|
World’s
best novel? Sorry, I haven’t got the time to write
it |
|||
|
Sven Wifstrand |
e-mail: svensays at gmail.com |
Update:
2020-09-06 |
|
|
||||
|
I am a super beginner. I
have begun lots of things, but hardly one of them has been completed or even
carried on for any long time. Living has, to my surprise, been going on for seventy
years, given you can count this as one (1) life, all those rags and small
notes that lie scattered along various obscure routes where somebody looking
like me is said to have been sighted. JE est un autre, Rimbaud says in a letter. It was not me,
Shaggy says in his rap, smiling sardonically. That is real self-denial, isn’t
it? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Once I believed I was
somebody, and if you believe that, you are certainly not satisfied with being
who you are, but you want to be something more and more etc. I wanted to be a
poet, yes, I wrote poems and wanted people to pay attention to what I wrote.
They did not, not very much, and that is no wonder, considering who were my
idols: Stagnelius, [Swedish romantic
poet], Hölderlin, Vilhelm Ekelund, [Swedish writer of beautiful poems
and enigmatic lyrical prose] all of them being known for having written very much for their
drawers. I should have stuck to Byron instead. That man with the crippled
foot? Yes, one physically or one socially disabled, the one is as good as the
other, don’t you think? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
"I have always
thought", you say, but did you really think so all the time? What you
were thinking when you were born can probably be found out through hypnosis,
but else, is there any opinion or experience that you have stuck to during
all the time you were conscious of yourself? If there is, I think that is
what really indicates that it was really me, and not some other undefined
beings, who lived through all those happenings. “I think, therefore I exist”
they claim that Descartes said, but how many of us have really read the work
where he says so? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Frequently, I wake up from
a dream, having a strong feeling not that it was reality, but that it
reflects something I have been through and afterwards forgotten. Could it be
somebody else’s experience that came to me while sleeping? Well, how did he
say, Rimbaud? The "I" is someone else, at least partly. Being an aging man I am still in some sense a child, and in some
sense a woman, to the extent that I have learnt from women’s more complicated
view of the world. If you are a woman you may be astonished of me saying so.
Good! Keep being astonished, and it may end with me becoming a woman in more
senses, or with you understanding me. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
To be a child, to be like
a child. I am not thinking of Jesus now, but I am thinking of the vulgar
saying about modern art: a child could do that. Exactly. He who says so, says
something about himself: HE DOES NOT RESPECT CHILDREN. In today’s upbringing
and education of children you do not work hard feeding the children with lots
of grown-up doings and grown-up knowledge, but you pay attention to the ways children experience the world. The artists had this
view already a hundred years ago! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
To be a woman. Through the
history of Western culture, those 2500 years that we have a good view of,
there goes a long procession of artists who see woman as a heavenly creature,
and another one of law-givers who see her as a piece of property.
Occasionally, they march together, like in a hiphop
video where boys wear heavy coats and hats and big shoes, while girls wear
the smallest of bikinis. Cry out loud that the right to be who you are must
belong to both sexes, cry it out loud, over and over again.
What does S:t Paul cry out for the Galatians to hear: There is neither Jew
nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ
Jesus. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
How did it happen that
the Church lost this outright message? A woman who lets herself be burnt
because she believes in Jesus, she is a good woman, you may have her as your
idol, but a woman who is alive, craving for her rights, she is dangerous even
today. To whom? To them, above all, who have something to gain from
sustaining the old ambiguous vision of Woman. Then what is the truth about
woman? Oh my, I am starting to talk like a preacher. O
Woman, create your own truth, I believe in you! End of sermon. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
But we have equality, haven’t
we, well, it is still a long way to go, but at least we see equality as an
ideal, still far away, but we can make it real? Yes, under democracy we talk
openly about what must be changed in order to make
progress, but the role of a woman, any woman, in this dialogue is for herself
to define. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
If I, a man, should yet
make a statement on Woman, then I am much for the deity thing. Like many
other men, indeed. The Venus of Urbino by Titian has far more truth than
"the hat gets it and the bonnet gets it not" [much-quoted
ruling from a Swedish regional law of the 13th century, meaning
that only men can inherit]. What did I say about a complex view of the world? Woman sees many
things in one, like God. I do not believe in God but
this is a good substitute, don’t you think? Just joking. Let us have another
try: that phenomenon which male thinkers through the ages describe as woman
never being able to decide, never to be trusted, etc, it is no fault, it is a
potential of hers, I mean. Being a man, I feel free to admire women, not only
various individuals for various reasons, but all of them because they are
women. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
We men who have this
feeling also know that women often have a trouble in accepting it, but we
cannot decide for them how to interpret us. Our feelings belong to us. Shall
women admire men equally, then? Stupid question to put for a man. He must be
silent, not trying to make up some stupid answer. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
However, you boys who
think girls are simply too cruel, and you boys who like boys more, I am your
friend too! Never think that I am writing this to persuade anybody in any
issue. Still, it is unexpectedly hard to write down lots of thoughts and
results that are your own, without loading your text with reasoning, as if
you wanted others to agree with you. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I mentioned some literary
idols before. Who do you think wrote this: |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Whoever will remember
the ills he has undergone, those that have threatened him, and the light
occasions that have removed him from one state to another, will by that
prepare himself for future changes, and the knowledge of his condition. - - -
If every one would pry into the effects and
circumstances of the passions that sway him, as I have done into those which
I am most subject to, he would see them coming, and would a little break
their impetuosity and career; they do not always seize us on a sudden; there
is threatening and degrees. |
|||
|
[Translated by Charles Cotton, 1877. The text was
put into the web by Oregon State University] |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Only a teenager, I already
was fascinated by the endless verbosity of Michel de Montaigne. I too could
do that, I thought. I filled notebooks with daily entries, I read a lot of
books in regular studies or just for myself, and I thought of my reading,
walking far in the Scanian plains where I grew up, and where I even today
feel good every time I come. But this is a lonely life, living with books!
You write as if you are talking to someone, who yet is not there. The modern
Montaigne would do good if he went around with a tape recorder, talking to
people, but I did not realise it then. Today, modern technology provides us
with yet a new way of talking, or should we say a new channel on which you
can send and receive, promising new possibilities which are still very little used. You, my reader, would you like to take
part in e-mail-philosophy, or will you go for the chatroom Deep Thoughts On Existence? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
It is well known that
novelists reap lots of stuff from their own lives to build up their allegedly
fictitious stories. There is a whole line of literary history, "laundry
bill research" they often say, which aims at finding out who is who in
fiction compared to reality. Some writers even are dragged into law suits by people who think they are unfairly portrayed
in novels. I am NOT Carl–Ivar Rydberg, the obscure brother of Carina Rydberg
[Swedish writer of scandal who gained fame by a novel intended to take
revenge on a guy who had refused to lend her money]. My method is far more treacherous. You, my
friend, may well figure in this story without ever having the slightest idea
about it! What evil is in that? Well, I will be the only one to score the
points, if there ever will be any. Carina’s Roffe,
I think his name was, he too has become a much talked-about person by his involuntary
posing in a novel, but I will not give you any such prospects. Your only
chance is to burst in like Markoolio [Swedish
hiphop comedian] shouting: It’s me!
It’s me! and taking over the show. Would I really
start writing the world’s best novel, it would be a
cyber-interactive-documental soap opera whose actors take part in writing it,
with hackers trying to break in to influence the work or just to spread
manure in it. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I have not brought it that
far yet. I always was - well, well, did you say always? – yes, I always was
slow. I got my teeth late, started talking late, my baby teeth stayed long in
place and so on. A sperm of Montaigne’s over-rich seed stayed on me when I
was eighteen, and now at fifty it is time to give birth. I am in some way a
woman, as I said before. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
If I had been more eager
to follow Byron’s trail, would that have made me faster? He was the one who
said: I awoke one morning and found myself famous, he was 24 then. He
got much sought after in society, and big game for ladies of the highest
ranks. Still, all his life he had the feeling of being an outsider, just like
me. He was famous instantly, and also it did not
take long before he was tired of it. He died at 36, burning himself out. I
think it may be healthy to be slow. |
|||
|
I never was close to
death, but at least I was near its realm when I was in intensive care, rigged
with pipes and instruments. Heart infarction struck me when I was right in
the middle of Stockholm city. If this had happened some miles from Grangärde [faintly understandable reference
to Swedish poet Dan Andersson, who was born in that village and also died young] I probably would not have been able to sit
here writing now. During the first month of the first year of the present
millennium eleven days of my life went by in a clinic, in a state of utmost
stillness, with a band of nursing angels always near. But Sven dear, I say,
you can’t really be that dreamy about lying in a
hospital! Sorry, but I often think of how cute the nurses were, and almost
all the patients being men, those two facts surely were determinative for the
mood of the place. My daily pill, ever since then, looks like a little heart.
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
Weak men and caring
women. A picture often painted, in various kinds of frames. I have seen neglective women too, believe me. The doctor who gave me
calming pills when I was already totally passive. Mothers who smoke when they
are out walking with their babies. Ladies who spend some evening hour in a
gym, having sugar buns with their coffee afterwards. Sisters, brethren, let
us not look down upon those who from ignorance and fear abuse their gifts,
but will we instead pray for them with all our hearts, that their souls be
enlightened now and forever! May all our wrath go against those dark forces
who make use of forlorn souls to thrive: the pills industry, the tobacco
giants, the prophets of the Cult Of The Body. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The Preacher in me had
some more exercise, as you see. I was brought up in a Christian, Lutheran,
creed, and on the whole I remained in it up to about
the age of 15. Those years, like many adolescents, I started reading and
writing poetry and taking interest in many kinds of art and culture. Thus I got into some aesthetic "religion", and I
can say that I never got out of it since then, even if it has been maturing.
Now, like then, I am convinced that art, music, literature etc are not only
some decoration for your leisure, but a force active in building your life. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Faith is one such force
for many people. Man has a need of seeing more than the eyes see. When we study
religion, and I have done that for a considerable time, we look upon the
differences between religions. The typical in them, and the struggles between
them, mostly root in historical and social contingencies. We seldom inquire
the depths that contain what they have in common. All religions (satanism
possibly not) want to do the same: show to men that there is more strength to
gain beside the forces that they can use on purpose. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I get that strength from
the stillness of nature. A wood with rocks and tiny lakes early on a summer
morning, like here in Nacka where I live, or a wide sandy beach in Scania,
facing the vast open sea, those are places where I worship in my own way. But
in winter where do you go? Into hibernation, if I
could choose. I do not like winter. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I love spring. To find
hepatica near a pile of snow. To sit basking by the lake and see the grey,
aging ice breaking up. To have a picnic in a meadow, surrounded by birches
clad in fresh pale green. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I love summer. The time
near the beginning of June when the oaks have got their leaves and the
weather is nearly always fine. The rich jungle-like green in the middle of
the summer, with its deliciously shifting shades in the evening sun. The
delight, with some tears, of seeing the girls who walk around with their cell
phones and water bottles, wearing almost no clothes. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I love autumn. To sit by
the sea, just looking, reading some meditational piece by Vilhelm
Ekelund: |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The
sea in chilly days of autumn is stormy, the breaking waves rush in against
the rocks like big white animals from the sagas. How wonderfully bright it is
to sit down below the lighthouse where the sea aster is in bloom, light and
blue in the white foaming clefts. This bright storm of sun, this singing blue
and golden flow, cast a spell of symbolic, mighty, earnest
and yet so full of joy. This bright clear storm stretches the mind out in
calmness of delight … |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Winter. No comments. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
But spring will come! Do
you want a dacapo of our symphony? OK, I lead the band
– two, three, four – spring is a jumping vivid allegro! Summer is a slow
movement: we lie on the beach or in a hammock. Autumn is a scherzo: we gather
tomatoes to throw at each other. And then winter …..
morendo. Is there a symphony which ends with a song of grief? Certainly, the
6th by Tchaikovsky, but in Russia it is always cold, isn’t it? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Lovely spring! Vivaldi! Quattro
Stagioni, not only a pizza but also a happy entrance for me and lots of other
people into classical music. But please tell, what is classical? Not so easy
nowadays when Louis Armstrong and the Beatles are classics too. Serious
music, as if other music is just entertainment? Wrong. Artful music, as if
other musicians did not see their work as a work of art? Still wrong. I would
like to say "sit still and be silent"-music, because that is the
rule of the opera house and the concert hall in our time. But not in
Vivaldi’s. For Bach it may have been the rule in church, but clearly not in
the coffee houses where he played much of his secular music. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I love many kinds of music, because you need different music for different
moods. The blues, I sit rocking, feeling the vibrations of the bass in my
stomach. Dixieland, I leap up, wiggling my bottom. The Wiener Walzer, I rotate, feeling like autumn leaves in a
whirlwind! I jump and flap with Billy Joel in Uptown Girl, I jest with Shaggy
in Boombastic, I long to go far away to Madonna’s
La Isla Bonita! But of course there also is a time
for the music of "sit still and be silent", by my standards rather
a long time. Spending six hours with Wagner’s Twilight Of
The Gods is like living a whole life in a comprised version. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Why did the dangerous
doctor think I needed a sedative? She felt that I was afraid. Afraid of what?
Afraid of the unknown. I had no idea of what was wrong when I hardly kept my
balance, my stomach ached, I slept very little and I had the feeling of
wearing a cap inside my skull instead of on top of my head. No test showed
anything that could explain. No real lack of balance, I always was able to
keep it when the doctor was there. No infection. No sore stomach or other
internal damage. I dragged myself along the streets of the town of Lund,
hoping that if I kept moving I would finally break down and be taken into a
hospital, and … well, I didn’t meditate so much on what would happen then. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I returned to my lonely
chamber, pulled the blind and put a knitted cap on my head to see if the warmth
would be soothing. In the disc-player: symphony no 2 by Anton Bruckner. That
music is like sun shining through the lifting mist and a light wind among the
trees. I thought: YOU MUST BE KIND TO YOURSELF! |
|||
|
(and here the scholiast
prudently has added: "because you cannot trust that others will") |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Next day I went to the
fourth or fifth doctor, can’t remember, I had quite
an argument before they consented to letting me in. And he found out what was
wrong: I had tensional headache. I did not even know there was a suffering
thus named, and apparently some doctors did not know either. How eased I felt
when I knew that I on the whole was not particularly
ill. The mere knowledge of this became the cure! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I was not afraid when I
sank into an easy chair to wait for the ambulance, not when they drove me in
the ambulance, not when I lay as a packet in Intensive Care – there was a
Danish nurse, I could speak a little Danish to her, it was nice – not when I
lay on the table with local anaesthesia hearing the unnecessary chattering of
the staff during the cardiac operation. I was just irritated that they had to
move me into another hospital for the operation. The orderly who was with me
in the ambulance lives in the same block as me. When I met him in the streets
later, he told me that he had thought: "that guy who is standing, he
surely is not so sick that we must drive him", and I had risen at just
that moment because it felt quite as bad to sit or to lie back, but I was
never afraid. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I am not afraid today. I
shall not be afraid. You shall not be afraid. People who are afraid hurt each
other, believing that thus they will be less afraid. _ _ _ _ _ and . . . . .
. keep firing at each other because they are too afraid to sit down and talk.
I could take my banjo and sing like Pete Seeger: WE ARE NOT AFRAID! You are
afraid of me, because you fear that I may be quite different from what I look
like, but I am not afraid of you, only sad. You do not understand what I say,
and I do not understand you, because you are looking away while you talk. You
are not looking at me, but at a monster picture of me that you have painted
from your imagination. It is never too late to look one another in the eyes,
instead of looking at a ghost which only one of us can see. Do not be afraid! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
Can I walk with my
eyes wide open |
|||
|
through the world full
of cross-eyed withhold? |
|||
|
Yes I can, but I know there will be
times |
|||
|
when it feels easier
to go blindfolded. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Many decisive answers
are given |
|||
|
by those who did not
hear what was asked |
|||
|
and the deepest wounds
can never be seen |
|||
|
least by the knives. |
|||
|
The weak make life
hard |
|||
|
to get hard
themselves. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The sombre sneaking
thoughts |
|||
|
cover your face with
slimy hands |
|||
|
but disdain will hurt
no one |
|||
|
no
one but
the disdainful. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Our will is a blunt
weapon. |
|||
|
In dreams all happens
by itself |
|||
|
therefore dreams are better than life. |
|||
|
Life slips away from
our hands |
|||
|
but dreams were never
there. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dreams were never
there! |
|||
|
In the night, near to
the sea |
|||
|
the counsel of strange
powers is heard |
|||
|
on all that our
distorted will and infected thought |
|||
|
the stinking drains of
a starving mind |
|||
|
has struggled to ruin
during day. |
|||
|
Yet in the morning we
know nothing more |
|||
|
of the strength that
somewhere beyond is still there: |
|||
|
the darkness, the eye,
the dreams. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
You there who choose
an odd road |
|||
|
not wanting to meet
me: |
|||
|
it is true that I walk
straight, with a steady eye |
|||
|
but everything else in
me is truly unmartial |
|||
|
- hope to see you some
time! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
This was me, a
quarter of a century ago. I told you I wrote poems, and this is one of them.
I tried to enter into a manner of speech similar to
Friedrich Hölderlin or Vilhelm
Ekelund, but today I can discern the Preacher being
there too as a co-worker. At that time I was unaware
of it, but actually I once had this and some other poems on a recital
programme in the Lund Cathedral, invited by a curate that I knew. Did she see
my spirit with a sharper eye than I did myself, then? Also
today I feel unsure about my flair for witty endings. It seems to me now that
I had trouble in handling the tension between my fear of feelings and my
attempt to form my own style of address. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The Preacher has an
old mate, let us call him the Platonic. Plato was, as many people know, a
classical Greek philosopher who is said to have a "theory of
Forms". The Platonic is that guy who claims that Soul is more worth than
Body. Everyone who says "beauty comes from within" is in some way
familiar with him. I, who have known him close for a long time, actually now
am tired of him, because he cannot give me an acceptable answer to one
important question: If there really is Soul and Body, and Soul is the
important part, why do we then care so much about superficial things like
neat clothing, good food and flowers in the window? The ladies who think of
what jewellery to wear while they are decorating themselves, looking in the
mirror, is it in fact unnecessary for them to do that? The world would be
terribly dull, wouldn’t it, if all mankind were clothed in old sacks and all
houses were painted in the cheapest-to-find colour, but when that old buddy
is up and running, he really thinks this is the way it should be! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
You also can call
him the Ascetic, from a Greek word meaning "exercise", and the aim
of his exercise is to raise the power of the Soul and castigate the poor
Body. After all these years that I have been meditating on these ideas,
reading millions of pages, I think we should grant this old friend a medal
and a pension, and we will hire the Preacher to give him an eulogy - …. some
time. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The poem starts and
ends with the image of walking along a road. That’s
me. In the past, and in the present. Always was, always will be. Nunc et in
aeternum. If you believe in reincarnation, then I am an eternal wanderer. The
nirvana thing, to coagulate for ever, I think it is nothing for me. Yet when
I call myself a wanderer I do not think in the first
place about Christian and romantic symbols of life as a path to follow, but I
think of the mere physical activity of walking! My energetic parents were
successful in handing this habit over to me: the whole family made long
walks, to sites of interest when were on holiday, or Sundays to some little
church in the countryside. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Like many before
me, I have found that walking outside is good for thinking. Jogging is not
that good, because it makes you hot and tired. Cycling or driving a car, you
must be observant of the road and the environment. Going by boat, I cannot
tell, being no sailor. Train is obviously good since I started writing this
piece when going by train back to Stockholm from Scania. But best of all is
walking! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
One of the many:
Friedrich Nietzsche. He got sick leave from his professorate
in Basle, and for the rest of his life was touring around to places where he
felt just a little little better. Walking all by
himself in the Alps or along the Mediterranean, he thought of the learned
work he had produced in the academic chambers, and then he thought of what he
just had scribbled in a note-book or typed out sitting in his hotel (must
have been one of the first typewriters, I think), and then he told himself:
only those thoughts you have gained by walking are anything worth. And I,
roaming the Scanian plains, the alps of Alto Adige or the rocky shores of
Malta, carry these words through the decades as a mantra or a benediction: |
|||
|
Nur die ergangenen Gedanken haben Wert. Through all these years,
I never ever put the question that occurs to me right now: Are you sure that
all these thoughts really have worth? Couldn’t you walk yourself into bad
thoughts as well? Surprised as I am, that this comes forth only now, I can
give just a partial answer. It is obvious that if you sit at home, by yourself,
looking at the wall, or if you are doing some tiresome household work while
brooding over your problems, it must be destructive. Then, if you call
someone on the phone or see someone outside to talk a little, it can be
useful, but if this person is not available or does not understand you, I
think you will feel still worse afterwards. When you are out walking, sooner
or later you step over something that distracts you, making you change your
line of thought, but can you really know immediately whether the new line is
a good or a bad one? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I really ought to be sure
of this, having been in this sport for so long. Sincerely, I cannot find in
my memory any moment when my walked-into thoughts were bad. Is it because you
are not sufficiently critical against yourself in your inner talks? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
And now for some
self-criticism. Household work is not always that dull. What do you do on a
rainy day, yourself feeling low? Read a book? Which book, I’ve
read them all. Hear music? Not so easy to choose, and probably will help only
for a moment. I know: make a dough and knead buns
from it. This small amount of exercise at the baking table, and the satisfaction
you get from smelling the newly baked bread, will heighten your mental state
with megahearts! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Those many wandering
thinkers were all lonely people, but is it necessary that you walk alone to
capture the good thoughts that come flying? Isn’t it really like this, you go
on meditating on ideas that you already have come to through reading and
conversations? Often when I was out, I asked myself, wouldn’t it be a treat
to walk together with some befriended soul and think out loud? It is a pity
that I never could try this, because no soul of that
kind ever showed up. The woman I shared a life with for 20+ years was the
kind who rather sit talking inside somewhere, and she used her superior
intelligence and mastery of the spoken word to keep me down rather than to
favour a sincere talk. Am I bitter about this? Bitter because of myself,
then, who could not find a way out of this narrow den. Instead I got into a
state of nearly lameness which increased the damage. It can take twenty more
years for me to understand how this can happen, you try to be earnest and end
by being seen as a dangerous person! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
A little more than a year
after the heart attack I visited the town where I was born, Lund in southern
Sweden, to take part in an academic event which was held to celebrate the
memory of my father who was a professor in classical Greek. Many people whom I
hardly had seen since my student days were there. While sitting on the train
back home, with mixed feelings about old recollections and ghosts, I
naturally thought of what had become of me since then. Speaking in terms of
career and success I am a failure, since I have had
so many great plans and hardly fulfilled any of them. I always felt strong
about what I chose to do, and then I followed my feelings quite as much in
deciding to quit. But then, I thought, this too can be something good, not
having stuck to one trail, but to feel that much is still left to be tried?
Thus, somewhere along the line, near Tranås or Mjölby, the title of a Super Beginner came up. What I am doing now, on
and on, still going on if I may point it out (*s*), is in some way what I always
wanted to do, but also part of a wholly new attempt. I explore the world
outside the narrow den, and I discover new worlds within me. The words I
write serve as a map, a log book and an album of
photos, but it is a somewhat doubtful record, because while I write on,
paragraph after paragraph, the parts already written somehow change
themselves. In other words: when I go back and re-read what I wrote I notice
how the thoughts transform, comparing to when they only were in my head. Yet
since I started, I have not changed anything except some small slips. Who
reads this may see still more than I do myself of the alternate universe
which moves inside and behind the visible one. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
THE alternate universe,
said I, as if there just were one such, and one that is regular. No, no, no.
There is only one universe, or there is an infinite number of them. The
particles of thought can be named and observed, but I never can be sure that
I have found all of them, or that they will act the same way the next time. I
can describe Body and Soul as body only, or as one emanation of a purely
spiritual power. Body and Soul, form and contents,
good and evil, catholic or protestant, all those ruptures I can mend, and
their being ever broken can be seen as a completed experiment. Now what did
Descartes say? I think, therefore I exist. Do you think that he
thought that he proved something thereby? No, but you need a starting point,
he said. I did look up that passage. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Trivial knowledge is good,
I think, if you want to play Trivia or to have an interesting conversation,
but there is a less useful side of it, too. Through it many sayings that are
only half true or even quite misunderstood are kept going for a long time,
until some bright researcher does a TV show on them. How many have read the
whole Discours de la méthode
and considered what Descartes wants to say? I haven’t,
I just looked into it to check that the famous phrase really was there: je
pense, donc je suis. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Why this talk of René
Descartes once more, or Renatus Cartesius as he is
called on the massive monument by Johan Tobias Sergel
in the Church of Adolf Fredrik in Stockholm? Just because. To a Swede like
me, this French free thinker is kind of a fellow countryman, since he met his
end while enduring a winter in Sweden. That piece of trivial knowledge is
correct. Even in our days one is sensitive to new germs when changing one’s
habitat. It is no wonder that poor Descartes rather soon got pneumonia in
cold and dirty Sweden about 350 years ago! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
He should have remained
in Paris, even though the Jesuits were hard on him. Myself, I would gladly have
remained in Paris. Oh, to dream that the 8 days I spent there in 1999 would
have changed into the horizontal eight! Early in Easter morning I sat in an
obscure café, seeing the Notre Dame beyond blooming cherry trees, and
remembered a lady friend who would have been 50 that week, if she had lived.
But she died some weeks before her 25th birthday from taking too
much painkillers combined with alcohol. Then I thought: "You should not
be alone in this city", and burst into tears. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Never say "don’t
cry" to someone who is crying. Say: "cry, you will feel better
afterwards". You can get into tears for a lot of different reasons, but
the relaxation that follows is always good! The sentimental poets of the 18th
century who claimed that tears were sweet rather than salt, they knew what
they were talking about. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Since that day in Paris I
never cried that much in an instant, but my eyes get wet at least once a year
around the day of S:t Lucia, when I hear children in white sing the
traditional songs. [The Feast of S:t Lucia, December 13, a very old
catholic celebration which survives and flourishes in ’’protestant’’
Sweden]. How come
that, after all these years, me having three children, I haven’t
got suited to it? I feel no need of an explanation. I just cannot resist it. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Last time I had fallen in
love at work, I was crying every night in bed, lying beside my peacefully
snoring wife. A young woman was appointed in the middle of winter, and at first I hardly noticed her, but then came summer and
holidays, and then I thought of her all the time! |
|||
|
Those tears were tears of
tenderness, not really of sorrow, or perhaps I cried for joy over new
feelings that I had not known of before. There is a prejudice about redheads
being vivid and whimsical, but this very redhead was shy and introvert, like
me, a sister soul I thought, and I felt she had secrets within her which I
longed to discover. Apparently she did not
appreciate the little attention I tried to show her, so there were no
discoveries made. Besides, at that time I still believed that my marriage
could be saved, but anyhow two years later it broke up. Que sera sera. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
"What happens,
happens". Or, in my slightly aggressive version: Whatever happens, I
face it. Not that I am a tough guy who can stand everything, but I am
prepared when it comes. I may be crushed, or I endure and come out of it,
maybe stronger than before, and most likely with some new knowledge. I was
down many times, and stood up again. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
"We need to
talk", my wife said to me one night. I said: "Yes, what
about?" She said: "Divorce". That was by far the worst bomb
that ever went off right in my face, but I had felt some fuse burning for a
while. During two months after this, I hardly could distinguish days from
nights, because of overheated thoughts that spoilt all my calm and all my
concentration. No sleep at night, and in daytime I somehow endured in the
office, thanks to tolerant fellow workers. Since then I never thought back of
what could have happened if I had not managed to keep up my work. There were
some people I could talk to confidently, and with their help I toiled on. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Once in a lunch break I met a woman in the food store who had been my boss
some time before, and a good boss, one of the best I had. Let’s
call her B. She was about my age and born in Scania like me, so we had
something in common beside work. After her being
transferred some year before, we had encountered every now and then in the
corridors and spoken a few words. I thought: "She is sensible, I could
have a talk with her", so I suggested to her that we would meet for a
walk and a cup of coffee or something like that, and she agreed at once,
apparently she had no doubt about it. Somewhat later we met at a rather
peculiar time in a plain coffee-shop which luckily enough was open. I told
her what was the matter with me and thanked her for
coming to see me early in the morning on a work-free day. She said she had
thought a good deal about why I wanted to see her, and she also told me that
once it had been near a divorce for her too, but the step had not been taken
and the marriage had been repaired. After that talk, we met a second time for
a walk, and a third time visiting a museum. In the morning of the very day we
should have met next time, she phoned, to say not only that she could not
make it, but also that she did not want to see me any more! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Cold, weak, appalled,
floored. What words do I use to describe how I feel when I, already in a hurt
condition, get such a stunning announcement in an issue which I consider
simple? What reason did she have, you wonder? Her husband had muttered at her
for "abandoning" her family to go to a museum with me on a Sunday,
so now she did not dare any more. I answered that I, being a gentleman,
certainly respected her feelings, but I asked if I could at least see her
once more to say good bye sincerely and not just so plainly on the phone, but
even to that she could not agree. I never yet went by crutches and fell
because somebody hit a crutch for me, but I think that would be similar to how I felt in this moment. The question also
is, did she tell me whole truth about her decision, but I surely will never
get to know that. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Where you are not, there
is happiness. Dort wo du nicht bist,
dort ist das Glück. Thank you, Franz Schubert, that
you with your song Der Wanderer have saved for us this exquisite line
of the otherwise totally obscure poet Georg Philipp Schmidt von Lübeck! There
is no better way, at least no shorter and clearer way, to explain what is
meant by ROMANTIC. You long to go to some other place, but you cannot tell
why or how that place would look, you just long for the unknown because it is
unknown. You imagine various things that disappear in the same moment, and lead your life in a double picture of dream
and reality. Certainly it is sickly always to yearn
for something indefinite, always to be a wanting soul, but isn’t it still
worse to feel the bitterness when you fail to make a dream come true? And is
it not this marvellous ability to discern something more beautiful and
sublime than the eyes can see, that makes us strong enough to live through
the darkest times of our life? Happiness is where I am not, can mean that I
simply abstain from trying to make my dream real, because then at least I
have the beautiful dream still with me and can dream it on! Dream being
better than life, because you lose control of your life, but in the dream
there never was any control to lose. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
All dreams are not
beautiful. How romantic is your life, if in your inner world you encounter
creatures with teeth in their bottom, like in a Dali painting? I do not know.
My knowledge of human soul does not cover that. Of course I have had
nightmares, everyone has some time, I think, and sometimes I felt outcast and
worthless, but I never was afraid of myself, and I never struggled to keep
awake for fear that the nightmare would come back. Sometimes I say to myself,
I could be a good psychologist since I have much patience, but quite as often
I doubt that I have the empathy that is needed too. I think that many who
like to watch horror films are as ignorant as me; that is why they watch, they want to be fascinated by unknown worlds. The
so called "horror romantic" is genuinely romantic, just as much as
those sweet feelings that are generally thought of, when you use the word romantic.
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
Someone does or says
something that is horrid and incomprehensible to you, but to him it is
obvious because he has a hell within him which he can see much better than he
can see what is around him, those things we others see. He is as helpless as
you, but he is not so willing as you to admit it. I think Nastasia
and Rogozjin in Dostoevsky’s Idiot are two
such people, and they must destroy each other when they come near. The idiot,
who is that? Not only the silly benevolent Prince Myshkin,
but all of us, who stand beside watching, unable to do anything. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I read Idiot the
first time when I was 18, just having finished school, the second time when that
bomb I talked about had blasted, and the third time
while writing this. It is a bit like revisiting places where you have been
before: you are a little unsure of what has changed and what you have simply
forgotten. Does a book change, you can’t mean that, oh yes I mean it, when I
read it and re-read it I enter a world that I do not know thoroughly, neither
then nor now! For me, it feels like the doings in Idiot
take place on a more or less dark stage, and out of the shadows a figure
suddenly appears whom maybe I have seen before, or
have not noticed up to now. Dostoevsky often describes minor figures in a way
like they nearly, but only nearly, act on their own, as if there was a
supplementary novel within the main one. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Nastasia is a real bitch.
Even though I travelled so much in the world of Idiot, I am still
unsure of what she really does to scare everyone so much. She is a
25-year-old smashy chick who comes out of nowhere,
as it seems, with lots of money by which she can lead a luxurious life on her
own and subdue all the men who want her and/or her money. Dostoevsky’s
picture of her is so shadowy that the monstrous features dim the more subtle
details of her personality. Monstrous or not, she herself is scared when she
meets a man who, although a bit scared himself, is not imposed by her, but
treats her with the respect a gentleman always shows to a lady, Prince Myshkin I mean. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Rogozjin then, what label would we put on
him, if he appeared among us? Is there a male equivalent of
"bitch"? Or is an egocentric and arbitrary behaviour so natural to
a masculine that we do not need to categorize it? A clinical category
perhaps, like incestually abused? I do not know. A
fourth reading of the novel will be necessary to find out about this. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Myshkin is far more
easy. He is no real idiot, although he has been in mental care for a
long time, on the contrary he is more intelligent than most other people in
the novel. By today’s standards he is a ninny. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The others call him an
idiot a couple of times, because he is inept in social life, but through the whole
story he does nothing worse than this: he misunderstands some dealings so
that the others present are embarrassed, and he gets a little hot during a
party and smashes a valuable vase. Around him, there are people who cheat and
mock at each other, make scenes, fight, drink, and steal. Myshkin
is as polite to the upstart mademoiselle with a dubious past, as he is to
noble ladies, and he stays by the murderer’s side comforting him until the
police come to get him. He has an inner self-confidence that does not compel
him to assert himself at the cost of others, but it helps him to cope with
troubles that come by. However, even if he does what he can, he cannot avoid
the final catastrophe. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Did we in our own
strength confide, our striving would be losing, says Luther in his hymn. God will forgive
you, if you believe in God, but if you believe in mankind, will men forgive
you then? You should not count on that. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
When I think more of
this, it feels like time to read the novel again for the fourth time, but no,
that can wait. I just look up the scene where Prince Myshkin
proposes to Nastasia the first time, or more
accurate, offers to marry her. How can the ninny come up with such a
surprising idea after he has met her only twice, both times in company, never
alone? It is hardly even his own idea, since he is
provoked into saying it by another gentleman present. Nastasia
of course is rather put out when she understands that she cannot tame this
man with all her rage and all her money. At first
she seems to accept the offer, and she makes good use of it, teasing the
rivals, but finally she insults Myshkin and leaves
the place together with Rogozjin, the brute. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
It is the heat of these
confrontations that, above all, makes me come back to Idiot again and
again. Speaking generally, I like to read tragic books to strengthen my
belief that this is not what always must happen. We can make a better life, I
am sure! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
But dear Sven, now you
are back into "aesthetic religion". Can you really say definitely that your life has been better from reading Idiot
three times? Better than it would have been if you had spent your time
chattering in pubs? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Such a question could be
awkward to me, because I cannot easily say no and admit that it really does
not matter what you do, but if I say yes it would feel like I boasted and
praised myself, and I do not want to do that either. Therefore
I can give no answer except to myself, so what, I am no preacher and have no
need to make you think like me! Religion you can call it indeed,
since I refuse to dispute it. This is simply my way of life, and has nothing to do with valuing works of art
according to moral standards, or with any other such clever theories. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Come vivo? – Vivo! I could sing with Rodolphe in
Puccini’s La Bohème. How do I live? Well, I
live! All questions of "would have been" are annoying to me, for
what has happened can never be changed, and what am I supposed to do with the
conclusions that could be drawn from it? One thing only: ask the Preacher. He
has been quiet for a while, but now he strongly feels it’s
his time again. The wise Preacher (P) will talk to the unsure Dreamer (D) who
dwells in another chamber of my heart. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
P: You already know, since a long
time, what is most important. Be sincere. Tell what you feel. Express your
thoughts immediately, not preserved or fermented. Never think of acting a
part in order to influence others, and do not try to
direct what others do by deciding for them how much they need to know! Even
the most well-meant manipulations can go very wrong. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
D: Certainly, but your wise
instructions, do you know what I think they are, they are preserved, just as
you said! When I am in the middle of things happening and have
to decide in every moment what to do now, then it is not at all sure
that reality is formatted so I can run philosophy-of-life.exe on it. And in
my dreams it is the same thing, what I see in dreams
has colour and form and words as if it were really happening, quite as
difficult to grasp. I can dream of something I want from future, but it is
inevitable that the dream also calls back what I did want once, in spite of
your jolly phrases like "what’s done is done, now we want to look
forward". |
|||
|
|
|||
|
P: Yet, occasionally it can be that
the dry principle comes to life in a way to show that it is not always so
very dry. Think of what happened recently when you were going by underground,
reading one of your train books as usual, and in the book there was one
single sentence that scorched you, so that you could not read any more for a
long while: |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Tout l’art d’aimer se réduit, ce me semble, à dire exactement ce que le degré d’ivresse du moment comporte, c’est à dire, en d’autres termes, à écouter son âme. |
|||
|
"The whole art of
loving is, I find, contained in your saying precisely what you are filled
with by the moment, or in other words, in listening to your own soul." |
|||
|
|
|||
|
PD unisono: This is SO true. What Stendhal
says in De l’amour will be another mantra or
benediction, for sure. That work, with its lengthy documentation and
reasoning, can be seen as somewhat parodious, but this sentence alone is more worth than
several whole books! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Lots of poems and songs
tell things like "you are my whole world", "all this and
heaven too", and many novels and films deal with the devastating
compromises that necessarily occur when anyone tries to lead a life in such a
spirit. Art is lying all the time, or speaking with
a double tongue. The holy scripture of aesthetic religion is not there, but
can be written only for me, by me only. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Is that what I am doing
now? I doubt. To promise such a thing would be precarious, after so little
work done. On screen it can seem to be lengthy, but on paper it is not more
than a skilled writer would produce in some hour. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
One of the many who
thought about aesthetics and religion two hundred years ago, in the romantic
era, was Friedrich von Hardenberg who called himself Novalis. He took a
degree in civil law while thinking and writing, and thinking and writing, and
was in love with a teenager named Sophie. Often he
called her Philo-Sophie, a good pun, since the Greek word philos
means loving, a philosopher is one who loves wisdom: |
|||
|
|
|||
|
If the spirit
sanctifies, every true book is a Bible. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The only real temple
in the world is the human body. - - When you touch it, you touch heaven. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Most people do not
know how interesting they are indeed, what
interesting things they tell. If one could truthfully render and consider
what they are saying, they would be astonished by themselves and feel
inspired to discover a new world within them. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Just some fragments from
a life which too turned into a fragment, since he died at 29, and then Sophie
was dead already. The toil of mourning is intense in his writings of the last
years, numerous letters and long manuscripts. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Sophie and Friedrich – two
who died young in a time when infectious diseases were still highly mortal.
You might think that she must have been an extraordinary girl, being
attractive to a man ten years her senior who was already making a career as a
writer and a civil servant. Scholars say that her letters and diary tell only
of simple everyday matters, but how do they know how much she herself may
have destroyed during her illness, or if her family did dispose of such
things that a bourgeois girl should not properly write down? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
All that he left, lots of
poems and reflections, and an unfinished novel, was published in print, but
only connoisseurs read it nowadays. However, there is one famous item. The
hero of the novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen sees a
blue flower in a dream, and he believes the flower to exist somewhere in the
real world, so he wants to find it. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The blue flower of romantic!
A symbol of yearning that is well-known. But what was Novalis trying to find
through his enormous writing activity, and what did I want long ago when I
read it all and made notes of it in a black book? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I think it was vague to
him, as it was to me. While in quest for the flower, Heinrich finds an
illustrated book with himself in many of the pictures, and the pictures show
things that have not yet happened, but the text is in a language that he does
not understand. That maybe is what I am doing now, I see pictures within me
and try to decipher the yet unknown text that comes with them. When I have
done that, you can understand what I have written, but how do I know what
strange pictures may appear to you when you read it? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
It is not easier to
imagine what you would encounter if you could see me in real life. Who I want
to be, or who I think I am, can be someone who nobody has ever seen. And vice versa, I would probably not recognize
myself in your picture of me. A confused sentimental old man who does not
know his place, but tends to assert himself quite unnecessarily?
That sentence about listening to your own soul keeps scorching me all the
time. Now I read another book by Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, much
more mysterious since there are imaginary personalities to discover. The
young private teacher Julien who is flirting with the mother of his pupils
just to exert some masculine power, and the mother who tremblingly falls more
and more in love with him, I need only a few pages during an underground ride
to feel like in another world. Julien, with so far-flying thoughts within him
and so frightfully scarce means of letting them out, this could have been me
at 20 years. But I surely would not have done like him, if there had been
such a lovely woman of 30 so near me, so near to my soul. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
There wasn’t.
Now we turn age upside down, and suddenly get into real life. Did I wrong to
declare my love for G S (Gorgeous Soprano), a member of the same church choir
as me, me being old enough to be her father? As a gentleman, I can tell
myself that I ought not take the risk of embarrassing a woman or make her
angry, but how much does that take? How would I feel, just giving her looks
and making some little tries to show her some attention? Would it not be
better to tell the truth? And what happened when I really did? I must say I
felt so released in that very moment. I understood I could have no hope, but
I proved to myself that I am not afraid of my feelings. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Ha, you are curious! What
did G S say? It seemed she took it quite nicely, she rejected me of course,
but in a way which was not contemptuous or shameful. However, it is evident
that she got embarrassed after thinking it over a bit, because we hardly talk
to each other since then, although we are still in the same choir, seeing
each other regularly. Through telling my love, I lost a friend. Sorry, I did
not mean it that way, I want to whisper, but how can I make her hear me? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I can only hope to be
able to hear my own inner whisperings, it seems. Let me seek comfort in song: |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I spend a lifetime
waiting for the right time |
|||
|
Now that you’re near the time is here at last! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I think Elvis was terribly
nervous every time he was near the microphone, and thus he got that
wonderfully trembling voice. I am never nervous, so I can never be that good,
but still I love to sing. When you try to be who you are in ordinary life
there are social conventions to stop you and your own inhibitions to block
you, but when you act, like singing someone else’s text and trying to carry
the message of it, then you can give all you have! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Can this be the reason why
many people choose to act a part instead of being themselves, in common life
where you think common people are just common? Hold
it, it is not that simple. You put it very roughly when you mean there is one
unique "self" and a lot of possible "roles". Look at the
ways of life among young people today, and you will find that "finding
yourself" is quite like "creating a role" or even
"swapping roles", and the idea that binds all this together is that
if you are invisible you are nothing! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
This idea of life also is
spreading to more mature ages. My friend Platonic, heigh-ho, where are you?
Gone. He has nothing sensible to tell those who are convinced that fitness,
beauty box and heavy muscles are the core of human dignity. The Preacher
sends word that he is working on the eulogy, but soon maybe it will not be
needed, because no one will understand what he says? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Why then do so many feel for sure that they must act their lives, instead of
living spontaneously? The fear of what will happen if the real You comes into
sight is so strong, that you must build a character which you feel able to
control since you have consciously created it. Someone among these frightened
actors even takes on as a tyrant director, forcing upon the others the
scripts of the parts they must play, in order to
prevent the terrible … |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Whatever it may be. The
truth is, sooner or later the involuntary co-actors discover that they are in
somebody else’s play, and so they in turn are frightened, and they wonder
what level they have reached in the PlayStation of Life. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
There are other roles
acted in common life, more openly, sex roles for instance. In Sweden in the
sixties, during my teens, this term came into everyday language with the rise
of feminism. I was sceptical then, thinking: it shouldn’t
be difficult to treat humans like humans? It is more difficult than that, of
course, as I realised later on. But the debate of
sex roles is much older. Stendhal, whom we already know, is critical to those
rulings of society which put limits to the opportunities for women to gain
knowledge and work. He deals with such questions both overtly in De l’amour and through the mind of Julien in Le Rouge
et le Noir. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Not only men play roles,
words can do too. We talk about symbol or allegory. A house is not always a
house. Quite often words are used to say not what the dictionary orders them
to say, but to represent something else. Meaning rolls away towards the edge,
and often overturns totally. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Those words we call
abstract were originally concrete. We may think this is a modern phenomenon,
to change the function of terms already existing, but then we are wrong. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
In the Old Testament they
talk about face, meaning personality, or about spirit, physical
breath, meaning inner life. "To lose one’s face" we say even today.
So I believe that when Jesus says that the bread is
his body and the wine is his blood, he too is telling something else than he
seems to. In my opinion, the tedious debates of theologians around the creepy
sorcery of the communion, the bread and wine turning into flesh and blood of
Christ in that very moment, are quite unnecessary! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The bread is the body of
Man, I think, the very base of basic food, an everyday source of carbohydrate,
protein and minerals, and the wine then is Man’s own blood and a basic supply
in the sense that a form of human culture without any drugs has not yet been
found. What is Jesus called, the others call him Lord or Master or Saviour,
but what does he call himself: Son of Man! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
It is Easter now, I do
this to his memory, which consequently here means to remember my own fate: I
take a glass of wine in one hand and some snack in the other. But then a word
comes into my mind, not from Jesus but from Nietzsche: |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Wenig macht
die Art des besten Glücks. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Little is needed to be really happy. So little, and so hard to get. Solitude is
much in my thoughts, because I am mostly alone. You
can very well live alone, there are substantial advantages in it, and it is
convenient to be able to decide always for yourself in details of your life,
but you should never be alone in your mind. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Never ask what will
happen, to know is dangerous |
|||
|
It may be written in
the stars but stars do not care for us |
|||
|
Try to think like this:
whatever happens I will face |
|||
|
This winter may be our
last |
|||
|
Or there are more
winters to come |
|||
|
But please, close that
gate |
|||
|
And pour a glass of
wine |
|||
|
While we are here
talking time goes by |
|||
|
Try not to answer today
the questions of tomorrow |
|||
|
But take care of this
day |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
I think Pilate had read
Horace’s poems, and talked with his sensible wife about them. Take care of
the day, carpe diem, is known to friends of poetry as Horace’s trade mark, and many who do not read poetry have heard
that phrase and know what it means. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Horace must have been
rather much like me, then? Well, yes, I did not try to make a true
translation, but I wanted to steal into his mind, to be Horace. Most
important here is the phrase "whatever happens …" which I have had
as a motto for many years without really knowing its origin. One summer, long
ago, I read most of his work because it was in my course of Latin, and that
was a fine summer with a great reading experience. But everything you read
cannot remain in the uppermost part of your consciousness. I think I have
been Horace since then! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Here I would have liked to
say some more words on Horace, but all of a sudden
it feels too hard to discern him from myself! He was not fond of glamour, and
did not seek adventure, but he wanted a quiet life, just like me. Wounded by
passion, like me, he did not dwell in bitterness, licking his wounds, but
went looking for what could be of comfort. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Go not to the crowd to
learn from them if you have the right to live. Go to the sea and the
moorlands and the deep western storm. |
|||
|
The sea, the woods, the
air, clouds, trees – all of them tell you: yes! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
This is not Horace, not
me, but another of Horace’s grateful readers, Vilhelm
Ekelund, born in Scania like me. When he wrote
these lines about the sea in 1922, he thought of the wide
open sea along the Scanian coast, and not of the cosy inlet near my
home where I often go for a morning walk. However, later in life he came to Saltsjöbaden, near to Nacka where I live, and found
himself very well at home in that region. I sometimes go to see his grave by Baggensstäket. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
In Ekelund’s
world the graves are alive as the flowers and the trees. He wanders in open
air with writers of other ages and talks to them, as if they were walking
beside him, and the literary scholar finds it difficult to describe who of
them is who, but how much does that matter? Ars longa, vita brevis, art is
long but life is short, the saying is, and I want the sense of it to be this:
if I can learn some knowledge, some tradition, and use it for my purposes, I
can also bring it on to someone who will use it long after my voice stopped
talking. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Now I suddenly came
forward, walking beside, oh yes, this is about me
too, and you, and our friends, and it does not concern literature only but
all things that we cherish. Have I a great zeal, do I see myself as one of
those walking thinkers whose thoughts will walk on, like Horace, like
Kierkegaard, like Nietzsche? Yes and no. In one way this is for me only, I
write down my thoughts to ensure that they do not only spin around inside my
head, and I save it in a website in order to have a copy not only in a
machine that can stop working or be stolen. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
In another way I want
you, who sit somewhere else in the society of dead poets, to know that here
another one like you is to be found. If YOU really are to be found. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
One way of investigating I
have already tried. Into the search window of Google.com I write the famous
names that are in my text, at first only a couple, and then more and more.
The search engine finds collections of quotations and educational reading
lists, still fewer after every added name, and finally there is only one hit,
to my own site that is. If there is another one who keeps writing this kind
of thoughtful diary with literary reflections, he or she is doing it in
private, not in the web. I am unique in the whole world. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
In 1978, I wrote in Lundagård, the magazine of the students’ union in Lund:
Rightfully all novels should be endless or unfinished. I thought that a
novel must be finished because it is wanted for print. A TV series can go on
for a long time, but in the end the actors and producers do not want to do it
any more. But life goes
on! I can tell you which is the world’s best
unfinished novel, one that kept on until the writing hand got forever stiff.
It must be Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften,
The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil. But the
big novel that is getting bigger still, where is it? Probably somewhere in
the dark, for reasons of copyright. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
When I first thought of this,
surely some military and scientific people already used means of storing and
reworking text without writing it on paper, and now all people can use these
methods! Most wonderfully, it never has to stop! I can give my password over
to my children, so they can keep on thinking when I am finito.
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
Soeren Kierkegaard walked by a while
ago. He had no children, at least not recognized, but he could have had some
if he had not turned Regine off. It is well known that he broke up the
engagement and commented on it in his many heavy works. Regine once said that
she wanted to be with him so much, even if she were compelled to live in a
cupboard. Soeren then ordered from the carpenter a
cupboard in a size fit for her to get into. He wrote in earnest and lived in irony, you could say. I make the opposite, no not really,
I try to avoid irony in my writing, but sometimes I simply cannot. Many
people in all the world read those books, and the cupboard is on show in the
City Museum of Copenhagen, but who gives Regine a thought anymore? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
It is probably as well
for her to be forgotten. Many women who were near the so-called great men got
into mischief or were harshly judged by posterity. The men around the much
fewer famous women seem to have got more luckily away, partly because those
women probably could manage well without them. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
And yes, even I must
confess being guilty of some time having lived
ironically, and at times I also was used in somebody other’s ironical life.
Long ago I loved a girl, found myself in bed with another one, and very soon
was courted by a third. What happened? Nothing more happened. Suddenly they
were all gone. They did not know of each other, so any jealousy was not near,
but I did not grasp what was going on, so I just quitted. My career as a casanova took an end before it started. But for a Super
Beginner it is never too late, is it? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
And here I tell for
true that the spirit of my life, which dwells in the most sacred chamber of
my heart, began to tremble with such a force that was felt in my finest
veins, and in trembling uttered these words: BEHOLD, A GOD IS HERE, STRONGER
THAN ME, TO TAKE POWER OVER ME. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dante felt thus, when he for the first time saw Beatrice, "she
who makes happy". He tells about it in his wonderful little book Vita
Nova, New Life. In my young days I made a Swedish translation of this
passage in a deliberately bloomy old-fashioned way, to be ironical. But that
is wrong doing, as I have later understood. If you
jest with feelings, you are truly afraid of them, and there are better ways
to deal with that fear, as I know now, having got rid of it after a long
time. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
But once on a beautiful
day of early spring in Lund, when I felt like Dante, I was afraid. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
Something at once took
hold inside me |
|||
|
shook me with heavy
force and to my right a smile |
|||
|
went by while I in
confusion only could |
|||
|
lift my hat |
|||
|
|
|||
|
How could this touch
me so |
|||
|
hard that I nearly
could not breathe? |
|||
|
Always there is
unknown tension in a |
|||
|
not awaited encounter.
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
To be a teenager in the
sixties was hard. It was hard in other times too, sure, but I say so because
I know from myself. The so-called sexual liberalism was big then. Serious
writers wrote pornography, and to read them was held to be radical, and there
was talk about sex everywhere. I who was brought up in a conservative spirit
and had not thought much of revolting it, at least not in this issue, I felt
always uneasy. But while sex was talked about and pictures of naked people
were shown, in everyday life no one looked so very sexy, I thought. Because I
was immature? No, I think so even today when watching old films and TV clips.
The girls look awful indeed. The clothes are horrid, like the spectacles and
the shoes and the hairdo. All that stuff should have been transported
directly into the museum just like the blotty pop
art. To complete the misery, I never was a success with those girls because I
am short. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
There was comfort in the
music. A new song from the Beatles or Rolling Stones or Procol
Harum made a glorious event, and it happened often,
since in those days songs were edited as singles
first, and then collected into albums. The productivity was huge. I can
mention more names who got into sudden fame and soon were forgotten, due to
the competition, and still they were good, so good that I don’t just feel
nostalgic when I listen to them in radio today, in the Radio Vinyl channel
which is very popular in Sweden. The sixties was a baisse in visual beauty, but a golden age of music! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Here, there and everywhere. The song Paul McCartney wrote when he
thought of marriage has stayed inside me since it appeared in 1966. I know it
was not yet Linda then, but still I think of her. She was lovely, it seems to
me. Now some years have gone since she died. I shed a tear when I saw it in
the paper. John and George are dead, what Ringo is doing I am not sure, but
Paul is in good health, still working with music, and as far as I know he has
not disappointed anyone in any other way, either. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Some disliked that Linda
was always a member of Paul’s different bands, but I think that is sweet too.
I want her everywhere, says Paul in the song. That is the way it
should be. As Swedish dance band singer Lotta Engberg puts it: If we do it,
we do it a hundred per cent! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
To lead a better life I need my love to be here – but apparently most of us must reckon
ourselves happy if we get 40 per cent. Must it be, when a woman comes into a
close relationship with a man, that she also provides herself with a secret,
locked and alarmed basement where she continues living as if nothing had
happened? Men have their ways of cheating too, of course, but I never had to
consider that because I never had or wanted such a relationship with a man. I
also think women are the more clever in hiding it. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I manage very well alone
when the thing is to be strong and patient, make decisions, do things, take
blows, but what kind of a life is it, always to be like that? In between I
need to be soft, loosened, do nothing, just be, and then it is that I feel
the most longing for one to share a mollusc life with, or one who is strong
when I am slacking. But to discover that the loved one is not there, even
when it looks like she is, that is far worse than to be alone. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Or else, I am the one who
is not there, but when that happened, I did not know until afterwards. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
Say nothing of death |
|||
|
no, nevermore |
|||
|
It was cold when we
stood there |
|||
|
in the dim sunshine of
autumn |
|||
|
brown leaves on the
ground |
|||
|
even falling down into the pit |
|||
|
dug for the urn |
|||
|
but I have to tell you: |
|||
|
the stones can not speak |
|||
|
the strength of our
mind fails us |
|||
|
if we stand numb
before the short grey words |
|||
|
the names tell nothing
of what really is there |
|||
|
and the figures mean
as much, I say |
|||
|
as figures do when you
talk about life |
|||
|
if men could welcome
each other that willingly |
|||
|
that tenderly and
gratefully |
|||
|
like the earth
welcomes the ashes - |
|||
|
then death is no more
there. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
The first time I visited
Greece, there was a local cigarette brand named BYRON, whose ads showing the
portrait of the poet were up at various places. I do not think Byron was a
smoker, even if he was hard to himself in many other ways. He did lots of
things during his short life, not only write. He was a Hemingway of his time,
travelling, sporting, going to war, etc. What sport, with the bad foot?
Horses, swimming, boxing! Much money was spent, and the poor body was wasted.
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
But he brushed his teeth
like a good boy, he did! In his letters to the publisher back in England from
all the many stations of his restless journeying, he talks of literature, and
of money of course, and every time he asks the publisher to send more dental
care materials. That is nice. I have been at Cape Sounion
where he carved his name into a marble column, and in Messologion
where he lay dying 1824, still waiting for a real combat with the Turkish
occupants. The most famous literary man and golden boy of the time ended as a
would-be war hero fleeing from failure in family life, and after his death
there was fuzzing and fighting over the remains. His manuscript autobiography
went up in flames, and so we never got his own version of some dealings the
scholars still find dubious. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
His poems we have, not so
widely read today, which is a pity because of the beauty of his language. The
school book writers may well repeat their phrases
about Byron as a poseur and a pop star, but what an address he had! There are
rivers flowing of pain and humour and phantasy through the allegedly
long-winded reports on Don Juan’s doings in the bedrooms and on the way
between them. If you can make an animated movie on Hercules or Chinese wars,
you can make one on Byron. Will you please do that by 2024, you computer heroes? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
How did Byron get in
here? His work is not in the style of my funeral ode, is it? No, but there is
a connection. The poem speaks of ashes, and Byron was one who burnt himself.
For me he could get in anywhere. I always think of those who had a bitter life
but now are the sweetest of angels in the heaven of art. Like Hölderlin and Schubert. I can walk with them, and write
down our talks, but I want to live sweetly now! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
When I held my new-born daughter
in a green cloth I sang Im
Prater blühn wieder die Bäume to her. [ The
trees are blooming in the Prater again, by Robert Stolz ] I hope I can be there to sing
when HER daughter is born, well, a son will also do, of course. The feelings
around having the first child cannot come again, I am afraid. When the second
child arrives you know much of it before, and at the
coming of the third one you are experienced. Is this the reason why third
children often have a hard life? I am a third child, mark well what I do say.
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
My mind goes to other
parts of the world where other children are born, not with a song but with
helicopters droning and bombs blasting. Man has an unbelievable force of
building where the ruins are and creating new life in the very realm of
death. It is a force of spirit, and a natural force, like when the fresh
green comes back into the black spots after a forest fire. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Force of spirit and
natural force, did I make a slip now? I said I would not use those distinctions? Right, but I still can use the traditional
terms in some way. Through them I can get nearer to my real issue. You can
invent new words, I have one already (megahearts),
but even then the message of those words probably is
not totally new, but it refers to concepts already known. Isn’t
it typical that I invented that new word when I was speaking out an
admonition, I who have said that I shall not preach to anybody but to myself! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
If there is one thing of
which I want to persuade you, this is it, a thing I always am near to,
sneaking and sniffing around it: forget body and soul, forget inside or
outside, beauty does NOT come from within but simply is all around us
already, it is personality that counts, and personality is the entire human
being, and even at some wonderful moment it is more than that, and for that
moment there is ONE word already which we all know! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The Preacher says that his
work is a little slow now in summer, but he is at it! My thinking walks
however are at their top. Now is the best time! The summer until now,
beginning of July 2002, has brought rain and sun evenly, so those forest
fires have not come, and berries grow and ripen well. In the radiant summer morning I go around the garden hearing the flowers
whispering . . . |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
Im leuchtenden
Sommermorgen |
|||
|
geh ich im Garten herum. |
|||
|
Es flüstern und sprechen die Blumen, |
|||
|
ich aber, ich wandle stumm. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Es flüstern und sprechen die Blumen |
|||
|
und schaun mitleidig mich an: |
|||
|
"Sei unserer Schwester nicht böse, |
|||
|
du trauriger
blasser Mann!" |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
. . . but I, the man in the
poem, remain silent, and what the flowers say is not very comforting. Do
not be mad at our sister, you gloomy pale man. Heinrich Heine has been on
a thinking walk that went wrong. The love story that begins all so merrily,
and then loses itself in dark painful emptiness, is not told in detail in his
cyclus of the poet in love, but flashes of it
appear and disappear, just like the bright moments of one’s life very soon
are memories only. Heine has walked far on the road of romantic,
and returned from it. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
She was like an early
summer with white blooming bushes, blue-eyed and blond, a face of rather
straight lines and a pale complexion. I can no more hear her voice in my
inside ear, since it was so long ago, that makes me sad, but I remember a little
how I felt hearing it. Charmingly giggling, always keen on society and
entertainment, but she had something else too that not everyone saw or cared
for. This party doll who dreamed of having seven children, but did no more
than buy a dog, soon found a grave which I have not visited since the day
when I was there for the last ceremony. Gloomy and pale, not sore at one who
was dead, but at them who had ruined her life, and unsure whether I too had
been one of them. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Le Rose et le Vert. The pink and the green. With
those beautiful flowery colours Stendhal wanted to portray a young woman who
takes her own life when she has lost control of the intrigue that she herself
has started. He never completed the novel. It even seems quite logical that
it died early, so to speak, because the writer moved his resources to objects
of a sounder build. In the completed chapters and in the sketches to the
story of the woman striving to have a man who is already had, there is no
comment whatsoever of that what is likely to come if she succeeds: children.
Evidently it was too difficult for a male writer in the first half of the 19th
century, having no children of his own, to work out this idea convincingly,
fascinating as it is in its outline. The Brontë sisters would have done
better of it! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Unfortunately the state is almost as bad in the
male section of the colour scheme, that novel which was completed, about
young Julien who ends with sacrificing his blood (Red) in the treacherous
game of the priests (Black). Louise, his first love who is a mother of three,
and young Mathilde who bears his child, they unite in mourning, but the child
is not to be seen. I claim that this marvellous thrilling colourful nervy
novel Le Rouge et le Noir is completed after all, yes, but NOT
complete. There ought to be a sequel about the fate of Mathilde and the
child. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The mystery of creation. We
men will never know how it feels. Many times I put
my hands and my ear on the round stomach to get some faint idea of what was
going on within. I sang tunes hoping that the little life inside would grasp
them. What was going on inside of me I know better. Things that were high in
value before lost in rank when this new life came near, a kind of vita
nova different from Dante’s, but this too was brought by a woman. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
If women were sensible -
they are not, you know - but IF they were, they would launch a massive
informational campaign aiming to show to us men how fun it is to have kids -
it is, you know. The knowledge you get from seeing friends with kids, when
you yourself have none, or from visiting a kindergarten, says very little of
how it really can be, since that way you see mostly the awkward parts. Not to
speak about numerous occasions when you have watched parents and children
having rows in public. What you do not see from outside is the calm, the
silence, the intimacy between parent and child which is so important for both of them. To be near a child growing is perhaps not a full time job, but it takes almost all your attention.
When I am not where you are, my child, I long for the moment when I come home
to you again. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Soon the time comes when
I am the one at home, wondering when the child will come back, and then I do
not believe that the child longs so very much to be back home with me. For
both of us this is a part of getting mature. Not look at the watch and yell, but be glad that she is back and all right. Talk to
her for her own sake, not judgingly, when something has happened that is not
all right. My daughter and her friends were in many ways
women already in their early teens, and it was not always self-evident how to
treat them, as intelligent grown-ups or as unexperienced children. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The world of yesterday,
when young people had to move correctly along lines drawn up by elders, was a
world of slow development. Today innovation is not excludingly
a youthful affair, but what we elders get from the
young helps us to develop ourselves and support them. Parents who crave total
power over their children not only hurt the children and themselves, but also
steal a mighty resource from society, from the rest of us. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Power. A notion that has
become difficult to grasp. It is of course important to gain power, but it is
not à la mode to say openly that you have it. We have democracy now. All of
us have our say, haven’t we? A successful politician can keep refusing
several times to be the leader of the party, and then finally accept, having
an air of doing his duty. Famous company executives can say it is fun to do
business. A king by inheritance still parades in the attire of a high
commander, but a president elected by the people does not. On the other hand,
democracy often gets undermined by the strength of leading personalities, and
the seemingly hard competition among commercial entities is weakened through
hidden cooperation. But the power over ourselves we can have, or fight for if
someone tries to take it away from us. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Unfortunately, sometimes
this will force us to fight an old-fashioned war, man-to-man. If I see a smoking
overweight dog owner I immediately put out a sign of
warning, but the vibes are not always that easy to feel. The attacks can come
from behind. Those who seem to be on your side can be wearing false uniforms.
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
Jesus is right AND wrong
saying "turn the other cheek". The AM, Aggressive Man, WANTS you to
fight back. If the CM, Cool Man, does not, then AM tries once more, and if
there is still no fighting, AM gets frustrated and feels like locked up in a mattressed cell. That is a pity. What then must CM do?
Overcome himself and fight back, to be in a way loyal? My answer is no. If CM
stays cool, at least one of the parties is satisfied, the CM, even if the
arguing was unpleasant. But who ever saw an AM being satisfied? I never. They
always want more. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
That was rough, you
think. Yes, but this is the way you do it when you investigate, at first you
draw a rough sketch. All dog owners may bark at me now, yelling that I am the
aggressive one. I can take that. The Preacher is too busy now to come in and
defend this position. "Aggression" is a label, a very surfacial description; there is no proof that all
phenomena gathered by this label have anything in common. Look at the
goings-on in society: fighters with fists and knives get caught rather soon,
while school authorities that allow mobbing in their domain usually are
acquitted. Yet the wounds deep down in your soul can keep bleeding long after
the crushed nose is restored. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I hear the choir singing
"Forget, and get on with your life" in
multiple voices. Those who sing want to be comfortable with themselves, that
is to protect themselves from critic, whether from others or from their inner
self. Let them do so. We will have to protect ourselves from them, but I
think we will manage. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Even if I should want, I
will never get away from my past. Flashes from it come at any time, in my
dreams or changing moods. I may as well think back voluntarily, trying to
understand what happened. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
But well, how do I
succeed in that? Maybe I do it that way just because I am a reflecting type
and do not know of any other way? I remember the ills I have undergone, and
how hard it felt in those times, but I have put them aside in my
consciousness that much that they do not worry me every day or confuse my
other thoughts. Do I really understand? I cannot tell if I have grown so much
smarter from this. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Montaigne, in a way the father
of my thinking, even claims that you become more apt to face whatever happens
to you, and maybe I have got some more patience through the years. But the
conclusions that you may draw, are they not rather discouraging? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Thinking back on all the
eras of my life, all things I have begun and closed down,
I find many moments where people wanted to depress or even crush me. Why did
they need that, me being so kind and harmless? Or maybe I am not, save in my
own world? The calm and patience that all can see in me, for them it may mean
that I am hiding my real intent to hit hard and precisely when the
opportunity comes, and therefore they must prevent it by hitting first? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Hurt me they could, with their
assaults and tricks, but crush me, no, not yet. I am at health,
and keep some positive view of the world after all. If I try to be
Montaigne now, I should ask: What will they bring next time? How much more of
this can I stand? Had I better work on that Mr Hyde personality they think I
have? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I could be a criminal, let’s say. Not in the first line to hurt any other person,
but I could go into theft and fraud in order to be
jailed and see if they can crush me there? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The MOOD of being in jail
you can have without any crime. You get water and bread for a meal, and you
can go out every day, but you cannot have much more than that if you are out
of work. Well, I exaggerate a bit. I look for bargain prices in the food store, and entertain myself with doings that are free or
cheap. Three months is a short time in relation to my 25 years of clerical
work, but your pace of living lowers fast. The few things you have to do, and the few more you CAN do by your limited
means, can now take all your time. The most evident difference is that I myself have the key to my cell. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Or, you can put the name of
Freedom to this. An empty space you can fill by your own will. If you know
what your will is. Superficially it is easy to get started with lots of
activities, even to plan time and routine like an ordinary work. But your
plans and skills will do nothing to overcome the sense of meaninglessness
that will appear even though. Those feelings can affect you even when you are
employed, but they grow much easier in you if you have no given task to
master! One traditional method against all kinds of worry is to force
yourself to work very hard all the time, trying to
forget what bothers you. Or you can do the opposite, press the brake, accept
this state of mind when it comes, because it does come! Whatever you do, the
purpose is the same: to regain power over yourself. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
Let all be bright
around us: |
|||
|
white clothing, wine
of the Moselle, sunshine, waters gleaming |
|||
|
the mirror shows us
darkness from within |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
Comfort, even joy, comes from
music. Now and before. Mozart’s clarinet quintet shows to my inner vision all
beauty by easy, simple pictures - up to a point in the last movement where
the viola suddenly comes forward in a monotonous figure in minor which is
repeated a couple of times. Then there is a sharp chatter from the clarinet,
and so the piece comes to an end in the same delightful calm as before. What
happened? A crying child came to mum and did NOT get comfort, because mum had
other things to do? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
It is not true if you say
there IS feeling in music. I cannot prove what Mozart had in mind when he
composed. However, it is known that listeners in his time were upset by some
passages in his works that to them were unexpectedly sad. I tend to see pictures
within me when I listen to music that I like, but I do not necessarily
conclude that others do. For those who have the most sensitive musical ear,
the music may be full of meaning just as it is. I also know that such music
that to some is calm, can get others into full rage, making them demand heavy
metal or disco bang-bang. To me now, the gleaming light of the clarinet
quintet is a means of remembering the beautiful summer of 2002. Music gives
me pictures, and the pictures help me to hear the music within me. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
About turn – halt! There
is also music that comes to us with heavy loads of the composer’s intentions.
An opera by Wagner is not only music and words and a plot, but a vision of
the world. There are also instructions by Wagner himself or by authorized
disciples how to adopt that vision. However, I refuse to adopt it. I can feel
drawn out into the overwhelming waves of sound without thinking narrowly
those thoughts that are meant by that very sound, and I can admire Wagner’s
unique treatment of the German language without going through all the
philosophy he has put into it. This man who wrote all of it himself, music and text, and had a theatre built for him to secure
his ideas of staging, he evidently wanted total control of everything, and of
everybody too, it seems. He does not control me. I listen to Wagner and think
much about what I hear, but I am not subject to his dictature, neither
anybody else’s, in art or life. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
No rule without an
exception. In the labour market the boss still rules. The entrance of every
place of work ought to have a sign: YOU ARE NOW LEAVING DEMOCRACY ZONE. I
think this is an important reason why long time sick
leave and early retirement increases, even though it looks like society is
improving in many ways. There are laws and agreements that denote the terms
of labour as if you and the employer have had a discussion on values, and yet
with all these benevolent principles written down, the employer has all
possibilities of treating you as completely worthless. How many working
people can stand such a treatment for how long a time? Lots of them have
their regulations of working time and holiday, but their holiday is poisoned
by their fear of going back to the job. A hundred years ago there was hardly
a democratic state in the world, and now there are many. Is there a hope that
the ongoing century will bring a similar rise in labour democracy? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I lost a job, but I retained
my health. They did not manage to crush me there either. Amid the cold of winter I light my candles and listen to Bruckner, seventh
symphony, which is a world as much as a Wagner opera is, only that Bruckner
never provided any guide to it. I have walked its paths by myself for more
than thirty years. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
I blow twice as many
horns |
|||
|
to make silence heard |
|||
|
humbly, majestically |
|||
|
|
|||
|
he who lost the fight |
|||
|
has another win to
hope |
|||
|
on his own grounds |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I no more believe |
|||
|
you must harden |
|||
|
or extinct |
|||
|
|
|||
|
suddenly one raises a
hand |
|||
|
the blast comes |
|||
|
and the mountain is
gone |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I also would like to
be Atlas |
|||
|
heave the world on my
shoulders |
|||
|
if I could dance with
it |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
Seeing music as pictures
within me, I think Bruckner wants to see what it is look like beyond the mountain,
and then he does not climb it like a well-behaved classic symphonicist,
but he removes it. That is why many think his symphonies lack form. If he
were talkative like Wagner, he would explain what is intended by his way of
building a structure and taking it down before it is ended, but he hardly
talks at all. His third symphony is dedicated to Wagner, and his ninth and
last he wrote for "dear God". THAT says a lot. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Do I talk with a split tongue,
I who sing in a church choir, giving voice to the words of faith at concerts
and services, although I do not believe? Tell me what you think. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I think I know what
Martin Luther would answer. He would say that all you do, within or without
church, is to the service of God and of men, and that it is better honestly
to disbelieve than to imagine or force yourself to a faith. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Anton Bruckner was a believer, and wrote sacred music while he was employed in
church, but later on the symphonies were his main work. But even they were
made for "dear God" or celebrating Richard Wagner who was nearly
divine. The mess of heathen ideas that Wagner loaded into his music Bruckner
did not observe at all. He just listened. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
That standpoint I can
take as an example for myself, regarding church music. Whatever the message
it is meant to convey, it is also a work of creative will in men, in those
who wrote it and those who gather to perform. If the believers hear our
singing and feel that it somehow is a support to their faith, then I have
done something for them, haven’t I, Martin? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Thereabouts I draw my limit.
I go into the church, but I do not kneel before the altar. The kingdom I live
in is of this world, but I respect those who want to live in the faith of
their fathers. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I read the Bible too, but
as a book among others. Through the ages, power-seeking
people have used Christian creed for their own purposes, and who can be sure
that no such tendencies have got into the book itself, during the time that
passed after Jesus lived and until the words were written down? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
In the New Testament, if
we put an ear to it, we can hear voices of simple men who have witnessed
great things. Some of them have made it their life’s work to tell about it,
to let others share the great experience, and others may have told anyway,
not having any special intention. We can share it, reading some texts that
are recorded some decades after the events, in a language foreign to those
who saw it happen. We also get fed with the preachings
and disputes of theologians through the centuries, and today the original
simplicity is far, far away. How can we get back to it? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Preacher: |
|||
|
|
|||
|
May I step forward? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dreamer: |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I say, what is this, are you
going to preach about Jesus, all the clergy does that very well, I mean well
enough for those who want to hear! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Preacher: |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Not at all, I would
rather say that I preach AGAINST Jesus. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dreamer: |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Oh dear, have you turned
into such a convinced atheist who wants to talk the faithful out of their
faith, that is not better. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Preacher: |
|||
|
|
|||
|
No way, that task I leave
to those who call themselves philosophers. Now hear: |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Prophets of love are all
over the place. All you need is love, all of us shall always love each other,
and that stuff. Yeah, great, of course we shall. But you who must live
without love, for how long will you be able to give love without getting any?
That they never tell, Jesus not, John Lennon not. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
24 000 people daily die
of starvation, according to statistics by the WFP, World Food Programme. They
would be overjoyed if someone could provide them with some barley loaves and
small fishes. It can be done. No one does it, though. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
One shall not believe what
one cannot know, they often say. But how do we know what we know? For sure?
Those who told about Jesus walking on water, they knew what would happen if
they tried it themselves, but they knew nothing of gravitation or density.
Today, we get fed up with information every day, but not a promille of it we can check for ourselves. In every issue
we have to trust those who say it is like that.
However, nearly every day we hear someone revealing that it is NOT like that.
What then is fact, and what is faith, in here? End of speech, thank you! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Thank YOU. The Preacher
goes back to work, and the Dreamer keeps on dreaming! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
In the lovely sunshine of
spring the dirty heaps of snow are drained, until soon the dirt only remains,
and I who have not yet found a job go for longer and longer walks every day.
Sometimes I know where I am going, and sometimes I change my goal suddenly,
or stand thinking for a while. Often there is a halt somewhere on the trail,
like going to Hötorget [ in central
Stockholm ] for a load of bargain bananas. If
I should write a novel it would be just so erring and vague in contour, like
now when I stroll among thoughts and feelings without ever having decided
where to go. I just rose from a filled bath tub and discovered that it was
standing on a balcony, rather high up with a view of the sea, as if I had
tried to take the sea up to the flat or the bath tub had moved because it wanted
to see the view, and now I am in a scarcely furnished bedroom where evidently
no one has slept since long, and the walls are off-white like in an art
gallery, but there are no pictures on the walls, and only after waking up I
realise that the bath water will pour out on the balcony under. It is of
course difficult to make a note of what you really "think" in a
dream, and when awake I like many other writers dream of using words to
capture what is between and behind words. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
If I only could, like
Agnes von Krusenstjerna [ Swedish novelist,
first half of 20th century] , write ten lines about a street in Stockholm
or a manor in Småland [ southern Swedish
province ] , so the
inner eye could see it! But look out, the person, most often a woman, who walks
the street or roams in the park can suddenly be far away, in the world of
dreams or back in childhood. The world of the Misses von Pahlen
is clear and dim in one. One little detail is pointed out and soon it is
gone, but much later it reappears in another form, and the colours change
rapidly from the mildest pastel to sharp crude contrast. If I should want
some music to sustain these visions it could be a
symphony by Mahler. Women who seek mature love, real life, not being
satisfied with matrimonial security only, that is the main line of these
novels, but I do not think of them as feminist because reading them is such a
great adventure. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Feminism is OK with me, yes,
but when I read a narrative or lyrical text I do not
put the message detector to it. The message will still come, in the slow
light of reflection. Agnes von Krusenstjerna is an
idol due to the struggle she had for her work, against conservative kins and guardians of social morals. When first meeting a
work of fiction I try to be open to what is yet undefined, even dangerous,
especially when the text is narrative AND lyrical, which is often the case in
Krusenstjerna’s works. Words and phrases fade out into
flowing waves of dreamy feelings, such as the awakening erotic between two
pregnant women who are not lesbians, or what a young wife experiences before
she kills herself because she does not want to become a mother. In fact I tried to read a treatise that wanted to analyse all
this from a feminist point of view, but very soon I stopped. Later, some
time, perhaps. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Now again it is Easter.
And spring! I found the Hepatica, and snow, not exactly beside,
but a bit further away in a shadier place. After singing in the Easter day
service in Engelbrekt Church I walked down sunny Humlegården. This is Agnes’ realm. She lived at the
corner nearest to the church in her young years when she first thought of
becoming a writer, but then the church was not yet built, this part being the
outermost of the town. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Krusenstjerna is one. Dostoevsky is. Stendhal
is. Magicians of thoughts and feelings: ours, their own, and those of the
imaginary characters. And then the message is there, all right. Krusenstjerna on the difficult roles of woman in a
changing society. Dostoevsky on Russia and Christianity. Stendhal on the
alienation of deeply sensitive young people in normal social life. But to me
these ideas come into the focus only when the magic is fading. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Magic is also around the
child hero Harry Potter, a magic of a more tangible kind. This is suitable for
the young readers who have not yet worked out their view of reality, and thus
do not like us grown-ups see it as very important
that everything in a book is real and logical. But there is a message in the
Potter books too. What message? Well, well … |
|||
|
|
|||
|
One message which I can
read out of any book, or out of the indefinite total of them, is this:
Nothing is EXACTLY what it seems to be. There is always one more point of
view that you can apply. And while you are viewing, something happens both in
you and in your object. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I often think of a work
of art that I saw at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm, in 2002 when
some students’ works were on show. In a glass showcase there was something of
a mouldy moonscape with a little junk here and there, and this mess started
moving when you approached it. Probably similar things have been made
elsewhere, I do not know, the name of the artist in question is Henrik
Eriksson. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
My work is not unlike. A
strange rocking verbal terrain in which you are a pioneer every time you go
there. It expands steadily, and its parts has an inner move which cannot be
foreseen. Still after two years, in the Swedish original I have never changed
what was once written, except for a few obvious mistakes. But this is not at
all a fixed principle. Sooner or later my mind can set on rolling back in my
tracks, confusing them so much that I only know what happened. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
This English version
however I have made during a few weeks, and I must confess that, myself
rewriting myself, I have felt free to make some new little turns here and
there. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
the star up there |
|||
|
looking down on
someone else |
|||
|
if it falls dying |
|||
|
my wish also will |
|||
|
|
|||
|
most things are
forgotten |
|||
|
like when skiing in
soft snow |
|||
|
the wind takes the
tracks away |
|||
|
|
|||
|
someone before me |
|||
|
may have written this |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
Tracks in snow, tracks in
sand. All things must pass. Not quite! The dinosaur in Africa is gone, but
you can see it has been there. A section of rail still left in the street
because no one has bothered to break it up, can be a symbol of destitution,
but also it can lead your mind to some painting of, say, Albin Amelin, with cargo vessels and cranes and locomotive
steam. That painting is as real now as before. Our modern society changes
rapidly, but as a counterweight we have a culture of memory that is more
vital than ever. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Modern technique,
generally thought of as making things faster and distributing them faster, is
also the best ever for preserving, and even
recreating what we thought was lost. Phantasy writers are often in for
travelling to the past, but I say that the road we are on leads to living in
several eras simultaneously. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Die Vergangenheit ist mir lieber als
die Gegenwart, aber ich glaube an eine bessere Zukunft. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The past is nearer to my heart
than the present, but I believe in a better future. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Nietzsche wrote that in
his diary when he was 18. I think that many among today’s phantasy-reading,
role-playing youth would undersign such a statement. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Today we preserve a lot,
but we also tear down a lot. When changes in building and ambient are in
question, it generally is described as a fight between economical claims of
renovating to make more money, and antiquarian claims of preserving for
aesthetic and historical reasons. I think that to ordinary people a third
claim is the most important: that of feeling at home. In recognition there
lies much feeling of security! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
And the opposite is true
too: not to feel at home is inquietude. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Home? How do we know what
is our home? The old authoritarian society wants us never to be unsure of
that. A couple of estates is a village, a couple of villages is a parish, a
parish has its church, and every estate has its own bench in the church. We
shall stay where we are and never think of being anywhere else. This society
is old, but still extant in many parts of the world, even as small cells
right in the middle of that world of European-American culture that our media
describe as a global entertainment park or smorgasbord. No one knows for how
long there still will be people who WANT to
subordinate, and others who take it as their task to keep them down. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Hand on heart – your hand
on my heart – the smallest cell can be you and me. If you say you love me, do
you say it in order to command or to obey? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Honestly I do not want you to want either
of it, or maybe there could be a little of both? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
More I cannot say before I
have heard your answer. While waiting I go on living in eras and believing in
a better future. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The little that is needed
to be really happy. That which everybody wants but
nobody dares to offer. The answer of the Jeopardy
question: What is tenderness and confidence? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I walk through the wood
in Nacka, enjoying the warming sun and the fresh green of early summer, the
cluck of the blackbird, white buds of lily-of-the-valley along a beck [
a nice Yorkshire, i e Scandinavian, word for a little
stream ] , oaks in
young leaf, and then I get on top of a rock looking wide out at all this
beauty, over the Salt Sea to Mölna on the opposite
shore. Yes, friends of poetry, Gunnar Ekelöf’s
elegy! But I could never write such a melancholy poem as he did, and set its scene to such a beautiful place. Ekelöf too lives in several eras, but he has no belief in
future, you correct me if I am wrong. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
[ The
Salt Sea: is the name of the innermost part of the passage from the Baltic
into the port of Stockholm. ‘’A Mölna Elegy’’
published by Gunnar Ekelöf in 1960 is a highlight
of Swedish poetry. ] |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The new society has a
strong belief in confidence, between man and woman, between native and
foreign, but it does not know very well yet what to do with tenderness. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Preacher: St. Paul just popped in? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dreamer: Oh yes. In his words to the
Galatians there is a premonition of a society where we help each other. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
St. Paul eventually came
to Rome, because he had a mission. I too came to
Rome, just because. Travelling in our days is in itself a
mission that you give yourself in order to develop through seeing something
different from what you always can see. Everybody travels today. The number
of tourists from, say, Somalia is not big, but in the rich countries this new
form of migration is one typical element of modern life
style. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
This is awkward for talibans who want to keep their society clean of external
influence, and for traditional globetrotters who must invent more and more
advanced travel adventures in order to stay an elite, but the rest of us
think that travelling, even when only for fun, is good for mutual
understanding and co-operation among nations. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
When I was a child the
family went abroad for holidays, most often to some German-speaking country, and
that gave me a German feeling which remained and grew inside me. I remember
quite well when nine years old, I leaned out of the hotel window in the
evening, shouting "zweimal Bier", giving
those who sat in the outdoor café a good laugh. No doubt that was the
beginning of my great interest in German language and culture. Other
languages came, French compulsory for a few years in school, and MUCH later I
came to Paris and realised what I had been missing, so after that trip I
bought a dictionary and started brushing up what I had learnt long ago. Never before I had believed all them who said that Paris
was such a wonderful city, but then I came there and found that all the
praise was true! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
In Rome, also an early trip
with my parents who were both advanced scholars in Classics, I already was
acquainted with Caesar and Augustus, so it naturally felt great to walk where
they had walked. I also, only eleven years old, could take in something of
the peculiar mood there, from the lovely language and the feeling that the
ruins and the old churches and the baroque palaces are part of a living city.
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
Here I had better burst
into song. Il balen del suo sorriso … No other language that I know is so well suited to singing, or the
music maybe is already within the language. I do not know if Rolf Jupither really knew Italian, but when he was Count Luna
in Trovatore he was in the soul of the language. [Rolf
Jupither, 1932-1984, was a baritone at the Royal Opera
in Stockholm] |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Il fulgor del suo
bel viso … Beauty does not come from within, it is all around us, even for him who
does evil, like Count Luna, although he does not know the total amount of his
evil doings before it is too late. Like Othello. The heart of Verdi’s music
contradicts the horrid end of the plot. Life can be made better. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
To lead a better life. The lightning of her smile, the gloam of her beautiful face, spreads its light deep down
in the coldest caves of your heart, promising closeness, comfort
and hope. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
English too can be a
beautiful language. I say woman, speaking the same initial as warm.
I say she, speaking the same vowel as in kiss. Then I say her,
thinking of its double meaning of owning and being owned, putting my lips
forward to kiss! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
Many times when tired |
|||
|
I hear the music talking
to me - |
|||
|
what does it hide when
I am alert? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
To float in air |
|||
|
three seconds in
Venice |
|||
|
between postcard and
reality |
|||
|
outside the railway
station |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Soft moist lips |
|||
|
eyes closed - |
|||
|
of the overflow of the
mouth the heart beats |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
The impression of seeing
Venice for the first time, and the impression of a kiss. Unluckily the two things
did not occur simultaneously, as they ought to. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dreamer: |
|||
|
But when you stepped out
of the railway station, imagine if la biondina
had been |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Preacher: |
|||
|
Are you talking to me?
Wrong person. However, I remember we went into one of the magnificent palazzi
housing the Casanova Night Club, but she was not there either. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dreamer: |
|||
|
We? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Preacher: |
|||
|
You and me. We shall
always be together. I am your voice, and you are my eyes and fingertips. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dreamer: |
|||
|
But when we talk about
this, I see only darkness, and my fingers freeze! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Preacher: |
|||
|
I know where she is. She
is standing in the boat to the island of the dead. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
The boat in Böcklin’s painting is black, and the oarsman has dark
clothes, but the coffin is white like the figure that is standing. The colour
of death is white. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Milk fat, wheat flour,
sugar. The milk fat is the type of fat that most easily attaches itself to the
inside of the blood vessels, narrowing them. The heart doctors said that. The
wheat flour forms a knödel in your stomach,
blocking it. I said that. About sugar I do not know very well, but most of it
disappeared from my cooking together with the fat and the flour. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
In 1997, when my shirts
were a little tight around my stomach, I weighed 65 kg. Now in 2003 I weigh
55 kg. In these years I was divorced, had a heart infarction
and lost my job. It seems like I dropped ten unhappy kilograms?
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
On the contrary. The good
thing that happened in these years was this: I made this discovery, at first through
pure intuition, when I decided not to drink milk and eat sandwiches any more,
and then I got more and more confirmation for it. I may persuade you about
this some time, but for the moment I only cry out a war cry: FIGHT WHITE
FOOD! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
What is
black then? Traditional mourning dress is still in some use,
but is very little noticed among finance brats and intellectual
goblins and a lot of girls who are neither. Life has all colours, mauve as
kidney beans, red as chili pepper, yellow as bananas, brown as soy, green as
sencha tea, my food is a journey, well, I do not travel to India or Latin
America or China or Japan for food shopping, but my city strolls often
include streets where these goods can be found, so some journey it is, to
strange scents, to languages unknown to me, to market places and small shops
that for a moment make me feel like in a bazaar and not in a common food
store. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Even an ordinary
food shop can be seen as a journey, though. You
start your shopping cart and proceed on low gear through the grocery
district, make some more speed towards the meats and sausages, and then you
check out among candy and tobacco. Not a very exhilarating trip, but you need
food, and I know a way of making the end of the trip a little more pleasant:
I pass along the cash stands to see if any of the girls I like are at work,
so I will have something nice to look at while paying. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Shopping
is dull. Lying in a hospital is dull too. But if there are lovely girls to
take care of you it is slightly less dull. This was said by me, old man who
has not yet gone into myself, waiting for the flame to extinguish. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The other
day she, in the food shop, not in the hospital, said her ordinary
"hello", and then she said "oh hello!!" because she
recognised me although she had just come back from maternal leave. And then
we talked a little about kids. Even today there is kinda
social life in the shop! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
And then
I walk home, alone as usual with my burden. The twice-a-week strength
challenge to mount a series of stairs with the usual load of fruit and
vegetables and other healthy stuff. Much fruit it is. With fructose in it. I
claim that the innate sugar in the fruit is far healthier than the refined
white sugar. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Mamma mia, now I am talking food again. It is hard to let go
once you are at it. Bulimia of words? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
apple |
|||
|
|
|||
|
This is what feeds me, this is what I always keep in store. In the novel Krilon Himself by Eyvind
Johnson all the keys are described that Krilon
keeps in his key box, and here I enumerate the keys to my keeping alive.
Johnson tells stories about the roles each key had in Krilon’s
life, and I surely could tell some kind of story
about each of these nourishments. Or maybe I should describe in 37 pages what
I cook when I invite the long-speaking Mr Krilon
for lunch. Not octopus, I think, even if neither of us is a vegetarian. [ In a
preceding novel, Krilon’s Journey, he
talks lengthy, with unbelievable deviations, about killing an octopus at a
fishing trip in Norway
] |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Krilon travelled to occupied Norway,
into dangerous ground, like a modern Bilbo, there and back again,
making detours to avoid the German troops. But he did NOT really kill the
octopus, he never fought the German Sauron. What he saw there forced him at
last to some action, though. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
What would have happened
if Krilon had found the weapon, the lost key if you
like, that could at once have freed the people of Norway, and all other
captive peoples? The Nobel prize-winning storyteller Johnson is a sceptical
empiricist, keeping both feet on the ground, while Professor Tolkien from
Oxford is carried away into the space of myth. It should have been the other
way round, eh? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Tolkien is two writers,
not one. He investigates the world with as much method as any other linguist
or historian, but that world exists only in a child’s mind, the child John
Ronald Reuel who never grows up. These two go together like Gandalf and
Frodo, sometimes they separate, sometimes they disagree, but they are always
friends. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
They do not belong to the
walking thinkers, even if there is a lot of walking in Lord of the Rings.
Their travel has a goal and a purpose. Bilbo maybe, but we cannot read the
book he writes, or can we, am I just stupid? The walking thinker has no goal.
He is at the goal already, or his goal is forever unreachable, because he by
nature walks on so long as the oxygen powers his muscles and his brain. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Krilon however, he fits in. He does not write
any book within Johnson’s book, but his thought is richly expressed in the
colloquy group that is threatened and scattered and diminished by death,
until near the end of the story where it gathers once more and fights the
enemy. The Fellowship of Thought goes from thought to action in a bunker deep
down under Brunkeberg Ridge. [Brunkeberg is in the
middle of Stockholm, today it can hardly be traced due to building activities
around 1960] |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Those 37 pages, I can’t get them out of my mind. They are really 53, I only
guessed before. There is a lot of food in fiction already, descriptions of
eating and drinking, when and how. Think of the mad party that Dmitri gives
in The Brothers Karamazov. But how many of these gourmets and gluttons
of novelists have any concern for what is done to the food before it comes on
the table? I don’t think that Dostoevsky or James
Joyce or Thomas Mann ever achieved much in the kitchen, but did they at least
any research on cooking to get it into their work? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Sorry, this thought made
me numb. I say one word only: Onion. And now for something completely
different. After more than three years, I have for the first time made an
adjustment in my text, not only a correction. I found a mistake big enough to
affect the line of thought. What mistake? Won’t
tell, haha. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Summer has come. A summer
shadowed by papers and figures and accounts. Holiday substitute, most often a
duty of younger people, is my duty now. But OK, it is a job, thanks a lot.
Something else and better than the involuntary retirement which I was in, kinda. Rain hits the glass roof of the office. Behind the
glass of the TV screen rain pours on the tough cycle riders in France, and on
the motorcycle camera crew that is with them on the track. The raindrops
hanging on the camera lenses, dimming the picture, gives me the feeling of
looking out through a window on the road of the cyclists. My home could be a
circus van following the Tour. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
So we are on the road again. The
wheel was invented way back in antiquity. Why did it take so long to invent
one more? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I cycled a lot when I was
young. Not as a sport, but just to make trips, look around a little.
Sometimes I saw racing cyclists in training along the roads, but I never was
tempted. I only thought they looked ridiculous with their monkey-like helmets
and spiderweb-like wheels. Yet this was maybe one of the few sports I could
have made any success in, since you don’t have to be
big. The mountain bike was not yet known of then, at least not in Sweden, but
I would have liked it. Many arduous paths were permeated by me and my
standard one-gear "Rex". |
|||
|
|
|||
|
And yet maybe not. I was
not born with a will to compete. At school I got into intellectual
competition, almost unavoidable if you grow up in a family of highbrows. My
stature had a part in it too, I think. Need for compensation. So we’ll talk no more about that. When I took my baccalaureate I was not disappointed that there were a few
who scored better marks than me. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
My last year in school
was the worst one. I did cope, after all, but not so eagerly as before. My
teacher of Swedish said of one essay of mine that it was "mature",
but I doubt that he did well in saying that in front of the class, and I am
quite sure that such a maturity was not a very sane state for a
seventeen-year-old. Music was sometimes a comfort, even that inaudible music
that grew inside me when my feet had carried me far, down some path along the
fields, to some slope facing a gently flowing river, with a book of poetry or
just with my thoughts. That is the way you conclude that being alone is
preferable, when almost any other situation is nearly intolerable. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Other people, how much
ever you wish to be with them, can expulse you completely, and you can do
nothing about it. Well yes, you can go to the sea and the moorlands and the
western storm, or, with our Swedish colloquial way of expressing love of
Nature, "take a walk in the wood". |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Preacher:
|
|||
|
The wood always gives
a hood – for some
people it is of no help, because they can’t ever do without people and
chatter, let us not think low of them, but if you want, the wood is always
there for you. Like God, if you believe. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dreamer:
|
|||
|
At night, when you look
out from indoors, it seems to be dark, but if you are out and the moon is
full, everything is beautifully lit, and today’s werewolves are not there,
but they are where most people are. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Preacher: |
|||
|
And then,
if you are alone in the wood, the wood tells you that you need not fear, not
there, nowhere else, and no one. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dreamer:
|
|||
|
And when she comes, a
brighter light |
|||
|
|
|||
|
* * * * *
* * |
|||
|
Stagnelius surely was awake in the wood at night time,
not sleeping like Endymion, because otherwise he could not have written this! |
|||
|
[A stanza from a glorious Swedish poem, Endymion
by Erik Johan Stagnelius. There is no full
translation available on the web, I’m afraid, but I
might provide one soon!] |
|||
|
|
|||
|
[What do I think I am doing? A year ago, when I
started translating myself, even my poems, into English, I thought it was a
bold feat. And now I propose to render one of the most precious pearls of
Swedish poetry and send it to the rest of the world! Such a venture can but
fail.] |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The poet implores the
morning breeze and the sunrise to withhold, thus letting Endymion keep on
dreaming. I think he ought to show some care for Diana too, who is forced to
leave him before day comes. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I was indeed awake that
summer night when a weeping goddess came to me, she wept for pain not for
love, and I was there to soothe and comfort her. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Only afterwards I can
believe that it was a dream after all, because no
imagination had seen that something like this could happen, and if it
happened again my thought would go back to that very night. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Diana is a goddess. She
has the power to make the glorious night come back, again and again. But she
must always hide her love, since she is also the
protector of virgins. Who can help her when she gets worn out by this habit,
always having to induce dreams in the man she loves, when she wants to make
love to him? Is Stagnelius right when he concludes: |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Once he awakes, what a
horrid void |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Stagnelius was not only a man of classical
learning, like all literates in his age, but also a true Christian. Did he
ever imagine the solution that would be near, if Diana could crush the limits
of ancient myth? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
She could let Endymion
die, giving to him the requiem aeternam
which is said to be the happiest form of existence, and to herself the
satisfaction of not more having him erring around in daytime, in the possible
sight of other women. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
All Saints’ Day just passed,
as one of the glorious days in the church of my country. Not that we,
Luther’s pack, are so eager about saints, and the commemoration of our dead
is not a big event either, but we are unable to resist the charm of catholic
composers like Mozart and Fauré, who have done
their utmost at this very point, Mozart even when he himself was dying. If
the thought of death provokes this heavenly music, what can we do about it? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I know what to do, but unfortunately I have no such talent. There is not, but
there ought to be, some equally majestic music about being born. The Messiah
of Handel or the Christmas Oratorio of Bach cannot be counted, for
they are only about Christ being born, not us. Even if I know I am unable,
for some day I meditated the idea of writing a Prequiem,
until I found out that this ingenuous title was already taken by a guy who
had written music for a condemned to hear before death. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The Olymp.
Heaven. Cyberspace. Words from another human being appear on the screen in
front of you, and you can’t be all sure about who it is and why, but you can
keep the words in your chat logs as if it were stone tablets that came to you
from the unknown. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Nothing really changes.
2500 years of understandable cultural history is like a second in the
development of the species Man and its way of life. Even today there are
people who manage to force their personal opinion on
others and make it appear as obvious truth. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
[ Here in Swedish I think about cursing as blaming
the devil when you feel out of control, but when you curse in English you
most often do not talk of the devil, but of sex: |
|||
|
where the fuck did you hide
the fucking hose … |
|||
|
and I can’t see how to fit
that into the same logic. Anybody help me out here? ] |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Those who in this manner
put sex into every sentence they speak, they are not sexy, on the contrary,
they are afraid of sex. The message they radiate is that sex is sordid and
can only be connected with fear and hate and violence, and so they come into
alliance with those who detest the open pluralistic society, where you can do
very much what you like as long as you do not harm anyone, with those who
oppose against the democracy of the heart. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
One such is the
headmaster in Stockholm who wants to reinstall school uniforms,
or forbid the pupils to wear the newest clothes of expensive brands.
They are searching for an identity, can’t you see? What use would it be to
prescribe a standard profile which was abandoned a hundred years ago, if it
ever was in use? You cannot in that way keep that devil
out who sneaks around whispering that some pupils have more profile than
others, in Sweden at least they call it "attitude". |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Get around talking to the
pupils instead, to the groups who stand smoking outdoors, to the moslem girls over there with their long coats and
well-knot shawls, and don’t forget those who are
there although nobody notices them. Tell them it is good that they care about
their looks, if they do, but that one should also respect those who have
other preferences. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
If you are bold enough,
you may also talk about beauty, that beauty is a gift which should be tended,
like intelligence or strength or what else young people are proud of. This however
is a bit dangerous because then it may happen that the talk comes to sex, and
that is not done, is it? Yes it is, in educational
TV programmes on "serious relationships", but those you switch off,
preferring the entertainment shows where they discuss "the very best
sex" as if it were a sport. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
My dear headmaster, you
may fail in this, but such a failure is far more honourable than your clumsy
attempt to turn back time. I would like to talk to you even today, when I
write these words, the 8th of January 2005, when Elvis Presley is
70, he still lives you know, also celebrating the 50th anniversary
of his first artistic success. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
During those 50 years
something has happened which you seem to overlook: a juvenile culture has
arisen which exists in its own right and not as an
immature prologue to adult life. This culture needs not to be corrected, but
to continue living as it wishes, and maybe it needs a little support against
all who get close to it in order to make money. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
And perhaps you could
forbid all who say "you are young and your
whole life lies before you", because that is no great expectation for a
suicidal mind of fourteen. Listen to the heart, the young heart, and you will
probably hear something like this: Yes, I am young now, and I will grow up,
but I am the one to decide when, not you. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Myself, I will get old
some time, but when is for me to judge, not for you. Ever curious. New things
happen that I could not think would happen, items that were not on the menu
and thus could not be selected. Surely there are life-hackers who transgreed such limits, but I am not among them, born in
September as I am. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
No need to be alone … |
|||
|
|
|||
|
You are who you are, at ease.
Calm and free. Or exalted and free, if you like. You
think what you like, and tell anything you think, or remain silent just
because that too feels good sometimes. Nothing prevents you, and nothing
pushes you, except joy. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
And you are not by
yourself in a void chamber, but in company of one who feels just the same. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Sing along with John
Lennon: It’s real love, it’s real! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I dined in a nice street restaurant
in Luxembourg, rue Beaumont, just a little off the most central quarters
where most foreigners go. I was there alone, but next to me there sat a
couple, a man and a woman that is, who were both around 55-60 it seemed. They
dined well and drank a good wine, and were talking in their lëtzebuergish all the time, sometimes both
simultaneously, but never raising their voices, and always about pleasant
things. With the help of my German I could understand some of it. They really
had a good time, and I enjoyed listening to them. Maybe I even would have
started talking to them, if they had been silent for just a little moment,
but they never were. Then they left the restaurant clinging to each other. I thought: being two could be like this too, not always like
Woody Allen! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Not that
I dislike Woody Allen, not at all. His films are very entertaining.
Regrettably most Swedish film goers disagree, so it happens that when a new
Woody Allen film is released, it has already disappeared from the theatres
when I have decided upon watching it. Swedish public prefers films with more
outright feelings in them, notwithstanding Ingmar Bergman whom Woody Allen
admires. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I do not
go the cinema often, mostly with my kids when there is a new film that they
want to see. That is great fun too. Shrek
was a treasure, a film that looks like an upside down
version of Beauty And The Beast, but in my view it is about personal courage,
daring to surpass social conventions. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Preacher: Long time
no see. Nice to be here again, merry Christmas! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dreamer: Well, I
am sitting here with twinkling eyes. Are you Santa Claus? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Preacher: Nope. You
may act a role to achieve something. Or you may act a role just for fun. They
call it LRP nowadays. We little boys in the fifties who played Cowboys and
Indians were something of that kind, I think. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
But if
you have gain from acting, ask yourself if there is a cost too. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
There is
no thoroughly better way of life than being yourself, and none worse than
having to act a role. Let Santa live, but only in the fairy tale where he
belongs. The three kings followed their star, and if you follow yours you
will become a king in some way. Thus reads my gospel
of Christmas. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dreamer: But if I am
dizzy and see many stars, how do I know which one to follow? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Preacher: Oh my,
some nerve was hit. I need to relax and wait for some stars to fade. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dreamer: Then I will
sing for you a song of a star. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
Yes, by
yonder star I swear |
|||
|
Which thro'
tears above thee |
|||
|
Shines so
sadly fair. |
|||
|
Tho' often dim with tears like him |
|||
|
Like him my
truth will shine |
|||
|
And love
thee, dearest, love thee, |
|||
|
Yes, till
death I'm thine! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Leave thee,
dearest, leave thee? |
|||
|
No, that
star is not more true |
|||
|
When my vows
deceive thee |
|||
|
He will
wander too. |
|||
|
A cloud of
night may veil his light |
|||
|
And death
shall darken mine |
|||
|
But leave
thee dearest, leave thee? |
|||
|
No, till
death I'm thine! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
There can
be rain that conceals the star, and you can have too much tears in your
eyes to see the truth immediately. The rain stops in a while, and tears stop
too, and all is light. But when that truth is not there to see any more, the
whole universe changes. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
A
beautiful poem by Thomas Moore, truly romantic. And then like now, Ireland
had many wonderful melodies. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Sweden
has beautiful tunes too, but somehow I did not grow
up with them. Some of them were sung in school, but none that was any hit to
me. My youthful source of music was above all the Fireside Book Of Folk Songs, an American
compilation of traditional songs from many countries, in original English or
translated from other languages. Thomas Moore was there, yes, and Scotland’s
Robert Burns. Bendemeer’s Stream and Sweet Afton were as familiar to me as Mörrumsån
where I used to angle. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Even when
I was a grown-up, it took a long time before I grew into the deeply Swedish
tradition of choir-singing, but I did. Now I sing in mixed or male choirs
with equal delight. The church provides the greatest works that an amateur
ever could sing: the passions of Bach, the requiems of Mozart, Fauré, Verdi – all music of death, true, but still
marvellous music that helps keeping you alive! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Being a
high tenor, I enjoy the honour of carrying the melody in a male choir, like
the high soprano does in a mixed choir, at least in the music of the
classical and romantic kind. The wood
always gives a hood, and something alike could be said about singing.
Songs are there for you when you need them. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
But I can’t sing, you may say. Doesn’t
matter, sing all the same. “He can’t sing”, people often say about a singer
they dislike. Still, Eilert Pilarm
has lots of fans. Sing without pitch, if you like.
Long before the rap came, there was
the talking blues. Take off your headphones and make yourself sound, through
lips, tongue, teeth, throat, lungs, muscles, feelings, thoughts … |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I dreamed
I was at a party, with musical entertainment. A tenor sang Beethoven’s famous
song Adelaide with words by
Friedrich von Matthisson who is not famous any more. He sang well, but he improvised and augmented
within the song, and when he came to the high notes at … im Gefilde der Sterne … he got throat
disturbance. Then at once I was not at the party, but in bed with a beautiful
girl, and while we made tender love I explained the text to her: - in des sinkenden
Tages Goldgewölke –
Oh, the sea, she said. – Yes, the day sinking in the sea with golden clouds. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Of course
this got to be a sexual dream. The sex fills out the personality, like the
song does while you are singing. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
But sex is
not the whole personality, maybe not even the most important part. I am a
man, but I don’t think all the time about what is
virile or what my “man’s role” may be, or something of that kind. The law
still orders us to be registrated as “male” or
“female”, but some day this will be obsolete. Perhaps we will get registered
by our DNA, and then it is up to ourselves to determine our sex, if any at
all. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Society
however is not merely the law. The world of human beings around me carries
much more than that. There is, you may say, a society of opinion that seems
to consist of a lot of expectations on me, whether open, or just felt, or
visible to all via the impact of mass media. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Preacher: |
|||
|
Mass
indeed. The weight of it. Today when we may feel free to do and say many
things that we could not before, the heaviest forces that stop us are the
gold of the advertisement buyers and the terrifying headers in the tabloids.
The government is a coordinator, the church is a place where you come as you
are, and the sword is not sharp any more. Today the
commercial loudspeaker stands as the guardian of hypocrisy. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dreamer: |
|||
|
In a free society you are who you say you are, someone says in the film Mumford. Thanks a lot for those words,
Lawrence Kasdan, I hope some day
to be able to shake hands with you. |
|||
|
But if it
is really significant to a free society, that you
are who you say you are, does it make any difference whether you act a role
or are yourself? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Preacher: |
|||
|
Maybe
not. Go ahead, act your role, since nobody sees your real self anyway. Will
there still remain anything such as we used to call
“truth”? |
|||
|
Yes, I
think some roles will never be acted, because they are TOO horrifying:
anorectic, serial killer, chairman of the employment agency. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dreamer: |
|||
|
Can I
play god? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Preacher: |
|||
|
Yes you
can, if your name is Carl Michael Bellman. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Come forth, thou God of Night, to ease the
flames of Sun . . . |
|||
|
|
|||
|
If the
phrase “divine beauty” ever has a meaning, it has here. |
|||
|
[ We
are talking about a Swedish poem from the 18th century, where the simple
human process of falling asleep is described in fifteen soft-spoken,
nature-loving stanzas as a revelation of Apollo. ] |
|||
|
[Again I fail. This poem
has some elements so typically Swedish that they would be pointless when
translated, and still it takes part in a movement that is well known in other
languages too: the transition from classicism to romantic. I think it would
be rewarding to pay a visit to some English-speaking poet of a similar
spirit, like Bellman’s contemporary Robert Burns. But I do not know Burns
that well . . . yet. ] |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Myself, I
fall asleep rather easily, but then I awake to soon, sometimes after only an
hour or so. Recently I even felt like I heard myself snoring in the very
moment when I woke up. That was horrifying! Most often I fall asleep again
soon, but then the same happens still again. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Probably
I should go to a doctor to get some treatment. But one thing I did not tell you:
I always sleep well after partying. Calls for some deep consideration, eh? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I dreamed
that a fairly big reptile bit my hand, and then I
woke up with a terrible headache. What’s happening,
I thought, I never have headache when awake, how can I get it in sleep? A
painkiller would have helped, but as you understand I do not keep such stuff
at home. I also wonder if it would have soothed the shock that I experienced.
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
Partying in
my sense is not heavy boozing, but an exquisite dinner with beer and vodka at
start, then wine with the main course, and maybe some drink later. What makes
me sleep well afterwards – is it the alcohol or the high-fat, low-fibre
gourmet food? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Bellman
prays Apollo to cure insomnia: |
|||
|
- come ease the pain and torment and fervour of my blood. |
|||
|
This I think
is a good description of one who is sleepless from excessive partying. Yet
when I go to party it is indeed in commemoration of Bellman, in the club Par Bricole. I would not think of going out to a luxury
restaurant just like that. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Cow peas
– small brown beans with narrow white eyes, soaked in water since the day
before, then simmered for 20-25 minutes, seasoned with some oil, soy, fond
and hot spices. That is something I can eat when I am by myself, as I am most
often. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I could
easily become a vegetarian, but I also consider which animals are the best
survivors: apparently those that eat various things, rats
and crows for example. Animals devour each other eagerly. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I cherish
a steak in the oven, or smoked salmon. In my childhood, when we bought salmon
from a local dealer in Mörrum, near the river Mörrumsån where some of the salmon was caught, salmon was
luxury food that we treated diligently, and cod was common. Today it is the
other way round, when we have farmed salmon and a
debate about the survival of cod. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Anyway I am sure that world health would
improve if we could grow less of plants that the animals have to eat so we
can eat them, and more of plants that we eat ourselves. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Preacher: |
|||
|
Simple
food, something I can see what it is while I am eating. Understandable food.
That is what I want. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dreamer: |
|||
|
But if I
could leave all constraints and only go for the most delicious food and the
most exquisite wines, then I believe it would still not be enough . . . |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Simple to
me is not always lean. I must have my malt. Cheaper kinds of whisky taste
like straw! We grow barley in Sweden too, and we have much water and peat,
yet we did not invent this heavenly potion. The Scots did. Walter Scott – a
Scotsman, certainly – has a funny passage in Rob Roy: |
|||
|
|
|||
|
A mighty pewter measure, containing about an
English quart of usquebaugh, a liquor nearly as strong as brandy, which the Highlanders
distil from malt, and drink undiluted in excessive quantities, was placed
before these worthies. A broken glass, with a wooden foot, served as a
drinking cup to the whole party, and circulated with a rapidity, which,
considering the potency of the liquor, seemed absolutely
marvellous. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
This of
course is meant to be told by an Englishman on a dangerous business trip in
Scotland around 1715, but I can imagine Sir Walter with a big smile while
writing it. What the English may have understood with “brandy” is not clear
to me, maybe something made from potatoes like our Swedish “brännvin”? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Brandy is
distilled from wine, as I have learnt. All the same, malt whisky is the best! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I pour a
little whisky and a suitable measure of water into a common drinking glass,
swivel it lightly and hold it under my nose feeling the scent more and more.
Then I let a small drop of it reach my tongue. This is really a moment of
comfort. The comfort would be even greater if you were here, having a whisky
with me. You who? I don’t know. The one I wanted to
meet, but who never came. The Islay potion makes me think of the sea. Or
tears. Salt anyway. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
O my Luve's like a red, red rose, Till a’the seas gang
dry, my dear, |
|||
|
|
|||
|
This wonderful song by Robert Burns is to me a
sailor’s song, something to sing to keep the pace while working on deck. And
to keep a good mood of course. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
In my dreams
the good mood keeps up by itself in some miraculous way. Sometimes I have
totally amazing sex dreams, then I wake up and tell myself: “this did not happen and it never will”. That guy Endymion, I think I am
beginning to understand him fairly well. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
There is
another way of being Endymion: refusing to wake up. To lead your dreams out
of the dark cave into the daylight of consciousness. What is true, good and beautiful is not always real, but we can strive
to make it real, and let the nightmares remain in the night. That is the real
sense of Platonic ideals. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
So I
thought, just when I wanted to go to bed, feeling drowsy after some glasses of
champagne. How many worlds there are that you may pass through, even
backwards! I sing with Bernhard Elis Malmström [Swedish romantic poet] in a song which we often sing at
Par Bricole meetings: Foam of wine, gleaming eyes, thought leaps bold and free … |
|||
|
|
|||
|
If I were
a history teacher, it would be tempting to try, as a pedagogical trick, to
use a reverse chronology, instead of starting from stone age or classical
antiquity. I would ask the students to think of what ideas govern the large
and small worlds of today, and how the generation of their parents adopted
and worked on those ideas when they
were at school. And so on, travelling back through the eras. Among film
makers and novelists such views are already in use for dramatical purposes,
but I think they also could be useful for the development of knowledge. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Think of
the history book as a blog: what happened latest comes first! But I am neither
a historian nor a teacher. In a school situation I think I would find it hard
to play the double part of being an authority and yet promote a creative
dialogue. The only thing that could make me want to be a teacher is the envy
I feel of those who are in company of young people daily. Which can be great
fun, as I learnt because I spent much time with my three kids and their nice
friends. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
With
history I live, but not in it. Once I began a postgraduate education, but
soon I decided that I am too sentimental to devote myself to footnotes and
references. I think it appears from this whole writing of mine that I rather
use history than serve under it. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The
history of myself is equally confused, or worse. I would never write an ordinary
autobiography starting from the beginning. Nor would I write one of the kind many celebrities do, focusing on what I have
achieved, because I have not achieved anything. It may look as if I lead a
passive life. I work office time and see my kids when I am free, but my kids
are of age and do not need much from me. Is my text just one lengthy defence
of my way of life? I feel no need to defend myself, really. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
If anyone
should ask me about my message, claiming I should have one, maybe I would
reply: Obey no rules! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
What? Me
anarchist? Not really. But I respect those who are. To be anarchist is a
choice you can make and be prepared to meet the consequences. Or you can obey
all rules and believe you are OK – but still you may get into disaster, and
when you do you cannot trust that those who made the rules will be there for
you. Rules are collective, but the responsibility very often hits the
individual. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Far
beyond the limits of law you may be accused of something you have not done,
and then you are more helpless than ever. Those who don’t
only observe you but think they understand what you are doing, they will not
hear your defence, if you have any at all. When this happened to me, I could
only yield. I would never hit back, but I wish I had the psychological or
diplomatic skills to find out what they really wanted to say, those who hit
me. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Tenderness
and confidence. That which everybody wants but nobody dares to offer. It
could be simple, but the tenderness can be felt like repressive tolerance,
and the confidence like “go ahead, I don’t care”. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Must I accept
the role of a psychologist towards the person I think is close to me? To
study her instead of just believing what she says?
To study something is to look at it from a distance. I don’t
know if it would have helped. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
December
2010. Is it winter depression? A feeling of insufficiency in many ways. Still
I like what we are doing right now, celebrating Advent, St. Lucia, Christmas.
Were it not for the santas and poinsettias, maybe I
would feel still worse. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Within me
I have a special chamber where I observe traditions simply because they ARE
traditions, no other reason really. It is a way of staying in touch with the
past without having to perform any awkward duties. The St. Lucia Day,
December 13, has been a feast in Sweden since the Middle Ages, so we keep it
up, why shouldn’t we? – but the ways of celebrating it of course have changed
with time. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
What has
Montaigne to say about feeling low? In the heavy volume of Essais, I
quickly find De la Tristesse. “Nope,
I am not that kind” he opens, and then after giving some examples of how
depression causes wrong actions, he says the same again for a conclusion. Is
Montaigne fooling us? I have to think that over
before I look for some more. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Could it
be that even Montaigne is hosting a Preacher and a Dreamer who, if not
compete, so at least have some little argument at times? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
So, if I have to be as hearty as Montaigne, I tell myself that the
best day in my life is yet to come. The wenig I have seen already, but
what really is [das beste
Glück] I do not know. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Those
small things: the stillest, the
lightest, the rustle of a lizard, that the fictional character
Zarathustra is mumbling about before falling asleep, what might that be? A
remedy for sadness they say is to value the little you have and the little
you actually can achieve. Should I write that down,
like I made a food purchase list when I thought about Krilon’s
keys? Zarathustra seems to know, but maybe he really does not. His words
could be an incantation. He tries to tell himself it MUST be like that. The
best moment might as well be the one that never came, but
takes place only in imagination. The occasion when I could have acted
otherwise than I actually did. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Sorry,
now I am into depression again, I did not mean to! There will not be any list
though, not now. I only say: coffee. The coffee I prepare myself is the best.
One cup of strong coffee from my French press, and just one ginger thin with it – this is one of the small things that make
my day when nothing else does. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
March 2011
beginning. Soon the footways will be cleared of ice enough for me to take my
long walks again. It is ten years since I wrote down the sentence “I am a
super beginner”. Nothing has happened. Or lots of things have happened, but
they do not make much of a difference. I am out of work again. Those small
things of joy that are within my reach are more important than ever. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Relax.
Feel the taste. Listen to the howling winds of spring. I sleep better
nowadays. My dreams are mostly of frustration, but it is not difficult to go
back to sleep. This I believe is what keeps me alive for long: my ability to
step aside. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Spring
came late this year, and when it came I got a job.
Funny coincidence! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Once
more, like seven years ago, I have spent the whole summer in the office, so
my workmates could have their holiday. Autumn is coming, and it has been
confirmed that I am hired for another six months. When spring comes again, I
do not know what will happen. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The small
things of joy that are near me will always be important. I cut a few King
Edward potatoes into small cubes, boil them for 5 minutes, dispose of the
water and add some oil, a generous spread of coarse ground black pepper, and
just a little tomato ketchup. After stirring a little I also add an egg yolk.
Now I have my own instant potato salad. With a glass of beer and a small
vodka with a piece of lime zest in it. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Should it
happen that Charles Dickens came to visit me, I would treat him with this
dish, also including roasted finely cut beef and small lightly boiled
carrots. Then maybe I would get a few lines as one of the guys in the
accounting firm where Pip is ordered to work by his secret benefactor. If
Dickens had been born in 1912 instead of 1812, he would have become a film
maker rather than a novelist. Great
Expectations is almost like three complete film scripts with dialogue and
settings described in the smallest details. |
|||
|
||||
|
If I had
been a real person close to Dickens, I would have knocked on his door in the
morning after he had completed David
Copperfield, shouting: “Hey Charlie, get up to work!” Really, why did
that novel have to end right there? Why couldn’t we have had David
Copperfield 2, 3, 4 and on? What is to expect if a story starts like this: To begin with the beginning of my life
… ? |
|||
|
||||
|
“Where should I begin
then?” you might ask. “Anywhere” a contemporary novelist or film maker would
say. I say: “Begin from right now and go backwards.” Think of what you just
did, because it is the easiest to remember, and what caused you to do that,
and what had happened before. Last night I dreamed that police came to
question me about some event I was said to have witnessed more than 25 years
before, with a gorilla involved. They even showed me a gorilla to make their
point perfectly clear. However the interrogation
hardly started, I just remember the officer asking why I had long fingernails
on my right hand, and I was about to mention my banjo playing when I woke up.
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
Just to
contradict my own advice, I take a long leap back in time. It is nearly fifty
years since I took up playing the banjo. The American folk song revival spread over the world. In Sweden there were the
Hootenanny Singers among many
others who enjoyed it, and Björn Ulvaeus was their banjoist [ the later ABBA
member, sure! ]. I liked him, and the sound of the
banjo, so I chose that instrument before the more popular guitar. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Since
then I sometimes played a lot, and sometimes very little.
Nowadays very little alas, because I am much into
choir singing, but still I find the chords rather easily! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The old
well-known chords OK, but new chords, alas, I have trouble with them. I
bought a ukulele, to have an instrument for accompanying myself which was not
so heavy to carry as the banjo. A banjo is heavy because it is built to stand
the pressure of the strings as well as of the drumhead. I found it
surprisingly hard to learn the chords of the ukulele well enough to be able
to sing with it. Ukulele is meant to be easy to play, and it may be for
others, but not for me. The way you tune it is completely different from
banjo or mandolin or guitar, all of which I know since long. I need more
time! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I have
seen to that now. The need of time. I got more and more tired by the job. A
good job as it was, but intense. Then the daily commuting. I lost power,
could not spend my free time with entertaining and useful doings. I chose to
retire from work, instead of toiling on to heap a few more pennies. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dreamer: |
|||
|
I sleep
until I wake up, mostly until dawn that is, but I have such strange dreams! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Preacher: |
|||
|
Having
daily routines is good for your health, but how to fix routines for dreaming
I don’t know. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dreamer: |
|||
|
Often I
remember the dream quite well. Sometimes I even think I learnt something from
a dream, but to maintain that kind of knowledge is more difficult. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Preacher: |
|||
|
Customized
Traumdeutung, that sounds like an interesting work,
let’s keep it up! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
A cat
with claws ten centimetres long. I do not think I want to know what that
might mean. I often have dreams of stress, like entering my hotel room to
pack and check out, and then they are already there to clean it. When awake,
I always allow myself plenty of time if I am to travel or do something else
that is not daily routine. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The
strange feeling of remembering your dream when you wake up, and then when you
think of it some hour later, it is gone! In daytime I often forget what I did
the day before. Maybe I should write more. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
That
novel? Well, I have time, but still - - - , maybe
rather a Kammerspiel wherein the Dreamer (D) and
the Preacher (P) tell tales to each other? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dreamer: |
|||
|
Oh what
a good idea! But where shall I begin? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Preacher: |
|||
|
From the
beginning. *takes a sip of his pint* |
|||
|
|
|||
|
D: Why not the reverse, tell something that just
happened and try to trace how it came up, it may be as thrilling as a crime
story … |
|||
|
|
|||
|
P: Hold on, where did I hear that one before? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
To begin
from the beginning, by my age to look back for earliest memories and what
happened next, I never wanted. Why should I bother that much? Memories come
forth when they want to, so I could consider them at those moments, couldn´t
I? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Lawrence
Durrell has a proposition which is rather like how I am thinking. If it is
any good I cannot tell yet, as I only have read half
of the first book of the Alexandria Quartet. Here is what he says in Justine, p 115 in the Faber&Faber edition: |
|||
|
|
|||
|
(What I most need to do is to record
experiences, not in the order in which they took place – for that is history
– but in the order in which they first became significant for me.) |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Durrell
says it somewhat aside while trying to solve a problem. I am not into such
ventures – yet. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
But I
have a recent mysterious example: in my dream I heard a choir singing Heidenröslein, not by Schubert, but by Heinrich Werner.
That piece I heard some time in my childhood and have never since thought of
it, cannot remember. My mind was uncommonly peaceful when I awoke. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Beautiful
music is meant to make you feel beautiful when you listen, or sing, hum,
whistle, whatever. A part of the aesthetical religion! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
And now,
only a week later, I dreamed music again! I hope it is a trend. Outside,
through an open window, I heard Mozart’s Bei
Männern welche Liebe fühlen and that was simply great. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
It is not
a trend I’m afraid. I have had no more dreams of
music. Dreams of frustration have come back.
The creepiest thing is, that often when I wake up slowly, phrases are
leaping through my mind as if I am telling someone of something that has
happened. Mostly weird stories. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Heinrich
Werner’s Heidenröslein
tells to me something of the pain behind Goethe’s
poem. In comparison Schubert’s version is more like a charming little theatre
piece. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
What
music would I like to hear in a dream? Maybe something else from my
childhood, like the overture of Rossini’s Barbiere di Siviglia, or a Bagatelle for piano by Beethoven. It has happened a few times
through the years that I have dreamed completely new music, or at least
melodies that I could not identify. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Alas,
sometimes it happened that I got into the wrong direction, so to speak: I fell asleep during a concert. It must have been
only for a few minutes, since I could not recall any
dreams from those occasions. Once I heard an organ piece which I knew well,
but it did not sound quite as it should, so I thought I had slept. Later I
had a chance to talk to the organist. He revealed that he had missed the
turning of one leaf, so he improvised a passage to get into track again.
Another time on a hot summer evening I was in a little wooden church,
listening to some exquisite chamber music. Some in the audience fell asleep,
but not me. I had had some colas before. Take that hint from me! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Music in
sleep. Now I have had a dream about Beethoven’s Adelaide -
once more! This time I was to sing it myself before a small audience
in what seemed to be a museum of music. There were different keyboard
instruments, and the pianist was choosing which of them he wanted to play.
Yes, it was a man allright. He went to a
harpsichord and started examining it, then I woke up, so there never was any
singing. Beethoven lieder with the harpsichord? Yes, you could try, even
though it would be against the composer’s own ideas of what a clavier could be - or just because of that! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Here I
was about to say: true, dream is
better than life, because in real life I would not be offered to sing a solo
in such an exquisite company. But then suddenly the memory came that
something like this really happened long ago! I was at a private party, there
was a grand piano (only one, LOL) and there were qualified musicians among
the guests. So by chance I stood there, singing Adelaide with a skilled pianist, and
he corrected me when I got a passage wrong. This memory travelled by the
subway of my mind for decades, and now it has surfaced! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Even longer ago, I bought a record
with Hermann Prey, and heard Jussi Björling on
radio. Which came first, I cannot remember, but thus I found this wonderful
song. Friedrich von Matthisson got fame during his
lifetime, but nowadays he is not considered a great poet. Anyway, through the
years I have felt close to that lonely friend, einsam wandelt dein
Freund … |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Good or bad
poet, I am not sure. Need to read more before I determine. Does Matthisson qualify in the group of walking thinkers? At
least when his view travels from the calm river to the snowy mountains until
the sun goes down among gleaming clouds, and stars appear, it is grand I think. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
That
statement of Lawrence Durrell, it is really good! It
took me a long time to read the whole quartet, not that it should be hard to
read, but because it has a meditative mood which all along evokes new
thoughts in the reader’s mind. Quite the contrary to Charles Dickens whose
stories are that visual and eloquent that you are almost compelled to read
them fast. Also to read once more, at least Our Mutual Friend, somehow a
Dostoevsky with a happy end. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dreamer: |
There is
so little music in Dickens. That feels empty! |
||
|
Preacher: |
Indeed! This
can be one reason to re-read. Some street musician may appear in a city view,
or some lady singing to the piano at a party, but is music ever of any
importance? |
||
|
Dreamer: |
This is a
mystery, like Edwin Drood.
The murder suspect is a music master, but even there
music seems to have only a social role in the plot. |
||
|
Preacher: |
So let
us meditate on the Alexandria Quartet.
A story about the life of a limited circle of people who all know each other
more or less, during a few years when they all live in the same city. Even
though the narrator is an “I”, all of them on occasions step forward, taking
the lead. There are even lots of quotations from an earlier novel which was
never really written, because its author himself is a fictional character! |
||
|
Dreamer: |
After
the last page of the last volume, I had a similar feeling as I have got from
other great reading experiences, be it Dombey
and Son or The Da Vinci Code:
Nothing is exactly what it looks like. |
||
|
Preacher: |
There is
always the possibility of another aspect that you cannot think of right now,
but later may appear as the solution you missed. |
||
|
|
|||
|
The
solution. The way out. Or the away route from what never happened. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
In the summer of 1972 I wrote: I have read the poet of the light and got sunburnt. When the paper
almost blinds you nothing is obscure any more.
It was Hölderlin that time. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Now,
summer 2017, I read Charles Dickens, the narrator of Granduncle’s often
sombre tales, sometimes with outburst of feelings, sometimes in a more
detached mode. And the city of London itself is a main character. The
travelling too. Dickens moves, I said that before. The tragic turning point
in Bleak House is connected to a
journey. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
My own
winding trip through Dickens´s 14 novels just ended with Barnaby Rudge. I did not save it for last, but it was the last
one I got hold of. In 2010, I blogged about mentionings
of liquor in The Pickwick Papers
(many, for sure) and then the other novels followed without any plan, and
sometimes slowly. During seven years I read other
things too of course. Sometimes many days could pass without me reading any
book. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Now,
summer 2017, I read much and enjoy sitting in the sun, like in 1972. I never
liked sunbathing in itself, but with a book it feels
good! From a biography by Peter Ackroyd I learn that Dickens, though he
worked so much, was a fan of long walks. I cannot say “I knew it!” because I
did not, but it certainly helps my understanding of him. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The biography
also tells that Dickens during those long walks set up his speeches, never
writing them down but keeping them in his mind until holding them. It always
worked. He is really my guy! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I keep walking
with other books. Autumn is here, so I go to a coffee shop or pub to sit down
and read for a while. This is a new habit of mine, and to my surprise I do
not find it hard to concentrate on reading in such places. Sometimes it
happens that someone, staff or customer, asks what I
am reading, that is nice too. A book title comes into my mind: Böcker och vandringar (Books and walks) by Vilhelm
Ekelund. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
It is hard
for me to get over that I did not realise that Dickens was a wanderer,
although there is so much wandering in his stories. However, in the novels
this mostly happens in awkward situations, like when Little Nell takes her
gaming grandfather away to escape his creditors. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
When I
was poor I could get out into the woods for a whole
day with food and drink in my backpack, because I could afford that much.
Today when I am better off I mostly take city walks which lead me to a pub or
coffee shop. Wandering because I like it, ever since I was a kid. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dickens
and Nietzsche. They walked daily and wrote a lot. I walk often and write a few
words occasionally. On the other hand, I am in good health at 67 years. I
regard myself as their follower, but it seems to be wholesome not to work
that hard. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dickens
and Bellman. They tried on theatre with no big success. Instead they created
their own drama. When I walk the city, preferably at night, I often find
myself in streets that Bellman walked. Or I imagine the London of Dickens,
like it was in 1818. The comic or scary characters in the novels like in the
epistles somehow belong to the same family. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dickens,
Bellman, and Nietzsche. What a club! But Nietzsche was not the social type. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Nietzsche
HAS a seat in the club, after all. His thoughts go astray through his
scriptures like confused characters in a drama. There is an attractive unpredictableness in his works, which to me is the main
reason to read them. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Spring is
near. I wake up earlier. Not exactly at sunrise, but the light affects me.
Eos or Aurora, goddess of red sky at morning. Funny that there is no goddess
of afterglow. The woods now again compete with the city about my walks.
During winter I often indulged in a nap after lunch. This will not be needed
if I get out walking. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I have
been to London once only, 15 years old. I had read The Pickwick Papers in Swedish, so naturally I went to the Dickens
Museum. Member of the fan club already then. Now I want to go to London
again, to see if I get a Dickens feeling there, like I get a Bellman feeling
in Stockholm. And into the Alps to get a Nietzsche feeling. In den Alpen bin ich unbesiegbar.
“In the Alps I am invincible”. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The Alps
in summertime, of course. I am not an ice and snow man. Nor was Nietzsche. He
dwelt in lowland during winter. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Summer 2018
is here. The other day I climbed a steep path up a rock about 40 meters high
above the sea inlet near my home. From the summit I looked down thinking: Did
I really get up that way? I did not need to go back by the same route, but
the mere thought of it scared me. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Why then
did I go up? Curiosity. I have always been curious. Like a child. I had seen
ordinary people getting up there with sport bags and other such things, so I
wanted to try. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Many years
ago I walked along Lake Mälaren
from Vinterviken to Vårberg.
The path ended at a bathing shore. Beyond there was nothing but the lake and
a steep rock. Only a trail up the rock, no other passage. Even that time I
ventured a climb, rather than going back to find an easier route. That was a
hard climb! At the top some 70 meters higher I was
rewarded by the lovely view of the lake with its shores and islands. The
place name is Korpberget, “Raven Hill”. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Recently
I also found a nice rock for sunset. Near where I live and easy to climb. The
name of that place I will not tell you. I can give you the name of the
goddess of afterglow, now that I have found out. A
group of goddesses actually: the Hesperides. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Near the end
of summer I got up high in another way, almost in
another dimension. Empire State Building. Take the elevator up 300 meters,
fast and easy. Look down at city and country, river
and sea. There is something special about New York. Even those districts without
very high buildings have much to offer. When I get
back there maybe I will walk along the Broadway from Battery Park in the
south, as far as I can manage. It is not so broad but very
long. Diagonally through the normal rectangular street plan. Diagon Alley, if you know Harry Potter. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I walk
on. One gets good thoughts when out walking. I will keep walking till I fall.
Walking is my way of thinking. I like big cities and heavy books. The
beginning chapters of Moby Dick are
promising. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Why do I
like a novel about whaling, when I am no seaman?
Herman Melville has a wide span of thought. The start of the story, when
Ishmael is preparing to get hired and sail out, is very entertaining. Then
there is a substantial treatise on all whale species known, and a script of a
musical comedy for the crew on board. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
So now I
have got down from the heights and travel horizontally over the wide, wide
sea with Melville. The book is divided in many short chapters, so it works
well to read it slowly. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
It ends in
a total catastrophe. The big white whale crushes the big ship and all the
crew drowns. All but one man, Ishmael of course. Someone must live to tell
the story. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The
frightful whale keeps swimming across the oceans. No one knows where it will appear
next time. Very much like the way I think. My brain is a romantic who wanders
through worlds far away and wide apart, as if they were neighbouring fields. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
When
those worlds clash unusual things happen. Strange? Yes, because they are always
new to me. Scary? No, I think I have been lucky. Nightmares do not count
because they seldom come and always end. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
That only
occasion when I was threatened at work I stood totally still, said nothing,
and looked the guy sharply in the eyes without blinking. Then he got
surprised and backed off. But that was long ago. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I too can
be stupefied like that. Unnecessary to describe such an occasion. Those who
have a quick tongue use it all the time against us who have not. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
What
would the use be of stopping such a person? None, I think. Except in a public
debate, but I never take part of those. In a private circle it would cause
destructive feelings. Unnecessary. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
I can not know what makes this woman or man strive to get
dominance in a company of friendly people. Of course
I do not speak about work, since I am retired. Imagine rather a bunch of
individuals who have known each other for some time, are interested in the
same issues, maybe are members of the same society with the purpose to
getting something done together. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Now I
have put some questions and answered “do not know” to all. Like in an opinion
poll where all other alternatives are so silly phrased that I avoid them. |
|||
|
One
opportunity where I might try hard to state my point would be if I was asked
to hold a speech, to people who actually were
listening. Then hell! But to talk friendly is indeed much more fun. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Talk
friendly. I dreamed I was to hold a speech at a funeral in a small village
somewhere in Sweden. I had said yes to the request at once, but then I got
worried about how to go there, and home again, in a suitable way. When I
really had started the trip, I almost immediately woke up, totally confused.
Why did I have a dream of frustration, I who have a comfortable life? |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The
travel could be the trouble. I always liked travelling, and always disliked
to to plan it. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Or could
the cause be that I now am reading Der Mann ohne
Eigenschaften, The Man Without Qualities, for the
second time? Some days before the dream I was on the part where Ulrich goes
to the town where he was born and raised, to take part in his father’s
funeral. While he is there some weird things happen. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
Preacher: |
|||
|
After all these years when you have praised
that novel! |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Dreamer: |
|||
|
I must admit that today I no more have
quite the feeling for it that I thought I had. |
|||
|
||||
|
I still feel
near the comical and social goings, but the philosophical phantasies in
between are more difficult now than the first time, in the eighties. In those
days I had grasped German in many ways, through romantic poetry, the whole
Nietzsche, and theology around the early 19th century. Later I
seldom have visited those fields. Lots of English instead: Dickens, Robert
Burns, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters. And Harry Potter. There are
connections. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The seven
books about Harry Potter growing up are written in a language and narrative
style which grows up with him. I know of no other series of novels that is
built that way. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Harry
Potter’s maturing story resembles that of David Copperfield. The janitor’s
demonic cat Mrs Norris has its name from a mean
woman in a Jane Austen novel. The old castle Hogwarts reminds me of The
Castle of Otranto. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Who would
I be at Hogwarts? Professor McGonagall, no doubt. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
September
2020. In Sweden we have a pandemic flu since six
months. The worst one since the Spanish flu around 1920. The status in my
region has improved during summer, but no one dares to reckon how autumn and
winter will be. I still must keep away from dangers of catching the
infection. I take walks in the neighbourhood almost
every day. Occasionally I make short trips by public transport when it is not
crowded, and take a beer in some nice pub when only
few other visitors are there. That way the summer has been pleasant. |
|||
|
|
|||
|
But
later, how will it feel? Walking in rain, darkness and cold? The first I can
think of is reading more books. I will re-read the seven books about Harry Potter,
yes I will. That will be the third time! |
|||
|
|
|||
Sven Wifstrand
e-mail: svensays
at gmail.com