Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

It's been a year of firsts. The first New Year, the first Easter, first Midsummer, first birthday, first All Saints Day and now the first Father's Day without you. We miss you. I miss you. The you you were before you got ill.

Mother is doing fine. You made a good decision to move back here. I'm so sorry you didn't get to experience it. She has reconnected with some old friends and have made some new ones. And she still keeps in touch with your old neighbors. She cries sometimes, especially when she goes to church. It's hard to see your Mother cry. But you know all about that.

We saw your brothers this Friday. Watched the play that might be the last one Henric does. He looked just like you on the stage. We saw that, both Mother and I. We talked about the decline of the Linnea. And we showed them the stone we got for you and Magnus. I hope you like it.

I know you were worried about my trip to Uganda. But I think that you got the message that I made a safe return. We never had the chance to really talk after that. You started your own journey, and we were not meant to come along.

I'm sorry I smashed your car. Although I know you would never yell at me or call me a bad driver. You'd only be happy I was still alive. I tried to save the sticker I got for you in Kivik, the one saying "Real men don't eat bananas, buy Swedish fruit!". It was difficult to make you happy the last years, but I know from Mother that you really liked this one. But it was stuck.

I think you'd have liked the new car we bought. A really small one. A black KIA. The kind you said was going to be your next car. You always made plans for the future. You did not go gentle.

Things To Remember

I admit. I'm a hoarder. The older I get, the more I keep on to things rather than throwing or giving them away. I also very much like my things. Not because they have any greater monetary value, but because they help me remember.

I've made several trips to Bangkok and every time I use one of the silk shawls I bought there, I remember how the breakfast mango tasted, I hear the roar from the traffic on Sukhumvit road, I feel the smoke from the fires at the temple yards in my nose and eyes, and I sense the warming sun on my skin.

From ITP I2W Bangkok 2009

Things also help me remember people. I keep my travel stuff in a black chest of drawers that once belonged to my father's aunt Bertha. She was a nurse, biking to her patients all over Småland, but also very active in helping the poor. When my father Göran went to school in Alvesta, he stayed with her and he was always very fond of her. 

Here I also keep the violet perfume flacon my mother's father Gösta gave to my grandmother Gudrun on Christmas Eve 1933 on their way back from Australia. There he transformed the stuffy Swedish church in Melbourne into a vibrant community with lots of activities for young people, a concept he took with him back to Sweden. Gudrun worked as cantor when she didn't run the vicarage. She made trousers for her daughters to wear, something of a revolution in the 1940's in rural Öland.

Not far from the sturdy chest of drawers stands a special shelf for sheets of music, simple yet rather elegant. It stood beside an old black piano that my father's mother Edith used to play. You can see and hear her play, 94 years old, at the end of Katarina Dunér's program on Swedish Houses. Edith loved reading and was always keen on learning. When her oldest son, my uncle Olle, started painting she wanted to try it herself. One of her still life paintings now hangs in my kitchen.

I've also kept a beetle boot jack. As a small child, it met me in the hallway to the teachers' house in Mistelås where my father's parents lived. Edith taught the small children and Martin the older ones. He was also very active in developing the community, initiating building a sauna at the stream and supporting the local football team. 

My parents got engaged at the football field, deep in the woods. It was my father who insisted on marriage. My mother Sigrun thought it wasn't that necessary, but he persisted, and they were married for more than 50 years. She now wears the ring she gave him in a necklace, where it encircles a small heart of gold.

From Lyse juni 2010

Today we celebrate All Saints Day in Sweden. Although we have sadly imported the commercial American Halloween tradition to some extent, this is very much a time when we gather to remember and celebrate the dear ones who've passed away. Candles are lit at the churchyards and graves are decorated with fir tree branches and cones.

Escapism

I saw you at the Central Station today. In your hoodie. Oblivious of the crowd. Enchanted, not by a broccoli forest, but by your smartphone.

My brain saw you before my eyes did and it gently steered me to the right to avoid a collision. Although my heart missed a beat, my step didn't falter and I continued to Moderna Museet.

I watched the exhibitions, sculpture after sculpture. And I wondered about what we choose to perceive. Social realism is not my thing. "I get enough of that in reality" I say when friends want me to watch a Roy Andersson movie. I also hide behind my camera, preferring not to see myself, unless reflected in some shiny object. It's a way of life. I try to not stay in the moment.

I suppose we' humans are good at not talking about the elephant in the room. We rather pretend to be saints and look the other way. Or ghosts, omnipresent but not really interacting. Nowadays, we can even let technology help us select what to focus on through augmented reality. Perhaps I should develop some Google Glass software that identifies people who are likely to make you miserable and gives you a nudge in another direction. I think the market is bigger than just me.

You didn't see me. I don't think you ever saw me. Saw. Me. I didn't want to see you. Not the real you. So, what did we see in each other? Perhaps we were just means for self-expansion and self-supression. What I do know, is that the elephant is still here.

We Never Went to Arthur's Seat

I've just finished watching the film One Day. It wasn't my choice and as I suspected, it hit a little too close for comfort. Still, I think it was a great movie with lots of truths in it. Or maybe not.

In one recent episode of Philosophy Bites, Peter Lamarque talks about the claim that great works of fiction often contains important truths about what it is to be human. He does not think so.

As an example, he uses Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and its famous beginning: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

I think the point he tries to make, is that we should look for the truth and real knowledge elsewhere and see fiction as providing other values. What is called "deeper truths" revealed in literature are perhaps things we need to think about and pay attention to, but perhaps they have no black and white answers and maybe it doesn't matter. For example, there's been no study investigating if happy families are more alike than unhappy ones and I don't think anyone would like to really know for sure. I suppose his book, The Philosophy of Literature, is not to be considered as fiction.

For a constructivist, of course, there is no truth, or perhaps more to the point, many truths. Perhaps we should develop the concept of "true truth" further, in accordance with the Cloud Atlas. Maybe then we can find the way to universal truths. Or at least the way to Arthur's Seat.

A Time For Everything

I go to the local library a lot. Last Saturday a book in a display caught my eye: "Cottage Dreams" ("Torpardrömmar" in Swedish). A very philosophical, down to earth and beautiful book about what it's like to live in a small, old, red cottage in the Swedish countryside. The wooden house and its creaking doors and smokey fire places. The surrounding woods with glades, lakes and tall trees whispering in evening. The sunny garden with ancient flowers, fruit trees, weeds and vegetables. The shy wild animals and the hungry although affectionate domestic critters. The smooth linen cloth descending from the blue fields long ago.

The very last chapter is about time and how everything changes, but also returns. Although I'm not a Christian, I very much appreciated the quote from Ecclesiastes 3:

"There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace."

To Be or Not To Be

Hynek Pallas wrote a review of the new Xavier Dolan film "Tom at the Farm" in todays SvD. A phrase caught my eye. Actually a quote from another critic: Carl-Johan Malmberg. He said it about Dolan's previous film "Laurence Anyways" and it really hit me. 

Malmberg said that this film was about the question of how we can be to the one we love what we want to be to ourselves (in Swedish "hur få vara för den man älskar den man vill vara för sig själv"). 

I don't think I'll get the answer through watching any of these movies, although I'm sure they are good. However, I'm glad they brought me such a precise and true question.

Colour Hermeneutics

What comes to my mind when reading professor Jeana Jarlso’s article about how memories impact our impression of colour is that there is a kind of hermeneutics involved. Similar to how we must take into account the social context and intentions of a writer (any writer, not only those involved in the text that happened to go into the collection called The Bible) when interpreting a text, we need to apply the same perspectives when looking at a picture.

In 2001, I visited the Sistine Chapel and saw the restored paintings for the first time. As Jarlso points out when quoting the historian Michel Pastoureau, it is difficult to really know what the painting looked like when new since so many are different from then. We now have electric light instead of candles. Colours change with age and we don’t know if Michelangelo, Botticelli and the others intended for us to have another experience of the frescos than when they were fresh.

How do we remember colour? Was my first home really that blue? When did my mother’s hair turn from blond to white? And what colour do we really refer to when we say we’re feeling green of envy? That is, what colour did Shakespeare refer to?