DILUVIUM
From the Latin diluvium: ‘flood”deluge’
Oh the river of sin became the founding of the monogenetic racial division. The first nations. Oh the shame became mine. In my yellow body I try to forget it. Hide it in his white.
diluvium when diluvium came
Like many sagas Diluvium has come out of deficiency. Out of separation. A woman tells a story to her lover. Like Scheherazade in The thousand and One Nights she has to tell in order to exist. To survive.
His back is long is of round stones gravel and sand. He asks me to scratch it. Slow currents around his feet flows the deepest grave.
I’m chosen for the night. To tell.
So I come up with a story he can recognize himself in.
Two parallel stories flow together when the milk in the saga flows from the trees and out into the sea. It is a hard but tender mirror she holds up, which reflects the idea of enlightenment and christianity about the white/bright as the superior good. This authoritarian and seductive light forces her to fantasize. Step outside his body. Split herself in order to be able to mirror herself in the world.
The philosopher Theodor Adorno describes the separation between nature and culture with the image of how Odysseus has his body tied to the boat’s mast to be able to listen to the sirens’ song without wanting to jump into the ocean mad with desire. Adorno writes that Odysseus masters desire; “The inner and outer nature” with his reason and states that “the song lost its power over the world”. In konstepidemin, the visitor is lured into bergrummet by the sound of “kulning”; a traditional way of calling on animals that in the saga relates to the song of the sirens.
in the light the fisherman sees the nut resting on the bottom of a forest and he feels as if he sees an old friend
every time he swims to the surface
it calls him back
Diluvium also reflects the biblical myth of the sea monster Leviathan, who, like his wife Behemoth, is slaughtered so that the world can appear to the righteous. Their fate has been linked by many to the blue whale that stranded in Askimsviken in 1865, where it was slaughtered. Today it is stuffed at the Museum of Natural History in Gothenburg under the name Malmska valen.
a snake
the fisherman becomes fish
puff
without a handle in the nose
can he sing
puff
in the afternoon
when god took her flesh
puff
so that the world came to appear
in suffering
