Ghosts

Ghosts

I’m hearing writer John Caselberg’s voice from the dead. A reservoir of thoughts and impressions, the threads of a life as I type his letters. I have a rough draft of the book I’m writing about Anna, his wife. A New Zealand artist.

I watched a movie last night, The Sunlit Night, set on the Lofoten Islands in Norway, and it brought me back to my time on the Lofoten Islands, when I stayed with a woman who sold grapes to me on the ferry dock. She didn’t want me camping. I was taking the mailboat up the coast of Norway and got off for several days on my way to the far north. I can’t remember how many days I was there, walking out from the little town on the road that passed the mountain called The Goat. The fields were deep chocolate brown, still furrowed with ice. The waters were turquoise around the mountains that came right into the ocean.

The movie is about a young artist, almost the same age I was when I came through there, who takes up an apprenticeship with an artist who’s in his own sort of exile on the islands. He’s doing an installation that uses an old barn. The artist has fled her complicated life in New York and a blistering critique from her teachers. I was fleeing, too, the year after I graduated from college when nothing worked out the way it was supposed to. I wanted to be a writer and thought I'd fallen in love but didn’t have any evidence that those things were going to happen.

The movie’s moral, if there is one, is that you make your own joy. The artist goes to a place so different it changes everything about her life, and then she leaves. At the end of the movie, one of the teachers critiquing the work she’s painted in the North asks, “Can you get to this level again without going back there?”

I thought about my ghosts as I watched the movie, especially the girl I was at twenty-two. And I thought about how the barn the young woman was painting with the artist on the island was filled with light by the end. Like Anna Caselberg’s paintings are filled with ethereal light.