For our dead.
In a cemetery, life becomes vast. So vast that it starts becoming sky at its edges. Absence here is the framework in which life arises. Its invisible traces lead into the world of listening. A silent glimmer in a wide expanse. There are no colors beyond. In the light of my having been, my substance refracts into brilliance. When I no longer have a body, you become my body, as huge or as small as however many of you there are. My sensuality has changed sides. I am now a shooting star in your dreams, the soft light in which you sleep. We have the temperature of your memories. We are the great space for all that is precious to you, all that is not and is no more in the outer world. Our weight even magnifies the glow of the birch in the November light. As long as we live in you, we will deepen and elevate you.
Rows of lifespans, condensed in the engravings of time. Delicate blossoms veil a name. A woman kisses her hand and caresses the cold stone. A beech tree bears an inscription that is rarely visited. Death makes us all nomads, wanderers here and there. Your husband, their son, your friend, my mother, their neighbor, each in the name of all the dead. Loss and love create the same expansion in our hearts. In the countenance of those who have passed away, we become defenseless, vulnerable, and beautiful as a newborn. Your dead I want to leave to you. What is most dead here are the dried flowers on the compost heap. In this place of twilight, life grows silently into the real, even in daylight.
The deceased live in my innards, where things get queasy. They inhabit the spaces between lines. They give me the presence of their absent lives, as white as the underside of a painted canvas. And yet the white carries the sound of their essence. The sensuality we inhabit together is the warmth of love, sometimes the heat of anger, or the cool breeziness of summer laughter. “How do you want to be?” they ask in me. “How do you want to live?” I want to look into eyes and not hesitate to embrace. I want to love so that human beings don’t lose each other. I want to be around you like a sun-warmed heart that looks after you and hopes to be recognized.
Without the meaning of my death, life would overtake me. The dead bear this meaning, which we, from our side, can never really grasp, like we can’t really grasp them. Sometimes there is a long silence. Eventually, there is a humming, a resonance between two sides, like delicate air. In it, a touch is traced.
About the artist
From 2019 to 2021, Yves Berger spent the days of November at the cemetery in his home village, painting a series of monoprints. Every day, equipped with his oil paints and four aluminum plates, he searched for an encounter that captivated his eyes. The images will soon be published under the title “Book of Life.”
Translation Joshua Kelberman and Laura Liska
