The Atom Station

5. At my organist’s

Judging by pictures on postcards, one would think that great musicians had been gods, not men. But now I learned that the world’s greatest composers have been the most wretched outcasts of humanity. Schubert was considered by good-class people in Vienna nothing but an uneducated boy who did not even know anything about music; and he revenged himself, indeed, by composing a cheap tune like Ave Maria that even country people in the north know; and died of malnutrition at about the age of thirty. Beethoven did not even get a rudimentary petit-bourgeois education; he could only just use a pen, no better than a farm hand; and he wrote a ludicrous letter which is called his Testament. He fell in love with a few countesses, rather like an old hack falling for stud-mares. In the eyes of good-class people in Vienna he was first and foremost just a deaf eccentric, badly dressed and dirty, not fit for decent company. But these two outcasts stood high in society compared with some others of the world’s greatest composers. Many of them were employed by comic-opera kings and were kept to play for them while they were feeding—including Johann Sebastian Bach, who, however, wasted even more years quarrelling with the bourgeois riffraff of Leipzig. Haydn, the world’s greatest composer of his time, was frequently beaten by the Esterhazy family, for whom he was a workman for thirty years; he was not even allowed to eat at their table. Mozart, the man who most nearly reached the celestial heights, stood lower in the hierarchy of society than the lap-dogs of the petty kings and bishop-oafs who used him as a drudge. When he died of misery and wretchedness in the prime of life, not a living creature followed his coffin to the grave except for one mongrel; people made the excuse that it had been raining; some said they had had influenza.

By now I was asking for the dance of the fire-worshippers: wild men beating drums at night around a pyre out in the rain… and suddenly some instrument breaking into a four-note melody with a searing quality that went right through me; and a few days later, in the middle of my work, I would wake to a sudden sweet stab of longing for that wild, brief, blazing melody.

And one day I noticed that there was some hair after all on the head of the cloven girl I had thought bald—light-blue hair, or rather green, thick and greasy. I had not previously noticed that head and hair were painted separately; well, thank goodness all her hair was there for certain—only separated from the head by a white line.

Queen Cleopatra, barefoot, wearing silk panties and a fur coat, with a cigarette in her mouth and covered with makeup, went gliding into the kitchen from the room of the bedridden mother of the house.

“I’m beginning to want that coffee,” she said.

The organist: “Cleopatra, you own the whole of Brazil, and Turkey, and Java”—and I cannot remember what other coffee-lands he listed.

“Yes, but she hasn’t got eleven fingers,” I said, and looked at the picture on the wall.

“Who knows,” said the organist, “but what the eleventh finger is the very finger she lacks even though she deserves to have it?”

“A picture is still a picture,” I said.

“And nothing else,” he said. “The other day I saw a photograph of a typist, and she has thirty-five fingers.”

“Shall I go into the kitchen and count Cleopatra’s fingers?” I said.

He said, “A picture is not a girl, even though it is the picture of a girl. One can even say that the more closely a picture resembles a girl, so much the further it is from being a girl. Everyone wants to sleep with a girl, but no one wants to sleep with the image of a girl. Even an exact wax model of Cleopatra has no blood-stream, and no vagina. You do not like the eleventh finger, but now I shall tell you something: the eleventh finger takes the place of these two things.”

When he had said this he looked at me and laughed. Then he leaned over to me and whispered, “Now I am going to let you into the most remarkable secret of all: the image of Cleopatra that resembles her more closely than all other images, namely the person who has just walked through this room and into the kitchen to make some coffee—she of course has a blood-stream and many other nice things, but even so, she is furthest of all from being Cleopatra. Nothing tells one less about Cleopatra than this apparently haphazard but yet logical biochemical synthesis. Even the man who celebrates a silver wedding anniversary with her after twenty-five years of marriage will not know more about her than the one who lay with her for half an hour, or than you who see her for a few seconds crossing a room; the fact is, she is not even a likeness of herself. And this is what the artist knows; and that is why he paints her with eleven fingers.”

Next day I stood in the middle of the room beside two domestic animals—an electric floor polisher and a vacuum cleaner—and began to study the pictures in the house. I had often looked at these ten- or even twenty-centimeter mountains which seemed to have been made sometimes of porridge, sometimes of bluish sago pudding, sometimes a mash of curds—sometimes even like an upturned bowl with Eiriks Glacier underneath; and I had never been able to understand where I was meant to be placed, because anyone who comes from the north and has lived opposite a mountain cannot understand a mountain in a picture in the south.

In this house there hung, so to speak, mountains and mountains and yet more mountains, mountains with glacial caps, mountains by the sea, ravines in mountains, lava below mountains, birds in front of mountains; and still more mountains; until finally these wastelands had the effect of a total flight from habitation, almost a denial of human life. I would not dream of trying to argue that this was not art, especially since I do not have the faintest idea what art is; but if this was art, it was first and foremost the art of those who had sinned against humanity and fled into the wilderness, the art of outlaws. Quite apart from how debased Nature becomes in a picture, nothing seems to me to express so much contempt for Nature as a painting of Nature. I touched the waterfall and did not get wet, and there was no sound of cascade; over there was a little white cloud, standing still instead of breaking up; and if I sniffed that mountain slope I bumped my nose against a congealed mass and found only a smell of chemicals, at best a whiff of linseed oil; and where were the birds? And the flies? And the sun, so that one’s eyes were dazzled? Or the mist, so that one only saw a faint glimmer of the nearest willow shrub? Yes, certainly this was meant to be a farmhouse, but where, pray, was the smell of the cow dung? What is the point of making a picture which is meant to be like Nature, when everyone knows that this is the one thing that a picture cannot be and should not be and must not be? Who thought up the theory that Nature is a matter of sight alone? Those who know Nature hear it rather than see it, feel it rather than hear it; smell it, good heavens, yes—but first and foremost eat it. Certainly Nature is in front of us, and behind us; Nature is under and over us, yes, and in us; but most particularly it exists in time, always changing and always passing, never the same; and never in a rectangular frame.

A farmhouse with a turf roof is not what it looks like from a distance some sunshine night in July; nothing is further from being a farmhouse. I had spent all my childhood in a farm opposite a mountain; it would be no use for anyone who wanted to paint my farm to start from the turf roof, he would have to start from the inside and not the outside, start from the minds of those who lived there. And a bird, I also know what a bird is. Oh, those dear divine birds! It may well be that this picture of a bird cost many thousands of kronur, but, may I ask, could any honorable person, or any person who appreciates birds at all, justify to his own conscience painting a bird sitting on a stone for all eternity, motionless as a convicted criminal or a country person posing for the photographer at Krok? For a bird is first and foremost movement; the sky is part of a bird, or rather, the air and the bird are one; a long journey in a straight line into space, that is a bird; and heat, for a bird is warmer than a man and has a quicker heartbeat, and is happier besides, as one can hear from its call—for there is no sound like the chirp of a bird and it is not a bird at all if it does not chirp. This soundless bird on a stone, this picture of no movement, no long journey in a straight line, might have been meant to represent the dead stuffed bird that stood on top of a cabinet in our pastor’s house at home; or the tin birds one could buy at Krok when I was small. But a picture of a dead bird is not that of a bird, but of death; stuffed death; tin death.