In the Land of the Cyclops

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  Seven years ago I bought a house in Österlen, in Glemmingebro, a village of some four hundred inhabitants. Once, there was a railway here, there was a dairy, a brewery, a bank, a post office, and a garage, and the majority of those who lived here worked in agriculture. Now nearly everyone who lives here works in Ystad, the nearest town. The only businesses left are a hardware store, a convenience store, and a small Thai restaurant. It is a place people move away from rather than move to.

  The name Österlen means “east of the path,” and the fact that already in its etymology it is a place passed by, like a backwater skirted by a flowing river, or a parenthesis in a sentence heading somewhere else, is by no means inapt, for there is something rather becalmed about the landscape and life here. Not that time stands still as such, more that what happens here stays here. This is what it feels like to me, at least, a sense of being outside something, but that this being outside has its own particular substance, its own worth, which comes of the very lack of connection to the center. This is truest when summer comes to a close and the vacationers and day-trippers depart the landscape, leaving it all but devoid of human presence, open to the wind and the rain from the sea, when the colors are drawn toward saturated yellow, pale green, and dark brown, for what withers away with autumn is the ethereal, all that strives upward toward the sun, all that waves and flutters and trembles in the wind, and what is left behind is what stands or lies and does not move, which gravity pulls downward and holds firm.

  For seven years I have lived here, for seven years I have crossed between the house and the little work studio, for seven years I have taken the children to and from school and their various leisure activities, always without curiosity, never extending my radius, never walking or driving to new places, never feeling the need to investigate anything different or unfamiliar, and never even having thought about it until now, presumably because what I look at every day, the same fields, the same distant woods, the same hills rising gently against the sea and the clouds that gather above them, is satisfying enough in itself. I find it splendid, and the splendor here is inexhaustible. And of course it is in constant flux, changing all the time according to the seasons and the nature of the sky. Today it is gray and full of rain, and the pale colors of the ground shimmer faintly in the dismal light; yesterday it was blue and full of wind, and the colors of the ground were more distinct, the earth dry and hard, though the folds in which it lay were soft and rounded. The farms and the unmade tracks, the herd of perhaps seventy cows that graze their various pastures throughout the year, the houses in the village, many built of red brick, the barracks-like Thai restaurant with its gravel parking lot in front, the bins of the recycling station farther along the road – all is familiar, and the familiar is satisfying, it has become my world.

  Nor have I been curious as to the people who live here, my social life has extended no further than talking to the parents of my children’s friends, classmates, and nursery-school chums whenever we have happened to meet, most often in the corridor of the school, or outside the door of my house or theirs, occasionally, though seldom, at the shop.

  A few years ago, I ran into a man I had never seen before, at my son’s nursery. He stood out because he spoke English. I asked him where he was from, he said he had just moved from London with his family. Later, I learned that he was a photographer, and on New Year’s Eve that year I ran into him again, we had been invited to the same party, and it turned out he was originally from Bristol, so we talked about Portishead and Tricky and Massive Attack. A few months later, I was working with photographer Thomas Wågström and graphic designer Greger Ulf Nilson on a photo book, they had photos spread all over the floor in the house here while I sat and tried to put words to them, and in the evening, as we sat together in the work studio with a bottle of cognac, Greger told me there was a world-class photographer living here, in this little village, his name was Stephen Gill, had I met him?

  Another friend who had got to know Stephen told me he was out in the woods nearly every day. He was scared of wild boar and always armed with a stick. He had a kayak too, and paddled the narrow streams in it. And he had motion-activated cameras placed in the field to photograph all the animals that happened by. I never met him when I was out, not even at the shop; the only glimpses I caught of him were when he was out cycling, and then I only ever recognized him when it was too late to raise a hand and wave.

  I often thought about getting in touch with him. There aren’t that many people here with whom I can talk about art and literature, at least not at his level, but I never quite got around to it, I’m not the outgoing kind, and phoning someone I don’t know is not something I feel comfortable with.

  Then, a few months ago, I received a text message from him asking if I wanted to stop by and see what he had been working on for the past three years.

  We agreed on a day and he sent me directions, the house was on the right-hand side, a kilometer or so down a gravel track in the open land outside the village.

  I drove down the track without seeing any house that matched the description, eventually reversing into a driveway and turning back. The fields stretched out emptily as far as I could see. The sky was white as it had been for days. I had never been that way before, and that simple fact, of being removed from my beaten path, changed the landscape entirely, or at least altered my perspective on it. It was as if the land somehow belonged to the road and lay sectioned out and angled accordingly in patterns now abruptly disturbed, and the feeling of flatland, kilometers of unfluctuating fields, engulfed me as I sat there behind the wheel peering to all sides while I drove slowly along.

  It is often windy here, the great swaths of wind that gather over the sea encounter no hindrance as they come sweeping across the land, but on that day the weather was still, the light unwavering in the air, and a serene spectrum of subdued color lay folded out in its midst.

  Normally I don’t notice the light when it’s as toneless as it was then, as a rule my attentions are focused elsewhere at that time of day, so what I saw there outside my usual context reminded me of other mornings in other places, especially Bergen after coming home from a night shift and sitting for a while in the apartment before going to bed; the light over Danmarksplass, when the turmoil of traffic, people, and structures did not absorb me but left me in peace, could be quite as unexcited and expressionless.

  A darkly clad figure stood outside one of the houses with a mug in his hand. As I came closer I realized it was Stephen. I rolled the window down and asked him where I could park.

  “Anywhere you like,” he said.

  There were several buildings on the property, in various states of repair.

  “Glad you could come,” he said after I’d parked and got out of the car.

  “Good to see you,” I said.

  We went inside into what appeared to be a workshop and up some stairs to his studio on the first floor. The space was big and open, with meters to the ceiling. Bookshelves ran along the lower walls, full of photo books. In the middle of the floor was a solid table covered with books and photographs, and more photographs were spread out on the floor to the right of it.

  “Have a seat,” he said, and pulled up a chair from a bench below the window. “Would you like a coffee?”

  “Yes, please,” I said, and sat down.

  “Smoke if you want,” he said. “I might have one myself.”

  His eyes were hazel and warm, his body language bright and eager. He was strikingly friendly, and I felt like I was being wrapped up snugly and taken care of while he talked. He told me he had worked nonstop while living in London, every day, completely immersed in his projects, until eventually he suffered a burnout. That was when he moved here, with his partner, Lena, and their two children. He told me too that he was unable to separate information, a condition that had not been diagnosed until recently; before that he thought it was the same for everyone. He explained it t
o me using an example: if he was taking money out of a cash machine, he said, he would not only be aware of the instructions on the display, but of everything else going on around him too. Everything was accorded the same weight, it was a total bombardment of information, significant and insignificant side by side, and he thought now that he had been using his photography as a way of controlling it.

  “One of my books is actually an attempt to dampen all information and take pictures that are silent and slow. It was in Japan, let me show you…”

  He went and got a book and handed it to me. The title was Coming Up for Air. The pictures in it were indeed dampened down, the colors soft, the borders between them unclear. They looked like they could have been taken underwater, and in fact some depicted creatures from aquariums, and their sludge and slime had been transposed onto the streets of Tokyo. There was a pale pink umbrella, there was a light-blue jacket, there was a gentle stream of people, there was a snuff-colored seahorse suspended in water.

  They were beautiful pictures, but disturbing too, because their beauty came from a world that was depicted so exactly and yet was unrealistic, completely unlike the world as it appeared to me. It was like looking at photographs of a dream someone had about Japan, or how a deaf person might experience the city. Subdued, soundless, colors washing about the streets.

  “But that’s not what I really wanted to show you,” he said. “I’ve been working on a project ever since we moved here, and I think it’s finished now. Do you want to have a look?”

  The photographs I saw that day, collected in the book Night Procession, were all taken in the landscape I live in and know almost better than any other, having driven through it every day for so many years. And yet none of their motifs are recognizable to me, there is not one picture of anything I am familiar with, all present to me a completely different world to the one I know.

  What kind of a world?

  It is the world inside the world. The center of gravity inside the center of gravity.

  The images are all from here, all captured within a radius of perhaps ten kilometers, and seeing them was like having lived in a house for many years and then suddenly becoming aware of a door leading into a previously concealed room.

  What kind of a room?

  These are photographs without wider perspective; they are without horizon, without sky. Most show dense forest spaces crammed with branches, tree trunks, rocks, grass, water. The local aspect is extreme; they present to the viewer a particular bank of a particular stream, a particular clearing with a particular tree stump in a particular wood. Their effect, however, is the very opposite of the local and particular, which they seem to transcend, distorting into the indefinite: a stream, a clearing, a wood, and only then, by extension, the stream, the clearing, the wood.

  The local has an outer limit, a border at which the specific landscape becomes unspecific, for instance when viewed from a great height, but it also has an inner limit, another border, at which the particular dissolves into the general. We live our lives inside spaces, and at an early age we learn to control such displacements, to continually make adjustments so as to ensure that the spaces we inhabit remain whole for us rather than disintegrating. The fact that we are particular individuals, and that some things are close to us and some distant, is so fundamental a part of our conceptual system that we hardly ever think about the role it plays in our understanding of the reality we inhabit. There is an I, and there is a them; there is a here, and there is a there; there is a now, and there is a then. The I dissolves as perspective is widened, I becomes a part of them, but likewise as perspective is narrowed, for we need only peer inside our human body for the heart to become a heart, the lungs lungs, the kidneys kidneys. And not only that, they will also become cavities and membranes, surfaces, slopes and faults, troughs and peaks, in a topography of the body that is in essence individual yet adheres to patterns so regular that they may be mapped, allowing medical students in our present day to orient themselves in them on the basis of sketches produced in the eighteenth century. Those sketches are a part of the space we occupy, we understand immediately that they depict the Human Being, a general, indefinite entity, just as we understand quite as immediately that a painting of a person from the same period depicts that particular person, a unique and definite individual.

  Stephen Gill’s photographs in the book lie on the very cusp of the unique and the general, each image appropriating elements of both, floating in their borderland. They depict the forest, inhabit the space of the grand, interfacing with the gamut of associations awakened in us by “the forest.” The wild, the dark, the free, the boundless, the mysterious, the alien, the humanless, the primitive. Fairy tales, myths, the romantic. Grandness reverberates in the images as it does in us, for when we look at them they are drawn into our space. The terrifying bird of prey with its glaring eyes, the gaping beaks of the fledglings, motionless as small statues, the murky backwater whose current is visible to us only as patterns in white froth, it too stonelike and stationary – not only do we see these things, we also recognize them, aware that somewhere out there they exist alongside us, and this contemporaneity of the alien, what used to be called the sublime, discharges an immediate, almost alarming existential fullness. I see the wild boar stand and stare beside the deer carcass while two other wild boar are on their way out of the frame, and something lifts inside me.

  Why?

  What I see is the world without me. That photograph is taken at night, with a motion-activated camera, it shows us the animals and the world that is theirs when they are on their own and undisturbed by human presence. The feeling this gives of seeing the unseen seems almost to seep into the other images too, which thereby not only reveal to us a world that is secret and mysterious, but also open that world to the past and the future, which is to say the way the world was before we came, and the way it will be after we have gone.

  But the opposite is present too, the grand and the general, the forest with its storm of associations, constantly colliding with the small and the specific, for the images in all their richness of detail are nothing if not realistic, some almost scientifically so, as if they were a part of some scholarly investigation, their urge to register even the most insignificant detail is striking indeed. But in contrast to the scientific study, the procedure here is without any context other than its own situation in the forest space, its only logic that of the space itself. In the tonality of human absence that I sense these images to be striving toward, the draining from the mind of all previous assumptions (which of course, like anyone else who considers them, I immediately begin to replace), in the space that is thereby opened up, something emerges into sight, something reveals itself. Surfaces and patterns connect up and appear almost to merge. Snails and stones, bark and boar hide, antlers and branches, deer legs and tree trunks, leaves and swirling current, swirling current and snails, snails and stones, stones and bark and boar hide. This is perhaps more than anything else an aesthetic investigation, an endeavor to drain the images of conceptual association, to dissolve meaning by turning toward the abstraction that arises so inevitably from the sheer density of lines and patterns, to allow purest nature with all its meaning to transmute into purest art with all its nonmeaning – but if this is the case then something else goes with it, for there is nothing pure about the natural world depicted here, nor about the way in which it is depicted. There is an element of slackness about these photographs in the sense of their being wholly unstylized and saturated, thick with sludge and the sap of plants, dense with shadow and pattern, arbitrary in their sections of reality and the perspectives they apply to it. This affects the patterns they display, for although the spiral of the snail shell is the same as that of the galaxies, and the current of the stream folds like the sand on Mars (and the logic of this is in some respect fractal – the idea that any part of a whole has the same form as the whole, much as a face caught between two mirrors recedes into an
infinity of identical yet increasingly smaller forms), the motives in these images are so substantial in themselves that the spiral of the snail shell, for instance, lies unconnected on the forest floor yet still belongs to it. The galaxy is merely a faint echo, amplifying the actual mystery, which is that of nearness. Nearness of place, and of life in that place.

  Something draws the images together, into a web of patterns and similarities, and into a wider cultural context, that of the forest, at the same time as it is countered by the substantial weight of the intentions that allows them simply to remain undisturbed where they have been captured by the camera, solitary as stones or tree stumps. Yet it is significant that this continual exchange, emptying the images of meaning and replenishing them again, happens in a space that is normally concealed, out of sight, in a world inside the world. I pass that world every day, not figuratively, but quite literally: from the car window I see the trees, in the air above them I see the birds, occasionally I glimpse a deer or a fox at the fringe of the woods, or in a field farther away. It is not something I think about or try in any way to understand, these are merely visual confirmations, points of orientation in an everyday life. But when I read, look at paintings and photographs, and when I write, it is to there I am drawn, toward the absence of the human, toward the world of things and matter. Increasingly often I think it is where the meaning of it all, the spiritual dimension in life, everything that we cannot talk about without sounding like fools, is to be found. That the spiritual is in the things that surround us, physical and concrete. L’Extase matérielle is a title that has kept on coming back to me in the thirty or so years that have passed since I heard it for the first time. It was around that same time that I read Francis Ponge, the French poet who wrote about mussels, bread, rain, cigarettes, and Thure Erik Lund’s novel Zalep, in which no person appears, and Michel Foucault, who in The Order of Things wrote of the conditions and systems by which things emerge and become clear to us. But most important were the poems of Tor Ulven. I read them first when I was nineteen. At that time I had nothing I could relate them to, but what was so incomprehensible to me then would later become obvious, as was the case for many other writers of my generation, among whom Ulven’s mode of writing, his ways of seeing and thinking have spread and become integrated. In Ulven’s work, man was seldom seen from within, most often from without, a thing occupying the space alongside other things, a process among other processes, a brief flutter of biological life in the infinity of time. The fact that I see this in Stephen Gill’s photographs too means either that Gill and Ulven proceed along the same path or that Ulven has colored my perspective on art and nature to such an extent that it is his gaze I apply and his thoughts I think when standing before Gill’s photographs for the first time or leafing through the pages of Night Procession. This is of course an important characteristic of all significant art, which not only reveals something to us, but at the same time teaches us to see the revealed elsewhere, in other things and phenomena. What exists in an image and what exists in us is impossible to say, the two levels of perception being equally impossible to separate. Seeing is by no means a given, it is something we must learn, meticulously and with patience, and it is not an abstract, visual action but involves the entire body – the way small children need to touch everything in their surroundings and put things in their mouth is an integral part of their learning to see – and a concept such as depth comes only from experience; a blind person suddenly able to see will need time to develop full spatial understanding. That the world with which we are so familiar is a meticulous construct, and that the connections we take to be so obvious are in fact arbitrary, is something all visual artists and photographers know, for it is the resistance they encounter when they work, the weight that must be lifted. Any photograph involves selection, the focus on something deemed important, and in this lies an element of compulsion. In photographic art, that selection involves artistic proficiency, and such proficiency, which is preexistent, determines what may be seen. How can we see beyond it? The compositional process and all its various choices mean inevitably that the photographer becomes part of the picture. How can we get beyond that? Nearly everything Stephen Gill has done has in some way also been about this. He has moved away from the center, away from himself, and has instead moved toward the fortuitous and processes beyond his control. He has moved toward the zone in which the local content of the motif and the universal content of the image have scraped and grated against each other. In the case of one series of photographs taken in London, he buried them in the ground and left them there for a few days; what happened to them in the soil became a part of each physical photograph, connecting it in a quite different and much more concrete way with place than light ever could. In another case he introduced objects and creatures from his surroundings – such as ants – into the body of his camera, producing images stained with shadows. A third series was taken at a pond and, like the forest photos, they offered no wider perspective, only fragments. Some of those fragments were microscopic, minuscule communities of life in drops of water, others were people living close by, blurred and elusive, taken with the lens dipped in water from the same pond. For a book entitled Archaeology in Reverse, he photographed things that had not yet come into being. In an area of London where nature, industry, and street life coexist in what appears to be a desolate state of incompleteness, he exposed concrete things and occurrences that were not in fact things or occurrences but only on their way to becoming so.