The story before ‘The end’ — a conversation with Anders Nilsen

Andreea Saioc,

Editor (Art) 

Dear Cheryl,

This is me on the way to promontory after setting up at the church. I don’t remember who I was walking with, I think Adam, probably my mom. When we started out everyone was behind me, following. I stopped for a while to let them pass. That’s you in my arms

— Anders Nilsen, The End

 

About dying as a concept and as a process, about love, about powerlessness, about how to wait and how to endure, about how cathartic art can be and about much more and much deeper, we talk to American cartoonist Anders Nilsen, the author of the book The End. Put in the simplest form, The End follows the artist’s experience of the death of his fiancee, Cheryl Weaver, in November 2005. Eight years have passed since, and the event lives on through the pathos and lugubrious immediacy of Nilsen’s storytelling, a tribute to love and life more forceful than any I have seen. The End came after Don’t go where I can’t follow, a heartbreakingly sad memoir of drawings, letters and photographs. Don’t go is the raw and painful story of how it started and how it ended, a God-like, nonetheless tragic position for Nilsen, who lived to tell the tale. The End however, with its simplest graphic and complex ideas, has a more tender perception that is painful in a mute sort of manner.

A strange dive into Nilsen’s mind, this private narrative of one man’s loss has an unmistakably universal value, for talking about love, time and its running grief, remembering and closure. And despite its crushing sadness, for its celebration of life because ultimately, what shines through is the longing for the parted’s physical presence, almost tangible through the long dual-perspective soliloquies tragically disguised into dialogues. And all at once, you are made aware of how wondrous it is to be able to grab that cup of coffee, and talk and be. It makes the blind eye impossible to turn.

I was afraid of what to ask and how to ask; the frailty of egg shells seemed hard near these questions and their answers to be. But Nilsen responded kindly and passionately, and with much patience, about the book, the story and the death. Let’s talk to Anders Nilsen.

 

The book

First of all, I’d like us to talk about the process of writing a book with such private a narrative as The End. What was it like to reread the material and edit it? Did the artist dominate, by trying to refine his work or was it mostly the human’s exercise of dealing with such a traumatic event?

Editing and re-reading several years after the fact was harder than I expected. Being both the artist and the human, as you say, much of the time it was just a familiar process of trying to get the rhythms of the story right and get the points and moods across, but it also definitely stirred up difficult emotions that normally stay pretty well out of sight these many years later. But there was a way in which that was nice too. It meant thinking about this person again and being reminded how lucky I had been to know her.

Many times I’ve wondered whether at the time of writing, you were aware of the fact that it was meant for public display. Or was it perhaps more of a diary-experiment, later redirected towards publishing?

Some of it was like a diary. I was trying to process and understand what I was going through. But once I decided to publish parts of that diary, I definitely did have an audience in mind. So some pieces are more self-conscious than others. There are also a few pieces, such as ‘how can I prepare you for what’s to follow’, which were done for a very specific audience — in that case friends and family on the occasion of the birth of my nephew. And really, even when one is journaling in the most private way, it’s hard to completely shake off the idea that someone may read it someday.

I’d like you to tell me more about your choice of drawing style, and above all, why you chose to combine such sophisticated textual reflections with such simple illustrations.

In the process of wrestling with a complex, slippery thing like grief, it seemed necessary to try to get it down quickly — while I had my finger on some particular feeling — and drawing quickly meant drawing simply. It’s also almost a truism in comics that the simplest, blankest faces tend to be the easiest for the reader to insert themselves into and identify with. Charlie Brown and Tintin are easy examples. The actual subtleties of the human face are incredibly complex. If you draw an eye at a slightly different angle it can change the emotional content by a lot. I wanted to avoid that problem and reducing my figures almost to empty vessels, seemed to work.

Now that you’ve just mentioned the comic genre, how much of the traditional comic book elements did you use in the book?

Parts of the book are pretty traditional — figures in a box talking using word balloons. I guess the fact that I sometimes don’t use panel borders, the fact that I use some found photographs for backgrounds, that I directly address the reader, include straight prose and things such as diagrams….all those could be seen as non-traditional. But I don’t really think about it that way. I’m a storyteller who uses comics’ forms when it serves my needs and other means when the needs are different.

However varied the definitions of comics may be, I believe it’s popular — not always informed though-knowledge that they tend to be light and entertaining readings. Your work is however incredibly sad, especially in the context of a consumerist capitalism that doesn’t agree with the idea of finality much. So how did it feel to put an object of such private value on sale and what were your expectations for the success of your work?

With The End I didn’t think about that so much. With the previous book, Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, I was much more worried about it. That book was more like a memorial to Cheryl and really wasn’t intended for an outside audience. And so making money off the experiences it described, felt more complicated.

But the book couldn’t have existed in the form I wanted it to without my publisher’s help, so I’ve tried to set the concerns aside, with varying degrees of success over time. It’s in print again, now, so that’s something. Interestingly it did better than either I or my publisher expected for such an odd category-less book.

 

The story

Can you tell me something about Cheryl? Anything you’d like.

She was an artist. She was super talented, working in film and video, collage, book making, painting and drawing, photography and printmaking. She had a restless mind, was extremely intelligent. She made people feel at ease, easily. She was very private. She was a great reader, she was an incredibly hard worker. She took life seriously in the best way. We met in art school. Our studios were next door.

 

Your description paints an unmistakable picture as to what your loss must have meant. And since in the history of art, many have coped with death through representations of the parted, I want to ask you, was this book your representation of her? 

No, not really. That’s my main regret about this work: that it isn’t about her, it’s about loss, and therefore it’s about me. I represent myself talking to ‘her’, but really it’s me talking to myself. It’s wish fulfillment. That’s the problem. She’s gone.

 

Would you then say that The end was written as part of your healing experience? Because there are certain schools of psychology that say the pain one experiences after the death of a loved one is a mostly egotistical manifestation, as we pity ourselves for being devoid of the presence of that person.   

Self-pity is certainly part of the mix, but any psychologist that wants to reduce grief to that should probably find a different job. I don’t think of working on The End as having been a healing experience. Working on it didn’t ‘make it better’. Going for walks with friends and talking about it was probably more helpful. As was being part of a grief group where I got to talk to other people who were going through the same things. But none of these things helps the grief go away. They just get it out in the open and help you feel less alone. I think the important thing is to go through it, to actually really experience the crazy emotional thunderstorm. If you do that you get better at it with practice. But even then, really, it’s only the passage of time that actually heals. I think because I’m an artist I saw that emotional thunderstorm and wanted to try and depict it on the page. It just struck me as an interesting subject. It was kind of a separate impulse.

 

Due to the illness and the treatment, Cheryl was starting to have an increasingly less coherent image of what was happening, which left you as the only entirely present witness to the process. Is that why you chose to share the story?

Death doesn’t really make sense. You can try and force it into having a reasonable shape and meaning that fits the human mind, but it will always resist. So if you can’t make sense of it the next best thing is to simply tell the story. Even non-sensical things begin to feel like they make sense when you repeat them over and over. If I had any advice to someone with a friend who just lost a loved one, it might be just to let them tell the story. Be available.

 

I’m just starting to understand how complex a process the writing of this book was, and how many were the ways in which it helped organize your experience. But in the end, and without forgetting about the cultural aspect of grieving, death is frequently dealt with through public displays of pain. Would you say that writing and publishing this book was your own kind of public mourning?

I guess in a way it was. Though again, that wasn’t my intention. One of the problems with grief is that people don’t know how to deal with it, so even if they know what you’re going through, they don’t bring it up. And of course most people don’t even know at all. There was definitely an impulse to want to kind of slap everyone around you in the face and confront them with it. It’s ugly and embarrassing, but it’s true, too.

 

Of death

As a concept, death has many cultural faces. For example, I have recently been at a conference of the Dalai Lama, where His Holiness said dying is like changing a set of clothes. So what is your conception on death? Is it, as the name of your book, the end?

That analogy only works if you believe in reincarnation, or an afterlife, which I don’t. Cheryl’s death did make me less certain about what might or might not happen after death, so I’m willing to concede that the Dalai Lama has as much right as anyone to his version. I just haven’t ever seen any good reason to think anyone actually has the slightest idea. All that said, I try to outline the way I see it in the book: we have this one chance, this one small glimpse into the universe. Eternity is, for us, always and only right now. It’s a tremendous gift. Don’t muck it up.

Since we were just talking about death in culture, I have to ask, how much of this conception is informed by the culture you live in?

I guess I come from a culture that says ‘If there’s not a sound reason to believe something, don’t believe it’. Which I find preferable to a culture that says ‘if it’s written down in a very old book and appeals to your prejudices, it’s probably true’. On the other hand I also am aware that our minds are not terribly reliable at coaxing the truth out of the world either way. Which means we’re all pretty much muddling through as best we can.

The way I saw it, your whole book is a reflection on a process, the one that leads to death and the one that follows it. But if you  were to anthropomorphize death itself, what would its face be?

I just  wouldn’t anthropomorphize death. To me death isn’t a thing. It’s the absence of a thing. It’s the profound dislocation of, on the one hand, a sudden, monumental, unfathomable change in one’s own life, and on the other the utter indifference of the universe at large to that change. Giving it a face just doesn’t do it justice, in my mind. It means trying to put it in a box the human mind can grapple with. In which case you are no longer dealing with the actual thing itself as it really is. Which isn’t to say I don’t get some pleasure and amusement from New Yorker gags about the grim reaper, or Greek myths about Hades. But those things are far enough removed from my actual experience of death and loss as to basically be about something else entirely.

Western culture, just like you say, has certainly been using a simplified image of death so far. And this image has been put, almost without exception, to a social corrective use, to make people live ‘just’ lives. But modern-day art has a much more complex palette of messages. So what is your message?

I’m not sure what the message is, or if I had one. I wanted to communicate what this process of loss was. To myself, mainly, but also to an audience. I don’t think death should be feared, exactly. And I don’t think it should be held up as a tool of self-correction, or social control. But it is real. And I think it is worth taking it seriously if it means making the most of the time that you have, and understanding one’s life as an incredible gift, but one you don’t get to hold onto forever.

As our time together is sadly about to finish, I’d like to ask one more question. Did The End mean closure for you? 

Closure comes and goes. As time passes it stays longer.

 

Image Courtesy: Anders Nilsen