Laundry Room Violence

Anyone who's been to Sweden, lived in a flat here and needed to wash their laundry knows well what a tvättstuga is. They also know that this word, usually translated as laundry room, has no counterpart in most of the world. And if they've been here long enough they often find the laundry room's booking system either too rigid or too easily misused.

Those who've stayed for a long time, but even those with a basic knowledge of the country, also know that Sweden is a fairly peaceful society. Which is why I occasionally ponder the particularly Swedish form of violence known as laundry room violence (tvättstugevåld).

This culturally specific violence has recently fallen into the spotlight. Nordiska Museet's currently (6-Nov-2009 untill 07-March-2010) holding an exhibition on the Swedish laundry room. I'm not sure how much of it is in English, but any visitor to Sweden should try to go there to get insight into the modern Swedish psyche.

Sweden and Finland are as far as I know the only countries with problems with laundry room violence—not at all odd, because they are the only countries I know of that have the particular type of laundry room system I'm thinking of. In nearly every apartment building in Sweden, you will find a communal laundry room, usually located in the basement behind fireproof doors, adjacent to saunas or storage rooms. In these underground laundry rooms we see a well-ordered instantiation of Swedish planning; we find a place where Swedes, who notoriously shy away from their neighbors, must meet their neighbors and share common rooms and washing equipment according to a strict booking schedule.

This rigid planning of society's time and space, in combination with the average Swede's social rigidity, makes for a locus terribilis. It's here that strict order, ideological structure, unspoken rules, and awkward attempts at spontaneous cordiality, collide into each other and make Swedes explode. When taking offense, the rule-rider inside Swedes lashes out at full dictatorial force. Like neo-Nazis who are filled with societal anger and knavishly cloak it with humanist ideology, Swedes in general are filled with wrath resulting from society's stringent rules and they lash out with full, rule-riding force, at those who make the slightest mistake in the laundry room.

Appropriately the laundry rooms are, as I said, underground. Thus the most brute and anal form of social structures are kept out of sight, just like the filthy underwear Swedes carry to the laundry room and conceal in those large, blue, plastic IKEA bags. The neighborhood friendliness that is suppressed in daily life in the halls and stairwells of apartment buildings is pushed down to the basement where conflict is summoned like a demon in the deep dark. In the apartment building's cellar, the first ring of Swedish hell, the unconsciousness surges full-force and flows with jagged small talk or rages with preemptive social fears.

You see, it's not at all different to children for whom monsters, ghosts or devils appear in the cellar. Or adults who fear serial killers that hide bodies in the basement or Fritzlers who lock up their children and wives down there. It's an ancient, crosscultural ritual to suppress control mechanisms or to let our shadow sides appear in shadow realms. Such as in Swedish toilets, where the bowl tapers to a steep slope and due to a perpendicular pipe at the bottom, hides nearly all poo from sight. Out of sight out of mind. Ur syn, ur sinne. Or in the case of laundry room violence: ur syn, ursinne. You just have to know Swedish to catch that one.

The old booking systems, such as using keys to place pegs on schedules into time slots (left), is being replaced by an electronic system (below). This electronic system circumvents one of the sources of laundry room violence by circumventing the possibility of human interaction at the booking schedule on the wall in the laundry room. So with the digital system, if you don't want to do it in the laundry room and risk having any uncomfortable, spontaneous interaction with other people, you simply log onto your computer and book your laundry time there. Yes, it's 2009 and this is what humanity has come to in technophile Sweden. In the digital system you can't access the room before or after your laundry time and if you're one minute late your laundry is stuck in the room and you must wait for the unlikely, kind neighbor who has the next time to help you get in. If you don't get in, such as happens to people often, because we are human and not rigid, digital systems, your neighbors may find your laundry still in the dryer and throw it in the garbage can, as happened to my friend...three times. Or they may throw your laundry on the floor behind the washing machines, which happened to another friend of mine.



Or if you're late and haven't picked up your laundry they may yell at you. Or if you're very unlucky and have irritated your neighbor over a few decades with your sloppy relationship to the laundry schedule and laundry room rules, your neighbor may come in there with a blunt object and beat you to death. It's happened many times and it usually gets media coverage. Hence the word and phenomena Swedes everywhere should be proud of: tvättstugevåld.

The system where I live now is electronic and it irritates me. In other places I've lived the system's always been analog and almost always looked after and scrutinized by the nosy retirees in the building. Anyone used to the analog system recognizes or remembers the notes. Those nasty, anonymous notes left on the door or by the schedule, or even, if your neighbors are aggressive enough, in your mailbox. These notes say things like: ”Stop acting like your mom lives here and take care of your god damned laundry!” or ”In the future be so kind as to give a fuck about stealing other people's laundry time” or ”Stop complaining and arguing about laundry times, you old, drunken hag!”

Dagens Nyheter (2009-Nov-26) quotes one laundry note you can find at Nordiska Museet's exhibition: ”Next time it happens I will personally pee all over your laundry. Then I'll come over to your place and punish-fuck you in the ass with kosher salt”.(1)

I'll leave it there with this very dirty subject. I must go out to the woods for a run to rid myself of the grime I feel accumulating in my mind from this affair called the Swedish laundry room!



(1) Nästa gång det händer kissar jag personligen ner din tvätt. Sen kommer jag hem till dig och straffknullar dig i röven med grovsalt.

More info:
Nordiska museet, Stockholm
Tvättstugevåld
Tvättstuga @ English Wikipedia
Våldet ökar i tvättstugan
Skulle tvätta - knivhöggs av granne
Tvättstugan på Nordiska Museet, Stockholm
Tvättstugevåld vanligast i söder
Ola Jacobsen - Persil

Image
Erik Mörner - Trött i tvättstugan - 2009

Grey Area

If you do not like grey, the North may not be the place for you.

November's haze, rain, wind, hail, fog and heavy, day-long dusk, which in some years outlasts winter and casts over spring, summer and fall, and then drizzles back into winter again, can wear down most of us.

The continuous haze of grey in a year like 2008, when the temperature constantly hovered around 45° F (8° C), is veritably an acquired taste.

The most lucid literary gestalt I've found for this is in Jonas Gardell's Så går en dag ifrån vårt liv och kommer aldrig åter (And so passes a day from our lives, never to return):

Grå tunghimmel över Sverige.
Idag kommer aldrig bli ljus.

Grey lumbering clouds over Sweden.
This day'll never be light.

As I write this, I cannot stop chuckling.

I realize Svenska Institutet (the government agency that propagates for foreign interest for Sweden), with the propaganda they create and for instance sent to me to promote Sweden before I went to Germany on a scholarship, would never want to hear what I'm saying. Their image of Sweden is evergreen. People are all blond and six foot four. They eat crayfish and merrily dance around maypoles in the night-long sunshine.

Also, I'm not writing from the moment, but memory, experience. It's just before 8 a.m. and it's actually light out, as in the sky's a pale blue. A few wispy and a few thin but solid clouds in charcoal and pink hover above the western horizon. I'm getting giddy thinking the sun's got a good chance of rising unobstructed today.

According to the meterology report I'm checking, the sun should go up at 7:52 a.m., which is about now.

In this, rainiest and dreariest of cities in Sweden (Gothenburg), our eyes, skin, and living spaces haven't been saturated with true, juicy, ocherous, contrast and contour enhancing sunlight since, well, October. So if this comparatively clear morning sky holds until at least 3:59 p.m. when the sun sets, we're in for a blast of sunrays from the steep pinnacle of 14,2° above the horizon.

If you think of a half-circle protractor and imagine the middle point of the ruler is where Sweden is on the Earth and draw at a 14,2° angle along the 150 million kilometer-long rays coming straight at us from the sun you'll start understanding...

just how long our shadows are,

just how far away we are from the sun up here.

Although I've thought about it, I've never measured the angles before. The Sun, which when you see it from late October and until mid-February glares directly into your eyes when you walk southward, now seems even lower and distant. For the past few weeks, when I see it, the Sun doesn't go above the four story tall pine trees outside my window. This is indeed a land of long shadows. The meek may inherit the Earth, but

they won't last half a winter in Scandinavia.




Regardless of the environment, the political landsacpe is grey. Gråsosse (grey socialist) is an epithet used to lightly put down those who are traditionally faithful to the Social Democrats and who usually lack any political engagement or vision. The gråsosses are the largest minority of Swedes. A century ago, calling a public official or politician grå referred to the politicians who took an ambiguous position between reactionaries and liberals.

I look up from the paper I'm writing on. The scaly, puzzle piece bark on the Scot's Pines outside my window has become ruddy and glows against the shadowy crevices in the treeflesh. Behind the pines are sheer-white birches overexposed by the crisp, morning sun. Their last mustard yellow leaves shimmer in the sunshine.

Grå is grey in Swedish. Both words're related to German's grau. In Old English you say grǣg, a word first recorded in the 8th Century and used then as now to describe the weather. These cognates are relatives showing a common Germanic ancestry. The words we share are often also indicative of conditions of life we've shared with our lingual relatives. But what is shared in this case is only an overlapping weather, not the same weather. Grå refers to different phenomenon than grey or grau, as the grey skies that Germans, Dutchmen or Pacific Northwesterners see above their cities are unlike the thicker, murkier, more foreboding welkin above the boreal North.

All those who philosophically come to see the world in its truer greys must adjust to their new perspective. So too must foreigners adjust when they come here. At first everything might seem just so grey. But the shades of grey are never the same. It's overlooked, this inconspicuous, trickiness of Nordic monochromacity. In the grey found here, saturation, value and brightness are, upon watchful inspection, highlighted. The interplay of tints and tones stands out. Around here grey is intense with hues, shades, pitch and sharpness. Feeling and intuition are ennobled by it. Filmlovers know that implicit meaning comes to the foreground in black-and-white film. The same is true in the weather and emotions of Northerners.

Why do more people not realize the thaumatic wonder of this in the darkest heart of even dreary winter? It is because they cannot see in grey. Thus they cannot see the grey.

The shades of grey are never the same, except perhaps in the irises of so many Swedes, which for the most part are either ice-blue or grey-blue. Perhaps their eyes reflect the grey outdoors. I'm reminded of people who turn orange after eating too many carrots. Or my pee turning red after eating too many beets... As if Mediterraneans were often olive-hued because of living in communion with their dear olives!

The shades of grey address an acquired taste for reality in the Grey Area, rather than the taste for superficial fantasy of the Equatorial Area. Those blind to monochrome call dreary, what we around here rightly call beauty.

I look outside again. The sun is gone. Call me a pessimist, but it's not coming back today. November's light-sucking gravity is too strong. I see greys. Slate and shale hues, arsenic and bistre etchings in the medium taupe colored tree bark. The green pine needles are now feldgrau and the birch leaves have turned a pale taupe. The clouds, or rather cloud, as it's only one giant one cover the sky now is Davy's grey and silver. Some trees in the distance are liver-colored, Payne's grey and seal brown.



The French journalist, Jacques Grandbeuf (2006) visited the Nordic countries to document the locals' opinions about nature. Appropriately his book ends with the following:

Every morning, in Måløy, Leif Breidalen sit [sic] on his sofa, close to the window glass. The rest of the house is still sleeping while he is slowly drinking his tea. In from of him, the panorama is majestic.
His eyes reach the other side of the fjord and continue from the left to the right ...
    The masse of water has already silver-grey reflections. ...
    Leif is never tired of his daily ritual. He observes with a fixed eye, for about ten minutes. And every evening, he places himself at the same place, and recommences. Ten more minutes of immobile meditation.
    ”Have you seen the shades of grey?”, he asked me. ”They are never the same.” And then he went back, sitting in front of me, to his twice a day meditation (p. 222).

I know this myself, from having watched over Stigfjorden and other fjords for many hours. Like any grey area, we live in a border between clearly defined worlds, in a border that is itself difficult to define, but recondite and intricate.



I finish writing this at lunch time. My friend exclaims Det snöar! (It's snowing!).

Yes, little white flecks barely noticeable at first have begun to grow in number. They swerve around. Most of them floating sideways or upwards in the glaucous, grey outdoors.

Today's never gonna be light. And I'm glad. So glad my lips glide into a soft smile of elation.




Images:
Wikimedia Commons protractor
Meijer, Bernhard, ed. 1909. Nordisk Familjebok: KONVERSATIONSLEXIKON OCH REALENCYKLOPEDI. 2nd Edition, Uggleupplagan. Vol. 10/38.
Wikimedia Commons shades of grey
author 2008

Literature:
Grandbeuf, Jacques. 2006. Nature in minds: Jacques Gandebeuf meeting Icelanders, Swedes and Norwegians. Edited by Elfar Loftsson, Ulrik Lohm & Páll Skúlason. Department of Water and Environmental Studies Linköpings universitet.
Gardell, Jonas. 1998. Så går en dag ifrån vårt liv och kommer aldrig åter. Nordstedts.

Death – A Memory from the Future

This post is aimed to be a meditation suited for Halloween, All Saint's Day and today, All Soul's Day.

I. Death's Certainty For All

In ”Death's Certainty for All” (1937) Harry Martinson wrote that death's deepest name is ”nearness”. The binding certainty of death makes it near to all. Its bewildering capriciousness, that it is not here but could be, brings it even nearer. Death, says Martinson, is not exclusively nearest heroes, nor do heroes have the sole right to it. Heroes like those returning from the Crusades, fighting Grendels, terrorists or other creatures of fantasy, face death like anyone. Martinson asks us: Who has the right to make death theirs when it is intimate with everyone? After all, death belongs as much to the dead pauper, unsung and forgotten on a lonesome forest path, as well as the hero well-sung in false key and found in common memory.

"Nearness is death's deepest name." Everyman, even the poor man in the Theodor Kittelsen's drawing (above), is near to and must face death.

As we see in Ingmar Bergman's film The Seventh Seal (1957) even heroes like Antonius Block who learned to live for death in the Crusades will avoid death when it comes unexpectedly. My hypothesis, overlapping with Martinson's thought, is that death is most difficult to face in daily life. That is why when heroic Antonius returns home and Death approaches him he falters. Like most he parlays, he stalls, he plays chess with Death. It is in the world of non-heroes that death is hardest to face. It's in this world that the heroic illusion offers no comfort. It's here one must face death in the most banal situations without the sweeping heroic deception. In the words of Martin Heidegger, death is for us a "not yet", and when it is yet, we tarry like Antonius Block.



The motif of death playing chess came to Bergman when he was visiting Täby Church and saw the late 15th Century mural by Albertus Pictor. In it Death plays chess. It is the only known medieval depiction of Death's chess skills.




II. Heroism

”There has not yet been any age that by its own prophets of doom been called secondary. And time after time, under the pressure of such prophets of doom, each age has by constant combative spasms, attempted to live history, sought to combat with history, to live an Illiad, to die Illiadically. But action or Action, as it put man against man and was thus sterile, and planted only sterile flowers for the cultural notaries to pick: heroic songs, chronicled fables about the arts of statesmen, or these very legislative arts, but never any salvation from history's wheel of imitation” (Martinson 1937).

As the psychologist Ernest Becker demonstrated in The Denial of Death (1973), death is traditionally dealt with through heroism. Harry Martinson saw this as well when he called heroism ”history's wheel of imitation” (historiens härmningshjul). He concluded that it is in silence you see it best but the truth is that it is a lie. Doubly a lie because heroism is false and because it is not the sole right of heroes to die.

Everyone is doomed to nearness to death. Not just heroes. Everyone. It's only that ”heroes love to die as something in itself”, but that everyone dies gives everyone the right to all criticism of the exaggerated heroism that still lives on in the minds of men and is descended from the "teachings of the ruling class" (herreväldesläror), the "ancient clichés" (urgamla klichéer) and heroism's "conceptual plague" (begreppspest) (Martinson 1937). It is the heroic view of time that by a trick of the eye, lifts heroes out of the secondary banality of the moment and raises them into primary time, immortality. This view swoons men under the heroic illusion and makes them proclaim ”we're making history!” (Martinson 1937, Becker 1973).

In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, one of the classic tales relating to death anxiety, Dr. Frankenstein tries to get the explorer Captain Robert Walton to turn back from the expedition in order to save the lives of his men. Walton replies in the classic heroic fashion: 'what are the lives of these men, when my name will live forever'.


III. Denial of Death

It's odd that in Sweden, allegedly a society on the vanguard of secularization, that most people get married in churches, baptize their children, celebrate all the Christian festivals and have themselves buried on sacred ground beneath Puritan-style headstones in somber Christian milieus.

Maybe it's not that odd. After all, Scandinavian social democracy is a sublimated or late form of Christianity. The secularization of Scandinavia came about through the earlier the works of Christianity. It's not as if Folkhemmet ran out from a historical vacuum.

Peculiar to Scandinavia's post-Christianity is that death mostly disappeared from society's view. Although Swedes like many others try to lock up death in hospitals, 85% of Swedes die in public medical facilities, most elderly refuse to be housed with their younger family members, and the younger family members refuse to take care of them more than the young in most other countries. What's more is that in Sweden death's not supposed to happen and it just doesn't happen. Even open casket funerals are considered impolite or a nuisance. A woman I know who comes Finland told me that when her son died in Sweden she asked for an open casket ceremony. When she came to the funeral parlor a handkerchief had been placed over her son's face. She confronted the priest about it. He took it away. When she returned to the room a few minutes later the handkerchief was covering her son's face again. The priest found death and the sight of it too repulsive and potentially offensive to the people attending the funeral.

That Swedes are slightly more uptight about death than others, even other Nordic people, might be true, but it seems like hairsplitting when I consider how nearly everyone I meet from other nations neurotically avoids death anxiety as well.

Besides, Swedes do love death and black metal. Although these routine death motifs can work as a way of avoiding the very reality of death. Similarly, I've suspected the stone-carved memento mori found above the western portal to Stampen's Cemetary (Gothenburg): "Think of Death" (Tänk på Döden) serves as a way to get people to neglect the deep thought of death.

It's said that this increased interest in death in modern music subcultures is a reaction to the segregation of death from our daily lives. Death like nearly everything else, has been institutionalized - relegated to hospitals and elderly homes. So perhaps it's not so odd that so many Swedes not only love death metal, but that Sweden has been at the forefront of developing the genre. The above mentioned city Gothenburg is the home of ”the Gothenburg sound” pioneered by bands like At the Gates, In Flames and Dark Tranquility. Hailing from Stockholm: Edge of Sanity, Dark Funeral, Mörk Gryning and Entombed. There are thousands of other death and black metal bands throughout the Nordic lands.

As this music was developed in the late 80's and early 90's it was after all meant to be extreme. Intuitively the death metal pioneers in bands like Carcass, Death and Morbid Angel, used death, medical pathology and motifs of witchery as a provocative icons set against an uptight, overrationalized society. Death metal's offshoot, black metal, which matured to its putrid fruit in Norway, seems to have lead to the most extreme music subculture known. Several of its Norwegian and Swedish musicians turned to self-made satanism or homebrewed paganism in order to conjure the powers needed to burn down Norwegian stave churches and kill rival band members or themselves.

Death and black metal are however aesthetically and politically relevant among less fanatic listeners. The style, opinions and heroic anti-Christian, anti-rationalization myths these genres provide for their public easily shatter the peachy (or beige or white) reality of suburban Scandinavia where the sublimated Christians retire at 65, live to 95, and take pride in the best dental health in the world.

”We know that people love myths that please their pretensions. You can survive on such myths for twenty years if you're given the bare necessities of life. During these periods when you rest upon myths you prepare a forced attempt to make history, working yourself up out of "secondary" existence, creating according to the dim lines of the myth and forging anew by the sword” (Martinson 1937).

Despite their outer extremism, the black and death metal scenes provided little more than alternative heroic myths grounded in thousand year-old pre-Christian heroism that sometimes lead to a flirtation with neo-Nazi ideology such as in Varg Vikernes' career and its offshoot nsbm (National Socialist Black Metal). Whether a fanatic black metal fan or an nsbm true believer, they thought, in the 90's that they had ripped fate from modern society's hands and taken it into their own. But their extremism culminated in a superficial reversal of the heroic aspect of the Western heteronorm. As always, Satanism is quite Christian.

"We love to reflect our heroic selves in history ... just like Narcissus and thus brush over and ignore the basic flaw of history's heroic perspective" (Martinson 1937). This flaw, as aforementioned is based on ignorance of the truth that ”Fate is at all times the destiny that closes in on each and all” (Martinson, 1937).


IV. In Poetry and Prose

Looking for death in Swedish poetry we see death is near but for the most part only implicitly. In the poems of Edith Södergran death is explicitly near. That she had tuberculosis and would die young were certainly grounds for this. In "Mitt liv, min död och mitt öde" ("My life, My Death and My Fate") she explores her insatiable will, or in Freudian terms her death drive. Her will wants to return the organism to the inorganic state. She says that this desirous will seems 'to not know what it wants', and that 'it is surrounded by darkness'. But, she adds, that when she dies, the will shall know and get what it wants. In this we see what later psychoanalysts have pointed out: that the death drive is not just a will to the quiescent state, but a drive that wants not only to reach this state but also survive it. As Slavoj Žižek states (2006, A Pervet's Guide to Cinema) the death drive says 'do anything you want to me and I will survive'. Furthermore, as Södergran shows, the death drive demands 'do anything to me and do it now so that I can survive the death of what I now feel'. In Södergran's last poems, "Landet som icke är" ("The Land that is not"), she returns to this blind, yearning will that longs to both die and survive death. She reports that it no longer desires "what is". Instead it desires "what is not".

In the poem "Pulvis et umbra" (Latin: Powder and Shadow) by Johannes Edfelt we find a reminder that death anxiety is inescapable:

Fear of death has us all in its hand
and no one twists out of its grasp.

Edfelt concludes the poem by panning out to the cosmic perspective: 'the span of one's life is like a grain of sand to the universe'. This perspective that emphasizes life's insignificance can be found in all cultures and in most, if not all, our consciences.

Gunnar Ekelöf wrote that we should not "long for death, but learn to use death" for "if death had not been, no one would have learned to live". "The one who truly lives", he says, "is as if he were dead".

In "Livsbåten” (The Lifeboat), Pär Lagerkvist plays with the concept of a life-boat, but also the boatman, Kharon. Implicit is also the relationship to the Christianity-inspired, Scandinavian death scenes. Lagerkvist demonstrates in his poem that we should not be worried for the moment of change for the lifeboat will keep sailing on its own. Without any need for anxiety, the boat will sail its way to "the other shore" as if an invisible hand steers the rudder and fills the sail. From a similar collected, religious angle the Christian poet Bo Setterlind's poem "Döden tänkte jag mig så" (Death I Imagined Thus) portrays death as a farmer out in the fields from dawn to dusk, sowing seeds from a wicker basket. This image reflects a Swedish-Christian stillness towards death and a sense of being taken care of. Setterlind's poem ends so:

It was the last day's morning.
I stood like a young hare
when he came.
How fearful I was before
his lovely song!
Then he picked me up and put me in his basket
and when I dozed off he began to go.
Death I thought to be so.

The meditations Setterlind, Lagerkvist and Ekelöf try to inspire with these devotional images is not only found in the 20th Century modernism. This pleading piousness towards the death (and mystic motifs about the Passion) constitute images by which the faithful have expressed their devotion in medieval Nordic church art. The graceful and absolving authority figure is discussed by Gundis Bringéus (1998) who reminds us of the 20th Century's great anguish and lack of inner peace. Many, as in all times of strife, sought to return to God, such as the continental thinkers like Jung and Heidegger, and even the modernist poets like Boye and Lagerkvist, or even the filmmaker Bergman. There is something of a historical wormhole at work here. At each end we find depictions of death that are characterized by peacefulness. In the age of nihilism there has been a renewed drive to return or cower to the devotional image and the deep, peaceful insight of large feelings the medieval mystic would feel. Feelings no doubt well suited for even the modern Scandinavian mind in its vast and separate world isolated at the cusp of Europe and Western Asia.

Gunnar Ekelöf, wrote in one of the poems written in his last years, 'Death, show me your face, but please be that of a smiling woman'. A drastic solution. Is it a regret about the plea? Does he suggest a women because he is intimidated by an unforeseen answer? First he desires for Death to show itself. Then by his own, or perhaps demonstrating human apprehensiveness, he deflects the object of his desire, with some pleasant fantasy. This face of Death, whether depicted out of hope or fright, is a devotional image providing a modern, liturgical meditation.

The sheer weight of darkness and diffident conceit in all the devotional images I've gone through and contemplated while writing this article have such a gravity that I feel them pulling me into their bitter rue...

And there is more. In Pär Lagerkvist's 1933 novel The Executioner (Bödeln) we find the Executioner wailing:

"Millennia glide away, people stand up and people disappear into the night, but I remain blood-drenched and look after them. I the only one who does not age. Faithfully I follow people's path and no trail they've wandered on is so clandestine that I've not risen a smoldering bonfire on it and moistened the ground there with blood. I was with you from the beginning and I shall follow you until your time is out. When you for the first time turned to look at the sky and suspected god, I cut up a brother for you and offered him. I still remember the windswept trees and the glare of fire that fluttered over your faces when I wrenched out his heart and cast it on the flames. Since then I have sacrificed many, to gods and devils, to heaven and abysses, innocent and guilty in incalculable hordes. I have obliterated people from the earth, I have plundered kingdoms and laid them to waste. All that you have desired of me. I have followed eras to the grave and stood for a while supported by my dripped sword, until new races called upon me with young, insatiable voices. I've whipped seas of humans to blood and quieted their uneasy din for eternity. To seers and saviors I've raised bales of fire. I've slaked human life to night and darkness. All I have done for you" (p. 67).

Death is in the past, it is now, it is in the future. It is not yet and it is often our fault, shunned like the executioner, but also appointed by us.

In ”Vision” Gösta Ågren writes about someone shot by a guard "halfway between the barbwire and the sea". He shows the "not yet" of death rushing in:

Their sight darkened, and death came
like a memory from the future.


V. In Philosophy


The Norwegian philosopher-mountaineer Peter Wessel Zapffe (1941) noted that man has two vital needs. He requires that life be meaningful and that his values be justified. Yet these very needs cannot be fulfilled in our imperfect world, which makes human life tragic. He continued saying that no society, no matter how just, can cover its metaphysical needs, let alone those of every individual in that society. This means that society is immoral and unjust. That we need what we cannot have secures our ultimate moral defeat. The need for justification does however inspire human hope (and certainly makes human existence rich), but the inevitable destruction of our values is undeniable. Thus, he concludes, that there is no final confirmation nor justifiable grounds for man to continue with his civilization. No doubt Wessel Zapffe would find the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, a morally consequent position to hold. We can though, he said, lower our moral criteria and revert to religious depictions. We can rest our fear of the world-as-it is in the cloak of God and grander orders as Kierkegaard, several aforementioned poets and Ernest Becker do.

Although I do not share most of his presuppositions or conclusions, Finnish Pentti Linkola speaks to me like Wessel Zapffe, because his philosophical relationship to death is powered by something more than a removed and abstract relationship to concepts. In that Linkola's talk of life and death is honest, unlike the hordes of those like Lars Gustafsson, Sören Halldén, Ingemar Hedenius, Henrik von Wright, Jaako Hintikka, who try, but fail to speak on such matters. They attempt to rise from their block-like arguments to make a linear shot catapulting past most conclusions of death, but always fall short. Instead of soaring, according to their aim, past the established field, they wind themselves into smaller and smaller analytical circles. Their very writing and its approach itself cannot answer two of the most essential questions about death: why do we approach it and how is our neurosis revealed in our approach?

In Linkola we find an unripe philosophy, but a philosophy filled with blood. A philosophy that reeks of bitterness and hubris, but also strides with the clear sight of pragmatism, of realism. Quite different from the bloodless philosophies of so many philosophy professors from the north who smell of neither death nor life. Rather they quiver with resignation and smell like storage rooms filled with manila envelopes and brown boxes stuffed with scholastic materials by which I am not swayed.

For instance Halldén logically manipulates death, presenting it as an array of accessible facts and sawing it down to manageable arguments. I am tempted thus to take my geist's common escape route to the European continent and seek council with Heidegger. He speaks of our relationship to death (being-toward-death) as more complicated than Nordic types generally are prepared to confront in their philosophical methods. In Heidegger's thought we find a schematic and open platform for the exploration of death anxiety in relation to a non-linear time experienced by man. We find a prescient testimony to the fact that humans of all creatures have the nearest, the most intimate understanding of the possibility and inevitability of death. How one deals with this is twofold: authentically (eigentlich; to accept death as part of oneself) or inauthentically (uneigentlich; to disavow death by rationalization or ignorance of its reality). By our reaction we are defined as individuals.

Heidegger also lays out for criticism, the way of speaking of death that is concealed in matter-of-fact discussion, routine logical analysis, established discourse or opinions about death that make us feel secure by objectifying it. If we simply discuss death and its related concepts according to prepared ways, we discuss it inauthentically, and miss what it means, and thus reify it as a fact among many other facts belonging to a stale, objectified world we are prepared to handle.

For instance, if I remember correctly, Lars Gustaffson (1969) argues that death is a state in the universe, not an individual, which may be an interesting philosophical point, a point that might even be able to be experienced asubjectively or be truer, but it has no bearing on the individual's inevitable death anxiety. The individual is the only one who can die and directly fear their own death.

The philosophy teachers' texts generally read like alchemical nonsense, but are poised and read as relevant, well-grounded tracts. They argue iron ore and frog breath at such temperature with an equivalency and the implication of such and such means thus, and that death anxiety is clearly not a fear, but that is unjustified pomp. Sometimes however, honesty shines through the contrived analytical experimentation, such as at the end of Sven Bjerstedt's essay "Fruktan inför döden" ("Fear about death"): all this alchemical reasoning is in the end only theoretical constructions bearing no weight on reality. Still philosophers like Ingemar Hedenius or Lars Gustafsson argue whether man's death anxiety is irrational, whether we can live a life of happiness without anxiety, which is essentially asking whether we can live a life without life. Death and life are after all not matters of philosophical reason or logical calculation.

I concede. To argue whether death anxiety is reasonable may not be entirely useless. After all useless math invented in Ancient Greece and dismissed as useless in the mid-20th Century (such as prime number factor and integer factorization) has become a matter of national and credit card security. Whether these aforementioned philosophical jumblings one day become real moments in our deep and near experience of death is not certain. Why? Because death (anxiety) is so much more than theory. It is more than literature, art, poetry and photography. It has most depth and is nearest in oneself or in being with others in relation to it where it comes to its full.

Mats Furberg expects this however, and replies:

"When the philosopher takes hold of the small questions one by one or begins exploring their underlying suppositions, you might get the feeling that he is doing something irrelevant. The connections between his minute divisions and the great, deep, soul-riveting problems seems to have fallen away. ... The accusations of superficiality is quite simply an accusation that we wade into streams of thought one by one and not all at once" (1970, p. 16).

The accusation is however not that but rather the following, that those small plots are irrelevant because they are arbitrary distinctions, crude reductions, metaphysically blind endeavors. They are not near enough.

Furberg also notes that philosophy teachers' reticence to state things about the big questions "has been lost also to ourselves. The profession deforms us. The little problem area we began to work with became to so fascinating that we without a sense of loss turned our backs on the big questions" (Furberg, 1970, p. 16-17). Yes, philosophy institutions are workplaces. "Philosophers" are often only "philosophy teachers". They are, as Furberg says, "fackmän" (specialists, professionals). In other words, sophists.

As you see, I turn away from nearly all this, and say, it has given me nothing. Scandinavian philosophy teachers give me neither death nor life! True, perhaps Páll Skúlason is an exception. But authors like Väinö Linna, Selma Lagerlöf or Halldór Laxness have more to give. And most to give would be friends and my shadow...

Except for Wessel Zapffe (despite my disagreements with him), perhaps Kierkegaard, and some unmentioned excerpts from Furberg and one or two more, I find nothing in these Nordic thinkers that truly speaks to me. And I'm not shrewd enough to present their thoughts in a venerable way. Around here there is too great a lack of zest or inspiration. I receive too much of the brittle, woody thought of most Nordic philosophers and in relation to death seek to myself in communion with the north's people and landscapes.

For these reasons I cannot digest the philosophy teachers' regurgitations on death for I am not a specialized grazing cow bred for chewing others' cud. I am a man. I am an omnivore. I am a nomad. And I have only one stomach for rumination of such things and those must be things I choose to eat where I want, not those things I must graze when and spit up where it is suitable for my herder to call my pen.


VI. Jonah and the Whale - Wormgods with Assholes



Society's overrationalization has at lead to modern nihilism. Rationality is inherently anarchic and this anarchism has left us in what we feel to be a vacuum of meaning. As Nietzsche wrote we have taken the plough into our own hands and uprooted the historical meanings. It seems appropriate to consider Nietzsche's suggestion that should welcome this nihilism as a moment of reflection, and not lapse into a return to god, like many poets, psychologists, thinkers and black metal musicians of the 20th Century did.

We must no longer be like terrified like Jonah's at the world, fretting about the whale about to swallow us. That the world will eventually shit us out. We must "never more complain about the pandemonium, no matter how it is, no matter how we understand life and death, whether scientifically, religiously, magically or bestially, to never more complain of the effects of the inferno, while we always sleep over the causes. I am afraid that this is a promise none dare give, that it's a responsibility none dare take on" (Martinson 1937).

The Jonah syndrome is discussed by Abraham Maslow as the fear of growth and self-fulfillment. In ecstatic moments people say "it's too much" or "I can't stand it". As organisms we are too weak for large doses of greatness. A fear of being sundered, loosing control, chewed up and spit out or digested by the world, of being killed by our experience: what most of us do is to cut back on the experience (Becker, 1973, p. 48-49). 'People set low levels of self-expectation and even lower levels of aspiration; they voluntarily cripple themselves with pseudo-stupidity and mock-humility to defend themselves against grandiosity'.

To Scandinavians I must ask: does this sound familiar? It certainly reminds me of Jante Law and the creation of the modern state and the post-Christian mentality that anally prizes the limits of self and others? In some way the state has attempted to replace the Norns with bureaucrats and Yggdrasil with a welfare system to protect people from the world and their own fate. The state now pulls the strings of fate and waters the branches of our material well-being.

Although death is near and deep within us, it is foreign. Our very insides are foreign to us. What leaves us comes out a stinking decay through the anus.

In industrial society we are overextended in the external. And like all cultures previously, we know not where we come from or where we are going. We know only that we are doing, and as true neurotics we dare not stop doing because then we, like all neurotics fear, nothing (but shit) happens.

Our middle class mediocrity, anal secularization and neurotic consumer culture also protect us from ”overwhelming awe of creation—the miracle of it, the the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum of each single thing, of the fact that there are things at all" (Becker, 1973, p. 49). Modern Scandinavians are wormgods, they can create their appleworld and devour it. They've solved the problem of having the cake and eating too. They design the apple they nestle themselves in like worms-engineers. They digest it and are digested by it.

Wormgods in a whaleworld who, swallowed by their own creation, both devour and shit themselves out with their own assholes.

From Norns to neurotics. From a fatalistic society to a deterministic one with belief in free will. Our social engineering has made us Norns pleased with our own work. We are technical optimists. We hate the whale, unless we've built it ourselves.


VII. Conclusion

If you've gotten this far thanks for reading.

The paradox of death: I have nothing to say about it, because I have not yet died.

In lack of something truly cutting to say about death, I've presented Nordic perspectives to it, and my relationship to them.

I think that Scandinavians, being a sublimated Puritan and modern, neurotic people, are unable to face death as soundly they once did. That is, as it seems their Viking Era ideology allowed the best of them to do. Both my gut and my intuition tell me that among modern nations it's in the "New World's" societal crevices that we find people, Americans, who perhaps have learned to handle and forge anew with death better than anyone else and in more creative ways. It's there, I suspect, that we find those who personally went through and solved the problems of nihilism and did not lapse into theism, deism or wishful thinking.

As such, I think it is what springs out from the psychedelic culture of the U.S. where we can find a painting and depiction of death that overcomes Christianity and nihilism. Is it possible an artist like Alex Grey can show us what is beneath the surface of death and ourselves in bearing also to our future while maintaining sight of more than the facts, more than Lucretian or Epicurean observations? It's in the U.S., in a culture half of 19th Century Scandinavians fled to and began, we find new ways of seeing death.

This culture like others does not exist in a vacuum. It has its own presuppositions, such as a deeper reality, as depicted by Alex Grey's skinless/surfaceless humans. Alex Grey clearly has roots in Christian and yogic traditions, in the idea that man is a "spiritual being". Perhaps he lacks grounded vision that doesn't fly off into wishful thinking. Alex Grey himself is after all a believer. But in his painting "Dying" (1990, left) we see an innovative perspective, an artist looking for something more, something of the future, something beyond argument of wishful poets and anal philosophy teachers. "Dying" might be a bit kitsch for some but it's authentic in its relationship to death. It has gained its depth from the nearness of death in an entheogenesis that uncovers the Fibonacci structure of the universe. It's a psychedelic play with spatiality, light and Golden Geometry. Auspiciously, while looking for a Scandinavian counterpart at the university library on November 2, I discovered something. As if by Hegelian and rhizomorphic growth this something popped up in Nordic thought too: in the work of architect Kjetil Thorsen and artist Olafur Eliasson's Serpentine Gallery Pavillion 2007 (right).


Images:
Theodor Kittelsen Fattigmannen 1894-1895
from Ingmar Bergman's Det sjunde inseglet 1957
Albertus Pictor Döden spelar schack late 15th Century
Mårten Eskil Winge Tors strid med jättarna 1872
Entombed bandlogo
Fantoft stave church burns down
Edvard Munch Skriket 1893
Peter Wessel Zapffe on an iceberg
Albertus Pictor Profeten Jona kastas i havet och uppslukas av den stora fisken late 15th Century
Anker Eli Petersen, a Faroese stamp The Norns and the Tree 2003
Alex Grey Dying 1990
atharabidi Eliasson 2007

Selected References:
Bringéus, Gundis. 1998. Nådafadern - Ett pasionsmotiv i senmedeltida kyrkokonst. Carlssons Bokförlag, Lund.
Becker, Ernest. 1973. The Denial of Death. The Free Press, New York, N.Y.
Furberg, Mats. 1970. Tankar om döden. Bokförlaget Aldus/Bonniers, Stockholm.
Halldén, Sören. "Ställningstagandet till döden" from Universum, döden och den logiska analysen, 1974.
Hedenius, Ingemar. 1959. "Dödsfruktan" from Tröstens villkor. Stockholm.
Lagerkvist, Pär. 1933. Bödeln. Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm.
Martinson, Harry. 1937. "Dödens visshet för alla" from Svärmare och harkrank.

Glad Halloween

Höst

My friend who's lying on the sofa wakes up from her nap because late-afternoon sunrays are beaming from behind yellow, jangling birch leaves and twinkling on her face. On the wall I see her shadow stand up, birch and pine shadows shimmy around it. We go out to lay on a large round swing together and rock back and forth. We hold hands. The temperature's dropped just enough to make me appreciate her body next to mine. The smell of fermenting leaves keeps our noses sharp. The sky is hazy and the maples above us are red and yellow.

We hop off and are dizzy.

Our feet.

As each new season begins we become aware of our feet. In the spring we walk to see the flowers, to be free on grass, ground and stone. In the summer we walk to picknicks, through forests, to lakes to bathe in. In the fall we walk to see the leaves and views of red and tawny valleys, or we walk quickly to fight the cold, or we walk to raise our spirits by kicking our feet through heaps of leaves blown about the streets or raked in piles in yards.

Looking up while drifting along the paths we take through the parks we see the sheer yellow leaves of Norwegian maples, and wet, oak branches sticking out like dark lightning on a canopy of golden leaves.



It's fall and leaves crunch under your feet. Geese fly and honk over your head. Musky and spicy tastes become richer. Candles seem ever more important and the dim evening light makes red wine taste better, eases our eyes and our ears to become more attentive to the words of our friends.

Autumn, or höst as it's called in Swedish, has many other names in the languages of the North. Haust in Icelandic, which like höst, comes from the same root as the English word harvest. You can also say efterår (afteryear, lateyear) in Danish. Or even lövfallstid (leaf-fall tide). Whatever you call it, it's the best season for smell, our most resonant sense.

It's also the season that Scandinavians show their mycological pride and with basket and tools in hand, slip quietly into the woods, so as not to give away their favorite spots in the mushshroom forests (svampskogen). The other day I had some mushrooms for the first time this fall. I made dinner for the napping friend I mentioned above. She was cooled by autumn like myself so I decided on buttering and roasting some chestnuts, baking some sourdough and cooking mushroom soup with fresh chantarelles (Cantharellus cibarius) and Karl Johansvamp (Boletus edulis). As we ate we listened to Lena Willemark and Ale Möller's Nordan - the album I've had on repeat this October. The meal warmed us for days.

Most people like mushrooms around here, although a few centuries ago the North was mycophilic like other Germanic cultures, there was a mycological renaissance when a royal line from Provence (a mycophilic culture) came here. We get our children used to mushrooms by filling the illustrations of children's books with all sorts of them. That inlcudes the usual red fly agaric found in children's books and on Christmas cards elsewhere, as well as less colorful mushrooms.

Höst. The year's calling to an awareness of mys. Höst. Amber time of still ears, deep smells, renewed tastes, leaf wandering and a new sense of touch, of hands and lips meeting, of being dearer and coming closer to our dear close ones.






Images:

Kristian M fall 2008
Majsan of Sweden höst9410 2008
Elsa Beskow
Helmer Osslund Höstafton vid Nordingrå (Autumn Evening at Nordingrå) 1924

The Apothecary

Homeopathy, ayurveda, acupuncture, reiki, wicca and the like are not as common here as they are elsewhere. Also what is not as common as they are elsewhere are shops selling or providing alternative medicine. Being a Puritan people Swedes are not fond of ecstatic states. As such psychedelic drugs used for healing or spiritual purposes are out of the question for most — even those who might accept legalizing such drugs.

For the most part, the above mentioned alternative healing cultures are more marginalized here than elsewhere because Swedes believe in their government and their government has secularized the hell out of them by making them a techno-economic people unlike any other. Swedes believe in their government run drug stores and its mishmash of modern science, marketing rhetoric that panders to a perk middle class, and the clinical appearance that betters the ”shopping experience” at the state-run drug store.



One might ask, if Swedes were truly interested in healing or curing their illnesses and ailments, wouldn't they instead of going directly to the state drug stores, find out what their problem is, and even use the internet or libraries to research and look up the medicines they're taking? But here, like everywhere, people are part of culture. And here the culture dictates that you go to the state run drug store and take what they give you. Anything from anywhere else is irrelevant.

After the wave of mass-immigration in the past two decades there are now more Swedes than previously who do not believe as deeply in the facade of the state drug stores. Thus the drug store's become quite a Svensson environment. That is an environment where those people (of immigrant background or not) who think they are normal, boring Swedes, or at least identify or can be identified as such, will go to the culturally appropriate environment to buy their culturally appropriate drugs, toothbrushes and other hygiene accessory. ”Social deviants” not falling into the Svensson flock avoid the place unless they absolutely must fetch a prescription drug there.

If you mention this as a problem the Swede-flock will defensively say in their glub way ”I don't see the problem”.

The problem is, for many of us, precisely this consensus, that there is no apparent problem and that as a culture we have no idea why things became or remain as they are.

The problem is, that everything is filtered through the state. You get your baby names checked by the state, you get indoctrinate at state schools, the confessions told to priests are subordinate to the legal system. Everything falls under or is filtered through the government because people believe they deserve their government. They believe, as H. L. Mencken writes about democratic rule, that they should get it good and hard. This is not too different from elsewhere, but here it's extreme with the state drug stores. (But time will change this and Swedes will think in unison then as now, that things are obviously for the best, that this is how it should be, that it was so wrong before; just as they now think anything different would be wrong and anything older was primitive).



In Swedish the drug store is called Apoteket (apothecary). That is the drug store – useful to know if you visit because all drugs stores are called Apoteket. Although there have been apotek in Sweden since the 16th Century it was in 1970 that the government-owned, former monopoly called Apoteket became the drug store.

I wrote ”former monopoly” because as of July 1, 2009 this monopoly was rescinded of its absolute power under the Swedish Ministry of Health and Social Affairs. Since then other companies and stores are allowed to sell drugs beyond Apoteket's grip. Of course this set off fears that Sweden would become like the U.S., that we'll buy all our Prozac, liquor and frozen pizza in a drug store managed by 18 year olds.

Notice from my post on the Swedish language that July 1, 2009 was an important day. Knowing that the first week in July is the week that many Swedes begin their vacations, including the members of parliament, one can't help but wonder if they pass controversial laws for that day so as to be nowhere near the reigns of responsibility when the laws come into effect. Passing laws to become active on July 1 gives the politicians a bit of a respite so that when they sneak back into their offices in mid-August most people are still on vacation, or their tempers are at least eased from summer break.

Apotek is originally not a Swedish word. It's Greek (apothékē) and means storehouse. Already here we see that the view of drugs and the system its built up on dissolve into ancient relations to drugs, thinking about drugs, and research on drugs going as far back as Ancient Greece and further.

The Swedish word for doctor, the one who gives you drugs, is läkare. This contains the verb läka (to heal). So in Swedish, a doctor is literally a healer. The nonclinical connotation of the word also makes us ashamed of it. So we often go for the more clinical sounding, and internationally approved, doktor. Doctor as you may know, comes from Latin, docére, and means to teach. Doctor has through subsurface political triumphs and thousands of small political advancements become, without great suspicion, connected to one who heals.

Doctor is like a castle of sand. It stands on a manmade island called medicine, yet the waves of its very history and the sea of irrationality from which it arises, constantly lap at its sandy beaches, threatening to melt it back into the proto-scientific sea of healing.

In ethnology you distinguish between healing (roughly medical pseudoscience or anything ignored by modern medicine) and curing (roughly modern medicine, including its pseudoscientific flights of economic fantasy). Each culture, even in the standardized, globalized world, has different practicies, different borders between healing and curing. Each country for instance has its own legal framework in which drugs are distinguished from drugs. For instance, which drugs are regulated, which are not, and how the established medical field and the executive powers of government will uphold these regulations. The system, in this light, can be seen as well founded on rational procedures and legal measures. It can also be seen as an arcane system of hocus pocus combining the best of empirical science with the worst of irrational legal and moral postulates.

How do we deal with drugs in Sweden? Well we must return to läka, which is combined with medel (means, middle) to make the compound noun läkemedel (means of healing; prescription drug, medicine).

Note that the origin of läka is uncertain. Some suggest a Germanic origin meaning to heal. Others think it comes from Celtic druids and their healing. They say it comes from Ancient Irish's líaig, which comes from Indo-European root lēpagi-. This is related to Sanskrit's lápati, to speak, to whipser. Above we saw Odin, god of healing and knowledge (among other things) whispering to his ravens, Hugin and Munin. To the left we see Star Trek's Doctor McCoy, a Celtic healer-doctor of the future, holding medical equipment that we imagine represent betterments of our own. Despite this better technology and the fact that Mr. McCoy probably wouldn't need medical tools descended from the magical wands of yore, summoning tools will still be need along with an authorative, but endearing doctor-look, and a certain attire or professional clothing to set him apart from others just like in Odin's day. Mr. McCoy, like Odin, is known for his whispering condemnations as well as his trademark cursing wails, that in their emotional conjurings, enable the crew to get the upperhand in difficult situations. (I mention these things not to prove the connection between healer and doctor, but to demonstrate it.) At this point an ethnologist or linguist draws many more connections from the doctors of today to the conjurers, the animal whisperers and other forms of medicine men. Thus läkare/doctor regroups with related professions and shows itself to be the specific healing as a practice that arrives from a certain type of saying.

What we through our culture's illusion of permanence and foundational veracity think is a historical exception such as the doctor (or the true drug or the clinical drugs store) is not the true medicine man, but our true medicine man.

One of the peculiar things about their relationship to apoteket and thus drugs in Sweden is that Swedes are stuck within what philosophers call an ”ontic” paradigm. That is, they are caught within in their cultural view of drugs and see legal and illegal drugs as two fundamentally distinct things. They cannot question this, because it would also bring into question their very belief in the absolute foundations of Apoteket.

Here, legal drugs are läkemedel (medicine). Illegal drugs are droger (drugs; of unknown Germanic origin) or narkotika (narcotics; from Greek's narkōtikós, to benumb).

In English we of course use the ancient Germanic word drug. The Swedish mind, in the past two centuries, has limited drugs (droger) to certain types of drugs. The view the English word drug provides is what philosopher would call ”ontological” (an encompassing view of drugs in general). As such, in English, drugs encompasses both those sanctioned and not sanctioned by our legal authorities and moral predicants. Drug provides a similar ontological view to drugs as the Greek pharmakon, which is the origin of today's pharmacology.

In Greek, pharmakon means cure, medicine and poison. Thus drugs overlap with pharmakon. Läkemedel are not pharmakon. There is no word in Swedish to say pharmakon or drugs. Pharmacology as a science has the ontological insight into drugs because it does not arbitrarily classify drugs according to what are subordinate questions of legality and morality. This science can be studied in Sweden, but it's ontological insight into drugs has not broken the modern state's moral and legal monopoly that classify drugs a priori as either läkemedel or narkotika.

As Nietzsche writes, language and morality are repressive. They exclude that which harms or seems dangerous to the flock. Language and morality, he writes, presuppose that the individual disregards thoughts, feelings and desires that are dissonant to the flock. The flock sees dissonant individuals as antisocial and destructive.

In Sweden the narcotics debate is often mocked as being onesided and not founded on any research (as such research is mostly illegal - as opposed to in other countries such as the USA, England, Germany, France, etc). It's also said that there is no recreational drug debate. As aforementioned there is in a sense no language for dissonant individuals to discuss such thoughts and feelings without using morally and legally dangerous language. Yet can this debate even happen? As Wittgenstein says, where our language ends so do our thoughts. As such, can one while speaking Swedish have an ontological discussion about drugs when there is no language or thought for it? Does this not also reflect the situation with Apoteket?

Above I mentioned pharmakon by way of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, because in Plato's Pharmacy (1972), the philosopher Jacques Derrida illustrated through the word pharmakon that rigid conceptual distinctions are inevitably betrayed by the rhetoric found in the dominant language. By looking at drugs we see the fissures in the dominant rhetoric that have already lead to cracks that on July 1 entered Apoteket as an institution. Perhaps one day these cracks will become rifts in the rhetoric related to the Swedish Ministry of Health and Social Affairs as well as the average Svensson's ontic relationship to medicine.

Images:
Nouna Andersson Pharmacists
Apoteket Svanen (Swan) (All Apoteket have their own animal names. This one is found in Stockholm.)
Odin with ravens
Mr. McCoy from Stark Trek

To Love and Protect – the Greatest Weight that is Peace

As you’ve certainly noted, I don’t usually write about current events. I talk about them a lot, but writing about them is more difficult. The goo that quickly forms at the top of the gravy of current events easily clouds sight of what’s at the bottom. Generally this makes the stew unappetizing. That is I’m a thinker. My nature is to wait for things to settle. But today I will not wait.

Instead of writing about the autumn or immigration to Scandinavia, as I thought I might, I’m going to write about the Noble Peace Prize awarded to Barack Obama. May this be an essay, perhaps the first essay that sees through the gunk at the top of the cup of chatter of the past 24 hours. So please, kind reader, visitor to my very small corner of the internet, take the few minutes required to read this.

The Norwegian language is the closest spoken language intelligible to Swedish ears. Sweden and Norway share many things, including memories of war with one another. At one time they were even same nation (1814-1905). Now, they are amiable with each other, but often joke about each other’s alleged stupidity. These are two adjacent nations stuck with a 1006 mile (1, 619 km) long border (longest in Europe) on a breadthwise cramped peninsula. Despite a history of quarrels, they have no current territorial disputes. Internationally seen, they have excellent relations. Although their peace grew out of specific conditions and the modern Scandinavian egalitarian mentality, they have something to teach the world about cooperation and peace. Is it not appropriate that it is here the Nobel Peace Prize is decided? Also considering the one nation, Sweden, provides the Nobel Peace Prize, and the other, Norway, decides over it. The prize itself is a symbol of international cooperation. That is, even if peace does entail a few silly, dumb Swede or dumb Norwegian jokes.

A reminder to Americans who suspect that the prize given to Barack Obama is a conspiracy, that he is the European favorite I must remind you that Scandinavians, Europeans, world citizens everywhere, are stunned at the decision as well. Although I favored Obama in the election last year, I too first felt confused at the news yesterday. I was stunned – as if someone slapped me in the face, or as if I, not yet thirty years old, had gotten my first bout of the type of cognitive dementia that affects the elderly.

When Herta Müller was announced as the laureate for the Nobel Prize for Literature it seemed so unfair, so unbelievable to so many. Yet when someone we’ve never heard of wins the chemistry prize, it’s alright, because we so know little about chemistry. The same with the prizes in physics and with economics.

When it comes to literature everyone has a strong opinion because they’ve never heard the name, because they think reading on average one book a month gives them literary expertise. And when it comes to the peace prize, the decision becomes outrageous, because it’s often someone we all know and because it’s a moral prize and we all feel we are excellent judges of morality. Especially this year it seemed outrageous, because the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to 2009’s most popular person.

Perhaps that’s enough cause for disbelief, yet what does the average man know of peace? Most Americans for instance were until recently for the War in Iraq. Half of American parents believe corporal punishment is fine. Even more Americans own weapons, enjoy weapons, find pleasure in their very comforting power. Looking at it in one light, the US government is a leading cause of death in some parts of the world. Although many Americans and people throughout the world may want peace, which of us work for it? What do we know of it? Which of us, to the defense of the Norwegian Peace Prize Nobel committee, have any possibility of exerting as much influence over world peace as Barack Obama?

(Notice I do not use the title “President” for two reasons. 1) Because president is a title that is today hardly distinguishable from the given pretensions of “King”. And 2) because the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is a man; a man who happens to cover his banal existence as a homo sapiens with the cloak of president as you or I cover ours with say “employed” or “unemployed”.)

Now, why did the Norwegians choose him? Is it because they are “socialists”? Because, as aforementioned, so many vehemently and reactionarily accuse, Obama is the European favorite? (And is this by the way not a skewed idea? To think that American power somehow falls under the will of Europe?) Did they choose him as a joke? After all, he is the executive leader of the world’s only imperial power which currently is fighting wars in several countries. Or do the Norwegians mean to praise an American enlightened absolutism? Do they in an Orwellian sense mean that war, in this case, is peace?

Obama, the man who worked for peace, prized for what he can do in the future too. One Swede I know joked yesterday in his status on Facebook, “Next year the Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded to someone who is not yet born”.

Cheekily, but optimistically, an Icelandic acquaintance wrote to me to say after the Bush regime, any change is going to seem like a wondrous accomplishment.

I believe in order to explain the motivations I’d have to provide a psychological analysis of the committee’s members. I’d have to give you an idea-history of the Nobel Peace Prize as well as a several year tour throughout Scandinavia, wherein you could begin grasping the special processes of Scandinavian thought, of how the world is viewed from this peninsula in the North.

Explanations will be subjective and post-facto. We are here now. The prize is given. We should, in the Norwegian committee’s intention, look forward.

We should, I think, see the Peace Prize as a weight. A weight from Scandinavians who have attempted to remind us of the ancient truth that with great power comes great responsibility.

Thus the question is, is this weight enough? Or is it too much to be placed on Obama’s shoulders with the weight already there?

This Atlas prize of peace is given to the one who can carry the world’s conflict. It is astute of Obama to have said that he is “humbled”, because there is little more humbling than this.

And as George W. Bush said to Obama in November after the election, you’re in for a ride of your life.

Once again, this prize is a weight, but not only on Obama, but his administration and collaborators, as he himself noted, but also on the entire American nation. With the weight that it brings, some Americans are more certain about predictions that the US will sink beneath the weight of its burdens, thus sinking beneath the world. But fear and suspicion are very wrong reactions to have. And perhaps the United States of America, the superpower, the Christ nation suffering for what it egotistically believes are the sins of the rest of world, will come to accept this burden with love, a combination of Nietzschean love of fate, and true Christian love that is compassion in action. In this sense, it is a test of Christian America to show the world that it finally wants to unlock its isolationist heart, to meet the world on the terms of the world, to talk to the world, to ask of it: How are you? What may we, in all our power, do for you?

Along these lines, perhaps this peace prize is the end of a unilateral USA. The signifier that demonstrates what some have predicted as the beginning of an era in which the US will become a leader among many leading nations. Does the Peace Prize not also call for more peace for the 2008 financial crash, the strain of many wars, of America’s oil, water and infrastructural problems. Is the peace a peace with the world as the US is not brought to its knees, but renewed?

There are two important philosophical issues I’d like to mention. In talking to people, reading articles, webforums, newsgroups and through other knowledge I’ve gathered in the past day, I’ve been able to gauge the thickness of the sludge forming and floating at the top of Peace Prize commotion:

1) People react, saying it’s dumbfounding, that there are more suitable peace-workers. Yet these people have no idea what they mean by “peace” and even less idea of what universally or specifically would qualify one for the prize. Instead they presuppose there is an ideal candidate somewhere that would be recognizable and unquestionable. This demonstrates a categorical cynicism and a confused moral Platonism on their part.

2) Each year the same Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to someone new. It has the same name, same tradition, etc. But it is also different every year. It has the guaranteed form of the Nobel Peace Prize, but it has varying content. What it means depends on world climate, who receives it, and the motivation for the prize. Thus to presuppose that one candidate was the true candidate and another was not is to miss the point, which is that there is a prize for an abstract quality that is put into practice by being awarded to an imperfect person acting in an imperfect world. The one who gets it is somehow, through their actions, thought to demonstrate and highlight that abstract quality. Thus, to bitterly dismiss the choice behind the prize by saying “it’s political” (like Hamas representative Muhammad al-Sharif), is to miss the point by the very fact of stating the obvious. It is necessarily political.

Once again, regarding the weight, I’m reminded of what Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: that we have achieved great things not by flowing responsibility over into a god, but by damming up this overflow and rising higher than god, and with greater responsibility grounded in our presence in an imperfect world (1).

It is in this very aphorism that Nietzsche introduces the concept of the eternal recurrence. It may be, in relation to yesterday’s news, that the recurrence of peace and the peace prize remind us of the meditation about peace that each of us has been able to choose to receive each autumn for the past century. About the eternal recurrence, Nietzsche says this greatest weight is announced by a demon stealing in to you in the night. The demon says to you (like the Norwegian Torbjørn Jagland eudaemonically stepping up to the podium in Oslo to announce to the world the Nobel Peace Prize winner):

“This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more”? Would like upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? (2).

Can anyone want the peace of the world on their shoulders? If they get it, can they rightly not accept it without mirth? Without acceptance of the current of providence flowing through the events? Could you not see this is who you must become and must also long to be? Is this insight itself not the beginning of entering the transcendence of peace?

Though he said he is humbled, does Barack Obama not also gnash his teeth at the prize? Raise his fist and guffaw at the weight of it? Or tremble before tug that must make him evermore aware of the undercurrents of world politics and the riptide of conscience he could easily be carried away with?

For perspective, let me quote what the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Harry Martinson, says of war.

In war man knows neither inside or out. Which leg to stand on today. The left, tender leg of sorrow, or the right inflamed foot of sorrow. But each morning the State continues to desire genuine, renewed patriotic feelings of love for the State. But man does not manage to carry that feeling for long without playing the hypocrite or being betrayed. The conscience is quickly jaded, when it is exploited by the State. Man’s expected to have social conscience and military conscience and historical conscience, and conscience that touches upon care for loved ones … we all must constantly accustom ourselves to the horrible contradictions in everything that we called the movement of the world (3).

Martinson intends to say that our political dignity can be raised to a spiritually frozen majesty. Even great idealists can become refrigerators that fall into the habit of discussing atom bombs and child care in the same tone. As Martinson says, we need not idealists, but realists, those few politicians who still have passionate insight and imagination, who can wield power and be believed. Those who know reality. Those with reality in their voices, not only their thoughts.

Obama won the election with the intention to end war, to reinstate a several hundred year old belief in human rights. His opponent, John McCain stood for a political line that was plainly disinterested in upholding Enlightenment values, such as human rights, the writ of habeas corpus and other values that the United States is founded upon, and those things that have been trampled upon by what many call “the Bush Regime”. Obama won in part, because of hope and change, because people believed they were possible and that a different future meant something. About this compassionate reality of politics and the future of the world, two things peace is ever in the spheres of, Swedish philosopher Richard Matz writes:

We find ourselves at most in the beginning of the great rehabilitation that has become necessary …after the Cro-magnon men-of-today’s many thousand year-old destructive rampage. A modern man can only with difficulty get an inkling about what it would be like to live in a world that does not presuppose…the bitter but unseen and missed possibility of living in a society that isn’t a disappointing society, but instead founded on a good and loving course – with sight of something in its base that is so self-evident and thoroughly honorable such as Saving Earth and the Future (4).

When Obama became president there was, as we all know, the postulate of Change. What we forget about this is precisely what we are constantly reminded of: change doesn’t happen over night.

Moreso, what we forget is that change is not permanent, it requires upkeep and that we live in an imperfect world, where change will necessarily be followed by...more change. Even with a transcendental political change that might be delivered by the realists in the Obama Administration in cooperation the realists among the American people, we know that change is an ideal, or as Norwegian philosopher Jon Hellesnes would say, it represents our hope of “living out the cosmic harmony in a collective ecstacy”; and as Hellesnes reminds us “[h]ope has always been the way to find the Final Answer” (5).

The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded for the way, along the way to find the Final Answer to unrest, but the award will come next year and further peaceful upkeeping will be needed. Peace is after all problematic because it requires a balance between justice and compassion. Putting ethical theory into practice requires a participation that implies a universalistic ethics that all modern justice and compassion are based upon. Thus we must sometimes, even as realists with passionate insight and imagination, must sometimes “stay cold” because “moral compassion simply isn’t enough to ground our action upon" (6).

The police in the United States have the slogan on the side of their cruisers, “to serve and protect”. Odd because police originally comes from the Ancient Greek word for people or city (polis). So it is exciting the man in charge of the strongest of the three main branches of the American government, the Executive branch, the branch in charge of executing justice, law, war, military and national police, is now also adorned with a badge of peace. What an auspicious combination that peace and power might be united.

The word peace itself, in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish is fred or frid. It's an ancient term and in earliest history we know that it meant to love and to protect. As such, let’s observe and bear peace to love and protect like Scandinavians long ago, and as Norwegians of today, believe that we symbolically through Barack Obama can do.



P.S. In this image is Frigg, the Nordic goddess of Love, with her servants who were aspects of Frigg herself. One of these aspects is Hlín, the protector goddess. "Frigg" etymologically comes from a word for love and is thus related to Scandinavian words for peace.

After writing this it becomes apparent to me that this is foremost a Note from the North, a sketch from and about Sweden, directed to Americans and Barack Obama.



Footnotes:

(1) Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), §285
(2) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §341
(3) Harry Martinson, ”Det överansträngda samvetet” in Utsikt från en grästuva ("The Strained Conscience" in View from a Tuft of Grass), 1963
(4) Richard Matz, “Människans fostran till att rädda framtiden” in En god led för världen: Sju uppsatser ägnade att pejla den dolda men kända desorienteringen och poänglösheten ("Man's Rearing to Save the Future" in A Good Way for the World: Seven Essays Dedicated to Take Bearing of the Suppressed but Known Disorientation and Meaninglessness), 1992
(5) Jon Hellesnes, Hermeneutik och kultur (Hermeneutics and Culture), 1988, p. 169
(6) ibid., p. 173-4

Images:
TeecNosPos Atlas Statue 2007
Carl Emil Doepler Frigg und ihre Dienerinnen (Frigg and her servants.) 1880

More info (Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and English - Google Translate can help you out):

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