Brightly shining water from the innermost core. More shining water follows after. All is tranquil. A tranquil movement that does not look as if it can ever come to an end. Merely moving on. It is all ordered without any trouble.
Large matters and small. And the matter today? What of that?
No matter any longer. This is a farewell procession of quenched, intense desires. And they are being carried to the ocean.
It glides out of the landscape and towards the distant, wide ocean. For the one who has an inkling, however small, of the ocean, the tranquil journey is not important.
*
The mighty river casts out what has no resting-place. No one interferes with it.
It is as simple as that, as tranquil as that.
*
As if something has reared up behind a hazy hill far beyond what is called the horizon: what has no resting-place any longer must be carried away. A river still as a mirror is clear from within; there is no more to it than that, it seems.
The air may be charged with bitter questions, useless questions. They will not be asked. They merely rest above the carrying water, rest while on the move like everything else. No current halts because it is difficult to understand that intense desires are quenched.
The fine carrying surface is filled with reflections from the banks, reflections so vivid that they are ready to tear themselves away and glide with it. But this must be a long journey after all; the hillsides and woods shudder to see their reflections exhibited thus, mirrored so translucently.
The river is the carrier, and it carries away a quenched desire, and has the most limpid water.
Yet the hillsides and woods do not join the company. They see themselves in the water, but remain where they are. It has been ordered so that no one may go wherever he wishes.
*
Questions are in the air.
But no answers.
There will never be any answers. The water glides out of the wood and past all questioners. What is so difficult? Farewell to a thousand glimmers, and a thousand rough raps and noises. All kinds of blessed sounds. What offers resistance? What is reluctant?
None of the banks will collapse; slowly the earth builds up and holds fast, slowly it acquires strength from an incredible variety of sources, and holds.
The shining water and its carrying. It seems so easy. What is difficult is obscure, and shyness forbids further questioning.
This is not exposure to the ravens.
It is high water after gales and heavy rain. Slender birch saplings growing on the banks have not regained their strength after the storm: they stand arched over, dipping their crowns in the water, looking like young girls, gentle, anxious and full of expectancy. The traveller speeds past.
*
A journey to the ocean can scarcely be ordered more fittingly. Gentleness has no part in this. Gentleness is left behind with the pliant birches.
Is it difficult to go on?
Not now.
Nothing can be grasped, nothing can be set aside to sink to the bottom. These soundless thunderclaps that are part of the process come first, the mirror of water comes oozing after, obstructed by so many hindrances. Hindrances in the stone walls and the earth banks, in leaning trees, even in bent straws. Imperceptibly it all melts away, it releases the tight little hold it has had. Everything is taken care of, all the grips and holds and hindrances loosen.
Not to be halted by a couple of bent straws.
Not to be halted by a memory.
To have a shining fairway to be carried upon. Now it moves straight on. The surface filters through the newest buds the whole time.
Is it difficult to go on?
Not now. There’s only the final message to be sent out. A slight pause while it becomes clear that we are going to the ocean. But what does that mean?
The answer comes: The ocean is the ocean.
Was that answer good enough? Why did that answer come? Does it perhaps not matter so much any more?
What does good enough mean?
What does matter mean?
No one has said that it does not matter. Have we not heard the thunderclap that this stillness creates? Then it matters enough. Perhaps it did not answer properly after all. It gets more and more difficult to detect an answer. What is it one has not known?
The shining, tranquil water glides out of the landscape, bearing what has no resting-place.
13
Beyond One’s Grasp
Scent of the first rain on a light dress, over warm flesh.
What of it?
Or on my own light shirt.
Fleeting, precious moments.
A scent that is gone as one turns round and stops speaking. Things that can’t last smell like that, things unaware of their existence. Quietly hidden on the tongue behind words of love.
Beyond one’s grasp—like the things one would like to have close when one ought not to wish for more.
*
The first drop on a linen shirt.
One stops short on the road and lifts one’s face, perceiving something: Yet another loss.
A message from a loss, strangely vivid, with no name.
This loss is the final thing of importance, the thing that incites, that strikes, and that creates.
The anticipation is important, but the loss comes last. The road becomes difficult across deep clefts, the side tracks get entangled in their own knots, and the meeting places become invisible.
*
But to explain what is beyond words about the scent of the first rain. There is a truth behind it, a truth one turns away from perhaps.
Again a truth, behind the words of love.
There are layers upon layers. It is wrong to come forward and pretend that one knows.
We sense it as a message, but the signals and the truths conceal themselves behind countless veils. We do not want to know; we accept the scent hastily, before the truth lies naked and near.
Veils. We cover it up quickly. One must keep a sense of wonder—like the longing that rises up between us on warm days, in the first drops in a shower of rain.
*
Thud, goes something beneath my foot on the ascent, beneath my boot. The flat stone on the path taps gently against the rock when I step on it; it is not lying steady, it can tilt over.
Thud, says the stone.
Not unexpected.
The stone on the path and I are good friends. It has been a reticent friendship for a long time now. Mysterious in its extreme simplicity.
Never disappointing.
A thud today as usual.
Or is it different this year? Once more, slightly new and different?
Why should that be?
Stuff and nonsense, I say, but perhaps I really wished it to be so.
Thud, at any rate, in affirmation, sealing the compact, tilting and tapping on the rock. A signal far within saying that it is now. That it simply is.
What is now? That is not explained. But it speaks to my heart and I understand the language. It speaks softly as if to someone poor and shy.
All’s well, it means.
I say nothing about my affairs; it is a soliloquy about our long friendship. All’s well.
Thud, about you and me and the summer, the brief summer, our happiness, evenings—and then that subtle signal from within. One imagines that it is being passed along far, far inside in the heavy rock chambers. And there the message is clear.
*
It will continue on the steep ascent.
All’s well.
The stone with its gentle welcome.
The stone that is there to stay.
The stone will greet each new wanderer on the ascent in its reticent language. Throughout all ages and throughout all ages. The restless wanderer will find peace and yet more peace.
And you?
Shyly you came to the path and asked. Shyly you came to know and understand.
14
Just Walking Up to Fetch the Chur
n
It seems so trivial, but it doesn’t take much.
Just walking up to fetch the milk chum early one morning can be a miracle.
The scents are a part of it. They are forgotten and reappear, like old songs. The great song about scents cannot be learned by heart, but it accompanies you wherever you go.
*
The sun came up recently over the ridge, and is spilling over the hillside. You have come out of the house to fetch the milk chum from the ledge up by the road. It is summer.
The scents matured during the hot day yesterday. Last night they hovered here acquiring a cool, intoxicating taste, but translucent and a little distant from us too. The sun renews it all in a moment.
And not only renews, but creates for today. Every day something new at this hour. The greenwood quickens as it does in the song, and our own hillsides quicken too. It is all around us, it will never leave us. It is like an agreement about being here together.
There are many things one would not want to miss. Just walking up to the road to fetch the milk chum in this teeming hour, before a new day in the heat-wave.
The hour of becoming before full daylight. He who sleeps sins when he sleeps away this.
*
Familiar farmyard birds fly up from the steps as you leave the house. Magpie and starling. Pretending to be afraid; not afraid at all. Out and about early. They settle on the nearest roof-tree, not the slightest bit scared. Simply looking to see whether anything has been dropped. The swallows are already sweeping the sky in endless pursuit; by evening they must be some of the most exhausted creatures in the world. Who could imagine that of a streamlined, floating swallow! In the morning you find joy, and the swallow itself seems bom of blue air and joy.
When you finally reach the main road the newly arrived milk churn is standing on the platform. The lane that leads up to it is a short one and makes a familiar crunching sound. It is on a hillside too. Nothing but hills. All of a sudden you feel the sun on your shoulders like a warm embrace.
The sun-warmed earth with its blades of grass, its ants and its flowers makes the hillside breathe out mixed spices towards you. And mixed for today.
Spices. Beyond all reason it makes you think of the cardamom-scented air in a pre-Christmas house when you were a child. In a snowed-under house in a snowed-under farmyard, a yard glittering with frost. There is no resemblance, but the wonderful enticement grips you, now as then.
Beyond all reason. But it is good. A dizziness at being alive in the midst of everything that makes the earth a fine place to live in. From a rustling summer morning to cardamom.
*
And then the girl on the road.
She came walking along simply in order to round off the picture. Girls on the road. They belong.
She belongs to the morning, walking long-legged, as if stepping in tall grass—I do not understand why. There is no grass on the crunching road. I cannot ask her, it is simply beautiful and right that she should walk like that, exactly like that. It would have been the same however she moved, I suppose. You can see she is walking wide-eyed because of the morning. Walking home in wonderment. Perhaps she has come from a dance somewhere and is happy. Stepping as if in tall grass.
The birches lean towards each other above the lane as she passes; they meet above her head as if she were a new Bendik’s maid.* As if in tall grass she walks, not into death, but towards life.
*
Flowers among the stones, and buds ready to open. The sun will pour down and the scents change as everything is awakened. You can see it already: never has there been such intense flowering on the hillsides as this year. As there will be, many have not yet blossomed. You are a part of this. You are meant to be here.
The strong awareness of being part of it all. In wonderment you walk on the hillside, in a morning shower of strangeness, just to fetch the milk chum.
Footnote
* Bendik and Aurolilja: a medieval Norwegian ballad of doomed love. The flowers planted on the lovers’ graves met and entwined overhead.
15
The Melody
A shadow over her?
No, none.
Does he see no shadow on her?
Not now.
There has been no shadow for many years.
No, and the dead cannot rise out of the earth to create one either. So there is none.
*
The light was not always so clear.
During the time when we were in her care and growing up, it could darken a little, and shadows could speed past, and sorrows speed past. They could feel bitter. In fact they were tremendous fantasies. Clear light shines around her. We cannot claim to be able to point to a single stain. Perhaps it has been washed away because we do not want to know about it, cannot bear it, will not allow it.
If anyone says it is not true, we are at once prepared with the answer that it is more than true, unshakeably true. And so it always will be. Do not come and say anything that creates shadows, face to face with such firm faith.
*
Beautiful girls.
For a boy there is strong enchantment in the word alone. We heard it and were aware of it for years, without being clear about what it meant. Later we learned how mistakenly, to the point of absurdity, it could be used. How uncertain a judgement it was. How blind and superficial it could be. It was not an easy lesson to learn.
But when we saw it lying thickly outside too, then we could not help ourselves. One was drawn towards it, and wanted to be drawn towards it. What was it? A state of well-being. An uplifting into something light, so it seemed, where one did not really belong, but was graciously allowed to stay for a little. It usually vanished quite quickly and was gone elsewhere.
We listened tensely to this talk of beautiful girls, alongside our own thoughts. We had them for a good and obvious reason.
At home there was an album bound in yellow leather, and in it there were beautiful girls. We often looked at it when the grown-ups were out of the room. But we saw most of them with indifference, we only looked at one of them.
And we saw her alive every single day.
The others in the album were her friends at the school she had attended as a grown girl. They were strangely dressed-up, these girls, in clothes that were different from those we were used to seeing on women. Most of them had piled up their hair, and all of them were smooth and pale, with skin like cream.
We leafed past them until we came to the place we were looking for, to the only important one.
Perhaps she was dressed up too, but no more than was just right. When we came to her in the pages of the album we did not say a word. We had habitual ways of talking about the others, and not particularly flattering ones either, making fun of things that differed too much from the way we thought they should be. Here we did nothing like that. We fell silent and looked.
At her.
She was just as she should be.
In every way.
But at the same time we saw something else that surprised us and worried us a little.
This was how Mother had looked when she was a girl and utterly young. So exciting and so attractive. And so kind in every way, it seemed. And so incredibly soft—and we weren’t thinking about cream.
Yes, but there was something in all this that was never mentioned. We did not wish to. We just thought it. We could hear her as we sat there thinking. She was as close as that, working on the other side of the door, clattering pots and kettles and pans, dishes and washing-up—there would be many workers to feed that day as usual. If she came as far as the door to keep an eye on the youngest her face was warm and perspiring; the day was hot beside the cooking stove.
We sat with her beautiful album, and without a word, in the greatest secrecy, we quietly compared the girl in the album with the woman of today with the pots and perspiration and one thing and another, that had at least begun to worry the eldest of us.
For they were not exactly alike, these two girls who ought to have b
een so. The comparison told us this clearly enough. We looked, and kept silent.
We looked at the photograph of the very young, vivacious girl for a long time and tried to discover how much of what we saw was still there. We discovered a good deal of it too. We were clever enough to see that. It’s about the same, we probably told ourselves. We did not understand the new values that had been added, and more than weighed up those that had gone. Occasionally the eldest, who had the responsibility, would exclaim ‘She is kind!’ in an angry tone of voice.
The younger ones sat with unaltered expressions.
One had to cling to the page in the album, to the gentle young girl there.
If we looked at the pictures together with people from outside the farm, we would point quickly and indifferently, informing with the outermost finger tip: ‘Mother’. Then leaf quickly on.
‘No, wait,’ the outsider might say and leaf back. Then we would all look at her for a long time, and we were tense.
‘Indeed!’ they said to us small boys. ‘Indeed!’
A hint of what they put into that annoying ‘Indeed!’ must have struck us. Surely they could have kept their mouths shut, they as well as other people?
*
Immersed in the melody.
What was it exactly?
Something we had at home and did not understand.
Outwardly it was the simple plucking that we did not pay much attention to, we who were born without much appreciation of music.
Early winter darkness out of doors. An early winter’s night, a long time until bedtime.
It was snowing out of doors. Snow, snow the whole day long, snow floating down invisibly and incessantly. We had no outside lamp.
The living-room window pane squinted indifferently out into the snowstorm. The lamp indoors cared nothing for snowstorms and difficult walking conditions and unploughed, snowed-up roads. The oil lamp indoors burned, muted and cosy.
But someone was going out tonight, in spite of the weather. Out to the music. Snow had never yet shut her out from the music that sang inside her.
Under the lamp she is practising her alto melody, plucking at a long wooden, stringed instrument, plucking through her homework. She will take the melody with her out into the snow and the darkness, her skis dragging heavy on her feet. Determined to reach the others with her melody this evening.
The Boat in the Evening Page 12
