So when Margrete walked out on me and I was left alone outside the Golden Elephant with my lungs aching, I was filled with a woeful certainty that great prospects were slipping away from me, that my vital spirit itself was forsaking me. I felt utterly dispirited. It is not, in fact, entirely unthinkable that I really did die.
I had one ray of hope. Faint, but still – a hope. ‘You’ll get a letter,’ she said as she turned to leave. A letter. Never have I looked forward so much to a letter. Because she had to tell me why she had done it. Give me a reason. Unless of course it was – oh, hope – a letter to say that she was sorry.
Waiting. Have I ever waited like that? I have never waited like that. For two weeks, waiting for a letter became a full-time occupation for me. During that time I would have had no trouble answering the question as to the meaning of life. The meaning of life was to wait. I do not recall whether I ate, or went to school, or did my homework, or slept; I remember only that I waited, that I was the waiting. I trembled at the thought of it, I dreaded it, longed for it, pictured words, expressions, phrases – even her handwriting, her distinctive ‘a’s – I saw them all so clearly. And underneath it all: the hope.
At long last a letter arrived. Or rather: a parcel. I received the collection slip from the post office on the same day that I was given the awful news – again by one of those ghastly friends of hers, a stuck-up bitch with buck teeth – that she had moved away, that she had left Norway again, gone off with her parents to a country so far away that I had scarcely heard of it, a country where her father, the bloody kidnapper, was to take up a post at the Norwegian embassy. The knowledge that there was a parcel at Grorud post office, waiting to be collected, made it easier for me to cope with the grief of her leaving. At least I would be enlightened as to what had happened, what had been going through her mind. And maybe she would have said something about coming back soon. About – oh, hope – missing me.
I collected the parcel. It was square in shape. And flat. It was an LP. I hunted through the wrappings again and again. No sheet of paper, no distinctive ‘a’s. Just that record. A parting gift, I thought. Only later did it dawn on me that it was a letter.
All I had managed to stammer out when we were standing outside The Golden Elephant was the start of the question that was on my lips: ‘But why … Why … Why …’
She had looked at me for a long time. ‘Idiot,’ she said. I realised that this was an answer. That one word. Idiot. It was a key. For me it has always been a key. I looked it up. It means an ignorant person.
The LP was Rubber Soul by the Beatles. I played it nonstop for a year. That record was like a chandelier, each song an arm, each verse a crystal droplet, each line a different colour. I would stand like – yes, an idiot, for hour after hour, watching the record spin round and round, hypnotised by the rainbow defining the radius of the black disc. Even today my eyes are liable to fill with tears, to the consternation and mystification of everyone around me, whenever I hear one of the songs from that album. All it takes is the intro to that played-to-death golden oldie ‘Michelle’, or the bouzouki-style guitar on ‘Girl’, and I have to sit down to save being laid flat out by all the emotions, the memories, that come tumbling over me.
I can safely say that I have never listened to any record, any bunch of songs, as closely as I did to that one. I attributed deeper meaning to those in many ways hopelessly banal lyrics than to, say, The Cantos by Ezra Pound. I looked for signs, messages, codes in each note, each instrument, each word, in between the words. Later, when I heard of people who tried to pick up hidden messages by playing Sergeant Pepper backwards with their fingers, not to mention those who pored over the cover and lyrics, searching for clues to the effect that Paul is dead, I was not the slightest bit surprised: I had long been familiar with such overheated modes of interpretation.
I am quite certain that no one in Norway knows as much about this particular record as I do. Rubber Soul may well be the only subject I have ever known anything at all about. For months, one of my chief pastimes involved learning absolutely everything I could, every little detail about this record. Such as the fact that Ringo played the Hammond organ on ‘I’m Looking Through You’; that ‘Norwegian Wood’ is a song about infidelity, not drugs; that Paul was given some help with the French words in ‘Michelle’ by Jan Vaughan, the wife of one of his friends. All the effort put into unearthing this information was part of an unconscious defence mechanism, a way of distracting myself, leaving me less time for pining. It reached the stage where I could have appeared on Double Your Money to answer questions on Rubber Soul. There was nothing I did not know: about the fuzz box attached to Paul’s bass for ‘Think For Yourself’, George Martin playing the mouth organ on ‘The Word’, the cowbell on ‘Drive My Car’ or the jazz chord on ‘Michelle’.
From a more objective point of view, it seems only fitting that my break-up with Margrete should be bound up with this music. Because as I began to get things into a broader perspective I realised that the Beatles had left a more indelible stamp on the sixties than all the assassinations and political debacles, or phenomena such as Woodstock and the rise of the Black Panthers. I venture to make this assertion on the grounds that neither the story of the group nor their music has ever lost its grip on people. The Beatles pervaded the consciousness of a whole generation. The Beatles were the sixties. The Beatles stand as the most powerful story of that decade. Their music was, still and all, the worthiest accompaniment I could have had to my grief, my anguish, my despair.
I am not sure, but I doubt if I have ever hurt as badly as I did during those first months after Margrete left me. This was also my earliest experience of a psychosomatic disorder, of being ill, feeling pain even when the doctor can find nothing wrong with you. I suddenly realised that it was possible: you could die of a broken heart. Strictly speaking, considering all I had learned about my own body, all its irrational responses, I really ought to have been better equipped to comprehend the anguish which Margrete suffered. The thought has also occurred to me – a dreadful thought, but I cannot rid myself of it: was my later blindness simply a form of revenge?
Broken-hearted as I was, I listened to the fourteen tracks on Rubber Soul with an intensity, a sensitivity, which might even have surprised Lennon and McCartney. To this day any one of those songs – ‘You Won’t See Me’, for instance – can still knock me off my feet. Not only my soul, my legs too turn to rubber. If I’m driving along in my car and the radio starts playing the ambiguous lyrics to ‘Drive My Car’ I have to pull into the side and stop. I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but I feel like curling up in the foetal position and dissolving into fits of sentimental sobbing. The beautiful vocal harmonies on ‘Nowhere Man’ hit all of my senses smack in the solar plexus. And every time I hear ‘Norwegian Wood’ the sitar playing sends me into a sort of trance, the real world seems somehow to dissolve, to melt into a succession of veils. It’s odd. I can listen, say, to Sibelius’s violin concerto, that intense, impassioned and in many ways stirring music, without so much as a twitch of an eyebrow. But those simple melodies: ‘Wait’, or ‘If I Needed Someone’, with their even simpler lyrics, can just about do for me, they are almost more than I can bear.
I have been thinking about what I wrote concerning the incident outside the restaurant, about losing my spirit. I have since come up with another explanation. She left me because I lacked spirit. Because I was incapable of communicating, did not speak her language. I deserved to be called an idiot. Well, it was obvious really: spirit also entailed being able to understand, having the gift of empathy. At any rate if my ever growing suspicion was correct; if, that is, spirit and love belonged to the same family of words.
In religious instruction classes at elementary school I was much taken with the description of the Holy Spirit. It was a real treat to hear our teacher relate, as only she could, the events of the Pentecost, when the disciples were endowed with the Holy Spirit and tongues of flame descended upon their heads. All at on
ce they were able to speak and understand every language. I studied the illustration by Gustav Doré in the Family Bible. I could do better than that, I thought. I drew that same picture again and again: people with huge fires blazing on their heads. The teacher could not help laughing, but for me this was something to aim for, a sudden longing. How was I to acquit myself, how to utilise my gift, such that I too would be crowned with flame, become a torch. Be understood by all. Or, more importantly: understand others.
Maybe that was why I went into television: to be able to work with such a bright, such a far-reaching light – with fire, you might say. With communication. Spirit. I remember my father and what he said when he converted air into music at the organ. Now I could say the same thing myself: ‘My work has to do with true inspiration.’
Much has been said about the television series Thinking Big. Much has also gone unsaid. In 1989 the walls came tumbling down all across Europe. Even in the grey, dreary Soviet Union which I had once visited the colours began to peep through, those that had been lying dormant, in the underground at least. But that year also saw the fall – one almost as momentous – of a wall of sorts in Norway, in Festung Norwegen. The Thinking Big series made the country open up, if only for a very short while. People pointed this out, almost incredulously, in newspapers, discussed it on television. One comment from that year stuck in my mind, one of the greatest compliments I have ever received, as it happens: ‘These programmes have engendered a new mood of tolerance in Norway, they have led to a new mode of communication with the world around us. Only a truly inspired work could have such an effect.’
How paradoxical. So why all this difficulty in getting through to a person whom I only needed to put out my hand in order to touch.
I had been looking forward to working on Lars Skrefsrud, the thief and jailbird who became Norway’s most famous missionary. Not even the religious aspect of the subject could put me off. Television was the perfect medium for this. At the sight of satellite receivers – we see them everywhere we go here in the Sogn area too – I always find myself thinking that television is the religion of our times, that these dishes are the private domes under which people worship their new god. In more misanthropical moments I am inclined to feel that the TV room has become the poor man’s Nirvana, a place in which we can empty our heads of all thought, step into the Void, switch off completely. If that is so, then it is also the fault – and possibly the boon – of the programmes being shown. The majority of television channels see it as their job to induce people to cut off, and out, completely.
I do not know whether to be sorry or pleased that no one has ever spotted the numerous autobiographical elements which I introduced, unwittingly perhaps, into the Thinking Big series. Although some are impossible to detect, since in these instances I had to abandon my original idea. As in the programme on Skrefsrud. From the minute I started on the groundwork for the programme I knew what I wanted to have as its hub: a book. A volume which would perfectly encapsulate the essence of Lars Skrefsrud: a man of spirit, a man who could communicate. Because that is the basis of all missionary work. If you wish to talk to a stranger, to explain your beliefs to him, you have to learn to speak his language. Her language. Skrefsrud’s work in India represented a lifelong endeavour to understand other people’s beliefs, something which also required him to expose himself to their culture.
Lars Skrefsrud arrived in India in 1863. He had been sent out there by the Gossner Society, but after some years he left the mission station at Purulia along with Hans Peter Børresen from Denmark to go to the village of Benegaria in Santal Parganas, and there, among one of the indigenous tribes of India, they set up their own centre, now known simply as the Santal Mission. They also founded the Ebenezer mission station. Skrefsrud had found his purpose in life. To master the Santals’ language.
There are few programmes on which I have spent so much time and effort, and few programmes with which I have been less happy. This was one of those unnerving experiences which gave me to know that I was an idiot, not a wonder. Or more of an idiot than a wonder. In the end I had to construct the programme around the dramatisation of two crucial and telling events in the history of the Santal Mission: contrasting its tentative beginnings, the baptism of the first three Santals, with the consecration twenty-two years later of the new church at Ebenezer, a building capable of accommodating as many as three thousand. By this time, thousands of Santals had become Christians and the mission station resembled a small, well-tended version of Paradise. The television footage was certainly colourful enough – piquant, you might say, as a curry compared to the bland fare of the Norwegian state church – but I was not happy. The Skrefsrud programme was in all ways a stopgap solution. I derived no comfort from the record number of applications to the Missionary College that year. My aim had been to make a programme about a book, about one man’s struggle to understand and be understood. I had wanted to depict something which lies deep inside every human being: the dream of speaking the same language.
Lars Olsen from Skrefsrud was a man of words. The first thing he did when he was released from prison, in which he had made up his mind to become a missionary, was to buy French, Greek and Latin grammars. He was already fluent in German and English. At the Gossner Society’s school in Berlin he studied several other languages including Hebrew and, not least, Hindi. In India he taught himself to speak Bengali and later went on to learn four other Indian dialects. Although it is unlikely that he spoke more than forty languages, as some would have it, it would be no exaggeration to call him a linguistic genius. His command of foreign tongues extended all the way down to the most difficult part of all, the actual tone of voice.
It is not that long since I read through my notes for this programme, with a good deal of nostalgia. I was amazed to find how well I remembered the original concept, and particularly all the details relating to Skrefsrud’s efforts to give the Santals a written language – take, for example the mere fact that before anything else he had to create a system of characters, an alphabet of sorts, using fifty ‘letters’ to reproduce the various sounds of the language. Having done this, he then wrote a grammar, while at the same time constantly noting down new words. More and more words. Within a very short time he had collected over ten thousand words which he later passed on to another Norwegian missionary who, in due course, included them in a massive five-volume dictionary. Norwegians have accomplished many great deeds; Roald Amundsen was, for instance, the first to reach the South Pole, but as far as I am concerned – you’ll have to pardon my subjectivity – there can be no greater deed than that of bestowing a written language upon a people which has none of its own. I like to think of Skrefsrud standing in front of a mirror beside a Santal tribesman, pronouncing words, sounds; I picture him mimicking the Santal, before examining his larynx and vocal chords with a laryngoscope. In my mind’s eye I see him roaming the countryside, on horseback, on foot, on his month-long expeditions among the Santals, always with his notebook to hand.
But what intrigued me most was the grammar he wrote. Might this be the most important book written by a Norwegian? I had actually held it in my hands, an exquisite volume with blue covers tooled in gold. I had spent hours leafing through it. A Grammar of the Santhal Language. Published in Benares – that alone: Benares – in 1873. It was hard for me to conceive of such a feat. Skrefsrud believed that the uninitiated underestimated the Santals’ language. He maintained that it was one of the most complex and philosophical in the world, as sophisticated as Sanskrit. The verbs in particular had such an overwhelming wealth of different forms. I flicked through the pages, shaking my head in disbelief at the thought that any man could wrest the intricacies of a language from it in such a way. I came to the part on the verb tenses – there were no less than twenty-three of them. How could that be? I still remember some of them: the Optative, the General Incomplete Present, the Indecisive Pluperfect, the Inchoative Future, the Preliminary Expostulative, the Continuative Future. I leafed t
hrough this book, almost enamoured of it – so much so that I really felt like learning Santali.
Suddenly I was struck by a strong sense of déjà vu. I had actually done something like this myself. Skrefsrud’s linguistic interpretations and his attempts to break through the Santals’ sound barrier had their parallel in my own life, in my year with Rubber Soul. I had received a communication from Margrete about a foreign language and had attempted to translate this album into something comprehensible, edifying even.
Where Skrefsrud succeeded I failed. That language remained a mystery to me.
I did not manage to realise my idea of making a programme about a man and a book. I still have a videotape on which I have preserved some lamentably bad clips from it. From these it is easy to see how difficult, not to say impossible, I found it to produce a memorable programme about a book. My powers of imagination laboured under my – then, dare I say – halting relationship with books. I was not well enough read, it was as simple as that.
The Discoverer Page 23