Beltane                                                                    Emergence Moon

These days my hero is a Norwegian (no surprise there) named Knausgård, whose six volume (so far) novel, My Struggle, has sold 500,000 copies in Norway where there are only 5 million people. His work, which I purchased last year and have not yet begun to read, recounts his life in a style more novelistic than memoir, not told in linear fashion, but through broad themes which nonetheless illustrate his life as it goes.

In spite of not yet reading them (and I will) Knausgård is my hero because his style sounds surprisingly similar to the work I do here, in this blog. Similar is the key word, because I’ve not been as brave as he is (I think he is from accounts.), nor as thoughtful toward the whole. Ancientrails is non-linear, and it could have been typed on Jack Kerouac’s famous roll of paper, the one he used to pound out On the Road. (There’s, by the way, a backward link to What is your walk? Though Kerouac celebrates the American road trip by car, On the Road could work with pilgrims inch-worming their way around, say, the holy mountain of Las Vegas.)

Can I acknowledge the pain I felt last Sunday morning when my long time friend, Mark Odegard, and I exchanged sharp words about China, potentially injuring our friendship over matters neither one of us truly understands?  I went into my a, b, c, d argument mode. A. China is not historically expansionist. Mark: tell that to the Dali Lama. Oh, well. Yes, but really about border security. I don’t like it, nor do I agree with it, but it doesn’t mean China has imperial ambitions. B. China’s military has not been blooded in a war against an external enemy in a couple of thousand years (at least not much) and when they have been, they’ve lost. And our military has fought many wars in the last 100 years alone. C. We spend more on the military than China does. All this while the visualize world peace Bahai retreatants ate noisily at other tables in the Villa Maria refectory and should have told us enough. Close the ears. Hug and talk about next year’s calendar.

But. Mark went on that John McCain says. Oh, John McCain is my lodestar for China analysis. Anyway he said someone will do something irrational. China loathes Japan for the 1936 invasion, the visits to the War Shrine. Japan is fearful of an expanded China. And North Korea. He’s a wildcard. Something will spark a war. Mark might have mentioned Taiwan or the Spratly Islands. Something will happen.

I pushed back about China’s rise not being about military gains but economic ones. Or, I might have, I can’t recall exactly now, but I remember the under current of having, again, gone too far in an argument. You don’t understand where people get there information. They trust Fox News, not the New York Times. He said.

But there I’d done it. And ever since that morning I’ve hoped I’ve not permanently injured my relationship with Mark. Then, we exchanged e-mails and agreed to meet for breakfast, maybe a week or so from now. He wants to continue them he said. That sounds hopeful. I want to reach across the table and say you are more important to me than China, all of China, old friend.

This the brave, honest sort of writing I imagine Knausgård using and what I want to adopt as mine. Not Knausgård’s style, not really, not his content, not at all, but the courage to say it all, not just some of it. And to do it every day. And the why of it comes then in the words, the path of them, the walk of them across the rolls of paper that this blog represents, an ancientrail, mine, being walked in the present.