August Strindberg once claimed in his profound, deranged seriousness that the stars in the sky were peepholes in a wall. Occasionally I was reminded of that when observing the endless stream of souls descending the stairs to masturbate in the darkness of the cellar booths as they watched the illuminated screens. The world around them was closed off, and one of the few ways they could look out was through these boxes. They never told anyone what they saw, it belonged to the unmentionable; it was incompatible with everything a normal life entailed, and most of those who went there were normal men. But it was not the case that the unmentionable was reserved for the world above, it also applied down below, at any rate if one were to judge from their behavior, where no one spoke, no one looked at the others, the solipsistic paths they all trod, from the stairs, to shelves of films, to counter, to booth, and back to the stairs. The fact that there was something essentially laughable about this, this row of men sitting with their pants round their knees, each in his own booth, grunting and groaning and pulling at their penises while watching films of women having intercourse with horses or dogs, or men with lots of other men, could not have escaped their attention, but neither could they acknowledge it, since true laughter and true desire are incompatible, and it was desire that had driven them here. But why here? All the films you could see in US VIDEO were also available on the net, and could therefore be viewed in absolute isolation without the risk of being seen by others. So there must have been something in the unmentionable situation itself that they sought. Either the lowness, the vileness, or the squalidness of it, or the closed-off-ness. I had no idea, this was foreign territory for me, but I couldn’t help thinking about it, for every time I gazed in that direction someone was going down to the cellar.
It was not unusual for the police to show up, but they generally appeared as a result of the demonstrations that were regularly staged outside. They left the place itself alone, to the enormous disgruntlement of the demonstrators. All they could do was stand there with their banners, shout slogans, and boo every time someone went in or came out, under the watchful eye of the police who stood shoulder to shoulder with shields, helmets and batons, keeping them under surveillance.
“What’s that?” Linda asked from behind me.
I turned and looked at her.
“Are you awake?”
“More or less,” she said.
“I can’t get to sleep,” I said. “And there are police cars outside. Go back to sleep.”
She closed her eyes. Down on the street, the door opened. Two policemen came into view. Behind them were two more. They were holding a man between them, so tight that his feet were off the ground. It looked brutal, but presumably it was necessary because the man’s trousers were around his knees. When they came out they let go of him and he fell onto all fours. Two more officers came out. The man got to his feet and pulled up his trousers. One of the officers cuffed his hands behind his back, another escorted him into the car. As the other policemen began to get in, two of the shop employees came onto the street. They stood with their hands in their pockets watching the vehicles starting up, driving down the street, and disappearing from view as their hair slowly went white with the falling snow.
I padded into the living room. The light from the streetlamps hanging from cables above the street shone dimly against the walls and floor. I watched TV for a while. I kept thinking it might worry Linda if she woke up and came in. Any irregularities or any suggestion of excess could remind her of the manic periods her father went through when she was growing up. I switched it off, took one of the art books from the shelf above the sofa instead, and sat flicking through it. It was a book about Constable I had just bought. Mostly oil sketches, studies of clouds, countryside, sea.
I didn’t need to do any more than let my eyes skim over them before I was moved to tears. So great was the impression some of the pictures made on me. Others left me cold. That was my only parameter with art, the feelings it aroused. The feeling of inexhaustibility. The feeling of beauty. The feeling of presence. All compressed into such acute moments that sometimes they could be difficult to endure. And quite inexplicable. For if I studied the picture that made the greatest impression, an oil sketch of a cloud formation from September 6, 1822, there was nothing there that could explain the strength of my feelings. At the top, a patch of blue sky. Beneath, whitish mist. Then the rolling clouds. White where the sunlight struck them, pale-green in the least shadowy parts, deep-green and almost black where they were at their densest and the sun was farthest away. Blue, white, turquoise, greenish-black. That was all. The text describing the picture said Constable had painted it in Hampstead at noon, and that a certain Mr. Wilcox had doubted the accuracy of the date as there was another sketch made on the same day between twelve o’clock and one that showed quite a different, more rain-laden sky, an argument which was rendered invalid by London weather reports for this day, as they could easily have described the cloud cover in both pictures.
I had studied history of art and was used to describing and analyzing art. But what I never wrote about, and this is all that matters, was the experience of it. Not just because I couldn’t, but also because the feelings the pictures evoked in me went against everything I had learned about what art was and what it was for. So I kept it to myself. I wandered around the Nationalgalleri in Stockholm or the Nasjonalgalleri in Oslo or the National Gallery in London and looked. There was a kind of freedom about this. I didn’t need to justify my feelings, there was no one to whom I had to answer and no case to answer. Freedom, but not peace, for even though the pictures were supposed to be idylls, such as Claude’s archaic landscapes, I was always unsettled when I left them because what they possessed, the core of their being, was inexhaustibility and what that wrought in me was a kind of desire. I can’t explain it any better than that. A desire to be inside the inexhaustibility. That is how I felt this night as well. I sat leafing through the Constable book for almost an hour. I kept flicking back to the picture of the greenish clouds, every time it called forth the same emotions in me. It was as if two different forms of reflection rose and fell in my consciousness, one with its thoughts and reasoning, the other with its feelings and impressions, which, even though they were juxtaposed, excluded each other’s insights. It was a fantastic picture, it filled me with all the feelings that fantastic pictures do, but when I had to explain why, what constituted the “fantastic,” I was at a loss to do so. The picture made my insides tremble, but for what? The picture filled me with longing, but for what? There were plenty of clouds around. There were plenty of colors around. There were enough particular historical moments. There were also plenty of combinations of all three. Contemporary art, in other words, the art which in principle ought to be of relevance to me, did not consider the feelings a work of art generated as valuable. Feelings were of inferior value, or perhaps even an undesirable by-product, a kind of waste product, or at best, malleable material, open to manipulation. Naturalistic depictions of reality had no value either, but were viewed as naïve and a stage of development that had been superseded long ago. There was not much meaning left in that. But the moment I focused my gaze on the painting again all my reasoning vanished in the surge of energy and beauty that arose in me. Yes, yes, yes, I heard. That’s where it is. That’s where I have to go. But what was it I had said yes to? Where was it I had to go?