I am sitting on the balcony. Benjamin, a restless specimen of the species Homo Ludens, is out swimming, jumping off the diving board on Lausholmen even though it is drizzling with rain. The view is even more spectacular in grey weather. Low shreds of cloud melt into one another or drift apart in fits and starts, like stage curtains opening or closing. Suddenly one of the mountains will heave into sight, mighty and distinct, almost like a separate planet, before its peak is enveloped again; or Vik, on the other side of the fjord, lies bathed in sunlight for a few minutes, while the countryside round about is dark and rain-drenched. I feel as though I am beholding several landscapes, like an increasingly hazy succession of veils. Suddenly Sognefjord has a Chinese look about it. I like it better this way. In fine weather all of the National Romantic aspects stand out so starkly, so unequivocally.
Some places have an impact that cannot be put into words. Margrete did right to take me to Xi’an. I am sure that certain spots spark off specific thoughts better than others. Were anyone to ask me, I would say that Sognefjord was the best place to start for anyone wishing to understand Norway. Our nation’s mentality. It is said that the sense of recognition engendered by a tree is so powerful because it is a reflection of ‘the inner tree’. Might not the same apply to a fjord. Do not all Norwegians have a fjord inside them?
Is it strange, I wonder, that I think so little about my years in prison? In many ways I found prison life as such, both the physical surroundings and the practicalities, the least difficult part of it all. I had no problem with the locked doors, the interrogations; with having to strip to my skin, with the knowledge of being under surveillance. I did not need to resign myself to my new life. I was already resigned to it. The other inmates very soon dubbed me The Monk. An apt nickname. I never spoke and wished only to be alone. The way I saw it I had entered a monastery. There were days when I did nothing in my free time except sit and repeat a mantra to myself, a word which encompassed everything I did not understand: ‘Purusasukta.’ I had finally found the perfect hiding place. I felt like the man in the print Margrete bought for me in Xi’an, a picture which I had hung up and often contemplated: a tiny, solitary figure in a vast and rugged vertical landscape full of blank patches.
After some years I began to think of my cell as the first cell, to imagine that I was back at the start, that everything was beginning anew, could begin anew. It was up to me to fertilise this cell, to generate life again.
For the first time since Project X I was reading – the first time, that is, not counting my readings to Viktor from The Cantos by Ezra Pound. I read a tattered copy of Victoria twenty times and more. I also read a bundle of books which I had come across as a teenager, books my mother had inherited and which I secretly sold off to antiquarian bookshops, having first noted down a quote from each one. From the library I borrowed the standard classics of the nineteenth century, books by Alexander von Humboldt, Søren Kierkegaard, William Morris. I didn’t understand it all. I understood a little. But I read them all resolutely, from cover to cover: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde. It was a kind of penance, an act of contrition. As if I wished to atone for my ignorance. I waded my way through the whole of The History of Philosophy by G.W.F. Hegel from which, prior to this, I could cite only one sentence – taken from the introduction, at that: ‘We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.’
Despite the efforts made to shield me, I did of course get to hear of a lot of the vicious, spiteful things that were written about me. That was tough. Then Kamala’s book appeared, and after it the strange biography for which Rakel was responsible. These marked a turning point. And were of invaluable help. To listen to, to read, my story as it was told by these two, by people who wished me well. I might not be alive today were it not for their accounts. And Kristin. Her visits. Her hands holding me. I was encouraged to survive by the knowledge that I was loved.
I am also quite certain that I began to write as a direct consequence of the two aforementioned books. And even though my manuscript was an embarrassingly cack-handed affair, circling evasively around a dark centre, it did serve a purpose. In the evenings, before I got rid of those sheaves of paper, I would run my eye over all the lines of letters. I was reminded of a long thread. For many years I had believed that I could not possibly have any more unfolding to do. This was not true. All the writing had helped me to evolve even further. I was not the person I had been when I started writing.
I had borrowed an old IBM typewriter with a golf ball. At the time when I was writing, I was forever taking the golf ball off and placing it on the desk in front of me. It looked like a miniature globe, its surface covered in letters. Maybe that is how the Earth looks from space, I thought: like a symbol-bedecked sphere.
It is a relief to be on board the Voyager, not only because of the crew’s optimism, their young minds, but because they are working on a project with which I have such a lot of sympathy – a combination, no less, of the world’s two greatest industries: travel and entertainment. Life on board is not exactly as I had imagined it. Granted, they do play computer games on laptops, but they are just as likely to be found playing chess on an actual board. They know as much about the Nimzo-Indian opening as they do about Myst. They are comfortable with everything from an old Commodore 64 computer to antiquarian books, from rococo balls and foxtrots to rave parties and trip hop music. They visit Net cafés, swathed in Palestinian keffiyehs.
I can see, of course, that they also have their problems to contend with, individually and as a group – oh yes, there can be friction on board! – but right now, at the stage I am at, I am much more interested in their positive than their negative sides. Hanna, for example – who, with her Korean features, sometimes reminds me of Bo Wang Lee – is also a qualified architect. She has worked on what was, at that time, the busiest building site in Europe, Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, and is still liable to refer to things she learned there, theories on town planning, when discussing the OAK Quartet’s own ideas. The other evening the four of them suddenly got onto the subject of the world’s biggest dam-building project, the Three Gorges Dam in China. Carl had actually been there and seen the work in progress. I cannot believe how much they have managed to do in such a short space of time.
And then there is their music. Not by chance have they called themselves a quartet. They can sing just about anything in perfect four-part harmony. Martin plays a whole range of instruments, from the mouth organ to the didgeridoo, the long pipe traditional to the Australian aborigines. He can also play Joni Mitchell’s songs, including the tricky ‘Song for Sharon’ from Hejira with the capo in just the right position and the guitar tuned exactly as the writer herself has it. I mean, not even I can do that, and I’ve listened to my fair share of Joni Mitchell – I, who did, after all, insert an F sharp/A sharp chord on the piano at the beginning of the fifth bar of ‘Gentle Jesus meek and mild’, a harmonic transition which, if I am lucky, is the only thing likely to get me into heaven.
It is evening. I am sitting on the balcony of our hotel room with a whisky. The weather has cleared up. I look across to the other side of the fjord. I was over that way once, to the west of Vik, west of Arnafjord. I saw something there, a man with his head in a woman’s lap, a sight I will never forget.
It is still light. The air is balmy. It is the sort of evening that causes me to remember. Takes me back to the inescapable centre of my life. To the living room and Margrete’s body. A dead wife clad in my own dressing gown. The spring evening outside the windows; a yellow, then a reddish glow on the horizon. I stood there staring. For how long I do not know. I realised that, unconsciously, I had been holding my breath. For more than a minute. For much more than a minute. As if I was diving for her, hunting for a pale glint of gold in the mud, that flash of gold which sometimes flickered in her eyes. I think I was making a last, desperate effort to save Margrete’s life. If, that is, it was not – again – my o
wn.
Then, as if it were the only natural thing to do, I sat down next to her. I lifted Margrete’s head onto my lap. For a long time I sat like this, sat with her head in my lap. It reminded me of something. Reminded me very much of something else. I had once seen two people sitting exactly like this, in a wild and desolate landscape, a man and a woman on an almost luminously green grassy bank by a lake. The man had been lying with his head in the woman’s lap. The water was like glass, mirroring the encircling mountains. It could have been a happy scene, set in an almost impossibly beautiful landscape. Then all at once the woman began to sing, with a large orchestra behind her, and the whole scene altered character due to the deep solemnity of the music. The woman sang, she sang in German, she sang ‘Mild und leise’ from the end of the third and final scene in the third and final act of Richard Wagner’s revolutionary opera Tristan and Isolde; sang out of great pain, great love, great sorrow. Her lover, the man whose head lay in her lap, was dead, and she too was close to death. She sat there, surrounded on all sides by tall cliffs, looking almost as though she were shut inside an enormous cauldron which, because of the singing, the music behind it, seemed to be full of seething passions.
I did not see it when we were filming the scene. Only afterwards, when I was looking at it on the screen, that shot, the posing, was I struck by how much it reminded me of an episode from my youth: Margrete with my head in her lap, in her garden at Grorud.
No other programme in the Thinking Big series was as easy to make as the one on Kirsten Flagstad. It made itself. Right from the start I knew that I had to avoid depicting her as she appears in a well-known film clip, kitted out with chainmail and wingéd helmet and spear, her hair fluttering in the breeze from a wind machine as she sings ‘Hojotoho! Hojotoho!’ from The Valkyrie, the sort of set-up which, magnificent voice or no, only served to confirm all of the prejudices which so many Norwegians had about opera. I wanted to break this pattern by filming in the outdoors, to bring opera to life, you might say. Not until later did I realise that I had built the whole programme around one of the biggest operatic clichés of all: a person singing as they die.
I had no difficulty in deciding which incident from Flagstad’s life to highlight. It had to be her stupendous breakthrough at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in February 1935, performances which turned her into an international star overnight. And since she could be said to have made two debuts, I chose the second one, made four days after the first, when she sang Isolde – which was also the part she was to sing more than any other in her career. The audience is reported to have been in ecstasies; they had apparently stormed the stage at the end of the second act. And it truly was a sensation. For the first time, a Met audience heard the voice which, some said, Wagner must have heard in his subconscious when he wrote the opera: possibly the most dramatic soprano of all time – the Voice of the Century as she was also called. The way I saw it, I was not making a programme about Kirsten Flagstad the woman, but about her lungs. About breathing. Because that was the secret: to be capable of turning air into resonance, into music. Into images. When you heard Flagstad sing, you thought of rivers of gold and floods of light.
I had listened to this opera again and again and was in no doubt that I had to concentrate on the ending, the ‘love-death’. When I mooted the possibility of shooting outdoors, of finding a dramatic natural setting, one of the cameramen, who hailed from Vik in Sogn, suggested filming the scene in what he called ‘Sognefjord’s best kept secret’ – to which, sadly, more than a million Norwegians were now to be made privy – namely Finnabotn at the head of Finnafjord. And when we arrived there by boat I knew with every fibre of my being that this was the place. Something about the landscape at Finnabotn told me this was the chance of a lifetime. One almost felt that the scenery alone could have engendered that all-embracing, yet uncompromising, love.
The scene opened with a still from the actual occurrence, the 1935 performance of Tristan and Isolde, Act III, at the New York Met, with Kirsten Flagstad as Isolde and Lauritz Melchior as Tristan, a picture which I held, flickering, on screen while I narrated the events leading up to this moment. Playing in the background – a recurring motif throughout the programme, this – was the famous prelude, a piece of music which, from the first fateful, ominously atonal bars warned of a stable core, the music’s very centre of gravity, which had become distinctly shaky, just as life does when love comes along. Then – let there be light! – I had the dead image of Flagstad and Melchior in their typical opera costumes and extravagant make-up, fade into living film, full colour, and a couple, ordinary people, in the same pose as Flagstad and Melchior on the stage, only here they were lying on a green hillside by the lake in everyday clothes, clothes that made one think of young people, teenagers even. And gradually the prelude gave way to the music from Act III and the woman on the grassy bank lip-synched rapturously to Flagstad’s voice, as it sounded in a superb recording from 1953 conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler: a voice full of light, velvet and molten gold.
A couple: a woman with a man’s head in her lap. Only when I was going through the rough footage for the programme did it strike me that this scene could have been drawn straight from my own life. One day I dived into Svartjern and found a gold bracelet and not long afterwards I found myself lying on a luminously green lawn with my head in Margrete’s lap, while opera music streamed into the garden next door from an open window. She had given me freshly pressed orange juice and I was enchanted. I lay with my head in her lap, revelling in those minutes, not knowing that this would be the happiest moment of my entire life.
She, Kirstin Flagstad, or rather, the actress playing Flagstad, or the actress who played all those who have ever had a broken heart or known what it is to lose someone you love, sang ‘Mild und leise’, and as she, Flagstad, this unhappy woman, sang the camera began to pull up, suddenly showing the scene from the air, revealing more and more of the surrounding scenery, the wild and truly spectacular landscape of which the grassy bank by the water was a part. Soon, as the sound of the music and the singing intensified, one saw that these two, the woman with the man’s head in her lap – Isolde with the dead Tristan, Isolde, who was herself about to die, and her dead lover – were not sitting in a crater, by a lake bounded by plunging cliffs, as first thought; as the camera pulled even further up it became apparent that the couple were lying on a grassy slope at the head of a fjord, at Finnabotn which, some kilometres further on, near Finden’s Garth, ran into a narrow sound before opening out into Finnafjord itself which, in turn, ran into Sognefjord with all its many other arms. Even for me it was a stunning prospect; the view of Finnabotn with, barely visible, a couple of dots, two people, two lovers, dying. And then they were gone, as if transformed into music, or to landscape: a fjord, encircled by snow-covered mountains, which was also a part of the great fjord, all its branches. The beauty and the drama of Flagstad’s voice accorded perfectly with the beauty and the drama of the scenery. The two became one.
The first time I saw television – probably an episode of Robin Hood on a Saturday at Wolfgang Michaelsen’s house in the early sixties – I went up and placed my hands flat against the screen. I felt the prickle of the static, but I was disappointed that nothing happened. The picture, the world inside the box, remained flat. Kristin and the OAK Quartet work with a medium that has overcome this flatness. When I touch the screen something happens. Their screen, that interface with its appetising signposting, gives me the feeling of something leading one endlessly further and further in. When I study their intricate structure map, I cannot help thinking of māyā.
I really was not sure about it when I booked the helicopter for the shoot; I was afraid the whole thing might end up being a bit too Hollywoodish, or too much like a music video. But the end result exceeded all expectations. It took the helicopter a little over ten minutes to climb to 12,000 feet, but byspeeding up the film we managed to get it to fit exactly with the final three minutes of ‘Mild und leise’
, the point of view rising as the music intensified, soaring upwards, until both the viewpoint and the music reached their peak with ‘in des Welt-Atems wehendem All’. The fabulous thing about it was the way the point of view, the shot, the helicopter spiralled upwards. When I ran through the final cut of the scene I was so moved that I could not speak. The shot of that scene and that landscape from a certain height told us that those two people did not die, there was no way they could die. They were not shut in, they were on a fjord. In their love-death lay the opening of something new.
I struck lucky with that programme. A commentary in one newspaper said that I had cut through the whole debate as to where the new opera house should be situated. I had shown that the opera lay here, in the heart of the rugged Norwegian countryside. Norway was opera.
Once when she was telling a story from The Mahabharata, Kamala mentioned one of the weapons which Drona the master gave to the hero Arjuna; an astra which could hold all the warriors on a battlefield spellbound by the illusions it created. ‘That’s pretty much what you did with your television programmes,’ she said to me.
One writer pointed out that, seen from above, this landscape, with the arms of the fjord reaching deep into the country, looked not unlike a network of nerve fibres, and as such could lead one to think, or imagine, that one was inside the brain, in the area relating to hearing, the enjoyment of sounds – or indeed, why not: inside the nervous system of love itself. I have heard that this place, the grassy bank running down to the water at the head of Finnafjord, has become a sacred spot of sorts for lovers. Quite a number of bridal couples have reportedly gone there after their weddings.
There would come a day when it would dawn on me that with this scene I had not only unwittingly reflected one of the happiest moments in my life, but that I had also prefigured the unhappiest. For a moment, as I sat there on the floor of Villa Wergeland, with Margrete’s lifeless head in my lap, I had a feeling of stepping outside of myself, of being lifted up; of seeing myself and Margrete on the living-room floor from a great height. A picture of dead love.
The Discoverer Page 42