remembering my father
I had just finished My Struggle book two yesterday. The second volume had been the most resonating, and striking, to me so far. Something divine had definitely emerged from the mundane, through life's slow accumualtion. It's really, a miracle. I felt, twice during this volume, some kind of euphoria. The floating, the full immersion into the world that the novel depicts, Knausgaard's world.
Although both the format and the length of My Struggle is similar to In Search of Lost Time, I don't think it's a pastiche of it. It's something fundementally different, perhaps with a nod into that past of Proust, which is efflorescent in its own way.
For me, I felt something completely different reading Proust vs. this. I felt, a certain kind of aggresion, which was not present reading Proust (but that could totally be from the speed at which I read Proust, which was required by the class that I was taking). In Proust seminar, Marcelle told us about this euphoric feeling of flowing with the passage of Time Regained, the last volume. I did not capture the same feeling then. But with My Struggle 2 I did. One time when Linda was giving birth. The other time near the end, when we have, finally, re-emerged from the convuluted layers of Karl Ove's remembering. Now we are here, I thought. It was a weird feeling. Possbily impossible to describe with words. Both times, I felt extremely hungry after the read (usually 2 hours at a time). But the pages kept me there. The life that existed within those pages progressed at increasing speed. Some words or phrases lingered here and there within the recess of my brain. After reading the birth of Vanja, all I could think about was, when Karl Ove was in love with Linda, he said
There, There, There.
There, there, there...
I thought of my father, who is not in the least similar to Karl Ove. I have too many words to say... I will just list a few memories
- As a kid, I love doing backflips with my father. Of course, I can't do a backflip. What we did instead was: my father will hold my hands, and I will jump while using (steppong on) his body as some kind of "intermediate thrust" to complete my full circle. That must have been so long ago. If not for my struggle, this memory will probably be lost indefinitely. (and you never know when a memory is lost, because there are so many!) But I could still ... remember the heat the texture of his hands which held my hands. His hands were smooth but tough as if the skin had formed some kinf of shell. But it was warm. It was firm. His nails were always well manicured. Perfect semi circles always. I felt very safe, even when doing my amatuer "aerobatic maneuvers", as I called it.
- The tough short beard of his chin (what's the word for it?). Warm. A signifier of life. His chin rubbing against my chin. It hurt a little. As far was I know all father likes to do that. When was the last time? A long time ago...
- In high school, my father accompanied me to this creative writing workshop for three weeks. We lived together in a tiny apartment. Red bricks, with a certain kind of coating that appeared as if wet all the time. We slept on the same bed, but of different direction (his head next to my toes). AC, that huge, old AC blowing against my face. My dry nostriles all the time. The smell of summer. Of wet summer after a wet rain. Wet concrete street, with a faint smell of mold, which was actually pleasant. So indolent a summer. My father didn't do anything for that three weeks. Just stayed with me there. I felt unfree. I felt constrained. I felt the room clastrophobic and wanted to kick my father in his sleep. Not very hardly but as a expression of discontent. I am not your boy anymore, perhaps that's what it amounted to say. Yet the logical part of my brain knew all these, all these I will regret. I had been boarding for high school for two years and it was the first time in a long time that I saw father. My father wanted to see me. He didn't care what I did. He knew he'd lost control long ago, the moment we decided that I should board for high school. When I left for America he told me he will cry for my departure, the honest man that he always is. When I left he told me to not live a second-hand life, whatever that meant. Was he implying that he himself had lived a second-hand life? He wanted to see me. That was all.
- I don't know if this was a dream or not. I don't remember when. Nor the context. But somewhere in my brain I had the conviction that my father said
I will take a bullet for you