Archive for March 2009
Fear of losing
Posted on: March 31, 2009
We lose many things
simply out of our fear
of losing them
Brida – by Paulo Coelho
Existential jetlag
Posted on: March 28, 2009
There was something strange about today. Like the day wasn’t suppose to happen. A miscalculation of some sort. A time gap.
I woke up from a nightmare. I was being haunted by something and was trying to escape, but every alley I ran down brought me to a dead end and another closed, blue door. I was slowly panicking. To the sound of a gentle voice I retrieved reality. Or did I not?
A white mist curtain lay over the land today. Even with degrees below zero I couldn’t see the smoke of my own exhaled breath. It blended right in with the thick dim air and faded into nothingness.
As I walked on the mud-spattered pavement I felt like I was being sucked into a vacuum of whiteness. Everything was silent except for the occasional sound of a snowdrop or the death of an icicle. For a moment I stopped and looked at a tree, as if trying to find something to hold on to. I tried to imagine all the hustle and bustle that went on underneath the barque, but although I stared at it for a long time, all I saw was a stripped and lonesome tree that didn’t move an inch.
While walking in this indistinct painting I thought about time.
I have read that everything happens all at once. That time is vertical and all events are stacked right on top of each other. We experience these events from our different reference points. That is how we grasp reality.
We are moving around time, like pointers on a clock. Ironic, isn’t?
When I got home from my somewhat peculiar walk, I made myself a cup of hot chocolate with lots of whipped cream. I opened up an old travel magazine and the title of an article caught my eye:
Existential jetlag.
Makes so much sense…
The Jayhawks – Blue (classic!)
Posted on: March 27, 2009
…
One of the good things about being home is re-discovering my old music.
This song is from the album “Tomorrow the green grass”, released back in 1995 and it is one of my all time favourites! I was 13 years old and played it on repeat on my stereo, singing along to the only word I probably understood “Blueee…”
The Jayhawks released seven albums but things changed, Mark Olson left the band and with time they fell more or less into oblivion.
Mark Olson and Gary Louris, just recently reunited on the album “Ready for the Flood” which is a great cd aswell, although they never reach the hights of “Tomorrow the green grass”, that with 13 classic songs still sound fresh and exicting to this day.
On the back of the cd there is a message, written in 1994:
“Dig in, there’s plenty to go ’round”
Crossroads
Posted on: March 26, 2009
if I could crane myself into your wheel of thoughts
grasp the imperceptible, that lingers in your silence
when you cease to speak (or you think you do)
maybe I would understand
what secret hides there, whirling like a solitary snowflake?
what doubts secure your suppression?
(the kind that makes your heart ache)
if I, in all forethought could assure
light in the shadows that you cross
faith in the ruptures that you fear
love in a resonance song, only you can hear
then, maybe I could amend
destined roads we are travelling
with your testing cranium navigator unravelling
landscapes of imaginings, hills and curves you desire to run
following your second instinct (the first is always love)
repel, repel, repel
Someone else’s words
Posted on: March 26, 2009
I was afraid that when I’d get home, I would have nothing to write about.
And I don’t.
Maybe, being sick in bed with snow falling endlessly outside my window has got something to do with it, but writing is my way to grapple somehow the impressions I get from around, the emotions that stir underneath.
“There are millions of things I could tell you, but I’ve got nothing to say…”
So, when my words empty out (or I need to get distracted from them) I read.
The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly (originally, Le scaphandre et le papillon, published in Paris 1997. In Swedish, Fjärilen i glaskupan, published by Bonniers Pocket 2008) is a story about the French director editor-in-chief of Elle that at the age of 42 suffers a massive stroke and becomes completely paralyzed.
“Locked-in-syndrome” is the tragically described diagnosis in which a patient with full intellectual capacity is trapped in his own body, capable of communicating only through an alphabet made from blinks of his eye.
And so, with this method he writes a book about the physical struggle, the desire to strike the hair on his children’s head or tell a joke to lighten up their faces. The mental journeys he makes to the closeness of the sleeping woman that he loves, the scent of a kitchen in the south of France on a Sunday afternoon, the everyday pleasures that we seem to take for granted.
För nöjes skull tar jag min tillflykt till mitt levande minne av smaker och dofter, ett outömligt förråd av sinnesintryck. Jag kunde redan konsten att ta vara på matrester. Nu ägnar jag mig åt konsten att kärleksfullt tillreda minnen.
Jean-Dominique Bauby sadly passed away three days after its release. The film came out 2008 and won many film awards.
…
One of my favorite books is by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami.
South of the border, West of the sun (originally, Kokkyõ no minami, taiyõ no nishi, published in Tokyo 1992. In English, published by Vintage 2003). It is a story about two childhood lovers, battling nostalgia and the constant wonder of “if”, in which life’s circumstances are bringing them close, yet somehow keeping them distant.
- Shimamoto-san, will I see you again?
- Probably, she replied. A smile played around her mouth.A smile like a small wisp of smoke drifting quietly on a windless day. “Probably”
She opened the door and went out. Five minutes later, I went up the stairs to the street. It was still raining. And Shimamoto was nowhere to be found.
Maybe it was an illusion, I thought. I stood there a long time, gazing at the rain swept streets. Once again, I was a twelve-year-old boy staring for hours at the rain. Look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in you head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free the world’s reality. Rain has the power to hypnotize.
This is, as close to an escape I get these days.
Lhasa De Sela – Fool’s Gold
Posted on: March 24, 2009
Succession
Posted on: March 23, 2009
- In: My Poetry
- 2 Comments
today the snow never ceased to fall
on this white coated view
of the playground from my window
seemed more like an deserted battle field
silently, my thoughts travelled to you
that’s not entirely true…
they are relentlessly departed, vanished in war
gradually, snowflakes make their way back to the core
Landing
Posted on: March 22, 2009
A week of moaning, crying, wondering and wandering only to arrive here. In my old bed in my childhood’s room with a cup of tea on one side and a slice of mud cake on the other. My mother just came in and asked if I wanted something else.
I am such a spoiled kid.
I have been writing depressing posts that I (luckily) have not published.
Instead I took a long walk to the ocean. It was frozen still except for a small crack in the ice where the water was performing a celebration dance in the sun. I sat a watched for a while on a bench.
The same bench where my mother sits on a black and white photograph. I lay in the pram next to her. This is also the beach, where I awkwardly walked covered up in clothes, the path to the kiosk, secretly admiring the other 13-year old girls playing volleyball in bikini. Around the corner is the parking lot, where I seven years later, failed my first driving test.
But now. I just look at the water and the sun and my mind is completely blank.
Time is so twisted sometimes.
I have been feeling empty, but slowly my cup is filling up again.
I realize that this is the greatest test.
All my writing, my gratitude, my philosophy is tested here. In my home town.
With old accustomed ideas and comfortable behaviours. All my talk about seeing the positive side of things, well, it may not be as clear and radiating as a fresh summer’s day in Cape Town, but beauty is constant. It’s just a matter of reflections and I need to be affirmative.
Yesterday one of my best childhood buddies called me up and said he was going to a party in a huge red wooden house in the county and invited me to come. He said there would be some interesting people there which sounded like something I needed. And true, by the end of the night we were all sitting and talking about otherworldly experiences, other dimensions and karma.
And I saw the first pristine starry sky in the Northern hemisphere in more than a year.
That I later ended up on the so called “sky bar” on Möljen and paid a stupid amount of money for a Mojito in which the bartender forgot to put sugar, that the place closed ten minutes later and I did a walk in on Stadshotellet, ran into my brother who gave me the worst rum drink I’ve had in my life and that him, his boss and me were shaking our asses on the empty dance floor to songs from 2002 before I, in the freezing night, hailed a car and asked the driver to take me home for whatever I had left in my pocket, are just matters that come with this package.
Of being home. In “Glada Hudik”.
The Escapist
Posted on: March 21, 2009
…and in the end…I lie awake…and I dream of making my escape…
Coldplay’s The Escapist
Iron and Wine – Such Great Hights
Posted on: March 19, 2009
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