Excerpt
When I first heard the tale of Wu Tao-tzu as a child, entering a picture seemed a very natural thing to do. What else
could you do?
Not to enter would have been to miss a golden opportunity. Pictures were few and far between in the 1930s, remember!
In Sweden there was in those days not a single television channel, no lush colour photographs in illustrated magazines, no coffee-table books full of eye-goodies and very few childrens books.
So when I saw a picture that was more than a black smudge on the page, I jumped at it. Or rather, I jumped into it, as if it was a jungle to explore or a room to live in.
The pictures that most excited my fantasy were often those on tins. Tins of sardines, of meat or even of tropical fruit.
Opening the tin was opening the picture.
Smelling the contents brought me to the brink of the picture world.
Eating was entering.
As a schoolboy, a few years later, I had already lost this natural gift of entering into pictures. I now took what seemed to me a more realistic view of the matter. I prepared myself for a career as a practising magician.
An older friend, who was a professional and gave regular paid performances, showed me how some of his tricks were done. I used all my pocket money to buy a cloak, a wand and a top hat full of secret pockets.
Now when I heard the tale of Wu Tao-tzu my question was: how did he do it?
What was the secret behind the opening of the gates at the sound of clapping hands?
How did he manage the art of his own disappearance?
He seemed to have penetrated his painting and found an inner room, a liveable, habitable inner space, behind the surface of art. How was this illusion created?
Or was it, perhaps, not just an illusion? After all, the great German novelist Hermann Hesse spent his whole writing life trying to enact the myth of Wu Tao-tzu. Musil and Proust were not far behind.
The more I studied the myth of Wu Tao-tzu, the more I was fascinated by the possibilities it opened up.
Questions multiplied.
Why did he disappear?
What company did he leave behind?
Did he experience the culture of his day as desperate and meaningless?
Or was his vanishing an act of artistic self-confidence? An attempt to verify art in life?
Wu Tao-tzu had the courage for solitude. That is what is so tempting about his fate. He had the courage to disappear and continue alone, on the other side of the visible in art.