A subway encounter in 1990

I have a note in my diary from 1990 that I ran into one of the architects of the Kaknästorn in the Stockholm subway on 31 January. The note doesn’t indicate where we entered the train or who was on the train first. I can only see that we were both on our way to work in the Old Town, and that while we acknowledged one another, I was apparently the first to open a conversation by saying 'hello'. The note adds that the architect was unable to place me immediately, likewise that he seemed relieved when he was able to make a connection to my face, and pose a perfect “cocktail party” question:

“Have you seen the Börjeson girls lately?” The architect had re-membered that I was a friend of the daughters of one of his oldest childhood friends from Örebro, Börje Börjeson, whose oldest daughter, Tina, had bought the little red house next door to mine. Tina had grown up on a nearby broiler chicken farm, and the little red cabin was where her father had once lodged several illegal immigrants to work the farm. She later encouraged me - whom she had met through mutual friends a few years earlier – to purchase the adjacent property when it too was up for sale the next year. Though the miner's residence I bought was much larger, it didn't have the same emotional ties to Tina as the little red house, to where she and her sister had often gone to escape from farm chores and isolation, and where there were several young available foreign men. It didn’t occur to me then that suggesting that I purchase the old miner's residence might be a dubious exercise of the popular Swedish expression “territorial control”*, nor that it could well become the scene of a modern drama.

“Yes, as a matter of fact I have,” I answered the architect, adding “You know that Tina is married to my youngest brother.” I could see how the architect tensed, the way his face flushed as though I had suddenly offered him a piece of a totally different puzzle than the one he was working on.

“No, no she’s not,” he said impulsively, adding: “She married a rich American and moved to the United States.” I don’t think it was just his negation of my statement - and the obvious conviction with which he asserted that Tina had not married my brother - that was so absurd. There was something vulgar and impersonal about the way he pronounced the cliché “rich American” that caused me to react the way I did.

“No, no, she hasn’t, she’s married to my younger brother,” I said, instinctively defending myself from the source of his information as well as from his preferential right to interpret it, and hopefully protecting the integrity of my “poor little brother” at the same time. Who had told the architect about the marriage? Why did that messenger choose to identify the marriage with something like his Jaguar, a vehicle which he had chosen to hide in the woods because it spoiled the view of his own country house. What was it that the messenger had wanted, and had not wanted, the architect to see? Clearly embarrassed and flustered by the situation, the architect seemed relieved that the train was just approaching the Old Town.

“Yaha, well, I’m getting off here, goodbye for now.”

“Yes, well, I’m getting off here too,” I said, continuing to shuffle to the right of the architect as he stepped out of the subway car. I was curious and sensed that I had nothing to lose by pursuing the topic, despite whatever discomfort it may be causing. It seemed to be a perfect opportunity to consume our anxiety by disclosing the hypocrisy. We walked silently side by side until we were out of the station, when he motioned to the right.

“Well, I’m off here…”

“Yes, me too” I interrupted, continuing to keep pace alongside of him on the narrow cobblestoned street, “I have an appointment with a graphic designer on Ferkens Gränd.” I knew that the architect had an office next door to where I was going because I had seen his name many times before on the building. Thus, I could politely prepare him either for a few more minutes of conversation, or the chance to take a detour. He seemed to succumb, however reluctantly, to my company.

“Yes, they were married several years ago, and have a young son now.” I think that both the architect and I sensed the need to begin from the beginning, with the innocence of a child.

To be continued...


* Max Weber’s definition of state, which has long been appropriated by the Swedish foreign ministry (though applicable only to strong states): “unchallenged control of the territory within the defined boundaries under its control, monopolization of the legitimate use of force within the borders of the state, and the reliance upon impersonal rules in the governance of its citizens and subjects” (SIDA 2533n)

In between flights

...and frights. Another pause in my story, brought to me by my first love (Michael Chase, Berkeley, CA, 1969):

FLIGHT

Hidden in suds,
while we were aloft,
the bashful sea played,
soapy and soft.

The patron of Sweden

Over the past 30 years in Sweden I have read stacks of “technological poetry” and reflected enough on the ”timeless erection” [‘tidlös stake’ på svenska] that one of the architects of the Kaknästorn would evidently like to be remembered by. It has taken me many years, and many a twist and turn of words in the dark, to eventually confirm my own perspectives. Sometimes I wonder why it has taken me so long, but that’s another story.

In one of my diaries of early personal encounters in Sweden, I note that I ran into the quoted (last blog entry) Kaknästorn architect one day in the subway in Stockholm. We were both on our way to work in the Old Town. I recognized him because he had a quaint little house in the woods not far from my old country house, and sometimes stopped by to inspect my place.
He had also invited me once on a tour of his house, which I found to be a perfectly charming museum piece, a piously renovated and meticulously maintained 18th century cabin with no running water or electricity indoors. There were funky scrap metal sculptures and a little homemade generator along a dammed up stream that ran through the property. When there was enough water in the stream, a falling squirt was used to power a lightbulb in the outhouse, though it wasn’t working when I was there. This was where he chose to remind himself of his history. When he was there he always kept his Jaguar out of sight in the woods behind his house, as though it marred the timeless illusion. I was learning about Sweden and Swedes.

On the unannounced inspection days, he would park his Jaguar under the pear tree in front of my house. I might be up on the roof laying new tiles, on a ladder puttying the window panes, sanding the fir floors, laying bricks around a new hearth, or wallpapering – all in my attempts to make an old whitewashed miners’ residence that hadn’t been maintained for decades, inhabitable. I never remember him knocking, though I believed he should have since we did not know one another particularly well. He always seemed to appear in some sort of a professional capacity, somewhere between that of an industrial patron overseeing his foundry and a housing contractor inspecting his construction site.

Getting used to the patronizing manner of this man was part of the process of acclimation to the Swedish landscape. I was young, a female, and a foreigner to boot.


To be continued...

From this tower…

In the more than 30 years I’ve been living in Sweden I’ve only once been up inside Kaknästornet, a radio and TV tower and one of the highest structures in Scandinavia. I didn’t think the view from up there was particularly inspiring or helpful, and definitely didn’t appreciate the dizziness it triggered, especially since I was responsible for the welfare of my little godson the day I was there. So I’ve never been back.

Kaknästornet was built while I was still walking in the shadows of the Campanile on the Berkeley campus. It was built during the sixties, on the edge of a pasture in eastern Stockholm on the outskirts of the town, while politicians and architects were leveling more old buildings in the downtown area than all those that had been bombed out in Prague during the Second World War. The first time I visited Stockholm in the late sixites, it reminded me of a ground zero. Without the trauma and debt of the war, Sweden could afford to flaunt a ‘modern’ city more quickly than the rest of Europe. And to eliminate the critical housing shortage at that time, the same politicians and architects who dropped the bombs downtown raised enormous apartment complexes in the suburbs, edifices that I actually thought were military facilities when I first visited, although I later found these ‘folk homes’ to be well-planned and practical on the inside.

Sweden in the sixties had no beat generation, no anti-war movement, and no civil rights (very few blacks) or free speech movement. Intellectuals worked for the State. The Stockholm harbor didn’t open onto Asia, but was shielded from the Soviet by Finlandization. And I don’t suppose that Swedish engineering students were nerdy enough to build funky lighthouse sculptures out of fiber optic cables, the way they did in Berkeley. In Sweden they were still using wood, concrete, and scrap metal reinforcements to play.

According to one of the Kaknästorn architects: “there were so many strange words used then – modem, video – and we had no idea what they meant, but a sturdy, solid, concrete tower was needed to house all the technological poetry…I think it still works, like a timeless erection.”*

Perhaps needlesstosay, I experienced a profound cultural shock, though I've kept my mouth shut for years.
More on Swedish architectural poetry of the sixties, to be continued….

In the meantime, enjoy my friend and all-time favorite Swedish jazz singer Jeanette Lindström singing one of my absolute favorite songs of hers: From This Tower, music and lyrics by Jeanette Lindström. Better yet check her out live in Sweden!

* Video film (May 10, 2007) produced by Terracom for the the 40th anniversary of the opening of Kaknästornet.

Why does the moth

I still have this one once loved saved on a napkin and spotted with candlewax from the sixties:

Why does the moth
meandering upon the lake?
Is the dappled curtain so intriguing
as to blind him to the lurking shapes below?
Away, little moth,
to the leaves and in the fields,
safely there.

Thanks to MC

The sixties – were you really there?

Statements like: "If you can remember anything about the sixties, you weren't really there,"* never fail to make me a bit queasy. While I usually shrug them off with “that’s one way of looking at it, however glassy-eyed”, it’s the sort of comment that reminds me of one unfortunate legacy of youth, about how quickly things take place in a catalyzed (hormonal etc.) reaction. And before you know it, it’s over and the world looks quite different. It also reminds me of the time when the significance of words like “I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more, Toto” from The Wizard of Oz, or “mad as a hatter” had yet to mean much.

Another reason the statement makes me queasy is perhaps because it reminds me of the many ways in which people seem bent on protecting territory by avoiding dialogue, or committing any constructive memory to oblivion. Others do it by hiding behind some dubious professional role or institutional status - like the doctor who claims a right to diagnose anything and anyone regardless of context. Like the one man/woman posse bent on taking the law into their own hands, we seem to forget that an individual who is called upon to witness and chooses to plead the 5th amendment, does so only to spare the details of self-incrimination. Better to testify, now.

Need I be queasy when I recognize how many post-war baby boomers we were who formed the critical mass of the San Francisco Bay Area counterculture, easily a million. While the term globalization had yet to permeate widespread consciousness, many of our parents had lifted our sights to the horizons of the Far East during the war. Thus the sixties weren’t just a reaction to the political and social conservativism of our parents generation. We were also familiar with the new wave of post-war Asian immigrants, with the first movements toward ethnic civil rights, as well as with the expressions of the local beat generation in art and literature. The sixties in the Bay Area were (note plural conjugation) the result of a complex of inter-related cultural and political trends, catalyzed by the war in Vietnam and nuclear testing in the South Pacific. We - hundreds of thousands of baby boomers who attended the world renowned universities and colleges in the Bay Area - were uniquely positioned to observe, empirically test and endorse, many of the freedoms of personal expression expounded by our local artists and through the Free Speech movement. And by virtue of our numbers we could deviate en masse from the conventional norms and political conservatism that had been characteristic of mainstream America. When less energy is required to activate, as in any catalyzed reaction, the reaction rate is that much faster. Many were consumed in the process.

While we were voracious cultural consumers, not all of us put everything into our mouths. Perhaps I become a bit queasy when I am reminded of the rotten fruit, moldy bread and mushrooms, and see all the bottles of jug wine and the sugar cubes. I can still breathe in the marijuana and hashish along Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and in the Haight in San Francisco. Not all of us listened day and night to all the music, though we did listen. I was there, for example, at a Bob Dylan concert off Broadway, and remember Joan Baez in the row in front of me. I can still hear the psychedelic sound of Grace Slick’s “White Rabbit”, the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, playing for free in the park during my lunch hour. I can also recall the ambiance at La Pena on Shattuck in Berkeley when Malvina Reynolds (Little Boxes) sang. I was there too, with lifted hands swaying to Aretha in her encore with Ray Charles at the Fillmore West. And as an usher at the Hyatt Regency, I was even privileged to listen to a rare Mahalia Jackson concert, for free, just a few years before her death. Yes, many of us were there and remember, even musical experiences, because we weren’t stoned out of our minds.

Many of us locals knew where the fault line went, because we had grown up in earthquake territory. Grandma and Grandpa lived in the Haight too, and went to mass regularly at Saint Agnes. We were young, naïve perhaps, but our survival instinct told us to watch where we put our foot. We knew already then that we were mortal human beings, just stepping out into the world.

While our episodic memory may be failing us now, it is said that our semantic memory is at its peak between the ages of 55 and 65, which puts mine at an all-time high. And so as I read through my old diaries, I’m finding that it’s easy to recall “the gist” of many of the happenings that I have described in more detail there. Like I wrote in my blog just a couple of weeks ago: “Remember we boomers have been around long enough to make a lot of connections.”


To be continued….

* Said by Paul Kantner, lead guitarist and singer in Jefferson Airplane, a San Francisco-based rock band, that had its hey dey between 1965 and 1970.

Remembering Josephine Miles, cont...

It wasn’t Josephine who told me to go for a long walk today while the sun was still shining, and to breathe deeply of the fresh winter air. But while I was out walking I could distinctly hear her voice. With unusual authority and without reprimanding she reminded me to be honest, to take one step at a time, and keep it simple.

You’re nowhere near the edges of the crater you were born into, she might say. You’ve made it past the half life of the radioactivity from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You’ve survived another death in the family. No teargas, no curfew. No need to run for your life, or to nurse a roommate who has flipped out on some psychedelic drug. No, you’re not in Berkeley in the sixties anymore and there are no more deserters to bring home from Vancouver. No one is accusing you for the war any longer. You can take down the "Do not disturb" sign and be their witness. No need to skirt the globe. Let the world spin of its own accord and help you to wind your wool into a manageable ball. She seems to be saying: Though you may be an unwanted witness, don’t worry, it will all pull together before it’s too late to make something of it.

Josephine Miles is one of those threads of my life that seems to surface whenever there’s a snag. Her words are often there, somewhere in the weave, like (if I recall correctly): “The most important decisions we make in our lives are those we make when the choices are limited.” What did she mean by that? I’ve been asking myself this question every other day for decades, at once thanking and cursing the God who gave me so many gifts and continues to present me with countless choices, so many detours off the main route in the short story of my life.

Some twenty years ago one of my old roommates at Berkeley, Toni, and I were talking about Josephine. Toni (then head of the technical publications department of a biotech company in the San Francisco Bay Area) told me that a young writer in her department had recently interviewed Josephine, just prior to her death. Our discussion reminded me of all the English majors in the United States who work in industry to support themselves. Perhaps I appreciate that reminder because Swedes who can write are as reluctant to consider the option as industrial employers are to understand the benefits. It’s a sort of Catch 22. Toni’s writers don’t regard their day job as prostitution, but as the well-paid and appreciated deference to reality it is.

Toni sent me a copy of the interview. A major reality of Josephine’s life was that she was disabled, and confined to a wheelchair most of her adult life. In the interview she said that this probably helped her to focus, to dedicate her life to language and to teaching. These were things she could do even when the elevator was on the blink, because her students were always prepared to carry her up the stairs.

Pruned plane trees

The air was clean after a week of torrential rainfall. I was strolling to class along Sproul Plaza, between the rows of drastically pruned London plane trees. Anyone who has spent any time on the Berkeley campus and seen those esplanades knows what they look like at this time of year, after years of severe winter pruning. Tourists who visit in the spring and summer are seldom privy to see them raise their fists to the sky, to see what power gathers under their shady foliage. Yes, the trees on Sproul Plaza, just like the ones along the Campanile, really need to be cut back each year, and severely, not just because they are a landmark but because their naked branches and their defiant limbs are a signature. I used to think they were grotesque, a tool for some socialist realist woodcut, but now I actually think they are beautiful.

Drastically, pruned, London, plane? “Do you really need all those modifiers?” I hear the voice of another constant companion, another alma mater. I can hear Josephine ask, always reminding us, her students, to cut the crap (my words), to get rid of unnecessary adjectives and adverbs. I’ll never forget the first time I met Josephine.

It was in January 1965 and having passed the plane tree esplanade, I had just entered the foyer of Dwinelle Hall, the humanities building on campus. There was a bit of commotion there, which wasn’t at all unusual in those days. Students were engaged, outspoken, sometimes even belligerent and boisterous. I noticed some male students scrambling at the bottom of the staircase to the right. All of a sudden I saw that they had hoisted an older woman above their heads and were carrying her up the stairs. The woman seemed calm enough. Though the living body bearers didn’t look like athletes, they reminded me of a football team carrying a teammate who had just scored a winning goal. Students were also considerate and helpful, and full of initiative then. “It’s Josephine Miles”, I heard someone say, “you know, the English professor who’s crippled.” I think the elevator was broken and she had a class to teach.

Perhaps that’s when I first learned that English would be the jewel of my university studies (even though I was a history major and an art minor), and that Josephine would be the personification of my Alma Mater.
Read On Inhabiting an Orange, by Josephine Miles.

To be continued...

Twelfth Night Tango

Someone called last night, with a voice from the past, and introduced himself as Astor Piazzolla, supposedly one of three biblical Magi. We were told by a Catholic priest in a sermon today that it's not the trip to Bethlehem that is the significance of the story of the Epiphany, but how the Magi navigated home and what happened on the way. I appreciated the reminder.
While I didn't recognize the voice on the phone last night, I did recognize the sound of the bandoneon and knew that whoever was calling had the wrong number, since the real Astor died years ago. He actually died of a stroke on his way to mass at Notre Dame. In an effort to be polite, however, I didn’t hang up immediately, but listened to the disk as it continued to spin (pirouetting) over and over on his turntable. I suppose he imagined that I was following him, every little thing he was trying to say, like the perfect dance partner. Or maybe he was just some old dj who had had too much to drink. Then, without waiting to be moved by the leitmotif, he hung up. Adios. I have since found out that he was born disabled, crippled for life by a hearing defect.
What tension he must have felt in that exacting impulse to hang up, allowing himself to be catapulted into the firmament, then back like a boomerang, past the computer screen and blurred proof sheet, dragging all the cords and pulling out all the plugs in the process.
Sigh. How effortlessly we seem to be thrown back by the music into our everlasting youth, hung up, and then suddenly turn (on slightly bent knees) to face that ever warm and lightfooted follower from another life, another time, another continent. We call it “work in progress". Who will hold the small of Viola's back on the next impulse to dance? Who - if not me - is prepared to follow her to the very end of a brief score on her way home, adieu.
I have to laugh (and cry) at a bizarre comedy of errors that is as well-written as well-directed to entertain. Sometimes we need these diversions - like Let's Dance - before the end of the holidays, huh?

Where do YOU come from?

The American Village,
Tokyo, Japan 1958

So you too have perhaps learned the meaning of another new word today. (I consider it part of my job as a translator). And hopefully you too are able to recall your own first dream. I find it interesting, between yesterday and today, to partake of an interview with the contemporary video filmmaker Bill Viola, in conjunction with the opening of his retrospective Hatsu-yume (First Dream) at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo at the close of last year: Interview with Bill Viola, Dec 2006

God forbid that the myriad of curious coincidences that connect us to places, events and people should render us superstitious (see my blog entry May 30, 2007). Remember we boomers have been around long enough to make a lot of connections.

When people ask me where I came from (which still happens regularly in Sweden), it’s not at all farfetched for me to think to respond “nowhere”, and bounce the question back, because we’ve all moved and changed our positions. And for me, the boundaries of so many of those spaces we call home - like a place, a house, a village, a town, not the least in Japan - have long since and literally imploded. Apparently obliterated, they have become an integral part of us, our memories, and the collective memory of everyone who has lived there too. Sometimes I think that if there were a mold for the post-war generation, for baby boomers, then my life must have been one of the first to be cast from it.

Several years ago, a Swedish acquaintance (pre-war) suggested that I had been born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Since he didn’t know much about my background, I was more baffled than offended. For the record, let it be known that unlike most of my peers I did not receive support from my family or from the American government to put myself through one of the best, however the most expensive, public universities in the U.S. Because my parents had paid state taxes I was fortunately able to attend that university on resident tuition, which was considerably lower than than for out-of-state and foreign students. I paid for my schooling by working odd part-time jobs and received various scholarships because I was an ambitious student. When I came to Sweden I had a good education in my bagage, one suitcase, and enough money to support myself while learning Swedish and until I could find work. I have since realized that any post-war middle-class American was probably considered wealthy by pre-war Scandinavian standards, and that my friend’s projection was undoubtedly augmented by memories of ancestors who had emigrated from poverty to realize the American dream… and never returned. The Swedish dream then? Who the hell am I to pose such a question? When you try to entertain yourself with reflections on a silver spoon, you’re either right-side-up (convex) or upside-down (concave).

Hatsuyume

For several years G has been in the process of writing a book which only recently has been accepted for publication. She called to share the good news and we made plans to get together during the Christmas holidays. I dreamed that just as I was leaving home for our appointment, the phone rang. It was the supervisor of the local Day Care Center calling to say that she was desperate. She was without personnel and the Day Care Center was full. She reminded me that I had signed up several years ago to work extra hours there. She insisted that I fulfill my promise, while I insisted on fulfilling my commitment to G. I woke up, and met G as planned. We had a wonderful long walk along the waterfronts of Stockholm in the brief daylight (no sunlight today), and ended up sharing not only our work and plans for the future, but also a pleasant lunch that included the escapades and more sustainable developments of our "babies". Meaning of hatsuyume?

Kinga Shinnen

A collection of mother Anne's Japanese fans.

What American mother could imagine, in the middle of a second world war, that her first granddaughter would be born in the land of a "perpetrator" only a few years later? They say the occupation was successful. In the spirit of Japanese culture, may the new year be full of respect and joy: kinga shinnen.