PRAISE FOR One of Us is Sleeping AND JOSEFINE KLOUGART
“Denmark’s pre-eminent postmodernist writer.”
—Fjords Magazine
“Scandinavia has its own Virginia Woolf. Few come closer to the human condition than Klougart.” —VG (NORWAY)
“Klougart’s graceful and precise language propels the novel through a succession of images that justify the vagueness of that feeling, what is eventually described as something akin to ‘separating an egg, passing the yolk from hand to hand, the fragile yolk that might break at any moment.’ This is a beguiling conjuring of consciousness.’” —Publishers Weekly
“Therein lies Klougart’s genius. She renders the emotional landscape in impressionistic soft focus. The speaker’s voice arrests because it conveys more than setting, plot, or character development—it transmits powerful feelings.” —LANIE TANKARD, World Literature Today
“Klougart delivers a sustained meditation on love, loss, and alienation.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Klougart deftly transports us into another person’s mind while simultaneously showing us our own.” —RACHEL S. CORDASCO, Bookishly Witty
“Klougart has crafted a rich novel. Her evocative explorations of how words and life work in tandem to tease meaning from the seemingly inexplicable and random events of life combine to create a novel that is richly creative and boldly written.” —ERIC MARONEY, Colorado Review
“A dolorous, yet beautifully composed work of failed love, loss, and lament. The star of Klougart’s book is her gorgeous, evocative imagery and emotional acuity.” —JEREMY GARBER, Three Percent
“A consistently compelling read from beginning to end.”
—Midwest Book Review
ALSO AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH BY JOSEFINE KLOUGART
One of Us is Sleeping
translated by Martin Aitken
Deep Vellum Publishing
3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226
deepvellum.org · @deepvellum
Deep Vellum Publishing is a 501C3
nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013.
Copyright © Josefine Klougart and Gladiator, 2013
Published by agreement with Leonhardt & Høier Literary Agency A/S, Copenhagen
Originally published in Danish as Om mørke
by Forlaget Gladiator, Copenhagen, Denmark
English translation copyright © 2017 by Martin Aitken
First edition, 2017
All rights reserved.
The author would like to thank
The Danish Arts Foundation for their support.
ISBN: 978-1-941920-50-3 (paperback) · 978-1-941920-51-0 (ebook)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2016959329
—
DANISH ARTS FOUNDATION
This translation has been supported with
a grant from the Danish Arts Foundation.
—
Cover design & typesetting by Anna Zylicz · annazylicz.com
Text set in Bembo, a typeface modeled on typefaces cut by Francesco Griffo
for Aldo Manuzio’s printing of De Aetna in 1495 in Venice.
Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
OF DARKNESS
PROLOGUE
SCENE 1
SCENE 2
SCENE 3
SCENE 4
SCENE 5
SCENE 6
SCENE 7
SCENE 8
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“Assuming that beauty is the distribution of light in the fashion most congenial to one’s retina, a tear is an acknowledgment of the retina’s, as well as the tear’s, failure to retain beauty. On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound. It is the deterioration of the greater speed to the lesser that moistens one’s eye. Because one is finite, a departure from this place always feels final; leaving it behind is leaving it forever. For leaving is a banishment of the eye to the provinces of the other senses; at best to the crevices and crevasses of the brain. For the eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention. And to the eye, for purely optical reasons, departure is not the body leaving the city but the city abandoning the pupil. Likewise, disappearance of the beloved, especially a gradual one, causes grief no matter who, and for what peripatetic reason, is actually in motion. As the world goes, this city is the eye’s beloved. After it, everything is a letdown. A tear is the anticipation of the eye’s future.”
Joseph Brodsky, Watermark: An Essay on Venice
All that the eyes see, upon which a gaze falls.
A bag someone places on the floor is: a bag someone places on the floor. All things remain as things, and in that way they are here. The room is not disrupted, the chronology is not disrupted—none of its constituent parts have ever been together in that way. The way I have always been she, and you have always been he. There isn’t necessarily any problem in that. A movement in and out of our bodies, a recollection returned, wandering back and forth between us. Or an anger no one understands. A common reservoir, the increasingly threadlike capillaries of the veins; something proceeding through time, then turning back.
All sounds are quite as distinct. All voices can be heard, and as such none enjoys priority.
A whisper is as clear as a shout. Something serves to amplify the weaker sounds and lengthen the louder ones so that we may hear them. The eyes decide for themselves what they want to observe.
That may be a comfort.
The ceiling, like the spine of a crouching animal. The duality of movement: inwards and outwards; down to the floor, then up. A whisper, and the space expands. Or: a whisper, and the space is compressed.
Not focusing on anything allows things to emerge more clearly. The ways in which they connect—with the eyes that see, and the bodies that listen. The fact of the eye requiring distance in order for an image to come together again in a new way.
Plains and skin. Coasts, cuticles.
Such leaps, on all imaginable scales.
Sound and image work on their own, independently. A thing such as distance. What can distances be measured against. A sky. A sail we have stretched out between walls. The arching vaults of cathedrals.
And the same goes for time, the past mingling with what is; the salient past that is here, and all that is yet to come: here.
The will of the image, and the will of sound. A liberation of the different planes.
For instance:
The image of a beach, a broad belt of sand in panorama. There are no people in sight, we see only beach, sea, sky. Presently we hear two voices, a man and a woman talking. We hear them clearly, their voices rise with ease above the clamour of the waves.
Next, they enter the frame, and the image splits into two images superimposed: the beach before and the beach now; before him and after him, before her and after her; everything that happened here will happen here—happens here. Death is perhaps merely a displacement, the same as silence. A moment’s imprudence and then again: here.
She opens her eyes and sees the sky through the crown of the tree.
He is standing in the boat, watching the ash settle like a film upon
the sea.
The sea, calmed; the sea, placid now the wind has died.
The ash upon the surface, a rise and fall with the shifting swell,
a soothing hand, a membrane containing all that is fluid.
Like skin covered in burns.
One can no longer see the sky reflected in the sea;
the sky, mirrored no more; the sea, no lo
nger returned by his eyes,
ash, descended upon orbs, lids above the oceans;
and she, as she lies here beneath the tree,
sees the sky dappled by its branches.
The sky is an eye.
Later, she must have been crying—her eyes are bloodshot.
The dying of the wind makes her open her eyes; the sky and the
tree reflected there.
The ash remains; the family must come ashore again,
a tight huddle in the boat,
joined together by the missing of another,
fingers knotted; coming apart and coming together,
filling out a shell.
All to no avail.
Grief, condensing, a pearl in the hand;
music in the next room.
Blue-black canvas. Nothing in the frame but that.
Threadbare canvas, greyed and lame beneath the sun.
The long fingers of the sun counting out different objects
or dabbing at them,
picking out buildings, areas,
illuminating one thing from outside, something else from within.
A few objects can be sufficient.
Illuminating from within.
A movement we understand with our eyes; things reaching out
to you with light.
Or else: our eyes understand differently than the mind; the blun-
dering mind. If one can distinguish and choose, then it is the eyes
one must embrace.
Trusting as the sleepwalker, the world throwing itself before the
eyes.
There is but one light in the world, belonging to the universe;
beaming from the galaxy, radiant in objects and things, passing
through the eye, this way or that; give me your hand, like this.
At first we see only the fabric, an expanse of smokish blue.
After a while we see the movement.
A body breathing beneath the cover.
A body is a crack through which to breathe.
After some time: a sudden adjustment of position, a glimpse of
bare skin,
not pale, but not the opposite,
neither rough nor smooth.
The eyes, borrowing and returning.
The eyes borrow the woman and the hills, the sea, the trees,
all that can be seen. The skin, according all movements direction;
towards or away.
A person is the only thing that can move a person.
An absence of interest in nature as it is found out there,
or perhaps an interest in what is human in nature.
Nature’s humanity, if that’s something we can talk about.
Where everything is a directed approach.
What do we do with that which is without direction?
Emotion undirected, and a feeling of being left out, always.
It’s not combat; there isn’t that much left to conquer, not in that
sense.
White flags.
She remembered they had talked at length and with gravity, that
he had looked at her with resignation and asked what there was
to be gained.
There is no movement in the frame.
The woman in the picture. She is lying on her side; we see her
knees from above, the clarity of tendons.
Still the syntax of nature exists, the sentence spoken: one voice
among several.
Or writing emerged from under limewash, now simply there, a
gaping wound affording sight of a time other than the one in
which you want to be.
We see her body in its entirety;
the landscape a blur in the background,
darkness.
The weave of the fabric, ripples of cotton, alternating dark and
light,
the shiny, skin-like quality of its surface.
Metallic, like the sea’s metal gleam in mid-morning.
Stillness, because what we see has no borders, no horizon, nothing
that reaches an end.
Our field of vision draws the only boundaries, and they are all
but imperceptible to us.
Within the frame of our vision, the picture, all that we have:
blue fabric.
We come no closer, only the opposite—we are moving away.
Moving backwards,
losing the pores of the woman’s skin, we lose the pores, the fair
down of her upper lip that you discovered, the lines of her skin
reminding you of some other age—youth, funnily enough, that
couldn’t quite be placed.
One step at a time, backwards across the fields, upwards through
the hills, stumbling,
higher still.
More and more dry red earth is seen, more and more of the earth’s
skin, less of the woman’s.
If you can tell the difference, then that’s the way it is.
The eye weeps because it is always losing something. Cities. Views.
All that the eye no longer sees is lost.
Rapid movements; the business of turning round on a step;
of moving to the other end of the country; grasping a bottle of
pills before it hits the floor, nodding and retreating a few despair-
ing paces before sleep in the final metres;
leaving furniture under wraps, yet another summer, houses, apart-
ments, gardens, a street light’s sad persistence, reading through all
your messages before you wake.
And still: the fact that only what we once saw is close enough to
us, so close we can reach out and touch it.
We touch it with our wanting or with our joy. A returning wish
to retain something or
merely keep it here a moment.
Always the same exchange: what you get, and what you deliver.
What the eyes get, and what they lose. A city to leave.
My body as it was, an apartment, a city.
Before you wake.
The hills, or a jam jar with a single pearl inside.
The details of the skin, the birth spots on your neck and the four
pale scars on your legs after the thorn,
that’s how I think of it.
With distance all the surfaces become more distinct.
We see the skin as a surface, the sweep of a landscape, the fir trees
a belt beneath the sky, the ocean a blue band keeping the sky in
place, the glassy sky during spring.
The city is a smear of grey on the peninsula. Extolled cities, how
could they ever disappoint;
what wanting does to what is wanted.
You feel the relationship between body and land, as if it were
sickness,
you feel it,
what it does to the body,
the place from which understanding something begins.
And the way the body is then an area, a surface, the way the fabric
is another.
There are no hierarchies,
there are planes latticing like day and night. Plaiting one’s hair
tight.
Distances alter when the eye finds a place to attach.
What eye can see in such a way.
We see a leg, a bare ankle.
A brown sandal of the kind I had when I was a child.
Flaxen hair like a bunch of flowers dropped in the sand.
She sleeps and shifts in sleep. The trusting movements that occur
in sleep.
Even unnatural sleep,
the sleep of alcohol or medicine, has something touching about it.
Through her thin eyelids we see her eyes.
The unsettled birds.
Ice, twisting itself apart in the bay, the rhythm possessed by nature,
&n
bsp; seen from somewhere else everything occurs in patterns,
there is a rhythm underneath all that is small,
all that is horrific, the tiny hairs below the eyebrow, plucked
throughout a life,
to the eyes distance is not crucial the way it is to the person dis-
turbed, to me, who is always
disturbed by details and the seasons. The composition and the
rhythm of all things is the same in the smallest and the greatest,
distance makes the pattern clearer;
my distance from you, today, as I pass through the city in which
we met,
visit the same café and generally;
try to get closer to you.
The rhythm of all things, not as a logical structure, but a sonnet
or a tree or a symphony;
simply that, something finding its proper place.
A moment only,
of falling into the world, standing on top of Stabelhøj Hill and
leaning back against the wind,
finding a point of balance there,
only then to tumble once more.
Standing there three times in the course of a life.
Balance is no stable state,
but disintegrates, the same way that the proper place vanishes,
the light changing, now once more another, once more again.
We have pulled away and see now her body in one image;
perhaps thinking that motion away must halt before her body
disappears, the way a pore of the skin disappears, burns out.
A feeling of standing with your back against a mountainside,
or with your heels on the edge of a gorge.
The distance becomes greater,
we see more and more of the hill.
The hill, sweeping up from the sea, and in a corner of the picture,
vanishing: this blue heap of fabric, the skin as an area of land
within the interior.
An object falling from a flatbed on the square.
Four or five glances picking it up.
A hand that does. A hand closing around it,
the way the dirt is brushed from it with a corner of a blue scarf,
the careful way it’s returned to the pile, as if putting a sleeping
child to its bed,
carried in from the pristine car, through pristine snow, to the
pristine bed.
Of Darkness Page 1