Excerpts from
The Peppery Sough - Fluid Fragments and Fixations
By Suzanne Brøgger
I live in a rather invisible place where progress has passed right by, and I am happy about that. Instead some kind of tearful god must have passed through in the early days, when time began, because there is something despondent about the place where houses and tree trunks have turned green from moss, dampness and tears. It´s a humble place that you will only find on very special maps.
Yes, it is a completely unremarkable place, but when you take a closer look or open yourself up to the place, it will tell you secrets and reveal the most curious and odd things, just like a piece of skin that is full of mountain ranges if seen under a microscope.
Instead of bread, I have brought you a stone today. It is seven thousand years old and comes from the centre of our civilization, Mullerup, which is an ancient kitchen midden from the Early Stone Age. You still come upon stone axes in many areas, and the earth is everywhere studded with arrowheads.
In terms of train tracks, I live only 100 km from Copenhagen but in terms of time, I live thousands of kilometres away. I live by the marshes where the marshwoman brews her list and I write my books - it comes to about the same thing.
From my window I can see where the world ends. Which it does over the hill on the far side of the brook; here a royal burial ground from the Bronze Age is located, and a little further over lives a bachelor in his sixties. He has lived there alone his entire life, and people say that he has put a large rock in his easy chair and talks to it and raises his glass to it well having a dram of snaps. He is very entertaining and sensible. I have run across him twice in thirteen years in the marshes. He is not insistent.
Five kilometres away - if you are a bird - is Trelleborg, the best preserved viking monument in Europe, and perhaps the most mysterious? Is it a fortress? A slave prison? Or a cultural centre? We don´t know, but it has probably been used to house all of the above at various times.
Translated by Marina Allemano
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