What is great about Karl Ove? How does he slowly, imperceptibly turn the table? How does he go from prosaic, mundane, overdrawn to the scintillating moments of the everyday? He might not be doing it quite as succinctly as how Mrs. Woolf would have done it. Yet in those certain moments, like the 30-page party on the last day of 2003 he gave when Linda was heavily pregnant, it reminds me of Mrs. Woolf, describing the moments, where you feel it is close to the essence of life. You don't get plenty of that.


Those moments are like the golden nuggets, hiding in the stream of life, it flows in one direction, you can only step your feet in the same river once, as Heraclitus quipped, or rather we ourselves are flowing in the same stream and could not swim upstream (more on direction of time later). They are far and few in between, and yet they glisten in the stream, and suddenly it happens, we experience one such moment, the scintillation, the spark, the eternal now, the beauty and frailty of human life, we are filled with feelings & understandings instantaneously but could not utter a word or make it intelligible.


It was everything. Absolutely everything. And yet those moments can only exist in time. It slipped through our fingers like sand, it cannot be possessed or owned. If we try to hold on to it a minute longer than it is meant to be, it starts to curdle and sour; if we try to recreate it by means of manipulation and reenactment, the taste of inauthenticity fills our mouth and stings on our tongue. Most people could not even preserve let alone relieve their own "moments of being". Yet a handful of artists were able to mine something from the swamps and currents of everyday life (for that is what everyday life feels like, it is at once a pool of stale and stagnant water, and an ever-flowing rapid hurtling downstream, never to return), and distill those tidbits into something golden. And through the work of such artists, it is as if we could live through those moments, or at least get a very strong sense of it.


I thought Karl Ove came very close to doing exactly that. And I suspect those moments will not be the same for every reader, I'm sure there will be plenty of readers who found his recollection of Vanja's birth to be their own 'moments of being': the interminable labour, the pain that seems to trump everything and how the mother was so possessed by pain that she is almost 'out of it' and not recognising the husband/partner, the helplessness & cluelessness that seem to characterise most men in the delivery room...



Yesterday I spoke briefly about Karl Ove - of how he seemed to capture certain moments. Initially you are bored or underwhelmed, and wonder why he needs to pay so much attention to certain seeming trivialities, but gradually you become drawn into it and feel that he really has captured the reality of human life. Of course he does not chronicle every moment laboriously, there are certain scenes he would devote twenty or thirty pages to describing. On the other hand, he would sweep through whole periods of his life in a stroke. We know he was inspired by Proust, but I cannot read Proust with the same swift and speed I read Karl Ove. Even if Proust is the template (of all stream of consciousness), his writing is already something I have to read with effort and concentration. Like when I read him spending 20 pages describing the appearance of the church (in Combray), it is like touring the church with a curator or historian, as opposed to how I would have experienced it myself. Isn't it telling of our age that we can no longer experience reality as Proust did (in all his eloquence and erudition)?



There is a certain danger to Karl Ove, because he makes people feel they could do what he does just by writing down all their thoughts and everything that goes on in their life and call that literature. There is already a plethora of such auto-writing, FB and blogosphere are awash with people sharing every single detail of their mundane life ad infinitum. We are already such narcissists and self-exhibitionists that we think everything in our life is worth writing about, and by posting it online, we think it worth reading too.


What makes Karl Ove's autobiographic writing literature, whereas everyone else's is not (in my mind)? Could Karl Ove set off, or exacerbate, the dangerous trend in making people think they could also write down everything about their boring life and it would turn into literature too? I suspect he already has a million imitators in English (and Norwegian and other European languages). Now that he is published in Chinese, will he add another million in Chinese?


But not everyone can do what Karl Ove does. He is being completely honest with himself, he seeks neither to make himself look better or justify himself. He often writes with excruciating honesty and spoke often of his sense of humiliation. Like when Linda, heavily pregnant with their third child, accidentally locked herself in the bathroom at that famous children's birthday party (where the health conscious highfalutin parents don't serve any food with gluten or sugar), he felt deeply humiliated that he could not kick the door in (he asked another guy to do it, after the locksmiths had come and gone and given up). Whereas most people who write online, only seems to be looking for affirmation and consolation from others. I get that we all need to be affirmed from time to time, but it just seems like everyone is constantly patting themselves on the back. What is the point of that?


Perhaps I'm not being fair, the same psychology and emotional extremes that afflict me must afflict them too. Perhaps they just never show their doubt online, perhaps their writing is their own way of encouraging themselves to keep going on. It is just that I don't see them in their moments of self-scrutiny and doubt. But then that is precisely my point, I don't mind writing being self-therapy, or any sort of art being self-therapy, but I do have a problem when people start mistaking their own self-therapy with real art. And if the urge to post everything online is so strong - why not - perhaps internet is a place for us to engage in group therapy and lick each other's wounds. Just don't claim it's art when it's self-therapy, it just makes me go: why don't you fucking lock that in your own drawer? Not that I'm above seeking affirmation, but I do not want to indulge myself, let alone kid myself into thinking there's something more to my own writing when there is not.


This would not do, it still becomes an angry tirade. But suppose I need to let out the steam? So I have. And so be it.


2021.04.05

復活節過後的禮拜一早上寫了上面的日記，雖然在馬特市上放英文內容可能不太適合，或者會有點礙眼，但如果我試著用中文重寫一遍，我一定會下意識調整內容，或者讓語氣和緩一點。所有公開的文字都想要被閱讀，但關於這篇我的心情仍參半。