широкая натура

Culturally we surely live in a twilight era: both Christianity and Enlightenment humanism are fading, and they have not been replaced by anything more than spiritually dead consumerism. That's a hoary complaint I'm sure many would feel and object that there never was an era that wouldn't have been, at heart, crassly, graspingly materialistic - but that's not really an actual rebuttal. Ideals differ and change by era, and as ideals go Christianity and Enlightenment humanism are not too bad at all. We now have, increasingly freely expressed, a certain frozen narrowness of mind dominating, a certain totally bogus righteoussness that would have felt at home in the early Victorian era though devoid of the fundamentalist Christian cum primitive capitalistic justification for it. A cynical, narrow era. I don't think that it's the Net that creates this impression though it surely has removed many constraints - it mostly just reflects our current reality. Not a good time, this.

The great hatred

I'm reading Rentola's excellent and chilling description of the elimination of the Finnish Communist Party by Stalin (via NKVD) in the 1930's Soviet Russia. Such times: these people had bitterly fought White Finland but were now ludicrously destroyed as "nationalists" and "spies". In Soviet Karelia the campaing got to genocidal proportions as all Finnishness was brutally eliminated and erased. We cannot really imagine the atmosphere of that era, the hysteria and the fear - those years were called "Great Hatred" by the Soviet Finns. It was a strange scattered bunch of leaders that finally emerged, mainly from Finnish prisons, in 1944-45. Those that survived could never forget and never condemn this senseless slaughter, the price would have been too high, but it was too high in any case. They lacked all flexibility, all independence and without the Red Army were always outplayed by the liberal-democratic mainstream. They took no risks, no independent steps. Those few that were left.

Stalin then destroyed Finnish communism, Paasikivi and Kekkonen only finished the job. It was a dead movement at heart, morally dead, and got what it deserved. That's a great tragedy as there was also much idealism in the beginning, with great crimes committed against them in 1918 by the Whites. Such a sad story that they should have encountered and embraced even more hateful and brutal violence in the Soviet Union than in the Civil War Finland. And that year was already the nadir of Finland, progress and liberalism had been recovering ever since while the Soviet Union got steadily worse. Doubly betrayed generations, but one can never excuse or forgive the silence of the survivors - in that moral collapse we can locate the weakness and hatefullness of Marxism-Leninism. We are well rid of that horrible ideology.

(postscript: Rentola's work on Finnish communism is great history of such amazing quality. He has produced three absolute masterpieces that I return to time after time. He keeps his distance, but the story itself is enough and would only suffer from obvious biases. I hope that these studies are constantly read: they show how profound can the study of history be, how illuminating. With such exceptions the rule of unambitious, unimaginative and superficial historiography is even more disheartening. But when historians are good, they exceed pretty much anything there is. Well, maybe theoretical physics would offer some little competition...)

Dan Andersson, a Finnish poet

It is eerie, reading Dan Andersson in Swedish: he sounds so strangely familiar, homely - and listening to his translations into Finnish, I cannot help thinking that they are even truer to his vision than the original. That's probably presumptuous of me, but Finnish surely is the darker, the more melancholic language, even more fitting for these sad, beautiful songs from the depths of the Finnish forests. And Sweden by far the closest, the most familiar nation to us. Free peoples lost in the midst of dark, northern forests...

Spring rites, like something almost being said

It has been a late and slow spring this year, so we are experiencing a more arctic pace for the coming of summer even here on the south coast of Finland. Even in more ordinary years the speed of the green explosion is exhilarating, but now it will be concentrated into mere 3-4 weeks with still having the last flecks of snow on the pale-yellow gray ground as I write today and a full green summer in the latter half of May... This subarctic year of extremes is certainly eventful with dramatic changes in light and nature. When younger I was not much affected by this schizophrenic northern climate but with each increasing year I seem to feel the changes more strongly. Now we have the exhilarating part of the year coming and the endless, dismal winter is only a rapidly fading memory...

Second second thoughts

A very esoteric subject to use the English language for, concerning very un-English things. Kalle Päätalo, a self-learned Finnish author, was in his time a hugely popular writer bringing back the rapidly vanished rural Finland to the couple of generations that still had a living connection with it. His most loved creation was his exhaustive Ii River series in which he (in mindboggling detail) describes his dramatic life story from great poverty and hard forestry work in really only semi-civilized North Eastern Finland through the WW2 to a relatively comfortable urban life and the beginning of his writing career. He truly was revered by his many readers and hugely patronized by university educated, sophisticated literary circles.

I was quite snobbish too in my teens and early 20's about his plodding, clumsy, incredibly slow moving style. My first reconsideration concerned the historical value of the story and its internal dramas: it really is amazing social historical description, a treasure of forgotten things, forgotten attitudes, and his brutal honesty about his own failures and repeated humiliations is actually a good, interesting story. I only gave up when the action moved away from the dramatic and interesting war years (he served for five years), and when the regular 500 - 600 pages for half or full year concentrated on endless fights with his intolerable first wife in more familiar urban circumstances. It just did not seem worth the effort, especially with the knowledge that there will be a divorce, one only prayed that he would just have gone with it and divorced the bloody woman...

Now, 20 years later I'm re-reading the series and having second second thoughts. Yes, the style feels plodding, clumsy, incredibly slow - but I think there might actually be quite a huge amount of thought and sophistication behind it. He might actually be a good, even great writer. Of course, as social history, as an exceptional historical experience it still is an amazing treasure, a storage of very rare things, but now, with more perspective, I sense a steely, majestic purpose there, a very intelligent and almost obsessively well hidden subtext, and feel somewhat chastened by this realization. One is maybe not as sophisticated as one thinks... It is awfully deceptive, awfully devious stuff, hugely interesting.

The forbidden national flag (or some words on Betti Alver)

I have been enjoying Juhani Salokannel's excellent Letters part of Jaan Kross' Life and Letters. The author himself took care of the life in his exceedingly interesting, crafty and quite odd memoirs, which led Salokannel to concentrate on literary analysis with very fortunate results. He does breach also some broader subjects and makes very fascinating comparisons between Estonia and Finland and their literary traditions.

Of course one massive difference is the cultural wasteland created by the Soviet system: so many people fled, were deported, died, and those that survived were not able to write, or publish. After Stalin things admittedly became easier, even as pure an artist as Kross could write, but with a careful balancing act in what at heart remained a terror system. This reality is very hard for us to comprehend having comfortably lived in an unoccupied Nordic welfare state. We have no real idea of that national tragedy, of how comprehensive the disaster was.

Betti Alver stood out in Salokannel's text - I had heard her name, but had not known her substantial influence on Kross, or even her distinctive poetic approach. She wasn't a nationalist writer, but she surely was a national writer, one that would have been undoubtedly quite productive and much celebrated (and later rebelled against) in a Finnish type post-war Estonia. That never happened: Heiti Talvik died (in effect was murdered) in Siberia, Betti Alver was silent for five decades. That's quite a difference indeed, something that is not easily communicated accross national experiences - but Salokannel does impressive work in this regard.

Oakeshott and Burke - and Keynes

I believe Keynes would have approved much of post-war Oakeshott. This is based on the fact that he approved much of Burke. I wonder why they don't make conservatives like them any more? Modern conservatism is actually pretty much radical early Victorian moralistic liberalism. That is if it's anything any longer but a mindless reflection of irrational powerstructures based on stupendous concentrations of capital.

Keynes of course was a progressive and thoroughly rational. But he was so thoroughly rational that he saw much wisdom in Burke (and would have seen in post-war Oakeshott). Practice and experience really are crucial, so are local contexts and conditions which have to be taken into account whenever we attempt reforms. Where he differed from these conservative thinkers is that his focus was on pragmatic reform and progress. It is the pragmatism that leads to respect of experience and practice and local contexts.

Burke and Oakeshott formulated great truths about collective human behaviour. They lived in times that made them especially wary of progressive, rationalist thought, and went partially overboard. Burke's idealization of the painted, decadent dolls of high French aristocracy and Oakeshott's overly positive view of private enterprises are examples of that partial blindness. Keynes, as ever, exhibits very little blindness in his political thought and action. He is my ideal statesman and thinker, unifying realism and idealism, reacting rationally and respectfully to local contexts while aiming to improve them.

The Nottingham lace of the curtains

I was today reading an account of the Oscar Wilde scandal by Hesketh Pearson, and wish not to have done it. Not a pleasant scene, no. I don't know at which stage the feverish revisionism and counter-revisionism of historiography currently resides, but the last time I looked (and it was in the early 90's, I'm afraid) it was fashionable to claim that "the Victorians" were not at all as prudish and inhibited about sexuality as it was once common to think.

And of course there is a point to that: most people in any age are lustful and carnal, naturally. Victoria herself with her thirty-odd (as memory serves) children was surely no stranger to sex and would undoubtedly have been bored to death thinking only of England while engaging in it. But to admit this obvious fact does not mean that there did not also exist awful and disgusting public middle class taboos about sexuality and sex. There did, and Oscar Wilde was one of countless of victims to them.

There is a certain peculiarly Anglo-Saxon (it seems) mode of hypocritical moral outrage even today - perhaps not as strong as it once was, but it's certainly still capable of rising to feeding frenzy every now and then. Not to speak of the unspeakable Anglo-American justice systems which seem to exist pretty much just to make a particularly nasty and sadistic section of the middle class to feel smug about itself. Och aye, shouldn't have touched that story this morning...

Furious affections

Thinking back to more tumultuous times of my life I am struck how little we change in some respects: love is an almost constant, no matter the age group. I'm now in much contact with very young persons, and though there is an immaturity there, in most, there is also a maturity that comes from the very fierceness of the feelings. Once again, or maybe actually only too rarely, I am reminded of my own luck: I never would have thought that I would turn out to be lucky in such central matters, in being able of fierceness... Anyway, youth is a kind of an automatic immunization against non-fierceness, non-furiousness - it's no good to advice, and I don't, but the young surely would do well to remember that it is only too possible to lose that immunity with age ("the only enemy"). But if they do find love, and surely many will, they will keep their connection to the essential and not lose it in the routine triviality of daily life.

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Yeats is... - Yeats is one of the wonders of the Western world. I believe literature is the most humanity has ever achieved: really, all we pretty much have to show for ourselves are our books, and now that we are slowly but surely distancing ourselves from literature, are we not regressing? This thought came to my mind once again as I was delighting myself in R.F. Forsters great, great biography of Yeats.

It is very hard to characterize Yeats - of course, one can say, and I have, that he was completely dotty, disconnected, and he was, but that's actually almost totally misleading: he was very, very shrewd even in his dottiness (and compare that with Pound's quite pathological version). He was no politician, no idealogue, and that he knew - in some ways he really knew himself. And the poetry: light of evening, Lissadell... It's quite something, quite something else, and equally hard to characterize. I often find myself ambivalent: it's no ancient dusty tomb, it engages, enrages, delights, one of the wonders of the Western world.

And that is really what we have to show for ourselves, as much civilization as we have ever had: art, literature. Increasingly unimportant things.

But it still goes on

I believe I have mentioned how important an experience it was for me to read Paul Fussel's Great War and Modern Memory in my early 20's just having arrived to study in Helsinki. It was more a personal and literary experience at the time, an esthetic experience of the combination of literature and history and personal life, a theme ever since very important for me. But as the years have progressed the First War has become ever more central for me as an historical event in its own right, as a central event directly in our own continuum. It still does go on: our civilization has been largely shaped by that catastrophy and the one that shortly followed, and in many senses we are shell shocked survivors from those two twin collapses of the progressive and optimistic West. There is not much trust, confidence in non-material things any more here: wealth is our strongest support and main reason for action.

Another year ends this evening, and I wonder whether my sense of a new constellation being on its way is correct or whether we just will struggle on, untransformed.

A shining city in a trough

In these past few years I have read various books on the George W. Bush administration's policies concerning Iraq and Afghanistan (the latest, the dry, academic, devastating study of Afghanistan by Tim Bird and Alex Marshall). The blindness, the pride, the ideological hubris of those years is beyond belief. The decadence: if you wield great power, you have great responsibility over people's lives - if you take decisions that will mean life or death for hundreds of thousands, for millions, you are then obligated to be extremely well versed, well adviced (and intelligently critical and questioning of your advice) about the people whose fates you will affect.

The moral and intellectual corruption of that administration is mind shattering, dispiriting. It is the clearest sign yet of the end of the American empire, this decadence, this casual ignorance of that president and his advisers.

Those were the times that were

Helsinki in November must be one of the most dismal places on earth: rotting leaves, darkness, subdued, tired people hurrying to get indoors, no sign of winter, of clear freezing air and snow reflected light. A moment in history too, as all moments are, this one surely better than most: no physical lacks, no war, silly, shortsighted elites certainly, but, more or less, that's what elites always are. (To be fair, this time Brussels cum Berlin seems to be outdoing itself in stupidity - no Lord Keynes around now, and these elites wouldn't listen anyway.)

Well, I should concentrate on other weightier matters, only this is not a time for concentration, November in Helsinki. Some years have earned their right to feel nostalgic about. Today I found myself bringing to mind one such... This is not to say that I would have regrets about this one: I have found my place, my voice - living life recklessly, to the full, seriously. But at times seriousness is not all you need. Not in this November.

Kaks naist, üks pilet ja pliaats ja paber

It is amazing, stunning how bad the trash media is, how reactionary, utterly supporting the existing structures while constantly working to make them even worse. This is surely no corporate conspiracy, as many on the left seem to think, any conscious, co-ordinated effort. It's much worse: it is how our society works, how it functions.

We have reached here, and will reach further, by taking small, relatively rational steps. There never was, or only briefly was, any deliberate awareness about the social democratic compromise, how satisfactorily it functioned. And it did, for a while. Now we are sliding, essentially randomly, towards something else - something that certainly does not seem to be as rational, as fair or as embracing of as wide social competition as possible.

There is no rational, calculated counter-force to this because that's not how our society works - there is also no rational, calculated effort to make things worse. Just human nature and ever unpredictably changing historical structures. Who knows where we will end, maybe at some stage we'll grow up and into rational control, but at the moment there is no control, only passion and short sightedness.

Love in a cold climate

Going through this dismal rainy fall morning was rewarded by an image of Turing entering mathematics in the 1930's Cambridge ("second only to Göttingen" in those times, according to Hodges' classic scientific biography, a classic biography - it hardly gets much better than that). That pure world independent of twisted human constructions, certainly fitting to Turing always so destined to be at the receiving end of that twistedness.

Not that I would really know whether that assesment of mathematics is totally true: that door has always been closed to me (maybe I have gotten occasional glimpses of glimpses of it), our human world, as twisted as it mostly is is, has been the centre of my interest, along with the process of experiencing it. But, I do suppose, suspect that it really is wholly independent, good that something is.

Art cannot do that, isn't that, but art does something similar, only in a radically different way. Extremes meet. I suppose I remain where I once began this blog (in the midst of a positively biblical decade of challenges): not far away from G.E. Moore and Principia Ethica - love, friendship, art, science, these are the long views, the constants.