Excerpts from
The Atlas of Rumours.
By Henrik Bjelke
The camera must have been pointed at the floor or have stood from the outset in
a position where the floor was the only thing it could take in. What there may
have been of interest in the room he obviously cannot see from this piece of
film. He sees the floorboards in a varnished floor. Only when a corner of the
rug comes into view does he discover that it is the rug he once sat on. ‘My
God, it’s back home at the flat. I wonder what will be next?’ He is not sure
that it was filmed in the flat. Then he sees the child, or rather its feet and
legs, not its head. A child all of two years old is standing in the corner. The
camera slides all too quickly past the child. One can’t see who it is or what
it’s doing.
He is holding this infant in his arms. He sees its eyes, he know its fate, he
sees its seeing, innocent, unrecognising gaze that roams from right to left, up
and down. He knows the rest of this infant’s coming fate, which cannot be
altered, and he knows that this child will be subject to deprivations which he
cannot ward off, and he also knows why its destiny will be cruel, for he needs
only to look at the child to know it. And by looking at the child he can see
that it is white, not white as opposed to black-skinned, but grease-painted
white and already wearing a Mickey Mouse hat with two round, black spheres that
are ears, and the hands are also painted white, and its little finger is bent
into its palm and plastered up, so there are only three fingers and a thumb on
each hand, the hands already turned into white gloves and three black stripes
drawn on the upper sides of the hands with black crayon. So he is sure that
this child was even at birth designed to be – not a human being, but a humanoid
species of animal, a fiction, in other words. Turned into a fiction at birth,
destined to be a human caricature and as on a strip of celluloid
transilluminated and moved mechanically in order to receive its deprivations,
endure its disappointments, suffer its wants through the filmstrip of an entire
life. He stands with the infant in his arms held out with the same elbows in
front of his chest, his underarms shaped like a bowl as if in invocation, so
the child rests with its back against his arms and its feet against his chest
and its head turned away from him in his hands, its face towards the sky. He
stands like that, looking at the sorrowless, innocent child. And his knowledge
is his sorrow, all at once he is filled with the sum of all the tears this
child will weep in the course of its life over and over again in a film that
was never finished. And if one were to ask how he could know what would happen
to this child (for after all, no one can know the events of a future that has
not taken place), the answer would be that its future had taken place long ago,
that it was already over.
Translated by David McDuff
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