Covering of snow
lies effortlessly silent
on the frozen sea.
Light at the end of the tunnel
Some confusion this morning in the Instant Kaamos office concerning the news carried by Selkouutiset of the end of the kaamos in Northern Finland. Apparently yesterday, the sun showed it’s face again in Utsjoki — Finland’s most northerly municipality – for the first time in 51 days, bringing the period of polar night to an end.
There’s quite a difference within the parts of Finland that fall inside the Arctic Circle. In Rovaniemi, for example, sitting just about on the circle, it is only on the day of the winter solstice that the sun doesn’t rise.
But when I checked the Gaisma site, it seems that Utsjoki will today enjoy a day nearly an hour and a half long. This does not compute. Any suggestions or explanations, however implausible, will be warmly welcomed.
This blog supports the blackout by Wikipedia against legislation passing through the US Congress that would limit internet freedom. For this reason, today’s links are Wikipedia-free.
The wanderer’s return
I come back to Helsinki to find that the Winter still disappoints with a measly one degree above zero. As I step off the plane onto the tarmac, my foot finds slippery sleet-water on top of ice, and I fall on my new case, painfully pulling a neck muscle which still hurts.
I’m back just in time for the start of my new Finnish course (“Once more unto the breach dear friends!“). It turns out to be a toughie. The seemingly most able teacher gives us an assessment test and the comprehension text – which seems to be something about the financial condition of the postal service – is otherwise incomprehensible to me. And I can’t quite bring myself to just randomly tick the multiple choice questions in order to gamble on getting at least 25 per cent. Having taken courses provided by Helsinki Summer University which are almost exclusively about pumping you full of Finnish grammar, I think I do OK on that part of the test, but less well on finding the “dictionary forms” of declined and conjugated nouns and verbs. Time will tell if I’ve been too ambitious in choosing this higher-level course.
After a remarkably long and deep sleep I awake to the darkness of the kaamos, on a day with temperatures happily a couple of degrees below. And with Mrs Kaamos, still on GMT, sleeping late, I sip green tea and look across the rear courtyards to the lights of the office building opposite, wondering what it must be like to go out to work in the dark, and come home when the sun has long set.
[Haven't found a better pic for this post yet. Do pop back later and I'll find you one.]
Dark Forests
Helsinki City Art Museum has pretty much got Finland covered this summer. If you’ve seem the City — and there is only one city that feels very much like a city — and if you’ve seen the forest, then you’ve seen pretty much everything — except the lakes of course. And the sea. And then there’s the islands. But apart from the lakes, sea and islands, and I suppose the smaller cities and towns, Finland is it’s forests and it’s capital city.
In The Golden Forest, Ritva Kovalainen and Sanni Seppo show views of forests in Finland and Japan. At the centre of the exhibition is an installation, The Wishing Tree by Reiko Nireki. A new sapling grows out of a tree trunk. Followers of Shinto traditionally place a branch in the stump of tree used to make a boat to express gratitude and reverance.
Hannes Heikura’s Dark Zone is a series of prints in black and white, mainly black. Anonymous figures are caught in various streets of Helsinki with the title giving the place, date and time. And while many are taken in daylight, in Heikura’s world, it’s always night. It’s hard not to suspect that some of the shots are posed — they are so perfectly composed. A hoodied figure stands by a wall, an end of Lasipalatsi in a sea of apshshalt, a lone skateboarder, Heikura says these are just the everyday streets and everyday people we pass without noticing. But once seen through his lens, they tell their stories of loneliness and beauty.
The Golden Forest and Dark Zone are at the Helsinki City Art Museum (Helsingin taidemuseo) until 4th September.
Doom, gloom and maybe one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse thrown in
I can’t say they didn’t warn me. But this is a Winter that is breaking records like nobody’s business and to the disgust of taxi drivers, Helsinki City Council is having trouble coping. Perhaps it’s the fact that it’s always so warm in our flat but every time I go out I still feel outraged by a cold wind that bites so hard you want to have it humanely destroyed. My fault for being too mean to buy a proper winter coat I suppose — the cheap anorak I bought in Oxford Street just ain’t doing it.
It’s not the length of the nights that gets to you but the darkness of the days. Every now and again, you catch a glimpse of a low, steamy sun but mostly the best you get is little more than a dim twilight. At least the discovery that a local bar offers a very good pint of Fullers ESB provides some welcome relief.
The lighter side of darkness
A second traditional Winter in Finland gives us a fairy-tale Christmas up in the wilds of Kainu. Thick snow encasing the trees got us asking why we find this kind of scene so beautiful. I wondered how much it came down to some kind of conditioning. Brought up on storybook images of snowy landscapes, experiencing it for real is like entering a childhood dream. Perhaps a people who had never seen snow, the Pirahã of the Amazon Rain Forest for example, witnessing such a scene unprepared and for the first time, would find it just plain spooky, threatening even.
So for want of any available evidence, I turn to a fictional case, that which takes place in Tove Jansson’s Moominland Midwinter. Moomintroll wakes up during his winter hibernation and unable to get back to sleep goes out into an unwelcoming dark and cold world. At first he undergoes feelings of melancholy and even anger at the sun that refuses to rise above the horizon. Always lurking in the background is the gloomy Groke, who sits on the Midwinter bonfire to warm herself only to extinguish it completely.Some suggest that the Groke (Mårran in Swedish and Mörkö in Finnish) is Jansson’s symbol for Nordic Melancholy. In fact the whole book can be read as a journey through malignant sadness.
The Groke
But it has a happy ending. Eventually Moomintroll finds a way to accept Winter in the midst of a blizzard:
Not until then did Moomintroll notice that the wind felt warm. It caried him along into the whirling snow, it made him feel light an almost like flying.
And here Moomintroll has his satori:
“I’m nothing but air and wind, I’m part of the blizzard,” Moomintroll thought and let himself go.
Of course, no season (of the world or the heart) lasts for ever. Eventually, Spring returns. The wise Too-ticky says,
“When the summer’s hot and green, and you lie on your tummy on the warm boards of the landing stage, and listen to the waves chuckling and clucking…”
“Why didn’t you talk like that in winter?” said Moomintroll. “It’d have been such a comfort. Remember, I said once: “There were a lot of apples here.” And you just replied: “But now there’s a lot of snow.” Didn’t you understnad that I was melancholy”
Too-ticky shrugged her shoulders. “One has to discover everything for oncself,” she replied. “And get over it all alone.”
Lost in music
Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival gives me the chance to lose myself in two of my greatest pleasures: beautiful music and natural beauty. After listening to a morning concert including violinist Gidon Kremer (photo) playing Tchaicovsky, I take a swim in the refreshing water of the lake. For a moment I pause and stare across to the opposite shore, verdant with thick pine forests.
For a moment, everything is forgotten: my work, my worries, even my krapula.
Maybe we should all lighten up a bit?
Younger readers who may not understand this sketch can get the background to it here.
Rumours that Monty Python’s Life of Brian remained banned in the Welsh town of Aberystwyth until 2009, actually turned out to be false according to Auntie (the BBC)
(By the way, I hope my regular readers like the new urban image. Let me know what you think — if enough people complain I can always reverse the re-branding.)
A Dutchman enters the debate
Baruch Spinoza (1632 - 1677) preferred reason to prejudice.
Mr. B. Spinoza of The Hague, Holland writes:
But if the greatest secret of monarchic rule, and its main interest, is to keep men deceived and to disguise in the false name of Religion the fear by which they must be held back, so that they will fight for slavery as much as they would for freedom, and think that it is not shameful, but a very honourable achievement, to give their life and blood so that one man may have a basis for boasting, nevertheless, in a free republic nothing more miserable can be imagined or attempted. For, it is completely against common freedom to fill the free judgement of each man with prejudices, or to enchain it in any way.
Not sure what he’s on about but, great quote anyway. Maybe the point Mr Spinoza is making is that if any one person or institution is held to be beyond criticism, and when rational argument is shouted down, then the outcome is tyranny.
