From Jens Bjørneboe, Moment of Freedom (Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions; Norwich, Norvik Press, 1999). Translation of Frihetens Øyeblikk (Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1966). ©1966 by Jens Bjørneboe. English translation ©1999 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer.
I spent the years in Stockholm drawing and painting or looking at pictures. The National Gallery in Stockholm I know very well from that time, but I was also often outdoors painting pictures. I took part in exhibitions, and I sold a landscape to the Götaverken Shipyard, I remember. I drew a lot of croquis, and became rather good at drawing. Both the paintings and the drawings were executed with a strict and conscientious naturalism. But all the same I think my greatest joy in the work was the sight of the colors on the palette, the way they looked when they were just mixed at random, layer upon layer. Of course I should have painted like that on canvas as well; completely nonfigurative and pure and free. But I didn't dare to do it; I would have felt it as a mockery and a blasphemy against the world, as an impudence and a fraud.
In fact during this time I retreated entirely into my sketching and my pictures, into drawing nudes, painting landscapes—or into the art galleries. In my life since then, and long after I myself stopped painting, I've still gone a great deal to galleries, in all cities and in every land. And it's probable that the painting and the study of pictures at that time prevented me from keeping records, for I remember clearly that the desire to record things would sometimes become almost irresistibly strong.
I also traveled outside the city of Stockholm to paint—one summer I was at Lake Vänern, and another summer on the island of Öland. In both places I painted diligently.
It's strange that the same way I reacted to the desire to paint consciously on the canvas just as freely as I was doing unconsciously on the palette—by rejecting the thought as irresponsible and frivolous—that's exactly the attitude I took toward the thought of beginning to record things: it was arrogant and blasphemous. I felt both things as immoral. I have never met a record keeper or a Servant of Justice with such terrible inhibitions of a moral sort as I had. Every day I had to fight against these inhibitions—and yet in fourteen years I completed fourteen protocols. They all carry traces of this, both in the choice of the subjects to be recorded and in the very way that the texts are entered—with extreme care and thought, full of deadly fear of being immoral or imprecise.
The paintings were clear, straightforward, and without any attempt at deceit; but they suffered from a caution in their execution which hindered any compelling personal expression. Today it's rather remarkable to think that I walked around Stockholm painting flower pots, apples, and landscapes while the whole world was aboil around me: it was revealing itself with terrible clarity as the combination of latrine and torture chamber it is. And my own inner pictures of the world were also an apocalypse; I knew very well that the world was a crematorium.
But I didn't dare to say it.
During this time London, Hamburg, Stuttgart were smashed. Dresden was leveled to the point that the people could be poured right out into the sewers, where there were any sewers left. Stalingrad was wiped out, villages and ghettoes massacred. Of the painters in the galleries I buried myself especially in Ernst Josephson, who is one of the greatest painters the world has seen. Theresienstadt was emptied, and the crematoria were full. Stockholm also had a significant Rembrandt collection, and several first-rate Matisses and Cézannes. In Teutonia they were completing the experiments with vivisection and frost research and transplants on humans. Aside from the painting I occupied myself almost solely with metaphysics. My interest in angels dates from that time; I became conversant with the structure and order of the angel hierarchy, along with the Egyptian mysteries of the sun. One day I came out onto the street in Stockholm, and saw that all the flagpoles were decorated with my own country's flag. It confused me for a brief moment, but when I'd gotten hold of the day's papers I saw that the war was over.
Only Japan was still putting up resistance against the rest of the world.
Technically the world had made progress in these last years. But my own life in Stockholm wasn't particularly affected by this. I was also greatly interested in Byzantine painting that summer. In August came the great change.
The planets Uranus and Pluto stood in conjunction in the Sign of the Black Widow, and I decided that it no longer concerned me what the little bears did to each other.
In my defense it should be said that several years passed before we got correct information about what had happened—no damaging communications escaped from Japan in the first few years. But the truth is also that nothing whatever happened inside me. The truth is also that the American censorship was effective. The truth is also that we were tired, tired as people get after wars—we were so tired of it that we quite simply performed the necessary on what happened in Japan.
As a Servant of Justice I would like to repeat this and emphasize that I simply didn't care to hear anything about it.
There now reigned complete peace, not least in those two cities.
Meanwhile the deed was accomplished, and many people understood that from now on the little bears had altogether new and unheard-of possibilities for harming each other; no destruction was any longer impossible; the Moment of Freedom had arrived.
I once had a dream which lived in me for many years, because it had the terrible force, this overpowering reality which dreams can have, and which is far, far stronger than the usual reality. It had a manifold intensity.
I was standing up in the gallery in a prison, on a floor of steel grating, looking down on the prisoners gathered on the cement floor down in the huge prison hall. The dream was in sharp images, with red and blue and black colors. Everybody inside the prison was yelling. They yelled and yelled. They yelled with a thousand voices in great, horrible rhythms . . . over and over again . . . an endless mighty surging howl of hate and vengeance. The whole enormous prison shook with their howls, and I felt the shrieking like ice in my heart. On the stairs and down in the hall prison officials and guards huddled together in groups, white with fear. The hall was immensely high, and the steel galleries shook. Prisoners were running all over in wild excitement, they were dressed in rags or insane carnival costumes, with scarves and caps in loud colors . . . and while they ran in long lines they repeated the howls, ever more rhythmical, ever more violent, ever more senseless, they filled corridors and stairways, and the bellowing began to resemble a kind of tom-tom song. I felt dread more and more like a hand around my chest, around my heart, around my throat. I knew that I was a visitor in the prison, and that the rebellion was about to break out now. The groups of guards and functionaries huddled together, lost and in mortal dread on the floor below. More and more the awful measured howls took on the form of a wild song, and the running through corridors and on the stairways began to resemble a kind of dance. The song received a text in the form of disjointed words and a ringing, wild, rhythmic laughter. From above I saw that the flock of guards knew that they were about to die . . . while the prisoners streamed dancing and howling through the main corridor toward the great steel gates. They swelled to thousands, pressing together, singing the song in a booming violent groan which was repeated again and again, a hoarse and terrible bellow of a thousand throats, a long “ah . . .ah . . . ah . . .” which rose to a sudden “aaahh!” with indescribable power. From the ceiling hung ropes with big sharp fishhooks on them, and one by one the guards and the functionaries were hoisted into the air with the hooks in their mouths. A couple of feet swung past me, naked, bleeding from the heels. . . . The song had a few words which were steadily repeated between the groaning rhythmic bellows: “Congratulations this lovely day . . . !” And then a new thundering “aaahh!” I understood that the rebellion was total now, and that something terrible was about to happen, something nameless and dreadful—slowly and with violent exertions, while they used the bellowing as a kind of chanty, a wild jungle-like incantation which redoubled their powers. The sound and the howls filled everything, and the bloody, tortured guards hung by their mouths like awful wriggling pendulums in the great steel hall. Their faces were very distinct, and blood was running out of their eyes and from the corners of their mouths around the hooks. New roars and howls filled this enormous house of iron and stone, and the steel gates were burst asunder as the walls cracked open. When the first ones came out of the building I was among them, and I felt as if a great hand were squeezing my heart with full strength. We streamed out into the streets, filling them—thousands of prisoners singing the words and howling: “. . . ah . . . ah . . . ah,” an endless slow plaintive groan, and then the violent yell of everybody at once: “aaahh! . . . aaahh! . . . aaahh!” and then the idiotic, meaningless text: “Congratulations this lovely day!” I was paralysed with dread as one can only be in dreams, it was a sick and powerless dread. The people streamed out of the prison, and they all had the same sinister expression on their faces, a sort of cold threatening grin, as if they knew what was going to happen, and that it would be worse than anybody thought. Many of them were running after each other in long lines, howling that song of theirs. They were clad in strange gypsy-like costumes, or in rags.
The city resounded with their bellows: the long “. . . ah . . . ah . . . ah . . .” and the violent “. . . aaahh!” from everybody at once.
The dread gripping the city was indescribable, people fled as before the plague, as before imminent death. Around me the prisoners were streaming in freedom, and it was unclear what they were going to do with me. Utterly sick with dread I began running along with the others, I had only one thought in my head: to get away, away. . . . As I ran, knowing that I had pursuers behind me, I saw a little boy who had been left behind. He was standing and crying; no one was looking after him or thinking of him. With a violent effort I overcame my deadly fear and stopped. I took him by the hand and walked on with him. He stopped crying. I knew at once that his name was Ivan, and the city around us was beautiful, it had broad streets and red brick buildings surrounded by parks, ivy, and tall poplars with dark juicy leaves. The air was clear and autumnal, the sky showed that it was afternoon by a faint reddish cast in the air. The prisoners, still dancing and yelling, ran through the streets, past us and onward. I walked peacefully, holding Ivan by the hand.
He looked up at me and smiled, and the dread around my heart vanished. Instead I knew peace and security.
Right afterwards I woke up.
I'm no great interpreter of dreams, but as a Servant of Justice I know that Ivan is my own, unknown I.
And I know that if God should call me in the night, this is the name he will use. And that it isn't a nickname, the way my everyday name in this mountain city is.
It was in Stockholm that I first studied the drawings of Callot, Castagno, Pisanello, and del Sarto. Later at the place of execution. Their knowledge of life is extensive.
They described life on that creative and renewing, blood-soaked earth which we call Tuscany, and which is the world.
It may be that Leonardo has done the most trenchant drawings of torture, mutilation, and executions—but the other empiricists can also add a few strokes. Including some of greater beauty.
It's astonishing how much larger a place in art history bestiality occupies than, for example, obscenity. And bestiality has always been allowed in the descriptive art forms, while the inherently life-preserving and constructive lewdness, obscenity and pornography have been prosecuted.
I shall now mention Callot, because he was for many years of great significance for my spiritual health.
Callot was a Frenchman who had made a Tuscan of himself. He was by nature of a dreamy and sensitive, romantic temper, but as a child he fled from the bosom of his good, safe, deeply religious family and joined up with a group of highly crime-oriented gypsies, who supported themselves exclusively by theft, robbery, and murder. In company with this immoral, godless, plundering, and murdering band he came at the age of thirteen or fourteen to Florence in Tuscany. After a few altercations with his more orthodox-minded family, he at length received permission to stay in Florence to educate himself in engraving, sketching, and graphics. He never touched a paintbrush, but kept to the steel pin and the metal plate, on which he with never-failing conscientiousness, veracity, and clarity inscribed his observations about the small two-legged friends' way of life.
It should be mentioned that Callot was a born lyricist and nature enthusiast.
He observed the little friends, and he set their favorite pastimes into his beautiful landscapes, dreamy and yet clear.
All these men, Callot's colleagues, such as for example Leonardo and Castagno and del Sarto and the heavenly Pisanello, belonged to the usual public at the execution rites of the time; the extraordinary executions took place publicly side by side with the usual, regular executions by hanging. It's impossible for me to say who produced the loveliest drawings of exquisite sufferings and advanced methods of dying. To Andrea del Sarto—the little tailor's son—we owe a series of extremely beautiful hangings, sharply and clearly observed, lovingly and tenderly done, with a masterful control of the material. Leonardo has still provided the most incisive yet detached portrayals of the human anatomy as exposed to the hangman's operations—and the depictions go hand in hand with drawings of his famous, grotesque masks, where the individuals' bearlike character is strongly brought out, both during pleasurable experiences and under sensations of strong pain. He, like the other observers, must have spent long periods of his life at the places of execution, and he naturally brought with him to the gallows square his loud, golden laughter. Of Castagno it will only be noted here that we owe to him some outstanding depictions of men being dispatched through hanging by their feet, vivid, movingly and realistically done—not without humor. Nevertheless we owe the most beautiful line drawings to the divine Pisanello, who more than any of the others sees the matter from its graphic, its transparent aesthetic side. None of the others understood so well as Pisanello how to ignore all distracting details and focus all attention on the beauty in the long, sweeping lines in the drawn-out necks—which, because of the loosened cervical vertebrae, can be stretched out like rubber bands, up to almost half a yard. The necks are like water lilies, like long, supple plant stems with the strangely round, inflated faces like large blossoms in full bloom at the top. (I've seen a similar effect in the dead of the 1940s, especially in places where modern methods of hanging with thin rope had come into use. Still, I've never seen such beautiful necks as in Pisanello.) The graphic beauty in the simple lines between body and head give his pages a bewitchingly distinctive, almost calligraphic effect. His hand never trembled as he worked. The drawings show how at the same time he was also eating his chicken and drinking his wine.
Still—the lyricist among these great record keepers is and will remain Callot. Perhaps his Gallic blood plays a role; he was from the excellent wine districts in Alsace-Lorraine. He was born with an eye for landscape, for wind and grass and trees. And he was also the only one who gathered this material onto some few graphic sheets as the high points of his life's work. The others spread themselves over larger areas.
One of Callot's main works bears the title Capital Punishments; but, as has been remarked, it could also have been called The Various Tortures. It's an astonishing picture, because the lyrical master and romantic dreamer has gathered all his knowledge of humanity onto this one metal plate. Here all the lethal forms of torture are seen at once, as a comprehensive vision of the conservative force in society—and they're surrounded by the spectacle-loving, merry theater public which belonged to the affair. He has added to the whole a laconic commentary in the Latin tongue: “Supplicium sceleri froenum,” which translated means approximately: “Torture is the bridle of crime.” In this one can read Callot's opinion of the system of justice.
The other engraving which I shall call to mind here has a different character, in that it is first and foremost a picture of man as landscape, between nature and trees and sky. The picture is called The Hanging Tree, or perhaps better: The Hanging Oak. It goes back to a historical incident on Tuscany's pregnant, fertile soil. The incident yielded a number of delinquents. The picture shows a large, beautiful oak tree. Above the mighty trunk there arches a glorious crown, borne by huge old branches. This whole tree is full of hanged men. I don't know what it's best to compare it with: are the people in the tree like birds filling the foliage, or like fruits borne by the tree? In any case it's a strange and mysterious picture, this age-old giant of a tree, bearing dead men on all its branches; in a way an archetypical image of life and the life forces which unceasingly bring forth more death. In the picture's mingling of enchanting, lyrical mysticism and veracious realism it never becomes overbearing as a symbol.
When I expressly say that this great poet of the graver has been of significance for my spiritual health, there's a reason for this. Callot was an observer and a singer. He died in his mid-forties, while he was still pursuing his work on the little bears. He died, however, of a stomach ailment, and he never lost his balance—his great, cool calm. He had certainly had much to upset him, but it didn't knock him endwise.
In our own excellent times, many have noticed that the world to a certain degree bears the stamp of wars and acts of violence. There are people who take this hard. That's because they don't think enough about Callot's world, and about how every period has been about the same: the total picture is a bloody operating room of an executioner's workshop. Why it should—just by pure accident, all by itself—have become any different after the last century's technological progress, is simply a completely open and unanswered question. But from men like Callot and Pisanello we can learn to keep our minds clear and our hearts tranquil, to eat our chicken and drink our wine at the place of execution, while conversing, for instance, about the significance of the extraordinary death penalty for anatomical science, and hence for the development of medicine as a whole.