In The Shower of Sparks That Constitutes This Eternal Event, It Is Indecipherably Written

The mainspring of my work has always been a fascination with what arises when I give myself to the unknown force and allow myself to trust what I do not understand.

In the beginning, I turned inwards, towards myself, in order to observe what was moving inside of me. Painting was like a magnifying glass, intensifying my feelings and bringing me closer to that which I did not yet understand. During this time, I first encountered Roj Friberg’s work. (1) Specifically, his interpretations of August Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata. (2) These works, which hung in the public library in the city where I grew up, portrayed some kind of catastrophic dinner party in a darkened castle. The halls were dimly lit by candelabras and chandeliers, which cast long shadows in hallways whose doors opened onto pitch-black rooms. These spaces were inhabited by black-clad ghosts, who sat stiffly around dining tables or stood lined up against a wall. In one picture, a violent accusation is thrown from one ghost to another; in another, there is the suggestion of a ghostly leg vanishing around a corner.

I immediately felt bound to this visual world, to the halls and the ghosts. I asked the librarian about the artist and learned that the paintings were illustrations of a play. A decade passed before I read this play—somehow it didn’t occur to me. Desiring to walk through the castle where Roj Friberg’s pictures were set, I started to expand on these scenes as soon as I came home.

For two years, I saw it as my primary task to uncover this castle through painting. Then I moved on. The ghosts were reduced to masks and hands, and the castle to lines of composition. In the mask, I found a doorway that allowed me to enter the picture. The mask was the fixed point that made all other points legible. The mask was my anchor.

Using this tool, I was able to reduce the picture even further, so much so that there was almost nothing but the mask left. Perhaps I’d produced a feedback loop of some kind, because painting became increasingly painful. I felt more and more disgust for the paintings, but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t sleep or eat, only paint loathsome masks. I was no longer in control of my hand or my gaze, because they were drawn, as if by a magnetic force, to the abyss that was the mask. There was no longer space for any life: no room, no objects, nobody else, not even myself—only the mask. The idea of painting was so deeply associated with my sense of self that abandoning painting felt like giving up on my whole life, but I saw no other way forward. So, I burned all the paintings I’d entangled myself in and disavowed my brush and my paints.

One of my teachers at the time, David Skoog, once told me that as an artist you enter into the unknown, like an astronaut on a spacewalk. You dive into the dark, infinite expanse and bring your findings back to the ship. This means you have to be careful with the lifeline that binds you to the ship and your fellow humans, because there is no value in a treasure that you’re unable to make legible to others. To enter the infinite darkness is dangerous; if you lose the connection to the ship, you risk disappearing.

I believe this is what happened to Carl Fredrik Hill. When I look at the drawings produced during his years of illness, I feel that I understand them. Not fully, of course, because if that were possible, people would be able to find each other in this abyss, but that does not seem to happen. It seems like a lonely abyss. Still, I know what it’s like to see your own name written in the sky. I know what it’s like to sink so deeply into yourself that everyone else disappears. Luckily, I have always been able to hold onto the lifeline. This might be because of my belief that what remains once all the cognitive constructions have been peeled off is

hearing and music. That my soul is part of an enormous soul. That at the bottom of myself is a you. Glorious you. When I can no longer understand anything at all, it is still so clear that I’m listening, that I’m singing.

To and about you.

Around this time, I met Mattias Eliasson, a guest lecturer who introduced me to the way care for an object is transferred to a viewer. If the care given to an object is treated as the raw material of the work, this charge, for whatever reason, can be directly sensed by another person. Without quite realising it, I had amassed a fairly large collection of objects that I was beginning to use as thinking aids. I brought the mask into the work with these objects, since I had a strong sense that I wouldn’t be able to give the objects meaning without this North Star. Similarly, I felt dependent on the frame. In the larger world, everything is part of something bigger, but within the frame, I could see a scene as something complete and still. An eternity, frozen in time. As if the objects within that frame had always existed, as if they could not have been any other way.

The word “landscape” has served as a guide in my abstract meaning making. When I enter a commonplace room with a commonplace gaze, I sometimes catch myself thinking that the colour on the wall is too light, or that the table by the window would have made a more pleasing impression if it had a different kind of tablecloth. But when I look at a grove in a meadow, it would be absurd to have an opinion on how a particular tree is leaning. When I look at a landscape, I notice, instead, that I accept the picture. In this way, I allow it to encounter me with fewer barriers. By giving this attitude a name, I can call something a landscape and encounter it as such. Whenever I approach a scene like this, I feel it expanding and touching me in a way that feels very close.

Another guide for me in this kind of thinking is Giorgio Morandi. I believe that the same kind of discovery was highly central to Morandi’s work. By stilling a delimited portion of the world, Morandi appears able to get closer to the distant tones the objects give off, and then, through painterly treatment, bring them forth for general observation.

Since I was in the middle of a conflict with painting, yet had no other framework, I turned on an overhead projector and called it a frame, arranging objects inside its light as if I were painting. But an important difference was that my actions within the work did not leave a mark on my canvas and could be infinitely rearranged. This relieved some of the tension that had become difficult to bear—not without sacrifice, of course, as this tension is a powerful force in painting, but I needed to think that I wasn’t painting.

As I started to work in space, the big problem of photographic reproduction took on central importance. For me, seeing has always been linked to thinking and the body. The way an object slithers out of my attempt to grasp it, evading me, is part of what it means to see. What I see is inseparable from the feeling that it is, in the very moment of seeing, taken away from me. Seeing, then, is always broken, and this brokenness is something I want to preserve. The photographic image has always given me an impression of intactness, and therefore it’s always felt less real. So, when it came to documenting my work with the objects, I decided to draw it; this was a way of preserving something, at least for myself.

I was once gifted a book of Alberto Giacometti’s writing. (3) These were texts of various sorts, spanning his entire working life. The first section included essays submitted to magazines; the second section featured texts from notebooks organised in chronological order up until his death at age sixty-five; and the final section was made up of dialogues.

Even though Giacometti died long before I was born, I felt able, through this book, to get a sense of his whole person, so real that I could almost hear him. I felt that I understood his mental world and drives as well as my own. Giacometti often wrote about the different stages of seeing in its constant pendulum—for instance, the way a commonplace vista can suddenly break free of its flatness and flick you on the nose. Or how a regular glass of water can appear as the only stable point in a floating space of shapeless bodies. For Giacometti,

the highest endeavour was to portray the world as he saw it—a simple, conventional project, but impossible. He was cognizant of this impossibility, but I also think he kept this awareness at bay to preserve his desire to try.

Most of Giacometti’s writing is about his failures. And it is probably true that any attempt to portray the world in order to convey it as it appears is inevitably a failure. Knowing this, reaching—the act of reaching for something like a landscape—and ending up with a messy collection of marks on a canvas is both sad and pitiful. But in the failure, the motif is kept intact, affirmed as ungovernable.

As I started to draw from my eye, I came to understand how useful drawing is for trying to see. When I take the position of drawing from my eye, my gaze changes. I do not ask what I am seeing; instead, I follow, and the hand imitates what meets the eye. In the hand rests a hidden matrix of gestures. These gestures, extended or interrupted, wavering or intent, are knit together, making a portrait of the eye’s wanderings, which I, through my body, am given access to understand. Putting down my drawing later, I find that the object I’ve portrayed has become more complex. It’s unfurled a little.

If I continue to give the object my attention, it keeps growing. With time, its impressions sharpen, so much so that I experience the object as corresponding to a point inside of me. When I subsequently place two objects that have gone through a similar treatment within a scene, turning them, it feels as if something within me turns, slowly. This discovery amazed me. By focusing on an arrangement of objects before me, I was able to observe and turn something that was inside of me.

For some time, I made it my primary task to attempt to understand how to approach an object without my preconceived notions blocking it. I was trying to figure out how I could allow the object to enter and work directly inside of me, so that I could attempt to understand what it was that I, in approaching the objects, came into contact with.

But the mask remained in the middle of my work and blocked my view.

Slowly, it was becoming clear to me that I was nearing the dead end I’d previously reached in painting, because when it came to presenting an installation, it didn’t feel complete without a mask in it, looking. Part of me had clung to the mask—to the extent that when I considered banishing it from my work, my sense of self seemed to pass before my eyes. I didn’t understand why I had created all these masks that were now lined up on shelves, looking down at me. It was as if I’d transferred part of me to the mask and sealed it. I didn’t know what was in the mask, but the thought of letting it slip from my hands and break against the stone floor was as off-putting as the idea of biting my finger with all my might. The longer I look at the mask, the blurrier my own lines become, the duller my surroundings.

I believe that James Ensor experienced something very similar. It looks as if he, too, felt the mask tug at his gaze. The painting Still Life with a Cabbage illustrates this; you can clearly see a mask break into the picture, turning the still life into a play. (4)

Ensor’s many still lifes almost always seem to exist on a spectrum of an impending and ongoing intrusion of these masks. They flip the outward-looking gaze inside out, mixing what is in the surrounding space and what is inside Ensor. Out of this mess, a spectacle emerges, where the inner voices bleed into the surrounding space. This turning inside out of the internal chatter puts the person making the painting at a remove. As I came to understand Ensor, I also started to understand myself. So, I packed up all my masks and placed them in a wooden crate in the basement, watched The Ghost Sonata, the play on which Roj Friberg’s series was based, and started to write a script.

Up until then, the idea of writing a dialogue had been completely foreign to me, but suddenly I understood that it wasn’t in any way a question of fiction, just of splitting oneself into different continents and listening.

I placed myself to the side of myself and observed the monologue that incessantly rises from me, as if from a steam engine. By studying its movement, I was able to localise three principles within me. I named them Figure 1, Figure 2, and Figure 3. Then I documented them as they spoke.

By giving these principles a name, I became a room, and the constant negotiation around power, guilt, order, and disorder was given a body in the room. Consequently, in the dialogue, I was able to see the very movement of thought. I have heard it said that it is the paradoxes in a system that give the system its power, and I see that now. For a long time, I was looking for the thoughts’ conclusions, the fruits that the thought can produce, and which can be of more or less use. Now, instead, I had turned to the body of the thought, which is to say, the constant movement of dissolution and reconstruction, of yielding and pushing away, of swelling and sinking.

I read Plato again and realised that it was high time to give these figures a motive. So, I put the motives that I’ve struggled to figure out my whole life into the room:
Agency.
Memory.

The real.
Where am I?
What is an object? And so on.

This produced no fruit. Instead, a movement developed that illustrated what it is to wonder. And what it’s like to be stuck inside oneself. I created three masks and three hands, gave them each a role, and built the room I had painted so many times. I sewed bodies from black velvet, and the masks became dolls. Then I engaged my closest friends. I see myself in each of them, and I was able to see them in me. The puppeteers’ relationship to the dolls

and to each other as well as the dolls’ relationship to their lines, the audience, and to the spirit that binds the things to their path became the play’s primary motives. (5)

When the mask had been given a body, a voice, and a room, I was freed of it. I was free to turn my gaze outwards, towards what is not me. So, I turned to the trees, because the trees have always been able to suddenly break through the flatness that cloaks the world in my gaze. The tree rushes over me in a flood that also takes my ability to translate the world into something graspable. When that happens, the separation between myself and what I experience begins to fade. Only then am I in the state I call “seeing,” where I am touched by what happens and the matte membrane that covers my gaze is broken.

For me, Ibn Arabi has been a guide in this searching, this longing for the world. He writes about what I call “seeing” as two different kinds of eyes: my eyes and your eyes. He describes approaching the real as a dissolution. When my grasping fails, both outside of me and within, “I” will die before death, and the eyes become yours.

“Listen, O dearly beloved!
I am the reality of the world, the center of the circumference, I am the parts and the whole.
I am the will established between Heaven and Earth,
I have created perception in you only in order to be the object of my perception.

If then you perceive me, you perceive yourself.
But you cannot perceive me through yourself,
It is through my eyes that you see me and see yourself, Through your eyes you cannot see me.

Dearly beloved!
I have called you so often and you have not heard me.
I have shown myself to you so often and you have not seen me.
I have made myself fragrance so often, and you have not smelled me,
Savorous food, and you have not tasted me.
Why can you not reach me through the object you touch Or breathe me through sweet perfumes?
Why do you not see me? Why do you not hear me?
Why? Why? Why?” (6)

I turn to the trees to see, because they show me very clearly how close I am. Painting, in this situation, becomes a kind of bookkeeping. When I read the tree and put my depiction in order, I’ve pushed the view away, replacing it, and the picture becomes stiff and dead. If I keep, instead, my grasping instinct to seal the tree at bay, a crack can remain, through which the real light of the tree can push out and float into my trembling hands, my witnessing hands. The picture becomes broken and charged.

In this state of seeing, something is uncovered. Not on the canvas, but in my soul. The objects turn out to be transparent, and inside them one entwined shadow trembles. Every time I see, I see this, from a new position. When it is time to navigate, these glimpses of seeing become leading marks, points that, when seen in a line, tell the navigator her position. The paintings of the trees, then, become a charting of sorts.

A lousy chart, I should say.

I initially approached the trees by trying to find a legible meaning in their various gestures. This thought was based on the simple fact that trees grow according to a determined structure, which they later either diverge from or follow, like attack and decay as described in a musical score. But all that came from this attempt to translate the trees were reductions and misunderstanding. I abandoned the thought.

It is possible that the legible meaning I was seeking cannot be achieved through a template, because if I measure the trees using the template I’ve invented, the resulting numbers tell me nothing. The trees remain in place, at the same distance. I believe, instead, that getting close is about sympathy. Because how does a child learn to feel for music? It must be the same to feel for trees.

This is not at all about measuring, but about connecting them to your body, about leaning close to what happens in yourself at the sight of a tree, letting yourself follow. I can’t translate the tree’s gesticulating pirouettes into concrete concepts, but when I watch them happening, they are absolutely clear. I see what the tree does, and it gives meaning. This is how I learned to read trees.

As my gaze was freed from the mask, I too could walk freely through the halls that were now empty. When I, having just started painting, entered the rooms prepared by Roj Friberg, I encountered drama and ghosts. These rooms are now empty. I send my gaze through the surface I’ve chosen to paint on, letting myself sink, and I enter something that resembles a house of glass. I turn, and the whole glass world rotates. I sink, and it rises. With my brush, I mark what moves past me in the journey through the room: arches, corners, and mouldings.

Every movement echoes. Until the image closes again, and I see nothing. There, too, is a sky.

1. Roj Friberg, Ur Spöksonaten [From the Ghost Sonata], 1983–93, colour lithographs. The lithographs comprise a portfolio of Bifteen prints inspired by August Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata (1907), printed by Duro GraBiska in an edition of 160. In the late 1980s, Parisian gallerist Edouard Weiss contacted Lena Cronqvist and Roj Friberg, asking each of them to interpret a Strindberg play of their choosing to be included in a set of published lithographs.

2. August Strindberg, The Ghost Sonata, 1907. The play premiered 21 January 1908 at Intima Teatern in Stockholm.

3. Alberto Giacometti, Écrits [Writings], ed. Mary Lisa Palmer and François Chaussende (Paris: Hermann, 1990).

4. James Ensor, Nature morte au chou [Still Life with a Cabbage], 1921, in the collection of Krö ller-Mü ller Museum.

5. Felix Oscar Christiannson, Chimärans bälgar (om längtan genom natten) [The Bellows of the Chimera (about longing through the night)], KHM 2 Gallery, Malmö , 21 February–8 March 2025. Participants: Viktor Nilsson, Charlotte Foureaux, Tobias Westholms, and Andrea Sitara Gran.

6. Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi, “The Creative Feminine: Sophiology and Devotio Sympathetica” [c. 1209], trans. Ralf Manheim Henry Corbin, in Creative Imagination in the SuEism of Ibn Arabi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 174.

Malmö Art Academy Bachelor text 2023.

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.