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P.112
Nina Folkersma, Amsterdam.
ADMITTED
1. HE WAS THERE FOR ONE YEAR. TWELVE MONTHS, TWO WEEKS AND ONE DAY,
TO BE EXACT.
He tells me that it went wrong in Paris. That then he had gone back to Denmark.
And that there he was admitted to the psychiatric ward of a hospital in Copenhagen.
The Rigshopitalet. The same hospital where the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier
had made his twelve part soap-slash-horror television series, The Kingdom. I can
imagine how he wandered through the labyrinthian corridors of that enormous
building, which once was the most advanced hospital in the Kingdom of Denmark.
And I wonder if he, too, heard the screams of the dead girl, Mary, the illegitimate
daughter of one of the hospital’s founders, the infamous Dr. Krüger — the girl
who people here say was murdered by her own father in 1919. They say that the
psychiatric patients in The Kingdom can still hear her screaming to this day.
He tells me more. Says that in retrospect he realized that it had in fact already started
at the age of five. The ups and the downs. By the time he was admitted at the age of
32, his condition was, as he himself puts it, ‘pretty heavy’. The light tone in which he
states this makes me suspect that the term is rather euphemistic at that. Again I
try to imagine it. What it must be like to feel like Superman one moment — flying
above the earth in your red and blue suit, cape waving — and crashing to the ground
the next. Feeling pulverized by a world that is suddenly as dark and obscure as
Batman's Gotham City. I am reminded of my own adolescent years, the period in
which I went through a heavy identity crisis and identified with — "himmelhoch
jauchzend, zu Tode betrübt" — the young Werther or with Madame Bovary.
His Sturm-und-Drang periods usually recurred once every six months. In a ‘good
year’ each of these periods lasted for two, three months. The energetic periods
were fantastic, naturally. The things that he could do then! His production was
phenomenal. Those phases more than compensated for the lethargic months
when nothing emerged from his hands. Again I see him flying, the world at his
feet. And I try to imagine that one perfect moment, right before the fall. That
moment when the air falls out from beneath your wings, but you still remain
floating. That serene peace, when time seems to stand still for an infinite
moment. But then comes the fall, inevitably.