The Clouded & Lost
Early last year I published a book. This happened almost by chance, through a beautiful friend, a magician and fool, who I’d met years ago through someone that we both recently lost, someone who I’d lost touch with for over a decade, yet who’d always galvanised in me the desire and reason to make something like this book in the first instance, back before I even knew. The book is a box, a dream, a spell, a multitude of journeys, a child’s fable, a bargain and a burden. There is a Skogsra (a forest spirit) and a Wendigo. It wounded me. It is cursed. There is only one copy, as far as I know. If you find it, don’t open it. Don’t let me give it to you, no matter what else I offer, no matter how much I cajole. It should not be. I can see it, just there.
There are photographs, colour and black & white, and words — as I say, a children’s story, a folk tale, a horror, and a poem interwoven, and an invocation, a chant. The colour photographs were taken on a Midsummer evening around sunset, near the house my parents-in-law lived, by a lake called Vik in a place called Smaland in the Swedish countryside. Small webs are there, seven flowers, a sense of leaping. The black and white photographs were shot on Gotland, an island off the east coast of Sweden. Bergman lived there once.
I took my pictures at Narsholmen, the place that Andrei Tarkovsky filmed his last movie, The Sacrifice, using Bergman’s photographer, Sven Nykvist. They burnt a house to the ground. When the first (and crucially, at the time, only) take ended, Nykvist realised that the camera had jammed. The house was rebuilt, reburned, refilmed.
Tarkovsky made seven feature films. The sixth, the second to last, is called Nostalgia. Tarkovsky’s images possess the fragility of faded memory, film exposing, overexposing, bleaching away. Reeds swaying in a gentle stream. The statue of an angel. A woman floating. A dying man traverses an empty Roman spa pool cupping a candle against the wind as it gutters. Things so deeply heartfelt they cause pain. Lost things, gone forever. Then found. Then built, burnt, rebuilt, reburnt. Ruins.
On Narsholmen, there’s a shoreline and a copse of trees that help identify the area where The Sacrifice was filmed. There’s no sign of the destroyed house. In Smaland, by Vik, the house I used to visit, where I took the colour photos for the book, was rebuilt a few years ago, leaving hardly any trace of the original. The tree we planted there, when my daughter was born, is gone too, I think.
I like to look at the book. It reminds me of many things, feelings. Dreams and reality. It blends them together for me, what has gone forever and what might be. It is a dream. It makes dreams. It tells me that everything is gone forever one day. One night, the images appeared in a dream, very very faint, whilst a voice told me a story. I managed to write down the bare bones of this story as soon as I woke.
“When Mr Whuhlrhamy, the conspiracist, fell asleep on his keyboard, his face typed “initub vy” and started a secret cabal that enveloped the planet. Whuhlrhamy, the conspiracist, initub vy the conspiracy he initiates when he falls asleep at his keyboard. Enormity. The definition of enormity. A global horror. Beyond anything before. Then it all falls apart into farce when he remembers how it began. His wife. Patterns.He dies before he can finish the manifesto. Who or what is Almigy?”
I made the book, wrote it and took the photographs, over twenty years ago. Roughly about five years after I finished the artwork, I looked for it. It had disappeared. I’d look for it, again and again, over the years. Gone. Lost. I gave up thinking about it, except very very rarely. Something fleeting. Another place and time, another life. Then, I found it, a few years ago. I don’t know where or when or how. It got published. There’s only one copy I know of.
Midsummer’s always coming again.
