8 december 2023

8 december 2023

John Bjarne Grover

Under 17.9.94 I write in my novel "The Dreamer":

Now this evening I had a strange experience. I went down to the petrol station at Tåsen, and bought a small chocolate just to have something to do. There were two guys behind the counter, conversing about somebody. I interrupted the talk, and as I went towards the door, I heard them taking the talk up again, and one of them said: 'He lives in Mercury street' (that is, 'Merkurveien' in Norwegian). On my way up again, I threw a glance up in the sky and saw a cloud formation which was enlightened by the moon from behind, to give the shining outlines of something which immediately occurred to me as Italy on a map, with the exception that it was turned the wrong way: The 'football' of Sicily lay to the right. I then also saw that Greece was just besides, but on the lefthand side of Italy. It would have been a strangely clear and precise map of the northern part of the Mediterranean if it had been seen from the moon. I was puzzled by this mirrored map, when three young lads approached me. One of them carried an envelope on which he had written something, and he asked me if I knew where 'Ustvedtveien' was. This is a street name composed of the proper name 'Ustvedt' and 'veien', which means 'street'. If, as seems to me the only reasonable interpretation, I decompose 'Ustvedt' into 'Us-tvedt' and read it 'US-tvett', the suffix 'tvett' means 'wash' (a verb, here in imperative). This verb is a little out of use in Norwegian, but it is, in the written form 'tvätt', the standard form in Swedish. It can then, by combining English and Norwegian or Swedish, mean 'wash us!'. However, a more personal and reasonable background for this seems to be that the three young lads were in the age of 16-17 years. When I was at this age, that is, some twenty years ago, we were three friends who used to keep together, so frequently that we even gave ourselves a sort of 'club' name, which was exactly 'US' (pronounced as two separate letters). The incidence must have pointed to this, for one specific reason: Some time ago, I saw that a person OSJ whom I knew from precisely this time (but hardly have seen since then) announced that he needed help for translation of a book from English into Norwegian in the Swedish publishing company he was working in. At first, I decided not to consider it. Then, a few days later, when I was in Hertzberg street, just beside the second car with a 666-combination, a young lad was carrying a packet across the street, and he was extremely similar to OSJ such as he looked twenty years ago. This told me that perhaps I should consider it, after all. (I suppressed this as I wrote about it above, since I could not see the relevance for the story then). Then one week ago I called him, and he sent me a test translation, which I started working on yesterday. Here is the coincidence: This text is about the wildlife of Italy and Greece. There was also a small map of these countries in the text he sent me, and I now see that it is this map which occurred in the cloud formation in the sky, reversed or backwards (just as some of the car registration numbers were).

I have mentioned this before, I think, but repeat it here: It is a remarkable interpretation of the beginning of Georg Lukács' "Die Theorie des Romans":

The important thing to notice about my novel is that it is 'meta' in that converse sense of it of being without fiction. A novel without fiction. This is what happened in the street that day - I saw the map in the sky and three lads came towards me. However, you are not justified in looking up the surveillance data: This is a piece of art and not autobiography.

This phenomenon could have been the reason why I took interest in Blanckenburg's theory of the novel with its concept of "Die Ründung".

Washing is the opposite of Feuer, like the map was seen from the other side.

I had seen these things some years ago and planned to make a study on the novel-ness of my novel: Is it an archetypal novel? I believed Blanckenburg would be interesting for this. I ordered Lukács' "The historical novel" on the internet but it did not arrive. When it finally arrived half a year later I had lost interest in the project.

It may have been a lecturer in literary theory at my studies in Oslo in 1982 who mentioned this 'Ründung' - I do not recall this precisely. I found the book in a library and found it very interesting. Now it seems that the internet is cleansed of Blanckenburg + Ründung - as far as I remember this was one of his main concepts.

Added 17 december 2023:

Having completed and published the article 'Sistrum and menat and computation theory' on 8 december 2023, I came to understand that there were certain parallelisms to the aircrash of JFK jr with the two Bessette sisters on board. JFK jr met his wife, according to this source, in 1992 and they married in 1994. That was after I had found the equation of the fundamental theorem of logic in Budapest in the early spring 1991. They were often followed by paparazzi. Before this she had worked at Calvin Klein, which I associate with the Adam maieutic of Meir. The question is whether such things are part of a more general 'parallelistic' phenomenon in culture. Could be americans are more concerned with this than others due to the history with the indians. The Bessette sisters were daughters of William J.Bessette and Ann[e] Messina whose names can be vaguely recognized in poem #1 of my TEQ - on page 14 (see the 'jape' etc). Towards the end of the poem one could perhaps even see traces of some 'sistrum and menat and computation theory'. (I had no such ideas when I wrote the poem). My view is that this probably is due to a third factor to which both phenomena could relate. Evidence of this is found in my TEQ poem #2 - see the comparison of my poem with Celan's 'Tarussa' poem towards the end of this file. 'American Beauty' could also be subjected to some comparison. The relevance of this can be seen in the theme of mirrored map in the sky - here from the beginning of Celan's poem (page 164):

Now for the 'proof' that this is something else - some enigmatic poetic complex perhaps, like a mirrored map in the sky: It is in the word 'Hyänenspur' which Celan uses - and which Kennedys perhaps could be inclined to recognize as 'Hyannisport'. See my TEQ #530 where the word 'Hyannisport' is used - and the poem seems to be quite markedly about the phenomenon of parallelism by its parallelism with its own parallel text - which is translated in my volume 3 page 1241 (61 MB): "And Cheirisophos [= 'hand-wise'] went into the river together with his followers, but Xenophon along with the best of the rearguard started running back to the original ford at the crossing-place by the Armenian hill, pretending to cross there in order to attack from the other side". A peculiar phenomenon that is.

I noticed in this file which I published on 10 october 2023: "Were the attack on Israel (the land of Ezekiel) on 7 october 2023 motivated by my writing of the present article?" That is how it felt. On background of the above, could be even the complex mentioned on 27 october 2023, it could be observed that the work with the article could have been at a time of accumulation of mythological clouds in the horizon - cp. even the accumulation of possibly mythological magma in the grounds under Grindavik on Iceland just before the article was finished. This volcanic threat went down again in the days after I had published the article on 13 november 2023.

And there it is again: The motto to Celan's poem is Zwetajewa's "Vse poety zhidu" ('all poets are Jews') = 'fs-jape-essette-du'.

Sources:

Celan, P.: Die Gedichte. Ed. Barbara Wiedemann. Suhrkamp 2003.
Lukács, G.: "Die Theorie des Romans". Luchterhand, Neuwied und Berlin 1974.