But it wasn’t the disintegration of completed structures I was going to write about, I was going to write about incompleteness. That which has not yet attained a definite shape, which can be taken apart, become something different. The apocalypse, the breakdown of all that has been completed, would be going at least two steps too far. It is morning, and lying before me is a text written by Edvard Munch. The text is an attempt at capturing, in writing, a moment in which a self, presumably Munch’s, stands gazing out to sea. There are waves that chase towards the shore, there are waves that break and in the instant they break reveal to him a kind of mystical, green-blue “gullet,” there is a line on the horizon which he has changed his perception of; he used to think of it as the end of the world, but now he no longer knows. The text is unfinished, full of cross-outs, with different versions of the same sentence. This is what I have said yes to writing something about: incompleteness.
There is a problem: I don’t like incompleteness. I don’t like the metamorphic, don’t like loose threads. What I dislike about writing novels, for example, is that incompleteness is such an unbelievably large part of the project, for such a long time, and churning around and around in my mind is the thought, this will never be finished, I dislike the month of March because it is the most incomplete month, when the grass that has finally shown itself in the fields can at any moment become smothered by snow again, and when that snow melts, it can become cold too soon, and large frozen snowdrifts are left in the fields, until they melt, and then it snows again, and then it freezes, and so on, and so on.
And isn’t it typical that incompleteness is the main protagonist in hell, both in the Odyssey and in Dante’s the Divine Comedy; for instance, what is Tantalus’ struggle in the underworld in the Odyssey if not perpetually incomplete, as he stands in the middle of a pool of water dying of thirst, and the water he might quench his thirst with reaches up to his chin, until he leans forward to drink; that’s when the water level sinks, and each time he reaches for the branches bulging with pears, reddening apples, figs, and olives, they are lifted, just out of reach, unattainable. And what about Sisyphus, who each time he has managed to roll the stone to its proper place on top of the mountain, has to resign himself to the fact that it rolls down again into the valley, and he has to begin the whole process from the start? Never completed. And Count Ugolino’s head in the Divine Comedy, which I can never stop thinking about either, is stuck on top of Archbishop Ruggieri’s head deep inside a cave, gnawing endlessly on the Archbishop’s skull, which I have written about in a novel where the characters feed on each other’s heads. What if the Archbishop’s head was totally consumed, what if Ugolino actually managed to eat it all, and the head of the Archbishop did not fill up again, perpetually? Then it would have simply been disgusting, to say the least, but not unbearable, in my opinion. It is precisely the incompleteness of the situation, the fact that it goes on and on, into infinity, that is so terrifying.
AND WHAT ABOUT LIMBO! someone shouts from behind the sheet of paper I am writing on. I stick my finger through the paper to make a peephole, and catch a glimpse of the head of who turns out to be Mrs. Jennings, from the 1995 film version of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, who is well-versed in gossip, what about LIMBO, she shouts as she stands beneath the surface of the paper raising her eyebrows suggestively, and with a knowing smile. Limbo is probably the worst of all impermanent places, where one has to hang out for all eternity, neither condemned nor redeemed!, exclaims Mrs. Jennings. Or, as the Divine Comedy states: “Were lamentations none, but only sighs, that tremble made the everlasting air!” For incompleteness, says Mrs. Jennings, exists precisely in this unbearable intermediate state between what is commenced and what is completed, do you not agree? She offers me her half-eaten muffin, but the hole in the paper suddenly closes.
Yes, I certainly agree. I stare at Munch’s text. Cross-outs make me feel unwell. He intended for a sentence to read like this: “I once thought the end of the world was there – { . . . } now I know nothing,” but in this revealing unfinished version, the first version quivers: “I once thought the end of the world was there – I no longer know what is there { . . . } now I know nothing.” He wanted to change “I no longer know what is there” to “now I know nothing,” because he has crossed out “I no longer know what is there”, and to be completely honest, I wish he had not done that; I think that “I no longer know what is there” is better than “now I know nothing,” and why do I think that? I think it’s because “what is there,” as opposed to “nothing,” resonates in the same expanse as the waves he depicts, in other words, a physical expanse so tangible that you might say that something exists there, the water, the ocean, while “nothing” is such an immeasurable expanse and such an immeasurable size—it may sound sound prettier, but it isn’t. This is what I think today, Tuesday, April 27, 2021; who knows what I might think tomorrow, April 28.
Today, April 28, I wander around my house thinking; I am thinking that I can respond to the request to write a text about incompleteness by writing a short story where nothing is brought to any form of completion. Either by leaving all of the sentences unfinished (but that would be too tiresome to read), or even better, with an incomplete protagonist, for instance. It might be that everything the protagonist did was incomplete, she might have walked over to the refrigerator to check if there was enough milk to make pancakes, but stopped in her tracks, and turned her attention to a different project; she might be sketch-like in everything she did, that everywhere she went, you could hear the pencil continuously sketching her. I walk to the shop to buy milk to make pancakes and continue to think about this, but am interrupted in my thoughts by the sight of a strange-looking man who is walking towards me further up the road, in the pouring rain. There is something weird about his head, it is so long, as if his head is naked all the way down to the collar of his jacket; I have difficulty discerning whether what I see is his naked head against the rain, or whether he is wearing a skin-coloured cap. I’m sorry, but his physical appearance actually resembles the glans of a penis. As we are approaching each other, I stare at his head through the rain, and wonder whether this is a well person, who is out walking with such a large, let’s call it strange and naked head in the rain, and who on top of that walks with his arms slightly ahead of him and with his knees pointing out to either side. I have never seen such a person before, baldheaded, and whose skin appears to lie like a three-centimeter-thick cap over the head, with a kind of rim of skin directly above the eyebrows, so that he looks like an alien wearing trousers and a jacket, or at worst, actually like a walking penis glans. He crosses the road twenty meters in front of me and disappears into a side street, and now I see that it is a skin-coloured cap. When it comes to incompleteness everything is possible!
Munch’s waves. The azure-blue line; the horizon. The gullet that conceals something, the mystery, eternity, the unattainable. The waves that continuously wave and never give up, do they ever arrive, these waves? A break. What is it we never arrive at? Answer: The unattainable, infinity, and thereby in its unattainable form; completeness. What is it that creeps towards the shore again and again? The answer: Incompleteness.
I can hear the smacking noise Mrs. Jennings is making beneath the paper. She is sitting in a boat impatiently chewing on an apple. I am watching once again all the film versions of Austen I saw when I was in my twenties. Back then I was the waves chasing towards the shore, now, on the other hand, I know nothing.
I remember a romantic dream I had as a child, about surviving alone in the woods, like Ronia, the robber’s daughter. It was often during spring that I had this dream, when the mounds of yellow grass dried from the snow which had either melted day-by-day or had been washed away by rain. I wanted to live near the little dam up in the woods, where the moss covered the stone like a smooth green carpet, and where there were birds chirping and where I could cook things on the bonfire I could build with the branches I’d gather, and where I could sleep out in the open. The only problem was that I was afraid of the dark and afraid of spiders and animals, and when it was quiet enough I became frightened of the things that rustled in the woods, and when, dare we ask, do the woods not rustle. Another problem was that I couldn’t get to sleep without lying in a bed under a duvet, with the light on, the door open and with Mommy and Daddy within reach. This came back to me for some reason when I saw a father fetch a shrieking two-year-old daughter in a pink coverall who had escaped to run back down the long slope, which they were making their way up, just ahead of me; I am on my way home with milk to make pancakes for my children.
The recurring nightmare about treading on a ground that disintegrates, did it stem from the time I had a scare because my father disappeared behind the side of a shed to fetch worms for a fishing trip we were going on, and I had been told to stand still up on the road and wait? What actually happened was this: I stood there and was six years old waiting for Daddy, but because I was so easily frightened, and because this was a strange place, and I heard so many scary sounds, such as goats bleating inside the shed, and oxen lowing, and because Daddy suddenly appeared to have been swallowed up in broad daylight, invisible as he was, I decided to go after him, even though I had been given strict orders to stand completely still, so I went after him, but didn’t know where he had gone, on the left side of the shed the ground was strangely flat and black, as if made of earth that was raked level, and I heard a frightening sound again and took a firm step straight onto the black ground, as though I were about to run, but didn’t notice before I had taken a few steps that I was standing up to my knees in liquid muck. I had to be hosed down with ice-cold water in the shed afterwards. My boots were ruined by the muck. Something I thought was flat and secure was deep and sinking and dreadful.
There’s something about the gullet in the incomplete text by Munch. The ocean that opens its mysterious, green-blue gullet. The dream that opened the asphalt. The muck that opened up to my boots. What is it that exists inside and behind things? And not least, what exists behind the horizon? That is the question. That line there, which Munch once believed was the end of the world (in other words: terminated), but which he no longer knows what is, or as he corrects himself: “now I know nothing”. He shifts his gaze from the perpetually chasing waves to the tranquil line out there, “out there – out there – behind the azure blue line,” interesting that the line is a fiction of the imagination, since the line does not remain put if we move closer to it, it would then be just as restless and in-motion as the waves, but a new horizon would appear, if one didn’t by chance run into land of some kind. And of course that’s exactly what happens when Mrs. Jennings and I are sitting in a little boat far out at sea and suddenly hit solid ground; I’m afraid it is muck, but Mrs. Jennings turns towards land and gaily waves with a muffin in one hand while she wipes crumbs from around her mouth with the other. Yoo-hoo, she shouts, most likely expecting a committee of some kind to queue up on land to receive us. Welcome, the committee at the end of the world will say, here everything is completed.
And then there isn’t much more to say! So we will keep as far away from this as possible.
The pancakes have grown into a stack. “I once thought the end of the world was there – I no longer know what is there”—that would have been the best choice Munch could have made in this text, but he made the worst, he chose “now I know nothing.”
“Many had painted an oak before / Munch painted an oak anyway,” wrote the poet Olav H. Hauge about Munch and about the problem of doing this sort of thing; painting oaks when other painted oak trees already exist, as if the world can get enough of painted oaks, and shouts to us like a construction manager wearing a yellow helmet, across the construction site: “You can paint something else now, thanks, we’ve got it now!”
The waves chase towards the shore. The sound of the ocean drowns out the pancakes frying in the pan. My feet are naked in the sand. Out there is the horizon; I know it’s not the end of the world. This is not finished, it is not completed; the mystical, green-blue gullet will not swallow me.
