It is late afternoon on the Ekeberg hill above Kristiania, the city we now call Oslo. A road runs along the ridge with a wooden fence on the fjord side, and below it the water lies flat and dark, holding the last desperate glimpse of light the way a hand holds a coin it has decided not to spend. Three men are walking; the third, a painter not yet thirty, has begun to fall behind. The sun is going down, as it does every evening, but on this very evening the sunset has a different colour, the colour of the inside that dwells inside someone’s soul. His friends walk on. He stops at the fence and leans on it, tired to death; the sky seems to have turned blood red, as if tongues of fire were above the fjord, and a scream was going through nature, and he could not say from where.
He does not run away. He is a man too tired to run, and still a man who stands his post.
He comes back. In 1892, he paints Despair: a figure at that fence with the sky already burning. In 1893, The Scream: the same road, the same fence, the same sky, only now the figure turns and shows us its face. In 1894, a crowd along the same rail, every face green, every mouth shut, and he calls it Angst.
He stood three years on the same one road. The most famous scream in art was never an event. It was a place a man kept returning to, at the same hour, to stand in front of something that would not show itself. He did not know what was coming in over the water. He knew where it lived, and he went there, evening after evening, and waited at the rail like a sentry posted to a border no map had drawn.
Black Angels
He had to stand by that very post to face a past that was, since the beginning, lurking inside of him.
Illness and madness and death were the black angels that stood at my cradle.
His mother died of consumption when he was five. His sister Sophie died of it a month before his fourteenth birthday, in a wicker chair, because she had asked to be lifted out of the bed. They took his sister Laura to the asylum. His father, a military physician, prayed over the children as if the house were under siege.
Munch was born on a spiritual battlefield, and did the only thing a man can do with a field he cannot leave: he stayed, and learned its every stone, preparing for the incoming battle against an unknown enemy.
The Sick Child, Death in the Sickroom, Madonna, Vampire are all reports from the same post, each one saying that the enemy is still out there, and still faceless.
Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder.
It admits the trap: the dread pointed nowhere. He steered by it, and drank, and lost the top of a finger to a pistol in a quarrel with a woman he could neither marry nor leave, and still went back to the rail.
You can hold a field for a long time and be broken by the thing you were waiting to see. In the autumn of 1908, after a long collapse into drink and something worse, he asked to be committed to a nerve clinic in Copenhagen and did not come out until spring. Baths, diet, quiet rooms, a mild electric current. This is the stage no one warns you about: sometimes the army shows itself by charging, and the sentry learns its shape from the wound.
The shape might not be what the sky had promised. He had arrived hearing voices, certain he was hunted, that enemies in Norway were organised against him. The doctors found only a bottle and a man. The enemy he had been watching the fjord for all those years had been standing at the rail the whole time, in his own coat, looking out.
Eight Metres of Dawn
In the spring of 1909 he came home to Norway for good, rented a house on the rocks at Kragerø, and began to paint what he had never painted before: road workers in the snow, a yellow log driving into the picture like a spear, and the sun, over the water, in the early morning, coming up. He had spent twenty years painting that light go.
Now he painted its arrival.
The university announced a competition for its new assembly hall, and it took five years and two undecided juries before they let him do it. In 1916 the canvases went up: almost eight metres of dawn on the central wall.
The Scream he had made in tempera, on cardboard, a fragile thing for a fragile hour. He laid this Sunrise on in oil, thick, on canvas the size of a wall, painted outdoors in a shed he built on the rocks. A low horizon, the fjord, two dark cliffs, and between them the sun, just risen, throwing out rays that run off the canvas and across the panels on either side.
In 1893 the sky over that water was horizontal bands, slats across a lid. Here it is spokes from a centre as a wheel opening into something new. On the side panels, men and women reach naked towards the light. On the central wall there is no one at all. The missing figure is the one who used to stand at that fence with his back to the sky. There is nothing to turn away from now, so he has turned round, and he is you.
He did not paint what the light revealed. No army on the water, no enemy given a face. He painted the revealing. And that is not the victory, whatever they say about the serenity of the late Munch: the sunrise ends the war that cannot be won, the war against fog, and begins the one that can be lost.
A sentry who has seen the army is no longer a sentry. He is a soldier, and the difference is that now he can win as well as be won.
He did not paint what the light showed him. He painted the light showing.
He was not cured. The drinking eased; the black angels did not.
An Army with a Shape
Fear has an object, as Heidegger said: you fear something, and something can be fought. Anxiety has none, which is why it cannot be fought. That is what a sunrise changes. Not that the dread goes, but that it acquires edges: a fear with a size and a direction, standing where the fog was. The ground is the ground at the rail still. But now there is somewhere to walk towards, somewhere to march against.
Everyone has a rail. A place, a person, an hour of the day, where you keep going back without being able to say what waits there. The temptation is to demand the name first, to refuse the post until the enemy has been counted.
There is nothing to do there but what he did: come back, in every light and in none, while the enemy is still only weather, is only the tempestuous reverberation in the air, or the imperceptible shaking of the ground beneath an approaching army.
Because the awareness does come, on its own schedule, and it is not always kind. What it shows is usually smaller than the dread it replaces, and closer to home one might think.
From that morning, the war is no longer against fog. It is against a thing with a size and a name, and things with names can be fought. It came for him, as it comes for all of us.
He painted the light by which a dark thing is seen, and left the cliffs on either side as dark as he found them. He stood at that fence for twenty years so that one morning there would be something to fear, at last, instead of everything. He stood by the fence so now there is something to fight against, and something to fight for.
Go to the field before you know the army. And then, in 1925, and again in 1927, a man past sixty went back and painted The Sick Child once more: the same wicker chair, the same red hair on the pillow, the oldest post he had, with his sun eleven years up on the wall behind him. By then, the enemy had a name. It was still in the chair. He went back and painted it with the light on.
We cannot know who won, but the battle has been fought.
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If you know someone who has been going back to the same railing for years, send them this.
I have seen The Scream many times, but after reading this, I feel I have truly seen it for the first time.
The return to the ‘railing’ is the paradox of existence. Do we seek refuge in it as our existential shelter, or is its relentless repetition symbolic of our Sisyphean suffering? The railing marks that boundary between ‘illusory safety’ and ‘terrible infinity’; the point where humanity confronts the precipice of its own solitude.”