Thursday, June 6, 2019

The Job of the Terrorists by Karl Ove Knausegaard





A few minutes after five thirty John was standing by the side of the bed shouting at me to wake up. I put on my clothes from the day before and took him into the kitchen. Outside, the sun was coming up over the horizon. Its rays were sharp and penetrated the room. Everything became visible in its light, the bits of food on the floor, the trail of coffee stains that ran from the counter on the right of the sink on the other side, the globules of fat that specked the surface of the sausage water in the saucepan, the two bloated sausages that lay at the bottom, split open, the two empty milk cartons next to it, the open packet of margarine, so soft it as almost fluid, its yellow color much deeper now than when it had been taken from the fridge. The Wetex cloth, stiff as a shell when dry, draped over the lip of metal that separated the twin bowls of the sink, like some odd fitting that was part of it, originally white, now a grimy gray. The glasses and cups, plates, and bowls that were piled up in the sink, spilling out over the stainless-steel draining board like some encroaching plant of glass and crockery. The two empty jars of pasta sauce left unrinsed behind the tap, insider red with what remained of their contents. The transparent plastic cheese wrapper, which to a distracted eye made it look like the label with the logo on it hung in midair above the chopping board that had been pushed back against the wall. The beetroot juice the wood had absorbed. The withered plants in the widow, dead for months, so much a fixture now that no one thought of throwing them out anymore. The table, with its glasses and plats, the jug of water with its tiny bubbles, the dried-up crumbs and other detritus that pointed to where the children sat, the empty bags of fruit that lay dumped, like little hangars of plastic among the drawings and drawing pads, crayons and felt pens, not to mention the two shelves on the wall next to the window, swelling like some coral reef with objects that the children had collected and kept over the past couple of years, from sweet dispensers in the shape of princesses or Disney figures, little boxes full of beads, bead boards, sticks of glue, toy cars, and watercolors, to oddments of jigsaw puzzles, bits of Playmobile, letters and bills, dolls, and some marbles with little dolphins inside that Vanja had wanted when we were in Venice the previous summer. The shelves were a kind of station; once something was put there it was out of circulation and stayed there. We had a number of such places where the lives of objects came to a sudden end, most notably the long counter in the hall, presumably once used as a kind of sideboards for serving food before it was taken into the dining room, since it had those kind of cupboards above and below, which were now crammed with all matter of stuff we must have thought we needed but no longer knew we had, some three cubic meters of discarded lamps, used and unused lightbulbs, candles, piles of printer paper, rolls of undeveloped film, heaps of photographs, loose as well as collected in the little yellow folders in which they had been delivered, cookery books, assorted children’s clothing, woolen tights from winter, odd socks, odd gloves, a pink Hello Kitty rain hat, a number of T-shirts, most likely outgrown, a hoodie, a thick sweater, napkins bought in abundance from IKEA, flowerpots, cables from old computers, extension cords, ballpoints and lighters, old paperbacks, washed but unironed tablecloths, invitations and advertising brochures, glossy weeklies, unused sparklers, a collapsed rice-paper lamp shade, the children’s birthday train with numbers on them in which you could put little candles, balloons and whistles, bits of their wooden train set, including a station building and a locomotive, drawing pads, DVDs, CDs, tea towels- all in all a mountain of stuff that from time to time sent Linda into a panic mode, the sudden feeling of utter chaos it could bring about would be too much for her. Not infrequently she came home with organizers and storage boxes to help her get on top of things; different boxes for different objects, a shelf for my mail, another for hers, with our names on then, like other people had, people who were tidier than us, but these systems would collapse after only a few days and everything would be chaotic again. It would get on my nerves too, and about once every six months or so I went through the lot, sorting and tossing, whittling down these bulging piles, only for them to swell again within weeks. It was if they were alive, drawing objects towards them and consuming them, growing bigger and stronger all the time.

Happily, the children didn’t seem to be bothered. Conceptions of inner and outer chaos were not yet relevant to them, they approached the world as an unproblematic place most of the time, which was probably right, I thought to myself now. The material world was neutral, we wove our inner psychological landscapes into it, coloring it with our conceptions until it couldn’t help but be messy. But it was a practical issue, nothing to do with morals. We weren’t bad people for being messy. Our messiness was not a sign of poor moral fabric. I could tell myself this, but it didn’t help, the feelings it stirred in me were too strong; as I moved around in all our mess it was if it were accusing me, accusing us, we were bad people, unfit to be parents.

‘What do you say, John, do you think I should clean things up a bit while you’re having breakfast?”

He looked up at me and nodded. I let the blinds down, lifted him into his chair, gave him his cornflakes and milk, which he seemed happy with, and began emptying the dishwasher .  .  .

I got myself a cup, poured the now brewed coffee into a thermos and took it out with me onto the balcony, where I sat down with a smoke, leaving the door open so I’d know if anything happened inside. Gazing out over the kilometers of rooftops I remembered  I’d had a dream. I’d been sitting in the same place. The sky had bee lack and crisscrossed by planes. Some had been very close, gat jumbo jets with every detail of their fuselages plain to see, others merely lights passing beneath the stars. The feeling it had given me had been intense and fantastic. Fantastic, fantastic it had been, and then I’d woken up.

I leaned back and put my feet up on the railing. The sun, bright and blazing, had warmed up the air around me considerably, and its rays burned against my face, sparkling in the window, the tabletop, and the shiny metal of the thermos.

Low-flying planes sweeping between tall buildings, sometimes sky-scrapers, sometimes ordinary towers, were something I dreamed about recurringly,  perhaps two or there times a year. Sometimes I was on board myself, other times I looked at them from a distance. Even in the dream I found myself marveling a how beautiful and unreal they were. Occasionally I saw great plane disasters too, entire scenes in which they came hurtling from the skies to crash into a building or a street, exploding into flame. For that reason, the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 was like watching a dream, to me. All the elements were there. The skyscrapers, the great shining airplanes, the impact, the flames. But while these dreams were oddly concentrated, always centered on some single point around which all my feelings in someway seemed to be gathered, the true-life event was quite differently open and expansive, and I felt I could remove myself from it and connect with it.

The job of the terrorists was to penetrate into our subconscious. This had always been the aim of writers, but the terrorists took it a step further. They were the writers of our age. Don DeLillo said this many  years before 9/11. The images they created spread around the globe, colonizing our subconscious minds. The tangible outcome of the attack, the numbers of dead and injured, the material destruction meant nothing. It was the images that were important. The more iconic the images they managed to create, the more successful their actions. The attack on the World Trade Center was the most successful of all time. There weren’t that many dead, only a couple of thousand, as against the six hundred thousand who died in the first two days of the Battle of Flanders in the autumn of 1914, yet the images were so iconic and powerful that the effect on us was just as devastating, perhaps more so, since we live in a culture of images.

Planes and skyscrapers. Icarus and Babel.

They wanted into our dreams. Everyone did. Our inner beings were the final market. Once they were conquered, we would be sold.

I took another slurp of coffee, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, stood up, pressed and index finger against one nostril, and with a swift, forceful exhalation expelled a glob of mucus from the other over the balcony.

“You do your morning ablutions al fresco, I see,” said Geir. He was standing in the open doorway watching me.


My Struggle Volume VI pages 273-277




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