“I’m afraid that then dialectics in its total abstrusity is only good for totally sick, ill, and mad people.”
— Goethe to Hegel, 1827
“It was unusable. However, what mattered was my passion and commitment”
— Vigdis Hjorth, Long Live the Post Horn! (translated by Charlotte Barslund)
[All unindented text below is taken directly from Vigdis Hjorth’s Long Live the Post Horn!, as translated by Charlotte Barslund. All indented objects are yours, truly.]
1
HE: Why are you pouting?
ME: "Because she does not express herself in theoretical language, no one expects too much from her and she is used to tripping out on layers of complexity in total silence." I’m quoting Chris Kraus in I Love Dick.
HE: Do you, though?
ME: She did.
I didn’t believe in ghosts so who was in the corner whispering? Dag, I said out loud. Then it grew deathly quiet. I looked across the fjord where the fog was descending and spreading out, hiding the tops of tall buildings and the masts of the biggest boats, then the smaller ones until finally everything was covered in grey. It wasn't nature screaming, nature was cool and numb, remote and inaccessible, it was me screaming a non-scream, me who was in the process of evaporating from lack of sustenance, I was completely beside myself, yet I'd never been inside myself. How to make the leap from screaming to writing, I wrote. To achieve in my language something I couldn't achieve in my life, I wrote, then I got up, went to the toilet and looked in the mirror, I was ill, I had been out too late that night in Paris, if I had really been there, what did the homeless do when they fell ill? I've nudged you, someone whispered, now you'll have to fall and hurt yourself. Despair, the voice said.
HE: You have your bed back. You escaped COVID contamination. You are now free from the no-place of the sofa.
SHE: I’m not so sure.
HE: What’s on your mind?
SHE: I’m thinking about Smithson’s use of mirrors in his “non-sites.” The making of spaces that reflect the viewer while throwing into shadow the factual world behind them. Wherever you look, the unflinching landscape looks back.
HE: What does the landscape have that you lack?
SHE: It has all the time in the world. All the time as we know it to show how Nothing reflects Nothing back.
. . . before switching on the light, he went to the kitchen, picked up a letter from the table and stuffed it into his coat pocket. Then he turned on the tap, bent down and drank straight from it as if he was very thirsty, as if that explained why he had rushed into the darkness. If I hadn't been paying attention, I wouldn't have noticed the business with the letter. It was small and square, not rectangular like an official brown envelope. He returned to the hall, turned on the light, took off his shoes and hung his coat on a hanger. The letter didn't stick out of the pocket. I decided not to get up in the night and sneak into the hall to read it. I wanted to preserve the curiosity I felt at that moment. So I'm capable of feeling something, I thought, I touched his arm, he jumped. Was it a love letter? An old flame he couldn't forget who had suddenly got in touch? We didn't have sex, the letter had come between us.
SHE: (writing in her notebook) When painting people close to him, Francis Bacon used photographs rather than sitting models. “I don’t want to practice before them the injury that I do to them in my work,” Bacon told critic David Sylvester.
[Tracey Emin’s tent installation titled “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 “ (1995), which burned up in a warehouse fire and has never been recreated]
Don't let them knock you off balance! Don't let them get to you. Then repeat what you've decided to say and add nothing else. Articulate in advance what you want to say in three or four different ways, same content, different wrapping.
[The needles, threads, and hands involved in stitching “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 “ (1995), which burned up in a warehouse fire and has never been recreated]
The secretive gap of the letterbox, I wrote. Two narrow for the biggest items, which must be collected with a delivery card, goods ordered online from the great abroad.
2
“Survival is a matter of avowing the trace of loss that inaugurates one’s own emergence.”
– Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power
“Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented.”
– Willem de Kooning
The shrill whistle of the steamer and the hoarse screeching of the seagulls, both reassuring sounds that everything is as it should be, amid repetition and the rhythms of nature, the whispering of the waves and the chirping of the birds, he was setting the scene just like we had done during the media training course.
A pair of portraits leaned side by side against a wall. . . . to vigorously mark the heads with lines as vividly yellow and blue and orange .. . underpainting . . . influenced by her research into the Greek myth in which the princess Danaë is impregnated by Zeus, who takes the form of a shower of gold. . . . several paintings by Titian. . . . . exploring ways to visually capture the moment of conception. Under the influence of religious imagery from the early Renaissance, she had incorporated cerulean and gold lines into depictions of several female figures . . . recalled Byzantine iconography, and a blue line piercing the subject’s cheekbone and emerging from her nostril evoked the way that, in some devotional paintings of the Annunciation from the fifteenth century, the Virgin is struck by a heavenly beam of light that enters through her window or doorway.
– excerpts from Rebecca Mead, “Jenny Saville, The Body Artist”
Then I was reminded of the letter, because we were eating at the kitchen table where it had been lying. So had his fairy tale found him after all in the form of a letter? A tale of unrequited love? His beloved had declared her love, but was tied to another and so he had to make do with me? Yet still he hoped? Had this been a Hollywood movie, I thought, and had the audience known the contents of the letter, they would pity him because he couldn't get the one he loved, but also pity me because I believed myself to be loved while my boyfriend loved another? Should I be pitied?
[The photograph of a young Roland Barthes in his mothers’ arms, captioned: “The demand for love.”]
The love letter, I wrote once I was back home, when it arrives with its declaration and everything is explained and out in the open. When it says black on white: I love you. I had never said those words, but now I had written them, bursting with unknown passion, with hitherto unknown hope. When the course has been set and the aim is clear, then no hesitation is necessary, I hammered away on the keyboard, my new secret love. No distractions in the form of responsibilities and unpaid bills, Christmas presents as yet unbought and time ticking away at the parking meter, forget all of that and remember this: that the button to be pushed is inside me and remember to push the button and climb the mountain of enlightenment and shout it out loud from the bottom of my heart, at that point I ran out of steam, but it was a start . . .
3
Once we have burned our brains out, we can plunge
to Hell or Heaven—any abyss will do—
deep in the Unknown to find the new!
—Charles Baudelaire
'Any letter without a clear name or address is put in a box labelled "addressee unknown" or in a box on which the postmaster has written "address incomplete", unless the sender has written their address on the back in which case the letter is returned to sender, but this is rare. Letters with no sender are junked when the boxes are full.’
Again there was nodding in the back rows.
'Thrown in the bin with trash and junk mail and that day's big, fat, lying newspapers, lost for all time!' Glum nodding ensued.
'But what if', Rudolf Karena Hansen said in a more solemn tone of voice, 'dead letters could be turned into living ones?'
'How?'
HE: Not everything needs to remembered.
ME: There is no recording of Walter Smetak’s 1970 production of Macbeth for which he recorded the instruments playing underwater.
HE: And why do you need that?
ME: I don’t think I need it…
A shadow fell across me, I looked around to see what had caused it, but there were no windows, the shelves were stuffed with toys in every colour right up to the ceiling and there were toys hanging from the ceiling, but there were no windows, I rushed outside. In the street I got my breath back and I went to a bookshop instead.
4
Speculative work cannot predetermine what actors or relations will matter until we follow, carefully and slowly, emergent entanglements in specific scenes. What we discover in that following may very well serve the interests of those in power - especially when those entanglements solidify into stable structures protecting elite interests - but then again, they may not. The open-ended, turbulent and bumpy nature of all entanglements means that they cannot be preemptively yoked to a priori categories of usefulness'. In this tempestuous intellectual landscape, we will find what we will find, regardless of what the university managers, funders and governments desire.
— Debbie Lisle, “A Speculative Lexicon of Entanglement”
Ah, philatelists, I thought, they’ll be on our side. Philatelists will support us, there are lots of them and most have the right to vote, the power to influence and a driving passion for stamps along with sentimentality, why has no one thought of them before? Philatelists of Norway unite against the EU's postal directive! Save the Post Office and Stamps for the People, I wrote once I got home, with the new king in profile, I added, because it was important to get the monarchists on board as well. Once again I was reminded of my childhood excitement at steaming stamps over the kettle and bashed the keyboard with renewed vigour. Long live the King and the royal family, I wrote, bursting with exuberance. Our quaint ambassadors for fjords and mountains and stamps. Our dogged and occasionally well-dressed champions, our timorous heartbeat's chosen ones, a source of comfort in times of hardship, leading actors in our anxious minds. We hail your blurred royalty! We celebrate our ageing Monarch, so lacking in pretension, and his cultured Queen with poems, paintings and presumably stamps, our unimpeachable Crown Prince so seemingly tender-hearted, our film star Crown Princess, our penitent Cinderella who gave a face to single mothers, the image of her naked body lives inside the heads of men of all ages in towns and villages, our whore and Madonna. We celebrate their duality and their duplicity, and our angelic Princess who talks to horses, dogs, daughters and the dead. In prison and in times of distress we want tiny squares of our better betters glued to our most important messages and tentative greetings and our Christmas cards because what would we do without them and their castle that stands full square like a stamp in the middle of a dangerous park guarded by men in horsehair helmets and holding shiny bayonets. Oh, royal family, royal ancestry of blue blood, older than the red post office, its high protectors, let yourselves be depicted so that you can be licked by our wet and willing tongues and thus ensure our missives reach their destination.
[Various images from the post album my grandfather taught me to keep, a history of Romanian stamps from the year of my birth until 1989, when everything shifted]
Once I got home, I opened my laptop to begin writing the Real Thing pitch, not because I wanted to but because I had to, to get it over and done with so I could devote myself to the postal directive. I wrote that the Real Thing was likely to be a success. There was a big market for all things real and genuine since many people felt themselves to be fake and imposters, I wrote, myself included, I added, but deleted it, it might be heartfelt and true but it was unprofessional. Then I hit a wall. What exactly did 'real' mean?
“Noli me tangere,” Jesus of Nazareth said to Mary Magdalene, as they stood inside the tomb negotiating relationality post-resurrection.
Was the man behind the Real Thing himself the real thing, I wondered? I googled him; he looks like every other capitalist.
[Photograph of Donald Trump wearing a suit and holding an adult female’s hand as a crowd moves out of a church and a child tries to find the word that would communicate the feeling of watching a yellow balloon drift from his hand up into the sky and vanish completely.]
'That I a strange experience in Alta,’ I said.
'Yes?'
But where should I begin?
Yes?' he said again, and then I remembered that he was on the edge and if I didn't get it right, I might get it badly wrong, and I said that the right words were proving hard to find and that I couldn't articulate what I wanted to say. He said he knew what I meant because he often felt that way, then he said that he was going on a winter holiday with his mother and Truls. He paused and then he said that he had missed me.
ME: Speaking of the two revolutionists who find themselves dying at the end of Sylvia Warner Townsend’s After the Death of Don Juan (1938), Heather Love compares them to Walter Benjamin’s soothsayers who “can promise nothing; all they have to offer is the depth of their longing.”
VIGDIS: …. you might as well stop swimming today as tomorrow or the day after, except that the water was colder here than in France, and my feet were already cold. And yet there was something I couldn't dismiss with my logic; a restless yearning in my body like an unrequited love I couldn't get over.
RADU: Long live the post horn!
*
“When someone asks what is your writing process, I think it must be to try and try and then finally, in the gap between the limits of my body and the possibility of pulling something through, somewhere in that gap—"
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Touching the Art