2001: Björk, Vespertine
By Lesley Jenike
I Can Obey All Your Rules and Still Be Me
I met an artist who told me a voice once spoke to her and commanded her to, “show [it] the liminal figures.”
“What does that even mean?” She rolled her eyes at the voice, exasperated. “And also, I’m not the kind of person who hears voices,” she said. “I’m an academic.”
She did some research and found that liminal can mean transitory or ambiguous, so she swapped her usual, slow-to-process egg tempera for watercolor—the medium John Singer Sargent called “best in an emergency”—and began to paint a woman covered in fur, a mermaid, a braid of hair tied with red string, and a single, disembodied finger.
Why am I telling you this?
Someone (I’ll blame Freud) said our old beliefs, the old gods, appear from time-to-time, catching us unawares and scaring us, making us feel strange—mainly bad, sometimes good, but always strange—and we call this the uncanny, and when the past (whether we remember it or not) bleeds into the present, we become (in that moment) liminal, we are liminal figures as in the figure that voice-hearing artist drew then hid under red ink like a wedding veil.
I’m telling you this because I’d been trying to say something when I met her—something about strangeness, how it creeps up on you, how strangeness comes when we find ourselves at the threshold of something: what’s known and what’s not known, what we remember from the future palling the past, the past unveiling the future like a bride.
Björk has always been a brink, an edge, a verge. She’s always been strange. But Vespertine—the 2001 album inspired by her new romance with the artist Matthew Barney—gave Björk’s strangeness a new physicality. Barney may have had something to do with it. His work deals in orifices both open and closed, a hyper-probe into the body’s processes. He was an athlete, a model, so no wonder Vespertine is sexy but what’s more, it’s an inquiry into the closed/open circuits of intimacy. One the one hand, trust was being built with a lover and on the other, trust was breaking down with a film director.
While Verspertine was in-process at night, Björk was filming Lars von Trier’s movie Dancer in the Dark during the day, playing the lead in that mashup of kitchen-sink naturalism and Hollywood musicals. As usual, Björk was putting herself out there on the proverbial ledge, on set under the “garish sun” and under the cover of darkness by the blue light of her laptop, weaving together her “micro-beats” into songs about tenderness and domesticity.
Björk’s liminality has its risks and rewards, but that’s what makes both her performance in Dancer in the Dark and on Vespertine so thrilling. I can’t fathom Vespertine without the stain (“An Echo, a Stain”) of what comes after and what came before. In 1999, I asked a burly dude in Newport, Rhode Island to ink a copy of Björk’s Viking compass tattoo onto my own arm. I suppose I got the tattoo to remind myself that home as an idea is mutable and the sea is wide, and of course as an homage to Björk herself, but also for reasons that were and are still being embroidered. Björk and Barney would plunge into an acrimonious separation in 2013. In 2007 I would fantasize about singing Björk’s “Unison” at my wedding: “You gardener, you discipliner, domestically. / I can obey all of your rules / And still be “B.”
On August 27, 2001, I’d moved in with the man I was going to marry (on that day, four years later), and was back in my home state in a haunted Columbus apartment where books fell from the shelves all on their own. I drove in a rush to the old downtown indoor mall to buy Vespertine. Back then, release days were sacred and the object of worship; Björk on the album cover in her swan dress with one arm up over her head, eyes closed in an expression of rapture—the same dress she wore to the Academy Awards a few months earlier. One of her original songs from Dancer in the Dark had been nominated and she famously laid “swan eggs” all along the red carpet. I think she was trying to tell us something.
Von Trier was allegedly brutal to Björk during filming, sadistic, even. “Lars, who is a complete fanatic,” she told an interviewer, “wants his figures to suffer, especially the female ones and I couldn’t really accept that.” Suffering figures. Liminal figures. Watching von Trier’s films, it’s difficult to disentangle the violence done to his characters from violence done to the actors who play them, and who better to open a door between the two than Björk, a freaky Icelander critics have sometimes dismissed as a strange girl/woman who scream/sings at volcanos and anyway, say some insiders, it was really just a power struggle between von Trier and his star. Björk, after all, was used to “running her own show.”
But the whole business traumatized her to the point of near-nervous collapse. Catherine Deneuve, (a fellow cast-member in Dancer), claims she witnessed Björk eating a sweater on set. Out of desperation, as a performance of pain á la Matthew Barney, or as a way to at least temporarily derail filming—who can say? Björk herself denies the whole thing, but even if it’s a myth, I find the anecdote instructive.
Textiles tell stories. There’s the story of weaving and embroidering which was and is still mainly a woman’s story, and because it’s a woman’s story, it can be ignored. And if a thing is ignored, it can do what it likes. It can happen in secret. Sometimes. Masts still have to be woven. Wall coverings. Quilts. Clothes. The world must turn. Ships have to keep sailing. Kids have to stay warm. But there are songs. And there are looms. And she’s pulling the strings, layering her sounds, a tactile technique for the esoteric, one layer over another, a quilt under which the future/ past can rest. Under which it can dream. Of the past/future upon which we are all strung—until we’re cut down.
See, when Björk ate the sweater, she swallowed the story. When Björk ate the sweater, it was like she was saying, “this time I’m going to keep it all to myself.”
But she didn’t, not exactly. I’ve never gotten to see her live, but I know from footage that she began her Vespertine shows by playing a lap-sized, clear plexiglass music box alone on stage as fake snow fell. It was a framing device, of course. Like so many nineteenth century novels, Björk first presented us with the circumstances of the story’s telling—like a party’s host gathering guests around the fire or a mother by her child’s bed winding the music box’s handle and opening the lid.
Vespertine was a collaborative effort with electronica duo Matmos, also a choir of native Greenlander women, a harpist, computer-generated beats based on analog sounds like the shuffling of cards, boots marching in hard-packed snow, the music box, of course, strings, a celesta. How do I describe this music beyond its liminality, its superimpositions of time on time, place on place, mode on mode? We bring our childhoods to bear in adult relationships, our adult relationships to bear on our children, pagan pasts to post-Christian presents. Call it “Pagan Poetry,” and it’s little wonder director Robert Eggers chose Björk to play a seeress in his 2022 Viking-era movie The Northman. Time is woven by women who slept with their backs to the fire, choked by the smoke it takes to see by, eyes aching from scutwork, threads licked thin enough to fit. They’ve got the future on a loom and the type of knowing that’s like rubbing a fist in the eye till there are patterns and there is symmetry.
Björk’s character Selma in Dancer in the Dark is suffering from a degenerative disease that will one day take her eyesight completely. She’s a factory worker so disassociated from her purpose, as I’m watching the movie, I have no idea what she’s making. Does she? What she does make are songs. She makes songs out of the factory’s repetitive bangs, whirrs, and clicks. She lives in her imagination, composing an ecstatic soundtrack that’s half acoustic and half electric, half body and half machine, a daytime drudgery that gives way, at night, to Vespertine’s clicks and buzzes, its obsessive audiophilia, its sex and love which have always sounded to me like the swarming of insects, a kaleidoscope of beetles and butterflies. But I see now that it’s the sound of eras bleeding into one another. In the video for the album’s first single “Hidden Place,” a medium-close up of Björk’s face and décolletage pans out to reveal that the skin on her back has been pinched and threaded as though done-up in a corset. When does sexual pleasure become obsessive, even horrifying? In the hidden places, in the privacies of our homes, our beds, in the secret medullae of our hearts. After, “gorgeousness, he’s still inside me,” comes the fear of constant occupation; love’s first flush will someday give way to something richer and stranger.
It was August 27, 2001, my future wedding anniversary (I didn’t know it yet), and the day Vespertine dropped. I suppose I thought the fastest way to get it in my ears would be to race straight to Camelot Music in the mall downtown then race back home again, pop the CD into my computer and turn its tracks into files so I could burn copies onto blank discs, add the songs to playlists. But first I had to walk through the mall, walk past its empty stores, skirt its atrium where every Christmas a gigantic tree was erected and hung in tinsel, where choirs of children sang carols, where there’d been a stage for fashion shows, Hansen concerts, teenage dance parties, and where young couples could snuggle and slurp their Orange Juliuses, parents could collapse with their fussy kids, and people in suits could bitch on their lunch breaks.
It was August 27, 2001, my yet-to-be-wedding-anniversary, probably the last time I ever went in that mall, definitely the last time I ever went into a mall record store. Digital downloads were choking out retailers. Malls were dying. In less than a month, two planes would obliterate the Twin Trade Towers in New York City, plunging us into an ash-epoch, something new, something strange, and maybe rich too, if we allow that word all its thud and difficulty. In time, new worlds are formed and the old diffuse and disperse, or become a collection of scattershot memory and hearsay, popping up now again like repeated figuration in a tapestry or a voice in our heads: “Show me the liminal figures.” I couldn’t hear it then, but the future was trying to talk to me.
Lesley Jenike's poems and essays have appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Bennington Review, West Branch, Image, the Rumpus, and many other journals. She teaches writing and literature at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio where she lives with her family.