She dressed Njaal in the same way. Nearly all other kids were H&M kids, or KappAhl kids, their clothes followed the seasons and the tastes dictated by those stores, ours too. If Njaal wore anything from H&M, it never stood out as H&M but was absorbed by other, independently selected and subtly coordinated items. He was elegant too, though quite unlike any Little Lord Fauntleroy, on the contrary, he looked like a child of our time but in his very own way, just as Christina was a woman of our time but in her very own way. Twenty years from now, if we looked at photographs from today, she and he, mother and son, would clearly belong to the first years of the new millenium, the same way as everyone else, none of us would be able to escape that, but in a purer, more stylish way, much like John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy are so obviously fifties and sixties, but with a completely different air of significance and elegance about them from our parents, uncles, and aunts from the same era, despite their being contemporaries.
The sureness of Christina’s dress sense didn’t correspond well to the way she came across as a person, in the sense that she wasn’t nearly as sure of herself, or as superior, as she was in her choice of clothes. I didn’t know her that well, and naturally we’d never talked about what went on in her mind, or about her appearance, but from what I’d seen I imagined the relationship between her inner and outer selves to be less than harmonious, I had the feeling her inner life was much greater and more expansive than her outer self suggested. She was cautious about how much of herself she revealed, not necessarily consciously so, most likely not, but her unwavering reticence seemed to indicate this was the case; she didn’t want her inner self to be made visible to others, brought forward where it could be exploited by other people’s attentions and thoughts. Why not? Was she hiding something? Was there something she felt ashamed of? Or was she just a very private person?
I recognized the same characteristic in myself. I had no way of knowing if that sense of recognition was relevant, for all I knew she might feel and think quite differently, but if it really was like I thought, then I knew exactly how she felt. If that was so, she had grown up in a family from whom part of the person she was had to be hidden. If that was so, her childhood had been all about freeing herself from that, enabling her to exist and act in her own right, to accept that part of her that was hidden and allow it to come out into the open, but so powerful is that dynamic, so deeply integrated in the singular identity of the self, that it’s as good as impossible to eradicate: it is you. Because what happens, or at least what happened in my own case, is that the part of you that cannot be expressed, which has to be hidden, leads its own life inside, and this inner life, to which you grow accustomed, becomes a way of living, something good, you become more than sufficient in yourself and have no need for others. What ought to unfold, folds inward. For Geir, to whom she was married, there was no such imbalance between what he thought and what he said, between what he did and what he felt. He was a social being through and through, he lived his life with others, even when he was on his own. For that reason Geir needed Christina a lot more than she needed him. She could live a whole life alone if she had to, that was my assumption. He, however, could not; without the constant emotional exchange that went on between his self and the social world, he would perish. He needed the outer world, she did not; she had all she needed inside herself. She was a person who felt a strong sense of duty, she did what was asked of her; he was not, he did what he wanted. I too felt a strong sense of duty, that was what the outer world basically was for me, obligation, whereas my inner world to a much greater extent was freedom. Only during the past few years had I begun to understand that retreating into the self was perilous, something that removed me from life. And only during the past few years had I begun to understand that it was something I shared with my father. He was a fundamentally lonely person when I was growing up, in the way he kept to himself in the house, shutting himself away in his own little studio in the basement, and in the fact that he had no friends. The social world was a game he mastered but took no part in; perhaps he found nothing of value in it, nor, I suspect, in anything else. The things that make a difference, those that are replete with meaning and significance, were, I think, wholly absent from his life. He bore the mark of remoteness in everything he did, and the only thing which countered that were the upsurges of rage and resentment that would come over him, which so agonizingly brought him close to me, physically and mentally, and which, one could imagine, to him had the very purpose of keeping everything at bay, maintaining remoteness.
In a diary we found among his things after he died, he wrote about “the solitary individual.” He wrote that he could tell the solitary individual apart from others, and it would seem he counted himself as one. He wrote too about conventions in more southern cultures, which were more inclusive and social than the Scandinavian, and it was impossible to read this as an indication of anything other than that he longed for such a life. The fact that he started drinking must have had something to do with that. Freedom, independence, community. The most radical difference in his lifestyle before and after he left our family, besides his alcohol consumption, was social contact, all the new people who suddenly came into his life. It was a new beginning, one last try, but the alcohol was not only a blessing, a bestower of grace, because soon he felt the desire for it when he got out of bed, or rather not desire, it was a need, he was compelled by it. On weekends he drank from the time he got up until he went to bed, during the week he managed to keep more of a grip to begin with, refraining from alcohol in the mornings, popping home at the lunch break to drink a bit, then drinking all evening, gradually it became harder and harder to resist, and eventually he gave in to it completely and no longer cared. But it started down there in his studio, the urge he felt to be alone, to keep the nearness of the world at bay, so impossible to reconcile with his longing for the social world, which could not be admitted or even acknowledged, not until the very end, when everything was already gone. He was trapped, increasingly confined, and he lost everything, due also to an outwardly directed aggression and destructiveness, as I understand it, which eventually he turned inward, and that was his decline, totally removed from society, back in the house where it all began, alone with his mother, in a steady flow of alcohol. The priest who held the funeral service said something I’ll always remember. One must fasten one’s gaze, he said. One must fasten one’s gaze.
One must fasten one’s gaze.
He could have said the little things are important; but he didn’t. He could have said that loving thy neighbor is most important of all; but he didn’t. Nor did he say what that gaze must be fastened upon. All he said was that it must be fastened.
It made sense to me then, as we sat in the chapel and wept that morning, his body lying there in its coffin a few meters away, and it makes sense to me today, as I sit here writing these words. I know what it means to see something without fastening one’s gaze. Everything is there, the houses, the trees, the cars, the people, the sky, the earth, and yet something is missing because their being there means nothing. It could just as well be something else that was there or nothing at all. This is what the meaningless world looks like. And we can inhabit the meaningless world quite adequately, it being a simple matter of endurance, and indeed we do so if we must. It can be beautiful, though we may wonder in relation to what, it being all that we have, without such a thought making any difference, without it really bothering us. We have not fastened our gaze, we have not connected ourselves with the world, and could just as well, taking things to their logical conclusion, depart from it. The connections that hold us back, which cause us to thrash in our chains, as it were, have to do with expectations and obligation, with what the world asks of us, and sooner or later we come to a point where we realize the imbalance of our honoring the world’s demands while the world fails to honor ours. At that point we become free, we can do as we please, but what has made us free, the meaninglessness of the world, also deprives that freedom o
f its meaning.
But if the world is meaningless, what good does it do to fasten our gaze on it? What kind of foolish middle-class delusion is that?
The question is how we define meaning. If we take the challenge of fastening our gaze seriously, it must be the case that it is not the object itself that is important, nor the person, in fact it can be any object or any person, in any place, at any time. The important thing is the eye, not what it sees: the link between the person seeing and what they see, regardless of what that might be. This is so because nothing means anything on its own. Only when an object is seen does it become. All meaning comes from the eye seeing. Meaning is not a property of the world, but something we attach to the world. The eye internalizes the extrinsic, but since the extrinsic remains so to the eye, something outside the self, it often believes that the meaning it sees belongs to the object or the phenomenon, which it then denounces, elevates, or remains indifferent to without understanding that what it denounces, elevates, or remains indifferent to is something within itself. It is by way of this internalization of the world that meaning becomes possible. All significance arises in the eye that sees, all meaning in the heart. Attaching meaning to the world is peculiar only to man, we are the givers of meaning, and this is not only our own responsibility but also our obligation. My father failed to live up to his obligation and he fell. It was not a punishment, but a consequence. That’s pretty much how I look at it today, thirteen years after he died. I believe the priest was right, it really is all about fastening one’s gaze, but I believe too that such a plea is related to the similar plea that calls on us to be good. No one disagrees about this, though for many it remains unattainable, related to the equally utopian though more popular call underlying so much in our society that tells us we must be rich. Certainly. It’s easy to be rich if you’ve got lots of money, and being good is easy enough for those who are whole, but for those who are not whole, good isn’t even within their horizon; indeed, perhaps no horizon exists for such people, no up, no down, no good, no bad, only anger or pain or loathing, because something inside them is broken, truly fucked up, and they are so deeply entangled in all sorts of unmanageable emotions, struggling for life with their backs to the wall, unless they’ve resigned themselves and given up completely. So many struggle for life, so many give up, and the rest, who know nothing of such pain or anger, watch TV in the cozy warmth of their own goodness. When I think about that, about what we have made of the world, a single great living room in which we sit and stare at what other people are doing, I think of what Dad once said, spitting sarcasm, as we sat outside at the barbecue, he, Mom, and me, the very incarnation of family happiness and hygge: “Now we’re living the life, aren’t we, eh!” And when I think about that, I think to myself that he did the right thing. To hell with meaning, to hell with everything, I’m going to drink until I drop. Drink myself into a stupor, drink myself into darkness, drink myself into the empty void, for desperate diseases need desperate remedies. I drink and I fall, I fall and I drink. Everything stinks, everything is shit, people are morons, to hell with them, I’ll drink myself stupid, stupider than them. People are small, but I’ll drink myself smaller. Because when I drink, as I shrink and become smaller and smaller, my shadow on the wall gets bigger and bigger, until the moment I die, slumped there in the chair with my nose broken and blood on my face and shirt, and from then on I will be nobody and my shadow will be everything.
My father failed to fasten his gaze, and he was not a good man. But he was his own person, and if he’d wanted to, wanted to fasten his gaze and be good, I think he could have done so. Something inside him was broken right from the start. To me it doesn’t matter: he was the way he was. I’ve never been able to see my father as a person in his own right, the way I see myself, he exists only by virtue of his relationship to me, as my father, and his actions are mysterious to me and yet sovereign. Whether he suffered or not isn’t something I wonder about. My father was a king without a country, and who cares for a king to suffer? That he died a clown, his nose reddened by blood, in his mother’s armchair, changes nothing. To me, he will be king until the day I die. He comes to me still in dreams, in all his former splendor, the terrible ruler of the basement, for insights are worthless to the subconscious; it’s like one of those boxes filled with crushed ice in which they transport living hearts, kidneys, lungs, livers, from the hospital where the donor died to the one where the living body waits. In this box, from which dreams rise in the night, dead emotions live on outside the body in which they once grew, and there among them my father still reigns.
The relationship between parents and children is a bit like that between customs officers and airline passengers; the customs officers watch the passengers through a window as they come through arrivals and can study everything they do, while the passengers, glancing at the same window from the other side, see only themselves. A child can learn nothing from his parents; the best he can hope for is not to repeat their mistakes. Dad wrote in his diary that he had been beaten as a child, and now he was a father who beat his own children. More than any other, such a statement stands as an argument against the idea that humans are rational beings. He experienced the pain and humiliation of being beaten at home, so why did he pass that pain and humiliation on? Perhaps the very ability to empathize, the ability to recognize that others feel the same as oneself and that those feelings can be just as important and may be taken as seriously as one’s own, gets beaten away. To begin with we are near the world, I believe, but if our trust is broken we seek refuge deep within ourselves, cut off from what goes on outside, and the remoteness thereby established is then so very, very difficult to surmount. But a connection of that nature, between abuse in childhood and remoteness from the world in the later personality, only seems obvious in a system in which the rules of reasoning alone are valid, not in reality, which is quite differently open and oblivious to logic. My own aversion to intimacy and all outbursts of emotion, and the fact that all the relationships I’ve been involved in have sooner or later seen me occupy the middle ground of detachment and levelheadedness, has little to do with that aversion being in any way metaphorical, a symptom of a relationship to a father or a mother having broken down. No, my aversion to intimacy and outbursts of emotion is due to my actually being averse to intimacy and outbursts of emotion, I can’t stand them, don’t want to be anywhere near them, and the remoteness I crave in such instances is a blessing, occasionally even the highest conceivable blessing. Sexual desire is the only thing that displaces that need for boundaries and distance, only in that desire am I able to surmount my fear of intimacy and need for remoteness and thereby be close to another person. At the same time, and this seems fairly obvious, that fear of intimacy rears up again, doubly potent, in that the person this sexual desire is meant to overcome my remoteness to is the person to whom I am nearest, with whom I share my life, since then there is no longer any remoteness and sex then becomes infused with resistance. Socially I can overcome my remoteness to others when drunk, then it goes away, but in no other circumstances. A hug is anathema to me, a pat on the shoulder or back a threat. But in such cases it is not remoteness that is the problem, and lack of empathy is not a defect, the problem is the intimacy; I genuinely cannot deal with it, and the same goes for people’s empathy. Why can’t they just stay away and leave me alone, I think to myself. Is that too much to ask? The loneliness Dad wrote about is not something I know. As such, I am more broken than he, in that I entertain no expectations of interpersonal closeness and empathy, this not being something I crave, which, I suppose, makes it easier for me than it was for him, and less likely that I will end up following in his footsteps and drinking myself into the grave. Why on earth would I drink if I had all my time to myself?
Swallows flitted back and forth high up in the sky. I knew it was a sign about the weather, but that was all. Either it would be fine when the swallows flew high, or else it would rain. That much I could work out. I knew too that they were
flying that high because that was where the insects were. But had the insects sought such heights because there was an area of low pressure or an area of high pressure on its way? And what did they actually do up there?
“How’s the novel coming along, Karl Ove?” Christina asked. “Or maybe it’s finished?”
“Pretty much,” I said. “I just need to change some names.”
“And then write four more,” said Geir.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 43