tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-135881252024-03-18T05:04:18.275+02:00Botanist on AlpScattered notes on life. Maintaining the connection with the long views: poetry, history, literature, friendship, love - distant echoes of Principia Ethica. Worries about the way we live now, can pomposity be avoided?stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.comBlogger421125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-64530517828943020302024-03-17T04:14:00.001+02:002024-03-17T04:14:52.493+02:00London not calling<p>Finland in the mid-80's, an insular, wounded country, still appeasing the Soviet Union, the giant neighbour. And a very nerdy boy with a shortwave radio in the deep conservative countryside. The BBC World Service of the time representing the best parts of the departed empire. London calling to far away towns. Obviously with all the failings that all human institutions have. Still such a voice for civilization that seems now to be more and more muted.</p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-41234500638805071302024-02-04T01:23:00.003+02:002024-02-04T01:31:36.019+02:00I'm no island<p>To sum up my journey in this world, my success: I am no island, I am not free but bound with ties of love. This is the life that I dreamt about in my distant, burning youth. This is what I actually wanted, not wealth, not fame. But not to be an island, as I so painfully were for many endless years when years were endless. I now love and I am now loved.</p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-5348595645605755632024-01-20T21:34:00.002+02:002024-01-20T21:34:19.484+02:00Imagine<p>I have a very faint memory but I think a correct one - one dark December morning with the radio on. The 8am news. And hearing that... It made the dark morning darker. I can fully understand that maybe he wasn't was a perfectly nice person. I think basically presciously few of us are, and those that are, are not maybe ultimately the best for humanity. In any case, whatever he was, it was and is the art, the songs, the texts. </p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-12397911355996634582024-01-07T01:56:00.006+02:002024-02-04T01:28:23.081+02:0030 years on<p>30 years on the boy is still not there, he is too feeble, too scared. The man is there, self-secure, taking care of his woman, funny and secure, taking care. Such a long bloody needless journey. Now the man loves and lives, 30 years on. And the stupid weak precocious boy is still not there, and not ever will be. As beautiful and perceptive as he was. This world just never was meant for him.</p><p><br /></p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-76859970171833414712023-12-23T15:20:00.002+02:002023-12-23T15:25:28.369+02:00Mundus renovatus est<p>I am so marginally Christian, barely existing on the margins of the margins of the faith. No trust whatsoever in the various churches and doctrines, those ice cold human power structures. Which are so contrary to the actual message of the unworldly mercy and forgiveness, of liberation and rebellion, of progress and linearity. I'm at home with my inheritance of Finnish Pietism, of that mysticism and tolerance, of impreciseness and hesitation. Which are so unlike your normal run of the mill human organizations. Obviously God does not exist empirically in this world, but maybe we should try to create something viable to fill that obviously rather catastrophic void?</p><p><br /></p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-61596786938454108412023-11-27T03:30:00.002+02:002023-12-23T09:20:44.842+02:00Without love I wouldn't care<p>So I will manage: I'm rather amazingly self-secure these days - against many expectations and premonitions. I now do actually function perfectly well. For several various reasons, only one among them the fact that I know I am and will be seriously needed in this life. Perpetually needed. There was a time when I desperately prayed for this yoke, and there was no irony there, no room for detachment. A million times rather with love than without. Burning, not freezing for me. And so still. So I do have succeeded by my own standards, by my own rules: having given hostages for fortune. Receiving and giving love.</p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-60234793632044705942023-10-12T15:03:00.006+03:002023-10-12T22:54:39.731+03:00States of minds in the early 20th century Cambridge<p>I have started re-reading Skidelsky's majestic biography of Keynes (for about 4th or 5th time, always such a pleasure) - the majestic first volume: it is such a fireworks of intellectual and personal history, and connecting the two in a hugely masterful way. And such a familiar feeling about the exotic submerging into Moore's upgrade of Sidgwick's ethics. It all seems so irrelevant, ridiculously highminded, ridiculously impractical. Benthamite utilitarianism is such a montrosity, so no wonder they all felt the need to get rid of its crudities. But why bother in the first place? So strange.</p><p>Though Keynes himself is surely one of the wonders of the modern world - and <i>he </i>took this curious, abstract discourse seriously for all his life, even if somewhat tempered by the horrors of his era. The later horrors that is, as the beginning in the pre-Great War Cambridge was surely one of the most civilized, most privileged and most <i>liberal </i>times and places in the history of humanity. Such a wild ride. Keynes was such a rounded character, his supple, practical, powerful mind choosing always the middle road, never erring into revolution or reaction, never into passivity or into dreary, soulless do-goodery. The greatest intellectual of hero of mine.</p><p>But the company he kept though brilliant and refreshingly eccentric was largely totally incapable of action or function in the real world outside the ivory towers of Cambridge and Bloomsbury. There were many exceptions of course but often the effect to an outsider is a certain feeling of suffocation, of narrowness. I do sympathize with D.H. Lawrence, with his rage against the brittleness and the irony. Though in reality that irony was often very sharply wielded weapon - and he was quite in need of it himself. Strange lives, the most shining of them must be Keynes' though, the man for all seasons.</p><p><br /></p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-25780801591741271982023-09-22T20:30:00.011+03:002023-09-29T04:24:51.950+03:00Hearing secret harmonies - or J.S. Bach Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D major BWV 1050 - 1. Allegro<p>Et al. Our civilization is red in tooth: mass murder to industrial lengths, brutal colonialism, rape, torture, famine knowingly induced etc ad infinitum et nauseam. Largely like every civilization known to humankind. We have just been particularly clever about going about it, particularly lucky, unlucky. But not for us, not for any of them, has it been the whole story. There have always and everywhere been secret harmonies, there has always and everywhere been grace and mercy, love, glad sacrifices. There has always been this and there always will be:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZK6-x9sdEYo" width="320" youtube-src-id="ZK6-x9sdEYo"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-46465705372624305742023-08-09T17:07:00.008+03:002023-11-25T03:39:36.449+02:00Life classes<p>Pat Barker is so effortless with history, with people in it. Well, educated, mostly liberal minded English people, but still. This summer's strongest literary experience was re-reading her second trilogy. So sharply, so memorably etched characters, moments. Those generations of the world wars: youth, love, death, betrayal by history and life. I think this contrast was probably at its starkest with educated, liberal minded people - young, educated, liberal minded English people, one does think. Others would have had less a sense of betrayal and loss, being more attuned to the ways of this world.</p><p>But it's not just history but the people: life sketched, the moments, the language and the skill. How light is the touch for the most part, how sharp the commentary, how deep the grief rarely ever directly addressed. Though maybe that's a certain failing too, too liberal to effectively rage. I don't know. Only these books do linger in mind. In any case in these increasingly alarming times one does tend to uneasily return to that crimson era. History didn't end after all: wars and betrayals did not end. In this absurdly privileged part of the world there was for a brief moment a foolish luxury to believe that.</p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-75280480191651469912023-07-27T15:13:00.004+03:002023-09-09T19:40:55.444+03:00Sweet is the night-air<p>This summer has been customarily good - the sun working its over the top magic in these northern latitudes, the scents in the soft air of the twilight, reminding one of this quote:</p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>"Jag skall minnas den här stunden. Stillheten och skymningen. En skål med smultron, en skål med mjölk. Era ansikten i kvällsljuset. Mikael som ligger och sover, Jof med sitt strängspel. Jag skall försöka komma ihåg vad vi talat om. Och jag skall bära det här minnet mellan mina händer lika försiktigt som vore det en skål breddfylld med nymjölkad mjölk."</i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Etc. Etc. Private lives do go on in this idyll, maybe a relative idyll, but thinking of this intensely burning world, yes, idyll. Uninterrupted by the catastrophes of history, just interrupted by the normal catastrophes of life. But what else can we do but live our lives?</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-81572662274928197962023-06-24T00:55:00.001+03:002023-08-07T01:09:05.969+03:00Special parenthood<p>It has been such a great privilege to have been gifted this task in my life: to have have experienced this love, this responsibility. To have this brilliantly loving, brilliantly uncompromising, brilliantly joyful, brilliantly impossible son. This experience, this ride is beyond any words. All I know is that I'm lucky, privileged having him in my life.</p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-57597871464692831862023-05-30T02:41:00.002+03:002023-07-22T08:22:00.965+03:00Modern times and rough beasts<p>The modern version of this is so heavily stressed, needing so clearly to underline the horror. As I suppose we do forget rather easily, needing reminding. But once this was obvious. And maybe we are about to get fresh reminders, who knows.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AKvTfpRmnj0" width="320" youtube-src-id="AKvTfpRmnj0"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-5953045525647535332023-04-27T11:21:00.001+03:002023-06-12T11:29:38.402+03:00La mia parte intollerante<p>My aim has been ever since of founding some semblance of control (in my late 20's) to be rational and analytic, empirical. Detached in this world of passion fusing with stupidity and self-pity, this world of bloodshed and unreason. Obviously, even this rationally, proportionately - without love, without genuine sentiment we are nothing, and even more in thrall to our passions. Like bloody Robespierre et al.</p><p>There are limits though: I have needed tremendous amounts of self-discipline to watch this fascist, shameless rape of Ukraine. To witness it from a very close distance. Obviously, this is what the world is, but some things get through, when some don't. That is human. Anyway, for once, maybe, aggression and bloodlust won't be rewarded here, in this world.</p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-6059449544747454422023-03-19T03:50:00.004+02:002023-04-18T18:39:57.012+03:00Reliable things<p>These times are rather Nietzschean: our burning, hysterical will is able to override all reality, all the uncomfortable empirical and logical circumstances. You can just ignore every contradictory thing and feel the way you want to feel, happily go down the long slide. For a brief while at least, for the time you need to ignore these circumstances here is rather short, these reliable things: empirism, logic, mathematics, death.</p><p>And also, not to forget, our half-instinct of being kind, constructive, curious, flexible, hopeful, genuinely loving. No, none of these things for these times, for the fear is too intense, the hatred too inviting, the flesh too weak.</p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-44204978745355057442023-02-24T01:36:00.002+02:002023-03-19T02:33:13.965+02:00The way we now live<p>The centre is obviously not holding these days. A constant theme of this blog as it happens. History, as ever, is slowly bulldozing through lives - and all previous certainties turn out to be totally ephemeral, passing, gone. There are no real ethical constants here, nothing not consciously created and upheld. What we mostly have is just this sorry species, mostly feral, mostly blind, stumbling through time towards the inevitable precipice, no doubt.</p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-78973080050082484712023-01-14T18:59:00.002+02:002023-01-14T18:59:23.614+02:00The Last of the American Girls<p>The once fierce Republic is now feeble and feverish - the worst are so full of passionate intensity and the best are largely not even participating. This, evidently, is what happens when you effectively give a free hand to big business and big finance. A near apocalypse already now when many of the old structures still do go on, still exist. Even if feebly, even if mostly not remembering why. A shining city on a hill no more. Well, it never was, but there was a genuine dream, sincerely held. What is there now?</p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-73759660000871320962022-12-28T23:13:00.002+02:002023-01-02T09:50:21.651+02:00Vita brevis<p>We have only just emerged, a few minutes ago - yesterday we used to be panicky apes under a scary, inexplicable sky. We have had a pitiful 6000 years of recorded history, 500 years of some sustained enlightenment, 80 years of relative affluence in some small parts of the planet. We are grass. There is no telling now how things will end up, how things will be transformed. Maybe for even worse than this current barbarism, maybe for better. We have not earned the right to pessimism or optimism. We know nothing yet.</p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-35736046588704380782022-11-11T22:00:00.001+02:002022-12-16T22:13:49.851+02:00Canterbury tales<p>It is strange to be a Nordic anglophile, trying: one's own society is so much better organized, so much more fair. And the image of England one has, of liberal, of literary England is rather unreal. The actual reality is Völkischer Beobacht..., sorry, Daily Mail and the plutocratic tory sadism and corruption. And so it has been rather too much of the time. The extended family where always the worst people are in control. Still, still: there is always the other side too, the decency and reason, reasonableness, gentleness. The place invented liberalism, had Shakespeare, first broke away from the brutal, primitive shackles of pre-modernity. A very strange country. (And not talking of Britain here, Wales and Scotland are something else, very different.)</p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-10930150704313213502022-10-06T23:52:00.008+03:002022-11-19T01:49:15.012+02:00Fighting fascism in Ukraine and in the USA<p>Strange times these. In many ways retro as I have often mentioned - the 30's come again. Or the 40's as in the present Ukraine fighting against a full blown fascist invasion. While we in the West waver and wonder, Germany and France among others ever being so eager for appeasement. And everything basically depending on the ever more unreliable US, being itself besieged by a scarily strong mosty homegrown movement of unreason, anti-empirism and anti-liberalism. Strange times indeed.</p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-54493707301026337122022-09-12T01:33:00.004+03:002022-10-17T15:33:09.924+03:00In praise of Jaana Rinne<p>This is rather obscure probably. Clifters was one of my favourite bands back in that distant youth, late -80's, early 90's. And Jaana Rinne wrote most of their lyrics - not melancholy linear stories in mostly literary language like most of her male counterparts, but impressionistic, joyously disconnected sketches of brief moments often only tenuously linked, written in very natural flowing spoken language, youth language. Quite like actual poetry. Then something happened and she stopped writing this high quality stuff and, I believe, took up a position in a tabloid. Never mind, those glory days were enough for several careers.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/901iJxAQyQI" width="320" youtube-src-id="901iJxAQyQI"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-84734994187464435792022-08-25T16:48:00.002+03:002022-09-22T18:10:27.503+03:00In less keen sounds<p>I have been re-reading Eileen Warburton's excellent biography of John Fowles - and again wondered about the chasm that so often exists between the art and the artist. Obviously in the former's benefit. The story of how his marriage came about is in parts simply sordid. The casual misogyny of those times: it was in the air they breathed, internalized by virtually everyone. Art doesn't begin to justify those dealings. Of course situations are complicated, private connections run deep and are not explicable to outsiders. But still.</p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-62717926878983074622022-07-27T22:55:00.006+03:002022-08-30T23:15:38.865+03:00The widening gyre<p>I believe that in pretty much most eras people have thought they were living in decadent end of times which mostly has basically meant that there had been some actual progress and improvements, and that the young were as young and as insolent as they usually are in the eyes of their preceeding generations.</p><p>But it is getting harder and harder to deny that there is something rotten, something rottening, in this global, high tech capitalist system, in this finance capitalist Anglo-Saxon version of the market economy. There is hysteria in the air, a panicky hatred is spreading. The Western democracies are weakening, splitting from the inside. Decadent, hysterical times, aided and abetted by the social media and the irrational, crazed enemies of the West, of liberalism.</p><p>The coming challenges are gigantic: the climate changing, threatening the very existence of our high tech civilization and which obviously can't be withstood by thinking and reactions focused on the next quarter. The various technological revolutions and the ever lessening the need for human workforce, the corruptive influence of the global entertainment industry and the ever more toxic social media. We are not confronting any of these: no, we are being carried by a flood stream.</p><p>A true cultural fugue, surely.</p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-89254260242644188922022-06-24T07:59:00.012+03:002022-07-29T20:08:10.067+03:00The brown wave still goes on<p>4chan, 8chan, "men's rights", incel forums etc. etc. - this wave of hatred, of rage, of misogyny, of deliberate ignorance circling the globe. Where does it come from? The dying of religion, of humanism, the waning of the capitalist dream, the casting off so many from being valued, necessary members of the society? And was it thus this vile surge was born, polluting the net and social media, polluting everyday conversation, polluting many people, hurting others via them? Obviously it's being fed by the enemies of the West, by fascist Russia, chauvinist China et al. But it was not created by them. What cultural fugue is this? So obviously debased, so obviously empty of all positive aims, just blind destruction and hatred, actual blind rage. What is it?</p><p>Perhaps it is only a symptom of a sea change for the better, the last scream of hatred at a waning, increasingly corrupt social and cultural model before a new and better one is gradually born. I certainly do hope so. But it is in any case a great dismal, scary spectacle of waste, aggression and debasement.</p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-26766408110940626532022-05-13T16:20:00.003+03:002022-08-30T23:23:53.351+03:00Kas teate mis värvi on demokraatia?<p>It is strange how willing so many are to bend towards a new order. Any new order. Though luckily not nearly all. Germany though is doing what it has best known to do for well over a century: murderously destabilizing Europe. France, apparently, is still ever sufficiently lost to hopelessly aim to replicate in reality whatever irrelevant things of grandeur <i>du jour</i> they are dreaming of doing.</p><p>But in many corners of Europe the memories remain stubbornly fresh, stubbornly powerful:</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD8VEVx4U6U" target="_blank"><b>Internatsid</b></a><br /></p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13588125.post-81834294401080128972022-04-20T01:24:00.003+03:002022-06-01T01:58:27.540+03:00She Came in through the Bathroom Window<p>I have been watching Peter Jackson's (I guess one has to admit it) brilliant <i>Get Back</i>. And am rather speechless - they were a legendary but rather ancient name in my distant youth. My going there was largely a blind rebellion against my peers. But such a lucky rebellion it was. Such brilliance, such talent, and such a process of creativity as portrayed in Jackson's document. Such warmth also, such good will - but their youthful brilliant, shining friendship gradually slipping into families and other responsibilites and interests combined with the peculiar strenght of their personalities only just having been half-reluctantly shot into absurd stars amazingly within just some few years.</p>stockholm slenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16909107517362691387noreply@blogger.com0