out stealing horses review

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don't really know how to write fiction reviews. For the last few years I've been a bit over fiction, only reading something if it comes with a strong recommendation by a friend. This book ended up in my hands because I was in an opshop and it looked like the kind of sweet, inoffensive thing that my mum would like. The cover had a horse and a cabin and a misty forest. 'Out Stealing Horses'. Cute. It was only 50c.

Not wanting to pass on any old trash to her I did a quality-assurance check, reading the first few pages. A few days later and I was almost finished. I'd forgotten how satisfying it is when someone speaks your language, uses it to tell a story that penetrates deep and messes you up. The unfolding of Out Stealing Horses is beautiful. Trond, the narrator, follows incidental thoughts with a sparseness and intensity that is not there to convince or portray faithfully, but rather as dot points for further introspection. It is not always clear why they are significant but the effect is one of bearing witness to formative moments in the creation of 'character'. We are all ultimately inaccessible to eachother- to tell the story of our selves would take a lifetime. Spending a brief moment suspended in someone else's reality is the best we can hope for. Reading this I did feel suspended; not coerced or directed, just observing, feeling.

In Trond's own words:

“People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours, and that lets you off the hook. No-one can touch you unless you yourself want them to.”

The darkness was something that appealed to me, though at times I felt the death and suffering verged on melodrama. That was until I learned that Per Petterson's mother, father, brother, and cousin all died in an accident when he was in his thirties. Tragedy is all around us, and those of us who know it best have it ingrained in our story. Out Stealing Horses is deeply personal without being trite, and though the end does wane slightly, I consider it to be an exceptionally well-written book. The smallest of things are suffused with feeling and reflection, transforming the mundane into the profound, and the living forest breathes out of the pages into the air around you.

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disorder of the day

psychiatric disorders. now there’s a bit of fun. like people obsessed with being in love, or politics, or game of thrones, it is something I could talk about all day every day. my most profound and deep thoughts centre around my own dysfunctionality; I can’t get it out of my head. so how do you reconcile with your deepest thoughts also being your most despised? passion is the experience of following your deepest impulses, giving voice to them. one of my deepest impulses is to disappear. I normalise this impulse by removing myself into the wilderness, onto the road, away. it feels good, I like it more than anything else in life. I just feel like a wild little animal trapped in a world I don’t comprehend or connect with. it’s like trying to frame waves. the confusion makes me insane as I oscillate in and out of a delusion that I can belong, if I just tune out the fear, if I just figure out how to be genuinely myself in a specific way that is genuinely belonging

what to do with it. booze and drugs provide nice temporary obfuscation, but mostly I just get through one day, then get through another, until the tumult subsides enough to think about anything the hell else. for a reason I can’t entirely articulate prescription meds have been something I’ve avoided, except for a very brief, uneventful stint with anti-depressants seven years ago. maybe I’ve started to come around to them now because I see more clearly than ever that I am at odds with my own chemistry. as the anxiety of youth dies away I am left standing here just feeling kind of unimpressed, in a way that is actually kinda strengthening, hardening. there is, more than ever, a fairly firm core of values to my character, so when these manic episodes of delusion&downfall wash by- which they still do, frequently- I generally just feel humiliated and isolated by my own self

what’s it all about. I cherish my wildness, my undomesticated heathen disregard for all the unnatural strictures. the last thing I want to do is throw in that towel for some baseline normative reality. but  it also leaves me fractured; I dream of taking the wildness and living the shit out of it, like just being a filthy radical dero with other wildfolk and enjoying this little blip we have together. what has made that unachieveable so far? is it a medically alterable chemistry? is it deeply wired ‘personality’, made up of billions of hypercomplex neuronal interactions, i.e. indomitable chaos? we tend to be pretty lenient with ourselves, we think that our bad attitudes and behaviours are just symptoms of not blossoming how we ‘should have’, and that maybe it just needs a bit of fertiliser; the potential is there afterall… but ofcourse you never blossom, not really, not beyond the usual getting older, more self-knowing, more shrewd. if you accept the stunted-blossom theory of shittiness then you kind of can’t hold anyone responsible for anything ever, it’s all just action-reaction. personality becomes a placeholder for unrealised potential to be the best possible you. “it’s not my fault, I’m actually great- it was those bullies who made me an arsehole”. which I actually believe in broader cosmic terms, while simultaneously believing that everyone has an ethical/moral obligation to be ecofeminist warriors or whatever, and judge them for not being. ha ha

so what to do with it. I don’t know. early check-out feels like an inevitability so I’m not too stressed about it, in the mean time I think I might start taking some anti-depressants and see if they can level me up a bit, lift the haze of bitterness so that I can stop feeling compelled to write self-indulgent blog entries like this and instead write about practical, good things. like how to build your own straw-bale house or do your own mechanics

scenes from a beach

perspective

the last few days I have had cherese staying with me. cherese is like a bit of a sister to me; we sharehoused together for a few years in melbourne, at really confusing times in our lives, and though we are completely different people, developed this deep mutual respect (I assume it's mutual anyways). she also happened to spend a chunk of her childhood living in queensland, and some of that on the sunshine coast, so we 'get' eachother in that subtropical kind of way. today we bought the biggest mangoes either of us had ever seen, went to a waterfall, and then euphorically rubbed them all over our pasty freckled bodies. qld

these days I spend so much time alone and happily adrift in the countryside, now with plans to do that in a mobile kind of way, so there is something very grounding about being placed back into some kind of context as a human being. to be reminded of my history, my story. it has been a pretty strange ride. remembering that makes me feel stronger. nine years ago I moved to melbourne with this sense that city life and academia would satiate my anxieties. my biggest lesson, which I am still learning, is that cities blow and that my primary motivation in life is to find that one thing that they can never provide; peace and fucking quiet. you don't satiate anxieties, you only grow them. the only remedy is starvation i.e. simplicity. ofcourse not everyone needs to live in a cabin in the countryside to manifest simplicity - which is excellent because I'd rather everyone stay over there and just sort their shit out in the city - but I do

I'm not sure what this post is even about. basically hanging out with old friends is good and grounding. my trajectory has purpose, if a bit convoluted. it has always been me, trying to find what truly brings my mind peace. it has been confusing but looking back I'm glad I pushed through with my gut instincts, because now I get to live the country dream with complete abandon, no regrets

I suppose it also helps to observe how your mates are just infused with that citylife tension, and be glad that it's them getting on the train/plane back to that, not you...

dreamtime

one of the guys I went to tafe with is a member of this brisbane psych rock band called dreamtime, and just sent me a download code for their new album, strange pleasures. I'd heard about them a few years back but never looked into them much. what an enormous loss. they are next level shamanic lords of the subterranean consciousness, damn. this is this best music I have heard in ages. it is so intelligent and profound, like a cosmic guide leading you through a prehistoric psychedelic ritual, into your soul, out the other side, and off into the lysergic void. amazing

animal testing

today mim showed me a radiolab podcast that she was super excited about, it was about another potential step in the cure for alzheimers. it was pretty cool; apparently flashing lights at the gamma frequency (around 40 flashes per second, associated with higher-order thought) into the eyes of mice for an hour clears away 50% of the beta amyloid build up (for 24 hrs til it builds up again). this seems to allow them to remember stuff better, or something. I dunno. it sounded pretty straight forwards and with real potential for application. but then in the last minute or so of the podcast they casually mentioned that something like 99.6% of all successful mice studies don't end up translating to human subjects. that made me so angry. I've always had a huge problem with animal testing, but had never heard a figure like that before, which showcases just how senseless all this cruelty is. the amount of mice that are electrocuted, infected with viruses, bred to have specific diseases, made cancerous, etc etc etc. all for a 0.4% applicability to humans. and for them to just mention it in passing like it was barely relevant. I'd be interested to know what that figure is for primates, dogs, all the other animals that get abused like this. it is so absurd, so unconscionable

and here they were excitedly yapping away, like as if the deal was almost done. that includes the head researcher. usually it is the media that hypes small, preliminary findings to sound like grand panaceas, but here was the scientist herself (who also happens to be the director of the institute) implying as much. blegh, makes me sick. I mean...I can understand the joy of a positive result, no matter how initial- science is hard- but that 99.6% figure just sets my teeth on edge. I really hope it's not long til we have reliable medical modelling software, so that we can stop being such goddamned monsters

another step stepped

last friday I submitted my last assessment for tafe, and within an hour got an email from the lecturer saying I'd passed everything, i.e. that I now have a diploma of conservation and land management (yae!) it was a surprisingly emotional moment, I felt pretty bewildered and teary. the last few months have been hell and I'm not exaggerating when I say that I only barely made it through. tafe became a bit of burden during that time, but also kept me from dropping off the face of the earth. my classmates were all so goddamned beautiful and inspiring and I always left class glad that it was a part of my life

so there was that, but also there's this profoundly satisfying feeling that I've finally put myself on the right path. I floundered around uni for six years and still had no idea who I was or what I actually deeply valued. after only a year at tafe there seems to be very little doubt left. not necessarily because of the course content or anything, but it happily coincided with some big realisations and lifestyle changes, and just fit like a friggen glove

after our farewell party at wappa dam yesterday I know I'm going to miss it a lot, mostly for the company. to be honest there's also a big part of me that hates institutionalised education and is kinda bitter about blowing $11,500 on knowledge I could have easily gained from self-education and the age old process of just hanging out and yappin. but any step in the right direction is valuable, as it seems all too easy to drift off into weird trajectories. so yes, all in all I'm stoked and ready embark on my new career as a feral bushbum. not like I needed a qualification for that tho, just this beast (sry climate change):