Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

“Where did you find the seagull?”

I pointed up toward it.

“Come along,” he said. “I’ll show you something.”

He switched the flashlight on and began to walk up the gently sloping ridge. I followed him.

“There,” I said when we got to the place.

Dad squatted down, handed me the flashlight, and carefully picked up the gull. It looked almost alive in the concentrated light. Dad spread out the wings and pushed some of its breast feathers aside.

“Can you see?” he asked.

“What?” I said.

“Come right up close, then you’ll see.”

I bent forward. And then I saw it. A tiny little arm, no longer than the tip of my finger, thin as a piece of wire, lay against its breast under the wing.

“It’s a hand,” Dad said. “Can you see?”

I nodded.

There were even nails on the pine-needle-thin fingers.

“Can I feel it?”

“If you’re careful.”

He raised the gull to me and I brushed the small hand with my fingertips. The pressure moved it slightly back and forth.

“You’ll see five fingers if you look,” he said.

“Why is it so small?”

“They don’t need them anymore. So they’ll disappear eventually. It’s the same as our little toes. They’ll get smaller and smaller, and eventually disappear too.”

He leaned forward and laid the gull on the ground again, folding up its wings carefully. Its yellow eyes glinted in the light.

A hissing noise came from below as Klaus threw water on the fire. Dad got up and took the flashlight from me. But he made no move to go. Even though he stood in the dark, and I couldn’t see his face properly, I knew he was staring at me. Neither of us spoke. Slowly he turned the flashlight beam on my face.

“Are you scared of me?” he said.

FIFTEEN years later he was dead. And so violent were the circumstances surrounding his death that it not only altered our future, but also our past. If he’d died in a car accident or slowly succumbed to illness, everything would have remained as it was, but the wildness of what he finally did had retrospective force, and now in some strange way is present in the whole of our childhood. A kind of coldness has spread through it, something solemn that we didn’t know about at the time, but that now colors everything that happened, even the most trivial and humdrum of the things we did. And it’s a disquieting thought that not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven. One single second, one single landscape, in which what happens activates and deactivates what has already happened in endless chain reactions, like the processes that take place in the brain, perhaps, where cells suddenly bloom and die away, all according to the way the winds of consciousness are blowing.

But if it’s true that events in the past open and close and constantly form new associations with what’s happening in the present, where does the notion that the past is fixed and finished come from? Nothing is ever finished, everything just goes on and on, there are no boundaries, not even between the living and the dead, even that zone is quivering and unclear.

Some years ago I read an article about a woman who lived in the United States in the 1950s, who’d fallen ill with cancer. Biopsies were taken, and these were kept alive and experimented with, until a clumsy laboratory assistant somehow managed to drop them on the floor, from where they spread into the outside world, and still exist to this day. These organisms proved themselves to be exceptionally viable. They are everywhere, even here, around me, fifty years later. That woman is long since dead, but her body lives on, and is constantly expanding. I find this terrifying.

What is manifesting itself here?

From experience, I always trust blindly in intuition. The fact that it always gets to the scene of the crime before my thoughts must mean either that it’s more observant, and gets a head start that way, or that it’s simply faster. It gets there first anyway. While thoughts, those slothful constables of the consciousness, have barely got moving, intuition is already at work examining what is going on. And whereas thoughts, when they finally do show up, can rely only on other thoughts in their gathering of information, and are therefore often left moving in circles, or end up in mutual antagonism, intuition has access to the subconscious, those depths where material from the outside world constantly pours in through the sluices of emotion and the senses, right down to minute shifts in surroundings that the thoughts never pick up, and whose consequences therefore are apparent to me only when I dream, or when a seemingly insignificant feeling interposes itself between me and the situation I’m in.

What is the scary thing about this expansion?

And why are the limited, the closed-off, and the local synonymous with sterility and narrow-mindedness, while the open and boundless are everywhere seen as absolute good, as fruitful, as broad-minded? There are countless people who refuse to be labeled, who energetically work to open the moment, stretch out the now in all directions, a contemporaneousness that takes up ever more room. There is more of that. But this expansion, acting within culture, is only illusory, opening up is only another way of closing off. The expansion is serial, the pattern that of the tree: the increase is more of the same, copied, and copied again. It’s inhuman.

Or perhaps not?

Perhaps that’s precisely what it isn’t. For if you shut your eyes and let your thoughts relax as your body gradually liberates itself from its many links with the outside world, and you follow your intuition into the bounded landscape that is yourself, what is it you see?

At first the familiar things — the old prejudices, the long-deserted thoughts, the oldest memories, which, forever congealed and divorced from their surroundings, exist inside you rather like stuffed animals do in natural history museums, forever caught in their own characteristic pose — but then, gradually, as you near the walls through which blood streams, things will become stranger and stranger, and by the time you are taken up by and enter the red, soft, evenly flowing river to be carried slowly down through the offshoots toward the heart, and hear for the first time that quiet rush, which is there every day, and for the first time see the myriad of blood corpuscles, those beautiful disc-shaped organisms that, after a short maturing process, leave the marrow and float out into the blood, where they work in gigantic swarms until after four months in the service of the blood they return to the marrow to be destroyed, it’s clear that you are a system you can’t control, and what is you is also outside you.

The heart beats, the lungs breathe, the blood flows.

But for whom?

That, you see, is the question.

Right now they’re doing it to maintain what you call you, but if you were in an accident, your heart might be surgically removed from your body and put into someone else, where it would continue to beat as if nothing had happened. As far as the heart is concerned, everyone is the same. All it wants to do, all it knows how to do, all it can do, is beat. Like some small, smooth, shiny beast, bathed in blood, it lies inside the chest and opens, closes, opens, closes. First the blood comes into the auricle as into a sluice, until it’s full up and the valve closes. Then it rushes on into the ventricle, which the following instant is compressed by its lateral muscles, so that the blood is practically crushed out into the arteries, whose elastic walls first swell with the pressure and then contract again in a way that keeps the blood flowing forward all the time. Warm and soft and calm, it flows on into the body’s darkness, up the aorta ascendens, past those dirty gray twins the lungs, through the arteries of the throat and into the brain, where it branches out into ever-narrower galleries and shafts, a chaos of needle-thin capillaries so constricted that even the microscopic blood corpuscles are distorted as they glide along them. It’s here that gases and materials are exchanged with the surrounding tissue fluids. Molecules are detached, seep through membranes, become part of new compounds on the other side, and are taken from there on into the landscape of the brain, which is irrigated with nutrition. The body may be sleeping, but the activity is just as great. Electrons fly up and down the nerve paths, the blood throbs at the temples, cells are activated and deactivated, all according to the pictures the current dream demands. Respiration is maintained, digestion is maintained, the separation of waste products is maintained, as well as the distribution of nutrients; new cells are produced, old ones are destroyed, a watch on the surroundings is always kept: a sudden noise, a hard touch, a bright light, and the eyes open right away.