7.28.23. - 8.23.23.
Finding Space. 7.28.23.
The moments between my alarm sounding and my finally successful effort to get out of bed cannot simply be chalked up to exhaustion. I procrastinate falling asleep the night before–scrolling or reading instead of resting–for the same reason: to elongate a false control, a false permanency over my life, whereby I can understand my actions precisely because I am inactive. My behavior from the past day is irretrievable, the next day inaccessible–so why worry? I can simply give in to the few minutes of true surplus at the end of the night and the minutes spent between snoozing at the start of each day. Impending doom, the Fall, chaos in freedom and its paralyzing effects.
--
The woman in my life loves Tove Jansson, the creator of the Moomins. She loves the art because it’s simple and direct in its beauty; and so I can’t help but recommend to her Knausgaard, whose writing, despite its nervosa and compulsively detailed ethos, connects the author and reader as one in a similar fashion. (Forgive my chauvinism, relating two Scandinavians to one another; perhaps there’s something in the glacial water. And so here I go, unable to resist the universal temptation to put to paper my thoughts on Knausgaard and on love--I'm only human.)
While children’s literature, at its best, requires the author to commiserate with the child on the latter’s terms, Knausgaard is often accused of the relentlessly autistic drive to pull his readers into his own subjective orbit. I disagree. On the contrary, the self which Knausgaard pulls us into is only expressed in qualities which are universal to anyone with a drop of empathy. Speaking about his children, he writes,
It is not the case that we are born equal and that the conditions of life make our lives unequal, it is the opposite, we are born unequal, and the conditions of life make our lives more equal.
He goes on,
When I think of my three children it is not only their distinctive faces that appear before me, but also the quite distinct feeling they radiate. This feeling, which is constant, is what they ‘are’ for me. And what they ‘are’ has been present in them ever since the first day I saw them. At that time they could barely do anything, and the little bit they could do, like sucking on a breast, raising their arms as reflex actions, looking at their surroundings, imitating, they could all do that, thus what they ‘are’ has nothing to do with qualities, has nothing to do with what they can or can’t do, but is more a kind of light that shines within them.
The flattening of difference–the conditions of life which eventually make our lives equal–is not some terrible Orwellian specter for Knausgaard. The shared language of life should be welcomed. At times it may limit our ability to express something truly novel to one another, since we are more or less the same, but this limitation provides us with the capacity for truly great art, which Knausgaard describes through the ‘vagueness’ one finds in Dostoyevsky.
...deeds and events for their own sake [do] not exist in Dostoyevsky, there is always something lying hidden behind them, a drama of the soul, and this means there is always an aspect of humanness he doesn’t include, the one that binds us to the world outside us. There are many kinds of wind that blow through man, and there are other entities inside him apart from the depth of soul. The authors of the books in the Old Testament knew that better than anyone. The richest conceivable portrayal of the possible manifestations of humanness is to be found there, where all possible forms of life are represented, apart from one, for us the only relevant one, namely our inner life.
Our uniqueness holds fast in the many “manifestations of humanness” we find in the Old Testament and the staggeringly long list of characters in Brothers K; and what is shared among all these shades of man is the “drama of the soul,” “our inner life,” the kernel of humanity expressed differently according to the winds which blow through us but nonetheless provides the basis of our love for each other. This is the only constant of our kind, that inner dimension which, somehow, is at once unique to each of us and exactly the same, and it is lost the moment we formalize ourselves.
We are pulled into Knausgaard’s subjective world while he is telling us that we are one, author and reader. We are told to venerate opaque writing–Dostoyevsky and the Old Testament, Kafka and Leskov–even as we are pulled into the “inner life” of the author and of ourself. Is Knausgaard really attempting to produce something ‘Great,’ then? His explicit internal search leaves little to the imagination, little “drama of the soul” apart from what is written before us. He is attempting to express the inexpressible, risking the formalization of humanity. Perhaps we can attribute this to our era–can we still achieve clarity-by-omission-in an oversaturated global psyche? Perhaps by trying to do so, our language becomes even more bogged down. Perhaps clarity can only come through the overexpression of life which we would gladly divulge if we were not encouraged otherwise (the truth of our time lies in TikTok).
Or perhaps Knausgaard is merely showing us a path to salvation as he leaves us behind to suffer:
Searching for something different… was the sole obligation literature had, in all other respects it was free, but not in this, and when writers disregarded this they did not deserve to be met with anything but contempt.
Over and over, Knausgaard tells us that the value of writing is in its production, certainly not in its completed state and perhaps not even in its initial insight; its value lies in its polishing and construction. The “drama of the soul” which Dostoyevsky achieved in vagueness and the openness of the human spirit, is impossible to find in Knausgaard–we are reading the finished product of a work by a man who convincingly attaches the reader to his hip as an “equal.” We have already been granted access to his inner life. The kernel of truth, the intoxicatingly human piece of Knausgaard has already taken place, in the act of writing, producing, always out of reach for anyone but the author himself, and even for Knausgaard the moment is now past: so how could we possibly be equals, when he has already extracted from the writing the divine surge which comes from its production, leaving a mere remnant of the craft for his readers? We can only be equals when we’ve taken up the project and left it behind; when we begin to write for ourselves, live for ourselves, something Knausgaard (as all of us will) struggles to maintain in his life during the periods between writing; and isn’t this space where life is lived? Isn’t this the eponymous “Struggle” of Min Kamp? Not in the writing but in its negative.
To create authentically is to search. Can reading do the same? Can we step outside of ourselves, even as we are taught today to interpret and analyze in such a prescribed manner that we are hardly ever interpreting? Interpretation is difficult after all, and when it simply lines up with the formula provided to us from our formative schooling years, when it is easy, can we really call this “struggle”? It certainly isn’t “searching” for anything.
And children’s literature, in the ideal, avoids the preconceived, both in its authorship and in its reception by the reader. We are encouraged to sink into a new world of color and fascination, to treat something outside of ourselves on its own terms, and thus to treat ourselves seriously and openly. Children have yet to concretize; but you and I have already limited ourselves.
--
When I hold her face in my hand, I don’t melt away because of some security or certainty in her person, but because I am unclear exactly who or what she is. This feeling hasn’t subsided with time, and so I am confident that, despite mankind’s shared inner light which connects all of us to each other, I’ve found someone who is open in the truest sense of the word–open to others and to herself, unconcerned with her notion of self from yesterday and, consequently, immensely sure of who she is. How else could she be so?
Is the direct enjoyment of beauty–the Moomins–searching? Hard to say.
--
Insights come in the middle of things, within a process. But if I believe this, why do I still hold watery, stern contemplation as an ideal? What good does meditation provide when the most forceful moments in life, so obviously, come with movement? Movement, yes, now this is the ideal. Why shouldn’t I continue to scroll? To abandon my time to Wikipedia dives and whatever other inward ventures keep my mind from focusing on itself? Perhaps it is good to be afraid of loneliness, or, rather, of being alone.
Or perhaps there are some processes which get the better of us, keep us stagnant in fact, and some which provide new objects of reflection for our benefit.
Writing and reading amount to searching only so long as they remain foreign to me. At this point in my life, I must say “Fuck Kierkegaard,” I must resist second natures in all forms. I believe in ritual, possibly even in ideology, but I must come upon it for myself, on my own.
8.16.23.
What is life?
Feeling to be sure.
But is my love my love
in the absence of my dread?
8.19.23.
Is the man with nowhere to be
apprehended with interest or caution
when fates cross on the street?
8.20.23.
Museum Speak–you know it when you see it–is not language. For those who enjoy this vernacular, which is both heady and empty, they are asking for a kind of confirmation which coaxes us back into ourselves. Our culture doesn’t seek pleasure, it seeks comfort. And Museum Speak accomplishes this because it is not language.
Language does not have to be specific but it must be able to describe conflicting subjectivities. The amorphous comfort we feel inside of the Museum Speak politic washes us away like the womb. It is an aesthetic experience unto itself, a physical analogue to the feeling we experience while scrolling.
Worse still, these conditions prohibit any other variety of aesthetic experience from emerging while we remain inside of the museum. In other words, Art under Museum Speak cannot achieve anything other than Museum Speak. It can only hope to replicate or strengthen the sense of stasis we feel when we contemplate the curator’s didactics adorned on the gallery walls. For now, this is our absolute horizon of aesthetic experience. We can’t hope for more.
8.23.23.
Always remember:
men confide in men.
Not explicitly,
as we only do with women,
but constantly.
8.23.23.
Currently reading Knausgaard’s second volume of Min Kamp, or A Man in Love. Although I sponge up his opinions on art and life, and the grueling day-to-day experience of love and fatherhood have touched me deeply in my lovestruck condition over the past few months; the most striking feature has been Knausgaard’s description of novel-writing, his process. It never occurred to me that a scene would predate a plot or even a theme.
When I’ve tried my hand at genuine fiction in the past, it was because I was trying to communicate a particular message, which by its nature must belong to the domain of narrative structure. On the other side of the coin, I believed that feeling should be expressed with poetry or strange, Leskov-like scenes which exist outside of a broader narrative arc. These scenes are strange because they are pregnant with a meaning, but an indeterminate one (and so dreams are wonderful source material). Once the scene belongs to a narrative, its meaning is defined. And so to begin with the scene in and of itself is to stake a claim in its own value, in its resistance to didactics.
We learn in Min Kamp that, when he began to write his second novel, Knausgaard started with an opening and nothing more: a father and son crabbing. Later, he tried to build from another, unrelated scene: a peasant witnessing an angel in the forest. There is no plot in mind when he puts these to paper, nothing grander than what is already described in these scenes. He works day after day on these passages and tries to build a story from the ground up, allowing the internal logic of the still-forming world to dictate itself and its characters into being. Like a canvas which does not reference the world outside of itself, these scenes–this writing–draws us in and asks for contemplation in a manner completely foreign to our contemporary novel, which is without exception grounded in the analysis of our contemporary world. Crabs and angels do not provoke messages, perhaps not even themes. Atmosphere and the sensory conditions aroused by poetry reign supreme.
And just as the readers are immersed in the scene, Knausgaard recalls how he surrounded himself with 16th century texts, images of angels, and Spengler in order to assemble the world he had both found and built through the angel in the woods. For an author to immerse oneself is typical, unavoidable even. But where most of contemporary literature relies on a frankly grotesque representation of the author’s life, conditions, and culture (or at least their marketable aspects), Knausgaard describes the books he was reading at the time of writing; the small, isolated office he rented out at the very edge of Stockholm which looked out onto a forested highway; and the faces and air he passed on the metro to and fro his work and his home, which was itself a complicated menage of love and dismay and constitutes the majority of A Man in Love.