If you sit in your garden and feel a bit like you’re tucked uncomfortably at the end of the dock in a guest berth, the reason is this: the garden hasn’t yet found a place in your muscle memory. Because it is only at the point when the garden has settled into your muscle memory, into your senses in as many ways as possible, that it will feel like your own. And that, of course, takes working in the garden, not just sitting in it.

So you should know your rose – not just its lovely smell but also the memory that you get from the shovel handle of when you planted it, or even the memory of the prick of its thorn on your finger. You can anchor every little detail in your senses, and it doesn’t even take much imagination. The scent of thyme on your fingertips, the downy fluff of a pasque flower against your palm, the silken glow of a peony opening in the morning sunlight – or the sumptuous mist of the wee hours of a summer morning twining over everything, and the rare experience of wading through it.

Etching a garden into your muscle memory and senses doesn’t happen in a moment, or two moments; it’s a long-term project. If you’ve felt the yard work in your limbs many times, you can take consolation in knowing that without going to that trouble the garden will never be known to you, never be your own. Overdoing it, of course, is another matter. There’s no need to  break you back for the sake of your muscle memory (says the woman who has made that very mistake). We sense things at a different pace than you might think; we need to give our senses time, they need to be awakened. When, at the end of winter, we feel oversensitive to the light, the scents and sounds, it’s because we’re partly frozen. The long period in the sterile indoors has done its work.

A gardener is happiest when she’s worked on a spot for a long time and sees it come to fruition.  A yard can be got ready-made, but a garden is another matter. If you start at the very beginning, every square metre of the plot can be connected to muscle memory. The bite of a shovel here, shifting a stone there, planting, raking, perhaps edging a flower bed. You feel it in your bones, in your core – why not in your muscle memory?

It’s moving to hear how precisely garden people remember their garden tasks. The journey from planting your first apple seedling to the time when the tree produces its first edible apple. Or when, after twenty years, you finally see the candlestick blossoms of a horse chestnut tree, long after giving up hope. Or when a peony grown from seed has enough roots to divide, to grace the ages. I never tire of hearing garden stories.

When I run into an elderly friend, I feel a great gratitude: they’ve passed many a baton to me in one way or another. The world is  a very narrow place when all our doings are with people our own age. We should strive to live in both directions: reaching to what has been as well as ahead, to what will be. When we abandon old people to their own devices, in institutions or in other ways, we abandon our own future selves. With those kind of deeds we make our own future grim –  can we really afford that?A garden often functions as a calendar, a sort of an open, illustrated diary for those who work it. I maintain that for many older people the garden also stimulates the memory. The aesthetic experience that surrounds us in the garden arouses the senses, anchors images in our minds, calms and delights us, enlivens and makes whole again things that we thought we had lost. Memories are carved out of places, people, and things. People want to carry these things with them, as part of their identity. They don’t weigh us down at all, yet there is nothing more weighty. The moment we lose them, we lose ourselves. An inherited garden, passed down in the family, is a rare thing. It may be in the muscle memories of numerous generations, and that is really something. If you have the privilege of taking care of such an inherited garden, it can function for future generations not just as a garden, but also a bit like poems that the gardener has hidden away here and there. Each person will interpret it in their own way, though there are always those for whom such a poem holds no interest. When I see a bulldozer and builder’s booth in a fine, old garden, I’m overcome with an inexpressible sadness, even though there may be a good reason for it – serious matters like real estate sales, new apartments or roads. When an old garden goes, more than one garden is nullified.

A worker at the dump once told me what the saddest sight in the world is: photo albums in the trash. So many homeless memories that no one has time to grieve an individual photograph.

Plants don’t grieve, they generally grow where they are planted, or else they stop growing. They don’t remember us, but we remember them. New life will come to take their place, whether we like it or not.

I’m sitting in the evening on the largest stone in my garden, on Derelict Hill. There are so many mole tunnels that I wouldn’t wonder if the stone disappeared into the earth and took this green-thumb with it. I guess that would stay in my muscle memory, too.

Translated by Lola Rogers

On the first day we played getting-to-know-you games. On the second day we played real Finnish baseball out behind the university. On the third day we travelled to the countryside. Classes started sometime at the end of the second week. We watched the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The professor slurped Coke, chain smoked, and rewound the video back and forth: Nurse Ratched’s plump face filled the screen and then in the next image where her face had been there was a basketball Jack Nicholson was squeezing.

It was the autumn of 1992, and I was studying film and communications theory in Copenhagen.

The excursion to the country frightened me, a shy bacteriophobic neurotic. The Danes thought the camping centre’s shared mattresses and group cooking were hygge – cozy. There is no way a dictionary translation could ever cover all the forms of cosiness the Danes achieve together. I fled the camping centre on the first morning. On the train to Copenhagen I recognised all the usual post-escape feelings: shame, fear, guilt, loneliness and overwhelming euphoria.

I did not learn Danish. I only knew one phrase fluently: ‘En hotdog med sennep, ketchup og ristet løk.’ I used it daily. After a few weeks I stopped attending lectures at all. Instead I sat in the Finnish language department’s small library room and ate pretzels and wrote short stories, long laments about loneliness and homesickness. I didn’t even bother to read them myself.

On one rainy afternoon late in October, I was once again sitting in the Finnish language department’s library idly flipping through the Copenhagen phone book. I noticed that there were five hundred Erik Hansens living in the city. I started thinking about what these Hansens think of each other. Did they feel a sense of solidarity? Did the more outgoing among them want to meet other Erik Hansens?

I wrote a new short story about loneliness and homesickness, this time such that the first person character suffering from loneliness had ended up on a summer outing with sixty Erik Hansens. I was completely saved from having to describe the loneliness because it was otherwise clear from the story that the others had a strong, obvious connection that my protagonist was condemned to be excluded from. I found that this was how I had always felt among people.

The short story about the Hansens’ summer outing finally ended up in my first book. Since I had become acquainted with the Hansens in such pleasant circumstances, I continued to think of them often. I felt like we had a lot in common. I imagined the Hansens as workaday Danes, cheerful and scrupulous. I did note the special cases – the Olympic canoeing champion Erik Hansen and the actor Erik Hansen and the artist Erik Hansen – but as I understood it, most of the Hansens lived perfectly ordinary lives somewhere in the suburbs of Copenhagen.

A couple of years passed. I was studying in Tampere and didn’t hear anything about the Hansens. That is until one day I read in the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper column ‘People of the world’ that Interpol had issued a warrant for Erik Hansen. He had committed some crimes abroad, stirring up trouble for the other Hansens, too: according to the report, an innocent Erik Hansen had been detained in Mexico because he had been confused with the Hansen the police were after. The Mexico Hansen had sat locked up in the airport jail for a day and then had been flown to London and locked up in a cell there. Around the same time, a third Erik Hansen had tried to go on a wine tasting trip to Chile – he had ended up locked up at the Santiago airport.

At the end of the news report it told how the Danish police were now considering outfitting all of the innocent Erik Hansens’ passports with a special stamp to demonstrate their innocence.

I sat in my studio apartment in Tampere’s Pispala neighbourhood thinking about all the Hansens that were travelling around the world committing crimes and tasting wine and vacationing. I also thought about the innocence stamp that the Hansens would soon receive: I imagined how they would go to the police station, and the police would applaud their innocence and give them the stamp, and how afterwards they would sit around with the policemen in the break room and chat about this and that and everything would be hygge. These thoughts made me melancholy. I would have liked an innocence stamp too. I would know how to appreciate it. It would have been nice to look at it on sleepless autumn nights.

I also thought about the constitutional principle that a person shouldn’t be forced to testify to his own innocence, but rather that others should testify of his guilt, and about how this principle of justice had always sounded somehow rotten, since it would be most pleasant if no one had to be involved in this business of testifying about people’s guilt at all. I also reflected on how unjust it was to force all of the Hansens to go to the police station to get an innocence stamp when the vast majority of them lived peacefully in their homes and certainly weren’t being driven to any old Chile by their wine addiction.

That one visual narrative detail from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the cut from Nurse Ratched’s face to the basketball, ended up being the only new thing I learned at the film school in Copenhagen. My other memories from that autumn are of city streets, of endless bicycle treks around windy Copenhagen. I still don’t know where I was going. I just rode. Cycling enthusiasts are always delighted to remind us how on a bicycle you can get close to the landscape, to the centre of life, but I just rode by. I rode by homes and parks and cafes; I rode by containers and cranes at the harbour; I rode by office buildings, empty lots, and demolition sites, past castles and red brick factory buildings.

When I returned to my digs in the evening, I left my bicycle in the dim cellar of the apartment building where dozens of reflector cat eyes glittered in the light falling from the streetlamps. Then I went up the stairs to the fourth floor, tiptoing past the landlord’s closed door and shutting myself in my room. I sat there eating cookies of the Kammerjunkker brand and reading the books I’d borrowed from the Finnish language department.

In November I wrote to Finland to ask a friend for a pulla coffee bread recipe. My intention was to bake in my sublet apartment kitchen the same kinds of long loaves as my grandmother in the 1970s. The rising phase failed. A couple of weeks later I got excited when I found a familiar pre-packaged liver casserole at the corner market. I bought a one kilo carton in a fit of homesickness. Back at the apartment when I ladled the casserole into the frying pan, it looked strangely smooth. It was Danish liver pâté.

My autumn as an exchange student should have ended at Christmas, but I fled for home on Independence Day, December 6. It was raining in Helsinki. The empty streets looked desolate. I was happy.

Since then I’ve visited Copenhagen three times and always found that it isn’t like before, that the enigmatic, inexplicable melancholy of my youth has disappeared completely from the city. Instead of the wastelands of the outer city and a dim bicycle cellar, I now notice the pedestrian street cafes and the whipped cream caps on the tall cups of cocoa. Drinking cocoa in those cafes, I’ve thought that I wouldn’t like to live my youth over again, that I would want to live someone else’s youth.

I’ve never met a single Erik Hansen, not on my trips to Denmark or otherwise. One or more Hansens may of course have happened to walk by on the bustling streets of Copenhagen, but they have melted into the anonymous, unfamiliar Danes.

Translated by Owen Witesman

‘The answer grows like the spring light. / In my desk drawer there’s something, important. / I slowly remember it.’ I wrote these words in my first published work, my collection of poetry Hämärän valo (‘Light of dusk’) from 1986. I was born in 1949, so I was something of a late bloomer.

Still I had been writing ever since I was a child. After a ten-year break, I published my first children’s book under a pseudonym. In the space of three years after that, a total of twelve books appeared in the Anni series. In 1999 I published my first novel, Maan ääreen (‘To the end of the earth’). Another ten years passed; my second novel, Herra Darwinin puutarhuri (‘Mr Darwin’s gardener’), was published last autumn.

I’ve often been asked – more often than I have asked myself – why I publish so rarely. I don’t find writing difficult, but it is difficult to write well. For me, writing well involves clarity, precision, brightness, finding just the right mood and rhythm. If it were simply a case of the classic ‘murder your darlings’ problem, it could easily be resolved through a process of sufficiently pruning the text, but such pruning would leave us with nothing but a bare tree.

Writing is such a synthetic process that it is hard to describe, as it is inherently bound up with one’s own language and mind.

Nowadays authors like to make a point of their own professionalism. Some start work at nine o’clock in the morning and continue until three in the afternoon. At the risk of mystifying and romanticising an author’s work, I admit that I am incapable of such self-discipline. I write when my soul tells me to write.

The material for my second novel built up slowly over a number of years. I would write in the evenings, at night, as once my funding had run out I had to support myself writing book reviews and columns and doing other literature-related odd-jobs. That being said, such external reasons are still almost nothing but excuses. This too may sound overly romanticised, but a novel will take as much time as it requires.

First of all, I needed a title. ‘Mr Darwin’s gardener’ is a title that just seemed to pop into my head. At the time I was living temporarily in a small village in the countryside; I used to look out of my window at the river bathing in the glow of the setting sun, behind a row of slender, bare tree trunks. And the name appeared. I had to write the book in that name, and after only a few seconds I knew that the title was not allegorical, but that the novel would tell the story of a real gardener working in Charles Darwin’s garden in the village of Downe in Kent.

Like a magnet, the title began to attract people and events, but all this happened slowly, little by little. I became frustrated that these imaginary villagers wouldn’t leave me in peace – and they wouldn’t give in to me either. At times I wondered whether I should shelve the project altogether.

Some time later I was in Berlin and went for a walk in the botanical gardens in Dahlem. All of a sudden I realised that there were tears in my eyes; I missed Lennart, the protagonist from my first novel, who eventually dies. And at the same time I missed Thomas, the man from my second novel, who had not yet been brought to life. I couldn’t bring myself to shelve Thomas, to leave him in a no-man’s-land somewhere between my head and the stuff on the page.

Reality finally gave me the kick I needed, as I daydreamed and emoted and wrote at leisure. In the summer of 2009 I was to turn sixty. I found myself thinking about this on New Year’s Eve and realised that I had to pull myself up by the scruff of the neck, up and out of the swamp. I began writing the novel using all the material that had accumulated over the years, and the moment was ripe. I achieved the kind of flow that brought my material together and honed it. I would write for many hours a day, barely having a shower or getting dressed.

Now a character called William N. is demanding my attention. He expresses himself in an irascible, croaky voice, because he’s not a particularly nice character. For personal reasons it has been weeks since I was last able to pay William any attention, but by this point I believe and know that, in my subconscious, he will be writing himself all the while.

Perhaps it is this sense of trust that keeps me going as a writer. It goes without saying that I hope I can have the mental and financial peace to concentrate fully on my writing. And it is not a question of having to meet publishing deadlines. Publishers and the literary world may try to pressure writers, but fictional characters couldn’t care less about such things.

I recently took comfort from watching a documentary about the filmmaker Wim Wenders. He confessed to being a very taciturn person. His friends and former wives said much the same thing. His latest wife, Donata, said that at first it felt as though Wim were not really listening to what she had to say. But a few days later, after giving the matter due consideration and without using any superfluous words, he would respond. In our hectic modern lives, such slowness and economy of expression seems very attractive.

If you’re not Wenders’ wife, that is.

Translated by David Hackston

The landscape of words is in constant motion, like a runner speeding through a sweep of countryside or an eye scaling the hills of Andalucia.

The proportions of the panorama start to shift so that sharp-edged leaves suddenly form small lakeside scenes; a harbour dissolves into a sheet of white paper or another era entirely. Holes and different layers of events begin to appear in the poems. Within each image, another image is already taking shape; sensory experiences develop into concepts, and the text progresses in a series of metamorphoses.

This kind of landscape is one of the primary tools in the poetry of Olli Sinivaara (born 1980): he allows sensual experiences to flood his text, while imagination simultaneously shapes, conceptualises and moulds the verbal landscape. The reader is moving through a baroque, labyrinthine world of images within images, through a sensory landscape that is constantly being born and reborn. In Sinivaara’s poetry, images are only in the process of coming into existence and reality is not yet complete.

Spindrift is flinging far out over the breakwater.
Glistening-horned oxen of multi-metrical waves
flood the streets of the palace precincts. The sun’s polished gold glitters
and spreads, turquoise’s myriad hoof-tints paw the sand.
The sky’s incredibly bright and gleaming, silver-blue.
The bellowing of those foaming ridges travels far,
sounding down to the depths of the veins,
carrying over the sickening deathly silence of millennia.
When the palace’s last remains have been trampled away,
my rainforest-footed oxen depart and settle down within
the walls of the building-site hut that’ll take the palace’s place.

As a reader, I experienced the illusion of stepping into Sinivaara’s consciousness and walking alongside him through this verbal landscape – almost like watching a film entitled Being Olli Sinivaara. I had no idea that things could be so fascinating inside someone else’s head! It’s a place where things are in constant motion, and that’s why it is best to read Sinivaara’s Valonhetki (‘A moment of light’, Teos) collection slowly; one poem a day is enough.

Exploring borders

The birth of reality is approached from a rather different perspective in the work of Aki Salmela. Salmela (born 1976) is acutely aware of the ways in which metaphors can lead us astray and how traditional turns of phrase smuggle into our minds the sort of values and presuppositions that should be taken with a pinch of salt. His collection Yhtä ja samaa (‘One and the same’, Tammi) retains this healthy sense of scepticism, but does not settle for mere irony. Salmela has a far more ambitious goal: to maintain a deconstructive hold on the text while, for instance, talking earnestly about love. Like a tightrope walker, the work is delicately balanced between irony and moments of the utmost seriousness. I say this even at the risk of finding that there is in fact no rope beneath the tightrope walker’s feet.

That said, Salmela makes constant use of metaphors – sometimes in jest, sometimes in all seriousness, for homo sapiens has no other means of approaching the unknown. Salmela questions his own metaphors. At the risk of sounding nihilistic, he pulls a new metaphor from his pack of cards and thus the motion continues, because ‘reality doesn’t consist of ideas; it consists of events, which are adept at giving rise to ideas in the minds of those caught up among them’. In Salmela’s prose poems, reality is unfinished and open; it is built from piles of useless junk upon old ruins. The project is condemned to failure, yet the work carries on regardless.

Love, like a hundred little hearts floating snowlike amidst the winter darkness. Love like a snowman in a happy family’s yard. Love like a soft knife against a hard heart. How could a poem go on indefinitely without some love-metaphors, however groundless. How could a way of speaking, how could a style of phrase. How could life, in this phase of life. And let’s assume a cloud shaped like a beautiful face floating in front of a heart-shaped moon, and glowing. And let’s assume. Love, like a carelessly kept promise, like a frail-looking seal fixed to the rest of one’s life, this little postal parcel, being carried by eternity.

Both Aki Salmela and Olli Sinivaara are products of the experimental poetry magazine Tuli & Savu (‘Fire & Smoke’); they both edited the magazine during the early 2000s. As poets, however, their paths have diverged: Salmela is interested in the classical avant garde, the American tradition of ‘language’ poetry and other post-modern trends, while Sinivaara has provocatively come out as a defiant exponent of modernism.

Where Salmela demonstrates the deceitfulness of language – the ways in which language guides and confines our thought processes – Sinivaara writes dazzlingly beautiful poetry, overflowing with images, poetry whose sheer baroque abundance makes any attempt to control it utterly futile. At first glance, it would appear that these two chaps’ aesthetic worlds have nothing in common. However, both of them write texts that exist on the boundary between language and reality – if, indeed, such a boundary is even discernible, given that we all live within the confines of language and cannot escape. It seems, however, that this is precisely what both these poets are trying to do.

Technology sometimes comes between the human body and our sense of reality in such a way that technology itself becomes our reality. Satu Manninen’s second collection of poetry, Sydänfilmi (‘Heartscan’, Gummerus), also exists in a borderland. Manninen (born 1978) has studied at the media art department of the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, and I believe that the influence of her studies can be seen in her work.

Manninen examines humans’ relationship with technology; her poems feature all manner of gadgetry – photocopiers, hospital equipment, monitors, screens and electric cables that in a variety of ways connect humans and their senses to machines. Our view of the world becomes fragmentary, as does our view of the body as time and space become increasingly non-linear. Images and sensory experiences collect, one on top of the other, or separate away from one another, and suddenly the human body no longer exists in a unified world.

The body is full of new extremities and probes that shape our experience of our surroundings: ‘On a dark road the mind goes into overdrive, / the link between the left and right lanes is broken. / I drift on to the white area of your ironed shirt, / I open the buttons and read the map of liver spots.’ There is an intimate feel to Satu Manninen’s collection, yet it deals with the kind of all-encompassing change that, unnoticed, affects our very existence with every passing moment.

How would it be to find oneself in a painting of the Fall of Man. I try to cover up the traces, paint a messier and messier dilapidated garden over it, but a garden hose twists in my belly. For so long hope swayed in the wind, and now they’re building a golf course on it, a board game loaded with hotels. The eye of a surveillance-camera eye tracks the bistros being carted along the corridors, hearts beat on the plates.

Pictures of time

In the past few years, the Finnish poetry scene has seen a great deal of so-called ‘search-engine poetry’, which makes use of our collective language hovering in the ethers of the internet. In his debut collection, Hajoamisen syyt (‘Reasons for decomposing’, ntamo), Markku Aalto (born 1970) extracts a portrait of our times from linguistic material he has found on Google; he collides different ways of speaking with one another and lets them reflect ironically upon themselves: this is the linguistic world in which we live today. Aalto  works with his material in a skilful yet cynical way.

Just love

It’s always nice to get to know new people, both possible future friends and sex mates. Free love’s on offer, love crossing class and language barriers, hopeless love and so forth. In the latest phase nervous people go weak at the knees when they’re shut up in a dark cell.

Pottering about with the course of one’s life it’s possible to produce an outline of the journey of life; typically the summer of adult life is spent in a whirl of romance. In it mature adults work for a good cause, until the woman’s on the front page of every tabloid, and then, having had a taste of the limelight, she’ll fling off her clothes as well and appear stark naked for the gaping eyes of the public. Thus death and heaven, too, will assume their appropriate places in the chronological continuum.

A mere feeling of love won’t reach further than the bridal bedside. The world falls apart – and changes, actually the very next morning. Folk sit round a candle and reminisce about people, animals etc. that have passed away. They might say aloud, in turn, that ‘I long for you – sign here – and I’d like to say to you… for example, that you’re important to me etc.’ Then they can compose themselves for prayer.

Tabloid past

Forty years ago, everything was still in a state of fermentation: traditional gender roles were breaking down; the world was changing; conservative society was confronted with a belief in progressive values. Henrika Ringbom charts the collective language of the era in her collection of prose poems entitled Händelser (Ur Nya Pressen 1968–1974) (‘Happenings. [From Nya Pressen 1968–1974])’, Söderströms). She has come up with a fascinating working method: in preparation for this collection she has reread old editions of the Swedish-language Nya Pressen, a newspaper that, in her childhood, was an important source of information for her.

A woman in space

Why not send a woman into space? Why not send her on a really long space flight? She would be forced to function. She would have to function as a functioning member of the crew. She would not be taken along as a guest. Already here on earth woman has shown that there are tasks for which she is better suited than a man. She can go from one home to the next, cut up meat, bread fish, fry fillets and freeze the dainty bits. At the wheel of the car she is best naked! The woman and the corset are a lethal combination! Unmarried mothers have more difficult childbirths. Unmarried and mother are a lethal combination! But the housewife has a dream. Her dream begins with the perfect contraceptive pill. And her dream ends. Her dream ends with the perfect water-jug. Why not send her into space? Why not send her on a really long space flight?

Ringbom explores subjects such as the ennui of many a housewife, free sex, the Vietnam War; she follows the moon landings, terrorism, hippies and the growth of affluence just as they were depicted in the pages of Nya Pressen. Ringbom’s method is brilliant: Nya Pressen’s tabloid language takes readers back to the age of innocence that existed forty years ago, but Ringbom’s winks from our contemporary perspective lend the collection an exciting cross-lighting. Rarely have I experienced moments of such clarity as while reading Ringbom’s collection.

Archetypal choices

Jarkko Tontti (born 1979) also delves into the annals of history, though not through a use of historical language but through his protagonist in Jacasser (Otava), a chattering (jacasser, Fr.) oaf (jackass, Eng.) called Jacasser. Is Jacasser the poet’s ironic alter ego, a middle-aged, sceptical, lonely man, who secretly dreams of acts of heroic bravery, though he sees the history that results from them as nothing but a trail of mindlessness? Jacasser is more of an archetype, a kindred spirit of Henri Michaux’s M. Plume, a man who wanders through history at times as the Greek teacher of Emperor Domitian, at other times as a merciless bishop in 17th-century Tartu, his relation to power remaining throughout one of both faithful servant and silent critic.

When Jacasser was old he cast his skin and renewed it like a viper, wrapped himself up as a delicate parchment, a white sheet embroidered with lace. Under his new skin Jacasser was strong and alone. In the evenings he recalled restless African states he didn’t have the courage to visit, houses whose doorbells he’d avoided in fear of an electric shock. Now he’d have time for it all, he’d and he’d. Old and in his skin Jacasser often returned to the water’s edge, sorrowed over the disappearance of the water plants and clear lake water. In the old days it would have been unheard of, the turbidity of an algae lake is the farmer’s gift to future generations. Jacasser also thought about the bottom, the new skin would keep the moisture out, all through that journey.

Tontti tells the story of his trickster protagonist in the third person. With Jacasser’s help, he compares different eras and, in an almost tragicomic light, makes his readers assess the significance of an individual life against the historical backdrop: our relationship to our fathers, to friends, love, to dreams and the seasons. The collection reaches its climax towards the end through a dramatic turn of events; all masks are removed as Jacasser exits the stage. The final poem in the collection is narrated in the first person, as close to the reader as it can possibly be: ‘I remained alone, between people.’ It doesn’t matter whether the speaker is Jacasser, Jarkko Tontti himself, or someone else. What is most important is that he is speaking.

Rules of life

In Stendhal’s classic novel The Red and the Black, the protagonist is caught between two paths: should he follow the Christian path or should he live the life of a soldier? Sinikka Vuola’s poems seem to exist in a limbo between God and our instincts; we are caught between two evils. In her collection Musta ja punainen (‘Black and red’, Tammi), Vuola (born 1972) makes extensive use of archetypes, but takes a further step into the unknown, a mythical wonderland beyond historical time.

Colours have other meanings too, which everyone who has ever gambled will surely know: only red and black can win. In Vuola’s collection, the game is a metaphor for life governed by a strict set of rules. However, those rules are of little use when our destinies are guided by coincidence, leaving us powerless to prevent death, cruelty and violence. The King and Queen of the card game fulfil their archetypal roles; they dutifully uphold the rules of the game, rules that change without our noticing. They step across a chequered stone floor, unable to escape the chessboard.

The troops are iron and steel, their weapons gold and silver
   the general, the aide-de-camp, the vehicles, the cannon, the cavalryman, the foot-soldier,
the rook, the king’s bishop and the knight,
   The king moves with dignity, a square at a time,
he cannot hurry
   and the walking stick is patched up in three places,
The castle, designed and built
    In the grandest rooms the floor
with squares too regular
   for me to feel good,
He looks at death, death at him with its bottle-green eyes: the enemy
   follows my moves but
                     illness and death don’t,
   they move wherever they want             Like the Queen
the rest are counters: hardened gold, silver and steel,

So, reality is uncontrollable: ‘the enemy / follows my moves but / illness and death don’t, / they move wherever they want’…. The theme of control is also apparent in the form of these poems. Vuola paces her texts with great precision, creating a finite whole, but lets go of the reins at top speed and allows the lines to flow, so much so that it’s frightening: as if someone suffering from insomnia had stopped obsessively organising their pills and fallen into a deep sleep.

Translated by David Hackston

Poems translated by Herbert Lomas, with the exception of A woman in space, which is translated by David McDuff

What’s the meaning of life? There are those who seek it in religion, while for others that is the last place to look. The scientist Kari Enqvist ponders why some people, including himself, seem physiologically immune to the lure of faith. Perhaps, he suggests, we should look for significance not in the big picture, but in the marvel of the fleeting moment

As a young boy I must have held religious beliefs. However, I cannot pinpoint exactly when they disappeared. At some point I eventually stopped saying my evening prayers, but I am unable to remember why or when this happened. ‘I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it – without knowing why,’ writes the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet.

When I was reading the Christmas story aloud, I didn’t believe in it. Although I know it cannot be true, I have the feeling that I have in fact never believed in God. My memory does not stretch back as far as my childhood so I cannot say what I thought back then or what kind of child I was. It is as though I have forgotten myself, as though the connection to that little boy is nothing but a construction, a play that in the deepest recesses of my ego I perform for my own gratification. It is for these reasons that my religious Bildungsroman is not a story of relinquishing but of forgetting.

What do I believe in? I believe that the universe is an infinite physical system without goals or objectives of its own. I believe that life on Earth is the result of serendipitous coincidences: our planet happens to be located a suitable distance away from a suitable star. I also believe that life may be found in many of the solar systems in our galaxy, but that intelligent life is a very rare occurrence. At the same time, I know that I do not know these things but that they are beliefs.

I believe that my ego is a process, a capitalist system of molecule factories lacking a concrete core, a five-year plan or a designer that I might call my ‘self’. Its seat is not in only in my brain, rather my whole body takes part in preserving my sense of self. I believe that my experience of my ‘self’ has been stitched together from smaller parts, that I have been many people and that at this very moment different versions of this self are present in my brain, versions that assume prominence according to need and situation. I believe that my will is not free but that my every action, opinion, desire and thought is born of the dance of atoms and molecules that obey the laws of physics and are unguided by the spirit. I believe that the word ‘I’ is a calming lullaby, selected via a process of evolution, a narrative echoing through my consciousness, constructed by my brain to maintain an illusion of continuity and control. I consider religious faith to be a meme that can easily take root in the mind, and I believe that religions do not answer any of the big questions facing the human race but that, for people of faith, religions offer the sense that these problems are being answered.

And I also think that these views do not in any way lessen the value of humanity; they do not lead to nihilism or to the disintegration of ethical values. On the contrary, I believe that regardless of these views – or even because of them – I am on the whole an optimistic, cheerful person, a mild pacifist equipped with a conscience that, compared to that of many people of faith, is highly social.

It is often said that science answers questions as to what the world is, while religion provides the world with meaning; science tells us how, religion tells us why. In this way, science and religion can be seen to complement one another. In the words of Archbishop Jukka Paarma: ‘Science examines the mystery of the birth of the world and the development of nature and humanity. Faith trusts in the notion that God’s will and His love for human kind is behind everything.’

But what exactly is the meaning that religion gives us? What does the archbishop mean with the words ‘behind everything’? Does he mean that God has created the world and its laws? And what, then, is the significance of this belief? That human life has meaning because God has a plan that He is hiding from us? Isn’t such a manner of thinking merely an example of the simple contention, ‘faith has meaning for me’? But what significance does religion attribute to a loved one’s brain haemorrhage? What meaning can be hidden in my mother’s Alzheimer’s disease? What significance can we read into the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers or the detonation of the atomic bomb above Nagasaki? Once again, people of faith are confronted with a fundamental theistic problem in attempting to establish a correlation between the meaning of God and the significance of individual events.

Indeed, is it not the case that religion cannot offer explanations of the meaning of human life, and that rather, in the face of disasters like the 2004 tsunami, it must accept that these are such incomprehensible events that all prayers simply evaporate on our lips? Why did the Burma Plate slip on Boxing Day 2004? Neither texts deemed to be holy nor the most fervent man of prayer can provide an answer. It is therefore reasonable to suggest that there is no glorious core that can be considered the source of religious meaning. Rather, there is simply a selection of practices that have assumed the stamp of religiosity. At times that stamp can fade away, while at others it can become strengthened through influence of strange coincidences in the surrounding society or human life. It is as though religion were a means-tested stencil for which the logic guiding its use is both fuzzy and passed down through generations.

This is the stance espoused by, amongst others, theologian Ilkka Pyysiäinen, who argues that Lutheran practices provide Finns with a religious prototype. They represent a yardstick by which other religions can be recognised as religions. ‘After this, there is a widening, never-ending sphere of phenomena that resemble religions to a greater or lesser degree. There is no clear boundary between religion and non-religion; there are only phenomena, some of which seem religious, while others do not,’ writes Pyysiäinen.

The small amount of religiosity that I was able to make out in my parents was also largely ritualistic in nature. As a family we never went to church. At Christmas we had a tradition of reading the Christmas story aloud before eating. This was designated my task, and perhaps my parents were hoping to achieve something almost holy as they listened to their only son’s clear voice as he read fluently and with conviction (and over the years with a certain level of theatricality) the familiar story of Emperor Augustus’ decree. As a child, my mother used to read my evening prayers with me, but on the whole it was as though the mere mention of religion was, by some unspoken agreement, deemed improper. The words ‘Lord’, ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ’ were never used. I believe that my grandmother’s Pentecostalism must have been lurking in the background as an example of the dangers that can be associated with religious language, as though devout religious practice had, thanks to my grandmother, become synonymous with failure, misery and insanity.

It seemed that, over the years, my father’s attitudes towards faith became increasingly indifferent. In this he was very much the product of the age, a century marked by the marginalisation of religious life in industrialised countries. Religion is dying away. It long ago relinquished its place as a guiding beacon for all human life, but its memory lives on in religious practices and rituals. My mother, whom I believe to have been more religious than my father, would sometimes use expressions like ‘such is our lot’, though I am unsure whether there was any deep, religious sentiment behind these words or whether they too were merely part of a ritual of sorts.

Although the focus of faith may be something supernatural, the seat of faith is firmly in the flesh. Though it is often said (in my opinion, erroneously) that thoughts are more than simply the sum total of electrical brain impulses, faith itself remains firmly anchored in the real world and in the laws of physics. It resides in the brain’s neurons and synapses. It rattles along the cortex and flies like a bird over the corpus callosum. It is both electrochemical and molecular biological. In our consciousness, it is physically present in the same way as memories, predilections or next week’s shopping list.

The analogy to a virus is particularly apt in the case of religion, as faith can be transmitted unwittingly and spontaneously. Unlike purely physiological viruses, religion is a virus of psychological reality or, more specifically, a collection of viruses – or memes.

Memes contain some element that makes them easier to remember. However, we cannot say with any certainty what that element is. Why some books become bestsellers while others are flops is a mystery that every publishing editor would dearly like to solve. One can only surmise that the architecture of our brains, their physiological structure and the ways in which they are filled with memories, opinions and personality traits make us particularly susceptible to certain memes.

Once the faith meme has been transmitted, it already has the power to spread itself. ‘Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations,’ it commands us. As a result of this, sparing no expense, people will get into their cars, drive around ringing the doorbells of complete strangers and asking whether they would like to hear about Jesus. More importantly, however, it commands us to baptise small children and to implant the meme in their minds. Were this not a question of religious faith, such brainwashing would seem wholly immoral, making, for instance, the British scientist and writer Richard Dawkins’ outrage over the religious labelling of children seem perfectly reasonable. Dawkins argues that talk about Christian or Muslim children is grotesque, for what is at stake is not the children’s faith but that of their parents. Still, the faith meme does not listen to such reasoning, but tells us that this is all for the good of the children, that in this way those children will be saved.

Seen from this perspective, faith is a collection of practice that is descended from one generation to the next as a meme. Its longevity is assured by the subsidiary belief, namely that the prize of such ritualistic practice is everlasting life and that to deny this will be punished with eternal suffering. The faith meme carries with it a package saying that faith is always the morally right choice and that non-belief is wrong in the most profound manner. This branding bears painful similarities to Microsoft’s saturation of the computer technology market.

Dawkins famously argues that DNA is selfish; its only concern is to reproduce itself. If we consider the faith meme in the same fashion, the various characteristics of organised religion seem suddenly to fall into place. The faith meme does not jump from one mind to the next as physical matter (doctrine), rather it is transmitted with the help of associated subsidiary beliefs (‘it is right to believe’, ‘faith will be rewarded’) and rituals. If the spread of Christianity had relied solely upon its muddled theology, the church would have dwindled away and become a mere curiosity centuries ago. But the image of the crucifixion or the thought of life after death, a life in which we will be reunited with our loved ones, awakens such powerful physiological reactions within us that faith is transmitted almost by force. All of a sudden we are saved – and who wouldn’t want to go out and spread the good news? It makes no difference that the doctrine itself is incomprehensible and riddled with inconsistencies. Why does a benevolent God allow evil to exist? How can one God become three? Why do we eat God – quite literally – at communion? But what of this! This is why faith has no core to speak of, for ultimately what we are dealing with is simply a group of practices that help the meme to reproduce and that caress and calm the human mind. Faith does not reveal the meaning of life and neither does it provide answers to the why-questions so despised by scientists, but regardless of this it gives us a strong sense that these questions have been answered.

One occasionally hears the contention that, whereas the genes written into our molecules are real, memes are nothing but words and, as such, are every bit as real as the tooth fairy. However, it would be wrong to imagine that memes have no physical being. They inhabit not only the world of the imagination, for thoughts and beliefs are firmly rooted in physical matter. When a belief takes root in our minds, it does so in a very concrete sense. Changes occur in the structure of certain nerve cells; the chemistry of our synapses is altered. The trace of a memory is a physical trace left on our molecules themselves. In fact, memes are probably far more complicated affairs than genes, as an individual belief is not isolated to one single molecule, rather, with all probability, it affects collections of different molecules in different areas of the brain. A meme is therefore a configuration made up of certain molecules. Neither is it necessarily an unambiguous one: different configurations can, in principle, correspond to the same beliefs.

The American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett had argued that, though we cannot identify the physical manifestation of a given meme in different people’s brains, this does mean that the meme itself doesn’t exist. All in all it is a question of how matter is arranged. We might consider memes as intricate mobiles suspended in abstract space, something that can grow or crumble as beliefs change. That being said, certain constellations can be very stable indeed and can latch on to brain matter with relative ease. If, by virtue of their structure, they strive to build similar constellations in other brains, they are behaving like viruses.

The genetic information stored in our DNA is copied from one molecule to the next using, for instance, messenger RNA, which transports the structural drawings of proteins into the cytoplasm around individual cells. Copying and transporting the faith meme is a more complicated affair: the meme causes an electrochemical reaction that is released in the form of preaching and chanting, practices which in the recipient’s brain trigger a construction process resembling the constellation of the original meme.

In the manner of real viruses, the faith virus can be easily transmitted to children whose immune systems have not yet fully developed. Children can be infected at the drop of a hat. The elderly are also in the high-risk group. This too fits the picture.

In theory, viruses can spread easily, but there is always someone who is immune to them. There are a myriad of reasons for this, but of crucial importance is the fact that the reason for their immunity is physiological. Certain parts of that person’s certain cells are structured in such a way that the virus – which is itself nothing more than a longish molecule – cannot latch on to other cells or reproduce itself in the way it is programmed to do (though, naturally, viruses do not have a free will of their own). Alternatively, in some people the body’s defence mechanism is so exceptionally effective that it even produces molecular structures that can neutralise the effects of the virus.

Similarly, the faith virus doesn’t infect everyone. The reasons for this must also be physiological, as recent neuroscientific research suggests. It has been discovered that religious experiences activate certain areas of the brain, leading some neuroscientists to talk of the ‘god module’. And although such a module may not exist, ultimately the phenotype of religion, anything from singing a hymn to reciting the creed is, as has already been ascertained, the expression of brain activity. Non-religious people are therefore people who, because of the architectural make-up of their brains – and therefore, by chance – demonstrate an immunity to the faith virus. In non-religious people, the meme does not trigger any kind of reaction.

Non-religiosity is not a wholly rational position either. People do not become non-religious merely from the weight of the scientific evidence. The unresolved problem of evil or the wrongs of history are not enough to snuff out religious sentiments, though of course they have played a role in developing atheists’ opinions. The philosophical semiotic analysis of religious language is, I assume, of even less significance. For non-religious people, their beliefs do not represent the rational acceptance of a certain doctrine, but what their heart tells them. I cannot reasonably claim that I decided that faith doesn’t have any emotional significance for me. This is simply the way things have happened, thanks to the architectural make-up of my brain. This is the way the molecular machine of my ego has worked: it has created certain chemical changes in my cells and synapses, the manifestations of which we call beliefs. It therefore follows that I do not believe my will has been free in the vulgar sense of the word.

When the city of Espoo celebrated its 550th anniversary, every home – including mine – received a little booklet from the church entitled Safe: An Espooite’s Faith. The booklet consists of short tales, which are a mix of high literature in the style of the author Bo Carpelan and texts by ordinary people. According to the text on the back cover, their aim is to ‘make the reader think about life and its meaning’. Well, I read it and I thought hard. Little booklets like these provide a far better window into the everyday religious life than the learned and carefully honed epistles of bishops. (An essay fragment by the pastor and writer Matti Paloheimo remembers to mention Wittgenstein, but who among us would not have committed that same sin?)

I had forgotten quite how anguished religious language can be: ‘One day this sorrow and wretchedness will end.’ Many of the texts in the booklet make repeated reference to ‘fear’ and ‘shame’. The assurance of joy and happiness, the climax of most of these texts, sounds like a mantra, just as a tightrope walker crossing a ravine might repeat to himself, ‘I will not fall, I will not fall’. Exaggeration and the obsessive exaltation of mercy speak of a terror that, despite the beatitude of faith, lurks on the edge of consciousness. These writers are at their most sincere as they thank the parish for the sense of security it offers, being able to cuddle up to someone else, protected from the dark, just as our ancestors at the dawn of humanity must have warmed themselves in their caves at night.

For me this booklet did not serve to anchor my everyday life; it made me sad. I felt bad for these people because of the anxieties they experience. They offload this anxiety by writing to one another: once I was lost, living in fear of death, adrift on a churning sea, but now I am safe. But why do people feel the need to repeat these matters ad infinitum? Why did not a single text take joy and love as its starting point? The only exception to this was a text written by an 81-year-old former deacon, offering an  uncomplicated account of his working life. I felt almost embarrassed for the editors of the booklet. For once they had the perfect opportunity to reach the vast majority of people in Espoo for whom religious life means very little. And yet I get the sense that, in that respect, they have been unsuccessful. What invigorates those in the hermetic common rooms at the parish, wilts under the broken light of the indifferent outside world into something banal.

These small vignettes about moving from the darkness into the light do not touch me, because I do not live in constant fear of death, I do not feel shame, sorrow or wretchedness. The average day is not perfect and my life includes unfortunate events, but it is not constructed around fear and shame. In this respect, I do not believe that I am in any way exceptional.

When we look for life’s meaning, we should not look for it in the overall structure but in life’s constituent parts. This is by no means a new observation but one that dates back to Horace when he shouted ‘Carpe Diem’! The words ‘seize the day’ may sound somewhat business oriented, but they can also be understood as a Zen microscope focussing on a single moment in order to separate it into as many elements as possible. This is also what natural science teaches us.

In fact, nature only teaches us if we examine it closely, with as fine a resolution as possible. In this way, nature reveals the mysteries of both matter and the cosmos, thus uncovering the world’s secrets, everything from the atomic bomb to the physiology of proteins. In science, people often say that the devil is in the details. But perhaps something else is hidden there too.

A pragmatist might argue that, if human life is the sum of its experiences, one would be well advised to maximise those experiences. However, this does not refer only to extreme experiences: hang-gliding over the Antarctic, riding on dolphins or travelling to Mars. In this instance, less can often be more. Perhaps it is enough to watch the Sun casting a beam on the wall; an autumn butterfly warming itself there; a cloud high in the summer sky; the wind scattering leaves; a hand holding a book. You need only watch people hurrying along the street to the Market Square; people spilling out of commuter trains at the station; people in far off countries sitting behind their stalls, hopeful and expectant; people that every day, with every step, carry life’s light burden with them. It is enough to listen to the sound of your breath, just enough that you can say to yourself: I am here, I am alive in this moment, this fleeting moment like a diamond between two strikes of the clock. ‘Not altogether bad,’ as the Brits say.

And perhaps it is at moments like this that we can disregard our destiny, forget the past and the future, and feel, if only for a brief moment, the burden of sorrow lift from our shoulders.

Translated by David Hackston

In this series, Finnish authors discuss the difficulties of their trade. Attempting to write a novel on the basis of his successful television series, Tuomas Kyrö – author of the extraordinary novelistic chronicle of the birth of capitalism Benjamin Kivi, which we featured in the old print version of Books from Finland and which you can read here – found himself lost for words. Liberation came with the realisation that, unlike in television, in books it is the writer, and the reader, who are in charge, and the only limits are those of the human imagination

In May 2009, after a year of writing, I held in my hand the manuscript of a novel whose plot and characters were complete. There was a subject, theme and the occasional good passage, but something was badly wrong.

When I swapped roles, writer for reader, I realised that my text did not touch the skin, and certainly did not get under the skin. I had wanted do more than raise a smile; I had thought I was writing a book that would make its readers want to turn the page, I had wanted to provoke, to cause laughter and even perhaps tears. Now all that my text provoked in the reader – me – was embarrassment and boredom.

What was wrong?

The narrative device was bland. Through it, the language of the entire book, and thereby the spirit of the entire book, was wrong.

The novel was based on a three-part television series which I had written earlier, and on the second reading I realised how clearly that original version was visible in the text. What had been intended to work as images and scenes simply did not breathe as prose. What had been genre-typical structure in the television script felt, on paper, like plot devices that had been forced on to paper.

I knew what was expected. The drama had to be made to work in its own terms as prose, the images had to be turned into language, visual nuances into linguistic ones, but I did not know what to do to make all this happen. The book was scheduled for publication the same autumn, so time was short.

I did a rewrite, but could not find the right angle or the right voice. The text felt like an unwieldy pile, and the right place for it was the oven. I called my editor and told him that this might not make a book for next autumn, it might not make a book at all, that perhaps this writer’s career would turn out to last all of eight years. ‘It will. It always has. You’re doing something that has never been done before.’

A big ask, and a lot of trust. But the trust of others doesn’t help when you don’t trust yourself. I requested an extension. I went to the loo. I grabbed a book from the shelf on the way, and sat on the seat. Without glancing at the book’s cover, I opened it at random.

God sat in a filling-station café in a Helsinki suburb. A couple of pages later Marlon Brando wandered along a street of post-war housing in the same city, looking at Finnish family home-owners.

God in Pakila? Marlon Brando in Maunula?

The book was Kari Hotakainen’s Sydänkohtauksia (‘Heart attacks’), and in an instant those few pages untied the tangled knots in my narrative strategy.

I had seen walls and limits in places where all limits are absent, where everything is allowed, where the setting can be Egypt, the Second World War, Pakila, space, a village school or a witch school. In prose, a dead person, or one yet unborn, can speak, decades can pass in one sentence or it can take four hundred pages to describe the events of a single minute. As I writer, I have the powers of a circus ringmaster, a clown and an emperor.

When you write prose, you don’t have to consider the price or location of a scene, you don’t have to think about the text’s relation to any other reality than the reality it creates. Its foundations can be made of cement, marshmallow or feathers, and the structure stays in place if the reader so wishes. The book is born in my head; it lives its life in the reader’s.

I have written five novels, and in each of them the same thing has happened, in slightly varied forms. The act of writing progresses from the conventional, from unwilling work, toward liberation. In the best case, language, story and writing itself combine to offer an element of detachment and surprise that is the same thing as the work’s spirit. The only limitations of the novel’s content are the covers; the space between them devours between 77 and 1500 pages of anything at all.

I began the book again; the voice was taken by the figure of the Trainer, who is a combination of the wise old Indians of B-movie Westerns, god, the devil and perhaps myself. I sweated it out before the book was ready, but in the end I beat the deadline. One reader said that he read the book at a single sitting and found himself out of breath. For a sports novel, that is some feedback.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Fast food for thought? Culture meets business. – Illustration: Joonas Väänänen

Extracts from a collection of writings, Ulkona (‘Outside’, Siltala, 2008)

Literature – and ‘serious’ writing in particular, the kinds of texts we publish in Books from Finland – is often seen as lost, irrelevant, pushed out to the edge of mainstream popular culture. But, argues Hannu Raittila, the margin is actually the area of greatest freedom. Everything worthwhile happens there – and business would do well to imitate art, rather than the other way round

It is easy to see culture as a marginal part of society, if viewed from an economic perspective. It is easy to see literature, for its part, as a marginal phenomenon even when compared with other areas of culture – pop music, for example.

In the technical language of the printing trade, the margin is the empty space left between the positioned text and the edge of the page. The margin is the space left over on the page.

The concept of a margin has become a metaphor for being pushed to the edge and losing meaning. Because I am an author, I am constantly being marginalised in relation to mainstream culture and the turn towards popular entertainment. If my work is made up of short stories or essays, I am on the margin in terms of the literary mainstream, and, should I choose to write highbrow literary prose instead of a concept genre product, such as serial thrillers, I am on the margins of the novel format.

Economically speaking, a margin can refer to things like the margin between loan deposits and advances, or the relationship between inputs and outputs arising from business activities in general. The margin is what is left below the bottom line. The margin is the purpose of the economy, the profit zone. The margin is shareholder value. The margin is something that the world markets watch with bated breath hour by hour around the clock.

From a dynamic perspective, the margin should be thought of as a resource. In the practical equations underlying the economy or the use of military force, marginal details carry the day. When two powerful forces face off against each other, the one that wins is the one that has more reserves – a greater margin, in excess of the balance of force. This has also been taught to hockey players: in interviews during intermissions we hear the basic slang phrases of the sport over and over again, including an aphorism about the deciding significance of ‘small margins’.

Philosophically, the margin is the area of freedom. Everything significant happens at the margin. In the reality of the economy, gigantic supranational corporations maximise their use of strength in order to survive in an increasingly competitive environment and to optimise their profits. The profit is the margin created as the product of this exertion of strength. It is produced at the margin with marginal strength.

The extremum of marginal freedom is an ancient ideal: creative idleness. One of its applications and expressions is art. The marginal author operates in this area. In order to succeed, the economy has good reason to be interested in the methods and results of artistic creation – which are produced at the margin and marginally. What should be understood in particular is the ethics of the economy in relation to the production of art. For that ethics, the economic outcome is not a value in itself, but a means by which the main thing, left at the margin of the financial statement, is resourced: art. The economic purpose of the activity is the ability to continue the activity.

This idea can carry broader human implications beyond art and its relationship to the economy. In economic life, the important thing is the area left at the margin, i.e. life. Generally speaking one can say that the possibilities of life – freedom – are located at that margin that is left at the edges of economic accounting.

In a specialised area of the economy like publishing, the author operates at the margin, i.e. in an operationally viable space, the area of discretion, the zone of possibilities. The author is the marginal factor in the business equation of publishing, the reserve. The reserve always performs the decisive motions when the prevailing powers have reached a static equilibrium or otherwise motionless state. Also in publishing, and particularly in publishing, the long-term prerequisites for making a profit will arise at the margin, in the zone of freedom, where resources are not tied up.

In profitable publishing you need a free reserve, made up of free authors. Management principles borrowed from general business management are constantly used to standardise, conceptualise and control operations. This is also the case when they are applied to book publishing. Management requires predictability and measurability. Management is the operational direction of will and goal-orientedness at the unpredictability of life. Economic management principles are derived from the administration of martial and industrial processes; they have not been adapted for the experiential industry and the culture business, which deal with the immaterial forming of values, ultimately with art.

The production of art cannot be subordinated to manufacturing. It will never be predictable and standardised like industry, because creative individuality lies at the heart of art. Creativity and individuality are the conceptual opposites of conceptualising and standardising. Herein lies the internal contradiction of the culture business, which those in the field must constantly try to solve. Similarly, artists must always be able to reconcile professionalism and free self-expression – the seemingly contradictory sides of the creation of art.

Before long, industrial production, which neglects the beginning and foundation of the product development process, will lose the race. In the culture business, the role of basic industrial research and taking risks through experimentation brings about creativity committed solely to artistic principles – for example, the writing and publishing of literature with small print runs. In publishing it is possible to reap quick profits for one decade by pruning tentative runners and focusing on popular literary genres, such as serial novels, and on products that increase productive stability and sales predictability. However, ten years is a short time in the culture business.

The ambition to create predictability through standardisation results in a breakdown in the connection between art and business. All that is left are the general principles borrowed from marketing, such as having a customer orientation and seeking opportunities for tie-in products. These don’t work very long in publishing. A customer orientation leads you to commission books for the buyer in charge of bookbins at a Dullsville supermarket. A publisher who focuses on tie-ins can find himself emptying helium from the balloons next to the books left over after bad weather struck the children’s book event.

The artist is not indifferent to the economic results produced by his work, but he does not subordinate art to economics. In practice this often means that he gives up attempting to achieve maximum production in a short amount of time in order to achieve a more important objective. Very often the by-product of this sort of method is a better economic result than would have been achieved by focusing narrowly on economic considerations.

In its relationship with art, the economy would do well to begin following the principles of art rather than demanding that art follow its methods. And it is a question of ‘doing well’ in every sense of the expression. You have to in a culture business like publishing. For the publisher is ultimately dependent on the author whose work – when well done – profits the publisher’s business.

Translated by Owen Witesman

I found myself in a temporary but intense period of creative crisis in the spring of 2006. The crisis was expressed outwardly in the classic manner – as an emptiness, a desertification. Suddenly I was unable to get to the place between dream and reality where an artist operates. Something was missing from my writing; the spark, the vibration, the lifeblood.

When my novel, written and proffered with love, sank into oblivion without really generating any notice, when the opportunity to be seen in a positive light was taken from me, I experienced such a shock of disappointment that it almost wore me down.

Then I came across the Swedish psychiatrist Johan Cullberg’s book Skaparkriser. Strindberg’s Inferno och Dagermans. (‘Crises of creation: Strindberg’s Inferno – and Dagerman’s’), which I had purchased years earlier. It often happens that a book demands to be purchased for the sake of some future need. It’s best to listen carefully to such impulses.

Cullberg analyses the creative crises of two Swedish writers, August Strindberg and Stig Dagerman, that end in the first case with the writer’s hard-earned triumph, and in the second with suicide at the age of 31. Cullberg bases his research on letters, diaries and other factual documents, as well as works of literature. It’s possible to be of many minds about whether a person’s life can be reduced to the papers it leaves behind or to consciously-created fictitious works. But the merit of Cullberg’s work is that he gives the reader useful tools for analysing creativity. When I was convinced that I would never again be able to create anything, Cullberg’s book made me understand that many of my fellow artists have had the same experience.

Cullberg describes what Canadian psychoanalyst Elliot Jaques called the two types of creativity: spontaneous and sculpted. In his research in the 1960s, he found that there is a radical change in many artists’ work around the age of 35 or 40. Their manner of working changes in quality. During their youth, creativity is intense and spontaneous; their output comes ‘hot from the fire’. But around their fortieth year their creativity becomes more sculpted. Occasionally, inspiration may still be hot, and subconscious work just as important, but there is a greater distance between the first flood of inspiration and the finished creation, characterised as a powerful process of shaping.

In the creations of a mature artist, the work of inspiration is only the first phase – what seems to occur quickly and directly is in later life usually the product of long incubation and years of work developing a theme. According to Jacques, during this middle period of crisis, the lyric-descriptive attitude of the young artist shifts toward a more tragic-philosophical direction. Radical need, impatience, youthful idealism and optimism are replaced by a more reflective and tolerant stance – this could also be called becoming middle-aged.

This ‘mid-life crisis’ is, in a way, completely banal and mundane. But Cullberg expresses great sympathy for the struggling artist in a crisis. It is an agonising period because on the one hand it concerns the artist’s mundane worries: how will I make a living, how will I justify myself to the rest of the world during a time when I am simply mulling over changes? How long will it take the source of my creativity to replenish itself?

According to Cullberg, the artist’s profession involves a continual struggle for self-confidence and legitimacy. That was the case during my own crisis: how could I justify my desire to continue with my themes, even though they weren’t really making much more money for myself or for my publisher? How could I presume to claim that my subjects were meaningful, when the literary public wasn’t the least bit interested in them?

This narcissistic trauma was clearly a result of the fact that my great work had gone down the drain. I wasn’t recognised. Precisely because of my early experiences, this was the most devastating experience of all for me. Because I had to create some kind of narrative or frame of reference for my own artistry, I decided that I belonged to that group of artists who never tasted success while they were alive.

Marja-Leena Mikkola’s wonderful translations of Boris Pasternak’s poems helped me to find the right path: my desert erupted in colour. I wanted to do what Pasternak urged: to remain true to myself, to stay alive to the end. ‘Another, step by step, will follow/The living imprint of your feet;/But you yourself must not distinguish/Your victory from your defeat.’

I also noticed that the crisis left a permanent mark on my person. Paradoxically, a large measure of my energy was freed up because I no longer needed to conceal my grief from myself or from others. Cullberg calls sadness the compost of creativity: in a state of sadness, there is an increase in receptivity to signals of both the outer and inner worlds. The empathy needed for creativity is strengthened because a more internal listening creates a readiness for understanding inner relationships. People in this situation are said to hold the key to the ‘room of their depression’. A slight depression or melancholy, if you like, may nourish creation. But a difficult depression can be devastating.

The sculpting of a self-image is almost unavoidable for an artist, because selfhood is an artist’s most essential tool. Middle age, with its inevitable changes, makes the consideration of selfhood unavoidable to everyone. One must accept the inevitability of death and come to grips with the fact that there are very few things that can be blamed indefinitely on circumstance. We must face our own evil – and our goodness.

The acceptance of pain and loss as a part of one’s own life is difficult. Internalising them as a part of the artist’s fate is tough. The word fate is indispensable here. My crisis taught me to thoroughly accept the course of my life, including those things that I could not influence in any way, to accept the losses that have left a deep desire in me to be recognised, losses that nothing can ever replace. Because they can never be replaced, there is also no need to try to compensate for them.

Paradoxically, I became stronger as an artist and as a person through the deepest possible experience of weakness. Sadness is something that we all have in common as people – it brought me closer to other people, without desires or expectations. And recognising this sadness doesn’t close off the deep, peaceful happiness and joy of life in all its phases.

Translated by Lola Rogers

Leena Krohn on the way to Cape Tainaron, Southern Peloponnese, Greece; this is where Europe ends. Her novel entitled Tainaron appeared in 1985. – Photo: Mikael Böök (2008)

The world wide web, whose services most of us now use for work or entertainment, is a greater invention than we have, perhaps, realised up till now: according to the writer Leena Krohn, it is nothing less than an evolutionary leap

Technology combats the limitations of our senses, geography, and time. The human eye can’t compete with the visual acuity of an eagle, or even a cat, but with the best telescopes it can see into the early history of the universe, with new electron microscopes it can distinguish individual atoms.

The human senses nevertheless have an unbelievably broad bandwidth. About a million times more data flows to our brains by means of our senses than we could ever grasp consciously. Instead, the consciousness of (even us) humans is meagre – as well it should be, since human mental health would collapse if its system were overloaded, if all of a person’s perceptions could pass into consciousness.

The construction of consciousness is more a process of discarding than of accumulation. But the most remarkable aspect of human consciousness is that a person can choose the focus of their attention, and also quickly shift it. Consciousness is an endless process of elimination, a process of choosing. The human mind searches and chooses meanings as a bumblebee does honey: meanings are the food of consciousness.

The information network, the world wide web, is such a notable revolution in telecommunications that it can be considered an evolutionary leap. The information network is also a network of individual consciousnesses, and the significance of the internet is one of a sharing of meanings, much like that in literature.

Within the information network, a person is an inhabitant of both the physical and the digital world. He or she is like an astronaut floating weightlessly in space, out of contact with anything material. For the astronaut, expressions like ‘above’ or ‘below’ lose their meanings, and to the traveller in the information network – the internaut – things both near and far can be ‘here’.

But the reader of a book also lives in two worlds simultaneously: his or her own reality and the reality created by the writer. Both the information network and the literature of the world (every single book) are cosmoses of the mind, albeit very different ones.

Familiarising myself with the internet in the early 1990s clarified a certain reality that should have been otherwise apparent, but simply hadn’t been. Literature is not books. (Neither are all books literature.) The covers of books, their numbered pages, or the black print do not make up literature. Literature consists of aggregates of meanings called works. The meanings are common to all humanity, but the way that they are chosen, combined, and collected into works is extraordinary and unique.

In the 21st century, the internet has moved into a new phase, and this shift also affects literature. No one really thinks, any more, that the net can change literature in such a revolutionary way as was imagined only a decade ago.

New genres such as graphic novels and interactive juxtapositional poetry have not taken the place of reading or buying Gutenberg-type books. Automated story-generating systems have not been able to hold our interest for long. Readers haven’t rushed in bucket brigades to contribute to non-linear niche-fiction begun by ‘real’ writers. They would rather write themselves, and that is a good thing.

The most linear of all literary genres, the diary, is more popular than ever before. What self-respecting person with writing ability who possesses a computer doesn’t maintain at least one blog nowadays? Encyclopedias as well, of which Wikipedia is the most significant, have also migrated to the internet.

There is now talk of a phenomenon known as cloud computing. It is likely that before long the work done on a computer will, like leisure-time computer activities, happen in ‘clouds’. Work will be completed and recorded in the hovering digital cloud that circles the globe by means of trouble-free online applications. There will be no need to buy separate word-processing, spreadsheet, layout, or presentation software for our own computers – instead we can use free software such as Zoho Writer, Buzzword, AjaxWrite, ThinkFree, Writely, or gOffice….

From anywhere in the world, on any computer, writers will be able to retrieve and continue their work on a document and share it with anyone they choose to. And every visitor to the internet’s social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, its marketplaces like InnoCentive, its Semantic Web applications like Twine, and its virtual worlds like Second Life, are also made to practise written culture.

The greatest change from the point of view of literature, however, is the digitisation of text, because apparently the literature of the world is moving to the internet in the very near future, whether that is universally accepted or not.

Project Gutenberg began the digitisation of books as early as 1971, Project Runeberg (which focuses on Nordic literature) in 1992. Their written content was not originally scanned – individuals typed it up and uploaded it from their own computers. The Million Book Project from 2001–2007 digitised 1.4 million mostly non-English-language works from China, India, and Egypt. Online bookseller Amazon now offers a million electronic documents (eDocs) and along with it the Kindle reading device which was recently brought to market has sold well, bolstering faith in the future of the e-book. My guess is that mobile phones will replace the Kindle as a reading device. (I confess I have read both non-fiction and fiction from my mobile phone on sleepless nights for several years now.)

But none of these projects can compare to Google’s ambitious goals. In Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organise Everything We Know, Randall Stross sees the Google BookSearch program as a project comparable to the first missions to the moon. Google’s specific goal is to digitise 32 million books from 25 thousand libraries.

Copyright questions are a problem even for Google, however. At the moment, readers can access approximately 7 million works in their entirety. According to a recent contract with publishers and authors, readers (at first only in the United States) will soon be able to choose from a much wider selection, including copyright-protected out-of-print books that Google has not yet been able to digitise.

As Andrew Keen asked in the Independent, ‘Is Google good or bad?’. Keen answered the question himself. ‘Google is, in fact, an Orwell-Disney co-production. The company wants to know everything about us so that it can help us in every way. Room 101 [Orwell’s chamber of horrors] then, on planet Google, is a brightly lit, cheerful place where we can, at the click of a mouse, know all there is to know about ourselves, our neighbours and the world.’

Google’s goal is a stunning one: an organisation begun as a search engine is aiming not just for the digitisation the world’s literature and its meanings, stamped with its own watermark, but for the organisation of all information. Is any firm fit for such a task?

Reaching the point of so-called ‘technological singularity’ – a complete shift to a new era, in which artificial intelligence reaches and surpasses human intelligence – is an event that has long been anticipated, and feared. Such a moment is not yet in sight. But as data streams expand and combine with one another, are we approaching an ‘information singularity’, a phase in which meanings begin to disappear into the cold, white noise of information?

At that point, the web will have grown into a universal library so immense that even the most advanced search engine robots will be lost in its labyrinths, like the visitor to the infinite library imagined by Jorge Luis Borges in his short story ‘The Library of Babel’ (written in 1941, it depicts a universal library containing not just all existing, but also all possible works, including texts consisting entirely of arbitrary strings of characters). In order to find a specific work in a library as comprehensive as this, a robot would have to be fed the entire text, word by word!

Translated by Lola Rogers

Knowing good and evil: Adam and Eve (Albrecht Dürer, 1507)

In Finnish fiction of the present decade, both in poetry and in prose, there seems to be at least one principle that cuts across all genres: an overt expression of gender, writes the critic Mervi Kantokorpi in her essay

Relationships and family have always been central concerns of literature; questions about gender and individual identity have received a new emphasis in Finnish literature from one season to the next. The gender roles represented in contemporary literature appear to become ever more stereotypical. The question is no longer only of the author consciously setting his or her gender up as the starting point for expression, as has already long been the case with modern literature written by women. Practices that gender and express differences are much broader and more fundamental; even when a text seems to be consicously breaking down gender clichés – the masculine man and the feminine woman – differentiation between the genders is still emphasised.

For example, in her new satirical novel Kohtuuttomuus (‘Excess’, Siltala, 2008) the dramatist and prose writer Pirkko Saisio (born 1949) depicts man as a soft and yielding feminine being, and woman as a strong-willed and powerful being who is comparable in working ability to more than one man; this superwoman has also spoilt generation after generation of men through her child-rearing.

If you stop for a moment at any Finnish backwater pub or TravelCare bar (travelling has diminished, but the care’s still there), you may notice that over time the Finnish man becomes a granny clothed in a shell suit. The facial features are fragile, the voice is shrill, the beard growth nonexistent and the body language minimalist. On the other hand, the Finnish woman may be found – in the same backwater that is – collecting mushrooms or berries in the same kind of colourful shell suit, while her husband sits in the pub, and she’s got a mobile phone on her belt and a farm co-op or Shell cap on her head.

The Finnish woman knows how to navigate the woods, split logs, change light bulbs, raise children alone, fill out an agricultural subsidy application, drive a car, vote, defend a dissertation and hold her own in panel discussions, divorce property division proceedings and municipal councils. What does the Finnish woman need a man for?

There seems to be some sort of overarching, essentialist thought pattern in the literary presentation of gender; that is, the essential characteristics of a woman and a man can be defined just as easily for any person. The reception of literature has also regarded that hegemony of the genders critically, not least because contemporary prose that revolves around relationships and sex is what most often ends up on the best seller lists – for example the blithe novel Ei kiitos (‘No thanks’, Otava, 2008) by author, actress and columnist Anna-Leena Härkönen (born 1965). It is a frank tale of a rebellious wife who’s not getting any from her reluctant husband. Härkönen’s idea isn’t new of course: the motives of the sexually unfulfilled woman have been considered repeatedly in the Finnish ‘strong women’ literature since Maria Jotuni wrote her unconventional comedies and novels during the first half of the 20th century, and which have since become classics.

Literature emphasising gender thus encompasses a very diverse set of projects: on the one hand, serious social analyses of identity and power, and on the other, projecs like those of Härkönen, a social butterfly participating in the popular public talk of our sexualised age.

The prose currently written by middle-aged male Finnish authors has been repeatedly called äijäkirjallisuus: the term, could perhaps translate as ‘bloke-lit’, refers to books that are ‘Boys Own’, and are masculine narratives with generally short sentences and a realistic style. This has referred just as much to the prose output of Kari Hotakainen, Jari Tervo, Hannu Raittila, Juha Seppälä, and Petri Tamminen (born 1957, 1959, 1956, 1956 and 1966) as to that of many other authors who are seen as writing about a world experienced as masculine. The great Finnish portrayals of men, the ur-novels, Aleksis Kivi’s Seitsemän veljestä (Seven Brothers, 1870) and Väinö Linna’s controversial war novel Tuntematon sotilas (The Unknown Soldier, 1955) loom in the background in this äijäkirjallisuus. Man, or a homosocial group of men, operates outside the carefully regulated domestic sphere represented by women and share the experience of ostensible freedom and outsiderness. These ‘men of the woods’ (an old, romantic-heroic appellation for the free, masculine, survivalist Finnish male) do the deeds of men and attempt to get along with women. Modern, urban nuclear family-centric life oppresses the man longing for the lost way of life in the woods. Stylistically, äijäkirjallisuus is often prose that laughs in a serious way at the ironies of life of the modern male. The ‘hard boiled’, polished laconic style of the leading modernist prosaist of the 1950s, Veijo Meri (born 1928), seems to have influenced many of the male authors of the middle generation, and the economical, vivid sentence is often the distinctive feature of their language. Ironic descriptions of a slightly younger generation of men can be found, for example, in Petri Tamminen’s novel Mitä onni on (‘What happiness is’, Otava, 2008; see Books from Finland 3/2008). The protagonist does not immediately flee the home to fulfil his need for freedom, but rather attempts to live a double life, which he sees as invigorating:

Clandestine romantic relationships caused our fathers’ generation enormous inconvenience: letters dressed up as official correspondence, calls to work on the family phone, evening walks near the beloved’s home, perhaps the wave of a hand from a balcony. It all must have been quite burdensome from the standpoint of guilt. With email and text messages, an affair can be mastered easily. It overlaps with family life. During a lull in the impassioned messaging you can go warm up the macaroni and cheese or empty the washing machine. The whole relationship experience resembles a harmless hobby that is a delight for everyone: dad gets something to do and the family gets an energetic dad. The Finnish man ran out of things to do with the advent of urbanisation. Neither lathes nor circular saws fit in the living room. Now the computer has saved men; the computer is the new lathe. If there is another woman waiting at this lathe, then all is actually better than before.

Authors have repeatedly protested against gendered categories and have experienced the male perspective of äijäkirjallisuus as a demeaning invective. It is actually more of an admission that gender matters: it is everyone’s fate, at least in Finnish culture. Depictions of identity written by men often concisely represent something of the prototypical Finnish distress with which both men and women are just as able to empathise. What is at stake is the different culturally-directed expectations placed on the genders and how they are fulfilled. The overvaluation of work in Finland is a burden felt by both genders. You simply have to be able to manage as both a highly educated professional and a middle-class builder of a family and a lifestyle. This hubris has been developed by Kari Hotakainen in his Finlandia Prize-winning novel Juoksuhaudantie (‘Trench Road’, WSOY, 2002). It is a tragicomic depiction of a man who attempts to acquire the idyll of the single-family home for his family at any cost. The novel Vihan päivä (‘The day of wrath’, WSOY, 2006) by Markku Pääskynen (born 1973) recounts the tragedy of a nuclear family gone bankrupt: in her distress, the mother massacres her family and herself. Economic and mental bankruptcy have led to several family murders in Finland this autumn, and in my opinion literature has long been predicting these tragedies as the final result of meritocracy.

What has been called the twin burden of the individual’s professional and family life has expanded in the post-modern consumer society to become a triple burden: body and appearance have become the final means to influence one’s identity. The market economy of fashion, beauty and style, combined with visual media, have created an even greater externalisation of body image. This can be seen best in literature written by young women; their literature describes the only ostensible freedom of the body as an object of external control. It is especially noteworthy how sexuality has become a required part of the life of an individual that has to be dealt with like any other job. Contemporary Finnish literature is inundated with depictions of hypersexual, frustrated people. This lifeproducing drive and source of energy turns against the individual, as for example in Lääkäriromaani (‘Doctor novel’, Teos, 2008) by Riku Korhonen (born 1972).

One can also take a splendid crack at developing, at least tongue-in-cheek, the concept of muijakirjallisuus (chicklit) alongside äijäkirjallisuus: it is, then, ‘Girls Own’ literature, with feminine overtones and the topoi that form from the pressures that pile up on the modern female. Cultural sayings are revealing. A woman who has successfully balanced career and family in Finland is called a ‘good bloke’. She is thus elevated and comparable to men, a warrior and survivor of the Winter War. The picture of a strong Finnish woman is often connected to the stories of äijäkirjallisuus. A man struggling at the edge of survival is joined by a woman, whose wisdom and skill save the man, if only he allows it. This setup repeats itself bewilderingly often in literature written by men and absolutely deserves further study. The flipside of the caricatured superwoman is the tragic current in women’s literature. The most discussed themes introduced in works by young women over the last ten years include depictions of motherhood, and above all, first-time motherhood. These themes are closely connected to the oppression of body image and the multiple roles ascribed to women that have appeared year after year in debut novels written by young women. The freedom of the modern woman is revealed as illusory at the latest in motherhood, which is not a choice easily renounced once made. Baby blues – postpartum depression – is not only the special difficulty of women who are prone to depression in these literary presentations, but rather it is indicative of a larger crisis of female identity and it ought to be treated as a social issue. The depiction of depression as such is very common in Finnish literature today. When written by younger women it means stories of eating disorders and sexual anxiety; in men’s portrayals, violence and alcohol are emphasised. Even though authors – Kari Hotakainen for example – emphasise that their fiction is not sociological research, the critical reader recognises the correlates of literature in reality with more certainty today than in ages.

An interesting difference from earlier periods – for example the modernism of the 1950s – can be best seen in poetry. The most evocative growth spurts in Finnish poetry in the beginning of the 21st century have come in the collections written by young authors. Themes involving gender can also be found in their work and are dealt with in varying ways. It even makes one want to comfort oneself by believing the old claim that it is poetry that is the forerunner, that it sees the future. Poetry appears to be seeking multisensory release both for women and for men while the prose being written by young women in particular remains weighed down by gender and locked in various ways in the prison of the body. The strongest areas of contemporary poetry written by women are the comparison of historic and modern images of women, as well as the development of various mythical continua. It is no coincidence that the young poets Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen (born 1977), Saila Susiluoto (born 1971) and Johanna Venho (1971) have returned to the wellsprings of Finnish folk poetry in their work, both rhythmically and symbolically. The nods to procreative womanhood woven into the poetry of Susiluoto and Venho almost feel like a new invention. Somehow they manage to write about motherhood as a natural facet of womanhood. The female body and all that goes with it can still be something that supports the ego rather than just breaking, closing off and victimising the ego as previous generations of writers often claimed.

Johanna Venho

(Give way! 1.)

I skied through an arch of trees
into snow-forest, onto the track,
and yelled to you from far back:
‘Now I know! Penelope had given birth!’
The antique heroic journey,
the leap into the unknown,
the way down into Hades,
the miracle and the self-conquest –
Oh Odysseus, you had to rush.
I fall flat on my face in the snow,
a ski stuck in a bush,
and somewhere far away you’re flashing downhill,
far away freighted trucks are trundling along,
I’m weaving my web unhurrying,
day in day out,
and snow’s gently descending and burying me.
I’ve taken a swipe at the surface of the magic pond
with my ski pole, I’ve smashed the one-night’s ice
and the pictured images, colours
I tried to camouflage myself with.
The font’s a fouled-up kaleidoscope
with the bits rattling, and on the bottom
knowledge and truth: they’re a thread of grey and gold
I’ve got to roll into a ball I could throw
or weave into a kite’s long rope.
I’ve fingered the dust by the wall,
and now I’ve slicked my hands on
full-blooded, ripe, sticky clay;
give me a little more time to mould it;
wise old women
often take off in an odd direction,
bonneted with snow-white
they collect pieces of porcelain,
happiness is making other folk feel good.

I lie awake at night and see
down to the end of the track: the snow’s melting
and the children are messing about in the mud
with bare feet, making them bird-legged,
their shoulder blades sharp,
their hair light and silky as a newborn sun.
By day we make binoculars out of toilet rolls –
here you are, you’ll see the truth with them,
but don’t get scared, it’s bald,
and, stripped off, it’s nothing at all,
till you toss it into the works
to spin round, getting crushed in the cogs:
you feed the final product to the hungry.
Don’t laugh. Many stop half way,
basking in an insight,
what would I know about that, I’m a tabula rasa,
the unread texts
vanish from me as if swept by a great sleeve
with a sneezing and a snorting;
when I ladle porridge onto the plates,
I’m ladling golden porridge

(From Yhtä juhlaa [‘It’s all a big celebration’, WSOY, 2006]; translated by Herbert Lomas, published in Books from Finland /2006)

In the poetry coming from young men, the masculine identity in its most formulaic form gets the boot. In his debut collection Vantaa (‘The river Vantaa’, Otava, 2007), Vesa Haapala (born 1971) writes amazingly naturally of a man as a writer-link in a chain of generations of hunting and fishing fathers. In his collection Lohikäärmeen poika (‘The dragon’s son’, Tammi, 2007),Teemu Manninen (born 1977) writes flarf poetry, which draws its material from internet forums and is full of archetypical masculine violence and aggressive language, and yet what surfaces is the eternal question: how should we live? Finnish literature is able to challenge its readers to answer.

Translated by Owen Witesman

(First published in Books from Finland 4/2008.)