A Man in Love: My Struggle book 2, Bobby Fischer, the end of innocence.

When you don't have a normal job, when you have to self-define - writing, housekeeping, anything that doesn't really have external status, there is plenty of time to mull over and stew in what meaning there is in what you do.Especially when you fall out of a daily rhythm - perhaps a late night, too much to drink, a slight hangover - and a malaise descends.  I read Karl Ove lying bed this morning, comfortable, warm and was feeling safe and secure.  His prose is relentlessly good, his thoughts run on in streams of meaningful consciousness, and it feels very privileged to be able to do this. Then I look up, recall the film / documentary about Bobby Fischer that i saw last night and unease creeps under the duvet, I feel tired, drift off, wake with the thought of Fischer's pursuit by the American government.  Fischer was a brilliant chess player, but completely insane it goes without saying. He disappeared for twenty years after the 1972 world championship match against Boris Spassky - refused to defend his title against a new contender, against whom he would probably have won easily.

Twenty years later he has a rematch, put together by a millionaire chess enthusiast, in Yugoslavia in the middle of the civil war there.  It's a pale affair, complicated by the fact the American sanctions against Yugoslavia mean that he is indited for playing there, and will lose all the money he won (he did win again), and possibly be imprisoned,  if he returns to the USA. He disappears again.

Then, just when everyone has forgotten about him, he surfaces in Japan, making a telephone call after 9/11 , a rabid totally insane call where he fulminates that the USA had it coming, a call full of bile and hatred (he's also, despite being Jewish, become a very nasty, rabid anti-semite).  Bush decides to extradite him and he is arrested in Japan.  Iceland give him a place to go, and he ends his days there, mad and bad, but mainly mad - a ranting obsessive.  What shocks is the fact that the USA went after him, even though he was so obviously a seriously insane has-been.  And what do you do when a very powerful country does that? You have to begin to doubt the sense of the American government, chasing straws - the Bradley Mannings and the Snowdons of this world are suffering the brunt of a country that is still the most powerful in the world, but is slowly losing that power and showing a very unpleasant vindictive authoritarian streak.  It's the same continuum of oppression that you see in Russia (Pussy riot & countless others) and China (Al Wei and countless others). Huge countries that have huge power.

I read some more Karl Ove. There's a few passages about goodness / innocence, I'll just pick out a short quote. 

"What you lust for is innocence and this is an impossible equation" 

What I want to do is enjoy and feel safe in that good warm feeling, under a duvet, reading good literature, but I never feel that innocent safety that I used to feel for long.  The world casts its shadow, money and things done and undone cast their shadow, there is no safe place anymore.  I have no innocence left, nothing left in which to bask and hide. Watching re-runs of the Edwardian farm is the nearest I get to those simpler states, and even then there is that doublefeel (as opposed to doublethink), where you feel good about the enthusiasm, the ingenuity, the beauty, but you know that in real life it was also undercut by starvation, disease and hard labour.