I had sat up, wide-eyed, thinking to myself that this was him, Jonas Wergeland, it was a self-portrait, an assertion that one man could have the width to populate a whole world. It was also a picture of Jonas Wergeland battling alone with a Titanic task, invisible to all but him; an attempt to achieve the impossible.

I stood in that black, party-fumed club with its dead echoes of here today, gone tomorrow music and inane adverts. I looked. I began to move my eyes from one screen to the next, as if they were different parts of a circular mosaic. The thought occurred to me that if all of the programmes were in the nature of self-portraits then Jonas Wergeland had succeeded in fulfilling an old dream: of living several lives at once. Standing there in that dark, factory-like space I slowly let my eyes travel round, feeling a little dizzy, but also amazed that I could actually manage to watch so many screens at once. It was an enthralling, almost unearthly, experience. At one point it crossed my mind that this must be what it was like to stand with one’s head inside a crystal chandelier, inside a circle of light.

I had seen every programme several times over, but never — obviously — at the same time. Suddenly — after twenty minutes or so — my subconscious told me that they were all connected, that if I could just manage to look at all the screens at once I would have the sensation of watching just one programme. I found an office chair on which I could spin round; I rewound the tapes, restarted them all simultaneously. And it was when I sat down on the chair and began slowly to rotate that the revelation came to me. The sum of the images I saw on each screen metamorphosed into a stupendous juggling act; I witnessed the way in which, throughout all these programmes, Jonas Wergeland kept so many images, impressions, in the air at once, as an expert juggler does with balls.

I spun myself round, a warm thrill running through me. These flat screens offered me a peek into wonderful depths, and filled me with an unfailing certainty that reality was round. In this almost vacuum-black hall, in which only hours earlier I had attended a superficial party, heard the stupidest things being said, and made the silliest remarks myself, I was now having my life’s epiphany, an insight which filled my every smallest cell. At some point — although I had no sense of time — I developed the strong suspicion that the lines in each programme also fell in a very specific order, such that if I were to join together the pieces of the separate lines I would hear quite different sentences; a sentence ending in one programme would continue, like an elaboration of a statement, in another programme, while in a third programme it might be the music which picked up the thread, or added another dimension to the argument. At other times I had the idea that the whole thing evolved into a dialogue, that the programmes were speaking to one another. To me, in the state I was in and precisely because I was confronted with this incomparable work of art — stories subtly bound together to form a magnificent fresco — in a hall that stank faintly of leftovers and vomit, that reeked of adverts and commercialism and facile kitschiness, the screens, the programmes surrounding me seemed almost to come to life. I sat in a circle of pictures and sound which gradually expanded until it encompassed everything. I remember what I thought. I thought: this is my Samarkand. This black room.

As I spun slowly round and round on my office chair I noticed how the light from the twenty-odd television sets struck me like rays. Like healing rays. I understood, or had some inkling of, what mental planning, what work — and, not least: what an idea — had to lie behind this complex interaction, the thousands of minute links which caused all these programmes to run together to form one cross-referring network. In the end, in his own way, he had succeeded in organising all of human learning in a new way, shown how the most diverse insights could hang together, on an organic tree of knowledge, so to speak. He had proved it to himself; I doubt if he felt the need to prove it to anyone else. I am pretty certain that I am the only person to discover this secret. And this superb self-portrait: how manifold and yet how homogenous is man.

I think it must have been at this point, as I sat in the circle of light, that I realised how little I knew about him. I felt that I was — at long last — discovering him. Discovering who my father was. It may sound high-flown, and I really ought not to be the one to say it, but no one else has seen it: Jonas Wergeland was not — when his career was at its height, I suppose I should say — an important person because he represented the world of his day, as he grew so sick of hearing. He was an exceptional person, one in a billion, because he embodied the possibilities of his day, all the unrealised potential. He reflected the future. He showed us, me at least, what mankind could be.