A Death in the Family (My Struggle #1)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

A town that does not keep its dead out of sight, that leaves people where they died, on highways and byways, in parks and car parks, is not a town but a hell. The fact that this hell reflects our life experience in a more realistic and essentially truer way is of no consequence. We know this is how it is, but we do not want to face it. Hence the collective act of repression symbolised by the concealment of our dead.

If the phenomenon of death does not frighten us, why then this distaste for dead bodies? Either it must mean that there are two kinds of death or that there is a disparity between our conception of death and death as it actually turns out to be, which in effect boils down to the same thing: what is significant here is that our conception of death is so strongly rooted in our consciousness that we are not only shaken when we see that reality deviates from it, but we also try to conceal this with all the means at our disposal.

the way we remove bodies has never been the subject of debate, it has always been just something we have done, out of a necessity for which no one can state a reason but everyone feels:

No less conspicuous than our hiding corpses is the fact that we always lower them to ground level as fast as possible. A hospital that transports its bodies upwards, that sites its cold chambers on the upper floors, is practically inconceivable.

It might thus appear that death is relayed through two distinct systems. One is associated with concealment and gravity, earth and darkness, the other with openness and airiness, ether and light.

Throughout our childhood and teenage years we strive to attain the correct distance from objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty … Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning.

The needs of the moment always trumped promises of the future, however enticing the latter.

The force of the sudden shame was the sole feeling from my childhood that could measure in intensity against that of terror, next to sudden fury, of course, and common to all three was the sense that I myself was being erased. All that mattered was precisely that feeling.

I do not want anyone to get close to me, I do not want anyone to see me, and this is the way things have developed: no one gets close and no one sees me. This is what must have engraved itself in my face, this is what must have made it so stiff and mask-like and almost impossible to associate with myself whenever I happen to catch a glimpse of it in a shop window.

For, while previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way. Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a boat in a lock: life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides.

We do not plan. Having to shop for dinner comes as a surprise every day. Likewise, having to pay bills at the end of every month. Had it not been for some sporadic payments made into my account, such as rights fees, book club sales or a minor amount from schoolbook publications or, as this autumn, the second instalment of some foreign income I had forgotten, things would have gone seriously wrong. However, this constant improvisation increases the significance of the moment, which of course then becomes extremely eventful since nothing about it is automatic, and if our lives feel good, which naturally they do at times, there is a great sense of togetherness and a correspondingly intense happiness.

And isn’t that enough? Isn’t it enough? Yes, if joy had been the goal it would have been enough. But joy is not my goal, never has been, what good is joy to me?

The only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing.

It was a very special feeling to wake up in the morning, all alone in a flat, it was as though emptiness were not only around me but also inside me.

Drinking was good for me; it set things in motion. And I was thrust into something, a feeling of … not infinity exactly, but of, well, something unlimited. Something I could go into, deeper and deeper. The feeling was so sharp and distinct. No bounds. That was what it was, a feeling of boundlessness.

I wanted to take Form and Colour, but since I knew how things stood, that the other students knew how to draw, had the gift, I decided against it. Instead I chose cinematography. The thought of this could sometimes weigh me down because I wanted so much to be someone. I wanted so much to be special.

There was something I had always liked about gliding through the darkness with the dashboard illuminated beside a man who was confident and calm in his movements.

For a moment I was filled with the sensation of white snow against black water. The way the whiteness erases all the detail around a lake or a river in the forest so that the difference between land and water is absolute, and the water lies there as a deeply alien entity, a black hole in the world.

Who cares about politics when there are flames licking at your insides? Who cares about politics if you are burning with desire for life? With desire for the living? Not me at any rate.

If you are sixteen years old all of this makes an impression, all of this leaves its mark, for this is the first spring you know is spring, with all your senses you know this is spring, and it is the last, for all coming springs pale in comparison with your first.

Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen,

They sat down at the table and things immediately livened up. And what, when I came, had been faces devoid of meaning or substance and which consequently I had only regarded in terms of age and type, more or less as if they had been animals, a bestiary of forty-year-olds with all that that entailed – lifeless eyes, stiff lips, pendulous breasts and quivering paunches, wrinkles and folds – I now saw to be individuals, for I was related to them, the blood that was in their veins was in mine, and who they were suddenly became important.

I lifted my glass and drank, shuddered as the acidic taste hit my palate, and once again recognised that clear, pure sensation that arose with approaching intoxication, yet still hadn’t arrived, and the desire to pursue it that always followed.

I remembered hardly anything from my childhood. That is, I remembered hardly any of the events in it. But I did remember the rooms where they took place. I could remember all the places I had been, all the rooms I had been in. Just not what happened there.

You know too little and it doesn’t exist. You know too much and it doesn’t exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing’s location and aim. But how to get there?

It is remarkable that the extremes resemble each other, in one sense at any rate, for in both immense chaos and in a strictly regulated, demarcated world the individual is nothing, life is everything.

For several years I had tried to write about my father, but had got nowhere, probably because the subject was too close to my life, and thus not so easy to force into another form, which of course is a prerequisite for literature. That is its sole law: everything has to submit to form. If any of literature’s other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these take control over form, the result is poor. That is why writers with a strong style often write poor books. That is also why writers with strong themes so often write poor books. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called ‘writing’. Writing is more about destroying than creating.

I stood stock still in the middle of the floor, as if the pain radiating from my body might disappear of its own accord. But it never did. It had to be removed with action.

What does anyone in their twenties really get out of a longing for their childhood years? For their own youth? It was like an illness.

There was a kind of freedom about this. I didn’t need to justify my feelings, there was no one to whom I had to stand to account and no case to answer. Freedom, but not peace, for even though the pictures were supposed to be idylls, such as Claude’s archaic landscapes, I was always unsettled when I left them because what they possessed, the core of their being, was inexhaustibility, and what that wrought in me was a kind of desire.

This wasn’t about knowledge, but about the aura knowledge exuded, the places it came from, which were almost all outside the world we lived in now, yet were still within the ambivalent space where all historical objects and ideas reside.

In recent years the feeling that the world was small and that I grasped everything in it had grown stronger and stronger in me, and that despite my common sense telling me that actually the reverse was true: the world was boundless and unfathomable, the number of events infinite, the present time an open door that stood flapping in the wind of history. But that is not how it felt. It felt as if the world were known, fully explored and charted, that it could no longer move in unpredicted directions, that nothing new or surprising could happen. I understood myself, I understood my surroundings, I understood society around me, and if any phenomenon should appear mysterious I knew how to deal with it. Understanding must not be confused with knowledge for I knew next to nothing – but should there be, for example, skirmishes in the borderlands of an ex-Soviet republic somewhere in Asia, whose towns I had never heard of, with inhabitants alien in everything from dress and language to everyday life and religion, and it turned out that this conflict had deep historical roots that went back to events that took place a thousand years ago, my total ignorance and lack of knowledge would not prevent me from understanding what happened, for the mind has the capacity to deal with the most alien of thoughts. This applied to everything.

In a book I read about art and anatomy Nietzsche was quoted as saying that ‘physics too is an interpretation of the world and an arrangement of the world, and not an explanation of the world’, and that ‘we have measured the value of the world with categories that refer to a purely fabricated world’. A fabricated world? Yes, the world as a superstructure, the world as a spirit, weightless and abstract, of the same material with which thoughts are woven, and through which therefore they can move unhindered.

The feeling this gives, that the world is small, tightly enclosed around itself, without openings to anywhere else, is almost incestuous, and although I knew this to be deeply untrue, since actually we know nothing about anything, still I could not escape it. The longing I always felt, which some days was so great it could hardly be controlled, had its source here. It was partly to relieve this feeling that I wrote, I wanted to open the world by writing, for myself; at the same time this is also what made me fail. The feeling that the future does not exist, that it is only more of the same, means that all utopias are meaningless. Literature has always been related to utopia, so when the utopia loses meaning, so does literature. What I was trying to do, and perhaps what all writers try to do – what on earth do I know? – was to combat fiction with fiction.

these sudden states of clear-sightedness that everyone must know, where for a few seconds you catch sight of another world from the one you were in only a moment earlier, where the world seems to step forward and show itself for a brief glimpse before reverting and leaving everything as before …

wasn’t thinking about anything in particular, just staring at the burning red ball in the sky and the pleasure that suffused me was so sharp and came with such intensity that it was indistinguishable from pain. What I experienced seemed to me to be of enormous significance. Enormous significance. When the moment had passed the feeling of significance did not diminish, but all of a sudden it became hard to place: exactly what was significant? And why? A train, an industrial area, sun, mist? I recognised the feeling, it was akin to the one some works of art evoke in me.

I didn’t know what it was about these pictures that made such a great impression on me. However, it was striking that they were all painted before the 1900s, within the artistic paradigm that always retained some reference to visible reality. Thus, there was always a certain objectivity to them, by which I mean a distance between reality and the portrayal of reality, and it was doubtless in this interlying space where it ‘happened’, where it appeared, whatever it was I saw, when the world seemed to step forward from the world.

for the problem is that the intellect has taken over everything. Everything has become intellect, even our bodies, they aren’t bodies any more, but ideas of bodies, something that is situated in our own heaven of images and conceptions within us and above us, where an increasingly large part of our lives is lived. The limits of that which cannot speak to us – the unfathomable – no longer exist. We understand everything, and we do so because we have turned everything into ourselves. Nowadays, as one might expect, all those who have occupied themselves with the neutral, the negative, the non-human in art, have turned to language, that is where the incomprehensible and the otherness have been sought, as if they were to be found on the margins of human expression, in other words, on the fringes of what we understand, and of course actually that is logical: where else would it be found in a world that no longer acknowledges that there is a beyond?

The idea that I could scrutinise this face unhindered for the first time was almost unbearable. It felt like an act of violation.

Was there anything better than sitting in the rear seat of a taxi and being driven through towns and suburbs before a long journey?

the presence of this thought-shadow, or perhaps better, thought-mirror, also implied a criticism, that I did not feel more than I did. Dad was dead, I thought, and an image of him flashed up before me, as though I needed an illustration of the word ‘dad’, and I, sitting in a plane on my way to bury him, react coldly to it, I think, and watch two ten-year-old girls taking a seat in one row and what must have been their mother and father taking a seat on the other side of the aisle to them, I think that I think that I think.

There were several other things he avoided as well, but which I had never considered, had never seen, because what a person does always overshadows what he does not do,

I had always liked staying the night with other families, having your own room with a freshly made bed, full of unfamiliar objects, with a towel and facecloth nicely laid out, and from there straight into the heart of family life, despite there always being, no matter whom I visited, an uncomfortable side, because even though people always try to keep any existing tensions in the background whenever guests are present, the tensions are still noticeable, and you can never know if it is your presence that has caused them or whether they are just there and indeed your presence is helping to suppress them. A third possibility is, of course, that all these tensions were just ‘tensions’, which lived their own lives in my head.

you have a kind of receptivity to those with whom you have grown up and to whom you have been close during the period when your personality is being shaped or asserting itself, you receive them directly, without thought as a filter.

I had never met anyone with such sureness of taste as him, but what use was it, apart from being the hub student life revolved around? The essence of a nose is judgement, to judge you have to stand outside, and that is not where creativity takes place.

Feelings are like water, they always adapt to their surroundings. Not even the worst grief leaves traces; when it feels so overwhelming and lasts for such a long time, it is not because the feelings have set, they can’t do that, they stand still, the way water in a forest mere stands still.

After I had finished reading she crawled forward and grabbed another book from the table. This one was about a mouse called Fredrik who, unlike other mice, didn’t gather food in the summer but preferred to sit around dreaming. They said he was lazy, but when winter came and everything was cold and white, he was the one who gave their lives colour and light. That was what he had been gathering, and that was what they needed now, colour and light.

I sipped the coffee and lit a cigarette. I can’t say that I enjoyed the taste of the coffee or the feeling of smoke descending into my lungs, I could barely distinguish the two, the point was to do it, it was a routine, and as with all routines, protocol was everything.

Not all rituals involve ceremonies, not all rituals are rigidly demarcated, there are those that take shape in the midst of everyday life, and are recognisable by the weight and charge they give the otherwise normal event.

As I stepped out of the house that morning and followed Yngve to the car, for a moment, it was as if I was entering a larger story than my own. The sons leaving home to bury their father, this was the story I suddenly found myself in,