Archive for September, 2004
No need to go anywhere
30 September 2004 | Authors, Reviews
Photo: Irmeli Jung
Mirkka Rekola was a minimalist before minimalism was invented. Eschewing any poetic flummery, her passion has generally been infused into brief, enigmatic notations of moments: reports of flashes of heightened awareness.
She records ‘the best thing I remember’ – captured as it flies. It may be the sight of someone intensely loved in some very ordinary action – but enhanced by an almost visionary light: a new rug is being hugged: ‘When you were embracing it I / almost felt it was breathing, / that rug, it breathed that autumn’s colours, and this one’s.’ And nature isn’t separate from us: ‘embracing a tree we grow.’ Or: ‘You’ll never get such tenderness / ever as from the snowfall’s / thousands and thousands and thousands of moments.’ More…
The best thing
30 September 2004 | Fiction, poetry
Poems from Valekuun reitti (‘The path of the false moon’, WSOY, 2004)
At first light I put my hand
in the hollow of a white willow -
once someone's cigarette box
had been left there -
now a bird flew out
going seaward.
Touch of a wingquill on the back of my hand.
It flew higher.
In the evening
I felt its touch on my shoulder blade.
An antiutopia, updated
30 September 2004 | Authors, Reviews
Photo: Ida Pimenoff
How many goodly creatures are the here!
How beauteous mankind is!
O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!
The quotation is the motto of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World dystopia; in Shakespeare’s The Tempest the innocent Miranda sees strangers for the first time when a ship is wrecked on the shore of Prospero’s enchanted island. In Huxley’s world, created in 1932, children in the year ’600 After Ford’ are bred in test tubes, and the opium for the people, ‘soma’, is taken to fight off anxiety. More…
To sleep, to die
30 September 2004 | Fiction, Prose
Extracts from the novel Unelmakuolema (‘Dreamdeath’, Teos, 2004)
Dreamdeath
Who would not like to cheat the grim reaper? Ways are known, of course, both scientific and non-scientific, but all of them are uncertain and temporary. Except for the simplest: to get there first oneself.
The refinement of this idea was Dreamdeath’s business idea. ‘Dreamdeath – because you deserve it!’ went Dreamdeath’s slogan.
The Dreamdeath home offered those who wished it the means to the most pleasant, even luxurious realisation of an autonomic death in an atmosphere of moral approval, against a suitable fee. At Dreamdeath the client himself decided when and in what conditions he would leave his mortal clay. More…