'And yet they say we live secure at home, while they are at the wars, with their sorry reasoning, for I would gladly take my stand in battle array three times o'er, than once give birth.'

Stills fra Lars von Triers 'Medea':

... og her et uddrag fra Sara Stridsbergs 'Land of Medea', scene 17:

THE GODDESS: A mother murdered both her children. Afterwards she walked into the 

sea with her dress loaded with stones. The sky was in flames above her. The beach was deserted. 

Medea is listening, surprised. 

MEDEA: Why are you in mourning? Who has died? 

THE GODDESS: A mother is sitting in the kitchen with her children. Her oven is full of 

roses. The kitchen is a yellow cone of light in which everything will be preserved. The 

melancholy, the window's glistening, flowing opening, the winter light. The big boy is 

standing on a chair by the sink. The little one is hanging on her hip. She is whisking and 
whisking. Then she puts on the gas oven. 

MEDEA: Why are you telling me this? 

Medea keeps studying her. She walks up to the Goddess listening closely to her as she 

speaks, reading her lips. As if she is in a hypnosis or stood at the bottom of the sea. Gets 

interrupted by the children's voices. 

AKILLES' VOICE: Mummy... Mummy? What are you doing? Are you sad, mummy? 

Should we phone dad? 

THE GODDESS: A mother goes out into the garden with her sleeping children. Shards 

in the wet grass. Her white feet are bleeding. The trees are asleep. All the birds don't 

sing. She beds her boys down into a soft bed of dirt. She is convinced that they are 

sleeping because she has fed them with soft drinks and sleeping pills. They are going to 

sleep undisturbed for a long time. Never unhappy again. She places the little boy's hand 

in the big boy's hand. She prays. Later she lies down on top of the soil and looks at the 

the sky rushing by overhead. 

MEDEA: Child murderer. 

THE GODDESS: The bridal bed is a woman's grave. 

MEDEA: Child murderer. 

AKILLES' VOICE: Mummy!  

THE GODDESS: A mother goes to see her children for the last time. The children 

are asleep in the bunk bed. The little one still has a teat. Gently she pushes the poison 

capsules into their mouths. The boys smell of sleep and sugar. Tenderly she squeezes  

their jaws shut over the glass. The poison explodes over their milk teeth. Death is 

immediate. She leaves the room- 

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.'