Looking for a Saltire flag pin

Scotland was a revelation, beautiful and kind of Nordic. The atmosphere was clearly different from Ireland and England. Still not a fan of the SNP though, their brand of incompetently bullying their way through, and not even succeeding. But I noticed how shockingly cold towards England I now feel, the good bits, and they really are pretty damn good bits, now totally drowned in Brexit, in the unfathomably corrupt media, in the general unspeakable stench of capital and corruption that is the metropolitan UK. Scotland will be so much better off without that utter shitshow.

Orwell on Dickens

No secular saints (nor religious either) in this world - I well know Orwell certainly was not one. Deeply flawed, a man of his dark times in so many things indeed. But reading his heavenly prose, his humane thoughts... One imagines him rather like he imagined Dickens. Two free intelligences.

Phony Beatlemania

The West is trembling, our foundations are shaking. Christian-humanist values are giving in for the toxic, poisonous, totally blind billionaires and giant corporations sowing hatred and discord with their deregulated, unlimited money. Adding to this the ever more plentiful of external enemies simultaneously throwing gasoline to the flames - but still, they could do nothing much without this internal rot, this current shakiness, this utterly plutocratic, corrupt shaking. Interesting times for sure. Would no doubt be good if the current elites, if these vaguely liberalish technocrats would know what to believe in, to have an unpragmatic faith in liberal democracy, in liberalism. I certainly have no doubts in that direction, not maybe totally happy but totally happily joining this particular battle. No shades of grey here.

I was a rock

Just random surfing this Sunday morning. And suddenly a song bringing back memories of my largely barren youth, not so painful this time (of many times), not anxious, mostly just resigned and slightly sad. I was a wall, protected by my books and my poetry, gazing through the window to the streets below, for only too many burning years. In the past, in the past tense now, no longer a rock, no longer an island - a kind of a success story, no, a true success story. But the path could have shorter been, to quote myself...

Passionate intensity

A wild unsafe ride is this experience. We have had a moment of (largely unsteady) progress in our most recent history and even that at a horrible cost. Now there are atavistic forces, atavistic emotions rising again in our animal minds. Yes, we are not entitled to perfect pessism or perfect optimism but it seems so obvious that storm clouds are now gathering, that yet again there is a rough beast slouching towards Betlehem. There really is no real security for us here, and likely never will be. 

Garp 35 years later

I must have been 18 at most, probably a couple of years younger. The multiple sexual bits were absolutely the most fascinating parts - themes like parenthood, marriage, relationships of all kinds, feminism kind of flew over or were just half-noticed. But it was a strong,  experience, varied, fiercely tolerant, if not of intolerance, of narrowness. All these years after one still approves and enjoys, a great humanistic text. I'm sure it does not tick all the correct boxes - and at the same time it actually does if seen with generosity, with imagination, with the selfsame attitude the text itself celebrates.

Macaulay's prose, Macaulay's world

A suitable summer holiday pastime: reading Macaulay's essays - that English rings and echoes, robust and clear, majestic. And not just an estethetic joy but intellectual whether you agree with all those often rash, often mistaken judgements and encapsulations. But with many of them you actually do agree. Obviously a man of his time which was racist, eurocentric, imperialist, and so he. But there is another note there, of trust in progress and enlightenmentm, in honest intellectual enquiry, a note of confidence in liberalism however narrow whig kind of variety. There is something very inviting in that attitude, in that confidence. The defects are temporal, the strengths for all time. We lack that confidence and that honesty now and have lacked for a long time. Has that been for the better?

Dutch "realistic" art of the 17th century

A great varied tradition for which my absolutely amateur musings will do no justice. My observations are scattered and my knowledge scant. But realistic those still paintings aren't, they are mystical, inexplicable. I have loved and been fascinated by them since boyhood, of that silence, more fantastic that any surrealism, any abstraction. One could lose oneself in contemplation of all that eternity.

Pane tähele

Times are quick, ever threatening, dark clouds abound. My first years occurred under an even greater danger but then there were miraculously much milder winds, certain defining sensations, an essential experience of youth of growing into a trust. Which seen from this moment was obviously rather ephemeral, basically just an illusion. But it was a huge privilege nevertheless, regardless. Damn the torpedoes. And now no absentmindedness should follow any defeats hereafter. We must witness, and we must fight.

Being a Liberal is an act of will

No, facts really do not explain themselves. And there is no such thing as a "self-evident" system of ethics, there just isn't. It is an existential, passionate choice to choose to believe in christian-humanist values, to believe in reason and logic and individual freedom and responsibility. In fair weather you can follow painlessly, not think about anything. But this is a wild, amoral world, fair weather, mild warm winds are brutally temporary. 

The last of Europe's Stone Age races: Finland and Ireland

Life takes us to unpredictable places - it took me to studying ancient Irish history in dusty libraries and archives of Helsinki. And then to Dublin 15 (god) and then to Phibsboro, for a pretty brief time after all, but for enough time to get an actual sense of the place besides all the books and archives. There is a real connection there, the extremes of Europe: two small nations grimly fighting for their existence with eccentric histories and cultures.

These thoughts inspired coming fresh from a Lankum gig in Helsinki, there so is a connection there...

In praise of Kevin Drum

 If there is an antithesis to this feverish, irrational, fastly regressing era - it is this man:

Kevin Drum

Rational, measured, judicious, empirical, data based. Something we as a species seem never able to achieve: animal passions, animal reflexes of terror and hatred and unreason for us.

The long views, the short moments

A particularly lovely evening yesterday in particularly lovely company - we live in dark times, and in all honesty times have always been dark, just that there have been these accidental islands and moments of civilization. So what I now call dark would for most people in most times be ridiculously bright. Who knows what will be but the long views will always be there, glimpsed from whatever hell or whichever fleeting resting place there is. But we will always have them and the moments of directly witnessing them, like in the Nordic summer evening, the long shadows impossibly late, the evening light shining on our faces:

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.

Mark Knopfler playing the guitar

The long views: art, friendship, love, the pursuit of understanding. We will always overstate our ridiculously brief moment in time: our bright individual dawn invariably turning into the gloomy, threatening storm by that particular individual evening. But however it will go, the long views will remain: value is not determined by history but is independent, perpetual, eternal.

I did not plan for this

It all went horribly wrong before I even had formulated the mere concept of planning, of control - a perfect storm of circumstances and sensibility. But afterwards, setting the goals of loving and being loved, being needed, I did succeed. I became a person: a loving man being loved. So maybe some other paths would have been more glorious, but I somehow really doubt that... This will totally do.