My Struggle , vol. 6: Jess Arndt, November 6

"What was so dangerous about closeness?"

(redux)

The Old 77, New Orleans, LA and Echo Park, LA, CA

All,

Like Omari, I'm struggling (no pun indented) more than I expect/ed. I can't re-enter the letter I wrote for our panel at ASAP/10 in New Orleans. Now I'm stuck in the Celan etc., stuck with, as Omari so well describes it, "a grown man desperate at the end of a 3600-page tome to show he has read some stuff"—but I'm longing for new bouts of burst sausages left out overnight in a skuzzy saucepan and all the other mundanities that are of course not actually mundane (that's the secret). I mean, who gets to say anyway? What "mundane" is?

Full confession: I have always imagined my (albeit sporadic) role here in the Slow Burn as an act of well-intentioned other motion, or pushing against certain more critical tides. This is what kept me up too late at ASAP in a tidy woodplanked hotel room with a midnight blue ceiling, tucked at the end of my strangely-aligned, hall of mirrors corridor. Not the shock of being away from my new young family. Not plastic to go cups full of double Sazeracs (that was night #2). Not New Orleans and its hallowed, as-yet not experienced (by me) haunty vibe. But Karl Ove, my relative apathy to Book 6—and how to get back "in."

Meaning—I like being "with" him. I slide easily alongside Katherine in her most recent letter (relieved) when she says: "I have to confess a lot of my time with K has felt like [sharing consciousness]; it's a big reason I keep coming back. He gets me and my shame."

Shame. Confession. I titled my ASAP remarks "What Was So Dangerous About Closeness?" because I wanted to redirect us to that slightly clammy place, the bodily vertigo, the mixed-upness that My Struggle(s) so often offers up.

Meanwhile, since the last letter, I've begun teaching again (though at ASAP I'm an "Independent Writer," something I'm proud enough to be, BUT, I keep thinking as the chandelier shudders above our panel's heads, then finally snuffs to blackout—possibly an unhelpful delineation between academic and non?). Nonetheless, at CalArts, just north of LA, the class I'm teaching is called Body Fictions: 3-D Writing and other Protuberances. This week we happen to be reading Gregg Bordowitz's book: "The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous," specifically, his chapter Dense Moments. The book is memoir/personal essay, but we've chosen it for its fictive offerings.

"Confession," says Bordowitz, "presupposes guilt. Testimony presupposes innocence. Coming out is a form of testimony. Recovery is a form of testimony. Disclosing one's HIV status is a form of testimony. All of these can take the form of confession. Testimony is a means of gaining sovereignty over the self... A testimony once started cannot cease. The telling must continue. A confession implies an end, but it is an endless repetition. I want to assume the largest measure of responsibility for myself. This can be earned only through a greater understanding of my limits: the limits of my thinking, my actions, my expressions. This is a testimony" (117).

That the telling must continue feels somehow true. I'm talking on a body level. Linked to the guts, to refreshing the cells. I believe Bordowitz and can imagine this is what Knausgaard is doing. Testifying to all the junk inside as a way to gain sovereignty over self (which as readers implicates us, means maybe we can do this too?). I'm all the way with Rachel in her most recent letter when she says: "I am continuing to read though, because while David Foster Wallace 'does not want to have access to' the part of him that may have written an 1100-odd page book in order to impose his phallus upon the world, I suspect that Knausgaard does want to have access to that part of himself, and furthermore, that he wants to make public how it happened." And suddenly I'm also reminded of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California: where Lady Winchester, widow to the terrible Winchester fortune and encumbered by the vast psychic weight from all the souls murdered by Winchester rifles, was implored by her guides to, as an act of penance, keep adding rooms FOREVER—meaning that as long as Winchester rifles (and thus the deaths) persisted, she could never be done.

I.e.—does Book 6 pitch over the edge, from testimony to confession? Is he so guilty about his uncle/Linda/his kids, HITLER, etc., that he keeps building outward, not to transform, but just to try to hold it all? Do I hate myself for caving, for asking questions like this?

Or maybe this is more to the point—(after spending the morning trying to photocopy very small bits of my extra slim and only book of fiction for a job application), does it really make sense to attack Knausgaard for writing big books, about among other things, child-rearing? Can't we instead argue that everyone (i.e. women + non binary people too) can strap on a big book if they want?

***

This past summer my small family and I were in Stockholm for almost a month. It was supposed to be shorter—we attended a gigantically queer wedding involving both circus horses and industrial sherbet-colored smoke bombs (thrown into a Viking lake from jet skiis)—but then our 1 yr old kid got sick with strange nameless bumps and the airline wouldn't let him fly. We think it was from wading in fountains, which we let him do naked because in Stockholm you don't want to seem against nudity i.e., you want to be with everyone and this, in Scandinavia, is how it is done.

As Omari says, parenting takes up much of Book 6. And maybe because I'm chin deep in the newly anointed trenches/fountains, I happen not to think Karl Ove is a bad father, or even a bad any kind of parent, at least from what we see here. He attends three kids at once—feeds them, gets them to school and sleep, and seems to take their subjectivity seriously, all the while trying to write. I like these parts. I am impressed that he (or anyone) can do it. I have only one baby—but what he describes feels weary and familiar. Tender even, in a zone that verges on excruciating. As in—at what point does the attention toward, and noticing of, a live being or beings become too much to bear?

"Njaal," says Karl Ove of his best friend Geir's child "was holding a glass in both hands, taking small cautious steps, it was an important task he'd been entrusted with" (310).

Of course I can't help but think of six year old Karl Ove in front of his own father, trying very hard not to fall/screw up. Then of my son (who falls all the time and purposefully, gleefully, pours water on everything) but still, thinking of him hurts me for some inexpressible reason tied up with vulnerability and will and love, and then of my own confused, once small self. In other words—the affective blur sweeps me up.

Why don't you write about sex? says Geir, in the same section. (I'm paraphrasing.) You write about everything else. But Karl Ove won't even tell Geir that he thinks Geir is missing out on the real joy of parenting. Instead, Karl Ove says:

"It would be an infringement. ... But what was so dangerous about closeness?" (320).

But in Book 6, this closeness might actually be unbearable. I mean for Karl Ove. On a day trip to Lund, Geir, Njaal, + Karl Ove are about to get in Geir's car: "Outside, the sound of Geir rummaging in the trunk was neutral, a noise like any other, rising and spreading out in the air, but inside it was different, it was the sound of something going on in the car, in some way belonging to it. The difference was immense. What was going on outside seemed safe and unthreatening, whereas what was going on inside was something one was defenseless against" (314).

Back in LA we've also been reading Laurie Weeks' excellent chapbook: "I Watch the Human." In class, we discuss how fluid and volatile, how mutable and ungoverned, we can be in our human containers. We practice this with writing exercises through which we inhabit what CAConrad calls "the extreme present." Of course, My Struggle, if it shed itself of Hitler's title, could also be called "I Watch the Human." "Inside was this enormous distance between myself and other people," (326) Karl Ove has said, again and again.Watching requires, or perhaps in Karl Ove's position is, the effect of enforced physical or emotional space. The baroque terror, then, that he shows us when encountering literally any other person than, (he says,) Geir, we have to take as real.

But even Geir's an effort for him. And on a rare night when they're alone together with their children, Karl Ove would rather go to bed early (his daughters are scared from a lightning storm) than sit on the balcony and finish a beer with his best friend. Geir is occupying Karl Ove's deck chair anyway, a proximity that makes this overlapping (but also somehow neutral) intimacy between them all the harder.

But fathering IS different in Sweden. This is what I'm trying to say. Or one of the many small things that keeps bunching up while I stare very hard at Book 6. In fact, fathers so thoroughly throng central Stockholm's copious playgrounds that a friend's mom, visiting from the US, comments: "how amazing there are so many male nannies here!"

The Father. Volkland. Hitler. Which is, after all, Book 6. It's not boring, as Katherine says. When we get there. But something about it labors. The place that after all this time we had to get to, which, when writing, is rarely the place you're supposed to go. We were supposed to go to NOLA. Is it gauche to say I've barely been to a better panel? That I was riveted by my comrades in arms? That maybe this is because through bearing witness in real time to the complications of Book 6, the panel brought the body back?? And with it our densest moments? New Orleans home of all Halloween then the Voodoo March. Day of the Dead. Now daylight savings but somehow both ends are darker. Fall back—into what. I agree with Omari, is Knausgaard a thinker? seems like an unnecessary question. I'm feeling my thoughts, thinking my feelings and anyway November 6th is just two days away/Keri our ebullient waitress in the gumbo joint pouring us out mammoth Sazeracs/the Brazilian election of Bolsanaro threatening not only everyone alive but (the timing the timing!) the Amazon jungle i.e. our lungs—how all the Fascism, all those pages=too much/not enough. (Diana leaves her copy in the drawer next to the hotel Bible.) But didn't Book 6 come out now for a reason beyond what Knausgaard, writing it, could see? Isn't that the beautiful stranger, the rub of birth—all of that tangled togetherness and pop! you no longer own it? if you ever did?

I still believe in the body.

Jess

ALSO IN THIS SERIES:

The Slow Burn, v.2: Welcome Back

The Slow Burn, v.2: An Introduction

My Struggle, vol. 1: Cecily, June 6

My Struggle, vol. 1: Diana, June 9

My Struggle, vol. 1: Omari, June 14

My Struggle, vol. 2: Dan, June 17

My Struggle, vol. 2: Omari, June 24

My Struggle, vol. 2: Cecily, July 1

My Struggle, vol. 2: Sarah Chihaya, July 5

My Struggle, vol. 2: Dan, July 12

My Struggle, vol. 2: Diana, July 16

My Struggle, vol. 2: Jess Arndt, July 18

My Struggle, vol. 3: Omari, July 25

My Struggle, vol. 3: Ari M. Brostoff, August 1

My Struggle, vol. 3: Dan, August 4

My Struggle, vol. 3: Jacob Brogan, August 8My Struggle, vol. 3: Diana, August 12

My Struggle, vol. 4: Katherine Hill, August 25

My Struggle, vol. 4: Omari, September 1

My Struggle, vol. 4: Dan, September 2

My Struggle, vol. 4: Diana, September 15

My Struggle, vol. 5: Omari, September 27

My Struggle, vol. 5: Diana, October 3

My Struggle, vol. 5: Dan, October 13

My Struggle, vol. 6: Omari, September 25

My Struggle, vol. 6: Dan, September 28

My Struggle, vol. 6: Stephanie, October 5

My Struggle, vol. 6: Cecily, October 9

My Struggle, vol. 6: Emily Tamkin, October 10

My Struggle, vol. 6: Diana, October 15

My Struggle, vol. 6: Rachel Greenwald Smith, October 23

My Struggle, vol. 6: Katherine Hill, October 26

My Struggle,  vol. 6: Omari, October 31