World’s best novel? Sorry, I haven’t got the time
to write it
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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 fifty-eight 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? |
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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? |
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"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? |
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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 a
fifty-year-old 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. |
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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! |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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I mentioned some literary
idols before. Who do you think wrote this: |
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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. |
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[Translated by Charles Cotton, 1877. The text
was put into the web by |
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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? |
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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 unvoluntary
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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 |
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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. |
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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 aestethic "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. |
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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. |
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I get that strength from the
stillness of nature. A wood with rocks and tiny lakes early on a summer
morning, like here in |
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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. |
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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. |
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I love autumn. To sit by
the sea, just looking, reading some meditational
piece by Vilhelm Ekelund: |
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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 … |
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Winter. No comments. |
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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 |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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! |
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(and here the scholiast
prudently has added: "because you cannot trust that others will") |
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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! |
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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. |
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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! |
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Can I walk with my
eyes wide open |
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through the world full of cross-eyed
withhold? |
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Yes I can, but I know
there will be times |
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when it feels easier to go
blindfolded. |
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Many decisive answers are
given |
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by those who did not
hear what was asked |
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and the deepest wounds
can never be seen |
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least by the knives. |
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The weak make life
hard |
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to get hard themselves. |
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The sombre sneaking thoughts |
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cover your face with
slimy hands |
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but disdain will hurt
no one |
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no one but the disdainful. |
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Our will is a blunt
weapon. |
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In dreams all happens
by itself |
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therefore dreams are better than life. |
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Life slips away from
our hands |
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but dreams were never there. |
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Dreams were never there! |
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In the night, near to
the sea |
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the counsel of strange
powers is heard |
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on all that our
distorted will and infected thought |
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the stinking drains of
a starving mind |
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has struggled to ruin during day. |
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Yet in the morning we
know nothing more |
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of the strength that
somewhere beyond is still there: |
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the darkness, the eye, the dreams. |
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You there who choose
an odd road |
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not wanting to meet
me: |
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it is true that I walk
straight, with a steady eye |
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but everything else in
me is truly unmartial |
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- hope to see you some
time! |
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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. |
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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 can not 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 jewelry 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! |
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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. |
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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 romantical
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. |
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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 |
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One of the many:
Friedrich Nietzsche. He got sick leave from his professorate
in |
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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? |
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I really ought to be sure
of this, having been in this sport for so long. Sincerely, I can not 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? |
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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!
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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’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! |
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A little more than a year
after the heart attack I visited the town where I was born, 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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 |
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He should have remained
in |
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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. |
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Since that day in |
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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! |
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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. |
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"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. |
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"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. |
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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! |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Rogozjin then, what label would we put on
him, if he appeared among us? Is there a male equivalent of "bitch"?
Or is an egocentrical 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.
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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 that most other people in the novel. By today’s standards he is a ninny. |
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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 compell 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. |
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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. |
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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 can not 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. |
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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! |
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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? |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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". |
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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: |
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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. |
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"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." |
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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 lenghty
documentation and reasoning, can be seen as somewhat parodious,
but this sentence alone is more worth than several whole books! |
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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 a such
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. |
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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. |
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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: |
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If the spirit
sanctifies, every true book is a Bible. |
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The only real temple
in the world is the human body. - - When you touch it, you touch heaven. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Sophie and Friedrich –
two who died young in a time when infectional
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? |
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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. |
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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? |
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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? |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 contemptive 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? |
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I can only hope to be able to hear my own inner whisperings, it seems. Let me seek comfort in song: |
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I spend a lifetime
waiting for the right time |
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Now that you’re near
the time is here at last! |
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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! |
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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! |
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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? |
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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 … |
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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.
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There are other roles
acted in common life, more openly, sex roles for instance. In |
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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. |
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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. |
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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! |
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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! |
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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: |
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Wenig macht die Art des besten Glücks. |
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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. |
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Never ask what will
happen, to know is dangerous |
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It may be written in
the stars but stars do not care for us |
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Try to think like
this: whatever happens I will face |
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This winter may be our
last |
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Or there are more
winters to come |
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But please, close that
gate |
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And pour a glass of
wine |
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While we are here
talking time goes by |
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Try not to answer
today the questions of tomorrow |
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But take care of this
day |
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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. |
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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 can not remain in the uppermost part of your consciousness. I think I have been Horace since then! |
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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. |
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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. |
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The sea, the woods,
the air, clouds, trees – all of them tell you: yes! |
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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. |
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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.
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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In 1978, I wrote in Lundagård, the magazine of the students’ union in |
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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. |
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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 any more? |
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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. |
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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? |
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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. |
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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. |
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But once on a beautiful
day of early spring in |
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Something at once took
hold inside me |
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shook me with heavy
force and to my right a smile |
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went by while I in
confusion only could |
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lift my hat |
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How could this touch
me so |
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hard that I nearly could not breathe? |
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Always there is
unknown tension in a |
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not awaited encounter. |
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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. |
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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 |
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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. |
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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! |
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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. |
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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. |
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Or else, I am the one who
is not there, but when that happened, I did not know until afterwards. |
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Say nothing of death |
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no, nevermore |
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It was cold when we
stood there |
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in the dim sunshine of
autumn |
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brown leaves on the
ground |
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even falling down into
the pit |
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dug for the urn |
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but I have to tell
you: |
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the stones can not
speak |
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the strength of our
mind fails us |
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if we stand numb
before the short grey words |
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the names tell nothing
of what really is there |
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and the figures mean
as much, I say |
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as figures do when you
talk about life |
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if men could welcome
each other that willingly |
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that tenderly and gratefully |
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like the earth
welcomes the ashes - |
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then death is no more there. |
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The first time I visited |
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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 |
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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? |
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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! |
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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 can
not 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. |
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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. |
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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! |
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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! |
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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 . . . |
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Im leuchtenden Sommermorgen |
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geh ich im Garten herum. |
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Es flüstern und sprechen die Blumen, |
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ich aber, ich wandle stumm. |
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Es flüstern und sprechen die Blumen |
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und schaun mitleidig mich an: |
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"Sei unserer Schwester
nicht böse, |
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du trauriger blasser Mann!" |
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. . . 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. |
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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. |
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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! |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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
vibs 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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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? |
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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? |
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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? |
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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? |
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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. |
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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. |
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Let all be bright
around us: |
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white clothing, wine
of the |
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the mirror shows us
darkness from within |
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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? |
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It is not true if you say
there IS feeling in music. I can not 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. |
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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. |
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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? |
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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. |
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I blow twice as many
horns |
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to make silence heard |
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humbly, majestically |
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he who lost the fight |
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has another win to
hope |
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on his own grounds |
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I no more believe |
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you must harden |
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or extinct |
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suddenly one raises a
hand |
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the blast comes |
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and the mountain is
gone |
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I also would like to
be Atlas |
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heave the world on my
shoulders |
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if I could dance with
it |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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? |
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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. |
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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? |
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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? |
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Preacher: |
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May I step forward? |
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Dreamer: |
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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! |
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Preacher: |
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Not at all, I would
rather say that I preach AGAINST Jesus. |
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Dreamer: |
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Oh dear, have you turned
into such a convinced atheist who wants to talk the faithful out of their
faith, that is not better. |
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Preacher: |
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No way, that task I leave to those who call themselves philosophers. Now hear: |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 everyday, 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! |
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Thank YOU. The Preacher
goes back to work, and the Dreamer keeps on dreaming! |
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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 |
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If I only could, like
Agnes von Krusenstjerna [ Swedish
novelist, first half of 20th century] , write ten lines about a street in |
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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 analyze all this from a feminist point of view, but very soon I stopped. Later, some time, perhaps. |
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Now again it is Easter.
And spring! I found the Hepatica, and snow, not exactly beside, but a bit
further away in a more shady place. After singing in the Easter day service
in |
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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 |
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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 … |
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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. |
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I often think of a work
of art that I saw at the Royal Academy of Arts in |
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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. |
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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. |
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the star up there |
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looking down on
someone else |
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if it falls dying |
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my wish also will |
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most things are forgotten |
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like when skiing in
soft snow |
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the wind takes the
tracks away |
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someone before me |
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may have written this |
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Tracks in snow, tracks in
sand. All things must pass. Not quite! The dinosaur in |
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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. |
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Die Vergangenheit ist mir lieber als die Gegenwart, aber ich glaube an eine bessere Zukunft. |
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The past is nearer to my heart
than the present, but I believe in a better future. |
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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. |
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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! |
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And the opposite is true
too: not to feel at home is inquietude. |
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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. |
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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? |
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Honestly I do not want
you to want either of it, or maybe there could be a little of both? |
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More I cannot say before
I have heard your answer. While waiting I go on living in eras and believing
in a better future. |
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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? |
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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. |
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[ The |
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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. |
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Preacher: |
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Dreamer: Oh yes. In his words to the
Galatians there is a premonition of a society where we help each other. |
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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. |
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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 |
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In |
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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 |
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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 Otello. The heart of Verdi’s music contradicts the horrid end of the plot. Life can be made better. |
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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. |
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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! |
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Many times when tired |
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I hear the music
talking to me - |
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what does it hide when I am alert? |
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To float in air |
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three seconds in Venice |
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between postcard and reality |
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outside the railway station |
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Soft moist lips |
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eyes closed - |
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of the overflow of the
mouth the heart beats |
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The impression of seeing |
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Dreamer: |
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But when you stepped out
of the railway station, imagine if la biondina
had been |
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Preacher: |
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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. |
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Dreamer: |
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We? |
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Preacher: |
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You and me. We shall
always be together. I am your voice, and you are my eyes and fingertips. |
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Dreamer: |
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But when we talk about
this, I see only darkness, and my fingers freeze! |
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Preacher: |
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I know where she is. She
is standing in the boat to the island of the dead. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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? |
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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! |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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! |
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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 more healthy than the refined
white sugar. |
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Mamma mia, now I am talking food again. It is hard to let go once you are at it. Bulimia of words? |
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apple |
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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 |
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Krilon travelled to occupied
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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 |
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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. |
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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 oxygene powers his
muscles and his brain. |
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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 |
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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? |
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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. |
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Summer has come. A summer
shadowed by papers and figures and accounts. |
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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? |
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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 mountainbike was not yet known of then,
at least not in |
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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. |
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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. |
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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". |
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Preacher: |
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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. |
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Dreamer: |
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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. |
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Preacher: |
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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. |
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Dreamer: |
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And when she comes, a
brighter light |
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* * * * * * * |
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Stagnelius surely was awake in the wood at night time, not sleeping like Endymion, because otherwise he could not have written
this! |
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[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!] |
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[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.] |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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: |
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Once he awakes, what a
horrid void |
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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? |
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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. |
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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? |
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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 can not 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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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[ 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: |
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where
the fuck did you hide the fucking hose … |
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and I can’t see how to fit
that into the same logic. Anybody help me out here? ] |
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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. |
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One such is the
headmaster in |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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No
need to be alone … |
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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. |
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And you are not by yourself
in a void chamber, but in company of one who feels just the same. |
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Sing along with John
Lennon: It’s real love, it’s real! |
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I dined in a nice street
restaurant in |
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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. |
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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. |
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Preacher: Long time
no see. Nice to be here again, merry Christmas! |
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Dreamer: Well, I am
sitting here with twinkling eyes. Are you Santa Claus? |
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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. |
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But if
you have gain from acting, ask yourself if there is a cost too. |
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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. |
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Dreamer: But if I am
dizzy and see many stars, how do I know which one to follow? |
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Preacher: Oh my,
some nerve was hit. I need to relax and wait for some stars to fade. |
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Dreamer: Then I
will sing for you a song of a star. |
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Yes, while yonder star is
there |
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Which thro' clouds above
thee |
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Shines so sadly fair. |
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Tho' too oft dim with tears like
him |
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Like him my truth will
shine |
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And love thee, dearest,
love thee, |
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Yes, till death I'm thine! |
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Leave thee, dearest,
leave thee? |
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No, that star is not more
true |
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When my vows deceive thee |
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He will wander too. |
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A cloud of night may veil
his light |
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And death shall darken
mine |
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But leave thee dearest,
leave thee? |
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No, till death I'm thine! |
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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. |
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A
beautiful poem by Thomas Moore, truly romantic. And then like now, |
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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! |
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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. |
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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 … |
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I dreamed
I was at a party, with musical entertainment. A tenor sang Beethoven’s famous
song |
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Of course
this got to be a sexual dream. The sex fills out the personality, like the
song does while you are singing. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Preacher: |
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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 advertisment 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. |
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Dreamer: |
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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. |
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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? |
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Preacher: |
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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”? |
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Yes, I
think some roles will never be acted, because they are TOO horrifying:
anorectic, serial killer, chairman of the employment agency. |
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Dreamer: |
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Can I
play god? |
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Preacher: |
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Yes you
can, if your name is Carl Michael Bellman. |
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Come forth, thou God of Night, to ease the
flames of Sun . . . |
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If the
phrase “divine beauty” ever has a meaning, it has here. |
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[ 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. ] |
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[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. ] |
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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. |
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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? |
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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. |
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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? |
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Bellman
prays Apollo to cure insomnia: |
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- come ease the pain and torment and fervour of my blood. |
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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 |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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e-mail: svensays@gmail.com