The Stronger

Mdme X: Why are you silent? You haven't said a word this whole time, but you have let me go on talking! You have sat there, and your eyes have reeled out at me all these thoughts which lay like raw silk in its cocoon--thoughts--suspicious thoughts, perhaps. Why did you break your engagement? Why do you never come to our house any more? Why won't you come to see us tonight? [Mlle. Y appears as if about to speak] You needn't speak--I understand it all!"

excerpt from The Stronger, by August Strindberg

Our acquaintance has been so uncanny. When I saw you for the first time I was fascinated by you. You seemed quiet and timid, though hardly shy. What I did not know was that you were so fascinated by me you could not let me out of your sight. What I did not know then was that you didn’t dare have me for an enemy, and were desparately trying to become my friend. Perhaps you wanted to know what I had that you did not, since I was sleeping with a man who had rejected you. As a foreigner, vulnerable in your familiar territory and language, I must admit that I was flattered by your attention. But when I invited you to my home, there was always discord. Was it because you really couldn’t stand me, my vulnerability, my candidness, my weaknesses as well as my energy and creativity? Or was it because I couldn’t stand you, your insecurity, your obsequiousness, the strength of your silence and territorial nature? Or was it because my fiancé was so uncomfortable in your presence, that our relationship was as awry as an ill-fitting gown? I did everything I could to make him like you, without success. But then, when he and I separated, an intensive friendship developed between you and me. You nestled close, confided in me, and it looked all at once as though you dared to show your real feelings. You told me that you had been hurt him, and that he had rejected you for me. Strangely enough, I wasn’t jealous! Mostly curious, like you. Then your father, with whom you were very close and had very mixed feelings, died. You said that you were confused. You told me that you were at odds with your mother, your siblings. That was when I suggested that you get away, go abroad, visit my family, and view your world from another perspective, as I had done in a similar situation. And then, what happened then?

And then I recall the christening...

tbc.

The Precipice Trail

"In Acadia National Park there are over 120 miles (193 km) of trails. The Precipice Trail is among the steepest and most dramatic. Beginning here it scales the glacier-steepened eastern of Champlain Mountain. The ocean view from the top is impressive.

Although the ascent is precipitous, climbing gear is not needed. Iron hand holds and steps of native stone are placed at strategic points. On hot days it is better to start out in the afternoon when the sun is behind the mountain. The Precipice Trail is not recommended for small children."

Engraved on the Precipice Trail plaque

Berlin Wall revisited

Whose side of
the iconostases
are you on
where priests and police
once patrolled
our grafitti?

No more checkpoints.
Pause between the acts
and stations of the U-bahn
before crossing,

twenty years
after the fall
of the wall

orchestras tune up
waiting for a master key
a common beat
new rate of exchange

Dominus deus
Domino Day
Nothing stands still
forever
yours,

Shakedown at the Brazilian Room

Lina really didn’t want to get onto this subject again now, but Louis had taken off up into the hills again and she had to follow. Said the weather was perfect for another shakedown. The plan was to practice an emergency landing in the parking lot of the Brazilian Room in the regional park district not far from her desk in 1971. The evening fog had become so thick that this was apparently a perfect opportunity to practice landing with 0 visibility.
They had to fly low, following their noses as they hung out along Wildcat Canyon Road, breathing the fragrance of the Eucalyptus and Bay Laurel to stay on track. Suddenly, headlights appeared, turning down onto what appeared to be a modern hacienda, an old colonial gem where there was evidently a party on the go.
While Lina had been invited to Monique’s birthday party, Monique hardly expected her to fly halfway around the earth to be there tonight. Nor did Lina for that matter. And since only Lina and Monique had any personal associations with Louis, they were both surprised and perhaps even a bit disappointed that Lina had actually showed up. Suppose no one likes to be reminded of the past when they’re in the future. Rubble vs. bubble syndrome, East vs. West. Berlin Wall.
Unprepared as she was, Lina happened to have what she hoped would be a very personal and dear gift for Monique in her Sierra Club backback - an etching of a famous battle that took place during the Enlightenment in Paris - which she left at the entrance to the Brazilian Room. Monique probably thought it was just a card, since it was a flat piece of paper in a brown envelope, no heavy box or glittery paper. Why else, when she had read the dedication on the back, would she throw an antique into the wastepaper basket beside the gift table?
The party was just getting started. A quick look around and Lina could see that most of the guests, apart from a couple of relatives, were unfamiliar. And so she took a seat at one of the round tables with covers for twelve, where she had no professional or other affiliation with the others, all of whom turned out to be members of APA. Conversation centered on Monique’s relationship with her husband Bill. Lina mostly listened, since she didn’t really know much about him. They said they didn’t know him very well either, but that Monique was depressed and had confided that he was the reason. They related browraising stories about Bill. Since Lina was the only one at the party who had known Monique back in Paris, before she met Bill, they were curious to hear Lina tell them how she met Monique. Lina didn’t tell them that Monique had been depressed then too, but stories about their safaris together.
Then suddenly the band tuned up and Monique came and sat down at their table trying to get people to dance. Since no one was game, she changed the subject. Lina saw her mother in a long white dress with gold brocade, and a lemon meringue pie hairdo, clearly enjoying the dance floor. The party broke up fairly early, and a couple of APA members thanked Lina for telling them about the safaris to Norway and Spain.

November 6, 2009

Cool and overcast, but still, as I climbed the southern slope of Lake Mälaren this afternoon, on my day off. Proved to be a good place to ventilate the turmoil of my turbulent take off with Louis earlier in the day, replete with a brief account of a vivid dream that I have always intended to record, ever since it happened (only once) in 1971. Louis continues to nurture the dream on paper, making sure that we both land on our feet, one here and one there.

Gotta soften those stiff old garden gloves. High time to change into overalls, a favorite ochre yellow LL Bean jacket, Gortex just in case it rains, regardless of what Obama would wear if he were in Stockholm today.

Properly clothed for the occasion, I proceeded to pull up the last of the Jerusalem artichokes, earthen jewels, out of their settings, and turn the soil. Collected the biggest chokes into a paper bag and replanted the smaller ones, deposited their withered stalks into a new compost heap, along with dried pea and bean vines that I had just managed to unravel from their trellises. And as I sifted out twigs from the composted earth and shoveled the rich soil over the empty beds, I thought of mom, laid to rest again this winter. And as I raked maples leaves into piles on a tarp, and portioned them out around the fuchsias and roses, I thought of dad. Working together – from above and below.

Untitled

There’s a logo on Louis: Hoist.
Leave where you lift off, cannot stay, must get away up into the foothills, to the banks of the Hatch Hatchy Reservoir.

Flap. Flap. Flutter. Float. Ooh ooh ooh ooh. Tick-tick, tappity tap tap.
Days pass, hours, minute hands wave by, gotta give it a try.

Wind your weightless way along a dusty path, step on stones, slip on loose gravel. Let glossy evergreen groves, sugar pines and silver firs keep you warm. Your stores are plenty in this dense foliage. Examine their fine needlework, textures, patterns and interlacing. Phantom robes will wrap all around you. Stay on that path, without repose, until stubs, pale gray trunks, gnarled and twisted branches weave their way alongside you and grasses dry. Snakes slither and slide across, or coil on a sunlit slab. A little hurried, but quickly hushed. You’re making progress.
Then look up: an opening. Listen: water tricking, flowing swiftly and eagerly like down feathers into a still room.

M just called and we're going to work in the garden, along the lake. Saved for the time being, by something as mundane as a bell.

Shakedown testing

The message was a blank paper crane she called "Louis".

"Louiiis!"

The spirit of Louis first take off had been a shimmy and shakedown that managed to survive a nosedive, just missing her wastepaper basket. Didn’t seem to hurt. After a cursory inspection, airborne early warning and control, Lina S. Berg propped Louis up on the edge of her desk.
“Louis, I think we’re just a couple of shakedowns from your maiden voyage.”
“Hit the sack, you need a good night’s sleep. This is gonna be a long haul.”
“But Louis, where are we headed?”
“Cross the Atlantic. Don’t worry about that. In the meantime, get some shuteye. My tip: rock yourself off somwhere between Herbie Hancock and a bit of Attitude & Orbit Control, and you're bound to fall up into the foothills. Believe me."

Welcome to the banks of the Hatch Hatchy Reservoir!
Further instructions await there.

Imprinted on pap…

Spring 1971

Be with the chicks as they fledge. And when they are ready to fly, send them an angel who can show them how and where to migrate, their only hope.*

The ‘message’ arrived in a windowed envelope, with that empty, official, staged look. Just her name, Lina S. Berg, behind an iridescent, soap bubble, butterfly wing window.
Even if the envelope had been personally addressed to her – in courier lettering that correctly spelled out her name and current mailing address – it was plain, universal, white, ultralight airmail. Who, but some young marketing consultant for a desperate publishing house might consider it worthwhile to make use of a cheap mailing list to promote their book club. Mass consignments, subscription offers sent out to an entire generation. Had it been a bank statement, a subpoena, a communiqué from the Internal Revenue Service, or a call to jury duty, there certainly would have been a sender. Nor did it have a commemorative stamp licked by a friend, just a barcode and U.S. Postage Paid, on an otherwise blank slate, Tabula Rasa.
Rather than throw it into the wastepaper basket, as any person in their right mind would have done, she was instinctively captivated, as though her survival depended upon it. In order to clear some space on her desk to write checks, pay more bills, and record a recurring dream before she set the table for dinner, she began folding it, into a crane. When she had completed her tasks for the day, she tapped on its beak, and watched it curtsy, before it began to rock of its own accord, and then take off.

Some glad morning, when this life is o’er, I’ll fly away.

* See blog entry. Fri Oct 23: “Once she showed me a photo of a goose in a silver locket she wore around her neck. Said the goose had been silly enough to think she was its mother. Blamed it on her father when that the goose ended up in a silver terrine on the family dinner table. So much for secret loves, and civilized family meals. Otherwise her lips stayed pursed as a roach clip.”

“Her hands were like broken wings, I suppose, and she knew it was best to keep them still. Hurts less that way, and probably heals faster.”

All in a day’s work

Confidential WIP
How can anyone work in this hole? Been workin all day on public procurement. Illustrated Man, a secret tender for an AVMC, audio visual mixing console.
Yeaah, yeaah, cold, dark, wet, dirty scenes. Aint so concerned about the facts tho, cause soon as they be warmin up, dryin out, lookin pretty gaudawful, propped up against the lite, i be sideways lookin past tissues. Human flesh, nothin to write on or see thru, mind you, wrinkles, fall, flat, quick, cold, dark and dirty as...
Haha, gotcha now, reckon she be doomed here, rising to bang, boom, howl hangin onto banknotes, bills and brooms, and scratch yer back if you scratch mine, frazzle and fray tenderly. Yer honor, ever forget compassion? The Sound and the Furry? Roaring lions.
Did I never tell ya once I had a niece, nice, did i?

Konfidentiell WIP (or Let Google do the Dirty Work)
Hur kan man arbeta i det här hålet? Jobbat hela dagen med en offentlig upphandling. En Illustrerad Man, ett hemligt anbud för en AVMC, audiovisuella mixerbord.
Yeaah, yeaah, kalla, mörka, blöta, smutsiga scener. Jag är inte så bekymrad över fakta eftersom så snart som de värms and torkas, ser de Gud så hemska ut, lutar sig mot ljuset, sidledes förbi vävnader. Mänskligt kött, ingenting att skriva om eller se igenom, märk väl, rynkor faller, platt, snabbt, kalla, mörka och smutsiga som ...
Haha, Gotcha nu, tror hon var dömd härmed till bang, boom, tar tag i sedlar, räkningar och kvastar, och löften om att skrapa din rygg om du kliar min tillbaka, slita och öma. Din Höghet, min ära, har du någonsin medlidit? Skrikit ut din ilska?
Berättade jag aldrig att jag hade en släkting, gjorde jag?

Stinging bee

“I think most people are too young to choose a profession like medicine when they come straight out of high school. Look at Monique, a few years more might have changed her mind about going into the profession.”

Monique was a French woman who had joined their class in their final year. While she was a couple of years younger than most of them, she had already received her medical degree and done her internship in Paris before she came to the US. She seemed very unhappy at UC Med, and most of her classmates, figuring she was homesick and didn’t like having to retake a year of medical school and redo her internship, were sympathetic, in the beginning.

She soon became the kind of person whom a lot of people either instinctively avoided or simply disliked. No one could say why, just that she seemed to exude some sort of hazardous emission. For some reason, her very appearance had a tendency to bring out coffee klatsch filters. While no one had ever talked about it much before…that wouldn’t have been polite as long as she was around… they had all sensed it, in different ways.

“Somewhere beneath her heavy brows, she always seemed to stare vacantly at her listless hands, resting in a stack on her lap. And everyone else had to look at them too, however inadvertently, because they wondered what it was she was actually cooking up. Pot luck?”

“Once she showed me a photo of a goose in a silver locket she wore around her neck. Said the goose had been silly enough to think she was its mother. Blamed it on her father when that the goose ended up in a silver terrine on the family dinner table. So much for secret loves, and civilized family meals. Otherwise her lips stayed pursed as a roach clip.”

“Her hands were like broken wings, I suppose, and she knew it was best to keep them still. Hurts less that way, and probably heals faster.”

No one seemed to know what had become of her, only that she had married a wealthy businessman whom she had met in Paris, and gone to work at a public hospital as an anesthesiologist.

“I thought she seemed to breath in fresh air through the darkest pores along the wings of her nose, and breath out some innocuous gas that put her and everyone around her in a trance. A true anesthesiologist.”

“Now that sounds like something a real doctor would say, Barb. I thought she looked like she was always gazing through a screen of invisible bangs, or through the black veil on a pin hat. I remember she had a very distinct widow’s peak, long watery blond hair pulled back into a knot at the nape of her neck. I often felt like trying to lift that veil, to stroke the loose strands of hair away from her forehead and describe what I saw, but Monique didn't offer much art, none of her own pictures, none of her own words.”

“That was the problem with Monique, no skills, no craft, and yet the few things she ever said or did made her seem crafty, sly, rather than shy.”

“ She just didn’t look healthy at all to me, more like a glossy mirror that vibrates just before it’s going to shatter. Not exactly the kind of doctor you want to anesthetize you before you go into surgery. Who wants to end up on a stainless steel platter in a refrigerator room after a good meal?”

“But I can’t help wondering how I would have felt about her if she had been able to reach out?”

“She did stick out, her tongue. Stung. Yellow jacket, WASP. I saw her in a Mustang convertible with windblown hair, and a bouquet of sunflowers in her embrace, and I believe she almost looked happy.”

“I saw her that day too, though she looked sad to me. Hard to know what was cupped in the palms of her hands. A coin, heads or tails, make it or break it, safe bet? Money, honey, blew her away.”


“ Maybe she was just embarrassed because she had psoriasis or something. Cracked, red, dry, scabs. Not a hand people usually like to hold, exactly, though hardly contagious.”

“I actually saw her once in a bathing suit, low back with a floral pattern - huge pink petals, with lime green pistils and sticky yellow stamens. Gaudy awful, had to recoil when she turned her back on me. It wasn’t pretty, allergic reaction, lots of pimples and puss.”

Suddenly they all giggled. Sign of a successful bee in the bonnet of med students.

“Oh Jesus. Just keep an eye on where you put that needle, will you. This is a sewing bee, not a stinging bee. No need to prick your finger to check your own blood, sugar. Wake up, put on a thimble or you are going to have a lotta blood on your hands too. Bumblebee flies by the power of their own ignorance, and neither the queen nor the workers are likely to sting if we don’t disturb them.”

“Oh genius bombus, you are, but that cuckoo gal was different Maxine. Bad genes, I'd say. Just listen to that buzz. Without basic social skills or even an ability to collect pollen, she can get pretty invasive. I think we better keep an eye on her.”

Sewing bee

“Some natural historian you’ve turned out to be, Maxine. Your invitation was really fitting.” She'd been charmed by the insect collection on the cover of the card that Maxine had sent out, inviting them, a group of old classmates to a potluck sewing bee. “Quite a source of inspiration for visionaries like us. So neat and tidy, and what a chorus line with so many fine legs in perfect alignment, not to mention those fuzzy coats, fragile wings and compound eyes.”

Maxine widens her big black tea, flying saucer eyes as she helps Sara off with her yellow jacket, wrapping it neatly on a hanger. Taking Sara’s hands into her own, she pecks her lightly on both cheeks.

“I like it when it’s obvious that you’ve been doing some serious scientific thinking about us, replete with family names and collection dates. I could identify right away with pinup number 20 of the bombus family. Has it really been 10 years since we first met? Jeeessus how time flies.”

“You know, after her death they put Frida’s diary in a plexiglass box too, and someone kept turning the pages every day for the whole world to see: heavy brows, drawn together into one bird, and tiny wings attached to dismembered feet, a piedestal at the bottom of the page with the caption: Pies para que los quiero si tengo alas pa' volar! Why do I want feet when I have wings?"

“They all fit right into that plexiglass box, all those specimens. Tupperware may be good for a lot, but just isn’t transparent, nor rigid enough. Remember nothing we say is to leave this room, must remain behind our ironing curtain.”

“We’re not spring chicks any more are we?”

“No, but a little metamorphosis has done wonders for you Max. I like your antennae. Suits you, those hat pins, though the pinheads somehow dwarf your collection.”

“St Mary’s intensive care has its benefits, but they force the interns to work long hours. Before the day is over you actually need those perks.”

Before either of them has a chance to say more, the doorbell rings again, and again, and again. “OK I’m no longer an intern on call now, but accepting regular duty.”

“Remember how Monique always recommended that we tell patients with a loose screw to go back wherever they came from. Maybe that was her appeal, to us? Maybe it’s better late than never to take her advice, huh Maxine?”

“I didn’t hear that Sara.”

When all the girls had arrived, a warm buzz filled Maxine’s bright yellow pad on the 17 floor, with a bay view.

“I can’t imagine a better housewarming cohort, so make yourselves at home,” Maxine announces. “Bees have to travel 50,000 miles, more than twice around the earth, for every pound of honey. Of course, no single honeybee ever made a pound of honey by herself. We need each other, working women with potluck.”

They all have so much to talk about, cosmos, nasturtiums, pistils and stamens, sweet blue peas, red currants, black forests, yellow trees, rivers, lakes and mushrooms.

Then Liz happens to mention Monique again…

Recovery of my straw hat

Hats off to Lotta Lotass!
No longer need for a hat
when you’re sunk in a trunk
of American redwood.

"I was just waiting for your hat to blow off."
Jaycee, crew member on Ca va bien, Sausalito CA, July 2009.

Fortunately the kids were nearby to recover it.

Hat back.
Returned.


Land once again in sight.
Low tide.
Remember the Ohlone.
Pt. Lobos CA, July 2009.

A bag of sisu

She was a slight, attractive and smartly dressed young woman who had come to speak in our local church. She had come to talk to us about the huge debt that we owed the Russians after the war, about the need to house and clothe our refugees from Karelia, about the pressing need to liberate ourselves from humiliation, the threat of poverty and moral decay. The world must know that David could conquer Goliath, that it was possible for each and every one of us to restore freedom and dignity. She said that we must never be led to believe that we had been trapped in a fissure between communism and facism. She told us that we could pool our resources, each and every one of us to the best of our ability, and thus contribute to the freedom of our people.
This was the bull-dog spirit, the Finnish sisu that this woman challenged us to incarnate.
I thought that she was very beautiful, this peasant baroness. Her lips were swollen and colorful. Her shiny dark hair was parted in the middle and braided in a knot that crowned the nape of her neck.
She continued to speak slowly, suggesting that we remove the wedding rings from our fingers and chains from our necks. Anything and everything of gold, mere tokens of our past, would help. Could we not make concrete use of these totems, by contributing them to a solid commitment to our collective future?
And so we did. We gave everything of apparent value that we had and dropped it into her gunny sack.
Suddenly, in the spirit of service, a handsome young man appeared before her. He offered to help carry the heavy sack to the bank. Slight and overwhelmed by the unexpected weight of her mission, the young woman fumbled with the strings of the sack, looked awkwardly up at the young man and said: “Yes, of course, please, and thank you.”

April 8, 1949
Lapinlahti Finland

So says the sooth

Dear L,

Trust that all the shards of our puzzle will gradually fall into place. In the meantime, please find here a note, however cryptic for the time being, that I just transcribed from my first interview with you last week:

“So how did your international career as a histologist get off the ground?”
“It started with a seed.”
“Just any seed?
“Well, it was a seed I found in the grass, behind the house where I grew up in eastern Finland. It was a Ranta-alpi seed, Lysimachia vulgaris," you added to aid in identification.

I looked up Lysimachia vulgaris when I got home and could identify it as a yellow loosestrife of the primrose family, sometimes considered invasive outside of its native range. The name stems from the Greek and Latin (lusis, lysis) meaning to loosen, deliver, solve, from the Indoeuropean word maghe for power, or battle. The plant is assumed to have soothing properties.

“My professor wanted to cultivate seeds in several nutrient solutions and see how their morphology and growth were affected in varying concentrations of amino acids. My Ranta alpi seeds happened to deviate in unexpected ways from other seeds in glycine-rich solutions. The stalks were deformed, there was rapid undifferentiated growth in the root system, and the leaves were thin and pale yellow.”

tbc...

Lysimachia vulgaris
Illustration from original book source: Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz 1885, Gera, Germany. Permission granted to use under GFDL by Kurt Stueber.

Chin up

Along the blue brim
picnic posts in drift and dune
sweet orange is coming soon
dawn on me.

What fell?

I tell yall.
It was big en heavy,
en loaded wit
sharp talons.
xx&urr XX&URR
witches waya sayin
parta sumpin bigger
like a lock
dat press by de key
en shoot de bolt
cclick cclick BOOOM,
like sum playin card
leff on de table
after de New Deal.
En wha happen den?
Eyes gunna tell yall
he aint gunna fall.
No he dun up
en split,
leff her lone.
Dat darn ol' cone
coulda cum down
on his head.
En who wanna
play dummy?
Bess he lie low
en play dead
less he be depress.

On time

Winter still holds us in its icy grip, despite the passing spring equinox. Meteorologist are predicting warmer weather soon.
I am here... the result of the cycles and sequences of events in which my ancestors participated, fashioned also by individual transformations.

Apropos fashioned: Today I wore the same outdoor clothing as I have for the past hundred days: a crocheted woolen scullcap decorated with hundreds of pink pearls, a loosely handknit mohair shawl, rustbrown leather gloves, and a dark blue duffel coat with toggle buttons made of reindeer horn...in case you fail to recognize me by my face.

Please excuse me for my computer illiteracy, or lack of etiquette.
Blogging out now before it gets too late.

On Lotta Lotass' Redwood (Ps. 96:12)

Snows still flurry here today. Seven days after the spring equinox.
Yet trees like these rise majestically above petty concerns and poverty. I am playing solitaire with a Redwood logger’s prayer book, a deck of picture postcards that were once sent by relatives and friends. Order is not immediately apparent in any well-shuffled deck. But when you begin meditating on playing cards - gathering, pressing, scanning, importing, retouching and cropping the motive - you eventually begin to distinguish the rank and file of each flake, unique people whom you never knew. And if you are lucky, a pile of sawdust will suddenly appear to mask what it would reveal.

Forgive me, for scratching xxu&rr at your portal for so long. Rubbing my twigs dry, day after day, I am still hoping to ignite a fire and release a seed to sow. Redwood cones call for extreme heat.

Redwood fire

On Redwood and other natural names (Gen 11:3)

for Lotta Lottas and other catkins

I am here in a land where a mushroom is not just a vulgar word for fungi, but a fleshy space where common names spell survival. Who would not prefer a Karl Johan (Boletus edulis) to a Sly Fly (Amanita phalloides), regardless of the taste or smell of the pulp, once they had learned to survive the two?

I live in a land where the alder, the tallest of which is altus, have red wood and flowers called catkins. Alders grow quickly and bees flock to their pollen. Come let us call it alder of the genus alnus, the deepest of which is altus, and have black wood and enrich the soil in burnt areas and in mines.

Come let us (also pronounced ‘lotass’ in other parts of the world, for the world no longer has but one tongue) move east and find a desert and settle there and chop and split wood, dig cubby holes, build a fire, and so live by that hearth, where nothing they plan will condescend and confuse us.

On Lotta Lotass' Redwood 1:5

“Trees, according to their type, correspond to the perception and cognition of the good and the true from which intelligence and wisdom derive. For that reason, the ancients, proficient in the knowledge of correspondences, performed their sacred rituals in groves. And thus trees so often replace Scripture, and the sky the church….”

Emmanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and its Wonders, and Hell

Whatever you may be expecting when you click on the link that brings you to Lotta Lotass’ Redwood site, you must first step onto a digital doormat and swat your paw at a number. cclLICK. Is this an illusion of order, a table of contents in the syntax of biblical references, a list of prayers for the canonical hours, a stack of library cards, or a bowl of milk? And where are the missing links in Linnaean binomial taxonomy? From here on you are only a cclLICK away from a picture of the genus Sequoia, named after an indigenous tribe of the North American indians. Each postcard is a vivisection of a pre-Christian pith, a life lived among giant trees, and the people who felled, sawed and transported them. The latter are literally as small as Tom Thumbs or Nils Holgerssons next to the vast perimeters and heights reached in one, and only one, place in the world.

While the bark - Meoww meoww - of Lotass' work tells you that questions about the work in progress can be sent to the 'ordfabriken' [word factory], I am still waiting for a response: why Redwood? Is it a coincidence? A question of good or bad luck? Size, time, place? Why not a local species: a 'tall' [pine], an 'ek' [oak, spoke], a 'gran' [spruce], or a 'bok' [beech, book]?

“Tall stories grow naturally among the tall timber,” says Louis Untermeyer in his foreword to the Wonderful Adventures of Paul Bunyan (Heritage Press, 1945). Paul Bunyan is the legendary folktale of a lumberjack in the Northwest who was born in the days when the country itself was young, and forests were vast and dark, and men were few and lonely. Dwarfed by the trees, men had to make themselves big, if only by way of their imagination. Paul Bunyan is the immigrant pioneer dream, a symbol of youth, bigger than the trees. “The Best is never good enough, and even the Biggest lifts itself by its bootstraps to be bigger. 'That,' we say proudly - perhaps a little too proudly – 'that’s America for you!'"

Lotass' Redwood brings lonely immigrants back to reality, to the Old World revisited. And of course, there was so much more of the world back then, however unevenly distributed. When you went west, you promised not to be so “territorial” about the land you left behind, but I could read in your letters that you were frightened, that you too had been wounded. You couldn't let go of what you believed was your birth right. Eliza Doolittle's lines gradually became more and more evasive, like an actress who has rehearsed for hours on end for a role, without really understanding how the play really ends. Is that so?

Back home the Internet lynx is likely to close in - xu&rr xu&rr- and haunt you for want of more. And then a storm is sure to rise up in Littleland, and everything must be cut back down, sawed and sectioned for transport. No more giant branches or book shelves or tree rings to climb on, leap and swing from. And remember how we used to laugh at the cartoons. Little Orphan Annie and ‘gee whiskers’ and ‘leapin’ lizards, and ‘warbucks’ and you will be alone once again in the clear cut, among the stubs, the twigs, the slash and the scrub. The “America trunks” are long since gone, removed, transported, emptied. Abandoned by generations before you, though you are still hanging onto the handle. And you are ashamed to say so. Why is this so?

You would begin by collecting a thing, things, and then a structure in which you could contain things, like fear and loneliness and where did I come from and where am I going, and all the other things that are everywhere always so alike. Do you have enough of that thing now, that thing on this thing? Is there a nature reserve big enough to contain it? Don’t worry, it’s still somewhere around here, a protected species. So when are you coming home?

...tbc

On Lotta Lotass

When the Swedish Academy announced last week that Lotta Lotass had been appointed to seat no. 1, I have to admit my curiosity nearly ran amuck. I had never read anything by her before, though the name sounded familiar. Her family name alone ‘Lotass’ [lynx paw] was enough to leave a scratch, which is pronounced: Xu&rr XU&RR. That no single person by the family name ‘Lotass’ exists in the Swedish public telephone directory, coupled with the fact that the word ‘lotass’ does not exist in the Swedish Academy’s own glossary of Swedish words, is curious - to say the least. Xu&rr XU&RR . Nor is the first name ‘Lotta’ on the Swedish Academy’s list of first names. Otherwise we know that Lotta is a nickname for Charlotta, a feminine diminutive of Charles - Purrr Purrr – and that a ‘lotta’ is a dutiful member of the Swedish Women’s Voluntary Defence Organization, a kind of a local girl scout.

Lo and behold her paw, I think I’ve got it: a poetic Pseudonym At Work. Perfect for Internet publications, with lots of links to what is to come from this particular species of a rare (undomesticated) domestic animal. An illegitimate kitten (born 1964) is to become a legitimate member of the family on 20 December, even though she's unlisted.

To refresh our window, let us recall that this is a beast that still lives in the forests that cover most of Sweden’s inland territory, and in rocky places. It prowls mostly at night like most Internet users. The lynx also likes to climb trees and go out on limbs. Its paws are large enough to serve as snowshoes, which prevent it - unlike its prey - from breaking through the crust. The lynx lives mostly on foxes and deer, and sometimes on sheep and chickens. The female lynx is known to use her claws to fight viciously for her kit n kin, her most powerful links to the future.

So the Swedish Academy is installing a Swedish girl scout to use her lynx paws to work hard, primarily in defence of the Swedish language, in a modern global medium. The Swedish Academy is installing the AUTOR_ETER program, a species of persona non grata to do the dirty work, and catch up.

Having done my homework, a little basic research, I proceeded to google the name “Lotta Lotass” and take a walk to my local bookstore, where I purchased a copy of “Den röda himlen” [The red sky]. There I note (on the back cover flap) that Lotta Lotass was born in 1964 in Borsheden, a small town in western Dalarna, the province most known for its Swedish cultural work horses. Her maternal grandmother’s father, Leonard Karlsson, was a diamond driller for the Grängesberg mining company who disappeared while working in Russia at the outbreak of World War I. He was pronounced non-existent on the 20th of December 1920.

We’ve got less than a year from now to find out for sure whether or not Lotta Lotass really exists. Her installation is planned for the 20th of December 2009 according to a press release from the Academy (6 mars 2009), in Swedish only. Read, and read on. What could be a more legitimate cause to celebrate?

Stockh_____ March 2009

Freiheitliche ordnung
1:6 Let there be expanse between the waters
to separate water from water
1:8 And God called the expanse "sky".
to fill depressions in the earth's surface
2:2 and on the seventh day he rested

Today's Oxymoron:
mournful optimist

Engelbrekt's Freedom Song

I am reminded today of a translation I did in the early 80s for an international peace conference at the Stockholm Concert Hall of this psalm, which was sung in four part harmony by children of Adolf Fredrik's Music School. If anyone out there happens to have a recording, I'd be grateful.


Freedom is God's open hand
To be sought in every land
By one who knows to hold it
By one who knows to hold it.
God has given soul and mind
Better free than chains that bind
With freedom cometh honor
With freedom cometh honor

Se original text (1439) på svenska med musik av Alice Tegnér:

http://runeberg.org/display.pl?mode=facsimile&work=vitaband&page=0128

Investigation on the bridge

The Investigating officer (IO) has been asked to interview Anna Modig (AM) and Inga Svanmärkt (IS), both artists-in-residence, on the scene of an alleged crime.

AM: Remember officer I am coming from different directions and so my perspective may be different.
IO: Well, could you please begin by telling me a little about that perspective. Where you were going, what you intended to do when you got to the bridge?
AM: I wasn't going anywhere, officer. That's just the point. I am becoming.
IS: She didn’t intend to do anything here, sir. She is just passing over. She's a commuter, sir. She crosses that bridge every day to get to her job.
AM: I’m following her; I have no intention, really, other than to keep an eye on her, focus on my work. Watch and see what she does.
IO: So why did you choose the western bridge?
AM: I don’t think of it that way sir. I mean that it is a western bridge. For me, it could just as well be an eastern bridge. Depends on where you come from I guess. No, I didn’t think of it as a western bridge, though we do live and work in the west.
IO: So you were not trying to flee from the east by taking the western bridge?
IS: No sir, she had no idea she could choose a different bridge, only that she has to get to work.
AM: The view can be dramatic from the middle of the bridge.
IO: Dramatic?
AM: Maybe that’s going too far, saying too much. I don’ want to exaggerate, but the view at sunrise and sunset can be dramatic, and I must admit there is something very special about a perspective that spans an ocean, from one continent to another.
IO: Excuse me, where did you say you live?
IS: She lives somewhere between Stockholm and San Francisco now.
AM: That’s mostly where I work too.
IO: Now that is very important information.
IO: Is there anything else that may have affected your choice of a bridge?
AM: Yes, as a matter of fact, I like the shape…Upside-down single suspension. I think it looks familiar, reminds me of my childhood. And it has both a foot and a bike path. No matter how you look at it, it is close on both ends to where I live and work today. Reliable for personal transfer.
IO: Excuse me, the shape, what were you about to say about the shape?
IS: Well, it’s like a full moon rising. And if you look at its reflection when the water is still, and fall for it, you can see the big dipper.
IO: Has it occurred to you that your intentions may have distorted your observations?
AM: Not mine so much, but Ingo’s perhaps. The rush hour commute can be exhausting.
IO: And so how do you think that her distortions may have affected the outcome of this investigation?
AM: Maybe I interpret the bridge to be a part of my golden cultural heritage, a right of passage. Maybe she thinks it is a gateway to the other side.
IO: Can you speak for yourself Inga?
IS: Maybe I jump too quickly to conclusions. I was just trying to get to work, maybe afraid of losing my job.
IO: And what did you think was at the other end?
AM: That’s what I'm still anxious to find out.

International Women's Day

Last night I found myself reading my diary from a trip to Mexico in 1979. It was an unexpected page-turner. I was fascinated by the most intimate reflections of a young woman, traveling alone in a foreign country, at the tender age of 32 – her self-esteem, empathy, intellectual mobility, and vulnerability. I LOLed and WOPed over her portraits of many of the people whom she encountered, some of whom she “hung out" or traveled with during those months.
One of many constantly recurring themes in this diary is how this smart, independent, young and therefore attractive this woman - who was me too - chooses to deal with the discovery that she is being followed, sometimes harassed by men. The natures of the incidents vary, as does the way she handles each potentially precarious situation. Could it be me? So very alive and in touch with her inner, and in the spirit of International Women’s Day, I offer an excerpt from that handwritten diary:

Mexico City, August 10, 1979:
…when I finally calmed down after the bus ride back into the city, I went out to the Anthropological Museum in Chapultepec. I spent a lot of time in the bookstore, browsing and reading and then took a look at the sound and light orientation show, which gave a dramatic perspective on the museum. Afterwards I went and sat in the sun on the museum terrace. A young Mexican man approached me and we had a conversation about rituals, he even wanted to talk about drugs. He seemed naïve, though sincere. Mostly I was happy that he enabled me to speak again to young Mexican men, face their weaknesses, their vulnerability without feeling so vulnerable myself. Unfortunately, on the bus home to the Velasco’s I was forced to confront one more insipid type who couldn’t keep his hands to himself, and muster the courage to say: “¿No puede dejarle la mano a su mismo? [Can’t you keep your hands to yourself?] He looked vacuously awestruck. He got off at the next stop and the rest of the bus ride back was pleasant.
When I returned home I let off a little steam with Olivia and then went upstairs to wash off the filth of Mexico City streets. The shower helped a lot; felt like a new person. After a cup of coffee with Alberto, and a brief nap, I went back downtown to the Zona Rosa without any incidents. I planned to meet Angela for a concert later in the evening.
I arrived at the Toulouse L’Autrec [my favorite restaurant with its inexpensive and delicious tortilla soup, which I make to this day], just in time before the afternoon deluge, the inevitable torrential rainfall. I found a table in the courtyard, under the awnings where I could watch it pour cats and dogs, and even marbles and baseballs, huge bits of hail that bounced like ping pong balls off the awnings and terrace, forcing people who sat too close to the edge to move indoors or to some other cover. It was a short, merciless hailstorm that I found entertaining. I was one of the only people still outdoors.
After dinner, while sipping my coffee, a tiny hunch-backed woman came up to me with an enormous bouquet of pink roses, saying “Los caballeros en la mesa alli le han mandado.” I asked her which table and she pointed up to a table along the balcony railing of another restaurant facing onto the courtyard. I looked up and saw a table of handsome young men looking in my direction. I lifted my hand and nodded toward them to say thanks, and one of them nodded and waved back. I rubbed my nose in the fragrance of the flowers, and breathed deeply. When I left the restaurant no one was following me. I had enjoyed an elegant gesture.
I left for the concert, where the first piece was The Selection of Love of a poet: “Si me has amado, cariñito, te mando todas mis flores, y ante tu ventana resonorará la canción del un señor. “

…To be continued

Time out for the multicultural human being?

Many people, even in a country like Sweden that has been quite homogeneous until fairly recently, live a multicultural life. We do so not because it is fashionable, not because it serves a worthy social cause, or to profile ourselves in the local media, but because it is an aspect of our identity, an integral part of who we are.

As one of the last to appear at an “all-employee, last-hired, first-fired, age before beautiful information meetings” in the spirit of the global financial crisis this week, I remarked facetiously to one of my colleagues who was already seated to my left: “I think I’ll plead age and take a seat here.” Expecting a welcoming smile, despite the tension in the air, I was shocked by the response: “So where do you think everyone else is supposed to sit, on the floor?”

Powerful feelings produce a void in thought, a time-out, where language and meaning can enter to effect a shift of consciousness that blurs the boundaries between self and other. I am in a twilight zone occupied by rituals, open wounds, islands, dreams awakening, solstices, beaches, immigrants, witches and brooms. As a writer, editor and translator, I am constantly investigating the many ways in which my cultural backgrounds affect my sense of self, what it means to live a multicultural identity, as well as other aspects of being human.

Perhaps I am preparing to consider what the future may hold once globalization becomes so extensive that individuals begin to shift their identities in-between cultures, to a seat where identity is less associated with specific ideologies, values or traditions, and more self-reflexive.

On youth-in-asia?

Our Mago, Gammie, Gerdie, Gertrude Kreigh Ryan died in Menlo Park, California, in the early spring of 1977, just before her 91st birthday.
Official cause of death: drug poisoning, an ill-fated mixture of medicines, separately prescribed to treat what may have been symptoms of an undiagnosed pancreatic cancer. I am told that just prior to her death she pulled out the intravenous feeding line and the oxygen tubing and said: “If this is what’s necessary to keep me alive, then I’m not for it.”

That night I dreamt that Mago had called us all to her bedside. She sat up with her unwieldy grey mane sprawled over and above delicate deaf ears. And there was that huge, familiar horse- tooth smile, likewise the ever-present twinkling of eternity in her big black-brown eyes. She was holding audience for the first and last time in her life, in a hospital room. As she waved to us all to have a seat, I noticed her bony index finger pointing toward the Duralex glass on her bedside table. She would drink, but not yet.
First she wanted to thank us all for coming, emphasizing how humbled and happy she was that we all could be there. Then nothing she said could be a surprise any more. “My father time has come with his scythe and wants to take me home to his pig farm in Indiana. I’m gonna surprise him though, gonna put on my slippers now and shuffle off the diving board. When he comes you can tell him I’ve already jumped off the deep end, into the deep blue waters of the San Francisco Bay, that there’s no point in lookin after me, cause I'll be sunk like a rock to the bottom.”
She then picked up a little foil packet and sprinkled its content into her glass. I knew then that the water in her glass wasn’t as fresh and pure as it appeared. It seemed clear enough, but became saturated with cowbane as the flakes fell like snow on wet Stockholm streets at this time of year, I recognized the bulk medium, the tiny seed-coats that can absorb so much moisture. You had to swallow it fast before it solidified. I knew that Mago would therefore empty the glass immediately, in one fell swoop, and so I left the room alone.
I took a seat in the corridor of the hospital and waited. After a few minutes the doctor came out to inform me that you had passed.

-----
Apropå den svenska debatten om aktiv dödshjälp i livets slutskede, undrar jag varför Sverige inte uppmuntrar något som i USA kallas "Medical Power of Attorney" där en vuxen, klart medveten människa får uttrycka sin vilja om huruvida livsuppehållande åtgärder ska tillämpas i olika situationer medan hon är mentalt frisk. Beträffande livsuppehållande åtgärder i livets början, bör ingen enskild läkare behöva fatta ett sådant beslut eller agera ensamt, utan efter diskussion och gemensamt beslut med ytterligare en medicinsk kunnig samt minst en förälder tycker jag.

On a magic carpet

Dear Mago,
I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing the moment I learned of your death. I was in the basement of an apartment building on St. Eriksgatan in Stockholm, helping a friend to move furniture into her new storage space. I had slipped an unopened letter from my sister into my pocket earlier that day, awaiting a moment when I could reflect on its content. A letter from my sister was rare, always well-written and to be cherished, at the right moment.
Alone for a moment, resting on a rolled rug, I recalled the letter. I pulled it out of my pocket, held it up to the light for a second, and decided that the moment had come. I hoped to have just enough time, to rip open the envelope and read:

Dear Sue Anne,
I just wanted to let you know that Mago passed a couple of weeks ago…”

I managed to read the entire letter, to learn about your funeral, who was there, some of the many memories of you that had been shared there, just before the automatic timer extinguished the basement lights.

When my friends returned some minutes later, they found me in the dark, sitting on that rug roll, devastated, feeling deprived of my own history. They have probably forgotten the incident - I was there to help them move - but I haven't. Tonight I plan to unroll that magic carpet.

… to be continued in the morning when my dream is refreshed.

On the broom

The first thing I did when I came home this evening was to pick up the broom by the door. Holding it upside-down, I paraded in with my staff, as if to say "My home is my castle." Yeah. Yeah. What was it I had come home to do today? To sweep, or to take my staff out onto the balcony where I might hold audience? So many current subjects to address. So much dust that has collected here.
As absurd as I may have appeared from a distance, I did actually choose to go out into the chill and tramp the sooty snow on my balcony. I didn't go out to clean, though. It's too early for that. I went out because I wanted to count the patined pipes of the wind chimes that had been hanging out there so quietly all winter. I weathered the cold to confirm that my instrument did still, in fact, consist of five pipes, all the prerequisites for a global pentatonic scale, enough for amazing grace to sound in passing winds.

Once out in the cold I had to lean and stretch across the pots, planter boxes, and insulation material, and get into a position to poke and pat around the rails to distinguish the brass pipes from the surrounding wrought iron bars. I had to give them a knock to break the dry twist of last year's grape vines, climbing roses and sweet peas. My rummaging failed to make much of a peal. Was I deaf or had the filth of the traffic on the street below, coupled with winter's icy grip, muted them so?

Eager to hear more, I took ahold of the bristles of the broom, its scruffy mane, lifted the wooden handle and having caught sight of what I was looking for, hit the bars and pipes as hard as I could. Damned. I wanted to hear those pipes, loudly and clearly. Then suddenly, overcome by a fear that someone - on the street below, on their way home from their job, to the bus, so-called normal people on their way to the grocery store, or to pick up children from school, afraid of losing their jobs - might misinterpret what I was up to. So I stopped and went in. Silly goose? Ghost? What had I seen? What had I heard? Was it the angry shout of a rebel army in the courtyard below, calling for my abdication? Delusions of grandeur? Someone else's resignation? My own? Or was it simply an elusive glee in the cacaphony of an unexpected prison break? I LOLed, indoors.

How could I ever forget? The broom? My ever faithful vehicle?

One of my first jobs in this old – new to me – country, to which I came ostensibly for love, was to rise each day at the crack of dawn and clean the floors of the John Wall AB Hardware Store – everything for house and home. I swept, though not groomed to push a broom. I didn't mind much. My colleagues were all sorts of friendly women from other countries, none of whom spoke much Swedish. We communicated with our hands and feet and trusted one another. Katarina and Yolanda and I were a team. Our hours there were five to nine ante meridiem , upside-down work hours in the year of the world (a.m.), Monday through Saturday. That was before we organized to punch the clocks for one another in the basement of Paul U Bergströms, thus enabling an hour or so of extra of sleep, at least one day a week. The supervisor didn't arrive until 8.30 and by then we were all there on duty with our mops in hand, bent over a wet floor. We did it. In a pinch, we could do it again. When I punched out at 9 a.m., I went on to art school and Katarina and Yolanda left for their day jobs.

A year or so later.
up against the Wall
I could finally write
my long awaited
Dear John letter:

Bäste John,
Efter flera års utbildning vid ett av de främsta universiteten i världen, och ett år på en konstskola här i Sverige, har jag nu lärt mig tillräckligt mycket svenska (och om Sverige) för att kunna säga upp mig som Er morgonstäderska.
vänliga hälsningar
En glad dam

I was pleased to announce my resignation as one of his many cleaning ladies. That was many years and jobs ago, when I could still expect a raise by getting another academic degree warmer and changing jobs. Even though my immigrant status and gender had probably set me back a couple of decades, compared to my Swedish mates, there was some strange security in knowing that as long as I was physically fit I could always push a broom.

Some four decades later, four flights up, on my corner balcony, I suddenly realized that I was still pushing the broom, and that maybe it was high time to ride it instead, now that I'm broken in here. What I did last night was to use my broom to knock on the pipes, hit the letter keys and space bars and alarm clock, and ring all the doorbells for neighbors to hear the sweeping sound it makes: I REFUSE to WASTE more time. I am replacing myself now with an older woman who wishes to age gracefully, dependent upon my neighbors for support. "Why can't we defy fire department and insurance company rules, and take a few risks needed to make this place fit for human life. Set up a bookshelf and a table by the door, exchange books and magazines and flowers and gingerbread in the empty spaces we share. Mop our own floors." That's what I said at the board meeting of my condominium association last night.
-------------
I am in the software store now, of my godchildren, generations to come or not, listening to the carillons of doctors, lawyers, chimney sweepers, carpenters and candlestick-makers. I wish to be free from all the file pushers and peddlers, and jump off the deep end into the Pirate Bay of legitimate file sharers. Sign me up for the new digital world where I can clap my hands, and tap my feet wherever I go. Watch out, sweeping through, this big bag lady is on the broom.

Caught between a rock and a hard place

Today I'm reacting to the local (Sweden) debate on nuclear energy vs. fossil fuel:

I dagens globala värld som kännetecknas av medicinska och teknologiska framgångar är det engelska uttrycket “to be caught between a rock and a hard place “ (svårigheten att konfronteras med två otillfredställande val) onekligen mer tidsenig än “att fångas mellan pest och cholera”. Ska vi, och många generationer efter oss, nu bli fångna i ett “slutförvar” under Oskarshamn eller Forsmark, mellan urberget och en kopparkapsel? Eller mer kortsiktigt mellan Vyborg och Greifswald?

Vetenskapsmännen ifrågasätter hypoteser om CO2 som den globala smutskastaren. Vem ifrågasätter politiker? Jag har svårt att förstå varför vissa politiker fortsätter att förklara politiska framgångar såsom det vore ett val mellan ytterligheter, mellan den “rena” kärnkraften och det “smutsiga” fossila bränslet.

Är det för mycket begärt att den politiska debatten nuanseras för att rymma existentiella spörsmål? Alternativ ur ett existensiellt perspektiv, medveten om begränsningar i människans liksom jordens resurser?

Trots min generationstillhörighet tror jag att jag börjar förstå ungdomars (Warcraft) uttryck “between a rock and a Thistlefur”.

Moodysson's Mammoth

On an editorial published yesterday in a Swedish daily newspaper (Per Gudmundsson SvD 6/2/09, http://www.svd.se/opinion/ledarsidan/artikel_2430341.svd) about the film "Mammoth", by the Swedish director Lukas Moodysson. I write:

Det var onekligen intressant att notera en gränsöverskridande recension om Moodyssons film på ledarsidan igår. Intressant också att inlägget rubricerades med en retorisk fråga. "Inte är väl Lukas Moodyssons film kvinnofientlig?" Är det av en slump att kulturdelen av Svenska Dagbladet inbäddades igår i en bilaga om den globala finanskrisen? Kanske har vi Lukas Moodysson att tacka för att kulturen äntligen fick lyftas till ledarsidan?
Även om jag inte kan hysa den hybrisen (läs: kristallkulan) som svar på frågan förutsätter, kan jag åtminstone delge några av mina funderingar. Jag kan tillägga att jag berördes varken av Moodyssons Tillsammans eller Fucking Åmal, men däremot av Lilja 4Ever och Mammoth, kanske för att perspektiven för de två förstnämnda var för lokala (applåderna på biografen fick mig att känna mig som en främmande fågel bland sällskapsresenärerna). Flera av mina utländska arbetskamrater visar sig benägna att hålla med.
Som engelskspråkig, associera jag ordet “Mammoth” förstås med “mamma" och "mother”, liksom med den sårbara “moth” som i mörkret och kylan söker sig till ljuset som människan tänder. Det ostyckade substantivet “mammoth” står även för en död, utslocknad, ett jättedjur som en gång fanns på norra jordklotet. Att allt detta får mig (en gammal kärring född i Asien som varken har svenska som modersmål, eller barn) att fatta pennan på egenhändig svenska uppfattar jag som stort. Och för mig ryms kraften i ordet "mammoth" vare sig på en PowerPoint eller ett pennskaft, eller på en insändarsida.
Jag uppfattar inte att filmen är kvinnofientlig - inte att läkarmamman från New York eller au pair mamman från Filippinerna vantrivs med sina jobb. Inte heller uppfattar jag att dessa kvinnor misslyckas etiskt med sina arbetsinsatser. Förutsättningarna är ju begränsade, vilket de tycks begripa. Däremot är det klart att männen i filmen tycks spela mindre etiskt försvarbara roller, som gränsöverskridande affärsmän respektive pedofil. Trots detta och till skillnad från ledaren, finner jag ingen tydlig sensmoral - åtminstone inte den som ledaren föreslår: att yrkesarbetande kvinnor leder till otrogna män och döda barn - utan snarare att filmen pekar på att problemen är ytterst komplexa.

Utan en mysbrasa* framför mig (snarare med ett ständigt raseri inombords) betraktar jag orättvisan och girigheten i världen, liksom inom mig. Vem vill se sig själv som en nattfjäril, bländad av sin längtan, eller som en benknota inlagd i ett pennskaft? Som en människa vill jag varken identifieras med ett utrotat djur eller med en insekt. Begränsad av min mänsklig sårbarhet vill jag hellre identifiera mig med kvinnorna än med männen i denna film, liksom med deras vingslag mot en stjärnhimmel och arbete med blod och bleck.

*ledaren betraktar filmen som en trösterikt fredagsnöje för småbarnsföräldrar.

Stringing natural pearls

4 Haikus

Stringing natural pearls.
Keep piling up on the stove.
Notes and anecdotes.

Rolling round noontime.
Beady-eyed spoon stirs in blue.
Forever strung out.

Halo time to scour.
Bright whistling copper kettle.
Tea tone for myself.

Nuclear deposit
Between rock and a hard place,
devil and the deep blue sea.

String note on a wet bag.

A grain of sand

However sloppy they may be, I try to make a note of my thoughts as often as possible. Sometimes I discover notes scribbled on crumpled pieces of paper in my pocket, by my bedside table, on a notepad by the phone, or at the bottom of my backpack, and wonder who wrote them. While I discard most of them, some remain a source of irritation or stimulation.
Natural pearls are hard to come by.

Judit's second-hand

Why do I know this? How do I recognize her?

Sally came to Stockholm to visit me in the spring of 1994. Every chance we had to share her story was precious. We were seldom alone. One day, as we boarded the bus to go out to the castle in Drottningholm, we managed to find and occupy a couple of empty seats alongside one another for one of those all too brief moments. Her second husband took a seat behind us. We were passing Judit's Second Hand, a vintage clothing store, when I pointed to the shop window and mentioned that Judit and I had come to Sweden the same year, and studied at Stockholm University together in the 1970s. I told Sally that Judit was a Hungarian refugee.

That's when Sally told me about her dream of having a second-hand shop, a dream that had been awakened a few years earlier (see previous blogg entry today) as she was hanging her mother's wardrobe in the bay window. She had wanted to keep her first wedding gown, to do something with it. That's why she had stored it in her mother's closet in the first place, nearly fifty years earlier, and why she had pinned the note "To be left behind" on it when her mother had died just a few years earlier. The removers hadn't seen her note, and when she returned to the empty house, it was gone. Too late, but the dream had lingered.

A second-hand shop, where she dreamt of fondling all the old clothing that people might bring in to her to sell. A place where she could put the past on display, pursue a legitimate occupation whether she made any money at it or not. Hadn't she loved and hoped and dispaired? She could spend each workday touching and feeling the grain of worn fabrics, breath in and listen to their stories. She would clean and iron them, sort them on racks together with other skirts and blouses, dresses, slacks and jackets, by color, material and season. They would be hers for a while, as she observed others rummaging, sliding hangers to get a better view of one lift one and lift another out with curiosity and delight, to take to a dressing room. Her eyes would follow them to the intimate space, and watch them as they emerged from backstage, from behind the curtain, to strut around the shop. She too would catch their reflection from a little distance, in a full-length mirror, and sense the dizziness as they spun around and stopped, shifting weight and planting the palms of hands on hips. Did this piece suit them? Together for a moment, they would observe how the fabric fell over shoulders and across breasts. Did it do the trick, and manage to conceal a vulnerable bulge in their thighs or buttocks? Did they see something new, in themselves, some unexplored territory? Look what a nice cut, such a flattering color or line around the waist. She would relish in the chatter, the giggles. What do you think? Doesn't the color do wonders? She would look back with them, and meet new owners, new lives.

After the war things will be different

Yes, after graduation from college things are going to be different.

When Grandma Abigail passed in June 1982, the sorting, cleaning, and emptying of her house had been overwhelming. So much to sift through, so many decisions, piles of letters, documents and photographs. Sally, her only daughter, didn’t want to save much, but on the day before the removers were to come she decided to take one last look through the stacks of boxes and bags of garbage. The chaos was now ordered, or so she thought. She glanced at the notes she had taped and pinned here and there to let whomever was to come know where to deliver things – “to the Salvation Army”, “to our house”, “to household waste management”, “to the recycling center”. She packed boxes for her two sons, and put aside a couple of mementos and a few pieces of furniture for herself.

Sensing that she had done as much as she could, she sat down on her mother’s bulky armchair, sinking into the seat that had long since lost its bounce, having given in to the weight of her mother’s body, once and for all. The upholstered arm rests were also well worn, evidence of the loyal support they had given her mother on so many occasions, especially when she had to get quickly back onto her feet. They were the levers that had helped to heave her heavy body to an upright position so that she could move on to her chores.

Sally wasn’t ready to get up yet though. She leaned back and surveyed the room, breathing a sigh of relief over a job well done, and let her eyes wander along the empty spaces and through the passageways between boxes and furniture.There were all those pieces of clothing she thought might be of value, to anyone, that she had brought out of the closets and hung on the curtain rod in the light of the bay window earlier in the week. She could clearly see the note she had pinned to the woolen overcoat, hanging in front of this open wardrobe. She knew that the message read that everything hanging in this window, with the exception of one dress, was for the Salvation Army pick-up. Waiting for a feverish flush to subside, she recalled the note that she had attached to that one dress: “To be left behind”. Though she couldn’t see that note just now, she was quite sure that it was still there, pinned to the front of an elegant bone-white gown with a full-length skirt that fell far below the hems of all the other clothing hanging in the window.

She was looking at that gown now, the one she had worn on her first wedding day in June 1942, when she had married her college love. Were they crazy? They had set the date. They were to be married just two weeks after her graduation from Stanford and a month after Tom’s return from service as a Royal Air Force pilot. He had enlisted after his own graduation from Stanford in 1940, just six months before the US had entered the war. Would Tom soon be returning to the front, or stay for good? Would things be different now that she had graduated and could work too? The questions were there, but on that day they had put them aside to celebrate. Love, hope and charity.

From my Laxdale notebook

(con't from "One of those days" 11 January):
I suppose I should be grateful for the elusiveness of that day now. When father suggested, from under his bushy grey brow, that we take a walk in the woods, I knew that it was more than a suggestion. When he gave me that surly, ashen look it meant that I would not only benefit from exercise and fresh air, but immediately and duly be rewarded. Another initiation into one of his secrets places was forthcoming. Father takes great pride in his familiarity with virgin forests and all their magic glades, moist mires, and plentiful pantries full of berries and edible mushrooms. These are the kinds of secrets that are meant to make poor people feel rich.

His grey-green high rubber boots make his feet seem oversized, add a funny footing to his slight build. The volume of his boots, coupled with the vision of his bulky handknit Norwegian sweater and down hunting vest, give him the semblance of a varsity team player. I wonder what he would make of my association today. His fur-lined earflap cap is a queer helmet that shadows his brow and softens his mien, as if to say ‘I am content, because you want to understand the secrets of the forest, your most intimate birthright.”
Under the staircase were various and sundry shoes and boots. I pulled out a couple of pairs for R to try on. They fit and she seemed delighted.

Notes from Laxdale

This bog is full of disordered fragments. (con't from 23 Nov.)

Had my father lived to be the author of this story, it would undoubtedly have been very different. Now it is high time to reveal what surfaces in fairy rings, in all the knotted morelles and truffles and berries that were laid out on our dinner table.
To tell my story is not easy because most of its images are not visible to the naked eye. It is a story quite different from tangible scenes of violence, sexual or other kinds of physical abuse that people seem to easily understand. Insults are not always physical, nor are they contained in isolated sentences, word against word, evidence that cannot be used to hold up in court. To think that all that unavoidable filth still nourishes mushrooms, meadow grasses, wild flowers and berries.
Like original sin, many insults are subtly, insidiously, and manipulatively developed over decades and so passed on from generation to generation. I believe that the purpose of art is not to nourish these sins nor to sublimate them, but to lift them to the light for forgiveness.
To tell my story I must carefully unwind all the strands that connect frostbitten cranberries afloat in a bog that father revealed to us that day. Precious few are privy to witness the scrabble that these tiny fruits, like a myriad of uppercase and lowercase letters, compose in their natural habitat. Once embedded in the moss, it is quite a painstaking task to untangle all the delicate threads of deep red and purple letters that have grown and drifted so far apart. And yet this what I must do in order to decipher the original order of these words, the sense of my story, to fulfill the purpose of my own art and craft.
Treachery lies not in the silence of this pristine quagmire itself, but in the silence of those who have been seen this magic carpet and were at a loss to sit down and tell its story. Knowing that this thick green moss both dampens sound and conceals natural decay, I walk carefully upon it, bearing witness to unfolding fantasies without fear of an inevitable ripple, at a pace quick enough to avoid sinking. I am travelling on a magic carpet.

One of those days

It is one of those long bare winter days in Sweden that I usually have such a hard time remembering, much less describing. There are so many of these days, all so alike, so monotonously grey, void of sounds and colors. You wake up to a cool, damp daylight, rather than to sunlight. Day in and day out, no fog, but a mist that veils contours and deceives depth. When you look out the window, the weather is as enigmatic as it is predictable and thus an easy excuse to go back to bed, curl up and read. It is one of those days.

When I woke up this morning I made a pot of tea and then went back to bed and read for a couple of hours. After a shower I managed to put in another intensive couple of hours of writing before it was time to join some friends for jazzbrunch at Mosebacke with Swing Magnifique.
On the way to Mosebacke, M and I talked about the history and demography of Palestine, of the Gaza strip. We agreed that we are tired of macabre reports and at a loss to affect change, but we can at least try to understand.
Late breakfast, later lunch, good company and swinging music had my feet tapping to sounds like Django Reinhardt. The view across the approach to Stockholm was magnificent, even if the water was invisible.

Now I am recalling a day like today some 30 years ago, spent with a friend on her father’s farm in the Swedish countryside. Perhaps I was confused, maybe even frightened, by the unfamiliar landscape, by strange signs and tacit signals from my company then. On a milky day like today, I find myself easily preoccupied - then as now - by something that happened before, on another day, in another place. Yes, it is a day like that, when I am neither here nor now for very long.

Better late than never

Even stale bread can be broken...if only to feed the birds.

I would have put these out fresh for you, but my Swedish Internet Service Provider (comhem.se) has been unable to deliver. Sorry Karin Thunberg (SvD today). I know you don't like the word "to deliver" (leverera), but we can always try to teach the younger generation the meaning of words and hope that they get the message.