Knausgaard's pessimism

 

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/karl-ove-knausgaards-haunting-new-novel

The above is a review in The New Yorker  by Brandon Taylor of Knausgaard's The Morning Star.  I get hard-copies of The New Yorker, and I get emails as well, presumably in a few days I'll get the hard-copy containing this review.  Presumably also, you'll be able to read the above even if you don't subscribe, but I'm not sure about that.  Sometimes, in regard to such things, one must be a member and "sign in."  I didn't "sign in" to read the above, but sometimes if I don't sign out I remain signed-in until I have a computer malfunction.

In any case I was impressed with the review.  I especially noted that Taylor says that The Morning Star reminded of Bolano.  Several years ago I read quite a lot of Bolano and commented quite a lot about the various novels at the time.  Taylor mentions The Savage Detective which I read.  He also mentions 2066 which I began but don't think I finished. 

I then recalled that I bought the first volume of Knausgaard's My Struggle, an unfortunate title in my opinion.  But perhaps the title in Norwegian would would have a different connotation than it does in English, but perhaps that is the fault of the translator Don Bartlett and not that of Knausgaard. I don't know. 

I picked up my copy of My Struggle and see that I hadn't gotten very far into it.  The English language translation was published in 2012.  It would have been sometime after that I would have encountered a review, and of course Susan died on July 4th, 2015; so, whenever I got the novel, we would have been in the throes of attempting to get her qualified for a liver transplant.  That was a hardship for her and in retrospect she probably thought it wasn't worth the trouble.  If it had been completely left up to her, she would have been content to die right away rather than be driven to the various facilities throughout the region having the various obligatory tests conduction so she could be closer to being eligible for a liver transplant.  At some point during this process, I wanted her to live more than she wanted to.

The "liver transplant process," it eventually developed, was a macabre joke on the part of the medical bureaucracy.  Eventually she had been approved and we were invited to a meeting in which we learned that there weren't enough livers available for everyone in the room.  Those who would be chosen first were those who had liver cancer.  I recall one fellow happily raising his hand to indicate that he had cancer.  Then too, one needed to be healthy (except for the liver) enough to survive the operation and be able to live on for many years afterward.  Susan, we soon understood was never going to get a new liver.

Thus, I would have been in some part of the process with Susan when I read the beginning of Knausgaards macabre description of the death process in volume one of My Struggle.  He is only 52 now; so, he would have been 40 when My Struggle was published in English.  Why would he find it so agreeable to concentrate so fully on the process of death?   When I was 40, I was dating Susan and had no interest in it whatsoever.  And this isn't a matter of self-deception.  At one time I read that pessimistic people were more likely to get cancer than optimistic ones -- William James "Sick Souls" as opposed to his "healthy souls."    Healthy-souled people simply don't dwell upon pessimistic matters to the extent that Knausgaard seems to.  I looked Knausgaard up on Wikipedia at some point and saw how young he was and wondered if he would be able to generate enough optimism to finish his "struggle."  After reading the review of The Morning Star, this morning, I checked and found that Knausgaard had published his sixth and last volume of My Struggle" (The English edition) in September 2018; so perhaps enough time has passed for me to resume reading volume 1.  The subtitle of Taylor's review of The Morning Star, states "In 'The Morning Star,' the Norwegian novelist gives voice to the feeling that something terrible is coming for us all."  Thus, Knausgaard seems not to have abandoned his pessimistic ways.  I would advise him, if I had the opportunity, that he should have himself checked regularly for signs of cancer. 

Lawrence

Forgetting to breathe

    Drowning southwest
    Of the island, I reached out,
    Fingers spread, treading.
    I hoped to avoid
    Such ventures, my
    Sense of direction flawed
    By a mother restricting me
    
    To the block we lived upon;
    So I sailed toward the
    Oil derrick southwest
    Of our house within
    That block and sight
    Of land, but remote
    From then, I entered
    
    Senescent storms I couldn’t
    Make sense of, fingers
    Reaching out of the sea
    I swam in.  They will say on
    The day my body washes ashore,
    “He lived Ninety years,
    “A race he successfully won”.

A Matter of time

    A siren dimmed in the distance
    And she was gone.  I was
    Sure of her duration, her
    Resolution, her being without
    End, and time supported
    My insistence.  Our walks
    In the sand were always sure.
    
    A star fell.  I didn’t need to
    Wish.  It was all there back then
    And I strove to keep it,
    Spending without restraint.
    Now none remains.  My
    Recollections shatter.  She
    Stopped being present in

    My dreams.  I carried a list
    With instructions for times
    Like these.  She was supposed
    Pick me up when our
    Tasks were complete.
    I limped to the door to see
    Her drive away without me.

Legal Lessons

  
   “Look into this,” I mumbled
    To myself, “six years – may
    Get out in two” looking
    At the street lamps struggling
    Through the fog, “so much
    Fog.”  I had been, years
    Before, a grunt on a hill top

    With a number, “everything
    Counted: years of service,
    Years of incarceration
    Unless I get a ‘not-guilty.’
    Doubtful.  I was at the
    Wheel despite taking
    That stuff from V.A.”

    “What was that stuff anyway?”
    I mumbled, thumbing
    Through the paperwork –
    “Have to get that from
    The prosecution: gave
    That stuff out.  Didn’t tell
    Me I couldn’t drive.”

    “I held out eight days
    Up there.  Where was
    Prosecution then?  Where
    Were those who sent
    Me there, and brought me
    Back to serve six years,
    Two with good behavior?”

Helen, Pensive

   
    Helen knew the look
    And feel of her
    Trojan archer, yet
    Set aside as she was
    Waiting the war out
    Reflected much more
    On her own momentum,

    Guilt, some had said    
    That she’d assented
    Too readily; yet she’d
    Been abandoned
    And betrayed, left,
    While Achaea played
    Games, left again

    As Hector and Paris
    Fended or fell. Now
    They’d set her here
    Like an antique vase,
    No one of moment
    Seeing her face,
    Her troubled brow.






           

A Hunter-Gatherer's guide and Post-Traumatic Growth

 

On 8-25-21 I was trimming branches out front, sawed most of the way through an especially large one which kept hold of my saw as it fell to the ground.  Unfortunately for me I held onto the saw.  The fingers on my right hand were bent back.  I thought they might be broken, but when I got up found that they weren’t.  However, something in my hand hasn’t completely healed.  When I write with pen and paper, as I do in my journal, pain increases with each line.  Fortunately my hand seems fine when I type.    

I’ve begun A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life by Heather Heyling and Bret Weinstein.   Quite a bit on this subject appears in science magazines, and I wondered if I would find anything new.  Perhaps I have:

From page 7: “Conscious thoughts are those that can be communicated to others.  We define consciousness, therefore, as ‘that fraction of cognition that is packaged for exchange.’  This is no trick.  We have not chosen a definition to make an intractable question simple.  We have chosen the definition at the epicenter of what people mean when describing a thought as ‘conscious.’”

I have gone on a bit in the book but keep coming back to this idea.  I recall Susan, in our early days of getting to know each other, telling me that I wasn’t in touch with my emotions.  She urged me to write her some poetry so I could find out what I felt emotionally, and that worked.  No doubt it worked before Susan urged me to do it.  I was writing poetry long before I met her, but I never thought of it in the terms she used.  

In one of the reviews I read recently, a poet (whose name I can’t recall) was asked the purpose of poetry and he said something along the lines of “a poet writes in order to find out what he thinks.”   That seems right as well.  I do not seem able to sit down and think my way to answers.  That probably wasn’t always true, but it seems to be true now.

In the 9-11-21 issue of ScienceNews is the article “Roads to the Good Life, Happiness and meaning are not the only ways to get there” by Sujata Gupta.  She begins “In December, my husband, our 5-year old daughter and I tested positive for COVID-19.  Life, already off-kilter, lurched.  Smell, taste, breath – were they normal?  The air smelled only of cold; everything tasted vaguely of cardboard. . . Prior to the sickness, I’d been researching pandemic fatigue, a term used to describe the boredom that can arise during a protracted crisis like the one we’re in now . . . research [of Shigerhiro Oishi and his team] suggests that the ingredients of a rich life come not from stability in life circumstances or in temperament.  Rather . . . it arises from novelty seeking, curiosity and moments that shift one’s view of the world. . .

Gupta goes on in a rather stream of consciousness fashion. One needn’t assume that we are all at risk for PTSD.  “A large body of literature shows . . . that natural disasters and other traumatic events can trigger a phenomenon known as post-traumatic growth: a transformation that gives people a newfound appreciation for life and a desire to help others.” [Gupta here quotes SN Online: 4/3/19]

“Growth” sounds unrealistic when applied to someone 86 years old, but perhaps I’m wrong.  I’ll have to give that some more thought, and I should probably give up sawing large branches from trees for fear of losing my ability to think.

Personal, technical problems & Garrison Keillor

 

Yesterday I spent an afternoon and evening as we all periodically do when our computers misbehave, or we think they do.  Yesterday I wasn't able to access wi-fi; which is usually the fault of my router.  After rebooting several times, I thought perhaps my router had failed; so I got a new one from my closet and went through the aggravating trial and error one must go through to set one up, unless one is a techie who does this all the time.

After getting my new router to work, I discovered that I had access to the internet through Mozilla Firefox, but I still didn't have access to my email through Mozilla Thunderbird.  I then recalled a few times in the past when I had access to the internet but not my email; so I hoped that my email would be back this morning, and it was. 

However I still couldn't access the photographic forums and the ongoing discussions I was in.  I could no longer type my password in the space provided for it.  Perhaps I have been banned I finally wondered.  Moderators can do that for all sorts of reasons, and they don't need to explain themselves to the real or imagined offenders.

After checking to make sure my new router was functioning properly, I checked my email system and found they were once again coming into my in-basked without hesitation.  The first one I read was the following from Garrison Keillor:

"I am thinking about moving to Texas so that I can be in open disagreement with the powers that be and express this freely, instead of living in colonies of liberal progressives where I must put tape over my mouth except when among close personal friends. Freedom of speech is watched closely where I live and we all know it. “What exactly is it you want to say that you can’t?” you wonder. It is something that, were I to say it, I’d be kicked out of the Democratic Party and my library card would be confiscated and I’d be barred from Amazon and Starbucks and the Episcopal church would make me sit in the Penitents’ Corner. So I’ll keep it to myself. . . ."  https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/

The moderators would make short work of Keillor if he voiced such an opinion on one of the photographic forums.  I myself occasionally think of moving to Idaho, but then I don't talk or write as much as I used to, so it's probably okay to stay here.