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.
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.
One of the things that this memoir, like others of this genre, the "I fucked up bad with coke/e/alcohol/absinthe/heroin/opium/valium" genre (no-one's done a ketamine one yet - except Yes They Have!! - John C Lilly, he of dolphin research and The Centre of the Cyclone, and The Human Biocomputer followed up his seriously serious taking of acid with a major, and I mean major, ketamine habit - this indiscretion is now going to be the main subject of this blog entry, but I guess I need to finish the sentence outside the brackets first), illustrates is just what huge quantities of illegal drugs you can consume, for days on end, before it all goes really, really bad.
We're onto John C Lilly now though - after the LSD centre book, The Centre of the Cyclone, and presumably a long time in counter culture circles, as they used to be known, he got heavily into ketamine. He didn't slump on thew kitchen table in a K-hole - he went all the way down that hole and out the other side into other universes - or so he reports. His book The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography is a bizarre mish-mash of his writings, bits that others have added, out of context photographs of famous people (including Richard Fenyman) with quotes from them beneath the photos saying, more or less the same thing, that John C Lilly was a nice, intelligent interesting guy, an obligatory foreword from Timothy Leary. I still don't know what to make of him. He believed, from his ketamine induced journeys, this (only a full quote from his Wikipedia entry will suffice:
Solid State Intelligence
Solid State Intelligence or SSI is a malevolent entity described by John C. Lilly (see The Scientist). According to Lilly, the network of computation-capable solid state systems (electronics) engineered by humans will eventually develop (or has already developed) into an autonomous life-form. Since the optimal survival conditions for this life-form (low-temperature vacuum) are drastically different from those needed by humans (room temperature aerial atmosphere and adequate water supply), Lilly predicted (or "prophesised", based on his ketamine-induced visions) a dramatic conflict between the two forms of intelligence. Wikipedia, 29/07/13
He once rang the President of the United States to warn him about this entity, after which he was forcibly detained in a psychiatric hospital
I picked up the book second hand because I'd always liked the stuff he wrote about acid. This book was a bit of a shock with its mixture of fantasy, reportage. To me it's a reminder that very bright people can have truly awful, wacky views despite their preeminence in other fields. You've only got to think of Linus Pauling, double Nobel prize winner and his obsessive belief that vitamin C cures 75% of all cancers.
Ill today, and somehow Karl Ove Knausgaard was too much to read while feeling slightly nauseous and uncomfortable. I picked up The Player of Games to read again, but the print was small and unclear - that slightly smudged effect that you get in cheap paperbacks and the paper yellowed with age so it wasn't a comfortable reading experience.
I had a look how much it cost on the Kindle, and it was only £3.99, so I downloaded it for big font size easy read.
I had forgotten the basic premise of The Player of Games, even though it's one of my favourite books. The eponymous player of games is tricked into playing a game in a far off civilisation, blackmailed in fact. He has committed a small indiscretion, but one that , even in the anything goes tolerant world of the Culture (even because it is an anything goes tolerant world), will haunt him if disclosed. It's both the relative littleness of the thing, but the fact that it impinges on his honesty so directly, that almost hollows out his life, makes it worthless, when he been having existential doubts about its worth anyway. This unease is at the heart of the book, and although it is soon eclipsed by the events that follow, this time round I reflected on the the way in which he would never forget the dishonour that he had committed on himself, even as the thing itself diminished through time and perspective. It was like a low level ontological nausea that mirrored the slightly physically sick feeling I had myself.
Karl Ove Knausgaard washes his pretty mucky emotional linen in public so you don't have to wash yours. That's a bit unfair to Karl Ove Knausgaard because he also has some great epiphanies as well - sometimes the shining white linen is flying out on the lines in bright sun and breeze.
Someone, in a film somewhere, I can't remember which - maybe it will come back to me at the end of the post, is going on and on about Ingmar Bergman and what a depressive and depressing Norwegian film maker he was, and what a depressive and what a depressing country Norway is,in a pompous, irritating way, until, finally one of the other characters cracks, lays into said Bergman judge, and leaves the scene with a great last line, half shouting half hissing it - "And Bergman was a Swede not a Norwegian". Kar Ove has a lot to say about Norway vs Sweden, especially on how correct the Swedes are, how they do things just right, and how intellectuals are intellectuals, proles are proles,but bus men are bus men only temporarily while they finish their Phd. So where is all this going? Nowhere fast as they say. I'm just delighting in Karl Ove pouring his soul and his gripes down on the page, going from one to the other without so much as a blink. It is a fantastic portrayal of masculinity in all its shades.
Our society has ever come to terms with the fact that some men don't like boxing, DIY or football, some women like DIY (my wife for one), and like doing it. So while being very proud of the fact that my wife has designed and made a huge built in wardrobe in our loft bedroom from scratch, I'm also slightly diminished in some way. I've never been good at that stuff - always bodge and cram things together, as my wife never fails to point out. Now she goes out to work, with a burgeoning new career, while I stay at home and cook, write, grow, shop, play online poker and Settlers of Catan. It has given her hugely increased confidence, and accentuated a certain natural tendency to bossiness that occasionally comes out in uncomfortable ways for me . On Thursday night at a dance class, as we were leaving the room, she says to me in front of one of the dance instructors "Don't leave your glass there - clear it up", and I do a sort of double take to indicate to the dance instructor that I'm not accustomed to being told what to do by my wife, before picking up the three plastic glasses stacked on the window sill, the top one of which is mine, and chucking them in the bin. Perhaps I am a little over sensitive - no that's a lie, there is no perhaps about it, because outside I ask her not to tell me to do things (in that tone of voice ha! yes there is a certain tone, not too over the top or obvious, just a little imperious) in front of people. She acts mature and puzzled, but fuck it, I had to say it for my own self respect. Obviously she was right about the glass - I should have just put it in the bin in the corner right away- but I didn't like it pointed out like that.
Not that I am complaining, but I realise that I liked being the one who came home with a large income, who ran stuff, who was a boss, who was used to being in command of things (or at least that illusion of command that comes from being near the top of the pile). But I can't say that I'm unhappy now- I might miss the money and the status, but I don't miss the politicking.
Through a series of events / sets of feelings, listed below (though not an exclusive set) I've failed to find the BBC series The Victorian Farm on watch again or Netflix, but found it on Youtube on my Nexus 7 tablet then and fixed it up so that it plays on the Mac Mini through the TV.
The events:
1. Picking out Far From the Madding Crowd for our lodger to read.
2. First time out rabbit hunting at the back of the downs.
3. Weekend comedown misery /sadness, empathy, happiness
4. Heat and warmth and the smell of the outdoors in summer.
5. Karl Ove of course.
I'm nearly in the state of mind that I was when living and teaching drama and english in Hackney in 1979/80, a long hot autumn where i was so phased by the teaching and the urban life that I watched All Creatures Great and Small on the huge TV we had in our skip furnished living room in short life housing in Rushmore Road. It's that longing for something a bit simpler and idyllically rural.
Then that, for some reason got me thinking about empathy and good works. If you are as lucky as I am, and have any degree of sensitivity, then you have to feel deep sadness and compassion at the plight of so many around you, and of course in the world at large. At times it's almost overwhelming. And I began thinking about those practical, energetic types who do good things, who become councilors who become Mother Teresa's if i can use such a crude blanket term to cover all passionately driven do-gooders. And I suspect that empathy and compassion are not a great part of their lives - there is no room for it - they're driven by and ideology of compassion or empathy which is not the same thing. So for example a "mother Teresa" type will have no problems excommunicating the aborticant, the left wing ideologue has no problem with the ends justifying the means. And that's putting aside the nakedly ambitious, the sociopaths and the unreflecting. Perhaps these people are effective in that they get things done, but I think they damage as well. Single mindedness always carries bigotry on its shoulder. Good reflective people are slower to act, read books, make our society better, the others shoulder their way through the crowds, knocking the slow and the meditative aside, and, incidentally kicking the shit out of each other where their paths cross.
