My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

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  I saw a cruise ship thronged with people pass slowly through a sinking city, a loudspeaker voice blaring out, a glitter of flashing cameras, and was it death I saw?

  Indeed, and it was sublime. The sublime is everything, though now, in our fracturing world, it has become almost extinct. We live under the hegemony of constituent parts, and death too is under its jurisdiction. It is the death of the individual that matters, we are snatched away one by one, hidden from each other’s gaze, and only the specified death matters. Not Death, but the death of constricted arteries and overexerted hearts, the death of lungs eaten up by cancer. The same applies to beauty. The covers of chunky art books almost always show a small section of a painting, a hand, the gaze of an eye, a bird, a sky, a figure in the background, seldom the painting in its entirety. Inside their covers the painting appears together with various sections of it, often with an X-ray for good measure so we can study for ourselves the processes that went into making the finished painting. Aha, so he moved the hat? In the case of a famous painting, lesser-known paintings from the same period are shown alongside it, and in the accompanying essays the issues raised are most usually social in nature – the people in that Renaissance painting, what clothes are they wearing? What class do they belong to? What sort of economic system was the artist a part of? Where did they get their paints, did they leave any fingerprints anywhere? What currents made the perspective possible or necessary? Was the painter a homosexual, and in what ways does this show in what he chose to paint? Why were there so few women painters, and how has this affected the way we perceive quality? This atomization of everything, this is also a result of the primacy of the visual, since it is no longer the impression art or death or the divine awakens in us that applies, but what it looks like – in the case of the body, what kind of memories precede our expiry; in the case of art, not the impression itself, but the preconditions of that impression. This atomization, which Broch and many around him believed to represent a degeneration, but which of course may also be seen as an enormous revitalization of a slowly withering culture, something to which not least the paintings of the Baroque attest, the world there almost exploding in detail and the own beauty of our physical reality in everything from pheasant feathers to dead hares, apples, blunderbusses, skulls, and shells, was met by another, seemingly contrary tendency, a universal science, una scientia universalis to use the words of Francis Bacon, achieved through principles of observation, probability, and verification. It is impossible to think of a science that is local, that a phenomenon or object, for instance, should display properties that applied only in one place, only then. Seventeenth-century debate about the wonder or miracle, which until then had been fully believed in, the improbable event that occurred only once, in one place, never to be repeated, perhaps illustrates better than anything the new line that was drawn through the world, as well as its impact. In his Religio Medici from 1635, Thomas Browne writes:

  That Miracles are ceased, I can neither prove, nor absolutely deny, much lesse define the time and period of their cessation; that they survived Christ, is manifest upon record of Scripture; that they outlived the Apostles also, & were revived at the conversion of Nations, many yeares after, we cannot deny, if wee shall not question those Writers whose testimonies wee doe not controvert, in points that make for our own opinions; therefore that may have some truth in it that is reported by the Jesuites of their Miracles in the Indies; I could wish it were true, or had any other testimony than their owne Pennes.

  On the one hand he argues in favor of the unchallenged authority of Scripture, doubting not for a moment the existence of miracles as a phenomenon, these being described in the Bible and therefore necessarily true; on the other hand he is troubled by doubt as to whether the miracle exists in his own time, Scripture in this instance falling short, requiring him to seek independent testimony. This new way of reasoning, based on observation, was gradually to displace faith and the idea of the holy, though the two viewpoints were nevertheless not dissimilar, since what characterizes the holy, its exclusion of all that is not holy, in like manner characterizes the rational, which excludes all that is not rational. This state of affairs still holds. Religion and art are no longer midpoints in our ways of perception, but exist at the periphery, without power or influence. While religion has become a personal matter – if a person is Christian, it is his own, private belief – art has turned to addressing issues that arise in the social domain in which our lives are played out, and on the odd occasion it chances to home in on that middle point of meaning where our world is defined, which is to say in the laboratory and the observatory, it invariably comes across as rather amateurish and undignified. At once ignorant and ingratiating, it talks big about string theory or quantum physics. A new path for the novel? For humankind? Party afterward? Anyone?

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  When I was a boy I wanted to be a surgeon. It was a wish that probably came from watching the medical programs shown on Norwegian TV in the seventies, long sequences of actual operations that had me completely captivated. The body was never shown in its entirety, only the parts of it that were cut into, the rest was covered up by material of the same kind and color as the aprons and masks worn by the surgeons and nurses. It was a smooth, pristine material without folds or stains, against which the white skin that lay like a crater in the middle with all its irregularities seemed almost obscene. When the scalpel was inserted and the section of skin cut open by the faceless surgeon under the light of a powerful lamp, it seemed as if a little ditch appeared. When held open by clamps it was seen to be full of fluids and pulsating organs impossible to distinguish from one another, much less identify, yet they gleamed like membranes in the light, and clearly some order did exist, for the rubber-clad fingers set to work swiftly and with obvious experience. And so it was I saw the heart, the blind beast that moves in the chest, and the blood in which it bathed. Many of my drawings from that time are of surgeons operating on patients, they were gory and full of blood, and my mother worried about me: perhaps there was something wrong? But surgery was part of a pattern; my other interests were diving and space exploration, all three areas having in common the fact that they served to open up the world, in the first instance the human body, in the second ocean life, in the third the vastness of the cosmos. I was fascinated by everything that was hidden to the human eye, longed to see into life’s secret rooms, to be admitted into the unknown. Of those rooms, the human body was perhaps the most exciting in that the unknown was inside me and in everyone I saw, always there no matter which way I turned, and yet not, for the body’s gurgling, blood-drenched inner realm remained out of reach, impossible to enter. Every summer we penetrated the surface of the sea and could glimpse the shimmering, darting life that existed there. The black universe of space revealed itself to us with twinkling stars on the clear nights of winter and autumn, when even planets might be visible too. Only the room of the body remained closed. The small gray sacks of the lungs; the spongy growth of the brain on its spinal-cord stalk; the tubes that transported the blood this way and that, through all the flesh and tissue of the body; these were things I had never seen. The closest I got were those images of operations on the TV screen. I have no idea how many such programs were broadcast, but presumably it was two or three series at most. Yet the impression they made remained, the fascination with the body’s internal workings, the strangeness of that secret life never left me, though it became gradually more ambivalent, often merging with revulsion; the sight of the body’s insides was at once revolting and alluring. As an adult I became absorbed by the exploration of the body that came with the Renaissance, when the physical human being was methodically mapped out for the first time, primarily by way of the dissection of fresh human corpses, often executed criminals, though sometimes bodies would be taken from churchyards, laid open behind closed doors or frequently in public in the context of anatomy lectures at the universities, in the so-called anatomical theaters. It was
state-of-the-art science. Thomas Browne traveled from England to continental Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century so as to study anatomy at Montpellier, surgery at Padua, and pharmacology at Leiden. But it was also a spectacle and a form of popular entertainment, the internal physical body was a sensation, a fairground of flesh and blood.

  Four hundred years on, what seems strange is not the phenomenon itself, but that such fascination did not emerge earlier. What prevented the people of the Ancient World or the Medieval Age from exploring the inner body? The ancient Egyptians were familiar with it due to their culture of embalming, but they were never fascinated by the workings and interplay of the human organs, their practice being completely focused on death and respect for the deceased. The Greeks, who took the practice of medicine from sorcery to rational science, based their knowledge of the internal human body on what they could observe and understand from the insides of animals and, one might imagine, on what was revealed by accidents or war, when the body revealed itself in various ways: the brain inside a shattered skull, the colon spilling from a slashed belly, the jutting bone and ragged tendons and arteries of a severed foot or arm. The idea that they might dissect a corpse themselves and study it at their leisure did not occur to them. The thought must have been impossible, for their thirst for knowledge was in every other respect insatiable.

  Why was that thought so impossible?

  Perhaps they regarded the body and life as one, so that the notion of dissection made no sense to them; perhaps they did not understand that the life of one body could be prolonged by the knowledge gained from dissecting another; perhaps they saw no worth in prolonged life. Or perhaps they simply considered the inner body to be sacrosanct. Whatever the reason, they did not cut up the bodies of the dead and consequently knew little about the functions of the internal organs. Their writings on medicine and biology, full of approximations and guesswork yet nonetheless surprisingly reliable in view of the absence of empirical observation, were standard through the hundreds of years before the Renaissance, when they continued to carry such weight that both Dürer’s and Leonardo’s anatomical studies, made with human corpses in front of them, contain errors, details of medical literature rather than the medical body, indicating that what they knew occasionally overrode what they actually saw. The same was true of Charles Estienne’s anatomical drawings from 1546, which include details of Galen’s text that were in fact nonexistent. But the new paradigm quickly replaced the old, the best anatomical drawings of the seventeenth century are so exact as to still be useful for teaching purposes. Naturally, such a radical modification of our human knowledge did not occur without opposition. In the mid-sixteenth century Paracelsus for instance wrote as follows on the matter of dissection:

  It is in no way sufficient to view the human body, to dissect, then to view again, and finally to boil it and look at it once again. To view in this way is to be compared with the unlearned peasant reading psalms: he reads only the letters and there is nothing more to say about him.

  Paracelsus’s alternative was magic. Only in the relations between the heavenly and the earthly, the concealed and the unconcealed could the true nature of things be explained. His arguments proceeded from a medieval conception of reality, a world consisting of correspondences between what was visible and what was not, between the microcosmos of the human and the macrocosmos of the universe, a God’s book whereby everything was a sign of something else and nothing existed simply on its own terms. To describe what was evident in the material world was meaningless until rendered otherwise by demonstrating or establishing its connection to the immaterial world. Paracelsus, with his to our mind chaotic hodgepodge of natural science, morals, magic, and metaphysics, in a world populated by spirits bound respectively to the elements of fire, earth, water, and air, connected with the human sphere in a near-infinite number of ways, was oblivious to the significance of anatomy to medical science, and from the perspective of his writings the practices of a figure such as Leonardo da Vinci, two generations older than Paracelsus, come across as empty exercises, whereas to Leonardo himself his work must have felt like an adventure, a second Creation no less.

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  In his notebooks Leonardo seems almost obsessive in his urge to delve into our physical reality, and he makes no distinction between the human and the material, the living and the dead, he wants to describe and capture it all, to understand. How come the fossils of mussels and sea creatures can be discovered at the top of a mountain? How come older people see things better from a distance? How come the sky is blue? What is heat? He attempts to describe the causes of laughter and crying, the nature of a sneeze, a yawn. He wants to know all about the falling sickness, spasms, paralysis. Why do we shiver when we are cold, and why do we sweat? What are fatigue, hunger, thirst, lust? He wants to explore our beginnings in the womb and to discover why an eight-month-old fetus dies. He wants to detail which muscles decay when we grow fat, and which become pronounced when we are thin. He wonders why the spots on the moon change when observed over time, and explains them as being caused by clouds rising from its waters, coming between the sun and those waters, by their shadow depriving them of the sun’s rays, the waters thereby remaining dark and unable to reflect the solar body. In all his observations and speculations he proceeds from what he sees with his own eye, and only that. Leonardo describes a world without transcendence, and yet it does not in any way appear closed, on the contrary, for not only is the richness of what his eye is drawn toward overwhelming, his very gaze is moreover so fresh that everything he sees, even the sun and the moon, the rivers and the floodplains, seems almost to engage and take part in the vigor and clarity of the new. The old world with its dizzying transcendence is quite absent, albeit still perceptible, in the will of the new. Little or nothing of that from which the need wrenches away is expressed, but it is found in the very sensation of that detachment, which is the sensation of freedom.