Laocoön

Laocoön
I was undoubtedly once upon a time an archaic statue; I remember that I smiled but not why. I walked up King’s Street and laughed, just out of college. This was without cause or perhaps only because I was early. I remember that I held a pair of reins which presently no longer existed, that I was of marble or bronze, that I was thrown flat on my back and lay there smiling at my lying there smiling, that dirt fell over my smile so that it became ever more a smile in itself, whether this came to pass through an earthquake or in a barbarstorm .I smiled and fell and fell and smiled. Thus did I go through various stages: became faun and nymph and  gauvner and crone and hellenistic sovereign and various gods and at last Laocoon writhing under the snakes’ strangle-tries and with limbs which were equally serpents themselves. As for my sons, they were only smaller versions of myself.

At first they admired this group but later were of the opinion that it was poor and eventually considered it established that at best I was created around the year 100 after Christ during a period of decline.
But what they did not think of was that I writhed and suffered nonetheless and that it made no difference whether I was made at an earlier or later period and whether I smiled or curled my mouth in pain and conflict. For everything belongs to the beginning. I am a kouros who has become a Laocoon, and smiling or suffering is real whether good or bad and whether one lives 500 years before or 1800 years after oneself. I am then Laocoon and I writhe constantly , in a questionable original as well as in a multitude of plaster casts, and that is as much fate and death as constantly to smile.
O you who walk by, burn me to quicklime if I am marble, put me in packing with a double lining if I am plaster, or scatter dirt and ruins over me that I may smile or writhe in peace.

Gunnar Ekelöf

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