Vision from the Edge: Breyten Breytenbach Painting the Lines

“Listen: this is the sum of my life: I travelled all the regions where peaks are looking glasses for the absent face of God and shadows are unknown there except when whispering under the sods.” Quite the contrary of a “social documentary,” this film offers glimpses of a man who has spent his life away from the “mainstream,” with his specific, his very own Vision from the Edge. September, the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands: Breyten Breytebach, poet, painter and anti-Apartheid activist, creates six panels/scrolls which will hang from the ceiling of the exhibition. These are part of a retrospective of his paintings at the occasion of the Jacobus van Looy prize. The scrolls, six poems handpainted with illustration, become the backdrop of a tapestry of sounds and images: poems, texts about and writing, memories of South Africa where the artist was born, thoughts and evocations of other places where the poet has lived in exile since 1959. Breyten painting the lines, and speaking with his own words about the Self, the Other, the private and the public persona, and the creative process. I and may you remember what it was, and is, and will be like to be a poet-in-process or a painter-in-progress, wildly paradoxical and deeply ethical; to live on the edge, to live the edge, close enough in any event to push yourself over it, for in this direction lies responsibility and dignity.