Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

The Italian historian Guido Bergotti, who wrote what is perhaps the most exhaustive biography of Antinous Bellori, The Angels of a Heretic (1964), describes the change in this way: he moved away from literary work and into the world . This sounds beguiling, and may be partially correct, but the interpretation nails Bellori’s life and thoughts down in a way that I find hard to square with the character of the manuscript itself. It was never intended as a book, nor is there even any substantiation for the widely held theory that it was the preparation for one. In contrast to Bergotti, I think it’s likely that as early as the publication of On the Nature of Angels , Bellori had decided not to publish again. The posthumous papers weren’t intended for other people’s eyes, and in all likelihood constitute a kind of conversation he was conducting with himself. (Something that doesn’t lessen their significance; if Bellori had attempted to lay out his worldview, clearly and concisely, the truth would have run through the stiff fingers of the style like sand.) Another argument that further strengthens this hypothesis is of a purely technical nature, but is no less significant for that. Bellori wrote copiously during these years, and because he couldn’t carry an unlimited amount of manuscript about with him, he developed a highly specialized form of handwriting. The characters he used were minute, microscopic in the true meaning of the word: none of Bellori’s notes can be read with the naked eye. One has to use a microscope. This means that even Bellori couldn’t read what he had written while he was traveling. He wrote for the moment, not for posterity. Something must have been filling him to the brim, and to release it, just to empty himself, he wrote away, all the time, almost while he was walking. The original manuscript, which is now in the British Museum’s manuscript collection, is almost entirely black, there is hardly any white between the lines, or between the letters. What the reason for this was he never reflects, he doesn’t find it strange himself, it’s just the way he is. Something burns within him, something fills him with a great restlessness, has him pondering and speculating all the time, his pen constantly crossing and recrossing the page. It comes in waves, between them are weeks when he doesn’t write a word, and the following notes are always prefaced with a short description of the tranquillity he felt during the lull. But by then it’s already begun again. The fever. Bellori’s fever. The thing that drove him to write On the Nature of Angels , the thing that drove him out into the forests and mountains, the thing that drove him to describe everything he saw, the thing that drove him to contemplate in rapturous outbursts the divine, Jesus Christ, the Trinity, and the apocalypse, life and death.

What was “the thing” that drove him?

The angels. He’d seen them only once, but that was enough, they still tugged and tore inside him, he still longed to be able to see them again, to be in their vicinity, it was the only thing he wanted. To control this longing he had to direct it toward something else. Whether it had to fill him, or he had to fill it, he didn’t know, but it made no difference because the writing did both things: he filled it, it filled him. When he wrote, he was reaching out for the angels. That no one would ever read it made no difference either. Because it wasn’t in there. Quite the opposite, it seems. A growing antagonism toward writing manifests itself throughout the notebooks, it forms as a result of a deep insight into the relationship between writing and the world, the unhappy confusion that had occurred, and was occurring. Writing had enabled the world and our concepts of the world to be always one and the same. As an extension of this, there formed in him an equally skeptical view of knowledge. What was there to know? Apart from a necessary understanding of basic, intimate, and daily things? Where was it taking us?

Christ never wrote , contests Bellori in his notebooks. It would have contravened the fundamental meaning of incarnation. The divine became a body: arms and legs, head and belly, heart and lungs. The divine lived in a specific place at a specific time. There was no universality about it, only a singularity. And that was where the meaning lay. That the meaning of Jesus’s life lay in every single unique moment that he had been here was something the men of the Church didn’t understand, they who had raised that bloody, crucified body into the language, and dissolved it in philosophy’s abstractions. But the people understood. The hysterical medieval worship of relics was an expression of it: God was here , among us, like us. Not all the time, just once. And at that moment, when Pontius Pilate was procurator in Jerusalem and Augustus emperor in Rome, he’d set his foot there , laid his head there , placed his hand there .

It was the yearning for the angels that drove Antinous to write, and this may seem ironic, maybe he even found it so himself. The most important revelation in On the Nature of Angels was that the worship of its immaterial aspects had distorted the divine and turned it into something else, something abstract and written, while in reality it was corporeal and concrete, as the angels he’d seen quite clearly showed. That was where he wanted to be. And to get there, he had to write.

At the same time it’s easy to overplay this pursuit. Presumably what he wrote wasn’t meant to be read, and the main objective of these years was to track down angels. Partly because he longed for them, but also because no argument in the world would then be able to refute his theory about the nature of the divine.

To stand clutching an angel in the marketplace and say: Look at this.

It is the period between 1587 and 1603 that we know most about, as that was when he committed to paper the things he saw and thought. The first part of this period, when he was writing every day, is almost fully covered; during the latter part of it he wrote very little. Between 1603 and November 1605, he wrote nothing at all, only to take up writing again at the end of his life, in the first few months of 1606.

The first time he got on the track of the angels was early in the autumn of 1591. In a forested valley in the Austrian Alps an old woodsman related seeing angels in the vicinity a couple of years earlier. Well, he assumed they were angels. He’d been told by his grandfather that angels had been there, gathered around great fires in the forest for one entire summer. The area was almost uninhabited, but his grandfather had seen the fires glowing there several nights in succession. They hadn’t seen them, but they knew quite well that they were angels, just as the old woodsman knew that it was angels’ fires he had seen.

For a long time this was the closest Antinous got. Two years behind them.

Between 1593 and 1595 he was in France, following the same pattern there, living in monasteries for the two winters, and going on his wanderings in the summers. He got right up to the coast of Normandy; he had planned to stay there for several months, without quite knowing why. The sea and the beaches and the cliffs and the raw and misty air awoke something in him. When he got there he roamed the shoreline and looked out across the sea, walking ever northward, and one day he came to a cave at the foot of a cliff: submerged at high water but dry when the tide was out. He went into it and found the remnants of a fire on the damp rocky floor.

He knew with his whole being that an angel had been present. And as the ash was still there, it must have been after the last high tide. He stooped and felt the ashes. They were as warm as his own body.