The Two-Edged Stream

I break the wind with my forehead, and it begins to ache. The sky is a steely grey and my cheeks are rosy—so I assume. A pale seabird sweeps past with a sense of helplessness before the roaring machinery, ringed around the neck.

The feeling grazes my shoulder. I let it slip past me.

In everything—I assume due to the character of time—moves a two-edged stream. Two gestures in one movement. The terms I’ve given these gestures: the becoming. the disappearance.

They’re contradictory and occur in absolute simultaneity, the impossible process of something being unfolded and folded at once. Their sound is like cymbals and strings. A grief deep like a chasm and an ecstatic song of praise, both occurring in the exact same moment. In the smallest of chestnuts.

I grew up seeing only half of the stream.

I could only see grief.

I was twisted, so the gestures appeared in me unevenly.

I was a knot, stretching tauter and tauter.

After many years of inklings, the knot came open in a violent snap and I lost myself.

My entire world fell away until all that was left was a string, and its movement was music. Apparently, everything else was removable.

I had a distinct sense of being a part of an all-encompassing instrument that plays for itself.

That I am the material and the listener.

That all I can do is to listen as it plays and let my string’s tone sound.

Since that moment, work (life) has been about intensifying my inner movement.

Alberto Giacometti

I sit down on a rock beneath the steel-grey sky and try to unclench my jaw. It’s the kind of rock that’s served as a bench for many people, including, in this moment, me. I look down at the frozen mud and allow my gaze to relax.

I let myself go a little cross-eyed, and the ground begins to billow.

How can I explain it?

It never stops continuing.

Every kernel of gravel is like a mountain.

When I came home with rocks I’d found, my dad used to tell me that you have to break a rock with a hammer to know what it really is.

One time we did, but the answer I got told me nothing.

My dad is a geologist who used his knowledge to search for oil in the service of a sheikh who was later imprisoned in a luxury hotel by Saudi Arabia’s crown prince.

Dad once told me that he doesn’t need to describe an experience to think of it as real, that seeing something for himself is enough.

I admire it.

But I don’t feel the same way.

I feel a great kinship with Alberto Giacometti, which I think stems from what appears to be a shared religious sense of duty toward depicting what happens inside of oneself, combined with deep despair over the impossibility of the same.

In Giacometti’s relationship to work, I see a struggle against disappearance.

A struggle he is well aware is unwinnable, but to which he nevertheless dedicates his life.

In the encounter with the overwhelming greatness of things—if there is to be even the smallest hope to grasp something at all—reduction is inescapable.

The human figure turns into a bust, a face, a nose bridge.

“I no longer know who I am, where I am;

I barely see myself anymore, I imagine my face must look like a diffuse, whiteish mass, fragile, barely held together, held up by a number of unshapely rags dragging all the way to the ground.

Uncertain appearance.

I no longer see myself, nor do I see that which surrounds me: glasses, windows, faces, colors here and there; yes, very brilliant colors, a plate on a table, the back of a chair.

It is the objects in particular that appear real to me, the glass seems much less precarious than the hand holding it, picking it up and putting it back down, disappearing. The objects have a different substantiality.

Heads, persons are nothing but the continual movement of the inside, the outside, they are incessantly remaking themselves, they do not have a true substantiality, their transparent side. They are neither cube, nor cylinder, nor sphere, nor triangle. They are a mass in motion, a changing form that can never be completely grasped. And then it is as though they are held together by an inner point that observes us through the eyes and which seems to be their reality, a reality without measure, in a space without limits and which seems to be other than that in which the cup stands before me or which is created by this cup.

Nor do they have a definable color.

All this must be investigated.”

—Alberto Giacometti (1)

To me there’s a clarity in the impossibility Giacometti describes here. I think of it as a heightened close-ness. The boundaries of the self and the other have begun to dissolve, showing their true limitlessness.

I use drawing as a tool to try to approach this incomprehensibility.

There was a golden lounge I once drew. The room was flooded with lines, crossing each other. Tiled windows, mosaics, rain beating against the skylight.

I placed myself in the state I call drawing. This state occurs as the hand begins to move in a slanted oval just above the paper and at an increasing speed, while I let my gaze bounce off the various objects it lands on until I’m sufficiently confused. By the time all I can see are angles, lines, and gestures, the pencil lands on the surface I will later call a drawing.

It might be compared to beating a rug. The first twenty strikes are a conscious physical act with purpose and intention. The next two hundred become a reverberating rhythm that silences the self;

now it is something that happens to you.

I saw the chaotic teeming, and in the pressure on the paper, there was a likeness to the room that fell over me.

The Distance

The sky has changed colour since I last saw it.

The clouds that previously covered the sky and rendered it mute have now begun to disperse; the new light reveals its shapes. Under the sky, by a line of pine trees across the water, is a house of cards that fights the weather.

When I learned to speak, the world closed before me, became flat, a remote story. Space, a conclusion I drew.

This is how it happened:

In the whirling hurricane of impressions and imprints, I put out a finger and pointed to a pattern I chose to call a glass of Chablis. A delimited particle of the storm became still in exchange for becoming invisible to me.

I continued:

Chequered tile floor, ballpoint pen, notebook, barstool, table.

On and on until I no longer saw anything at all.

Instead I started to read and count:

The barstool is under me, atop the table are the notebook and the glass.

Under both the table and the stool is the floor, and over the notebook, the pen strides, writing all these words in order. All had its place, in its order, when I looked through the catalogue.

The sight of the world made no impression on me, because the world and I no longer touched each other as it slipped between my fingers.

Then, a gust of wind grabbed hold of me and reawakened the buried memory of the hurricane.

I remembered a life far more real than this and suddenly space was immediate.

In front of me on the table, the entire world stepped out of a candelabra and asked me to hold it in my chest. I looked out the window where a tree grabbed hold of me with its gestures.

The tree’s gestures took hold of me in a way that made me realise I’d never truly been seized before.

The love and the grief over what I saw filled me like a glass of water and then it ran over me like a rain.

The Approach

I used to view language as a windmill I had to conquer.

It was only yesterday that I understood that it is my power. A simple but very meaningful sleight of hand.

In the black water, between the waves, I see a stillness reflecting the clouds above.

I can’t break out—it’s a confused thought. But I can bend and twist, stretch to create openings.

I turn to objects because I’ve noticed that if I see them and fall silent before them, the impression is deepened, and they emerge.

Their meaning becomes musical.

To reach this closeness with the objects, I first need to make my gaze stop bouncing between its references.

To get some kind of clarity, I first need to still the water.

I tear up four lines in the frozen mud and make a frame.

I call that which is within the frame the stage.

Inside the stage, objects have no past.

They came into being precisely where I find them, and they’ve never been anything other than exactly what they are.

I understand the stage and the objects within it as landscape.

That is to say, a place where you can be and move, and where the figures don’t claim meaning outside themselves and the viewer.

Everything around me: the seabird’s wing flaps, the sky, the row of pines—they’re reflected in me.

And in everything around me, I see myself.

As softly echoing memories.

It seems I am myself an empty vessel, and the world, in movement and facades, is finally a depiction that points back to me.

Everything self-experienced, echoing in constant motion. Sculpted in me.

An object reaches me, touches me. I allow the impression to imprint, mark this touch.

With this mark and its relations, I build a system I can navigate in order to subsequently compose, with these touches as my material.

The encounter with the objects within the stage creates an inaudible tone.

When I, the viewer, approach the objects, the sound increases in volume.

When the objects move, the tone changes.

This tone is the material by which I seek to illustrate the motif.

When the composition of the objects leads the inaudible tone to approach a resonance with the landscape, the wind emerges.

The objects led me here, because I followed the ­ traces. Deep within them, a reflection of the landscape.

The Landscape

“If everything broke in me as the force passed through, that’s not because its function is to ­ break: it just finally needed to come through

since it had already become too copious to be contained or diverted — along its way it buried everything. And after, as after a flood,

floating upon the waters was a wardrobe, a person, a stray window, three suitcases.”

— Clarice Lispector (The Passion According to G. H.)(2)

The wind increases and the trees agree:

“That which happens.”

“That which happens.”

It touches my entire being and my hair turns into a flag.

A small brook between two hills rises and sinks at the pace of the moon, which revolves like a fan.

A tree grows buds, the buds grow into large green leaves, which yellow and scatter in the wind.

Tall grass grows beneath the pulsing sky, becoming earth where new grass grows.

I look back at the row of pines and the water that’s stilled.

Everything becomes a mirror. The same on both sides.

The inside has been given an outside and the outside an inside.

My worries and doubts dull and fall off, carried away by the wind, disappearing.

That’s when I see the booming depths within me, breathing slowly and meeting my gaze.

We look at each other and I lose my lines.

First in fear. Then in grief.

A shudder makes what little is left of me tremble and radiate in a mix of grief, fear, and a profound gratitude over finally being seen.

Never has anything been this real.

All was on fire, brilliant, and the moment echoed.

Stretched.

(A silence)

I remain kneeling, with everything I used to be strewn like autumn leaves around me.

The sky, the trees, the wind, and the water.

The entire world is a quiet waltz and I, a trembling string that plays along.

Every movement. Every colour. All is whole and clear.

I see it.

It is so unbearably beautiful.

You are so unbearably beautiful.

You crumbling sandcastle.

1. Alberto Giacometti, Écrits, ed. Mary Lisa Palmer and François Chaussende (Paris: Hermann, 1990), quoted in part in The Colossal: From Ancient Greece to Giacometti, by Peter Mason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 218. The remainder is our translation (Kira Josefsson).

2. Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G. H., trans. Idra Novey (London: Penguin Books, 2014), 66.