PANORAMICS

Today my sister called me to ask me when I'd come home. She misses me, she claimed. I blurted at her and called her crazy. I said, “are you crazy, what makes you think that I want to come home, ever?” “You're crazy,” she retorted. And I said: "you don't know what crazy is until you fall in love with Norway.” “But don't worry,” I continued, “I'm not crazy enough to stay here and be poor.” So I'll be back on the job on the first, to my infinite regret.

While shooting ducks outside the place I'm staying at, on top of a mountain in Tromsø, of course, it occurred to me that there is a peculiar depth to Norway that fascinates me. It's Norway's profound voice that attracts me. Wherever I turn my head, I hear an echo: “speak to me.” This is me talking to the stones, the snow, the void, and the trees. And they echo my sounds, though when my voice filters through snow, it sounds like snow. The same with the void. After walking on the panoramic plateau and reflecting myself in the beautiful waters around today, I marveled at how articulate Norway makes me feel. And I also thought that I looked like a woman in one of Eric Rohmer's movies.

A Tale of Winter is a favorite, and at some point one of the characters says to the protagonist: “You're articulate, because you let your feelings talk.” The lead is a woman who accidentally gave the love of her life a wrong address instead of her own after one encounter. The man is thus lost to her, and yet she keeps waiting. But while she invests her waiting with faith that the man will find her, she also lets herself be courted by two other. They 'speak to her', as it were, even beyond the philosophical babble which informs all of Rohmer's works, but they don't seem to echo her desires properly, which has consequences for her indecision to love either of them. Rohmer's film is filtered through Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, which is very much about desires, resurrecting statues, and making the stone speak, and it struck me that what makes Rohmer's language so powerful is the fact that he dares to say to Shakespeare what I say to Norway: “speak to me.” Indeed, eloquence emerges from faith in the fact that what will be echoed back will not be a standard answer, but rather faith itself in the cold.