Misology, the distrust of words, as was the case with Phyrros, Phyrromania; was that a way to go for a writer? Everything that can be said with words can be contradicted with words, so what’s the point of dissertations, novels, literature? Or put another way: whatever we say is true we can also always say is untrue. It is a zero point and the place from which the zero value begins to spread. However, it is not a dead point, not for literature either, for literature is not just words, literature is what words evoke in the reader. It is this transcendence that validates literature, not the formal transcendence in itself, as many believe. Paul Celan’s mysterious cypher-like language has nothing to do with inaccessibility or closed-ness, quite the contrary, it is about opening up what language normally does not have access to but which we still, somewhere deep inside us, know or recognise, or if we don’t, allows us to discover. Paul Celan’s words cannot be contradicted with words. What they possess cannot be transformed either, the word only exists there, and in each and every single person who absorbs it.
The fact that paintings and, to some extent, photographs were so important for me had something to do with this. They contained no words, no concepts, and when I looked at them what I experienced, what made them so important was also non-conceptual. There was something stupid in this, an area that was completely devoid of intelligence, which I had difficulty acknowledging or accepting, yet which perhaps was the most important single element of what I wanted to do.
Six months after I had read Geir’s book, I emailed him and asked if he would like to write an essay for Vagant, where I was on the editorial staff. He said he would, we emailed back and forth, all in formal and factual terms. A year later, when from one day to the next I left Tonje and my life with her in Bergen, I emailed to ask if he knew of anywhere to live in Stockholm; he didn’t, but I could stay at his place while I was looking for something. Sounds good, I wrote. Fine, he wrote, when are you coming? Tomorrow, I wrote. Tomorrow? he wrote.
Some hours later, after a night on the train from Bergen to Oslo, and a morning on the train from Oslo to Stockholm, I schlepped my bags from the platform down to the corridors beneath Stockholm Central in search of a left-luggage locker big enough to take them both. I had spent the whole journey reading to avoid thinking about what had happened in the preceding days, all of which was the reason for my departure, but now in the midst of the thronging crowds of people heading to or from commuter trains it was impossible to suppress my unease any longer. Feeling cold to the depths of my soul, I walked down the corridor. After stowing the two bags in separate lockers and putting the two keys in the pocket where I normally kept my house keys, I entered the toilet and washed my face with cold water to make myself feel more alive. I studied myself in the mirror for a few seconds. My face was pale and slightly bloated, hair unkempt and eyes… yes, my eyes… staring, but not in an active outward-facing fashion, as though they were looking for something, more as if what they saw was drawn into them, as if they sucked everything in.
Since when had I had such eyes?
I turned on the hot-water tap and held my hands underneath it for a while, until the heat began to spread through them, tore off a sheet of paper from the dispenser and dried them, threw it in the bin beside the sink. I weighed 101 kilos and had no hopes for the future, but now I was here, that was something, I thought, and then went out, up the steps and into the concourse, where I stood in the middle, surrounded by people on all sides while I tried to devise some kind of plan. It was just past two o’clock. I was due to meet Geir here at five. So I had three hours to kill. I had to eat. I needed a scarf. And I ought to have a haircut.