Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

I stopped outside the block of flats where Jon Olav lived and rang the bell. No one answered, I walked on, up the hill and down past Støletorget, and soon I was crossing Torgalmenningen, burning inside the whole time, I was a fool, I had nowhere to go, no one to visit, I just walked, burning with shame about everything. I walked along Nygårdsgaten, cut up by the Science Building and went into the park, the plan was to sit down and have a smoke, it was Sunday, I was out for a Sunday walk, but in the park, look, that was where I held Ingvild’s hand and I didn’t want to think about that, even then she must have known she didn’t want me, that I was no good for her, and I didn’t want to go to Danmarksplass, Yngve lived there, and for all I knew she had his keys for the weekend and was in his flat now. I didn’t want to walk the other way either, Sydneshaugen School was there, where we had drunk coffee, the gate where we had stood talking when Morten appeared. Instead I walked down the first hill and came out by the Grieg Hall, followed the road past the library and the station, turned right where the old town gate once stood, and then continued uphill, back along the roads at the top of Fjellsiden.

Yngve was probably on his way home now. If Ingvild wasn’t in his flat he would drive straight up to Fantoft, where she would be expecting him.

She opens the door and gazes at him with tenderness and affection.

They embrace.

They kiss and kiss with mounting passion.

Glance at the room, then they undress each other at top speed.

A cigarette afterwards.

What did your little brother say?

He got angry. But it’ll pass. You should have seen him. Ha ha ha!

Ha ha ha.

Wave upon wave of heat rose to my head, which I lowered, and into my face. I walked past an old fire station, it was made of wood and painted white, beneath it the town’s myriad colours vibrated, I walked along the very highest line of houses until I slowly began to descend and was back outside my bedsit.

That is where he lives, I thought. The brother who believes he is a writer. And when I opened the door and went into my room it was as though I was still in the street looking at myself, the conceited idiot who closed the curtains and kept out the world.

Rolf Sagen was going to teach us for the next two weeks. His course didn’t deal with genres, neither prose, nor poetry, nor drama, nor essays, but writing itself, the process of writing and a variety of relevant strategies. He gave us a number of practical tips, such as how it could be useful for prose writers and dramatists to make what he called a hinterland, you wrote down everything about the characters and their relationships and in so doing knew much more about why they acted as they did than was apparent from the finished text — a hinterland was the complete world of which the narrative revealed only glimpses — and also he talked about the underlying motives or premises of writing. Sagen was a trained psychologist, and he spoke a lot about how important it was to penetrate down into the deeper layers of consciousness when you wrote. He had a few activities for us to do. One of them was about emptying our minds of thoughts, it was like meditation, we should try to be ahead of our thoughts, deny them space, just forge on into the unthought, and then, at his command, write down the first things that occurred to us.

‘Let’s start now,’ he said, and so we sat around the table, all of us with our heads bowed and eyes closed. I couldn’t do it, I was just thinking about this situation, about having to empty my mind, but it was beyond me. Two minutes passed, three, maybe four.

‘Now write,’ he said.

The first thing that occurred to me was the name of a town: Darmstadt. I wrote a little story about it. When everyone had finished we had a break and when we resumed we had to read out what we had written.

Sagen held his beard between thumb and forefinger in concentration, nodded and said this was interesting, unusual, remarkable, fruitful. When it was my turn the string of superlatives came to an end. He listened to what I read out, then eyed me.

‘You’re using only the surface of your mind when you write,’ he said. ‘And if you do that there won’t be any depth in the text. What was the first word that occurred to you?’

‘Darmstadt.’

‘Hm, a German town,’ he said. ‘Have you been there?’

‘No.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid there isn’t very much more to say about the text. You’ll have to try and penetrate deeper into your consciousness.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

What he was actually saying was that my writing was superficial. He was right, I had realised that, there was a chasm between what the others wrote and what I wrote. I described a young man walking the streets of Kristiansand. I hadn’t drawn either him or the streets he walked from the depths of my consciousness. Sagen confirmed what I had suspected, he articulated it in words, I had to descend into the depths of my own consciousness, into the darkness of my soul, but how the hell was I supposed to do that? This was not something I found easy! I had read Death Fugue, no writer had ever delved further into their consciousness than Celan when he wrote that, but what use was this insight to me?

The next day we had another activity. This time we were given a few nonsense words to keep repeating in our heads until Sagen told us to write the first thing that occurred to us.

Once again all eight of us sat around the table with bowed heads and closed eyes. Now you can write, Sagen said, and I scribbled the first words that came into my mind.

Two leather chairs

in the wind

That was all.

Sagen scratched his chin.

‘That’s interesting,’ he said. ‘Two chairs in the wind. They’re outside, I take it. Yes, they must be.’

‘That’s an exciting intro,’ Knut said.

‘You’ll have to work on it a bit more, Karl Ove,’ Trude said. ‘It might turn into a poem.’

‘It’s an image that doesn’t immediately make itself apparent,’ Sagen said. ‘There’s a tension, there’s nothing contrived about it. Yes, that is interesting. You’re on the right path, I think.’

I had been thinking about the two leather chairs we had at home when I was growing up. They stood on a green hill and the wind blew in from the sea. But this was just nonsense, I realised that, although I found myself unable to dismiss the others’ comments that it might be the beginning of something, a poem.

I carried on when I got home.

Two leather chairs

in the wind

a yellow bulldozer — that was the next bit that occurred to

me –

noise from a town

you have already left

As soon as I had written that I knew the sort of comments I would get. Delete the yellow bulldozer. Remove the ‘already’ from the last line, it’s redundant. So I did that and the poem was finished.

Two leather chairs

in the wind

noise from a town

you have left

At any rate it looked like a poem. I knew where the image of the leather chairs originated, ever since I was small I had been fascinated by the relationship between inside and outside, when what was supposed to be inside was outside, and vice versa. One of the most hypnotic memories I had was the time Geir and I had stumbled over a cellar full of water in a half-finished house. Not only that, there was no floor, so we stood on a little rock surrounded by water, indoors ! The episode on the refuse site, which featured in one of the texts that got me accepted on the course, also dealt with this idea, the way Gordon and Gabriel set out chairs, a table and lamps in the forest. Two leather chairs in the wind had its roots there, the magic of childhood in six words. noise from a town/ you have left was different, I had seen many instances of it in the poems I had read, something is stated and revoked at the same time. Also the converse, where the same merges into the same, such as, the hare snows into the hare, but so far I hadn’t come up with any such images myself.