Camilla is now where I once was: at the mercy of mourning. Mourning (mine) is now something that occasionally rears its head, and which I can shove aside if I don’t have the strength or time to handle it. I am happy that I wrote Mourning Diary (even though I felt like some kind of accountant while doing so), so I can go back and see what it was like, what and how I thought and felt.
Alma writes everything down. I am being recorded. Camilla’s mum once said that when she was young and wrote poems, she got a sense that she only looked at things in order to be able to write about them; and she did not like that. She was not at it for very long anyway, writing, probably only a few years. Alma mentions, if I can express it a little rigidly, being in the world and her transforming the world and existence into writing have long gone hand in hand. It is equivalent to reading, she says, experiencing and interpreting simultaneously. To exist and to write absolutely belong together, they can no longer be understood separately, she says. All of that I understand very well. I have never believed that analyzing destroys anything. On the contrary. But I felt offended when one day I pointed something out to her at the sea, and she replied that after she had written about the sea, she had stopped looking at it. As though it was emptied once and for all. I almost felt offended on behalf of the sea. It had been crossed off the list of items and matters already written.
‘I wonder if I’ll end up there one day?’ I asked cautiously, and I pictured her sitting in a wasteland, an emptied world, holding a thick book (with a pencil stub fastened to the book with twine, just like my granddad’s ledger.)
Then she got angry and replied that she wanted her literature in peace. And I replied that I wanted to be able to say something without later having to see it in print.
It developed into an argument, our first. And now I have an irrepressible urge to flip through her notebook to see what she has written about me. But I keep away from the rows of cutting alphabet marching; enclosing annihilating not-summoning; Alma, you ought to be ashamed.