Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

Three times during the following hours I went down to the basement with the book stuffed down my trousers. I spent the rest of the day writing, and when evening came I sat on the sofa with the collection of poetry and the text analysis book I had bought to prepare for the poetry course which began the next day.

The first poem was short.

Nowadays

Whatever you say, let

the roots follow, let them

dangle

With all the dirt

just to make it absolutely clear

where they came from

Make it absolutely clear where who came from?

I read it again, and then I realised it was referring to the roots of words. That is, you should display the roots of words and the dirt around them to make it clear to those listening where the words came from. So, talk coarsely, or at least don’t be frightened to.

Was that all there was to it?

No, surely it couldn’t be. The words were probably a symbol of something else. Perhaps of us. In other words, we mustn’t hide our origins. We mustn’t forget who we once were. Even if this was nothing to be proud of. The poem wasn’t at all difficult, you just had to read carefully and think about every word. But this didn’t work with all the poems, some of them I couldn’t crack however many times I read them and however much I thought about what they might mean. One poem in particular irritated me.

He who walks with a house on

his head is heaven he

who walks with a house

on his head is heaven he who walks

with a house on his head

This was pure surrealism. Was it the man who had the house on his head — and what did that mean by the way? — who was like a heaven or was it the house that was his heaven? OK, let’s say the house was a symbol of a head and his thoughts were various rooms in the house and this arrangement was heaven. So? Where was he going with this? And why repeat exactly the same words two and a half times? This was just pretension, he had nothing to say, he put a few words together and hoped for the best.

For the next two days we were bombarded with poems and names of poets, schools and movements. There were Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Eluard, Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl, Gottfried Benn and Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann and Nelly Sachs, Gunnar Ekelöf and Tor Ulven, there were poems about cannons and corpses, angels and whores, gatewomen and turtles, coachmen and soil, nights and days, all thrown together in incongruous assortments, it seemed to me as I sat there taking notes because, since I had never heard of any of these names before, apart from Charles Baudelaire and Tor Ulven, it was impossible to establish any kind of chronology in my mind, they all became part of the same morass, modern poems from modern Europe, which clearly wasn’t so modern after all, it was quite a long time since the First World War had raged, and I talked a bit about that in one of the breaks, the paradox of the poems being modernist while being so old-fashioned, at least as regards the content. Jon Fosse said that was an interesting point, but they were modern primarily as regards form and the radical thinking they expressed. This was still radical, he said. Paul Celan, no one had gone further than he had. And that made me realise that everything I didn’t understand, everything I couldn’t get my head round, everything in these poems that appeared closed or introspective to me, this was precisely what was radical about them and made them modern, also to us.

Jon Fosse read a poem by Paul Celan called ‘Death Fugue’, and it was dark and hypnotic and eerie, and I read it again at home in the evening, and heard in my inner ear the way Fosse had recited it, and I found it just as hypnotic and eerie then, surrounded by my own familiar things, which merely by virtue of these words going through my head lost their familiarity, they too were woven into the poem, and darkness swept through the poem, for the chair was only a chair, dead; the table was only a table, dead; and the street outside, it lay empty and still and dead in the darkness which emanated not only from the sky but also from the poem.

Although the poem touched a nerve in me, I didn’t understand how it did or why.

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown

we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night

we drink it and drink it

we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined

One thing was the fathomless darkness that existed in this poem, quite another was what it meant. What thoughts lay behind it? If I were ever to write like this I would have to know where it originated, be conversant with its starting point, the philosophy it expressed. I couldn’t just write something similar. I had to understand it.

What would I write if I were to write a poem now?

It would have to be about what was most important.

And what was most important?

Ingvild was.

So, love. Or falling in love. The lightness of spirit that flooded through me whenever she was on my mind, the surge of happiness at the thought that she existed, she was here now, in the same town and we would meet again.

That was what was most important.

What would a poem about that be like?

Immediately, after two lines, it would be traditional. There was no way I could rip it into pieces, so to speak, and fling it over the pages the way modernists did. And the images that came to mind when I was thinking about it were also traditional. A mountain stream, cold mountain water glittering in the sun, the high mountains with white glaciers down the sides of the valley. That was the only image of happiness I could conjure up. Her face maybe? Zoom in on her eyes, the iris, the pupil?

Why?

The way she smiled?

OK, that’s fine, but I was already light years away from the starting point, the dark hypnotic and bewitching allure of Paul Celan.

I got up from the bed and switched on the light, sat down at the desk and began to write. Half an hour later I had finished a poem.

Eye, I’m calling you, come

Face, my beloved, sorrow

And life that plays

a black melody

Eye, I’m calling you, come

That was the first decent poem I had written, and when I switched off the light and settled back in bed I had a better feeling about the Writing Academy than I’d had since I started. I had made huge progress.

The next day we were given our first written assignment, by Jon Fosse. Write a poem based on a picture, he said, any picture at all, and after lunch I was on my way to the art museum by Lille Lungegård Lake to look for a picture I could write about. The sun had come out in the morning, and there was a vibrancy about all the colours in town, everything was wet and gleamed with rare intensity, dazzling beneath the verdant mountain slopes and the azure sky.

Once inside, I took my notebook and a pen from my rucksack, then deposited it in a cloakroom, paid and went into the quiet, almost deserted gallery. The first picture that caught my eye was a simple landscape painting, depicting a village by a fjord, everything was clear and tangible, the sort of scene you could imagine seeing anywhere along the coast, yet there was something dreamlike about it, not in a fairy-tale way as with Theodor Kittelsen, this was a different dream, harder to grasp but even more compelling.

Had I seen this landscape in real life I would never have dreamed of staying there. But when I saw it here, hanging in the white room, I wanted to go there, I longed to go there.

My eyes moistened. I liked the picture, which had been painted by someone called Lars Hertervig, it was so intense, and in a way it turned the whole situation on its head, I wasn’t just a Writing Academy student without a notion in his head about art who had to write a poem about a picture, a pretender, but rather someone who felt so passionate about it that it brought tears to his eyes.