Was walking across the Groningen countryside, over which an incomprehensibly blue sky arched, so radiant that I had to laugh at the sight. And then again because of my own formulation of thoughts: ‘incomprehensibly blue’. What would intelligible blue look like? No idea of course.
You spend all day saying all kinds of things in your mind.
So I recently told myself, not for the first time, that I prefer not to encounter people when I walk. But I certainly don’t want to go to deserted areas in Northern Norway for that, no, just stay here on the same Groningen land with no one else on the street, on the path, between the fields. While this is clearly an inhabited and created landscape, which I also prefer. I’m too small for really big, rugged nature with no trace of human presence anywhere in it. I like to sit alone on the beach with a view of the wide sea, but I certainly don’t like to be alone in the middle of the ocean.
This apparent loneliness deepens the experience of pleasant, because temporary, loneliness. A farmer working in the field is not a nuisance, he belongs in the landscape, I have nothing against that. But another walker, no, I’d rather not. That disturbs the feeling.
Sometimes it even seems like a form of envy. A while ago, a large photo of a Greek marble statue was printed in the review of Sacha Bronwasser’s new book: ‘the kouros of Flerio’ was printed underneath. What?! That is the small kouros of Naxos, an unfinished statue left behind due to a break in the marble that I have been visiting for over forty years, years with a man who had built a kind of cult around it. There is a small painting on my wall depicting the same little kouros, 35 years ago I spoke to the old lady who dug it up with her father in her youth (‘with my own hands, with my own hands’) – what does it do kouros in the newspaper? What does Sascha Bronwasser have to write about this? That kouros is mine!
Now this doesn’t make sense, I know. It is a strange possessiveness that often occurs, especially in art. On the one hand, I want an admired poet, take Anne Carson for example, to be admired and liked by others and I like it when I meet someone who also knows and reads her and then we exhaust ourselves in enthusiasm, on the other hand I can’t I can’t stand it when ‘just someone’ (that is, someone I don’t know) writes about her in the newspaper or a magazine. Soon everyone will like her!
Snob.
Or is it that you like to share your own kind of appreciation only with some others, in a way that connects you? The urge to possess obviously does not extend to famous works of art, no one can imagine that they are the only one in the world who ‘really’ enjoys Proust. And often enough you are eager to share your own enthusiasm: listen to this, read this. But then those with whom you shared that experience should not from now on act as if it is their song, their painting, their line of poetry.
While of course you appropriate just about everything through others.
And so I walk across the land, enjoying the fact that there is ‘nobody’ while everything around me is man-made, laughing at my own idiotic thoughts, and then rushing home to share those thoughts. But they are only mine!