Sundown 15.08 p.m. CET

(interpretation of Hades and Euclid II by Harry Martinson)

Hade’s oven fell
onto flat land
passing arbitrary judgments,
burning in brick huts
- superficial gravestones -
victims of shallow treatment,
without solace from above
without support from the depths,
regarded of no value
regarded without redress,
regarded without measure of eternity.
Their wailing meets with scorn,
and the crown of measure, Euclid,
cries out, seeking Chronos’ sphere.

Snowfall (dedicated to Christian Bök)

Snow falls, snow falls. Snow falls, and with it the ideas of snow (ideas playful, cool, elusive). The first snow falls with the graceful descent of a few feathery flakes. These scattered crystals mesmerize as they pass by our window, some generating particular awe as they float back up into the sky. We wonder if they are falling to confirm gravity or to prepare for a second coming. When snow falls we talk about the weather, how complex, irresolute and trivial it is, and how you must know everything to foresee it. And yet like meteorologists, when snow falls we continue to forecast, knowing all the while that we are just guessing. If the first snowfall seems to mock us, we are not offended, because we can see that as soon as it touches ground it is short-lived. The first snowfall hints at natural patterns, the beauty as well as the devastation of climate change. Scientists tell us that all snowflakes stem from hexagonal ice plates and that when the temperature is close to zero and the wind is still, these microscopic plates use the humidity of the atmosphere to branch out, but that when it is windy and only slightly cooler, they form hollow shafts, minute needles. And so as snow falls on a wind-still day like today, fluttering flakes – each with six extended wings – are silently lighting upon our windowsills like a cheerful chorus of Christmas carolers, though they remain silent. When snowflakes fall, we are reminded that they have not come to be heard, but to bring silence, to insulate, to seal cracks, to hush birds, muffle footsteps, dampen noisy traffic, and to reflect the light of the moon and the stars. Snowflakes fall, ever so quietly, fascinating us with their spectacular choreography in a new light. A couple of hexamerous bodies careen toward our panorama to the rhythm of a tango, freezing in a brief moment of passion and intimacy, before abruptly changing direction and swiftly disappearing from our sight. Others whirl like tiny dervishes in a trance. Each flake has its own path to follow through layer upon layer of atmospheric change. Each and every member of these dance troupes is unique and not to be mistaken for some frivolous, trifling or inanimate matter. Snow falls, and with it more and more dainty, winged crystals join together in a spirited flurry, like in the second act of Swan Lake. Then suddenly, the temperature plummets and the wind whips. Snow falls, and with it old ideas of snow (driven, bitter, apocalyptic), no longer content to fall gently in flakes, but intent on piercing with needles, throwing darts, spears and javelins in a random blizzard that is surely the beast of a Second Coming, if not a widening gyre that signals the revelation of a traceless void. When snow falls now it is charged to obliterate all marks of distinction, to bury everything in its path under powdery white blankets and crusty grey sheets, and to interfere with any clear vision by rapidly zooming in and out of focus. When snow falls now, it falls in a relentless flow of cosmic particles and icy asteroids that send chills up our spine as they scrape past our windows and ports. (Occasionally and incidentally) when the snowfall lets up we are temporarily relieved by a landscape view of the winter wonderland that has just touched down on planet Earth.

snowfall

The vertical fence posts planted in my garden last year are the earthbound foreground of an experiment for today. Pointing to the sky, like a row of pencils, they border the significance of choice among a myriad of ways to create new perspectives on a day (daylight is short at this time of year). The red points of the stakes have clearly taken on new form and color. Their rusty red tips, once the tools of a proofreader, are now soft, blunt, dull and grey as erasers. Perhaps they have become the stubs of a universal conscience with which poets communicate, or the toothless gum of a Muse?

Foreign assets at risk vs. risky foreign assets

Boy, am I glad I don’t live as far far south as Malmö or as far north as Umeå, Sweden!

Yesterday Swedish media reported on two more mysterious shots at foreigners in Malmö. Today there was an article in Svenska Dagbladet, the biggest daily Swedish newspaper (sourced from the biggest local news feed, Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå, TT) about doctors in Umeå doing controversial experimental surgery on foreigners. We have learned to trust our papers. Altercation. But real snipers and knifers are closing in (ever since Sverige Demokrater, the local populist party, entered the Swedish Riksdag?). I think this is getting really crazy (read: scary). Who and what are we to trust?

Maybe we should trust Google translate. After all, funny as it may be,it does at least give some sense (to the discerning mind?) of what is going on in the world around us.

The original TT article is in Swedish ( I encourage everyone who is familiar with English to enjoy testing Google translate) can be found at: http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/riskabel-hjarnkirurgi-pa-utlanningar_5550727.svd

This is the push:
A certain type of lobotomy-like brain surgery is no longer performed on patients because of the high risk of permanent damage. But operations continued in Umeå until 2007 - on Americans.

New snow

It snowed here yesterday.
They say that weather reports are trivial.
I say they’re fundamental.
Is it because I live in Sweden
where have all the flowers gone?



And to think that just last week
M and I packed our bikes
getting ready to move.

Swedish Election special

The dead can speak to the living, but the living cannot speak to the dead. Lars Gustafsson

If you haven’t yet read Dagens Nyheter’s article (19 Sept) “Two poets on their way to the ballot box” - email correspondence between poets Lars Gustafsson and Göran Greider published on election day - you might want to click on the aforementioned link (in Swedish).

It’s a rare wrap full of juicy election tidbits. Wise way to make use of a Swedish daily!

Having recently published a new collection of Lars Gustafsson's poems, a swell take on the Promythean myth, I can still envision Erland Josephsson sheltering a flame flickering in his hands as he trudges through the rain, splashing across a big puddle in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia.

Let’s face it, there’s no key in the back of the Book. Though when 20 xenophobes (not just their house-trained leader) enter the Swedish Parliament, they're bound to grow some interesting bushisms). Then Gustafsson might be asked to take another look at his philosophical equations involving tolerance and intolerance. The church bells tolled on Swedish Election Day and Greider ultimately promised to wake up Gustafsson on Judgment Day.

In the meantime, you might want to follow Lars Gustavsson's blog, in Swedish.

Sommartid

“They must be keeping you in the deep freeze over there in Sweden. You still look just the way you did many summers ago.”
My Uncle Pollard (spoken at a family reunion in a redwood forest in the Santa Cruz mountains )

“Would he feel any cleaner in the snows of Sweden, reading at a distance about his people and their latest pranks?”
JM Coetzee (Summertime)

Ever since I first arrived in Sweden in the early 1970s I have always listened to a popular Swedish radio program called Sommar. These days the tag melody ‘Sommar sommar sommar’ is enough to put me into my laidback reception mode, prepared to reflect anew on the preludes to someone else’s achievement, ill-fated deeds or terms for life. Every afternoon, over a period of some 60 summer days, a series of more or less well-known personalities in Sweden are given the opportunity to host his or her own 90 minute public radio program. Air time consists of fragments of a personal monologue, broken up, tempered and joined by tracks of music.

The invitation to host the program is considered an honor, an opportunity for a seasonal crop of personalities to step out into the limelight and tell us some things we do not know, about themselves. The assumption is that those who are to host the program offer personal perspectives on life, anecdotes and reflections that will be of interest to a broad Swedish public. Many listeners believe that the honor should be a confirmation, not only of some pinnacle of achievement, but also of virtue. The latter is controversial.

Agenbite of inwit.

This summer I listened to the voice of Annika Östberg, a Swedish convict condemned to a sentence of 25 years to a lifetime, as an accomplice to two murders in California. After having served 28 years in San Quentin California State Prison, she had recently been deported to Sweden to serve the remainder of her “time”. Needlesstosay, I was curious, in much the same way as I am often curious about the lives of other Swedes who emigrated from Sweden to the San Francisco Bay Area, just before or around the same time that I immigrated to Sweden.

The thought occured to me that Annika Östberg may well have been one of the many young “street people” that I encountered in 1967 during the Summer of Love in San Francisco – a girl I saw propped up against the wall of Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley on my way to school, or a waif that asked me for spare change in the Haight -Ashbury, on a visit to my maternal grandparents. Perhaps she was that forsaken woman who caught my eye one day in Golden Gate Park, the summer before I turned away, helpless as she, to understand why. Life is not just.

I was curious to hear the voice of a woman for whom an idealized childhood suddenly came to a brutal end, despite the surrounding fragrance of the Bay Laurel and Eucalyptus. I wanted to hear the voice of a woman who for all those years - that happened to coincide with my years in Sweden - had been imprisoned behind walls that block out a magnificent view of the Richmond San Rafael Bridge and the surrounding bay. A picture postcard, without a message or an addressee and thus no chance of reprieval? I sensed that her grip on the concept of “home” was as firm as her grip on the bars of her cell. Highway to Hell (AC/DC) and Seismic Rumbles (Country Joe and the Fish) have never made so much sense, before. Was it pathetic of me to imagine that we had anything in common, that we had simply exchanged places, tit for tat? Or that we had been playing a game of musical chairs that caught us both off guard? Whose release party was I supposed to be celebrating? For what melody?

I was definitely on guard as I listened to "her" program. She must be reading, but who authored the script, I wondered? Who could have chosen a more nostalgic voice for a Swedophile: Jussi Björling, Nämner du Sverige [Mentioning Sweden]? Was it true that her grandmother’s favorite tune was En gang seglar jag i hamn [One day I’ll sail into the harbor] by Alice Babs? Swedish words seemed to flow naturally from her lips. So how had she managed to maintain her mother tongue, though she hadn’t been in the country for decades, since she was 10 years old? Like her producer, she seemed focused on this task, I thought. Over the years she has kept in touch, with plenty of support from the Swedish media, without Internet or a cell phone... Curious.