Growth Of The Soil
Nothing grows here? Everything grows here man and beast and fruit of the soil-Knut Hamsun, Growth Of The Soil
Be contented! You have everything to live for, everything to believe in; you are born and you bring forth, you are vital to the earth. Not everybody is, but you are: vital to the earth. You sustain life.
—Knut Hamsun, Growth Of The Soil
Everything seen is accomplishable by virtue of seeing it done. The maps say “Here be dragons,” but you know better. The territory has been surveyed by your eyes and the possibility of things sampled by your life.
Every good writer loves the Earth. Virgil and his Georgics. Thoreau and his peas. What better analogy for the growth of writing than growth of the soil?
Life provides for the writer. Mundane experiences trickle past the mind’s eye and blend into the supernatural. The observer turns his head away from the music that offends his soul. His aim is only that which calls to him.
The first farmer was told that no one can live here. The land is barren and nothing will grow. Really? I live here. And life is what I reap. What was barren is now a verdant garden because I have lived. What was thought impossible is revealed possible through the light of living.
The first writer arrives. He is told that his style is barren of ideas. Really? Because I…
It is this connection that draws the Wanderer or the Viking with the writer. Theirs is an unsure labor. Full of doubt from others and from themselves. A wasteland stretches before them. Yet there is an organizing principle, an unseen intelligence somewhere behind and beyond those eyes. They will make sense of the nonsense. This is the love that draws the spade together with the pen.
People are always focused on forms. They find some fault with their partner over a mannerism that is not up to snuff with their standards. Whom amongst us can say we allow the specificity to mold back into the universal? Imagine if you could—your partner as pure love. An entire lifetime of Heruclean living just to spend one or two moments of pristine dancing. Multiple selves all for yourself. How could you find fault?
A time to get, a time to lose.
A time to keep, and a time to cast
away.
A time to rend, and a time to sew.
A time to keep silence, and a time to
speak.
A time to love, and a time to hate.
A time of war, and a time of peace.
—Book Of Ecclesiastes
It is a great silence that ties Hamsun with the Viking Sagas. These explorers who not only ventured outside the bounds of territory but stretched the confines of the heart and mind. Oh, how hard it is not to love the Pagan man who swings an axe into the head of his enemy and later composes poetry by the light of the campfire. The Chinese philosopher hobo’s ultimate aim is aimless wandering. The Emperor of his own estate peers into good and evil to settle the matter with the trajectory of his life.
This is the man I would wish to spend the rest of my days in Valhalla with. He has been told by the world in every which way that he is wrong. But this man still has his axe, his ox, and his pen. If he is wrong, then we have not yet truly seen how wrong he is.