arts, literature

Mieke ‘Mik’ Schelstraete: andrOmeda

Eighteen young Flemish and Dutch authors drew inspiration from the collection held by the Mauritshuis in The Hague. They looked at seventeenth-century paintings through the lens of an alternative history which they then brought to life in short but powerful texts. Mieke ‘Mik’ Schelstraete takes us inside the head of Andromeda in the eponymous painting by Rembrandt van Rijn. ‘Gradually the separation between sky and sea takes shape, thin and tentative.’

andrOmeda

In the absence of both monster and hero, Andromeda remains chained to the rocks. It’s unclear on whose altar she has been sacrificed, for whose mistakes she’s being punished. Her wrists are weak. Her arms are tired. At the first sign of a sliver of rising sun in the darkness, fear rears its head as well.

Between the darkness of night and the midday sun lies a red twilight. Gradually, the separation between sky and sea takes shape, thin and tentative. The horizon is sharp as a paper cut. Through her eyelids, Andromeda perceives red. She blinks and sees the separation. She closes her eyes again or narrows them to slits. She sees the line take shape. Andromeda knows what the day will bring her. She’s dead nervous. Her bowels are bothering her. Her insides are cramped. Her stomach feels hard, and her anus is clenched. She feels like a drum filled with intestines full of fossilised shit. She can’t ignore the fact that she’s scared. The shit’s centre of gravity sits somewhere just above her anus. She has stitches in her lower left abdomen and nausea churns between her midriff and her oesophagus.

The sun rises. The harsh, flat beams turn the crown of her head into a hot plate. The sea is unrelentingly dark blue underneath the pale blue sky. The two planes are unchanging and still. Andromeda scrapes her feet across the ground. The rock is hard and rough. She plays with a crumb of rock between two toes. She feels the dust beneath her soles and in her hair. Every now and then, when a young goat ventures too close to the edge of the cliff, she is sprayed with sand and grit crumbling off under the animal’s weight. The bits of stone are itchy on her scalp. But today there are no goats, the day is too hot, the grass too unappetizing. Andromeda’s brain reaches a boiling point. Her right bicep quivers. She tries to find a position in which her wrists are less tightly bound by leaning this way and that, never quite resting against the rockface, but the ideal position is elusive. Her breathing becomes more and more shallow. Her cranium is full of horseflies slamming furiously against her forehead. A headache begins behind her left eye. Her temples are throbbing, and the nausea intensifies. Her throat feels constricted.

The sea reflects the sun’s rays into her face. She looks again: the line. Views it from one corner of the eye to the other. There’s nothing to be seen. Just a flat plane stretching out before her and continuing as far as she can see. Andromeda keeps tracing the line with her eyes, back and forth. She does it until everything turns red again, evening falls, and all she can look at is the darkness.

• deBuren
• Mauritshuis
• Rembrandt