Midnatt

Thank you and good night 

Text: Thomas Torjussen

The last song of the last encore. You arrived late to the concert, and pushed your way through the crowd to a better spot. But the show is almost over. 

You watch the crowd. Rotting on their feet. Fed up. The band has been playing for too long. The audience; their faces hanging off their frame. You notice how tired they look. The last scream is fading out. A generic riff, turned into an equally generic feed-back. And now the drummer is gearing up for the final onslaught. The band will, true to form, go out with a Bang. You see them crouching, on old ailing knees. All set for the last jump. The almighty rock’n roll jump, followed by the obligatory collective guitar-noise in A-major. A triumphant “Thank you and good night”, and we’re all off to bed. Lights are dimming, pyrotechnics sputtering. The drummer is on his feet. Beating his way down the tom-toms. The crash-cymbal saved for last. The rest of the band are hunched over, dying to perform that last jump, but in a fumble of drumsticks, the wooden hut collapses. The drummer tries again, beats and rolls towards the final crash-cymbal, but is stuck in rhythmic stagnation. One and two and: One and two and: There is no musical way out of this. 

You want it to end. You want deliverance from this unworthy sortie, but cannot, because you were born at this very moment, and shall live your whole life in it. 

If you turn around: 

Towards the back, less people are holding their breaths. Less hope, sagging shoulders. More space. Then, darkness seeps in. As alarming as the encore is unbearable. A drunkard crawls on all fours in the cone-shaped light from a lamp. He has lost his keys. You are a decent person. You get down on your hands and knees to help him. But the keys are nowhere to be found. That's obvious. This doesn’t stop him. He crawls around, swearing his despair. You stand there, in this tiny patch of light that is all we ́re given, watching the fumbling bum circling around your feet, and the darkness that surrounds him. And you ask: “Are you sure this is where you lost your keys”? And he says “No. I lost them over there, but it's too dark to look there”. 

We’re all in this ancient Sufi joke. I’m there, standing in the tiny patch of light we ́re given. Staring into the dark, the pessimist, too afraid to enter, mostly. 

Pessoa’s devil is in there. The joker and the liar. Jazz and irony. All that is too heartbreakingly beautiful, and that which will lure me towards death. 

I see them entering. The dim and the enlightened, the ones with wings made of wax. The ones with nothing to lose, those who must enter, and those you know will never return. And the posers. They sprint back, triumphant, with something ungraspable held aloft, above their heads. They describe what they've found as something bordering between absolutes. Between life and death, light and dark. Padded with contradictions and abstracted to a point where the poser, and narrators, are equally untouchable. It is not what they've found that's important, but that they actually found it, where they found it and how they went about finding it. 

«Out of brief candle – Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon stage, and then is heard no more, it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.» 

But among the many dilettantes there are those with sincerity, with a greater ambition than strutting around on stage in their brief allotment of time. They come along once in a blue moon, those with the ability to expand this small patch of light we are given. I feel a greater sense of gratitude towards these artists than anyone else in my life. They transport me away from the unbearable encore that I was born into, shine light on the permanent and ignore passing fancies. No longer short of breath, I wonder how I was able to breathe before. 

Christer Karlstad’s paintings became a part of my breath and tiny patch of light a long time ago. I first met him when we were both twelve and he has been my best friend ever since. I've followed him from our metal head-days in Blystadlia, to his culottes- and ruffle-days in Oslo, to the homey creature he is today. He has certainly changed, many times over, but his paintings always lead me to the same place. 

Translated by Helle Karlstad