Karl Ove continues to inspire and make me feel better about my life. I read this while sheltering from a thunderstorm at the allotment this morning, in the ramshackle shed that just about supplies cover from the rain.
The flat landscape, the sun rising, the stillness outside, the sleeping passengers, reinforced by a happiness that was so strong I remembered it twenty-five years later. But this happiness hadn’t had a shadow, it had been pure, undiluted, unadulterated.
Knausgaard, Karl Ove (2013-04-25). A Man In Love: My Struggle Book 2 (My Struggle 2) (Kindle Locations 8482-8484). Random House. Kindle Edition.
In previous posts I've written about that sense of fear, that shadow that stops me from being simply happy and content in a way that I did manage when I was younger. Not always, but some of the time. I seem to feel so much better actually at the allotment, there's a sense of calm there as well as the magnificent view ( I watched the storm clouds mass over the sea from my hilltop plot, and the most beautiful birdsong). Partly I think it's the physical work, the keeping going, partly being outside surrounded by green, bathed in fresh scented air. I had another idea to add to the story that I began yesterday and I hope that will allow the story a greater range, across a meadow of childhood, across the darker recesses, but, finally, hopeful, childhood nurtured in the bower of a family that values kindness and communication, that can't stop bad things, but takes them in its stride. The kind of family that I want to have supplied, and probably did, no I know we did.
But back to Karl Ove, he slips in and out of the hell that can be a life in your forties, when successes have happened, but they haven't changed your underlying sense of worth, don't make it easier to sweep floors and empty bins, don't make it easier to communicate the depressive moments, sometimes insulate you from the good times (that shadow of fear), don't stop you from stopping yourself enjoying yourself. He experiences and writes so well about those times when you are so locked up in yourself that you can't get out, you can't join in, you can't celebrate. Yep, been there, and in the other places too, the joyous, and have never understood how literally you can switch from one to the other in an instant, just a little stimulus, the wrong word or the right word. Why are we (Karl Ove & me... and others I'm sure) so volatile, so unable to accept our blessings, so quick to bury ourselves in undefined, terrifying .. what? remorse? depression, fear. Something that swoops over the self and shrouds it in unfeeling.
Meditation helps. I watched myself this morning, in the 20 mins I set aside just to sit and think, watching the feelings rush in, like the dark clouds across the sea today, and just letting them enter and knot up in my stomach ( can I really write? should I start the WordPress project, can I do it? how long is this fucking meditation going to last, for God's sake?), and as I did that they dissipated and went. They would return but each time I felt the knot and the thought I just sat still and let it pass.
I've taken just to highlighting passages in Karl Ove on my Kindle, often without any comment as they speak so clearly for themselves. It's easy then just to view my notes and marks from the menu and zip through looking for the passage I want. That too is an eye opener because I realise how many passages I have marked that i have simply forgotten about. That's not say that I wouldn't remember them if I had the right stimulus, but it emphasizes how much i forget, even from books that I have ready many times. War & Peace is probably a bad example, being a very long book (do I really need to say that - isn't War & Peace just synonymous with "very long book"), but when I ask myself - "What do you remember?" - and I have read it at least twice (is it three times?? why can't I remember that?), the first thing I think of is the Count having a dressing gown made of red squirrel fur. I don't even know if that is from the book, or from a snippet about Tolstoy's life. To be fair it is some time since I even reread it - and the first time was the Constance Garnett translation that I heaved all round France for three months and finally read in a little village in the Pyranees while working the vendange. I have this melange of impressions - running away (or into?) battle, the socially awkward Pierre, a bet where someone drank a bottle of vodka standing on a window ledge, the Princess's stiff father, a Prince and an estate. But here isn't much else there, it's like a forgotten faded BBC costume drama remembered for its period detail and production values. I do better with Anna Karenina, which is not really about Anna Karenina, it's about Tolstoy, having a family and farming an estate - Vronsky and Karenina are just foils, although the image of Vronsky riding the mare to death in a race is indelible, as D.H. Lawrence said, but he is still peculiarly blank, a rather stiff and hopeless product of his times, as is Karenina. But then I reread that on holiday in Crete only ten months ago.
So today I meditate, run a little in the woods, walk down past the bakers, and think of an image, which fits with another previously written snippet, and realize I have a fully formed story to be written ( the first paras written just before this). I recall my wife's remark that I span the personal and the wider political stuff well in short pieces of writing ( although she thinks I lack the commitment and stamina for a novel), and know that the bombing of Yugoslavia will counterpoint this story of this young boy's
...taking on seriously of Christmas as an emotionally significant commercial family event, where presents
were to be bought and left underneath the Christmas tree ...
The story begins to shape as I walk back, playing Graceland on my iPod, and the combination of the two starts, as it does now, the tears streaming from my eyes. Luckily I have sunglasses on as the tears run slowly down the outside of my cheeks, as I am not sobbing, just feeling, I don't know, my soul's rain run across my face. Tears, anyway, that I cannot stop. Even now the keyboard is blurred, another reminder that I must learn to touch type. People would worry if they saw me, but they wouldn't understand how this kind of feeling and weeping is essential to me - it brings me back to life.
