internet

2012-02-15T04:13:00.008+02:00

it has been ten days since the last time I was able to draw in a painless breath. my mucus filled lungs rasp quietly underneath my chest which feels as if it was caving in on my heart. I try to breathe as slowly as possible, consciously controlling the muscles around my throat and chest. spasms of involuntary coughs come and go, stirring and stressing the vast amounts of toxic goo within me. I know the inflammation that pneumonia is can spread from the lungs to the heart.

unable to move, I lay drooling on my bed. like satori that is just a blink of an eye away for each of us, so does my well-being appear to be only a realization away. yet, I could die like this is the only realization I have had in hours, and as such it seems only to worsen my condition - I am powerless, numb and indifferent in the face of death. the recent suicide of my father taught me that life of those once loved continues.

I open my eyes and stare at the wall. my distorted vision makes it appear as if it was meters away, though I know I could touch it with the palm of my hand - if I could.

the surface of my eyes begins to gather a layer of an unknown liquid, not tears. soon I find myself staring at a blurred image of a white sky, arching above a lake which surface trembles to the rapid beat of my suffocating heart. slowly, the wavering lake soothes, making me able to see the white skies clearly from underneath.

“welcome back to the abyss, kid! you died again, did you?”

“what?”

“well, you wouldn't be here if you were alive now would you, kid?”

“oh. god.”

“yes. how long is it since the last time we talked? over a year it must be in your time, kid.”

“are you mad with me? I know I went off with the best of your advice only to end up dead again.”

“mad, me? never! besides, nothing could make me happier than having you dead. you are my favorite kid, kid.”

“I recognize that shine in your eyes.”

“you do? what does it tell you, kid?”

“it tells me that the body is the placenta of the soul, like the earth is the cradle of humanity. and here I am, born, grown, dead and transcended. and here you are, one with me, ready to reveal timeless truths.”

“my, my! you truly have grown, kid! one day you will overcome us silly gods, and go on creating an abyss of your own! now, let us realize what you came here to realize so you can wake up alive and well!”

the words spoken seem to merge into a single sound, a sound of a song vibrating through my every iota. a wave of realization sweeps over me, merging me with itself - we become real as a haze of purple and dark blue. now, floating as and in a formless hue, I have all the time in the world to think.

during the years I have done yoga I have seen my body change in reflection of internal changes within my mind. I have seen how postures, gestures and expressions have been cultivated in accordance to the internal qualities developed. I guess I am lucky to have begun doing yoga as a kid, thus having my growth as a part of its practice.

a few years ago I noticed my body to react involuntarily to my thoughts through slight changes in posture, spasms, even thoughts. in time I realized that my body has a mind of its own.

through speakers reproducing the long ago recorded voice of terence mckenna, the concept of archaic revival has floated to my knowledge in the past weeks. if such a process is really unraveling around us, then my body is the perfect documentation of it. lucid dreams since I was five, yoga since I was nine, naturally occurring psychedelics since I was thirteen. all merely attempts by the wise body to wake me up to its true nature.

floating formless, I remember the body I no longer possess, realizing how perfectly it followed an ancient program throughout its growth from the tiniest cell. a general sample of a human body, yet the energies flowing through it from the ether made it unique in its becoming. the individual form of it was the representation of hues of energy such as these I now float in.

suddenly, I recall the condition which I left behind - the pneumonia. like all other processes of the body, it must have been the result of similar kinds of intangible hues. the energies of my heart!

the hues of purple and dark blue begin to dense, forming the song of a final realization screeching through the ether - a broken heart is a poor metaphor. what really happens is corrosion due to imbalanced energies around the heart, the organ, the material and the ethereal.

convulsing, I gain consciousness on the floor by the bed, violently coughing out a bloody lump of mucus. my whole body trembles as waves of cold sweat sweep up and down my back. water running from my eyes and my lungs contracting in purifying agony, I look at the lump of goo on a napkin. it reminds me of a placenta-a-a...

the word rings a trigger, a reminder of a dream I just saw. did I die?

as I breathe in with force I can feel myself able to use the air, to live off it again. gasping, I damn my foolishness in letting my heart leak, and realize that the first step in healing it is forgiving.

2012-02-11T15:17:00.015+02:00

the black and white photographs are those of I.K. Inha, shot c. 1892 - 1895 in f-land. the one above goes with the description taking a ram to pokkouhri of Venejärvi. pokkouhri is, apparently, a carelian religious practice resulting in the pouring of sacrificial blood into the cracks of the steps of a tsasouna, an eastern orthodox prayer room.

anyway - add nazi chocolate, throw in a few question marks and profit from the northern lights.

2012-02-06T16:51:00.000+02:00

2012-02-04T15:01:00.002+02:00

2012-02-03T08:57:00.000+02:00

2012-02-02T08:15:00.000+02:00

2012-02-01T08:09:00.000+02:00

2012-01-31T08:44:00.000+02:00

2012-01-30T13:09:00.008+02:00

early morning traffic in rome

cigarettes and tears for breakfast;

streets I used to call my home

are turning into bittersweet dust.

a phantom whispers in my ear
today you choose who we'll slay;

pointing out the one most dear

I bow down my head and obey.

posted from altitude of 5836m

2012-01-29T00:31:00.000+02:00

2012-01-27T22:24:00.001+02:00

2012-01-23T10:10:00.000+02:00

2012-01-18T05:02:00.000+02:00

2012-01-14T08:13:00.000+02:00

2012-01-11T03:01:00.000+02:00

2012-01-10T00:54:00.000+02:00

2012-01-06T03:44:00.001+02:00

2012-01-05T03:00:00.000+02:00

2012-01-05T01:48:00.000+02:00

2012-01-04T13:52:00.000+02:00

2012-01-03T13:44:00.001+02:00

2012-01-02T08:01:00.000+02:00

2012-01-01T03:52:00.000+02:00

2011-12-11T23:40:00.000+02:00

2011-11-28T03:03:00.009+02:00

rain sweeps over the shorelines of gulf of f-land. the month of november is nearly over, yet there has not been a sight of snow in helsinki. the moisture in the air brings with it a variety of thoughts to the many minds trapped inside rooms with high ceilings and windows overlooking the sunless sea. “I stare into the abyss and I like what I see,” many of them think.

sound of the rain falling onto the sheet metal covering the outer windowsill is the first sensation to penetrate into my awaking mind. slowly the sounds bounce off the walls to provide me with a sense of the space around me. the room is only damply lit, yet I can see the alarm clock on the floor. two thirty. my body feels as if still paralyzed over the sublimity of the dreams just seen. slightly trembling, I turn to look at her reading under the floor lamp.

“what are you doing awake?”

“I revel in this state of single-mindedness with you and everyone else, embracing the old hag trapped in my young, feline body. I am reading the words of my fellow men from the nineteenth century.”

“oh yeah?”

“oh yeah. I turned one hundred and forty-one a week ago. congratulate me.”

I stare at her and see the well-concealed signs of laughter surrounding her starry eyes, exhibiting the mysterious smile that has driven men crazy over the efforts to immortalize it on canvass. I'm not falling for this. I pick up a handful of pistachios from a bowl, place them over her open book, and move myself to sit on the windowsill behind heavy curtains.

slowly, the curtains begin to divide the space into two spheres inhabited by two distinct conscious beings. trapped in a chain of ever-altering states of mind, their thoughts cross like the air that begins to circulate in a cold flow through the room after the window is opened. on the secluded space of the windowsill, pipe smoke spreads around potted plants dying for coldness and the lack of light. slowly the borders of the space fall, and even I wake up to feel the shared mind.

her mind, so overwhelmingly consumed by the dead poets, makes me gasp for the cold, moist air. enhancing the experience, I kneel down and stick my head out into the rain. “we enjoy simple things such as shared decay,” I think, and turn to face the falling rain as I blow out smoke. I feel my body relaxing, and smile at our lunacy. living in a dungeon, in pure single-mindedness. living off of the traces left behind by fellow conscious beings into writing. non-verbal communication stands out in its silence. I catch a thought of hers,

“photographs are selective recreation of reality in its toughest from. the challenge is to recreate while capturing a view from reality itself, in respect to the demands of novelty, insight and control. now and forever in a single frame.”

peeking from behind the curtains, I see her pale shoulders glow in the darkness, next to her mind spread all over the pages of the book in her hands. yet, simultaneously, she is somehow thinking about the things I should be thinking.

I recognized her immediately when I saw her, when I saw her for the first time. I recognized her from a distance, and had all the time in the world to stare at her approaching smile in a state of amazement that felt forever. that smile was mine, the reflection of my true nature. “this makes no sense,” I thought, until the touch of her made me laugh at myself for ever trusting my senses in the first place. all those thoughts that had circled in my head, trying to define the undefinable crumbled and became forgotten forever through laughter. reality is stranger than fiction, and we do love the strange.

after closing the window, I pick up my notebook and lay down on the windowsill. slowly, the sounds of the rain soothe the voices of my mind. holding a pen in my hand, I begin to write down her thoughts.

“my skin is dry. it cannot be for the winter, for this winter is still but a fall. it must be dry for creative distress. I am using a state of inspiration for purely selfish goals, writing notes for a personally gratifying artistic product instead of credit points awarding essay. heehaw, says the cowboy and runs to the sunset, leaving his horse behind. “fuck you horse! I can do this on my own!”

the beauty of post-modernism is that you can pretend to be writing up to the point of making art out of that pretension. demands very little effort, very little focus. focus is the magic ingredient of the universe. the more focused a thing is, the more amazing its effect upon whatever are. I know nothing about physics, but I've heard of intense tight spots squeezed between time and space made of amazing amounts of concentrated energy. focus. if only the definition of an artist would hold a demand for exercised focus.

the human mind is the master of distractions. it never trusts the conscious part of itself enough to let it see all the processes it is involved in. the more minimal one manages to keep the processes not aligned with whatever it is that the conscious mind wishes to focus on, the more content one is. peace of mind is met. “a state of flow,” I have heard consultants trained as philosophers say.”

suddenly she breaths out all her thoughts and ascends to focus on reading the words of some dead poet, exhibiting the very focus she thought about. I begin to hear the rain again.

the reason why I am documenting her thoughts is the effort to reveal our shared nature in words. it will be a long process, but I am quite determined to succeed. I know reality exists somewhere in between the lines, mirroring the mind which made them possible. literary works do not appear from a void. the time and energy used to cultivate thoughts of a conscious mind define the birth of words.

when I first saw her the thing I recognized was our shared nature - we are both conscious beings, like we all are. how conscious, that is the subject of a million stories. everyone seems to have a special way of being conscious, always similar to others, yet still distinct. individual. if I fall to assume things of strangers, I might miss the most important distinctive qualities of them. even rare and precious ones.

I peek to see her shoulders again, but instead meet the stare and the smile. in unison we think of a paradox,

“nobody knows me.”

2011-11-20T21:05:00.000+02:00

2011-11-19T00:49:00.004+02:00

Source for Origin of Knowledge

“Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith, which were continually inherited, until they became almost part of the basic endowment of the species, include the following:

that there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself.

It was only very late that such propositions were denied and doubted - it was only very late that truth emerged, as the weakest form of knowledge. It seemed that one was unable to live with it, our organism was prepared for the opposite; all its higher functions, sense perception and every kind of sensation worked with those basic errors which had been incorporated since time immemorial. Indeed, even in the realm of knowledge these propositions became the norms according to which “true” and “untrue” were determined - down to the most remote regions of logic.

Thus: the strength of knowledge does not depend on its degree of truth but on its age, on the degree to which it has been incorporated, on its character as a condition of life. Where life and knowledge seemed to be at odds there was never any real fight; but denial and doubt were simply considered madness. Those exceptional thinkers, like the Eleatics, who nevertheless posited and clung to the opposites of the natural errors, believed that it was possible to live in accordance with these opposites:

they invented the sage as the man who was unchangeable and impersonal, the man of the universality of intuition who was One and All at the same time, with a special capacity for his inverted knowledge; they had the faith that their knowledge was also the principle of life.

But in order to claim all of this, they had to deceive themselves about their own state: they had to attribute to themselves, fictitiously, impersonality and changeless duration; they had to misapprehend the nature of the knower; they had to deny the role of the impulses in knowledge; and quite generally they had to conceive of reason as a completely free and spontaneous activity; they shut their eyes to the fact that they, too, had arrived at their propositions through opposition to common sense, or owing to a desire for tranquility, for sole possession, or for dominion.

The subtler development of honesty and skepticism eventually made these people, too, impossible; their ways of living and judging were seen to be also dependent upon the primeval impulses and basic errors of all sentient existence.

This subtler honesty and skepticism came into being wherever two contradictory sentences appeared to be applicable to life because both were compatible with the basic errors, and it was therefore possible to argue about the higher or lower degree of utility for life; also wherever new propositions, though not useful for life, were also evidently not harmful to life: in such cases there was room for the expression of an intellectual play impulse, and honesty and skepticism were innocent and happy like all play.

Gradually, the human brain became full of such judgements and convictions, and a ferment, struggle, and lust for power [Machtgelüst] developed in this tangle. Not only utility and delight but every kind of impulse took sides in this fight about “truths”; the intellectual fight became an occupation, an attraction, a profession, a duty, something dignified - and eventually knowledge and the striving for the true found their place as a need among other needs.

Henceforth not only faith and conviction but also scrutiny, denial, mistrust, and contradiction became a power, all “evil” instincts were subordinated to knowledge, employed in her service, and acquired the splendor of what is permitted, honored, and useful - and eventually even the eye and innocence of the good.

Thus knowledge became a piece of life itself, and hence a continually growing power: until eventually knowledge collided with these primeval basic errors, two lives, two powers, both in the same human being. The thinker: that is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for the first fight, after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power.

Compared to the significance of this fight, everything else is a matter of indifference: the ultimate question about the conditions of life has been posed here, and we confront the first attempt to answer this question by experiment. To what extent can truth endure incorporation?

That is the question, that is the experiment.”

2011-11-18T23:02:00.000+02:00

2011-11-10T01:24:00.000+02:00

morning of eighth

evening of ninth

2011-11-08T01:06:00.000+02:00

2011-11-05T22:10:00.000+02:00

2011-11-02T02:02:00.035+02:00

white horses run in slow motion above the sea. their hooves bounce off the tense surface, splashing and sending vibrating waves to travel down towards me, floating underneath. the stream of the horses is endless. I have all the time in the world to focus on their movements, their beautiful muscular bodies, not really dead yet never been alive. beyond time and space there's no necessity to breathe in, no necessity for a heart to beat.

as I open my eyes nothing changes in my bodily sensations - I am still under the sea, floating in the abyss - yet without a single afterimage I see what I really see. laying on my side, I support a thick book leaning to a pillow with my left hand. focusing my eyes onto the page on the right, I read,

“each novel presents an opposition, which is never canceled out dialectically, of many consciousnesses, and they do not merge in the unity of an evolving spirit, just as souls and spirits do not merge in the formally polyphonic world of dante. at best each could form, as in dante's world, a static figure, one that did not lose its individuality, one that linked together rather than merged with other figures – but this static figure would resemble a congealed event, similar to dante's image of the cross (the souls of the crusaders), the eagle (the souls of the emperors), or the mystical rose (the souls of the blessed). likewise the author's spirit does not develop or evolve within the limits of the novel itself, but, as in dante's world, this spirit is either a spectator, or becomes one of the participants. within the limits of the novel the hero's worlds interact by means of the event, but these interrelationships, as we have said before, are the last thing that can be reduced to thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.”

relating the words to my own experience of separateness from the conscious minds around me, the image of an old windmill arises and I turn onto my back to stare at its reflection from the cracks in the ceiling. the concepts of those who have tried to intellectualize this beautiful existence from the blessed perspective of the I into false patterns float faintly through my mind, and my heart begins to beat in zeal. turning my eyes to the page on the left, my eyes loose the capacity to estimate their distance from the text and try focusing to somewhere beyond it, making the letters and words and paragraphs twist and multiply.

if I can't even read, how could I write?

I drop the book onto the rug growing out from under the bed, creating a short damp sound to bounce off the empty walls. the huge room with three windows facing west, one of them a bay window partly opening up to a balcony, provide me with as much light as the wintery world outside can offer - the sun lays its rays nearly set.

I left most of my material belongings to the holy land of crazy poets, st. petersburg, five months ago when I drifted here to one of the most beautiful districts of european capital cities - vinohrady. in five months all I've bought for this apartment is the rug and this bed. when I arrived I had nothing on me except for the clothes I was wearing, few notebooks and eleven of my companions in books - just small drops now in the mass of them inherited from my uncle who used live here. he was a writer, a prominent one in prague, and I guess in all his benevolence he thought I'd be able to follow his footsteps if just taken away from the rotten streets branching out of nevsky prospekt, like he was forced into exile by the bolsheviks long ago. he didn't have other heirs - in addition to the books the apartment is mine to keep.

I climb from the bed to sit on the wide windowsill, and open one of the windows up to the snowy twilight. as the coldness sweeps over my body the white horses neigh and run down my spine to hide under the radiator. I light a cigarette, and the smoke I blow out of my lungs ties its warmth to the cold air, producing a steam rising up to the sky.

two weeks ago I found a stack of notes by my uncle, dated back to the forties. he had hid them inside the shallow covers of a book titled ancient weird religious rites. in them lay markings of my uncle cultivating a coherent enough of a theory on characterization to have grown quickly into a vast land of intertwined concepts inside the mind of mine. it is beginning to form a reality around me - a reality from which it is easy to draw perfect characters into writing. perfect, meaning such that they'd fool anyone into believing their consciousness in black and white to be of a true individual, not something created by a mere imitator of reality. something more than a product of a mind that's merely that of a naturalist.

the idea, in short, is to create internal value structures so wide that they grow to demand characterization from any conscious mind perceiving them. they demand an independent existence within the mind of a writer, a demand justified through the coherence of the value systems they hold, like they hold the potential of reflecting their vastness through action and dialogue. how could one deny such beings an existence in black and white? can't blame them anymore for pounding the back of my mind, calling me to write them into being - chattering like monkeys in a tree.

as the sunlight leaves the particles in the air bare, the first stars become visible high above. I don't know if I have what it takes to ever create a coherent character. my own system of values is still infallible, and so, if the madness of my uncle is to be trusted, there exists a danger of merging. that is what the book I had in my hands has words on, too. did dostoevsky create the views into minds of characters such as nikolai vsevolodovich stavrogin while remaining himself separate from their values, their imagined minds?

my uncle saw the process as something resembling schizophrenia - in order to understand another human being, for whatever reasons, the decision to deconstruct them leads to holding a complex structure providing a view of how life is for the other I within one's own mind. there is no need to worry about the capacity of a human mind to hold such vast conceptual realities within it. the issues arise when the person becomes confused over his values and those that are merely the products of his empathetic capacities. as a result, his mind looses coherency, his judgements suffer, his perceptions vary.

the only way to relieve the burden of characters, concepts, whatever one wants to call them, from the mind is to cultivate the internal structures into something tangible, externalizing their existence. that is art therapy. on the next level a conscious mind decides to cultivate the internal value structures far enough to reflect them for a wide variety of other conscious beings, in the light of his choosing. that's the ability to create a work of art that stands independent of any contexts in its capacity to transform vast amounts of meanings into a comprehensible whole - an object with a lot inherent in it.

in literary works, every time a character once cultivated from a value structure imagined by a writer becomes understood by a reader, understood through so many words they fill not a page but five hundred, the character becomes realized. that's the mind of a character, reflected from his thoughts, words, actions and even the scenes surrounding him in a mental vision drawn subjectively by every single individual reader.

I climb back to my bed by the windowsill, close the window and sit looking at the dim room for a while. I need to separate myself from myself to see what I hold within that's deserving to be evoked in black and white. for starters I need to find another heroine than the one who I've been obsessed about - too much money and an obsession to white horses, nothing particularly interesting nor new in that association for anyone.

wearing my black leather cape over a wool sweater, I walk up the hill by riegrovy sady. the thick layers of snow creak under my boots, compelling me to walk faster. I need to sort my head out, refresh it a bit. too long of a chain of thoughts to elaborate exists as the reason why that translates into a need for absinth.

inside my regular, resting on a concave opening up to a small square, a brisk sound of chatter gives rhythm for the yellow hue around. the scent of beer hanging in the air associates to the senses left into me by many past nights of bedlam. after ordering my shot, I mix it with water while still standing by the counter. the opaque green transforms into a misty greenish haze. the sight warms my heart before I've even had a taste. I feel my mind orientating itself away from the antisocial void experienced together with the coldness outside.

I look around and see mikhail sitting at a corner table, talking to some locals. I sit next to him, and by striking a conversation in russian I close us into a world of our own. after a few exchanged platitudes, we begin to speak in english, mixing to other loud voices around. after the shot I switch to lager, and in the following hour my empty glass is changed to a new one by a nearly noticeable, rapid two handed being circling between the counter and a table full of men, and another, another...

mikhail has been drinking way longer than an hour, I realize as he begins to go on about dostoevsky. I've heard it all before, and he knows it. the only reason he uses his loud voice to speak about this again is the desire to draw in desirable strangers from the other tables around. I already see a couple of eyes on us.

“in dostoevsky, the adventure plot is combined with the posing of profound and acute problems; and it is, in addition, placed wholly at the service of the idea. it places a person in extraordinary positions that expose and provoke him, it connects him and makes him collide with other people under unusual and unexpected conditions precisely for the purpose of testing the idea and the man of the idea, that is, for testing the “man in man.” and this permits the adventure story to be combined with other genres that are, it would seem, quite foreign to it, such as the confession and the saint’s life.”
“saint's life?” repeats a man from the table next to us. holding a glass of pale lager close to his lips, he is ready to continue his static patterns of behavior as soon as his words have reached and encouraged mikhail to become even louder - he goes on to deconstruct the situation at hand to its bits while I sit quietly pondering on how would a saint's life feel.

“at the base of the genre lies the socratic notion of the dialogic nature of truth, and the dialogic nature of human thinking about truth. the dialogic means of seeking truth is counterposed to official monologism, which pretends to possess a ready-made truth, and it is also counterposed to the naïve self-confidence of those people who think they know something, that is, who think they possess certain truths. truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person. it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction.

socrates called himself a “pander” - he brought people together and made them collide in a quarrel, and as a result truth was born; with respect to this emerging truth socrates called himself a “midwife,” since he assisted at the birth. for this reason also he called his method “obstetric” - but socrates never called himself the exclusive possessor of a ready-made truth. we emphasize that socratic notions of the dialogic nature of truth lay at the folk-carnivalistic base of the genre of socratic dialogue, determining its form, but they did not by any means always find expression in the actual content of the individual dialogues. the content often assumed a monologic character that contradicted the form-shaping idea of the genre.

in plato’s dialogues of his first and second periods, the dialogic nature of truth is still recognized in the philosophical worldview itself, although in weakened form. thus the dialogue of these early periods has not yet been transformed into a simple means for expounding ready-made ideas, for pedagogical purposes, and socrates has not yet been transformed into a “teacher.” but in the final period of plato’s work that has already taken place: the monologism of the content begins to destroy the form of that socratic dialogue. consequently, when the genre of the socratic dialogue entered the service of the established, dogmatic worldviews of various philosophical schools and religious doctrines, it lost all connection with a carnival sense of the world and was transformed into a simple form expounding already found, ready-made irrefutable truth; ultimately, it degenerated completely into a question-and-answer form for training neophytes - catechism.”

the honesty of mikhail's has now drawn two more familiar local faces to our table, and the discussion begins to fly off to all possible directions. inhibitions become forgotten, and after a while I am no longer in control of what I say. reacting almost too quickly to the words of others, I reveal the depths of my mind in everything I say. just out of mad confidence I let the flow of thoughts speed through a very coherent structure of associations, traveling a route called “random.” my drunkenness holds hands with the ability to tie into short sentences the vastness of meanings drawn from the moments we share, only comprehensible to the other mindful beings entwined in this time and space.

I am not completely sure how, but we seem to overcome everything at hand through the words exchanged, extending the reality through the concepts within our minds. even though enjoying the sense of being inside the tight spot between time and space, I break its spell by rambling. the words brought from that sense obscure the material world devoid of inherent meaning by a plenitude of subjective meanings suddenly intertwining around this table, filtered also through other minds than mine.

I lean back to listen and observe the others for a while, and glance around the bar. something on the walls triggers me to remember the reason why I left my dungeon to come here - I was to find another heroine. I look at mikhail and he turns to look at me, and our eyes exchange a few senses of things. he has plans for tonight. I am not included.

smiling a smile nearing a laugh, I think about the foolishness of coming here in this search of mine. it has been a long time since dead poets like me and mikhail found muses from any bars. our taste of them has anyway turned to these places filled with just middle-aged men.

I pull on my cape, farewell everyone, and walk out from the yellow hue into the grainy darkness outside. in an instant all the toxic strains laid by me on my body for the past days feel as if climbing up my spine, and my head sizzles itself dizzy. my knees kiss the ground, but I feel no pain. crawling towards the small icy fountain in the middle of the square, I am so delirious the snow under my hands feels hot.

I turn to lay on my back to catch my breath, and quite obviously hallucinate the snow around to melt into a pool of liquid, so hot it steams and vaporizes into the air. raising myself to stand up, I notice a woman approaching me through the mist created by my mind. when she gets closer, I see she has long orange hair down to her waist and a body dressed in layers of black. her eyes defy the ability of mine to focus.

everything that happens next arrives to my conscious mind as if through a blurred lens, like a sped-up-film not focused to anything. the first moment from which I can say myself to know something unravels as I lay on the backseat of a car, a taxi most likely, with my head on her lap. her laughter is loud and her flowery scent an impossibility in the frozen lands we live in. I am surprised over the coherence of my voice howling out my address,

“chopinova dvě.”

the room bathes in white light as I awaken. more snow has fallen down from the heavens during the morning hours. I feel my body - no hungover. I stretch my hands towards the ceiling - no bruises.

climbing to the windowsill, I clumsily open one of the windows and breathe in the fresh air. my eyes burn and turn the scene outside to its negative in color, just for a split second - riegrovy sady flashes from pure white to dark shades of phosphorous green, as if the trees of the park, now buried under snow, all would lively sparkle.

what happened yesterday? I was supposed to begin the construction of a character for whom to write a story for, but instead I... got drunk? is that it?

I light a cigarette, pick up a pair of wool socks to wear in addition to just boxers, and fall into a memory of last winter in st. petersburg. the coldness wrapped into the air floating damply over the baltic sea went through everything I could imagine wearing, making a sprained muscle under my left shoulder blade color a few weeks with suffering. the moist from the sea feels different in the air than the moist from vltava. it is not so suffocatingly cold here.

in an instant my mind ties together pieces of information not before associated, memories, as I see a dark figure ascending up the hill towards me through the park. I recognize the orange hair, returning from the center. frozen to but observe, I follow her movements through the whiteness to the front door underneath. where did she get the key?

I close the window, jump down onto the bed, onto the floor, and quickly dress myself. all I remember from the night that involves her is being delirious in the square in her presence, laughing on the backseat of a taxi which I did not pay for, and then laying here drawing circles on her back. I am not sure if we were introduced. all I know is that I don't know her name.

I hear the key turn inside the old lock and suddenly sense the smell of the books around, a smell that is normally adapted senseless for my conscious mind. the door is open and there she stands, silent and stunning.

closing the door, she walks to be but a touch away, and I look into her eyes for the first time through sober filters. my quick mind has already gone to create a characterization of her, and as we stand and stare I think, which comes first - the eyes of the character or the character? where do the internal parts of a paramour end, where do the external begin?

she leaves my gaze to go through a stack of books by the bed, and I begin to make us coffee. waiting for the water to boil, I sit onto the windowsill by the kitchenette, and look through the open space how well she fits here. her presence is completely coherent. there is nothing in her gestures or posture which could translate to insecurity of any kind. I could almost make myself believe she owns this apartment and not me.

I remember the sentences read yesterday, the words about static figures, the kind that do not lose their individuality and become merged with others. as I look at her I am sure she will never merge into me, nor will I to her. I know it from her presence. she is present in every moment, making it impossible to infiltrate her mind, her perceptions, her senses. memories from last night begin to emerge - otherwise I wouldn't know these things about her without even knowing her name.

I pick one of the books left to rest on the windowsill, and open it from a marked spot.

“anyway, it seemed to him that when you add a concept of dynamic quality to a rational understanding of the world, you can add a lot to an understanding of contrarians. some of them aren't just being negative toward static moral patterns, they are actively pursuing a dynamic goal. everybody gets on these negative contrarian streaks from time to time, where no matter what it is they're supposed to be doing, that's the one thing they least want to do. sometimes it's a degenerative negativism, where biological forces are driving it. sometimes it's an ego pattern that says, I'm too important to be doing all this dumb static stuff.

sometimes the contrary anti-static drive becomes a static pattern of its own. this contrary stuff can become a tiger-ride where you can't get off and you have to keep riding and riding until the tiger finally throws you and devours you. the degenerative contrarian stuff usually goes that way. drugs, illicit sex, alcohol and the like.

but sometimes it's dynamic, where your whole being senses that the static situation is an enemy of life itself. that's what drives the really creative people - the artists, composers, revolutionaries and the like - the feeling that if they don't break out of this jailhouse somebody has built around them, they're going to die.”

the coffee pot hisses and spits out steam. I pour the coffee into two tall glasses, covering it with greasy milk. seating myself next to her on the floor, leaning to the bedpost, I look more closely to her and see that in addition to the coherence of her being, there's acceptance. she possesses a coherent structure flexible enough to accept the love of another into it, without confusing it to the merging of values, experiences, bodies. her mind can be penetrated without breaking it. perfect.

2011-10-30T17:45:00.000+02:00

2011-10-23T18:14:00.000+03:00

day and night

2011-10-14T19:41:00.000+03:00

2011-10-05T23:58:00.000+03:00

2011-10-04T01:56:00.006+03:00

aestheticizer in helsinki

in the past, the decline and fall of the light which turns helsinki into a cold, dark hell, has signaled the time for me to close myself into my dungeon resting in the heart of the city. a few weeks ago, I wrote the following to my little black notebook while laying in clean sheets well protected from the coldness outside,

I've decided to close myself down, to hide from all capable of acknowledging my existence. from the books hoarded I find the words of the strangers - the distant and the dead. they, the words, are a bouncing ground for my mind, a mind looking for clues of similar senses of life not to be found from the world opening up outside of the cubic meters of this room.

helsinki is the center of the universe, and as such it possesses the weirdest sense of humor. it loves presupposed truths whispered inside of it, and does all in its reach to twist the mind of the whisperer into seeing his own foolishness. it all stems from the incredibility of there ever existing such a quantity of buzzing conscious life in these latitudes. so much sweat and tears and hard liquor have washed the streets to life.

and so I began to see things differently after my heart melt to run up and down my spine. the fall wind wasn't as suffocatingly cold as it was the day before. when I sat among all the books hoarded from the dead poets I couldn't concentrate to any of them anymore with the same intensity I yearned. I was having a conversation with an alive poet instead.

helsinki is an ideal place for a poet, a poet who is ready to accept within his sphere of experience anything, at any moment. a person open for all potentials draws them to fulfill around him as a creation which is not made real by just one mind, but many. today is my turn to document it.

I sit on a big rock, looking at a mother and a son throwing pebbles to bounce off the surface of the sea glimmering in the warm light. for a brief moment I can understand the charm of spending time with someone born yesterday - for a kid anything can be real. my heart sings,

I feel the sun and the sea, breathing the air

the only three things we all share

as the sun warms my anklet, I begin to lure myself into the thought of all the beauty around me being nothing but a dream. my eyes follow for some time a huge wooden sailboat slowly lingering past me. as I marvel at its beauty I sense three old oriental tourists in suits, passing me on the path winding behind my back. the gentle demeanor of them towards each others as they take a couple of pictures close to where the mother and the son are playing warms my heart.

I want to take a picture of the three men when I see them turning to return to walk the path past me, but decide not to fall to document out of respect for their ascendancy. then, as suddenly as thoughts rise to my focus, the one with the camera steps off the sandy pass onto the grass, coming straight towards my black sunglasses. I am so blinded by the ever emanating light I sometimes wear them even, foolishly, at night.

“can you take a picture of me?”

in confusion, my hasty mind imagines for a second him to want me to document him for the dyslexic. but, as he hands me his eos 7d with the lens with a red ribbon around it, canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L USM, I realize it to not be the case. he descends from the grass to lean onto a rock underneath me by the sea, so I jump off the big rock I am sitting on, wearing my camera on my back and having his in my hand, to crouch on another big rock on the same level with him.

baffled, I frame the picture as to have the line between the rocks and the sea split the image in two, with him posing ever so courteously, in his dark beige raw silk suit on the right side, with the sea reflecting the sun and the icebreaker kontio on the left. branches of a tree with round leaves slowly forgetting their greenness cover half of the blue the sky. I have to get these pictures for myself, I think in near desperation. when he returns to stand on the grass, I follow his lead and ask,

“can you send me those pictures via email?” he leans to show me the pictures, rolling the memory to the wrong direction after the one picture where I see what a beautiful portrait I took of the stranger, and so I see an eastern girl child sitting on a couch, dressed for some occasion. I stress my point from between trembling lips,

“the picture I took is beautiful. you are such beautiful a person and the light is amazing. can I have it via email?”
“yes, a very beautiful day,” he answers, which makes me curse my foolishness, turning my impetuousness to ramble,
“beautiful day in helsinki today. we have had such coldness and now the sun finally warms my boldness. where are you from?”
“vietnam.”
“I had a best friend from vietnam when I was six years old. her name was hani. did you know vietnamese were finland's first refugees, back in the seventies?” all the three men look but confused, and I realize they don't stand under the english language. we farewell, and nobody sends me an email.

and so that lens haunts me to this day - oh how it captured the ever emanating light! what a tease was this vietnamese!

later, I sit in a booth of a bar on the same street which has at its end the island in which I met the vietnamese. playing trivial pursuit with two old friends, I am as loud and cunning as I always am in my natural habitat. the joke is known to us three - if a stranger shares the space with me, already at least a bit intoxicated and with something weighing on his heart, he'll end up in my table. the loud deep voice of pure confidence will do that to anyone.

I conduct the game compellingly as I share my poor jokes related to the game well worn out and published over a decade ago, with questions demanding a twist of a sense of time, back into the days of mika häkkinen's reign. after an hour or two of playing, a bit drunken bearded man asks to be seated into our booth, and like always, I say please do.

“I am sorry I sit here, never mind me really.”
“oh you're all welcome to sit there,” I say and ask the next question. the stranger intervenes by asking his own from the friend sitting next to me, offering his hand for a shake,
“are you a couple?”
“no we're not.”
“you are friends?”
“we are all old friends, yes.”
“oh. I miss having friends like that, friends to play like that with. I am sorry I sit here,” he repeats, and I become annoyed by the unnecessary apologizing from the man who I can see needs no-one to forgive him.
“if you want to sit there just shut up with the apologizing, it's of no-ones interest. now, an answer for me: how many adjoining neighbors does austria have?”

we continue to play, and the stranger sits staring at me. no matter what he utters, I play down the self-pity between his lines while making my friends relieve their stress about his weird focus on me by laughter. and then, finally, the stranger says,

“you have been fucking with my mind seven times now. I know you. I am not intelligent like you are, but I know you. I am just a bullshit artist. I know you, but I have to go back to paimio now. there is a sick girl there I need to attend to. will you please hug me?”

I look at his face and I recognize it well, and raise myself to hug him as the dear friends of mine are baffled to the bone. he leaves, and to this day his pursuit haunts me - what the fuck did he know?

2011-10-02T20:29:00.000+03:00

2011-09-30T23:24:00.007+03:00

“hey. been trying to meet you.”

“hey. must be a devil between us. or whores in my head.”

“whores at the door?”

“whore in my bed.”

“but hey, where have you been? if you go I will surely die. we're chained.”

uh said the man to the lady, uh said the lady to the man she adored. and the whores like a choir go uh uh all night. and, mary, ain't you tired of this uh as the sound that the mother makes with a fake embrace?

2011-09-30T22:20:00.000+03:00

2011-09-27T20:53:00.000+03:00

2011-09-25T04:42:00.014+03:00

the gayest possible music insinuates itself into my consciousness through the ether. grand gestures are being made all around me by a flock of people, grand gestures like firm palms bouncing off chests bearing joyous hearts to point into a distant above. where the hell am I?

I walk through the smoke filled, dimly lit, spaced out room onto the terrace. the cold, moist air strangles my body to wrap around itself as I lean to an iron balustrade, lighting a black cigarette. the thought of the brand name, black devil, amuses me warm when I place the sugary flavored tip on my lips.

as I turn my gaze away from the glimmering city lights, I notice a blind girl sitting on the ground, leaning her arched back to an amphora shielding alluring dahlias from the slight fall wind. either she's not aware of my presence or then I am hearing her soliloquize,

the dark nights let the stars begin their shine

affirming the reflection of mine in the sky

can count a hundred things thought in unison
sharing a sphere but not the same horizon

suddenly, I recognize this place. I am where everything appears extraordinarily real through being structured to form ever so sensible, solipsistic space. I am inside of my mind.

my metamorphosis into the devil's hound began after sleeping with gogol. the memoirs of a mad man looped all night somewhere in the back of my mind without having the form of a language, but an indescribable sense of the reality reflected in them by a long ago dead, crazy russian,

“oh, what cunning creatures these women are! now I have found out what a woman really is. hitherto no one knew whom a woman really loves; I am the first to discover it - she loves the devil. yes, joking apart, learned men write nonsense when they pronounce that she is this and that; she loves the devil - that is all. you see a woman looking through her lorgnette from a box in the front row. one thinks she is watching that stout gentleman who wears an order. not a bit of it! she is watching the devil who stands behind his back. he has hidden himself there, and beckons to her with his finger. and she marries him - actually - she marries him!”

2011-09-20T23:37:00.002+03:00

2011-09-19T22:54:00.002+03:00

2011-09-18T22:34:00.000+03:00

2011-09-18T01:32:00.002+03:00

2011-09-18T00:52:00.001+03:00

2011-09-16T01:31:00.021+03:00

the vague sounds produced by a piano somewhere behind a wall onto which my bed leans to wake me up to damp coldness. apparently when I left my consciousness I also left the window open for the air embracing the rotten tiber to run through the streets of the night to my bedroom. laughing at the images created by my half asleep mind, I hold my head and hit something warm with my elbow - oh - the devil, too, is on my bed. sleeping.

I focus my eyes on a huge tattoo depicting a snake on her back, a snake curled and twisted to be as three dimensional as possible. I reach my cold hand to touch the soft skin of her back, to see if the snake can bite me to death. instead, the coldness of my fingers spreads goosebumps all over the scarlet colored, poisonous looking creature. she, sound asleep under the image of the predator, makes a couple of discontent sounds and adjusts her position. I better get off the bed.

I pull a sweater to cover my naked body and sit on the windowsill to smoke. it is raining quietly outside. as far as I've managed to pay attention, it has rained nonstop for the past three days. that's january in rome for you. the back of my neck and head feel as if they were filled with some unknown liquid - piss, for all I care.

turning to look at her, I try to remember where the hell did she come from. I remember myself going to mr pucci after work, for an aperitivo. I remember meeting a bunch of american film makers. I remember we ordered few bottles of champagne to the terrace table. I remember talking to a blonde californian girl with the whitest of teeth. and then... god damn.

I've met the devil in the past, too, but never has it resided in the body of a woman before. the joke around has been; what kind of trousers does the devil wear?

thus, in the past it has been surprisingly safe an adventure to get drunk with the devil. but now I see a miniskirt on the floor, next to the bed.

I throw the stub of the cigarette onto the traffic filled viale di trastevere running underneath the window which I finally close. I let myself fall silently from the windowsill onto the oriental rug on the floor, and crawl the few meters separating me and her to climb back onto the bed. pulling the blanket onto us two, I place myself in line with the devil. I slide my left hand between her tender breasts, reaching her throat which shows signs of awakening by breathing in two uneven breaths of the coldness still hanging in the air. I breath in the scents lingering around the thickness of her hair to which my face is pressed - the smell of rhubarb and gooseberry are sensible somewhere beyond the stint of sweat and cigarettes. I know she can hear my question,

“where did you come from?”

“from your dreams.”

“no, seriously. I don't know who you are and where you came from. this is my lair and I tend not to have strangers around. so please, wake yourself up a bit and tell me what the hell happened last night.”

“you were in distant, non-existent lands, dreaming yourself away from the life you wish not to lead, and there was I and you asked me to come and stay with you in the awaken moments of boredom.”

“did we meet at pucci's? the last thing I remember is drinking champagne with a big group of americans. you know mr. pucci, the cafeteria slash bar a few blocks away, in piazza mastai?”

“you're confusing me. go back to sleep.”

as if on command I fall off from my consciousness, fall as if dissociating - I see the body of mine tied to hers remain as static figures as I plummet downwards from the bed into the darkness beneath.

in the night of helsinki, I surf through the neon lights of a crowded club. having lost all my friends to the temptations of the night, I decide to leave. first, though - need to go the the men's room.

as I enter the lavatory area, I see I am alone with a girl. my mind takes the time to freeze me to a stagnant position before my consciousness realizes who I am seeing. wearing a dark grey dress with an open back nearly reaching her tailbone, I see the scarlet snake which reminds me of a morning in rome, experienced long ago. slowly, I approach her body leaning over the sink. when I get closer, I see she's washing blood off her hands, blood stretching up to her elbows.

“what happened dude?”

“my boyfriend got into a fight on the dance floor. needed to defend him.”

“are you hurt?”

“no, I'm not, this is all from the guys.”

I look at the red liquid spreading around the whiteness of the porcelain sink, and in all my scurry go on to ask,

“do you remember me? we met in rome, two years ago? you stayed at my place for some time, in trastevere?”

she turns her head to look at my face, with as baffled an expression as possible. as I begin to feel like a complete idiot, I see her eyes move a few times quickly from left to right, and the gaze she lays on me after they settle gives me the answer necessary.

“I have a bottle of wine in my backpack downstairs. if you want, we could go to the shore and drink it up. for old time's sake, or something like that.”

“why not. the ass I'm with is in a better care than mine for the night anyway.”

I follow her lead downstairs, pick up my backpack from the cloakroom, and head into the night. silently, we walk through the streets of three am. she walks ahead, twisting every single step she takes into a dance which draws the air around into embracing her perfect body. the rhythm of her movements plays a song strong enough to make the sun begin its rise hours early, shedding phosphorous light over the houses representing neoclassical architecture. not for a split second does the scarlet snake on her back loose its contact with my eyes.

as we reach the shoreline next to uspenski cathedral, she sits down onto the concrete and draws the cold saltwater to form circles beneath her feet. I sit next to her, open up the bottle of red, and hand it to her. as she drinks from it the water stills itself in contempt. the forces of nature seem to whimper under her will, just as my nature is drawn to her like that of a dog's.

“tell me, miss devil, what are you made of, and why are you here making the world twist its course to serve your beauty?”

“I am made of all the sins imaginary, and the world as it is perceived by you twists as it should in order to make this experience ever more profound for you, and only for you. so, what is it in your manliness which prevents you from seeing why the object of your desire turns to be ever more amazing, ever more incomprehensible? what is it in the self-esteem of men these days? I haven't had fun since the nineteen twenties!”

“oh, so it is honesty you ask... you need to guide me - that is what you are here for, isn't it? what other reason could one imagine for your fall from the heavens if not to guide the lost?”

she laughs and turns to look into my eyes with the sort of a glare which turns the surroundings of ours into a mass of unrecognizable, dark glow. suddenly, I remember the dream where I first met her. in the dream I was trapped into the suffocating pressure of the deep sea, from which she pulled me up after I promised to grow to be the first man of my time to have what it takes to take her. and then, in the dream, I was courageous enough to smuggle her from the non-existent lands into the sphere of the real - to my roman bed.

“you remember!”

“yeah.”

“to highlight - I am here to remind you, men, of the role you need to take in order to serve the purpose built into your divine bodies. the female spirit is intangible and by definition undefinable, and oh so lost! the role of yours is to take an individual female soul and create safe enough surroundings for it to manifest the highest possible ideal built into it. the female spirit is a serving spirit, the sort of which in all its servitude can spread its internal, deeply inherent qualities by manifesting through the male confidence and power. yin and yang. there is nothing to be achieved through strength if the strength itself is not cultivated through the primal instincts only intact in the feminine spirit.

the issue your culture has had for a long time is the emphasis of submissive and mindless females as the ones worth of pursuit - which, of course, they are if one prioritizes “easiness” high. but, instead, the truly victorious men have always gone for the dark and mysterious women who no-one can define with the word dedicated to easy - girl.

the more strong a man wishes to be, the more consciously developed woman he seeks. the feminine strength acquired through conquering the spirit of such a woman is something not possible to achieve through other means. it is this process which makes our culture whisper - behind every great man there's a great woman.”

2011-09-12T23:31:00.000+03:00

war song

soldier, in a curious land
   all across a swaying sea,
take her smile and lift her hand -
   have no guilt for me

soldier, when were soldiers gone?
   if she's kind and sweet and gay,
use the wish I send to you -
   lie not lone till day!

only, for the nights that were,
   soldier, and the dawns that came,
when in sleep you turn to her
   call her by my name

dorothy parker, 1944

2011-09-12T20:42:00.000+03:00

2011-09-09T00:57:00.000+03:00

2011-09-07T23:22:00.002+03:00

stoned, she does yoga on an oriental rug dominating a huge, nearly a century old room. next to the window, I sit on a purple arm chair which in the mid-seventies decorated a penthouse suite of a hotel long ago bankrupted. my eyes follow the slowly floating, myrrh scented smoke rising from an incense placed behind chiffon curtains shielding the candle lit room from the strange eyes inhabiting the apartments sharing the same inside courtyard. I couldn't care less. I am invisible even to her.

it has been decades since anyone who I would deem “interesting” lived here. back then I was a young man, and this room had a russian 19th century chandelier hanging from the three meter high ceiling, and a dining table long enough to serve thirty-two. this was a house for parties, parties which were an utter necessity for the man of the house back then. he was a tailor with a firm will to become the best in the business in the only way he knew how to - he made one ladder of the societal hierarchy of this city be his dining room table.

I remember one of the nights around that table in a way which carries me back to my seat, back to my young and tender body, back to the distressful thoughts pounding the back of my traitor mind. a spook for the late kgb, I had swum my way into the vests made by the tailor in order to get drunk with his prestigious clientele. the things I had found out from the oblivious merchants, artists, politicians and their foreign guests, were almost as priceless for the cccp as they were a burden for me.

in time I've come to realize that the cognitive carriage I dragged behind me as a shadow was something which tricked me into experiencing what I, from my very subjective stance, did on that night. earlier on that hot summer day the only daughter of the tailor had been accepted into the university of helsinki, situated a few blocks away. as a sign of the wealth of the family, she had been able to choose a humanistic field. she was to become an archeologist.

I had seen her but briefly in the past when she brought in more food or beverages from the kitchen, or during the early morning hours when she helped carry the passed out guests from the dining room to one of the only elevators in the capital city of a young country. due to my position, I had only on some vague level of my mind made a mark of her beauty.

her proud father had asked her to join the feast of his clientele on the evening of her admittance, and there she was, sitting across the table from me. she wore a dress cut so as to appear to be melting off of her, a dress made by her father of thin purple fabric embroidered with pearly circles around her sculptural shoulders. I could not say a thing to her in addition to few words of congratulations, because her pale blue eyes appeared to pierce through every living thing and I did not want to draw them to me more than was necessary.

she was seated in between two right wing politicians, who kept on pouring vodka for each others while pulling out more or less imaginary stories of relic hunts from their intoxicated minds. the effort to impress and amuse the young lady squeezed out of air by their cockiness was breathtaking. as I watched the trembling of their bloated, saliva filled cheeks, I decided to have her. she was to be mine for a moment which was made beautiful by my moral impurity demanding a clean canvas to be born anew.

the cognitive burden on my shoulders must have had an effect on that decision. it must have pushed me towards putting an end to the lie I had come to know my life as, and the only way my deeper being knew how to trick myself out of it was by selecting carefully a target for the most irrational emotion possible, a target which would sing the final song of me from foolish lips to the ears of elders. pity me not. the only time I had her was an equally grand exchange of the primary forces of life as was the beating which left my skull crushed on the ground by the piers not far from this room.

she, who is now resting her face on her soles in front of me is deserving of similar force directed into her. in the past few days she has proved to the silent witnesses, the walls and me, that she has more control over her physical being than the men in tailored suits ever had of anything around the dining table.

and so, I descend from the armchair to sit next to her twisted body on the floor, and blow the ice cold wind of my transcendental lungs to her right ear. calmly, she lifts her head to see if the window is open.

2011-08-29T04:50:00.000+03:00

highest goal is to become whole
during the processing of an eternal soul

the endless space of mind stores past fears

only releasable through a body made to shed tears

lunacy of this kind does not need genes or environment

consciousness encompassing even dreams is crazy yet brilliant

2011-08-24T02:21:00.034+03:00

as the sun sets somewhere over the railways and far from my sight, I light an incense growing from the grass. the slender wind jogging around the damp park has the scent of vanilla dissolve into it, slowly making the air around us a bit special. it has been a while since the three of us sat together in a park like now, eating random exotic foods and beverages brought form distant lands to serve as triggers for viewing our whereabouts from a healthy distance. I remember us drinking stolichnaya and borjomi the last time we wandered on lawns. it was weeks ago.

after spending the last weeks in the company of so many non-satan worshipers, I've come to forget how good it feels to be together with fallen angels. my mind is not only playing with terms here - stirring and twisting and, thus, owning the words - but also hiding a bit of truth into a provocative metaphor.

earlier today I leaned to my bike, waiting, in the middle of the inside courtyard of helsinki's main railway station. the people were running past me in the afternoon scurry, off and on to trains from the platforms of the weird station which the trains only leave for one direction - north. as I let my gaze fall from the world around me to my muddy shoes I noticed myself to be standing 700,9 kilometers from the arctic circle.

like my gaze, we three fell in an early age from the imaginary heaven culminating to such mantras as “being born in finland is winning the lottery.” not “like” winning the lottery. winning it. I cannot say what the reasons for the falling of others were, but I tripped over and fell hard after I began to realize how artificially the world around me is governed. I had been given time and space to build up my own system of values and standards from early on, cheers to good parenting, and so it was rather tough to realize that the ideals well thought through as being the highest on my view were barely visible in what went on in the outside world. worst was to realize that words are corruptible.

in a “social democracy” we who go for quality in everything, more or less by instinct, are left to show our respectful fingers to the majority bearing but vague values. like, instead of having a society which promotes individual achievements people are driven by a weird lunacy called equality. one cannot imagine anything that could produce more serious cognitive dissonance than the idea of equality in the form presented by that mass. I know that only basic potentials are equal, never the end results.

with both of my hands I lure the smoke from the incense to float to my face, and james begins the conversation by singing her translation of our national anthem,

“oh our land finland, borning land! ringing the word golden! no valley, no hill...”

“wait, wait, wait! is this national anthem about things lacking?”

“yeah.”

“I want to get right to the point now. some people may have successfully become oblivious to winter after all this sun and light, but I have not. the summer has been awesome and as short as it has always been here, and I know it to be nothing but downhill from now on. first the darkness falls so early each day you begin to wish the snow would already fall to shed some lightness into the dark. then comes the snow, comes on heavy, and you wake up one morning and it is minus twenty degrees out. standing in your underwear in front of your window, holding a cup of coffee and looking at the pure whiteness outside, you thank mankind for electricity on some very primitive survival level of your consciousness. without it you'd woken up dead.”

“waking up dead is so relative, and maybe even comparable to the fear felt by them around us who are so excited about “society.” if we would not work together, nothing up here would work. that is the fear driving these people with ancestors straight from the dark forests together. in addition to living in a city, the only real difference between them and their grandparents is that today the comfort zone of men grown to be but pussies spreads way too wide when looked at with the eyes of a warrior.”

“it is natural to fear all which you do not understand. think about bears. they run in fear if they hear an old woman singing in the forest while picking berries, or when an old drunken man runs towards them with a baseball bat. they fear because when they look at how we behave they have no idea what the fuck is going on and why. they fear us, because we are unpredictable, and I cannot blame them - who would have guessed that a bunch of hairless monkeys would one day build a shuttle to leave the earth for the moon?”

“it is the higher state of consciousness, the ability to see and break patters, to see potentials and build. this is the reason why we rule animals. we have the imagination to own. and, as a sugar topping, the confidence produced by the strength of that illusion of owning is what brings us respect.”

I laugh and my eyes follow the noise coming somewhere from the sky visible beyond tall birches. an example of general aviation flashes through a strip of sky framed by the trees, then another, and another, and I begin to see that this guy is not just flying the plane. he is owning it.

“animals, those fools! I cannot help it, I have to rise my hands to that human achievement up there! see a bear flying that?”

“I've seen a bear drive a car.”

“anybody can drive a car, but not everyone has the balls and the skills to fly through empty space in a small plane like that guy up there. besides, not even father lenin could make bears beat gravity. it takes a lot of understanding before you cease to fear it.”

2011-08-22T00:02:00.000+03:00

over a cup of coffee the dyslexics compare a day on a motorcycle...

...to a day on a bicycle.

2011-08-19T00:31:00.003+03:00

a mind enough mad and akin

turns my sweet solitude to aching

it is a matter of honor to submit

under a man with royal wisdom and wit

words from here on can do only harm

I hold my breath in front of his complex charm

2011-08-15T15:58:00.014+03:00

a rumor about an old anarchist friend having been granted a government provided SRS crawls into my ear on a squatted street. laying on the hot asphalt I know this must be one of the last t shirt saturdays this year, because the fading heat of the sun evokes in me nothing but a feeling of us leaving it behind by thirty kilometers every second. the nature of that thought is also from where I know I have a hungover, again, first time in months - my mind works too slow to perceive anything but the deepest values in everything I direct my attention to.

the words mumbled around me tune down as I see Iggy staring down at me, blocking the sun. his enigmatic stare is still there, in his eyes not seen in years. my mind calmly reminds me of him, how he is, by flashing back memories of his wildest performances in everyday situations. politically incorrect behavior - the finest of acts - manifesting in things thrown down from balconies, insults and bad jokes. in short, I remember times when I saw up close craziness made socially acceptable through stardom.

Iggy moves from blocking the sun, seating himself next to me on the pavement. my eyes begin to sparkle when I realize the immediate future bears a real joke of a conversation. flashing the widest of smiles, he begins,

“imagine de niro as a kid, a kid with hair like a lion's and the same sparkle in his eyes as you see in mine.”

“every time I see such a sparkle, I've come to think, it must be a sign of a very coherent mind, because only a coherent mind can perceive potentials so well.”

“if you want to go a little crazy, then think about how potentials relate to social norms. when you see a new opportunity open up in front of you with your sparkling eyes, there is a very small chance your inner voice says something other than why not. but norms? norms?”

“the scary thing is that, a coherent mind is not necessarily a perfect mind. if I take perception as an example, the guiding cognitive tools and principles behind it may work very fluently and logically, but still the individual may view reality through some restricting elements. from what I've seen, a very prevalent such restriction is the lack of confidence in asserting oneself to others. when seen in behavior, it manifests as an everlasting cockfight.”

“ah but a good cockfight is an absolute necessity for us! you know, the values, which I know you share with me and a bunch of nearly extinct men, are worth fighting for. especially now, when the organism of society is forming itself to provide for the most social. the definition of social capital is twisting itself away from values related to integrity, to achievement, to mastery. the logical hierarchical order based on values springing from times with more closer union with man and his land is being replaced by some other logical order. what, I don't know, but I hate it already.”

“last cries before everything falls to communism!”

“when you value life you hate everything reminding you of death, and do know there to be also individuals who love life yet hate the living, because the living remind them of their own decay. such views you can find from our kind who have become lost into social circles run by altruists.”

“fair enough. how do you define empathy?“

“after experiencing a wide range of human emotions, as only a conscious being can, it is possible to reflect and know from the being, and especially words, of another person what he is feeling.”

“I am not empathetic at all.”

“em, that's because there's something pathetic about you dear. but you'll grow like do all who gain the necessary experiences.”

Iggy rises up and walks calmly away through the fighting dogs of crust punks, and as I look at his posture and overall body control I wish to get to verbally abuse someone who has a negative generalization as his opinion on opiate addicts. what a perfect topic to use to argue for individual responsibility, and in the end, free will.

later, after loosing my voice confined me to solitude, I sit on my balcony, drinking green tea flavored with dried ribwort plantain, chilies and strawberries. my rusty voice reminds me of another time when I sat on a balcony over the rooftops. it was one of those rare moments when I knew I'd found a new person who I can speak to as provocatively as I wish. a person with no fear.

on that balcony, back then, I sung with my rusty voice only the sections of a certain poem my mind was able to remember in the light of the full moon;

but as all several souls contain
mixture of things they know not what,
love these mix'd souls doth mix again,
and makes both one, each this, and that.

when love with one another so
interanimates two souls,
that abler soul, which thence doth flow,
defects of loneliness controls.

we then, who are this new soul, know,
of what we are composed, and made,
for th' atomies of which we grow
are souls, whom no change can invade.

but, o alas! so long, so far,
our bodies why do we forbear?
they are ours, though not we; we are
th' intelligences, they the spheres.

and if some lover, such as we,
have heard this dialogue of one,
let him still mark us, he shall see
small change when we're to bodies gone.

2011-08-07T22:29:00.000+03:00

2011-08-03T23:26:00.005+03:00

coincidences, coincidences, coincidences. like being inspired by a pianist showing off the spread of her fingers into placing my hand on three stranger's hands, to compare, and finding out my hand to be the same size and width than a man's who's born on the exact same day as I. or like robert pirsig and lila, a name referring to a color which, again, first time in three years beamed behind my eyelids the other night as I was falling asleep on a couch, like I've done on different couches for a week. beamed before I read the first page, which, as such, is the coincidence of coincidences;

“lila didn't know he was here. she was sound asleep, apparently in some fearful dream. in the darkness he heard a grating sound of her teeth and felt her body suddenly turn as she struggled against some menace only she could see.

the light from the open hatch above was so dim it concealed whatever lines of cosmetics and age were there and now she looked softly cherubic, like a small girl with blond hair, wide cheekbones, a small turned-up nose, and a common child's face that seemed so familiar it attracted a certain natural affection. he got the feeling that when morning came she should pop open her sky-blue eyes and they should sparkle with excitement at the prospect of a new day of sunlight and parents smiling and maybe bacon cooking on the stove and happiness everywhere.

but that wasn't how it would be. when lila's eyes opened in a hung-over daze she'd look into the features of a gray-haired man she wouldn't even remember - someone she met in a bar the previous night. her nausea and headache might produce some remorse and self-contempt but not much, he thought - she'd been through this many times - and she'd slowly try to figure out how to return to whatever life she'd been leading before she met this one.

her voice murmured something like 'look out!' then she said something unintelligible and turned away, then pulled the blanket up around her head, perhaps against the cold breeze that came down through the open hatch. the berth of the sailboat was so narrow that this turn of her body brought her up against him again and he felt the whole length of her and then her warmth. an earlier lust came back and his arm went over her so that his hand held her breast - full there but too soft, like something over-ripe that would soon go bad.”

2011-07-31T22:55:00.000+03:00

2011-07-31T04:13:00.001+03:00

2011-07-29T03:17:00.009+03:00

early morning sounds of traffic beam outside as we lay on a huge bed after a night of reading books out loud to each others. I rest my head on the tanned stomach of an old friend, reading poems by dorothy parker. my slow and rusty voice vibrates to my chest, to my cheeks,

if I abstain from fun and such, I'll probably amount to much

but I shall stay the way I am, because I do not give a damn

an ambulance helicopter flies over the building, making the huge bay windows tremble. I feel weak and left behind by the world outside, and do not know where does the capacity of my mind to know in advance come from. seeing the future is the wrong way to put it, for seeing is active. what I experience is a passive, uncontrollable sense of remembering something not yet happened, as if everything meaningful enough to define time could overcome it and show its effects beyond it.

tonight I remembered how, in an apartment with tall purple walls, I woke up late one afternoon to fall from my bed onto a wool carpet on the floor. it was spring time, two years ago, and the friend now pondering on the words of dorothy was living with me, playing the role of a lover in my dreamlike den.

I laid naked and nearly catatonic on the chocolate brown carpet for a long time, shocked by the dream I'd had. for the past winter months I had taught myself to believe, to know, that the relationship I was in was the one, the one that would last from those confused times until we were both wrinkly or dead. the reason for my stance was the uniqueness of the love I felt. I could not imagine myself to love anyone else, nor could I imagine anyone else to understand, accept and love my bipolar being. that is why I was bewildered to wake up bearing love for a mysterious figure from a dream.

in the dream I was in a boundless world and for no reason at all went into a crowded pharmacy. from behind a small counter I found a blond man, who I immediately knew myself to love. I can't remember the conversations we had when he accompanied me outside into the boundlessness where I got to know that after just two years we would meet in real life.

I crawled on the carpet to face my mirror leaning onto the purple wall, and looked at myself for a long time, as if trying to look for answers. when I told the dream to him who lays here with me earlier tonight, he said,

“oh girl. what would you ever need from a drugstore? did you meet somebody last spring who worked behind a counter that really serves your needs? don't answer me, because I know you did.”

I have known for a long time that the only people who understand the depths and the heights of my mind are the kind who have a similar spectrum of perspectives on life. yesterday, when walking in a park, I was talking on the phone with my father when I fell to the grass and cried silently for no reason I could recognize, but I guess he did. now, from the sounds of morning traffic underneath my window, I know without looking it to be the horn of his motorcycle that calls me out for a ride.

there are no words to use to describe a sense of life based on something so complicated and profound as to drive one regularly near madness. those without experience of such varieties tend to feel but resentment towards us, and I bet they have no idea of the tranquility and sheer peace we feel when cruising through the city. the center of helsinki is surrounded by islands with beautiful housing areas, and as we drive for tens of kilometers with only crossing the city's borders to drive through tapanila I feel my chronic escapism relieved.

moving through scenes of life while sitting comfortably on a bike I am taken out of all the contexts driving me slowly insane in their arbitrariness. I could not be more happy than I am to have come from a person who on some unconscious level knows the quality of our shared lunacy and how it can be relieved, even if just for a moment. our way is the highway.

2011-07-25T01:52:00.006+03:00

needed to call you because I am standing on the edge of my mind

can feel a cry lurking behind my cheekbones and around my heart

won't let any tears flow and my voice will not crumble, I promise

life is like a pipe and I am a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside

yesterday all over the city I
had seen many dismal faces
around the tropical moisture
of the streets in the northern
hemisphere though I had no
reason even to ask if there'd
be a collective reason hiding
in plain sight in strange eyes

aaahhhaaeee

feel too tired as my modus operandi
has been heavily overloaded and the
only rational thing would be to boot
my mind to start again inside a land
of the unconscious in the mode of a
lucid dream and you know how it is
too hard to do re-programming here
where one is not conscious of being
conscious like a ghost in a machine
so be wise to know the necessity for
me to have around an external mind
in the form of a fried to call at night

...

we had been running around the city in different assemblies for 24 hours when standing in front of a gas station, 24 hours during which I had not seen a piece of news. I had had people sleep over at my place, with me sleeping on my carpet, running around in parties that continued from the night to my dreams. a single lightning had struck while I slept, pounding heavily inside the clouds beginnig to shed water over the streets made hot by the early morning sun. when I woke up, I had three of my loved ones gathered around, laughing in a way that drew me from the floor, devoid of my morning set of news blogs, to another adventurous day around the streets, parks, a forest.

so, as I sat on a concrete block on the edge of a huge parking lot of a power plant, enjoying the asphalt made hot by the sun and listening to shit heavy metal from a spot where one could see straight to an open air stage without paying a dime, I received a text message;

I can imagine benny hill music playing when the dude slaughtered in the island.

I had no idea what the message meant so my mind raced to see if there were scenes I'd seen in movies or somewhere recently enough to provide a clue of the point of reference of the sender. I found nothing, though the heavy metal got driven over by benny hill playing in my mind.

as I saw the headlines on the door of the gas station I stormed inside, suddenly stressed by the normality of the people around me. I picked up a yellow paper by the counter and eyed through sentences on the first seven pages. I could not believe the void we had existed in, completely unaware of yet again one norwegian going berserk.

I guess the trauma would have been less severe if I had found out about it on my own, accompanying the news online to a breakfast or something. but after a day of meeting tens of people none of which said a thing about this before the text message which now hinted at there being a mayhem going on around /b/, I felt as if my state of shock was the only thing real in a world of sleeping gray matter.

an italian landlord of mine once asked me, in the midst of a long conversation about the exotic land I come from, why do we like killing ourselves; he had heard about f-land's suicide rates and the school shootings. I couldn't name a single reason, but told some things about our culture and how it has evolved from rather antisocial groups of people in deep forests, about the darkness of the winters and the mind blowing light of the summers, about men and women and social roles.

school, as an institutional experience for many, is a miniature of a socialist world. everything is governed by a hierarchical structure, with paid leaders and obligatory participation of the little workers in the functioning of the society. an antisocial person within such a context might easily grow to tie the values behind his only social surroundings, in addition to his family, to the wider world around him. and it is not even hard when the tv news keep presenting the country he lives in as being extensively bureaucratically governed. if he does not find the values he feels within himself from anywhere in the outside world, that being values somehow tied to selfishness, he feels himself as an outsider. he is alone in the world, or well, usually boys like that tend to magically find nietzsche.

it is logical to arrive to a point where one fights in the behalf of one's values. the only mistake collectively being done is to not to analyze that logic when such actions surface in unexpected places. when a juvenile, depressed individualist goes on a killing spree in his school only to perform an extended suicide we should be able to read behind the act to see it as rebellion. and if we see rebellion in the form of an extended suicide, what does that say? it speaks of a rebellion which assumes that the act of rebelling itself will result nothing, because the selfish individual wishes not to survive from that act. in short, they don't know any better in this world, and do not believe there to ever be.

but wait. we all live in the same world, right? I even had the same history teacher in high school as did the first school shooter of ours. I knew people who knew people who died in the school just ten kilometers from our house. but yet he appears to have lived in a world where the only solution was to kill as much of them who he thought to consciously present the values he felt were destructive and evil. he saw in the collective miniature society the institutionalized indoctrination into a world which, for me at least, does not exist in the form the structuring of the school would imply. I am free to choose a lot more.

in a weird way the manifestos left behind by people committing extended suicides are intended to draw attention to the logic behind the individual, by the individual. the problem seems to be that collectively we are too much insulted by the references of the material to our own experienced world that we tend to shun them away, rather than objectively look at the values and views held by a person disillusioned enough by his reality to commit hideous acts of violence. we need to bring up the false premises and learn from the logic behind them.

the scary thing is that from many if not all of such manifestos one can see the rebellion against collective values. as long as we hold up structures which make majority rule possible we will never achieve a sense of security of our individual freedom. logically, the best rule would be such that is done through a well informed and thought through process mirroring values based in the highest view of life, which the rule of the majority does not account to in large settings, because so many are mistakenly devaluing themselves and their lives. one reason for such a devaluation are false “cultural” narratives, especially prevalent around texts deemed religious.

the looming panic behind the possibility that “assholes would take over” drives people paranoid. if people believe there to be no place for a reasonable and rational process behind the actions of others, or worst, the collective, they have no way to know what to expect. one essential premise for a rational process are the right facts, the second is a coherent set of values to put the facts in perspective. what we tend to get from our culture and many of its institutions is facts of life stirred with an incoherent and often contradicting values. you know the feeling, like the whole world would be speaking to you like to an idiot or a child.

my guess is that if we lived in a world where everyone was free and responsible of leading their individual lives without anything to owe for the collective, we would be psychologically more healthy. we would have better self-esteem, because we would have to know our own values and virtues in order to adjust ourselves to the facts of life around us. and when one has good self-esteem, it is quite natural to have a good esteem of others, too. when you have looked behind the logic of yourself you tend to see the logic behind others.

the thing to note about the norwegian is that, at thirty-two, he had taken the same thought process present in the manifestos of school shooter to a point where suicide after the act had turned to surrendering, and the scale of rebellion had grown to reach wider government. today, I have spent hours trying to figure out his view of the world and of himself, from a specific form of a manifesto - a youtube video. the principals of strength, honor, sacrifice and martyrdom are present. but yet, like in all cognitive dissonances, he appears to at times be speaking against “suicidal humanism” which for me would indicate the death wish of altruism - the sacrifice of the self for the collective. and that is what he did. can you see the contradiction behind mixing honor and sacrifice together?

honor is showing your respectful finger to all you disapprove of, and doing it loud. that is the act of being truthful in a given situation where something fucked up occurs. no need for bombs or joining an organization that promotes peace on the other side of the planet. why? because one can only be fully in control of the action of one's finger, not a bomb or an organization.

there is no need to fight a “cultural war,” because cultures as such are imaginary collective wholes which will never be as close to representing the truth as the individual is. what I show my finger to is fake selfishness, like treating yourself with a frozen super market pizza as if it would not be a death wish in the form of artificial food, or like enjoying shopping without understanding that you're really just wasting your time to please others by mere looks. it is selfishness based on giving low value to oneself. I raise my hat to those selfish motherfuckers who go for quality and their own pleasure in everything they do, making every moment of their lives special and so live life as it really is - a complex set of infinite possibilities for the expression of happiness, in this very moment.

yet, if others want to live their lives based on different values than I do, there's nothing but the finger and and a conversation about those very values that might follow. I know I cannot get along with every single person on this planet but that never makes me devalue their lives. I never devalue a conscious choice, because I am not in the position to judge anything that only really affects the individual making the choice. he is the one who lives as the one who made it.

all I can hope for is for others to have values and priorities that are thought through and conscious, meaning, out in the open for rational discussion. the choice really is whether to be or not to be conscious of the values which make up one's perspective on life.

the ideal would be to live one's life as one wants to live it, and give everyone else that same freedom. how one wants to live one's life is a choice always present in the given set of circumstances around every minute. everyone has a pair of legs to walk toward fulfilling whichever choice they make. the ill practices of another “culture” are not my issue. I can come and visit a place with laws and customs I disapprove of and get drunk, or, if getting drunk is forbidden in that lot, I am more than happy to be banned from there after one drunken mayhem produced by smuggled turbo yeast, sugar and water mixed and left cooking for a day in a motel. all just to express the individual freedom of mine to get wasted. I would count that ban as a merit.

I am not the least bothered to agree with the norwegian mass murderer that political correctness sucks. if a mass murderer is correct in something, that does not mean that the actions he decided to take are justifiable, because after looking into his logic it is possible to find flaws which have lead to a morally unjustifiable act that has nothing in essence to do with the one thing he is correct about. when things like this happen and all we are collectively left with are weird manifestos, the only option is to try to make sense out of a sense of self which has manifested itself as a daytime nightmare. if a person feels a strong need to rebel against something there might be something to learn from that logic which probably bubbles in the minds of many - and that logic must be brought forth as part of the world we live in. why? for the sake of understanding.

a good point to start when looking at the values of others is to find out what you view yourself as, and what is the value of your life on your opinion. the logic you will find is an example of the structures we all share - a sense of self.

to exemplify, I view myself as my conscious mind and the value of my life is the totality of life as it can only be experienced by me through my consciousness. every human being, and all animals, I have met have had more or less conscious minds and thus the value of their lives is the totality of life as it can only be experienced by them. so, I have no need to control the lives of others, because I know a conscious mind cannot be controlled in its experience of the world. everybody can be fooled, but never do we own the mind of another. so why bother trying? I also have no need to direct the minds of others to any direction by forceful means, because I know reason to exist from experience and I am beginning to know how to use it.

just as the content of my conscious mind is under my control, so it is for all others. I carry great responsibility for the content of mine, and respect the varieties of contents in the minds of others. life is how I experience it, and I have the freedom to choose where to do the experiencing. if a place I am settled in becomes intolerable to live in for any reason I may deem a reason enough, I will move. everyone else, if I am asked, has the same right. I am more than happy to fight for a job or for an apartment or for a spouse with people from whatever backgrounds. the only thing that matters for me, and what I hope would matter for many others, are individual qualities.

and quality, my friend, is something that is known to drive people mad. good night.

2011-07-24T11:42:00.001+03:00

12h

2011-07-22T20:10:00.000+03:00

“the problem we have with arsy is that he is what he is. an asshole. you know what is the most annoying thing about assholes? their behavior escalates, because they cannot honestly face themselves but instead blame all their wrongdoings on others. and if not consciously blame, then on some other weird level they experience at least resentment towards those who have been more or less willing partners in their behavior, or merely around them. why? because they cannot face themselves on any level.

back some weeks ago I took myself out at night to spend some time on cliffs overlooking the city, smoking and photographing. as I sat there while bats flew around me in rapid patterns I thought wow, am I happy to be in my company. not alone in the company of somebody else. not in the company of an asshole. if I would be like arsy, those moments alone would be just filled with my mind lying to itself about itself in order to hold it all together in the company of myself. hold it together for what, well, to have a good time I guess.

I think there is some sort of a logical contradiction going on in arsy being so social. he is good with people, like they say, always finding something common to discuss and brave enough to look everybody in the eye. maybe, just maybe, his sense of self is so fluent and all over the place that it is actually easier for him than for most to adjust himself to a variety of characters. and that very arbitrariness might extend to his values, to his sense of morality, and when combined with the amount of people he adjusts himself to, constantly, he actually does not know between right and wrong at times. he steals, lies, cheats, all of those things, but not daily. just you know, sometimes.

well, in those times when he is the most far away from himself, I like to believe, because I do think he is a great laugh.”

“I want to say something and I promise you, I don't know what I am quoting;

program yourself to feel, with depth enough to know what's up and heart to sense the real.”

2011-07-21T22:07:00.000+03:00

2011-07-18T03:30:00.007+03:00

back when living in an island of africa, I spent my 21st birthday inside a haunted house napoleon once slept in, trying to find a small piece of something worth 1500 euros from a huge pile of old furniture, motor parts and tens of boxes of fake flowers. I was accompanied by three sardinian men, all either too old or too ignorant to pay attention to my magical day.

after not finding anything tangible after hours of digging in the dusty room, we returned to the small village where I lived in a four story house as the ninth weird member of famiglia. on the fourth floor, in a room with huge poorly isolated windows, I had a sofa-bed to share with a punkabbestia I had fallen in love with during one cold winter night in helsinki almost a year before my very 21st birthday.

after eating the dinner that evening, with all nine of us around one small square table, I climbed upstairs to lay on the sofa-bed and smoke. the house shared a wall with the church of the village of lingering houses built wall to wall to form a huge maze I easily got lost in when walking the blind bitch pitbull of ours. laying there, I could hear the church's bells sing for midnight, the hour of my birth. drinking from the mouth of a bottle of white while crying out of sheer happiness, I knew where I was from, where I was now, and in a weird way I knew where I was going.

now, late on a friday night of helsinki I am in in the company of '88, '89, '90 and '91 born mates, celebrating the 21st birthday of one of them. all of us, except for the one not turned the magical 21 yet, agree it to be the best age there is. gathered around an oval table, we eat cherry cheese cake and salt-dried vobla, and drink icy cocktails based on egg liquor, russian champagne and dark beer.

I could not be more happy as I am when sharing the space with amazing storytellers. for years we have formed an unofficial group of people who know what the term markku refers to, and thus gather around frequently to analyze its effects upon the world.

markku is a term attempting to define the kind of people who go on living their lives in the cloud of positivism. markkus lead their lives believing firmly the never fully analyzed view of life being about progression in the material domain. they are our engineers, our salesmen, our professionals. going around with the belief of saving a piece of the world everyday, they possess the sort of a logic behind their being that is worth a gift bag from all us sardonic.

tonight, we yet again share stories of encounters in the revolutionary world of markkus.

“when I picked you up today from kisahalli I remembered that some weeks ago I delivered a two liter oxygen bottle there.”

“for the people working out in the gym? pumping all the oxygen out of your body will do stuff to your brain I hear.”

“no, for the drunk tank.”

“imagine when, after a drunken night you will never in your life be able to remember anything of, you lay on a concrete bed dry as this vobla with your numb brain too lazy to properly control your breath. then, like angels appearing from a door to light two police officers enter the room and place an oxygen mask gently on your face. full of gratitude and bursting with newly found life, you vomit into it and the next guy they hand it to will smell your gentle fucked up breath.”

“a kiss from a drunkard to another.”

“speaking of medical equipment, I had the most david lynch moment of my life some time ago when I had to go and buy a special suction cup for a glass eye from the only place in helsinki where you can buy one. I found out online the place is in mikonkatu, in the same building where the casino is. in the lobby I looked up where the office of the company was and took the elevator to the top floor. I have been to many elevators around helsinki, but that elevator was the fanciest I have stepped into here. it looked as if somebody had rubbed it clean from top to bottom just a second before I entered.

the elevator doors opened to a long white oval room. I looked around for a reception desk or something which I could walk to and present my case, but all there was were three doors on one wall, a meter from each others, and few chairs. on them there were two retards, and a guy with an empty eye socket. I asked from him what I should do, and he said “just wait, they will call you out by name.”

so I sat there for some time, knowing that it was only slightly possible that my employer who needed the suction cup had called and said I was coming. suddenly, the middle door opened and a woman looked around without saying a thing. I stormed up to her and presented my case quickly, and she let me into the office.

it was one big room with huge windows facing the railway station square with a view over the city, to the west. when I entered I noticed all the three doors lead into it. the people working there can choose, based on where in the white waiting hall with chairs only on one wall a customer is sitting, to open the door number one, the door number two or the door number three and welcome the customer to walk straight ahead across the room from his seat to enter the office.

the view was really amazing, and I kinda felt sad for it being lost most of the time from the eyes of a man who in the corner, under some delicate instruments, was filing a white ball between his fingers.”

“so, in short, you are speaking about the best office real estate in the city dedicated for pedantic handicrafts and the ones who lack distance vision or sight altogether?”

“yeah. there are so many places in this city you could never dream to exist.”

“I work in a corner office on the third floor of a jugend building. on the street level there is a legendary tailor shop that has been there for decades. back in the eighties, the owner of the place took two young apprentices straight out from school. in the years that followed, he frequently stood leaning onto the drawing table without saying a thing as they hurried to finish suits for politicians working in the parliament just a couple of blocks away. often enough, he leaned closer and while leaning his head to his left hand he used the index finger of his right hand to tick his glass eye. tick, tick, tick, like the time ticking away.

at other times, he stopped all the work at the height of the hurry to have a meal at his house. his special dish was rabbit stew with red wine. he said, there is no bargaining with food.

after twenty years of apprentice, the master died, and bequeathed the shop for his apprentices. another earthly heritage he left was his glass eye placed in frames on the wall of the tailor shop, forever looking over the work being done.”

“now when I know that I am sure there will be a day soon when I will enter that shop with my camera, looking as if in the need of something tailored asap, only to ask if I can take a picture of the eye.”

2011-07-15T20:55:00.003+03:00

a lonely hunter from inner dunes

the curse's cycle same as the moon's

driving through the city's big parks in the rain

“hey! beautiful!” plea those never to be seen again

a variety of different characters have inspired me this week

the strangers, the colleagues, the friends, the family, the loved

a sense of happiness has been rising within me like tides licking a cliff

and today I will share it with a birthday girl like I share a well rolled spliff

2011-07-11T00:59:00.018+03:00

wasted days spent

wasted in solitude

with stories inside

my head spinning

their way towards

an empty piece of

paper that's never

made impure with

ink in this messed

up reality being so

intangible and lost

scenes of

life never

but silent

echoes in

our abyss

where we

just dwell

confused

and filled

with tales

the label crazy suits those

who stretch reality toward

supporting the tales which

gush somewhere between

all the moist ears attached

to heads varying in shape

and size together with two

sockets for vacant staring

eyes made quite common
by processes of evolution
triggered during cambrian
explosion beginning some
five hundred thirty million
rounds around my sun ago

I know myself to be surfing underneath the surface of the sea

and as you might imagine things look pretty different in here

where one can be reminded of the quiet option of descending

to obscurity by just looking down at the silent lingering mass

of dark blue hue tempting in its promise of existence in a void

of anything resembling the experience around the concepts of

time and space which even I used to accept as the two guiding

principles of life learned from those years I spent on dry land

searching for meaning from all related to tales which felt as if

they were defying those physical laws in their very being like

fossils of dinosaurs or books by long ago dead men or sweet

promises of everlasting love whispered from tender lips with

redness signifying how the life giving flow of blood goes on

2011-07-09T20:55:00.000+03:00

2011-07-04T21:41:00.038+03:00

in eur, the part of rome built under mussolini to embody fascism, music is played from the headset of a young finn updating the crm of a given global software corporation, typing away while staring at the ceiling and in doing so catching the eye of the ceo from her glass walled office. spending time in it just a few hours per week, merely to show her presence, she sits there hoping her native italian hr manager would spare her the joy of hearing his chauvinist jokes. just for today.

across the penthouse space, from another glass walled office, the statistics team emails their monthly report to team leaders, managers and executives. delighted for having something worthy to read through when in front of a wide screen instead of just her blackberry, she focuses on it. summer months are the toughest for b2b, creating a difficult time to reach true decision makers. yet, from all the teams one stands out from the others in regards to its overall lead count - scandinavia.

after some data mining she learns that there is a single individual accountable for the result, so she emails him to come to her office after lunch.

later, at the terrace of the restaurant downstairs she picks on her cesar salad, pushing the croutons with a fork to the edge of the plate. enjoying the smell of grana padano, she reads her favorite blog.

I was sitting between a man and a woman, crowding a couch of a familiar apartment. I could not concentrate on what they were speaking about, because I was almost passing out as I tried to sit up straight. my muscles were tired of all the cycling I had done around the city, and my mind was weary from all the sensory stimuli I had had. but, passing out in company before it is appropriate does not belong to my way of being.

I sat down onto the floor to feel more comfortable, having my back against the two on the couch. he, who I admit loving, touched my shoulder and said,

“you can lean onto my knee.”

as I began to drift away from my consciousness I felt myself filled with joy of being able to relax, especially so after realizing that with the back of my head and neck I was really leaning onto his knee. I still could not hear what was the conversation continued on the couch, but I could sense from the tone of his voice that he was comfortable. he was ok with me leaning onto his knee.

for some reason after my body had relaxed my mind became more alert, and I had to ask myself several times without finding an answer how had I gotten there. I could not remember. as far as I knew I was banned from his company, from that apartment of his. without moving a muscle on my body or making a sound, I began to realize that there was love in the air, that there was love in between us. I guess he realized it simultaneously with me, because at that moment he wrapped his arms around me, pressing his chin to my forehead.

there were no distractions, no issues, no questions, no nothing but the love I felt, so I had to open my tired eyes to look at the hair hanging on his face as he crouched over me, just to be sure of his reality. I looked at him and I looked at the ceiling behind him for a long time, and I could not have been more sure of what I saw was real. I was sure I was not dreaming, and that very certainty drove over me like a train and I knew everything was right. I was happy in a way one is expected to be in the moment of “the end.”

before letting myself fall asleep I knew I had to use the toilet, so I got up to walk through a corridor, knocking down some empty beer bottles on the way. as I looked at myself from the bathroom mirror I gazed into my eyes, and that very moment I began to see what my eyes really saw - the empty bed I was laying in.

she sips the last drops of her merlot and lights a cigarette. from a table filled with men in suits across the patio a man of seventy catches her eyes, and winks his left. decisively, she gets up to return to the office.

sitting on her saddle chair, she waits to see an unfamiliar man enter her office from the flow of people coming and going to lunch or wherever. instead, a woman wearing stylized equestrian apparel walks in and seats herself to the chair across her desk. she has a pair of startlingly observant, dark blue eyes.

oh, her, sighs her mind silently at the sight of the long blond hair which makes her realize her to be the same girl who did the typing without looking at the keyboard earlier today. this is not the first time her first language's weird habit of dividing nouns into gender categories causes confusion - she had thought the name aino was a man's.

“I think we have not been formally introduced.”
“I know your name and position, miss ferraci.”
“well we are all set then, aren't we. according to last month's statistics you have done amazingly well. almost more leads than the whole scandinavian team combined if excluding you from the count. now tell me, what is it in you that appears to be lacking from all other lead generators in regards to overcoming the challenges we have during summer months?”
“I am aryan.”

without giving out anything in the form of expressions the unmarried thirty-something miss ferraci hesitates for a second, but realizes quickly that there was a hint of irony in the voice lacking an accent.

“I think you have a point there. during a holiday in india some years ago, I got to rest my gaze in call centers reaching as far as the eye could see.”
“wow, I never thought I would be lucky enough to work under someone who knew what I am on about. I am sure I am not educating you about anything new when I step it up a little, and maybe our current context will help you form an opinion of what makes me be what others are not based on what I will say. may I quote from the chapter the aryan-ness of the doctrine of awakening from your country man julius evola's book the doctrine of awakening with the subtitle the attainment of self-mastery according to the earliest buddhist texts from my memory without the further references?”
“you may.”
“the man who was later known as the awakened one, that is, the buddha, was the prince siddhattha. according to some, he was the son of a king; according to others, he was of the most ancient warrior nobility of the śākiya race, proverbial for its pride: there was a saying, proud as a “śākiya.” this race claimed descent, like the most illustrious and ancient hindu dynasties, from the so-called solar race, and from the very ancient king ikṣvāku. “he, of the solar race,” one reads of the buddha. he says so himself: “I am descended from the solar dynasty and I was born a śākiya,” and by becoming an ascetic who has renounced the world he vindicates his royal dignity, the dignity of an aryan king. tradition has it that his person appears as “a form adorned with all the signs of beauty and surrounded by radiant aureole.” to a sovereign who meets him and does not know who he is, he immediately gives the impression of an equal: “thou hast a perfect body, thou art resplendent, well born, of noble aspect, thou hast a golden colour and white teeth, thou art strong. all the signs that thou art noble birth are in thy form, all the marks of a superior man.” the most fearsome bandit, meeting him, asks himself in amazement who might be “this ascetic who comes along with no companions, like a conqueror.”

not only do we find in his body and bearing the characteristics of a khattiya, of a noble warrior of high lineage, but tradition has it that he was endowed with the “thirty-two attributes” that according to an ancient brahmatical doctrine were the mark of the “superior man” for whom “exists only two possibilities, not a third:” either, to remain in the world and become a cakkavatti, that is, a king of kings, a “universal sovereign,” the aryan prototype of the “lord of the earth,” or else to renounce the world and become perfectly awakened, the sambuddha, “one who removes the veil.”

legend tells us that in a prophetic vision of a whirling wheel an imperial destiny was foretold for prince siddattha; a destiny that, however, he rejected in favor of the other path. it is equally significant that, according to tradition, the buddha directed that his funeral rite should not be that of an ascetic, but of an imperial sovereign, a cakkavatti.

the awakened one is “a proud saint who has climbed the most sublime mountain peaks, who has penetrated the remotest forests, who has descended into profound abysses.” he himself said, “I serve no man. I have no need to serve any man;” an idea that recalls the “autonomous and immaterial races,” the race “without a king” - being itself kingly - a race that is also mentioned in the west. he is “ascetic, pure, the knower, free sovereign.”

these, which are frequent even in the oldest texts, are some of the attributes, not only of the buddha, but also of those who travel along the same path. the natural exaggeration of some of these attributes does not alter their significance at least as symbols and indications of the nature of the path and ideal indicated by prince siddhattha, and of his spiritual race.”

2011-07-04T11:03:00.000+03:00

this week started with poems exchanged via email

everything's blurry
since last night waking up to an aching need to pee
i even fell to the bushes during my crouch
head boiling with fever
trying to create
cause I know i can create
where is it
something like a stupid fever can take it away
when it's needed
but you cannot force, i know
but today, just a moment ago
i opened my e-mail and
there it was
a reply i didn't expect
cause sometimes i'm a total fucking pessimist
who doesn't believe that anything will ever happen
but there is now a mail that broke the agony
she liked my mail
and she'd like us to come
to her wooden little house

love you, maybe no work will be done but i'll just put up pictures of a nigga bob

> > > > >

pessimism leads nowhere
the decision is to bang your head to the wall
or let the wall bang your head - and laugh!

I know you're into absurdity, babe

you will rule any little house
be the divine mother of fire and wood
I can already see myself sleeping on your floor

I am sitting at the office
have had dreams of love in the past two nights
please tell me they are real?

no matter how tough the shit gets
you have the biggest balls I've seen
and I bet the past winter made you stronger

I love you for you know how I really am
unlike many others who only see a shadow
like they see the ghost you've turned into

and I know better, too!
you are the ghost
roaming in our forests
but when you return among men
you will again prevail as the lion king

booo-hoooy!
nigga nigga nigga - boooooob!

2011-07-03T05:10:00.002+03:00

a tired body exchanged a lot of love with helsinki

during one of those days when the sun does not set

2011-06-30T19:21:00.021+03:00

the breath of helsinki is visible in tree seeds flying through the air like snow. one cannot be sure about them not being from cottonwood while sweating in a park with two gorgeous women.

“charlie? you know when you know you are a dyke? when a girl is talking to you and you, for some distinctly physical reason, cannot hear what she says even though your full concentration is on her.”

“why, that can happen with men, too. like, when your mind escapes somewhere to spend some private time with itself, leaving you just standing there as nothing but your mute soul. happens to me all the time with all kinds of people.”

“yeah but you are a man. us women are here with our keen minds all the time, ready to pick and gather every cherry in sight.”

jackie clears her throat and laughs, and knowing her they all know she is about to play it all into a more deeper gag,

“I am a rather strange queer in admitting openly in every possible opportunity, like now, that I do not believe my being gay to have anything to do with my genetic make-up or any other argument we have to support determinism. I chose to be gay. the social roles I decided to adjust myself to in my childhood, the types of things I decided were worthy of my attention in my early teens, and the douches who came to embody my relationship with the opposite sex in my late teens and early twenties were all my choices. I repeat, my choices. what I grew up into being was not the result of a deterministic process but a random hit and miss excursion which could have been lead by people who I looked up to and who saw my potentials as a human being while having a long, lived experience of how it is to be one, but, unfortunately, those people just weren't around. there is not just one choice behind anything that grows to define an individual. it is a whole chunk of choices all intertwined somehow and thus in the reach of one's very own consciousness.”

“which means that you should be able to choose yourself out of being a butch.”

“I could. but I like myself this way and other people appear to like me as well and my life is pretty decent, so why aim at heteronormativity? it would be such a long process I would barely be in the age to reproduce when I got through my reprogramming into heterosexuality. so fuck it.”

“plus men are douches,” says eudokia and passes the dutch as jackie leans closer to whisper as if it wasn't meant to be heard by charlie,

“yeah they are.”
“thank you, ladies. sitting out here in the open with gays and individualists I get the feeling of being there when a dream of a thing called the soviet union was shattered out of reality, and I cannot hear anymore what you two gorgeous beings are saying as I drift back twenty years. I think I want to go and party like boris jeltsin tonight.”

2011-06-30T00:31:00.001+03:00

back to
nine to
five to
presto!

2011-06-27T00:55:00.001+03:00

midsommar

2011-06-23T02:55:00.000+03:00

2011-06-21T03:21:00.000+03:00

2011-06-20T01:57:00.001+03:00

beyond the iron curtain you can mail gasoline for a moped club or try to steal a satellite dish, while a man best known as the “cigarette butt eater” represents us socialists.