Paul atten Ash

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Skrik

after Edvard Munch (1893)¹

“My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art.” — Edvard Munch 

“In the beginning was Scream / … / Who begat Fear” — Ted Hughes, “Lineage”

To be unseeable—the unopening of the soul. I cannot be in this world. Stormed insides, torn. Here, let me sketch it for you. Sick mood at sunset, beneath a conflagration of stars. From high on the Ekebergåsen, Kristiania’s blue depths—these fjord waters welling up their black oil. I am walking at dusk with two friends who saunter on. I have become invisible to them. All the vital fibres of my being want to scream out a bowel-emptying cry. Lift me up from this drowning! Save me from myself! But gaping my mouth, what comes out is charred, silenced, and I let the eternal scream through Nature rip through me as at a distance.² 

Here is the shrinking of the soul. Under a gaping fresh wound of northern skies, I am face-to-face with my fear of life. It is unfathomable and hides beneath everything. Would that my friends have stopped, turned back, and asked: Munch, man! Whatever is the matter? But I am beyond help. Sick with worry, I am the fjord’s dread quavering. Shivering out, I am lost to the freeze of life. Can you not feel the keel of the ice mountain that grips the heart? That melts and puts out the furnaces of hope? The quaked voices of Creation & Progress—what are they? Nothing but the slow icing-over of humanity. For this world is just too much for me. 

Fear is a shaking man leaning against a railing. A blort of tearing deafness. A brain-shuttering lost courage for life. It is the letting-go. But I am grateful that I can render this wild ferment of atoms for you. See? Here is the dark tide’s rip that can put souls asunder, this cloudburst of maddening blood-red skies upending the city—a scene that can only be painted by a madman. This sickening dread is the recoiling from all existence, its monstrous Modernity. Fear is the thin spectre that follows me, and I bear witness to its weepings that linger as a threnody to our extinction, hands cupped at sundown around a hollow head. It is the mummification of the soul, my body bandaged and embalmed with honey—this life a ghost rapture of bees, hymns null in the vine. 

Skrik. In the torturous tearing-away at stitches. The itch beneath the itch. The ticking-off of the clock. The endless hours. The fretted chasing around of chess pieces. In the echo of my companions’ footfall, ebbing away. The screeching of phantom birds, the gunshot’s after-râle. In the sails of becalmed ships, the breath of melancholy that binds us to the blind horizon. The tidal wash upon the rocks, the graining away of days, the despair. One day you too may look around fearfully to find anguish storming the faces of friends and family—sensing a rend, unfathomable. Within this gaping chasm we all go down together, deeper into darkness, doomed to the hells of the self, where no one can help us. For in the end we are the solivagant, alone with our fear, lost to the Fold: all brackish-lipped, tidal-wide, a writhe of night creatures.³ 

But I am alive to this illness. It becomes me. Here at home among fin-de-siècle freaks, I choose to stare down my demons. (I am still walking at dusk. My two friends have gone on. I am invisible to them. Whatever is the matter? I am dust.) Picture yourself in a world that is bleeding out inexorably. Industrialised. Edging ever closer to oblivion. No home to run to, each face locked in fear. Death walking among the hordes.⁴ My palette is the future’s blue shadows. And I see horrors—in mistings of cities flattened, all in the name of Progress. Here, a hairy creature eats itself, lost children and dogs vomit up their worry, all slobbery. And each pole is streaked with glossy blood. The dead live inside us, and the tiny holes of their eyes are raw. 

And here are the spectres of wars to come. They gaze in through incipient cracks, sniff us out, watch us backing away towards the unlit corners, clinging on to each petty belief, all so afraid of each other we would rather perish. Our skin pitched in the oil of our own annihilation, thumbing out the eyes of the world, reeking of emptiness.

And in the end, puzzled and frightened, my reflection will stare back. Self-portrait of a hermit.⁵ Noctivagant. The night wanderer—sea caves for eyes, absolute black. The mind, perhaps, unknowable. Only fear, at the window, night pressed up against the pane. In the solitude of an empty room, I envision my self-haunting. Walls enclosing, neither coming nor going, lost to a vertiginous sea. I am frozen, ever-keeling beneath a frieze of stars. And you will regard me with the eyes of onlookers, of night-seers patrolling the depths. And perhaps, in my fear, you will inhabit the void between us and come to know this rend.

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Notes:

^1. Edvard Munch, ‘Skrik’/‘Der Schrei der Natur’ (‘The Scream’). Oil, tempera, pastel, and crayon on cardboard (1893).

^2. Edvard Munch, The Violet Journal, MM T 2760, fol. 56r, Munch Museum. Dated 22 January 1892. Trans. Francesca M. Nichols. https://emunch.no/TRANS_HYBRIDMM_T2760.xhtml (accessed 25 February 2025): 

‘Nizza [Nice] 22/1 92 
I was walking along the road with two friends 
– the sun was setting 
– I felt a wave of sadness – 
– The sky suddenly turned blood-red 
I stopped, leaned against the fence 
tired to death – 
– gazed out over 
the flaming clouds like blood and swords 
– the blue-black fjord and city – 
– My friends walked on – I stood 
there quaking with angst – and I 
felt as though a vast, endless 
scream passed through nature’ 

^3. The Old Norse name of the Oslofjord was Fold. 

^4. Edvard Munch, ‘Angst’ (‘Anxiety’). Oil on canvas (1894). 

^5. Edvard Munch, ‘Selvportrett. Nattevandreren’ (‘Self-Portrait. The Night Wanderer’). Oil on canvas (1923–24).

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Banner Art:
Edvard Munch, ‘Skrik’/‘Der Schrei der Natur’ (‘The Scream’). Oil, tempera, pastel, and crayon on cardboard (1893). National Gallery of Norway. Wikimedia Commons