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| FOX / one of my artworks from a few years ago |
The sleeping, shining-white fox fits in wonderfully
with the stillness of the night, which still remains
magically bright. Mikkl is like a fragment of the
mysterious Ice Age, lying hidden in the frozen, quiet
brightness. In the transparent heavens the large moon
looks quite near, not as it does in Europe where its
light is cold and distant. Here it seems to belong to
our world, the luminous picture of a sharply outlined
ice landscape.
Mikkl’s behaviour takes on a touch of timidity. All
animals grow timid in the winter night, the hunters say.
[…]
“Poor Mikkl, you’re traipsing to your doom. In a few
days the fox-trapping will begin; they’re after your life.
They will pull your beautiful fur over your head and
send you far away to a place where a lot of people live
close to each other. There they will give you glittering
eyes made of glass, and then you will hang in one of
the thousand glittering shops in one of the thousand
glittering streets, together with thousand of other
glittering dead things. Do you know, Mikkl, there’s
so much artificial glitter there that the people no
longer know anything about light, about its coming
and going, and about the magic of twilight.”
I fetch water from the lagoon; it is so clear that I can
see the rust-brown weeds at the bottom. Mikkl also
laps up some of the clear water but without letting me
out of his sight. Suddenly he raises his head and stares
at me as though it were the first time in his life he had
seen me. Horror glares out of his wide, glowing green
eyes; then he leaps aside and runs off without once
turning around. He runs across the black field of stone
and at last disappears, a tiny spot in my sight, at the
foot of the great black mountains.
Perhaps they become clairvoyant, the animals, as the
darkness grows, and then see the true face of men?
—Christiane Ritter, A Woman in the Polar Night [1938]
