as the sun sets somewhere over the railways and far from my sight, I light an incense growing from the grass. the slender wind jogging around the damp park has the scent of vanilla dissolve into it, slowly making the air around us a bit special. it has been a while since the three of us sat together in a park like now, eating random exotic foods and beverages brought form distant lands to serve as triggers for viewing our whereabouts from a healthy distance. I remember us drinking stolichnaya and borjomi the last time we wandered on lawns. it was weeks ago.
after spending the last weeks in the company of so many non-satan worshipers, I've come to forget how good it feels to be together with fallen angels. my mind is not only playing with terms here - stirring and twisting and, thus, owning the words - but also hiding a bit of truth into a provocative metaphor.
earlier today I leaned to my bike, waiting, in the middle of the inside courtyard of helsinki's main railway station. the people were running past me in the afternoon scurry, off and on to trains from the platforms of the weird station which the trains only leave for one direction - north. as I let my gaze fall from the world around me to my muddy shoes I noticed myself to be standing 700,9 kilometers from the arctic circle.
like my gaze, we three fell in an early age from the imaginary heaven culminating to such mantras as “being born in finland is winning the lottery.” not “like” winning the lottery. winning it. I cannot say what the reasons for the falling of others were, but I tripped over and fell hard after I began to realize how artificially the world around me is governed. I had been given time and space to build up my own system of values and standards from early on, cheers to good parenting, and so it was rather tough to realize that the ideals well thought through as being the highest on my view were barely visible in what went on in the outside world. worst was to realize that words are corruptible.
in a “social democracy” we who go for quality in everything, more or less by instinct, are left to show our respectful fingers to the majority bearing but vague values. like, instead of having a society which promotes individual achievements people are driven by a weird lunacy called equality. one cannot imagine anything that could produce more serious cognitive dissonance than the idea of equality in the form presented by that mass. I know that only basic potentials are equal, never the end results.
with both of my hands I lure the smoke from the incense to float to my face, and james begins the conversation by singing her translation of our national anthem,
“oh our land finland, borning land! ringing the word golden! no valley, no hill...”
“wait, wait, wait! is this national anthem about things lacking?”
“yeah.”
“I want to get right to the point now. some people may have successfully become oblivious to winter after all this sun and light, but I have not. the summer has been awesome and as short as it has always been here, and I know it to be nothing but downhill from now on. first the darkness falls so early each day you begin to wish the snow would already fall to shed some lightness into the dark. then comes the snow, comes on heavy, and you wake up one morning and it is minus twenty degrees out. standing in your underwear in front of your window, holding a cup of coffee and looking at the pure whiteness outside, you thank mankind for electricity on some very primitive survival level of your consciousness. without it you'd woken up dead.”
“waking up dead is so relative, and maybe even comparable to the fear felt by them around us who are so excited about “society.” if we would not work together, nothing up here would work. that is the fear driving these people with ancestors straight from the dark forests together. in addition to living in a city, the only real difference between them and their grandparents is that today the comfort zone of men grown to be but pussies spreads way too wide when looked at with the eyes of a warrior.”
“it is natural to fear all which you do not understand. think about bears. they run in fear if they hear an old woman singing in the forest while picking berries, or when an old drunken man runs towards them with a baseball bat. they fear because when they look at how we behave they have no idea what the fuck is going on and why. they fear us, because we are unpredictable, and I cannot blame them - who would have guessed that a bunch of hairless monkeys would one day build a shuttle to leave the earth for the moon?”
“it is the higher state of consciousness, the ability to see and break patters, to see potentials and build. this is the reason why we rule animals. we have the imagination to own. and, as a sugar topping, the confidence produced by the strength of that illusion of owning is what brings us respect.”
I laugh and my eyes follow the noise coming somewhere from the sky visible beyond tall birches. an example of general aviation flashes through a strip of sky framed by the trees, then another, and another, and I begin to see that this guy is not just flying the plane. he is owning it.
“animals, those fools! I cannot help it, I have to rise my hands to that human achievement up there! see a bear flying that?”
“I've seen a bear drive a car.”
“anybody can drive a car, but not everyone has the balls and the skills to fly through empty space in a small plane like that guy up there. besides, not even father lenin could make bears beat gravity. it takes a lot of understanding before you cease to fear it.”
