Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘If you won’t receive how can anyone reach you?’

‘What makes you think I want to be reached?’

‘But that’s no good.’

‘Come on, you answer my question first.’

On the left the festival green came into sight. It was a small patch of grass with a few benches and a long table at the back which was generally used only on Midsummer Night, when everyone in the area gathered together to dance round the tall leaf-bedecked pole in the middle, to eat cake, drink coffee and participate in a quiz with an award ceremony concluding the formal part of the evening. I joined in for the first time that summer and waited intuitively for someone to set fire to the post. Surely there couldn’t be a Midsummer celebration without a fire? Linda laughed when I told her. No, no fire, no magic, just children dancing to the ‘Little Frogs’ song around the enormous phallus and drinking fizzy drinks, as everyone did in the smaller communities all over Sweden that night.

The pole was still there. The leaves were withered and reddish-brown with white streaks of snow.

‘It wasn’t so much what I did as how I felt,’ she said. ‘The feeling that anything was possible. That there were no hindrances. I could have been president of the USA, I told mummy once, and the worst of it is that I meant it. When I went out, the social side was not a hindrance; quite the contrary, it was an arena, a place where I could make things happen and be completely and utterly myself. All my inclinations were valid, there wasn’t a speck of self-criticism, there was a sense of anything goes, right, and the point was that anything also became true . Do you understand? Anything really did go. But I was incredibly restless, of course, there was never enough happening, I had a hunger for more, it mustn’t end, it was not allowed to end, because somewhere I must have had an inkling it would, the trip I was on, that it would end with a fall. A fall into the absolutely immovable. The greatest hell of them all.’

‘That sounds dreadful.’

‘It certainly was. But it wasn’t only dreadful. It’s fantastic to feel so strong. So confident. And somewhere it is also real. In other words, it exists in me. But you know what I mean.’

‘In fact, I don’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve never reached that point. I know the feeling. I think I’ve experienced it once, but, heck, that was while I was writing, sitting quietly behind a desk. That’s quite different.’

‘I don’t think so. I think you were manic. You weren’t eating, you weren’t sleeping, you were so happy you didn’t know what to do with yourself. But you have some kind of boundary nevertheless, some security inside you, and this is a lot about not going beyond what you actually, and it is a big actually, can tolerate. If you do something for long enough without the tolerance there are major consequences. You have to pay. It doesn’t come free.’

We had joined the path running alongside the lake and into the forest. The wind had laid bare great swathes of ice. In places it was as shiny as glass and reflected the dark sky like a mirror, in others it was grey, greenish and grainy, like frozen slush. Now that the train had passed and the warning bell had stopped ringing there was almost complete silence in the forest. Just some rustling and cracking as branches rubbed or the occasional thwack. The squeaking of the buggy wheels, our own brittle footsteps.

‘At the hospital there was one thing they said which became important for me,’ Linda continued. ‘It was a simple matter. But what they said was that I had to try to remember I was actually fed up with myself when I became manic. That I was deeply depressed. And just that, the thought that I existed, helped. This is a lot of what it’s about, completely losing sight of who you are. In fact. And I think this might have been the most significant reason for it going so far. I had never actually lived. Had never had an inner life, that is. It had always been an external life. And things went fine for a long time, I pushed it further and further, and then in the end it wouldn’t go any further. It came to a stop.’

She looked at me.

‘I think I was pretty ruthless in those days. Or there was something ruthless inside me. I had cut myself off from others, if you know what I mean.’

‘I think that’s true,’ I said. ‘When I met you for the first time you had a completely different aura from today. Yes, ruthless, that fits. Attractive and dangerous is what I thought. I don’t think that about you now.’

‘I was on my way down. It was during those weeks it happened, that I started to lose control. I’m so pleased we didn’t get together then! It would never have worked. It couldn’t have worked.’

‘No, probably not. But I was a bit surprised when I found out exactly how romantic you were, I must say. And how close you want those who are around you. How important it is for you.’

We were silent for a while.

‘Would you rather have been with me when I was like that?’

‘No.’

I smiled. She smiled. Around us all was perfectly still, apart from the occasional whoosh as the wind gusted through the forest. It was good to walk here. For the first time in ages I had some peace in my soul. Even if snow lay thick on the ground everywhere and white is a bright colour, the brightness didn’t dominate the terrain, because out of the snow, which so sensitively reflects the light from the sky and always gleams, however dark it is, rose tree trunks, and they were gnarled and black, and branches hung above them, also black, intertwining in an endless variety of ways. The mountainsides were black, the stumps and debris of blown-down trees were black, the rock faces were black, the forest floor was black beneath the canopy of enormous spruces.

The soft whiteness and the gaping blackness, both were perfectly still, all was completely motionless, and it was impossible not to be reminded of how much of what surrounded us was dead, how little of it all was actually alive and how much space the living occupied inside us. This was why I would have loved to be able to paint, would have loved to have the talent, for it was only through painting this could be expressed. Stendhal wrote that music was the highest form of art and that all the other forms really wanted to be music. This was of course a Platonic idea, all the other art forms depict something else, music is the only one which is something in itself, it is absolutely incomparable. But I wanted to be closer to reality, by which I meant physical, concrete reality, and for me the visual always came first, also when I was writing and reading, it was what was behind letters that interested me. When I was outdoors, walking, like now, what I saw gave me nothing. Snow was snow, trees were trees. It was only when I saw a picture of snow or of trees that they were endowed with meaning. Monet had an exceptional eye for light on snow, which Thaulow, perhaps the most technically gifted Norwegian painter ever, also had, it was a feast for the eyes, the closeness of the moment was so great that the value of what gave rise to it increased exponentially, an old tumbledown cabin by a river or a pier at a holiday resort suddenly became priceless, the paintings were charged with the feeling that they were here at the same time as us, in this intense here and now, and that we would soon be gone from them, but with regard to the snow, it was as if the other side of this cultivation of the moment became visible, the animation of this and its light so obviously ignored something, namely the lifelessness, the emptiness, the non-charged and the neutral, which were the first features to strike you when you entered a forest in winter, and in the picture, which was connected with perpetuity and death, the moment was unable to hold its ground. Caspar David Friedrich knew this, but this wasn’t what he painted, only his idea of it. This was the problem with all representation, of course, for no eye is uncontaminated, no gaze is blank, nothing is seen the way it is. And in this encounter the question of art’s meaning as a whole was forced to the surface. Yes, OK, so I saw the forest here, so I walked through it and thought about it. But all the meaning I extracted from it came from me, I charged it with something of mine. If it were to have any meaning beyond that, it couldn’t come from the eyes of the beholder, but through action, through something happening, that is. Trees would have to be felled, houses built, fires lit, animals hunted, not for the sake of pleasure but because my life depended on it. Then the forest would be meaningful, indeed so meaningful that I would no longer wish to see it.