Unexpected Religious Experience

Oh my god, this book I'm reading is one of those ones that are so good you wish another person were always reading it over your shoulder, just so you could look up at them and say, "Ah? Ah?" It wants to be read aloud to someone you love. I can't stop telling everyone I run into about it.

The book is A Death in the Family, the first in Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard's six-part autobiographical novel, My Struggle. It's so intensely personal in detail and deeply relatable in unguarded psychological insight, I never want to put it down.

Yesterday evening I went to see ambient electronic musician Tim Hecker play in a church, and I brought the book with me, as I was by myself. My friend Meg showed up after awhile and sat beside me while I was in the middle of enjoying the passage below like a very rich meal, and I almost didn't want her around. Of course I was quickly happy to have her company and hear about the Low concert in the same venue the night before (both shows part of local annual weirdo music festival the Obey Convention), but when she first sat down I admit to being a little disappointed.

I have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness, and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive. And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape. Time is slipping away from me, running through my fingers like sand while I… do what? Clean floors, wash clothes, make dinner, wash up, go shopping, play with the children in the play areas, bring them home, undress them, bath them, look after them until it is bedtime, tuck them in, hang some clothes to dry, fold others and put them away, tidy up, wipe tables, chairs and cupboards. It is a struggle, and even though it is not heroic, I am up against a superior force, for no matter how much housework I do the rooms are littered with mess and junk, and the children, who are taken care of every waking minute, are more stubborn than I have ever known children to be; at times it is nothing less than bedlam here, perhaps we have never managed to find the necessary balance between distance and intimacy, which of course becomes increasingly important the more personality there is involved. And there is quite a bit of that here. When Vanja was around eight months old she began to have violent outbursts, like fits at times, and for a while it was impossible to reach her, she just screamed and screamed. All we could do was hold her until it had subsided. It is not easy to say what caused it, but it often occurred when she had had a great many impressions to absorb, such as when we had driven to her grandmother's in the country outside Stockholm, when she had spent too much time with other children, or we had been in town all day. Then, inconsolable and completely beside herself, she could scream at the top of her voice. Sensitivity and strength of will are not a simple combination. And matters were not made any easier when Heidi was born. I wish I could say I took everything in my stride, but sad to say such was not the case because my anger and my feelings too were aroused in these situations, which then escalated, frequently in full public view: it was not unknown for me in my fury to snatch her up from the floor in one of the Stockholm malls, sling her over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carry her through town kicking and punching and howling as if possessed. Sometimes I reacted to her howls by shouting back, throwing her down on the bed and holding her tight until it passed, whatever it was that was tormenting her. She was not very old before she found out exactly what drove me wild, namely a particular variety of scream, not crying or sobbing or hysteria but focused, aggressive screams, regardless of the situation, that could make me totally lose control, jump up and rush over to the poor girl, who was then shouted at or shaken until the screams turned to tears and her body went limp and she could at last be comforted.

Maybe I'm finding this stuff so compelling because my own grandmother died last weekend and it's got me thinking a lot about family relations and how we invent, react to, and manipulate each other's characters, for better and worse. And that's all tying in with the other book I just finished, which I quoted from a few posts ago, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men, by James Hollis. That one's a Jungian account of men's inability to guide each other or themselves from childhood into a healthy adulthood, and their subsequent hurting of each other and of course women. Fairly bleak stuff, with a nod to some proposed solutions at the very end.

In any case, when the music finally started up, I was in an extremely receptive state. Meg left the pew to watch from the balcony, so I was left on my own again. The notes and textures Tim Hecker coaxed from a variety of gadgets on a table in front of him immediately struck me as some of the most beautiful and thoughtful sounds I'd ever heard. I found myself grinning uncontrollably five minutes into his set.



It got very loud very quickly, and I let the sound affect me bodily with its intense vibrations, as well as artistically and emotionally. I soon found myself in a kind of altered state, ecstatic one minute, on the verge of vomiting the next. My body swayed uncontrollably, my mouth opened to catch more of the sound, which became really quite deafening. All the cavities in my head opened up. I started to sweat. The concept of myself as a separate entity began to lose meaning as my heart beat faster and faster, becoming a pleasantly aching hole in the middle of my chest, like the feeling of being in love.

The whole experience left me shaky and out of breath afterwards. I felt like I was seeing things differently, more clearly. Other people all seemed worthy of great sympathy in their silly, awful, relentless personal struggles. I now saw the appeal of those ecstatic worship sessions where Christian ministers whip the congregation into a frenzy of physical, prelinguistic worship. Also the danger, of course, but that has always been apparent.

Anyway, so read some Knausgaard if you get the chance, I guess is what I'm saying.