Destroy she says

At vandre træt ind i et overfyldt seminarrum; Freie Universität, der ligner et rumskib bygget på en nat. Aldrig at læse sine kursusbeskrivelser ordentligt, aldrig at lægge mærke til, hvem der egentligt underviser og så pludselig: Sara Stridsberg som gæsteprofessor i Berlin. Sara Stridsberg, som gør mig nervøs og begejstret når hun kalder sit seminar for 'destroy she says' og taler således om det, som hun de næste 6 måneder har tænkt sig at udsætte os skrækslagne lykkelige studerende for:


'The madness of writing makes us into other people, in the act of writing we leave ourselves. When I am writing I can truly understand the temptation of setting fire to something, the lustre of the first, tentative flames, the heat and glow reflected in the destroyer’s eyes and finally the madness of the fire as it obliterates everything around it. There is nothing as beautiful as a forest fire or a burning field, in the ravaged landscape, afterwards there is nothing left to remember. At the moment of writing, the author is someone else, she leaves herself, body, consciousness, her personal experiences, makes way for what is alien, she is literally out of her mind. A trapdoor of light, opening to the unknown, the unexpected, incomprehensible, a window facing onto night. Literature is the place for the delights of the doomed, the text is the smile of sickness.
To write is also to dream, a mad persons’s daydream, since only the mad devote their days to daydreaming, since only authors get paid for daydreaming. But unlike the mad person, a dream cannot be kept incarcerated, it cannot be caught in a photograph, it cannot be held responsible. The images of the text, of the dream multiply at the speed of light beneath the skull bones of citizens, and no regime of this world can check them. Every word is a casket, every word has a rose sewn up inside. Literature sews old and silver threads into her ruined dresses and coats. A fur left on a park bench becomes the silhouette of a bag lady, the author sees things that are not there, the text makes connections that do not exist, it harbours the paradox, utopia. All is mere language, all is mere wind. The American writer Joyce Carol Oates claims that all great art is transgressive and must therefore endure the punishment that will result; a public judgment, a distancing, a banishment from the community, to hospital, solitude, loss of reality.
The question is: How shall we write and live and stay healthy and alive and carry on being destructive insane desperate loving crazy. All these mad geniuses, all the burnt, stolen, missing, denied, refused, plagiarised, suicidal texts, all those unread and misread letters to the world, all those dangerous regions where writing takes us. Like madness, literature can function as a temporary respite and a place of refuge from the pain for the person writing, private pain and the pain of the world, war, the killing fields, the destruction around us, an asylum.'