Great to be back after almost two months - everything is the same and everything has changed! Most of the snow is gone, but a lot of it still remains here and there. I knew there would be ice on the lake, but I expected the birches to be in bloom, at least slightly greenish, but no, not yet. The spring is only beginning here. The sun is incredibly bright and warm and stays high up in the sky, its dazzling light both energising and exhausting. Arriving here yesterday I soon realised I cannot simply continue to work from where I stopped when I left. Or in some way perhaps I can, by making a second part, which will be different, of course, and still somehow resemble the first part.
What is changing, what remains the same? A colleague agreed to help me by sending a challenge, a prompt, a question, a quote, something to act as an impulse I could start from. This morning I received a brief poem by the great modernist poet Gunnar Björling that almost made me cry. The text is impossible to translate here without destroying it; about the defiance in looking at the world as if nineteen, of remaining nineteen through age and time and wrinkles. Perhaps even remaining true to who you are, which is a scary thought. It is easier to think of life as a form of becoming. When the mountain slopes are filled with brooks that sing of spring it is easy to feel forever young, or at least in the beginning of a journey. Everything around is waking up as if born again. Life is so fragile, the time for growth so brief, that each creature feels precious. Or perhaps, on the contrary, the plants and animals that live here are extraordinary strong. How else could they survive? I sure wish I could grow new hair each spring, like all these other growing things.
What is changing, what remains the same? I tried to recreate the image I repeated for a day in April, and found almost the same spot for my camera tripod; the wooden construction I used as a signpost was still there. Almost, that is, because the shores are open, I cannot walk on the ice, of course, and even the slight shift in the angle of the camera transforms the image. I will probably make a version, one day every second hour, without the human figure, nevertheless. Another option I tried was sitting on a rock on the shore. I placed my blue scarf as a marker for the snapshot, which I made without a tripod, as a note. There is too much information in the image with branches and rocks and whatever, but I have to accept that, if I want to face Malla Fell as before. Everything changes; perhaps something remains the same.
What should I change and what should I try to maintain as the same? A delicate balance; in some sense nothing is ever, ever the same. That is the beauty of it, the whole point of performing landscape; it changes all the time. And that is why repetition is needed, to somehow artificially produce an impression of something remaining the same in order for all the small changes to become discernible. By saying that, I repeat myself, again. Tonight I repeated my attempt to climb up to Saana, which I gave up in April, and this time I succeeded; not all the way to the summit, but high enough to be on the mountain, to have an other view of Malla. And for a brief moment I felt nineteen.
