This is London calling

To far away cities - and even to remote Ostrobothnian villages as I have described. Me with my lousy shortwave receiving radio back in the 80's in Nurmo. Once I got to Helsinki I bought an actual shortwave radio. The BBC World Service was the gold standard obviously. And in those circumstances, in that media environment it certainly was. But ever increasingly with the years it seems to require more and more effort to explain one's anglophilia. Thqt nation is getting ever more crazy, ever more nasty, ever more ruled by the nauseating, corrupt, semi-fascist Tory media. Where are the English Liberals? The English Progressives? To paraphrase Betjeman. They largely invented liberalism and progressivism - where are they now?

There's nothing wrong with the look that's on her eyes

Separating sex from love needs experience, and re-uniting them needs maybe even more experience... These matters are so hard and we so often are not an any sort of a match to them. I am glad that at least I have learned my ropes quite a bit better during my more mature age. It took such a long time though. And I am very far from perfect still. Love, desire, intelligence and will. I think none of us can perfectly balance them.

I will not cease from mental fight

A perfect Pietist hymn too, so fitting to my background and heritage. And actually the very same nonconformist heritage as Blake's, just in a later Finnish interpretation. A losing battle surely, one is tempted to say in this slough of despond, but pessimism is certainly as much of a sin as optimism is. One is so much fond of, and more, of liberal Protestantism, but maybe not totally sharing with all that absolute puremindedness. Surely an impossibility in this permanently fallen, corrupt, cruel world.

I was such an idiot

Being otherwise pretty smart these days, crazily well read and pretty well thought and lived. But I did brutally waste my youth in burning, in torture - a bright flame I said afterwards mostly for self-comfort. My capabilities led me to my weaknesses, and how weak my weaknesses were. To this mature age it's still hard to come to terms with that brutal failure. But by and large, I actually have come to terms, have accepted, have pardoned my then so hopeless, burning self. That's the only way. But weak moments do come, do return, the regrets, the second guesses. That's how one lives, just a very thin sliver of life but very piercing in certain bad moments. Oh well, that's how one lives. And I could live way worse, I well know. From experience.

Kodu kui majakas

My estophilia was consciously awakened by Jaan Kross: Keisri hull in its Finnish translation was such a text, such a call for defiance, for justice. But also the culture of my childhood, the memories of the Awakened (heränneet) of their recent estophile past was surely in the background too. There were books that I had glanced at or even partially read, things that I had heard, felt: Estonia was a place, a certain absence. But Jaan Kross made it concrete, then just bit later on JMKE, Rahvarinne, that exhilating sense of liberation, not only of Estonia, but also of Finland. And other, more personal things followed. Estonia is now both well known and still well loved, warts and all.

The centre not holding

All over the West internal strife, atavistic hatreds and prejudices reviving, partying it's like the 1930's back again. The vaccination of the 2nd World War is obviously waning. And like back then, unchecked markets, unchecked and ever short sighted capital are leading us towards blind rage and division, dissolution. The social democratic centre is barely holding any longer, maybe cannot hold. We can't obviously learn from history. 

Acceptance World

I rarely have conscious reading plans but I think A Dance to the Music of Time is highly due for a re-reading - I have read it in quite a haphazard fashion, out of sequence, intermittently and sometimes impatiently. Powell's certain conservatism (admittedly with quite a small c in the text) has not always appealed. But there is something pleasurable in the prose, in the observations and rhythms. A dance it is. 

London not calling

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.

I'm no island

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.

Imagine

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 so much darker. Even then, even so young. 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. 

30 years on

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.

Mundus renovatus est

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?

Without love I wouldn't care

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.

States of minds in the early 20th century Cambridge

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.

Though Keynes himself is surely one of the wonders of the modern world - and he 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 liberal 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.

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.

Hearing secret harmonies - or J.S. Bach Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D major BWV 1050 - 1. Allegro

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: