I is Another: Septology III-V

by Jon Fosse

and this need to paint that I’ve had ever since I was a boy can’t just suddenly disappear? yes, from the first time I painted I wanted to keep painting since I was so good at it, but after a while being good at it was totally unimportant, yes, it was a mistake, I didn’t want to be good at it, I wanted to paint just so that I could say something that couldn’t be said any other way, yes, paint from a faraway closeness, that’s how I think about it, I think, yes, make the blackness shine, yes, paint away the shining darkness, I think, and how often I’ve thought these thoughts, I think, because I always think the same thoughts over and over again and I paint the same picture over and over again, yes, it’s true, but at the same time every single picture is different, and then all the pictures go together in a kind of series, yes, every exhibition is its own series, and finally all the paintings I’ve ever painted go together and make up a single picture, I think, it’s like there’s a picture somewhere or other inside me that’s my innermost picture, that I try again and again to paint away, and the closer I get to that picture the better the picture I’ve painted is, but the innermost picture isn’t actually a picture of course, because the innermost picture doesn’t exist, it just is in a way, without existing, it is but it doesn’t exist, and somehow it’s as if the picture that isn’t a picture sort of leads all the other pictures and pulls them in, kind of, I think, but maybe I’ve no...

because there’s a silence hidden in everything that is, and it’s this stillness that is the innermost part of everything real, I think, and it’s this stillness that is God’s creative silence, as Ales used to say, because God is an uncreated light, she said and I’ve experienced myself that the black darkness is God’s light, this darkness that can be both in me and around me, yes, this darkness I now feel that I am, because in the darkness is a stillness where God’s voice sounds in silence, I think and I see the chair where I always sit next to the round table

and then I look at Bragi standing there and looking at me with his dog’s eyes and I think that dogs understand so much but they can’t say anything about it, or else they can say it with their dog’s eyes, and in that way they’re like good art, because art can’t say anything either, not really, it can only say something else while keeping silent about what it actually wants to say, that’s what art is like and faith and dogs’ silent understanding too, it’s like they’re all the same,