The Discoverer (60 page)

Pound peered curiously at Viktor as he handed the bottle to his
companion
. Viktor’s worshipful expression did not appear to make much of an impression on him.

‘A masterpiece,’ Viktor said, or sighed almost. ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking, but which canto do you consider to be the most important.’ Viktor stood there, waiting for the magic word, the key that would lay the work wide open instead of, as now, being only slightly ajar. This was no formative trip, but something far more ambitious: a mission in search of the answer to all things, the ultimate truth. I was reminded of my own feelings on that day in my childhood when I was introduced to Uncle Melankton.

Pound stood as if in a dream, his mind somewhere else behind those misty blue eyes. ‘I was wrong,’ he said, motioning towards the book. He went on standing there, gazing into space, shook his head slowly while the fingers of one hand scratched the knuckles of the other. ‘Those poems don’t make sense,’ he said, ‘they were written by a moron.’ ‘But, but, but …’ I could see that Viktor was totally thrown. ‘But it’s … a masterpiece,’ he said again.

‘It’s a botch,’ Ezra Pound said. ‘Stupid and ignorant. I knew too little about so many things.’

And with that the ancient left us, walked off slowly along the
canalside
with the white-haired woman. Viktor just stood there with his mouth opening and shutting, as if he were choking on a sentence. I told him to relax, Pound was probably just feeling a bit down, I said. I followed the woman and the old man with my eyes until they disappeared into a restaurant. ‘Cici’ it said on the sign. And all at once I realised that I had come face to face with myself, a wonder who knew, nonetheless, that he was a fool.

Viktor was left with a faraway look in his eyes. Or maybe he was lost in one of those whirlpool visions Pound was always on about. Viktor stared into mid-air, at the point where the poet’s head had been. Aghast, I thought at first, but after he had been standing like this for some minutes it dawned on me that he was actually awestruck. ‘What heresy,’ he gasped. ‘To condemn your own life’s work.’ Viktor kissed the book. I had a nodding acquaintance with
Hamlet
, and to me Viktor looked exactly like Ophelia at the moment when she started to lose her marbles.

We wandered back to the hotel. Viktor was acting like an absolute lunatic. Hooting with laughter one minute, cursing and swearing the next. Shaking his head and slamming his fist into walls along our way. ‘Jesus!’ he exclaimed every few minutes. ‘Je-sus!’ In the hotel room he slumped down into a shabby armchair among all the other heavy, cherry-wood furniture, with a look in his eyes that could have won him a part as the occupant of a deckchair on the beach in the film of
Death in Venice
, which Visconti had just finished
making. He opened the bottle of grappa we had bought. ‘Holy shit,’ he said after the first swig. ‘They wouldn’t win any prizes for this. I should have kept the aquavit.’

Barely a year later, in Lillehammer, Viktor Harlem received a blow on the head from a block of ice which left him staring into space in an institution for twenty-odd years. The look in his eyes the same as in Venice: faraway. Or rather, the light in his face was extinguished, as if a light bulb had gone out. I always had the feeling that his head would tinkle if I shook it. Despite Viktor’s affected wonder at Ezra Pound’s self-denigrating statement, it often occurred to me that it was actually in Venice that he was dealt the blow to the head that put him out of action for so many years. That he had been hit, not by a block of ice, but by a book. It was as if he needed twenty years to digest the shock of his guru describing his life project – a superhuman feat and the object of Viktor’s unstinting admiration – as a complete and utter failure. Each time I visited Viktor at the institution I was met by the eyes of someone who did not consider it worthwhile being fully conscious in such a meaningless world.

After all those years, he would one day get up and perform an
achievement
which would leave a lasting impression, but I knew nothing of this in Venice. To be honest I had worries enough of my own. In all probability I had been more thrown by the meeting with Ezra Pound than Viktor, at that point anyway. I needed room to breathe. I needed to be alone with my fear. It seemed clearer to me than ever: I could wind up a fool. Despite the
knowledge
of the powers pulsating within me.

Having deposited Viktor at the hotel with the bottle of grappa, I hopped onto the first
vaporetto
to come sailing along the Grand Canal. I had to take my mind off things, I had to find solace. I gazed at the buildings slowly slipping past, seeming to pile up in my memory. And suddenly I discerned a secret, mutual affinity between them, an all but invisible similarity, even between façades lying far apart; and at one spot, near the Rialto Bridge, it struck me that if I looked a little closer I would see that all of the house fronts were in fact the same façade. They were all part of an endeavour to say something about the perfect façade. Just as Cézanne painted the same mountain again and again. Palazzo Dario, Palazzo Barbarigo, Palazzo Loredan. Variations on the same possibility. I leaned over the rail of the
vaporetto
, trying to memorise each frontage – Palazzo Garzoni, Palazzo Grimani, Palazzo Bembo – so that in my mind I might be able to lay them one on top of the other, veil upon veil as it were, to create the underlying, ideal, façade, the palace in the depths, behind, beneath everything.

I am not sure, but sometimes I am inclined to see a connection between
the television series
Thinking
Big
and the ranks of façades along the Grand Canal. At the time I regarded the canal more as a long strand and the
palazzos
as almost identical pearls. Something I could collect, something which, by mere accumulation, could save me from ending up as a fool.

I had laughed at Viktor’s discourses on
The Cantos
, Ezra Pound’s
megalomaniac
attempt to construct a different sort of unity out of fragments. But some years later, by which time Viktor – I almost envied him – had found an impenetrable hiding place in an institution, there I was myself, striving to draw up a new map of human knowledge, a Project X which probably had more in common with the American bard’s euphoric songs than I liked to think.

My study of – I might almost say: worship of – the cross spider’s wheel web had inspired me also to try working breadthwise and from here it was only a short step to a more spatial perspective. I left my seat in the reading room and took instead to roaming around the campus. By studying the relationship of the university buildings to one another, which departments occupied which floors, I hoped I might discover something about the relative order of the various disciplines. Why were the buildings housing Sociology and Physics situated so far apart? And why did Philosophy occupy the floor
above
Theology in the Niels Treschow building?

It may well have been these strolls around the campus which prompted me to move base to the College of Architecture. Because my aim was not to become an architect; I was still looking for some means of organising all human knowledge – something better than the stunting 534: Sound and related vibrations, 535: Light and paraphotic phenomena, 536: Heat and
thermodynamics
; what I sought was a set-up which would make the most of the potential stored within the knowledge common to all of us, hence enabling us to take a cognitive leap forward. The first months there seemed especially promising. I had been spurred to apply the principles of floor-planning to my work. I grouped the sheets of paper I had spread out on the floor of the living room in Hegdehaugsveien as if the main classes and the subdivisions listed on them were rooms in a large house, or private and public premises in a metropolis.

This soon had to give way, however, to a more ambitious plan – this too architectonically inspired – in which I tried to find a dimension of depth in the connecting tissue of the arts and sciences. I tore up the sheets of paper on the floor. I started working with larger sheets, progressed from miniatures to massive canvases, so to speak. The living room was now full of transparent plastic tablecloths suspended from the ceiling, closely covered with subject
headings. It looked rather like a lot of bookcases sitting one behind another, the only difference being that these you could see through, see all the way to the very back. Sometimes I had the impression that I was once more on a
vaporetto
on the Grand Canal; I felt as though I was gliding past a succession of transparent, almost identical palazzo façades. On the first sheets I had listed the more concrete main classes and subjects; the further back you went the more abstract they became. Each heading had, therefore, possible links running in countless directions. I suddenly perceived, for example – with the taste of gooseberries in my mouth, as it happens – that there might be a connection between palaeontology’s interest in fossilised dinosaur bones and modern neurology’s theories regarding the reptilian layer of the brain. Often, when I was standing looking at these transparent tablecloths, contemplating the groups of subjects hanging in layers, one behind the other, I felt
something
close to a new state of mind, as though my vision and my thoughts were now in tune with an awareness I had always possessed.

What Margrete liked better than anything else was to walk around the garden, barefoot and without an umbrella, when it rained in the summer. She was the sort of person who could set such store by a fine dinner service that she would stroke it with her fingers. Sometimes she would kiss me just to enjoy the sound of a kiss. That was the best sound in the world, she said: the sound of a kiss. I never made any allowance for such knowledge, such wisdom, when I was struggling with my Project X.

I have never been all that interested in the so-called explorers, all except one: Fernão de Magalhães, or Ferdinand Magellan as he was known to us in school. True he was killed in the Philippines, so he never made it back to his starting point in Spain himself, but it was his initiative and vision which brought about the first circumnavigation of the Earth. No one combined strength of will with cosmographic perception and nautical know-how the way Magellan did. The others hit upon a bit of land here and there, but it was Magellan who tied a string around it all, binding all of the individual discoveries together, threading the pearls neatly onto a strand so that they formed a circle. There could no longer be any doubt: the world was round.

There were times when I thought of my Project X as a Magellanic voyage. Like Magellan I wanted to find other routes, new straits to sail through. I dreamed, not least, of an outcome every bit as deep-reaching as his: a
completely
new view of the world. Magellan showed the people of his day that the world was bigger than they thought.

I soon came to look upon the plastic tablecloths filling the living room as sails,
especially when I aired the room and the sheets flapped gently in the draught. I was not in Hegdehaugsveien at all, I was on board my
Victoria
, the only one of Magellan’s ships to make it home. Magellan sailed round the Earth. I wished to sail round, to encircle reality. When I read those layers upon layers of words, I felt a breeze blowing inside me, or rather, I felt as if something were being opened up, as if I were about to acquire more of that profound insight of which, all my life, I had known myself to possess only a subset. Meanwhile, the work, the thinking, was taking its toll on me. It is said that while
crossing
the Pacific Magellan’s men lived on worm-eaten biscuits and dirty,
foul-smelling
water, before they took to eating rats and sawdust, and chewing hide ripped off the timbers. During the Pacific Ocean phase of the Project I led an equally spartan, if not quite so drastic existence. Leonard’s Italian cuisine was a thing of the past. If I did get round to eating anything, I tended to fall back on Spaghetti à la Capri, which I did not even bother to warm, just spooned straight from the tin. It reminded me of my childhood, when the only
provisions
we needed for a walk in the forest was a stock cube to lick.

The actual crossing of ‘il Pacifico’, a totally unknown area, was Magellan’s greatest achievement. They thought it would only take a few days to sail from the New World, America, to the Moluccas, the centre of the oriental spice trade, instead it took almost four months. Magellan could almost be said to have discovered the Pacific, its vast scale. I too wanted to find something like that: an unknown, or underestimated sea. In selecting the main classes for my new system I gave priority to those subjects pertaining to the mind or things immaterial. I aimed to disentangle a hidden, as yet unrealised, meaning from the world. Fold out reality. A few of today’s particle physicists maintain that we can have no conception of the greater part of the universe simply because it is comprised of a form of matter so essentially different from anything we can imagine. I know it sounds strange, not to say crazy, but I believe that during the most transparent phases of my Project I was on the track of something like that.

Once, I was waiting for Margrete outside a cinema. She took a taxi from work. I observed her through the dark, tinted window as she was paying the driver. I could only just make out her face. The thought struck me that she was trapped inside a black crystal. That I would never be able to break through to her.

The longer I stayed in that room, among those transparent panels covered in writing, the more the feeling I had had ever since studying the spider’s web was confirmed – a hunch which was reinforced by the notion of
circumnavigating
the world: I ought to arrange the subjects in a circle. Like a wheel.

I reorganised the room. This time I hung the sheets in concentric rings. And the first time I sat down on a chair in the centre and scanned the
headings
of the subjects and the classes surrounding me, receding layers of script, words forming sentences of sorts, spokes radiating to an outer rim, I sensed what a tremendous boost this gave to my thinking. Everything seemed to explode. I saw patterns of breathtaking beauty. I glimpsed concepts, totally new sciences, with names as yet unuttered by any human being. I caught flashes of solutions in which everything interlocked – not by dint of
thousands
of tiny gear-wheels, but with all the categories mixed up in such a way that gear-wheels meshed with butterfly wings and crystals, the whole thing encircled by elementary particles. I was thrilled, but I was also startled. The plastic tablecloths seemed to glow. For some time I felt that I was on the threshold of a breakthrough which would have incalculable consequences, that I was all set to make a magnificent contribution to civilisation. There I was: friendless, gaunt, dead-beat, but I truly
had
created a chandelier of knowledge, three-dimensional, something that could be considered from all sides, with every piece hanging in its rightful place in relation to the others, not packed in boxes and tucked away singly on shelves. At my most audacious moments I felt I was on the scent of something comparable in importance to the alphabet, something which would enable us to form new concepts; an instrument by which mankind could steer, one which could give progress a hefty, and most timely, nudge.