Authors: Jan Kjaerstad
One weekend I stumbled upon a fresh source of inspiration. I was on a visit to my parents at the house in Grorud, and when I went out into the garden on the Sunday morning to look at the apple trees I saw the sun glinting off some silken threads strung between two gooseberry bushes. I bent down to look, and there was a cross spider. It had just finished attaching the first frame threads of a web. What with the cross on the spider’s back, I could not help
feeling that it would be as good as a church service just to sit here in the grass for an hour, observing with creeping fascination how the creature slung its wonderful wheel-web between the branches.
The snag with Dewey’s way of thinking was its disastrous one-
dimensionality
. The main classes and their subdivisions formed one long, vertical chain. My observation of the spider’s web inspired me to experiment with a new scheme in which the groups would also be ranged side by side in rows. Such a set-up might well reveal totally new, horizontal links between the
subjects
. A hitherto unseen interplay between, let’s say, biology, economics and meteorology.
I knew it was impossible, but ideally every book in a library would be placed in such a way that it abutted on every other book. It was something of this sort that I had dreamt of as I struggled to organise the books on Karen Mohr’s shelves. Each book should have connecting lines running in several directions. What I was looking for was a network, not a classification system. A similar notion had been running through my mind as I stood in the vast Central Lending and Reference Department in the Deichman Library. When you walked over to a shelf and pulled out a book, a string of others ought to be pulled out along with it. Sitting in the garden in Grorud, gazing at the spider’s web, I pictured myself taking
Peer Gynt
off its shelf in the Central Lending and Reference Department, and how, in so doing, I caused a number of other works to fall out, including some from other sections: a travel guide to Egypt, Norwegian folk tales, music by Edvard Grieg, the history of the National Theatre, a biography of Ibsen, a history of language, poems by Lord Byron, a lavishly illustrated book on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples.
In the reading room on the top of the Physics Building I did occasionally leaf through my astronomy books – more for fun, really. I was particularly taken with a little-supported theory that there might be a tenth planet, lying beyond Pluto, dubbed Planet X. So it came about that I named my own search – or research as I cockily referred to it – Project X. Although it is
possible
that in adopting this letter I was also saying something else: I did not know what my project actually entailed. And thanks to my ill-fated
encounter
with Silapulapu, I am still none the wiser.
When the reading room closed I carried on working back at the flat in Hegdehaugsveien, to the accompaniment – morning and evening for many years – of Bach on the stereo, as if I were trying to deduce the spirit with which he bound his notes together; a spirit, a sort of glue almost, which I thought might be of help to my own ‘Kunst der Fuge’. I had eventually come up with forty-six main classes and a whole host of subdivisions, some of
them denoted only by Greek letters. I had covered large sheets of paper with writing and these I spread out all over the living-room floor. Time and again I was heartened by the astonishing correspondences that came to light when I read across or down or diagonally. But just as often, even with Bach’s fugues playing in the background, I saw only impenetrable constellations. Although they may simply have seemed that way due to my own limitations.
At the weekends, summer and autumn, I went out to Grorud where I would spend the mornings in the garden, looking at the cross spiders
building
their wonderful silken wheels among the bushes. For some weeks I was also able to stuff myself with gooseberries which, with their sharp, complex flavour – the tough, hairy skin and the soft flesh that was both sweet and sour – spurred me on in my hunt for subjects rich in contrast. When the dew was lying and the sun shining, the webs looked like little galaxies, spirals of glittering stars. I wanted to spy out the secret of their construction technique. The first stage of the process in particular appeared to be crucial, the way in which the spider attached the anchor threads, bridges of a sort, often with the aid of the wind, before commencing on the actual framework. It was these foundation threads which varied most from web to web. The radii, the spokes of the wheel, were always spun from the centre outwards. The construction of the capture spiral followed this same pattern, with strands radiating out from the centre and sticky threads running inwards again. Finally – and this really intrigued me – the centre was destroyed and respun. I never tired of lying there in the grass, watching those fragile, shimmering works of wonder take shape before my eyes.
Back at the flat I covered huge sheets of paper with more and more writing, big and small, with connecting lines, fine as silken threads, running this way and that, speaking of a form of order which also had to allow room for
disorder
. It got to the point where the living-room floor looked like something far more complicated than a spider’s web. I felt as though I was on the verge of a spectacular breakthrough. That it was only a matter of time before a veil would be ripped aside and a claustrophobic grey hallway would have to give way to a light, bright, free Provence. And I
was
on the scent of something important. Before long I had transformed my flat into a sailing ship and my project into a voyage worthy of Magellan himself.
I’ve been thinking – maybe everyone has their secret Project X, something that drives them, moves them to push themselves beyond their limits. Viktor Harlem, for one, wrestled with just such a mind-boggling idea. And whatever one might think about this vision, or utopian concept, so robust was it that one long weekend in May it brought us – Viktor and me – to Venice.
Axel, who had fainted at the airport and had to stay behind in Oslo, was a dark Adonis with whom I lost touch after high school. Viktor, on the other hand, is as present in my mind to this day as he was back then. It is hard to describe the young Viktor Harlem, the brains behind The Three Heretics, but when I close my eyes what I see is a shining face, a face glowing with an almost uncanny intensity, rather as if a hundred-watt bulb had been screwed into a head that was only designed to take sixty watts.
Although I was quite clear on the purpose of our visit, when the time came to complete the final stage of our mission I began to falter. As Viktor stepped aboard the
traghetto
which was all ready to push off from the stop outside the Hotel Gritti Palace, I tried to explain to him that I was not coming, that I did not want to leave, could not face leaving, the Grand Canal, that waterway lined on either side by such mesmerising buildings, the sound of the water grinding away at the age-old stone. Why didn’t we find ourselves a table on the hotel terrace, overlooking the canal; order some cake – some
tiramisù
– and coffee, I asked. Please, I said. What I did not say was that I no longer had any faith in my friend’s audacious plan. I was trying, as gently as I could, to save Viktor from making a terrible fool of himself.
And what did Viktor have in mind. Viktor meant to pay a call on the poet Ezra Pound, a very old man now, and supposedly still living in Venice. Back in the flat in Seilduksgata in Grünerløkka, when Viktor first mooted the idea of looking up Pound, for a moment I thought he was talking about the British currency, that we were off to find a whole pile of money. Which was not too far off the mark: to Viktor, Pound was as good as a treasure chest.
We were staying in an out-of-the-way hotel, in a dim room dominated by a lagoon-like mirror, with enigmatic stucco decorations on the ceiling. The hotel’s one notable feature was a portrait of Armauer Hansen, hanging on the wall of the lobby. ‘My great-grandfather was a doctor too,’ the hotel manager told us. ‘He met the later so famous Norwegian when the latter visited Venice in 1870 on a travel scholarship, then too in May as it happens.’ Viktor promptly took this as a good omen. ‘We’re on the trail of something much more important than the discovery of the leprosy bacillus,’ he confidently announced to the manager. For my own part, I interpreted the sight of Armauer Hansen’s countenance more as a warning of the city’s contagiousness.
After two days I was actually feeling rather weak. I had spent most of my time on board a
vaporetto
; I had travelled up and down the Grand Canal at least twenty times, for much the same reason as one sees a film again and again: to savour scenes that have gradually become familiar and to keep on discovering new details. I could not get enough of it, almost had to rub my eyes as I tried to take in the sight of the rows of Byzantine and Gothic
buildings to either side of me; façades redolent of the Renaissance and
neo-classicism
, walls which altered colour with the light and whose reflections created a rippling fairy tale down in the canal. The fronts of these palazzos
were
Vivaldi’s music. I leaned over the rail of the boat, staring, staring with lovestruck, avidly curious eyes. I had planned to see other sights in Venice, but I never got beyond the Grand Canal. I never visited the Doge’s Palace, nor the Accademia and – no one will believe it, I know – I did not so much as set foot on the pigeon beset square of St Mark. The Grand Canal was all I needed and more; this lazy, inverted ‘S’ of water winding between rows of palazzos, with each façade that hove into view more evocative than the one before: Palazzo Dario, Palazzo Barbarigo, Palazzo Loredan. I felt as though I was sailing along a spine in my own imagination, a backbone made up of identical and yet widely differing vertebrae. I was struck by an intriguing and unnerving suspicion: if I were to enter any one of these buildings along the canal – Palazzo Garzoni, Palazzo Grimani, Palazzo Bembo – inside it I would find another Grand Canal, equally spellbinding, which would hold me there for the rest of my life.
Just before the
traghetto
left the little jetty, I joined Viktor on board anyway. Something in his face made me do it. All of a sudden he looked worried. As if he realised that everything was at stake here, his whole life project.
When we stepped ashore on the other side of the canal, he seemed even more uncertain. He led the way up the labyrinthine street, in the opposite direction from the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, and turned left at the first bridge, onto the Fondamenta di ca’Bala. ‘What if he’s not at home?’ Viktor muttered, stopping short. ‘Come on, let’s go back.’
I had to take charge. ‘Of course he’ll be at home, where’s he going to go? He’s as old as the hills, for God’s sake.’
Viktor was an avid fan, to put it mildly, of that motley literary bazaar which went by the title of
The Cantos
: a fragmented poetic work touching upon just about everything between heaven and earth. At the flat in
Seilduksgata
in Oslo, Viktor kept having to build more shelves to hold the books which were supposed to help him pursue more of the strands in Ezra Pound’s vast tapestry of words.
The Cantos
were for Viktor what Provence was for Karen Mohr: an experience which craved a lifetime. Viktor wanted to achieve a thorough understanding of Pound’s work, but he understood very little of it. Then he had the idea of going to Venice. He was devoutly convinced that all would be revealed if only he could meet the poet himself. ‘Devoutly’ being the right word here. Viktor had the same motive for seeking out Pound as some people have for wishing to meet God. It was much like having the chance to ask about the meaning of life.
In spite of all this, or perhaps precisely because of it, Viktor walked more and more slowly along the side of the narrow canal. The street scene was what any holiday brochure would describe as ‘picturesque’, with just the right number of cats, flower boxes on the walls, little bridges and elegant
motor-boats
with hulls of gleaming varnished mahogany. Suddenly Viktor turned left again, looking both quite certain and utterly lost, as if he were wavering between a sense of having been here before and of finding himself on some distant, watery planet. We were standing in the calle Querini, a narrow, paved cul-de-sac, outside a deep-pink or terracotta-coloured house. Viktor goggled at the lion’s head knocker on the dark-green door. His courage failed him. I basically had to half-carry him back to the canal. Viktor pulled a bottle of aquavit out of his satchel: ‘Maybe we should just drink it ourselves.’
I said nothing. We simply stood there, leaning against the railing along the canalside, staring down the cul-de-sac at the pink house front, as if we both knew that all would be revealed if only we waited long enough, stared hard enough. Then the bells of Santa Maria della Salute began to chime. It might have been the cue for a revelation: the green door opened and around it came a head, a lion’s head larger than that on the door knocker; an old man walking with a stick and accompanied by a white-haired woman. They came hirpling towards us. Something happened to Viktor. He woke up, or woke up and all but fainted away. Pound appeared to have the same effect on him as Venice had on Axel – the reality was just too much for him. I nudged him in the ribs and as he pulled himself together I heard a panic-stricken: ‘What do we do?’ And I, to whom this man meant nothing, said: ‘Ask him. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?’ As far as I was concerned this was an interesting dilemma. You meet God. You are allowed one, possibly two, questions. What should you ask?
The woman and the old man were now level with us. Viktor took the plunge, he held up his hand, stopped the couple. They did not seem
surprised
, nor particularly well-disposed. Pound was wearing a broad-brimmed brown hat. His hair stuck out from underneath it. The maze of wrinkles on his face was like script, the marks of many lives. I remarked on his eyes, blue but with a sort of mist over them. Viktor approached Ezra Pound.
Produced
a book, ‘every heretic’s bible’ as he put it, the latest, expanded edition of
The Cantos
. The writer squinted at Viktor for some time before accepting the proffered pen and signing his name, along with a couple of words, on the title page. As he took the book back Viktor handed the bottle of aquavit to the poet, as a thank-you – or, why not: an offering – pointing as he did so to the ship on the label and reciting the first line from ‘every heretic’s bible’: ‘And then went down to the ship …’