Liquid Tungsind

Did I bring him some schnapps? I should at least have brought him some schnapps. And then, Ah!, schnapps! Good. And what about sild – see, he knows some Danish, he says. Sild. They used to be a Danish restaurant in town, he says. He'd go there with his friends – when he had friends – for an open sandwich on Saturday mornings, he says. The open sandwich – well, it's not really a cuisine, is it? The Danes don't have much of a cuisine. But sild on an open sandwich - not bad, he says. On rye bread. Home-made rye bread, preferably, he says.

He goes to fetch shot glasses from the kitchen. Aalborg Akavit should be served cold, he says. See, he knows that. He knows something about Danish culture, about so-called Danish culture. They used to drink Aalborg Akavit with their Danish lunches, he and his friends, he says, and drink Danish lager. A shot, then a chaser: that's how the Danes drink, he was told. A shot, a chaser, then another shot and another chaser. And then some more shots and chasers.

I hope you're not going to get drunk on me, the poet says. Drunks he doesn't mind, but Danish drunks! The Danish drunk is always maudlin, he says. Always morose. Tungsind, that's the word Kierkegaard uses for Danish melancholy, isn't it? He wrote it down, that word, on a post-it. Tungsind – was does it mean, literally?, he asks me. Ah, heavy souled. He likes that, he says: heavy souled.

He'll drink, and I can watch. Oh, alright, he says, I can drink too. He pours us each a glass. Skol!, he says. – 'Are you full of tungsind now?', he says. He thinks he might be full of tungsind, drinking with me, he says. Drinking with a Dane, God help him.

'Your dictaphone's still going', he says. 'Why don't you turn it off? Are you trying to catch me unawares?', he says. He's got nothing to say, anyway. – 'Not a thing! I might as well record the empty wind whistling'.

He's lost in the middle of his life, the poet muses. Lost in some sense, although he doesn't know how. In the middle of life … It's like the beginning of the Inferno, Dante's Inferno. He's lost in a dark wood, assailed by beasts. – 'You're a beast', he tells me. 'A great Danish beast …'

Sometimes he feels like a character in a novel, who realises he's in a novel. – 'But I'm not in a novel', he says.

Ah, he says, pouring more schnapps. What story should he tell me now? The story of the leak from the gutter from the upstairs flat? Of the leak, the flood, that ran down the wall in a single sheet? Or how about the flying insects that stuck to his face when he walked through the Meadows the other day? It was disgusting, he says.

Anyway, he says, his storytelling is only a kind of indirection, like the magician who tricks you by distracting your attention. There's something he wants to say by not saying it, the poet says. He's trying to tell me something.

But what would a Dane understand of these things, regardless of his tungsind? Danish melancholia turns inward, he says. It's a melancholy of the Danish soul. Mancunion melancholia – because that's what he's trying to describe to me, Mancunion melancholy and perhaps British melancholy, he says – is turned outward. It's about the world and the relation to the world, he says.

It about being defeated by the world. It's about lying down and giving everything up. You've had enough! You can see no point in anything! Why bother? That's what he said to himself when he gave up writing. Why do anything at all? Why not just lie down and wait for the apocalypse? - 'For Ragnarok, as you pagans would call it', he says.

There's probably a can't-be-bothered grant in Denmark, isn't there?, the poet says. A waiting-for-Ragnarok grant …

The flat, the yard. – 'Nothing really begins here', he says with great emphasis. 'Nothing really happens. You can be up early – but for what? Ready to work – but for what? You can pull the chair to the table – but for what? There's no way to gather yourself for a beginning as God gathered himself up before the creation.

He went astray, the poet says. – 'I lost the beginning. I lost hold of the beginning. And if you can't begin', he says, 'you can't end either. The day lies down and rots. The day gives up', he says.

But what could I know about that, the poet asks, about days rotting? The Dane has no idea of ruination. He always keeps his appointment with the beginning. The Dane's punctual, above all! He knows where he is and where he has to be!

There is no people more orderly than the Danish people, he says. None more dutiful. The Dane can become melancholy, yes. Melancholy over his schnapps on a Friday night. Melancholy in a Danish bar on Sunday afternoon. Muttering about his tungsind, the heaviness of his soul. My soul, he says, it's so heavy, boo-hoo, boo-hoo, he says.

But come Monday, and the Dane's refreshed, he says. He's forgotten his heavy soul and his boo-hoos! He's ready for work! Ready to organise! Ready to be taxed! Ready to spend tax-payers' money! And off he goes to work on his bike, following his cycle lane!

*

God, it's disgusting out there, he says of the yard. The plants are dying. The concrete's streaked with green. And a layer of scum over everything, God, what is it? Everything that will happen, will happen here, that's his feeling, the poet says. Everything that can happen …

It's like that scene from Nostalghia. The sky will brighten, and the sky darken. A night passes in eight minutes. A week in eight minutes. A year, a millennia. Everything that has happened, happened here, the poet says.

'There's only one word for this flat', he says. 'Absolute. It's an absolute flat', he says. 'With an absolute yard. Look at it', he says. 'The plants look ill. God knows, I look ill. We're all ill, all of us, except for you Danes with your white teeth'.

What can I know of it, his illness, his wretchedness? He's a wretch, he knows that, the poet says. – 'See, this is what your schnapps is doing to me! It's poison', he says. 'It's liquid tungsind', he says. 'You've come here to poison me, you beast of a Dane'.

'Look at them, the clothespegs on the washing line. What do you think they're try to say? What do they mean? And that oval rock, covered in algae … what's it doing there? And that brick, likewise covered in algae?'

He could never write about the yard, the poet says, that was his trouble. There was no poetry that could be written about the yard, or his flat, for that matter. His table edge is at the same level as its concrete surface, the yard, he says. He thought he might make some kind of reckoning with it, the yard, he says. Thought that if he began writing earlier enough, if he was there before dawn, watching it dawn …

Purple and black and white, those are the colours of the pre-dawn, the poet says. Purple light, the outline of the black pipe, the white wooden door to the road. Every day, waking up, his first thought: I've outlived myself.

Upstairs, in the morning, he hears his neighbours passing from one room to another: there are others around him who are alive. But he's not alive, not anymore, he says. He watches over his own corpse. He keeps his own vigil. He passes alongside himself, among himself … how can he put it?

He sees the light come on in the bathroom of the house opposite. The sky's light blue. The colours of the world are beginning to reveal themselves. He closes his curtains. He's had enough, he says. It reminds him of so many mornings, old mornings. It reminds him of so many botched mornings and botched days, he says.

'Oh God', he says, 'no more schnapps'. Can't I see what it's doing to him?