It is night
with glaring sunshine. I stand in the woods and look towards my house with its
misty blue walls. As though I were recently dead and saw the house from a new
angle.
It has
stood for more than eighty summers. Its timber has been impregnated, four times
with joy and three times with sorrow. When someone who has lived in the house
dies it is repainted. The dead person paints it himself, without a brush,
from the inside.
On the
other side is open terrain. Formerly a garden, now wilderness. A still surf of
weed, pagodas of weed, an unfurling body of text, Upanishades of weed, a Viking
fleet of weed, dragon heads, lances, an empire of weed.
Above the
overgrown garden flutters the shadow of a boomerang, thrown again and again. It
is related to someone who lived in the house long before my time. Almost a
child. An impulse issues from him, a thought, a thought of will: “create. .
.draw. ..” In order to escape his destiny in time.
The house
resembles a child’s drawing. A deputizing childishness which grew forth because
someone prematurely renounced the charge of being a child. Open the doors,
enter! Inside unrest dwells in the ceiling and peace in the walls. Above the
bed there hangs an amateur painting representing a ship with seventeen sails,
rough sea and a wind that the gilded frame cannot subdue.
It is
always so early in here, it is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable
choices. I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives. All
sketches wish to be real.
A motor far
out on the water extends the horizon of the summer night. Both joy and sorrow
swell in the magnifying glass of the dew. We do not actually know it, but we
sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route.
While the sun burns behind the islands.
The blue house - T. Transtörmer
