Comments
Loading Dream Comments...
You must be logged in to write a comment - Log In
Artist
Inspired byWelcome to Valhalla. I kill death. Death kills me. I resurrect the bodies I have created. Create an extraordinarily detailed panoramic surrealist painting based on the original image. Four immense triangular towers of vermilion, burnt orange, ochre and yellow rise against turquoise and midnight-blue skies. Tiny windows, crooked doors, rusting ladders and precarious balconies conceal regenerating bodies. Skeletons acquire flesh while living figures dissolve into luminous dust. Death appears as a colossal shadow between the towers. A pale moon illuminates drifting souls. Blood-orange ribbons descend from heaven. Architecture becomes anatomy, anatomy becomes memory, memory becomes life. No text.Richly texured Mixed Media art, tempera, gouache, and gesso on linen, grains of sand, in style of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, representing the logical absurdity of a vibrant landscpe at the ocean, an ancient weathered limestone and powdery blue coloured rickety cottage struggles against the forces of the sea, crashing waves, sea spray, fog, against stormy skies with thick, swirling clouds, inspired by the aesthetics and symbolism of topographical maps; SK.no text.
There was once a man who lived beside the ocean and had the unfortunate habit of bringing dead people back to life.
He didn’t do it for money.
There wasn’t any money in it.
Most of the people he resurrected were terribly disappointed to discover that they were alive again. They had already made their peace with eternity, and now somebody was expecting them to put on their shoes.
The man lived in a little blue house beneath four enormous towers painted the colours of an ancient sunset.
Nobody knew who had painted them.
Some said Odin had painted them before he lost his eye. Others said the towers had been painted by a Norwegian fisherman who had accidentally caught the moon in his net and needed somewhere to hang it.
The moon was still there.
It hung over the fourth tower like a potato that had become interested in astronomy.
Every morning the man climbed the red tower and killed Death.
Death was a very agreeable fellow, considering his occupation. He wore a long black coat and had the face of someone who had been waiting for a bus since the beginning of time.
“Good morning,” Death would say.
“Good morning,” the man replied.
Then he killed him.
It was not particularly difficult.
Death had never been very good at defending himself because, until recently, nobody had ever tried to kill him.
By noon Death would return and kill the man.
This was their arrangement.
They had been doing it for nine hundred years.
Neither remembered who had started it.
According to the Prose Edda, Odin had gathered the slain warriors into Valhalla so they could fight all day and feast all night until Ragnarök. The man thought this was a marvelous idea, except for the fighting.
He preferred resurrection.
He had filled the towers with people he had invented.
There were women who had never been born, children who remembered futures that hadn’t happened, and an elderly Viking who had died in 873 and now spent his afternoons trying to understand the workings of a toaster.
There were also several gods who had been forgotten.
They sat on balconies overlooking the sea, drinking coffee and watching the waves destroy themselves against the rocks.
One of them was Baldr.
He was still beautiful.
He was also profoundly tired of being beautiful.
“I’d like to be a turnip,” Baldr said one afternoon.
“Why a turnip?”
“Nobody expects anything from a turnip.”
The man promised to think about it.
Meanwhile, far beneath the towers, Yggdrasil spread its roots through the bones of the earth. Níðhöggr gnawed patiently at the roots, as he had always done.
Every now and then he stopped to listen to the sound of the sea.
Even dragons get lonely.
One evening Death came to the blue house carrying a small cardboard box.
Inside was a dead bird.
“I found this,” Death said. “Can you bring it back?”
The man looked at him.
“You’re Death.”
“I know.”
“You killed it.”
“I know.”
“Why do you want it alive?”
Death looked embarrassed.
“It was singing.”
The man took the bird from the box and placed it on the kitchen table.
He had resurrected kings, poets, warriors, gods, and entire civilizations that nobody remembered.
But he had never resurrected a song.
He touched the bird.
Its little heart started beating.
The bird opened its eyes and began singing something that had never been heard before, not even by the gods.
Death sat down.
Outside, the four towers leaned toward the ocean.
The dead crowded their windows.
The moon shone through their bones.
Even Odin stopped counting his warriors.
For a moment nobody killed anybody.
Then Death began to cry.
His tears fell through the floorboards and into the roots of Yggdrasil, where they became tiny blue flowers that would bloom only after the end of the world.
The man looked at Death.
“Tomorrow?” he asked.
“Tomorrow,” Death answered.
And they shook hands.
That night, the sea continued throwing itself against the rocks, dying in a thousand white pieces and returning again, as though resurrection had been its idea all along.
Somewhere in the fourth tower a Viking finally made toast.
It was burned.
He ate it anyway.
And that was how Valhalla survived another day without Ragnarök.
Nobody wrote it down.
There were already too many stories about the end of the world and not nearly enough about what happened the morning after.
