I’m wondering now, if similarly with my experience with Mark Rothko paintings, I missed the point with Karloff Noseguard’s My Struggle. My brain was so trained to look for a more defined subject in a painting, the eventful transition from background to subject, that I lost everything entirely. With no defined trees, I couldn’t see a forest, as it were. Rothko was absent of all drama for me, as if he were just a housepainter. It all seemed manufactured and at points I wondered if his name itself was a confabulation, like an industrial brand name. Of course there was a singular large event, or at least one, and that was the abrupt transition of one color to the next. There was more though, as my 2nd grade son pointed out. There was depth of field. There was texture. There was the interaction of the media themselves, oil on wood, etc. With no defined subject and setting, as my eyes and brain were conditioned to look for, I thought it was all a ruse.

With that I am willing to admit that lack of these things I’ve been conditioned to look for in literature I was/maybe still am unable to see the depth of field and texture and color and nuance in My Struggle. I will stand by my tastes and preference to see growth and movement, to look for an event or defined transition in literature, but it’s more difficult to say that Knausgaard has nothing to say. There is depth and color and nuance but it never approaches traditional. It is a diary still and I still believe that much of its appeal is voyeurism. With all that though it’s not for me to say it has no value. After all, with simply a change of perspective I found meaning I hadn’t previously seen.

Nothing changes if nothing changes. Maybe the struggle itself is that time moves on and all there is is aging and eventual decline with no real epiphanies. I’m not sure but I can’t dismiss it all as tedious reporting of non-eventful events. That is how most of us live, after all. The two big events are birth and death with little in between. OR, there is a lot in between but it’s all the sum of the nuanced life, tiny events.

That is what I was getting at a couple days ago when I said that there has been very little to mark the passage between one day and the next, except light and dark. Who knows, maybe that’s what Rothko was getting at with some of his paintings, a light field of color and a darker one. Day and night? I don’t know. This morning has been an interesting lesson for me in subjectivity, bias and intellectual conditioning.