We strain to understand the whispered words, but most of the sounds feel as though they have no meaning; they’re only a physical process, airy vowels and tiny consonants that rub against the mouth. The sounds of the voice have become abstract; they’re vaguely reminiscent of tingling, little grains of sand in an otherwise white and infinite room, like the sound of an old Geiger counter.
Each phrase from the voice is followed by a silence that disappears into the white forest. Every sequence full of sound has an empty twin, a moment of nothing, a negative. The silence emerges like a reflex, a blink, without associations, without content, as if every sound has been directed at something else and waits for an answer from the other side of the wasteland.
Upon encountering the light, the shape of the egg has been rubbed out or inverted, and the egg now beams so powerfully that we can’t look straight at it: the egg is everything.
Form is the thing in us that stretches, that pushes the boundaries between us, against us, creating the sensation of intimacy. Here in the white forest, feet are one with the ground they step on, bodies pass straight through trees, the bark and skin tickle each other, their movements synchronised. White mushroom caps growing from white sand stretch directly into our bodies, soft like porridge. We don’t know if we’re on our way through something or if we’re stuck. We don’t know if we’re alive. All boundaries are rubbed out, and nothing is impenetrable anymore.
Or perhaps these descriptions don’t describe the forest; perhaps they describe our own resistance to it. To describe is also to construct form and perspective; it’s the reflex of mortal dread. Could language be used for something else? Aren’t there other reasons to write? If we let go of the descriptions, will we discover that we’re no longer moving at all, since we already exist within everything in here? We’ve given up shapes, our own shells and components and we’re back in a flow, that gelatinous substance that ruled the earth before the harder minerals, rock types, skeletons and shells came into existence. This could be the beginning, the egg white, the original place, the original life.
I wanted to meet you in this place. I wanted to meet you where we leak, where we’re almost nothing, here in someone else’s story. A place where I have given up almost everything: body, self, clarity, every component. I wanted to meet you here and talk to you about love, about bonds between people, about form and content within those bonds. About how they glitter like a shortcut to something human through the dimensions; I wanted to grab it, hold it, give it space and listen to it. I wanted to meet you, but it only exists in flashes, at moments, in little eggs.
Are you here?
Pale, faint sound waves have begun to oscillate in the white light now. Blurred electronic drone images replace the silence with sonic form. We sense that something is happening somewhere else, that the sound of it has been brought to us from places we can only hear, as if from behind an impenetrable wall. Our ears stretch and travel through time and space faster than sight or body. We’re getting nearer all the time.
The girls come out into a clearing in the white forest, where the white light gradually dims until we can make out trees and grass in the background again. First we see them only as contours, as rough pencil sketches, the preliminary stages of a painting. Then the empty sections between the edges are filled in with pale colours from a thick brush.
The wind is blowing hard. The music has gotten louder, and the sound waves, along with the sound of the wind blowing, fill us up. They fill us up, just as the gradually brighter colours start to fill in the sketches of trees and grass and sky. The ears and the image and the eggshell vibrate.
VENKE, TERESE and the egg look around at their new surroundings. The landscape appears teeming and dramatic compared with the sedate forest and white light the girls have just travelled through. The place is both familiar and unfamiliar, a harsh Southern forest, estranged. A pale new moon hangs crooked between the clouds in the sky, above the birch crowns and the moors. The egg is in someone’s hands and gleams in the moonlight.
Initially the girls think they’ve arrived at the family farm of Arne Myrdal, the leader of the People’s Movement Against Immigration. But then they understand that they are at Knut Hamsun’s farm in Nørholm, south of Grimstad, where Hamsun tried to write and cultivate the forest floor like Isak Sellanrå in The Growth of the Soil. Maybe Hamsun believed in magic, too contaminated by the Southern spirit, he wanted to make his own art real. Maybe Hamsun was interested in the spirits of the soil, too. Twenty years later he was a Nazi, and seventy-five years after that I raised my hand in Norwegian class to say his Pan was an insult to the brain.
At the far end of the clearing is a little white house. It looks like a summer house; it’s old and has thin walls. It’s Hamsun’s writing lodge. The paint is flaking, the windowpanes are fragile and thin, and water damage has cracked the windowsills and wall panels.
The girls walk slowly through the clearing toward the entrance on the side of the house. The door is cracked open, just enough to fit a small egg. They climb the little stone stairs slowly.
Inside the house it’s terribly dark, and VENKE and TERESE are just sketches of insignificant shapes on a wood-panel background and the old hallway pictures. They glide slowly through one room and then a small passage to get to the main room
