In the Land of the Cyclops

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In the Land of the Cyclops Page 15

by Karl Ove Knausgaard


  I woke up at half eleven when Linda rang, she was nervous. We didn’t talk much, she was feeling down, has been for nearly a fortnight now, and she never says much when she’s like that. I know it’s hard for her with the children when she’s not well, and her mother being here then is more of a complication than the help it’s supposed to be. It’s not so much the children sensing that she’s depressed, more that it takes a lot of energy to cope with all the routines. As long as you’re feeling on top of things, it’s the easiest thing in the world to get them dressed and off to nursery, do the shopping, make dinner, put them to bed. If you’re drained and low, conflicts arise and before you know it they’ve escalated out of nothing, suddenly you’re standing there battered by strong wills and clamorous protests. But in a few days she’ll start to feel better again and everything will be so much smoother. Thankfully, she spent time writing in a café yesterday, and the same today. Right from an early age she’s had this fascination with Greek mythology, the gods and the heroes in it, and as far as I can gather she’s now started writing about them in a kind of present-day reality. Her writing is so incredibly good, though strange to me, I have trouble connecting her with the fantastic sentences she writes, they come from a place I don’t know.

  As for myself, I’m feeling a bit better. What held me in its grip and paralyzed me yesterday is gone today, all that’s left is the flat everyday gloom that comes with who I am to myself, a lousy human being, on better days one who’s just never quite good enough. But anything is better than the dread, or whatever it is, that swallows me up.

  Last night after I’d written about Dante I called Geir Angell. I’d got it into my head the passage was about Dante’s name, having written in an essay I got published in Vagant in 1999 that it was the only place in the poem where he’s mentioned by name, but something didn’t seem right, and since I haven’t got the book with me here I asked Geir to look it up and read me the passage out loud. And no, Dante’s name isn’t mentioned, not there nor anywhere else in the surrounding text. What it was about, which back then I’d misunderstood, most likely confused by a secondary text, was that this was the only point where Dante is identified. The sinner whose head he kicked recognized him and mentioned the most hurtful thing to him he could think of, which was a battle between the Guelphs and Ghibellines in which Dante’s family had been betrayed and had suffered a great and decisive defeat. The screeching head in the ice was the traitor himself. Dante suspects as much, which is why he grabs him and tears at his hair. Name yourself, he demands, but the sinner refuses, until one of the others inadvertently gives him away – “What’s with you, Big Mouth?” – and Dante can then continue on his way.

  I was going to write something about the relationship between the name and the body, based on my incorrect idea that the passage was about Dante’s name and that this was the only place it was mentioned, for nearly everything in the Inferno oscillates between the bestial nature of the nameless body and the name’s incorporation of it in culture and history, between identity and lack of identity, culture and nature, something the episode in the ice could open up if it were the case that Dante’s own name had been threatened there, and there in particular, so near to absolute evil, the abyss of the fallen angel, Lucifer. But then when Geir started reading I realized that wasn’t what was going on at all, and that promising point of entry closed again. He read it out in stuttering Swedish, not firm or rhythmic, and in the background his son Gisle, not yet a year old, was crying, he was on his own with him. Dante’s brilliant turns of phrase, as surprising as they were precise, came through unaffected by the Swedish language, Geir’s mistreatment of it, and his son’s crying. The figures of the sinners stuck up like straws preserved in glass. Their teeth were like the chattering beaks of storks. But the most striking thing was the use of the first-person pronoun. That the person telling the story was an “I.” I knew this already, but it was still surprising to me, I suppose subconsciously I’d been preparing for an epic poem in the grand tradition, like the Iliad or the Odyssey, unthinkable in any other form than the third person, or for a work from the medieval age in which the subject wasn’t usually that prominent either. It wasn’t unknown; I knew that Augustine’s Confessions had been the start of a genre, the very genesis of first-person literature, and in The City of God he frequently used his own person, drawing on examples from his personal life, but that wasn’t quite the same, because Augustine was no literary character, he appeared as himself. The other great theologian of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, was by contrast detached and neutral in his writings, and that difference, between the subjective and the objective, is what makes Augustine’s writings so much more vivid, less bound to the age than those of Thomas, which simultaneously shape and point toward the medieval world, to us so mysterious and closed. Augustine is our man in the Middle Ages, Thomas the medieval man in our time. Dante exploits the confidentiality of Augustine’s “I” and gives it expression in Thomas’s objectively explained, systematic and orderly world. Dante is a witness, who sees and feels on behalf of the reader. But he is also his own man, a tough and self-respecting individual who doesn’t shrink from having the dead quote his own poem in the kingdoms of the afterlife. And it’s perhaps in such a light that the episode involving Bocca, Big Mouth in Kirkpatrick’s recent English version, is to be understood: it’s personal. He has been betrayed. He is furious about it. But still it’s strange, because of course the situation he describes, with Big Mouth there in the ice, never happened, it’s something he made up, and why does he make it so weird? So detailed and exact, his foot strikes a head, the head rages, spits out a name that makes him suspicious, Dante tries to get it out of him, make him reveal who he is, and then when he won’t say, Dante tears out his hair in clumps. All of this occurring on a vast expanse of ice in which thousands of heads with chattering teeth and frozen tears are trapped, surrounded by darkness and the void. Dante loses control, for the first time in the poem he intervenes physically, but he loses control in the text, it’s something he’s writing, and how is that to be understood?

  Rage is one thing, its depiction another. What was he thinking? That proximity to evil made him evil himself, made him lose his judgment and become violent? Augustine’s episodes are so clearly examples, meant to illustrate a thought or insight. No such thought or insight for miles around in Dante.

  5:21. Dark and still and cold outside, the brightest stars visible in the sky. I froze while chopping wood this afternoon – my fingers and toes – it’s so easy to underestimate the cold when you’re not exposed to it regularly. One of the few steps forward in my life since I was a boy is that I don’t feel the cold anymore. We froze like hell when we were kids. Toes and fingers prickling with cold, cheeks and thighs like ice. Now I’m never out more than a few minutes when it’s like that. My life’s lived inside, in the house, in the car, in supermarkets and shopping centers, cafés and restaurants. It’s an escape, from the pain, and thereby the world. As I stood there, childhood came back to me, the times I had to keep Dad company while he chopped wood, for example, behind the house in the raw air of autumn, or when we had the boat, hauling it up onto dry land or putting it out in the water, all the times we were out fishing in the early morning before school or late in the afternoon. Frost in the air, frost in our bodies, frost in our souls. Sometimes, in our worst arguments, Linda has told me I’m cold. She always takes it back when I confront her with it, but what’s said is said, it has to come from somewhere. In a way, she’s right. I don’t like to be touched. I don’t like it when things get familiar. Intimacy, I can’t stand it. The exception is when it comes to my children. Few things make me happy, one is when they climb into my arms and snuggle, another is when I hold them and they nuzzle their heads against mine. The way they wriggle in under my arm when I read for them, and curl their legs up, as close to me as they can get.

  At the same time, I’m the one who got the job of setting boundaries for them, making them beha
ve, so I can trust them when I’m out with them on my own, and when they file along behind me to a bus or a plane, trundling their own rolling bags, or when we pass together through the supermarket and bring the groceries in, I feel I’ve done a good job, they’re doing what I want them to. But there’s always a price to pay, and my success comes at the cost of establishing distance between us, and when they throw themselves at their mother in all their unquenchable thirst for her affection and she complains about the division of labor between us that allows me to sit and read the paper in peace when I’m on my own with them, whereas she is constantly pestered for one thing or another, I feel like throwing my arms in the air and shouting at the top of my lungs. Closeness has a price, distance has a price, so which do you choose?

  But of course it’s not like that. Who do I think I’m kidding? I behave the way I do because distance is inside me. It decides my actions and thoughts. I analyze my way to nearness, warmth is a calculation.

  In his tract entitled De Vulgari Eloquentia, Dante suggested that variations in human reason are so great that each individual seems almost like a species in itself. None of us, he held, can understand the actions and feelings of other human beings on the basis of our own, the way animals can. Therefore God gave humans language, we were the only creature who needed it. The purpose of language is to differentiate, which is to say to express uniqueness, as well as to connect, by making that uniqueness apparent and clear. In a world where the human is so defined, hell must be the place where people are abandoned to their own actions and feelings, like animals. And this is exactly how Dante describes the Inferno, body upon body trapped within themselves, beaten and tortured, with no other language but howls, shrieks, shouts, moans, and grunts. They are no one, and they are everyone, from the outside they are automatons of flesh and blood, or animals. But for the beaten and tortured, things are different, each is a someone, with a name and a history, but their individuality is doomed to remain inside them, this, one can imagine, being a part of their punishment, to be someone in a world of no ones, and to know that all share the same fate. On his descent through the circles of the Inferno, Dante continually pauses in front of figures he meets, asking Virgil or the figures themselves who they are and what they have done. In that way he gives them back their names, their identities and histories, they are again seen as specific individuals, and no matter how terrible they and the deeds they confess are, the moment is, and must be, one of grace. But not Christian grace. I think Harold Bloom was right when he said that Dante wasn’t a Christian poet. It’s something else. On the other hand, the Divina Commedia doesn’t end in Lucifer’s abyss at the bottom of the Inferno, the journey goes on, continuing out to sea, onto a shore, up a mountain, into the firmament. The division of hell into circles, zones, and particular places for particular sinners might seem like a kind of bureaucratic perversion, a teeth-baring travesty of order, but it should also be understood in the context of its antithesis, heaven and goodness, whose image is light, that which knows no bounds but flows unhindered and limitlessly everywhere. Goodness is open and undifferentiated, evil is pent up and closed in on itself. What makes Dante so hard to grasp is that the human world is inside this system, which has so to say been inflicted upon it, both the limits of darkness and the limitless light are unyielding constants, on the one hand marking the boundary between human and animal, mute biology, on the other the opening toward the divine, while man himself emerges in something else, his individuality, that which is particular to everyone.

  November 26, 8:55 a.m. I was woken last night by a loud, piercing siren, jumped out of bed and hurried downstairs to find out where it was coming from. The first thought I had was that it was the fire alarm, even if it was far too loud for that. Disoriented from sleep, and with my heart thumping hard, I quickly realized it wasn’t. I went over to the window at the other end of the house, thinking maybe it was the car alarm, though again I knew it didn’t sound like that, but the car stood quiet and untouched outside in the snow. The siren was still screaming, and now I was sure it was from outside, somewhere close by. It was as loud as an air-raid warning, but sounded different, and came in waves.

  Abruptly it stopped. I went to all the windows and peered out. Everything normal. Just the snow drifting along the empty lane under the yellow glow of the street lamps.

  The clock in the kitchen said ten past four. I went upstairs and back to bed, straight back to sleep. When I woke up again it was daylight. The sky was heavy with cloud, the wind was blowing, snow whirled in the air. I’ll probably never know where the siren came from. There’s no way it was a dream, that I was sleepwalking and imagined it all. I sleepwalk a lot and it never happens like that, the grip of the inner being on reality is much greater when I sleepwalk, and in this case the signal was too loud and clear to come from inside me.

  But it was strange. Normally everything’s so quiet here. The only sounds are the wind, rushing over the plains, pulling at the trees so they look like they’re on tiptoe, the underlying rumble that comes from its depths. Occasionally, the roof will creak, when the wind turns and seems almost to grab hold of the house from outside, like an overly firm hand.

  The under-floor heating still isn’t working. I went into the cramped cellar earlier on, through the hatch in the kitchen, looked at the panel in the cupboard down there, the temperature was low, five or six degrees, and the pressure was low as well. I turned the knobs a bit, flicked some switches. Nothing happened. All the pipes leading into the house were cold. I turned a blue tap, it spluttered, and water burst out, dark at first, then clear. I turned it off again in a hurry and the deluge stopped. What did that mean? I fetched a cloth and wiped up the mess, stared at the panel again for a few more minutes, then eventually gave up and decided to ask Linda to phone the previous owner sometime today or find his number for me, maybe he can come and have a look at it.

  Instead of writing I went for a drive, first taking one of the narrow roads that cross between the fields, it was nearly invisible in the snow, great blankets of it, white veils sweeping through the air. It was like in the high mountains. Once at the coast road I took a left and followed the line of the esker, great leaden clouds towering above. After a short distance, I noticed one of its slopes was completely black, and as I got closer I realized it was black with birds. The same black crows that occupy the tree behind the house. Now they were on the ground, an enormous flock, perhaps five or six hundred of them, sheltering from the wind that came up from the sea. I’d never seen anything like it, and pulled over to the side. It was a magnificent sight. The dense clouds, whose occasional shafts and hollows were filled by sunlight, the sea, hidden behind the steep white hill, the wind that swept up over the slopes, the flock of birds that seemed so completely lost, as if after a disaster.

  There’s almost a full moon now, shining faintly behind the clouds. I read the other day that we go back two hundred thousand generations. The moon has shone for them all. A short time ago I looked up at it from where I was standing in the yard, and paused at the thought that Dante had stared at the same moon. Cave dwellers and peoples of the savannah, hunters and gatherers, farmers and forest people. The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Amerindians. My forebears. Myself, through all my life, three, nine, eighteen, thirty-seven years old. Every night, the moon has been there.

  But what the thought conjured wouldn’t come. I felt no sense of history’s depths, no sense of being surrounded by our colossal past. If the moon is an eye, it is the eye of the dead. What it says to us is you are alone, you too. You can believe one thing, or you can believe another. It makes no difference, my children. Fight the fight, live life, die death.

  Tándaradéi!

  Having seen Walhalla, Anselm Kiefer’s dark and monumental exhibition in London this past winter, the last thing I expected of him was such a radical turn toward the light, such an explosion of color and desire. Painting after painting of women in sexual ecstasy, set against radiant f
lowers, against water, against sky. Heavy-laden ears of wheat, with and without houses nestling in them. Sunrises, flower meadows, planes traversing the skies. Large, light-filled oil paintings of river landscapes. But first and foremost female figures. They are painted with a light touch, and the figures themselves are also light: some of them sail or fall through the air, others float in water, nearly all are surrounded by flowers, and their ecstatic poses are so numerous that the paintings appear to be charting the gestures of passion.

  They comprise an unabashed celebration of vigor and beauty, and when I saw them for the first time, it struck me that nearly everything about them represents something new in Kiefer’s pictorial world – the medium, the motifs, the format, the colors – but also the temperament showing through: that, too, appeared to me different. It was clearer, at once both freer and more concentrated, with a virtuosic lightness I cannot remember having been given such free rein in Kiefer’s paintings before.

  But Kiefer’s career spans nearly fifty years, and the germ of these paintings was already there in the late 1960s, when he also painted watercolors of flowers, and in 1970, when he painted the watercolor Winterlandschaft (Winter Landscape), which depicts a woman’s face hovering in the sky above a snow-covered field spotted with blood. Rather than a new departure, these motifs, the format, and the technique represent a return to something that was there in the very beginning, back when he wasn’t “Anselm Kiefer,” the celebrated artist known all over the world, but simply Anselm Kiefer, a young German artist in his late twenties, obviously talented, obviously headed somewhere, but just as obviously unable to know where his art would take him.

  The striking thing is how all the elements he would later give weight and fullness to were present from the very first. His themes were already then the presence of history, especially German history, and the transformative power of myth. Neither the past nor myths have a physical existence – they belong to the world of ideas, and have more to do with the way we see the world than with the world we see. In Kiefer’s works from this period, depictions of physical reality, often fields and forests, are combined with signs taken from immaterial reality, often in the form of writing but also of symbols, such as snakes, fire, palettes – or the recurring figure of the early years, a man giving a Nazi salute, as in the watercolor Eis und Blut (Ice and Blood) from 1971, which depicts a snow-covered field with some trees in the background, stained red here and there, as if with blood, and a small figure in an overcoat with its right arm raised. Or the acrylic painting from the same year, Mann im Wald (Man in the Forest), with bare tree trunks standing close together, like a grating, and a figure in something that looks like a white nightgown holding a burning bush in its hand. The face is the same as that of the man in the field, and both bear more than a passing resemblance to the artist himself. And where are we then? The pictorial space and the motif, the solitary figure in nature, evoke associations to romanticism and Caspar David Friedrich, while the burning bush is a symbol of the divine and the presence of the divine, a myth, and the raised arm symbolizes Nazism, history – while the Kiefer-like face draws it into our own age and brings the realism into the painted. At the same time, there is something ridiculous about both figures, one in a nightgown, the other in a military overcoat: it is impossible to take them seriously in the way one takes Friedrich’s figures seriously. Laughter means distance, irony means distance, signs mean distance, yet at the same time, what the signs augur – loneliness, eternity, death, the divine – are each in their own way deeply felt entities.

 

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