Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

I can safely say that I have never listened to any record, any bunch of songs, as closely as I did to that one. I attributed deeper meaning to those in many ways hopelessly banal lyrics than to, say, The Cantos by Ezra Pound. I looked for signs, messages, codes in each note, each instrument, each word, in between the words. Later, when I heard of people who tried to pick up hidden messages by playing Sergeant Pepper backwards with their fingers, not to mention those who pored over the cover and lyrics, searching for clues to the effect that Paul is dead, I was not the slightest bit surprised: I had long been familiar with such overheated modes of interpretation.

I am quite certain that no one in Norway knows as much about this particular record as I do. Rubber Soul may well be the only subject I have ever known anything at all about. For months, one of my chief pastimes involved learning absolutely everything I could, every little detail about this record. Such as the fact that Ringo played the Hammond organ on ‘I’m Looking Through You’; that ‘Norwegian Wood’ is a song about infidelity, not drugs; that Paul was given some help with the French words in ‘Michelle’ by Jan Vaughan, the wife of one of his friends. All the effort put into unearthing this information was part of an unconscious defence mechanism, a way of distracting myself, leaving me less time for pining. It reached the stage where I could have appeared on Double Your Money to answer questions on Rubber Soul . There was nothing I did not know: about the fuzz box attached to Paul’s bass for ‘Think For Yourself’, George Martin playing the mouth organ on ‘The Word’, the cowbell on ‘Drive My Car’ or the jazz chord on ‘Michelle’.

From a more objective point of view, it seems only fitting that my break-up with Margrete should be bound up with this music. Because as I began to get things into a broader perspective I realised that the Beatles had left a more indelible stamp on the sixties than all the assassinations and political debacles, or phenomena such as Woodstock and the rise of the Black Panthers. I venture to make this assertion on the grounds that neither the story of the group nor their music has ever lost its grip on people. The Beatles pervaded the consciousness of a whole generation. The Beatles were the sixties. The Beatles stand as the most powerful story of that decade. Their music was, still and all, the worthiest accompaniment I could have had to my grief, my anguish, my despair.

I am not sure, but I doubt if I have ever hurt as badly as I did during those first months after Margrete left me. This was also my earliest experience of a psychosomatic disorder, of being ill, feeling pain even when the doctor can find nothing wrong with you. I suddenly realised that it was possible: you could die of a broken heart. Strictly speaking, considering all I had learned about my own body, all its irrational responses, I really ought to have been better equipped to comprehend the anguish which Margrete suffered. The thought has also occurred to me — a dreadful thought, but I cannot rid myself of it: was my later blindness simply a form of revenge?

Broken-hearted as I was, I listened to the fourteen tracks on Rubber Soul with an intensity, a sensitivity, which might even have surprised Lennon and McCartney. To this day any one of those songs — ‘You Won’t See Me’, for instance — can still knock me off my feet. Not only my soul, my legs too turn to rubber. If I’m driving along in my car and the radio starts playing the ambiguous lyrics to ‘Drive My Car’ I have to pull into the side and stop. I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but I feel like curling up in the foetal position and dissolving into fits of sentimental sobbing. The beautiful vocal harmonies on ‘Nowhere Man’ hit all of my senses smack in the solar plexus. And every time I hear ‘Norwegian Wood’ the sitar playing sends me into a sort of trance, the real world seems somehow to dissolve, to melt into a succession of veils. It’s odd. I can listen, say, to Sibelius’s violin concerto, that intense, impassioned and in many ways stirring music, without so much as a twitch of an eyebrow. But those simple melodies: ‘Wait’, or ‘If I Needed Someone’, with their even simpler lyrics, can just about do for me, they are almost more than I can bear.

I have been thinking about what I wrote concerning the incident outside the restaurant, about losing my spirit. I have since come up with another explanation. She left me because I lacked spirit. Because I was incapable of communicating, did not speak her language. I deserved to be called an idiot. Well, it was obvious really: spirit also entailed being able to understand, having the gift of empathy. At any rate if my ever growing suspicion was correct; if, that is, spirit and love belonged to the same family of words.

In religious instruction classes at elementary school I was much taken with the description of the Holy Spirit. It was a real treat to hear our teacher relate, as only she could, the events of the Pentecost, when the disciples were endowed with the Holy Spirit and tongues of flame descended upon their heads. All at once they were able to speak and understand every language. I studied the illustration by Gustav Doré in the Family Bible. I could do better than that, I thought. I drew that same picture again and again: people with huge fires blazing on their heads. The teacher could not help laughing, but for me this was something to aim for, a sudden longing. How was I to acquit myself, how to utilise my gift, such that I too would be crowned with flame, become a torch. Be understood by all. Or, more importantly: understand others.

Maybe that was why I went into television: to be able to work with such a bright, such a far-reaching light — with fire, you might say. With communication. Spirit. I remember my father and what he said when he converted air into music at the organ. Now I could say the same thing myself: ‘My work has to do with true inspiration.’

Much has been said about the television series Thinking Big . Much has also gone unsaid. In 1989 the walls came tumbling down all across Europe. Even in the grey, dreary Soviet Union which I had once visited the colours began to peep through, those that had been lying dormant, in the underground at least. But that year also saw the fall — one almost as momentous — of a wall of sorts in Norway, in Festung Norwegen. The Thinking Big series made the country open up, if only for a very short while. People pointed this out, almost incredulously, in newspapers, discussed it on television. One comment from that year stuck in my mind, one of the greatest compliments I have ever received, as it happens: ‘These programmes have engendered a new mood of tolerance in Norway, they have led to a new mode of communication with the world around us. Only a truly inspired work could have such an effect.’

How paradoxical. So why all this difficulty in getting through to a person whom I only needed to put out my hand in order to touch.

I had been looking forward to working on Lars Skrefsrud, the thief and jailbird who became Norway’s most famous missionary. Not even the religious aspect of the subject could put me off. Television was the perfect medium for this. At the sight of satellite receivers — we see them everywhere we go here in the Sogn area too — I always find myself thinking that television is the religion of our times, that these dishes are the private domes under which people worship their new god. In more misanthropical moments I am inclined to feel that the TV room has become the poor man’s Nirvana, a place in which we can empty our heads of all thought, step into the Void, switch off completely. If that is so, then it is also the fault — and possibly the boon — of the programmes being shown. The majority of television channels see it as their job to induce people to cut off, and out, completely.