FULL MOON RAMBLE

 

These days of bitter cold have got me down. Playing like I'm in Norway and it's summer doesn't work. A friend with half Norwegian ancestry was thinking about going there and someone from Norway told him the snow is all the time, but for a very short time in summer. The snow makes everything you do a major bother, dealing with the snow. It sure is a bother here dealing with the snow. I've read that the Native American Indians, anyway the Lakota, had names for something like 26 kinds of snow. I've noticed over my years of dealing with snow in the mountains, which means less and less every year, I don't recall two kinds of snow the same. Surely it happened, but I've been struck every time it snows at how different one kind of snow is from another. Some of it is easy to walk in, some you have to punch every footstep through the snow. Some is wet and sticks to everything, some is dry and sticks to nothing. Some drifts and some does not. I've not given the varieties of snow I've encountered names, but I do know how to read it for walking and for driving from half a lifetime of experience. I have to admit, I'm all for global warming. Sorry, Polar Bears. I like a short winter. Winters here in the mountains used to be about half the year. It would start getting cold end of August and finally toward the end of May would let up. The hard part would be November through March. Now winter is a little bit of a cold spell we're going through. I've heard in Helsinki, Finland, the summer temperatures have risen into the 80s and people are buying air conditioners the first time.

I went out and walked a little over half a mile in the below twenty temperature Friday afternoon. My nose has been running, feeling a tiny bit feverish, though not. I'm waiting to see if it's going to turn into something. Spent most of the day in bed today attempting to sleep it off. I hope I'm feeling better before doctor appointment Tuesday. Anything I tell him I'm having issues with, he jumps to write a prescription and I have to tell him it's not a problem, I don't want pills for it. I just thought he'd like to know. He didn't want to know. I take enough pills per day. It's like with somebody involved in the psychiatric profession, they ask if you've ever thought of killing yourself, and if you say yes, here come the men in white coats. I made that mistake. Then I had to explain, Of course I've thought of it. I'm a human with a mind. Everybody has thought about it. Anybody who says they have not is lying. It must be one of their alarm signals. If you say yes, all hell breaks loose and you have to talk fast to explain I REALLY DIDN'T MEAN IT. I got an ear infection, I suppose. Woke up this morning unable to hear from the right ear. I so don't want to tell the doctor about it. Next stop, drugstore to pick up another prescription. I don't like to tell the doctor about anything that's not debilitating. This is debilitating. All sounds are like they're on my left side.

He told me once, "We are chemical machines," so I go see him like I see a mechanic, when the machine needs fixing. First lesson among mechanics: if it aint broke don't fix it. When he said that, I stopped myself from saying, "Maybe you are." Or like PeeWee Herman said, "I know you are, but what am I?" Then, I'm not really sure. I know he was right in the way he meant it. It just ran all over me the way he put it. I can't identify my body as a machine, the same way I can't identify my mind a computer. When he diagnosed my heart issue, he said, "You're gonna die." Only thing I could think to say was, "Duh." He's known for being off-putting when he talks. I like that in him, to a point. He's direct, tells it straight. Suburbanites moving here to the exurbs hate him as a doctor. They go a few times and find a new doctor. "He doesn't have a bedside manner." My feeling about that is, who needs a bedside manner? I'm not going to bed with him. Though I do have some problem with him. I've gone to him thirty-five years and he has no idea who I am. He has his charts. All he wants to know about me is in the charts. A few times I attempted to give him context around something that happened. He wasn't interested. He's jaded by years of being a country doctor, dealing with people who don't take care of themselves as he instructs them, like taking their pills as told, instead of when you think about it. I think he's of the belief system that losing someone to death is a failure. Like wanting me to get a new heart so I can end up in a nursing home having strokes and staring at the ceiling, watching auction shows on tv, shitting in diapers. Glory Land cannot be that bad. I have so many friends and pets over there, I don't have a lot of resistance to Glory Land.

Forecast says the temperature will be up to 50 Monday and 60 Tuesday. I'm past ready. I'd forgotten how miserable below 20 can be. My game of pretending I'm in Norway and it's normal is not working. I'm thinking of how miserable it must be below 20 half the year. And wind off the North Sea. In Kansas, I grew up in Scandinavian protestantism. I understand why Norwegians I see in movies are largely quiet and don't make chatter. I got it when I saw a documentary of conversations with Ingmar Bergman in his retirement. I wrote about it in I WAS A TEENAGE EXISTENTIALIST. He had the same kind of protestant austerity through his childhood as I had in mine. Different, of course, because his was in Sweden and mine was in Kansas. Growing up with a Swede for a preacher was austere. Absolutely austere. I learned how to play along in appearance and go my own way in my mind. It got me through those years where only appearance of being controlled was required. I learned how to be out of control and it not show. Sometimes I like that, then sometimes I don't. I've no idea what it would take for me to break loose and express myself emotionally. When somebody really pisses me off, I act like I have no problem. Learned that from being lorded over by daddy, who would hit me again if I reacted. Whoever it was will never have a chance to piss me off again. I have control over second time. I stay away from that individual like I stay away from crocodiles. So I just took it and acted like it didn't matter, when what daddy was really doing was making me hate him more than I hated him the day before.

Mother was a churchaholic, dead and buried in denial, and daddy a mad man. The kid didn't have a chance. I reparented myself after I got away from them. Coming to the mountains was a big part of the reparenting. I had discovered Meher Baba on the way to the mountains, so arriving here was a spiritual path thing for me. New understandings, new knowledge, I came to the mountains as to a monastic situation where I lived by myself with Meher Baba my abbot in spirit. It doesn't mean I meditate around the clock. I don't meditate at all. I don't do austerity except for what my meager income cannot afford. Don't believe in it. I don't do yoga or tai chi. I've come to believe in living my life. I didn't know that before. I don't worry myself over sins. I have a fair enough understanding of what sin is not to be bothered by it. Largely sin is a control device by protestant preachers and catholic priests, religionists generally. Mother told me she's had it with the grand children. They don't visit her and they don't invite her to their birthday parties. I couldn't say it, but she's a wet blanket to kids. They know she's watching every move they make and hearing everything they say, judging them. And they know they can't get away from her without being told she wished they went to church more often and would get saved. It wouldn't matter if I told her. She wouldn't do anything about it. She's on automatic pilot for the Lord's work. It's her duty. And the grandkids only see her when it's their duty.

A couple weeks ago somebody told me that some kind of behavior was my duty. I said, "I don't do duty." Nor do I do should or s'posed-to. I make my own decisions for my own reasons and nobody who watches television is going to advise me on should, s'posed-to, or duty. The philosophy of television is if it can't be seen by a camera it's not real. In my way of seeing, it's the other way around. If it can be seen by a camera it's not real. Like after so many years of medical school, doctors tend to give little attention to the subjective. Only the objective is real. I'm of the belief that only the subjective is real. Not a belief like a religious belief. It's just obvious to me. The subjective is where intent is formed by attitude toward life, which is created by all kinds of subjective influences. Objective is excellent for the scientific method and I have no problem with the objective. Thanks to the scientific method I'm writing this on a laptop online. Without the scientific method I'd be using quill, parchment and candle light. This is faster, but slower is surer. Still, I see the scientific method as a tool, not as the nature of existence. It's a good tool for picking apart the nature of existence to help understanding. If the kingdom of heaven is indeed within, that seems to me awfully subjective.


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SCANDINAVIA IN MOVIES

     geiranger fjord

I've taken an interest in having a look at Scandanavian cultures, from Finland to Iceland, to Greenland. These are the descendants of the Vikings, or so I suppose. Getting some understanding of what it was about the Vikings, the Nordic wild men who wore helmets with bull horns sticking out of them. I've heard about the Vikings all my life, but knew little about them except they were from Norway, I supposed, and that was about it. Snow and ice everywhere all the time. I've been curious about what the fjords are like. Fjord is a word I remember from learning it in school, what an odd word it was, like when I learned island, that it was not is-land, but I-land. First grade. Substitute teacher that day. I thought it interesting that the coast of Norway had fjords all up and down it. Learned that Nazis used fjords for submarine hiding places during WW2. Norwegian skiers are consistently great skiers in international competitions. It's a country of mountains and snow. What else would you do there, besides ski and ice skate? One thing, you could work your ass off on a farm among rock cliffs a thousand feet high all your life in a dysfunctional extended family, fish and dream of America.



In the time of the Vikings there was no America. It was Turtle Island then, though the Vikings surely did not know it by that name. Danes settled Iceland, Greenland and probably over into Nova Scotia. I believe it's in Massachusetts that evidence of Viking visitors was found. Here, in our county, in Piney Creek, Phonecian markings have been found on a rock. Just because those people didn't have satellites and atomic bombs, it doesn't mean they were mindless. A dozen or more guys set out with oars and sails, an understanding of the night sky in relation to the earth. I see the fjords in movies and get a feeling for what they are and what they're like to look at from a boat in the water between rock mountains and cliffs both sides. People live in them. I look at the map of Norway and see fjords penetrating over a hundred miles inland, the western part of Norway stripped to bare rock by millions of years of wind from the North Sea up there where the Atlantic current makes the turn from going north along Greenland and Iceland and having to make the turn, like a U-turn in a river or creek, the water eats at the land until only the rock remains.



The satellite map of Norway looks like a large rake went over Norway, left to right. As long as the land masses of earth have been in the configuration they're in now, the constant wind and surges of storm, the wind full of water, most often ice, beating at the land until only rock cliffs are left, 500 ft to 1000 ft high, immoveable objects in relation to irresistable forces. The fjords are now veins running deep into the country, boats the form of transportation, boats for fishing, probably the way of life all up the coast to Trondheim and over the top of Sweden to Finland, where ice never thaws. Mountain people have the name world-round of being tough people for work and fighting. I'm beginning to have an idea that fjord people would make a good match for mountain people. What I saw in the film, I AM DINA, by Dane director, Ole Bornedal, made in a Norwegian fjord somewhere in the Bergen region, told me life in the fjord villages was intimate, extended family. Everybody hard working. Women had their hard work and the men had their hard work. The religion was absolute.



I've been paying attention to the architecture in Oslo I've seen in a few films, HAWAII, OSLO mostly filmed in the old parts of the city, and TROUBLED WATER in the newer parts of the city. I've gone to google maps and looked at Oslo from above. It looks like what I think of as bastions everywhere, buildings that look like their walls are 3 feet thick, like if a dump truck loaded with gravel was to hit one at 100mph, gravel would have gone everywhere, the cab accordioned to about a foot thick and not a dent in the side of the building. Might scratch the paint, but no more. Makes me wonder about the nature of the Norwegian people before Oslo became a city, in the time when they lived by fishing along the coast of fjords. Inland was mountains. It suggests to me that all along the history of people in that land now called Norway have lived in the face of the storms of the North Sea. I imagine the wind flying through those fjords for dozens of miles, icy wind raging through the wind tunnels. Surely, the people who settled along the fjords knew the best places to be out of the worst part of the wind. Generation after generation of people in direct relation to the North Sea where the landscape of Norway turns the ocean current all the way around. It seems natural the architecture in Oslo would have the power of presence of the Rock of Gibraltar. It looks like no force of nature could overwhelm the buildings of the old part of the city, like the cliffs along the coast.



If the Vikings consisted of people from Norwegian fjords and the Danes, who also face that North Sea, but without the mountains. These would be people whose lives had been lived in boats fishing. Taking off in a sailboat with a dozen or so others, they'd have no problem going anywhere they wanted. Fish were all around them anywhere they were. Take a horde of men from the fjords in boats with oars and sails, whose arms and legs are pure power, them going at it with axes and spears against Scottish and Irish, also people of the North Sea, shaped by the wind. I'd say it would be a formidable battle. It must have sent terror through a coastal village when the Vikings landed. Maybe. I don't know. Mind going off into imagination. The root of it is the people who came up in the Norwegian fjords would be formidable people. Much like mountain people in that what happens in the fjord stays in the fjord. And, like in the Appalachians, a similar culture all along the chain.



One thing I see, Norwegians are familiar with living in isolation. Though a day trip by boat to the next village couldn't be too bad. They live in a world of water and boats, fishing, familiar with silence and solitude. I see a certain comfort with silence in what films I've seen from Norway. The people are not chatterboxes. Surely, Oslo has its punk set trying to be like on tv. I see a Protestant stillness in them, not a stillness from within, but a stillness from culture, like in the American old-time Protestant culture. From earliest childhood, one is taught not to fidget, to sit still, no frivolity, only straight-faced sober demeanor. I think of imagining living among Norwegians. I'll never get there in this lifetime, so I can see these places in films made by some of the more interesting directors I've seen. Erik Poppe of Norway, Ole Bornedal of Denmark, Bille August of Denmark, and a string of satisfying film makers. Since I discovered not long ago the Swedish influence on my nature from the preacher in the church I grew up in, a Swede from Minnesota, I am seeing in films from Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Oslo, that I feel very much at home among the Scandinavian people. I'm loving my tour of Scandinavia through some of the finest films I've ever seen.

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NORWAY AND MAX MANUS THE MOVIE

       

         edvard munch

It's Christmas present buying time again. Money flies away anyway, but this time of year it disappears like stinger missiles. I'm out of money and have more presents to buy. Not a lot, but a lot is the same as a little. Any is more than I can handle. A half hour at amazon.com and I'm done in. Won't gain any weight this month. Won't lose any either. I'd like to buy presents for everybody I know, but can only handle a few.

Watched a Norwegian film today, MAX MANUS, the story of Norwegian resistance in Oslo during the Nazi occupation. It was historical, Max Manus the name of the hero of the resistance effort in Norway. I knew nothing at all of the Norwegian experience during WW2. I suppose if I think about it, I'll remember hearing about U-boats hiding in Norwegian fjords, but no more than that. I've been learning about Scandinavia seeing movies, looking at maps in the Atlas, seeing landscape and cities, seeing the people, hearing the languages. Max Manus began his war effort fighting Russians in Finland. Back in Oslo, he once said he would like to go back to Finland, because there it was clear cut; in Norway you didn't know who was with the Germans and who was not. Everyone you knew was a potential for turning you in.

He became a national hero quite inadvertently, as I suppose all heroes are founded, didn't see himself any greater than the guys he worked with who were dead. Toward the end he was talking with a German officer, who was locked up on war crimes charges, the German asked him how he managed never to be caught. He said he was lucky. The German said he didn't believe in luck. Manus shrugged it off. What else could he say? We got a brief look into his memory in several split-second shots of moments when a guy he was with was killed, which could have been him. It was flipping a coin. What else could he call it when he could have been shot many times, was hit a few times and survived? He didn't see he was a hero for surviving. He felt like he should have been dead with his friends that didn't make it. He'd found his talent. The war over, he didn't know what to do. All he'd ever done was be a soldier.

A couple of times, escaping arrest, he would go to Sweden on cross-country skis. He was fluent in all three languages, knew English and evidently German, too. At the end of the war he was honored by the king in a parade it looked like everyone in Norway went to. Manus sat in the front seat of the king's Rolls, the king and his wife in the back seat. The camera held on Manus's face for a long time as the people on both sides of the street were thick and all waving Norwegian flags, all cheering for him. In the beginning of the parade, his face was like he was looking for the cat hole, the way out of there. He was not comfortable. He was not a hero. It was not him they were cheering, but his friends who died. His face was pained. After a long while between two rows of his country's people waving the home flag that had been his inspiration, his face softened, his eyes lit up a little bit and the beginnings of a smile appeared on his face. The End. He got it. His efforts, his stress, his agony, his fear had prevailed. He accomplished what he set out to do. Maybe it wasn't so bad to survive it, after all. 

Edvard Munch was from Norway, the painter who made the Scream and a large number of beautiful paintings with powerful feeling, a brief poem of a story. A 4-hour documentary of Munch's life used to be available at netflix a year ago, but isn't now. I wanted to see it again. At amazon it's more than $40 and I'm not paying that to see it one time. As a documentary of Munch's life, it carries the same feeling that is in his paintings, that came from within Munch, himself. Maybe 5 years ago the art museum in Oslo was hit for two Munch paintings, the primary ones, the Scream and the Madonna. What a shock it was for something like that to happen in Oslo. Oslo never gets in the news. Anyway, that's how it used to be. Then the crazy fascist killed sixty-some children of liberal parents, weeding out the next generation of liberals. He tested the Norwegian penal system to the max. If I remember correctly, and I don't, twenty-one years is the maximum sentence. Then you get this guy who needs to be put out of sight of the sun forever, looking at 21 years. I imagine they've found a way to deal with his sentence. I'd say he rates out of the ordinary sentencing like his crime was out of the ordinary. It's not my call. I'm glad I don't have it to make.

I have an inner longing for my next lifetime to be somewhere in Scandinavia. I'm thinking I would like a lifetime in a country with a sane government. Seems to me those five governments are the sanest in the world. Living in any country is living under a government. China is a bit too much like the USA for me to want to turn up there next time. I'd like to live someplace where their only tradition in war is actual self-defence in landscape nobody else wants. Oslo, Stockholm and Helsinki are about the same latitude as Fairbanks, Alaska. They have long nights and long days and long winters, long, long winters. Short summers. But when it's all you've ever known, it's home. All of Norway is mountains. The northern two-thirds of Sweden is mountains. Finland looks like Piedmont from south to north, east to west. Countless lakes in Finland. Big lakes. Big lakes in Sweden too. Big lakes in Norway, long lakes like very wide river. In Norway the highways run alongside lakes and rivers everywhere all over the country. I look at the topographical map and marvel at how wonderful it would be to drive some of those highways in the summer. Norwegians don't strike me foolish enough to fish their lakes and rivers to extinctions. Scandinavians in general seem to me sensible people. The ones I've known have been. 

It would be funny to grow up in Stockholm in the same kind of fundamentalist spirit I grew up in Kansas locked into, asking what crimes against humanity had I committed in past lifetimes to warrant growing up in a Kansas fundamentalist church. Wouldn't that be irony of ironies. The Finnish language fascinates me. It is so radically different from the others. Possibly people living there feel like they are the backwaters of the world. Maybe that is what appeals to me about a place like Helsinki. St Petersburg a short voyage by ferry or plane, the same as to anyplace. Denmark would be a nice place to live. All these countries are mostly country people in little villages sprinkled all over the land with roads between them. This may have something to do with why these nationalities seem like such sensible people to me. Maybe they have their feet in their roots all the time. That sounds a little too idealized. More than likely they're people like people other places, people with their own cultures, their own belief systems, their political preferences.    

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SCANDINAVIA DREAMIN

     scandinavia


Scandanavia has occupied my mind the last several days, more each day. I've discovered at netflix Danish films. By now, I've seen maybe 10, totally impressed with every one I've seen. It had never occurred to me a little (relatively) country like Denmark that isn't in the news much, with one major city, Copenhagen, has so many world class directors and actors. Every Danish film I've seen has been up there among the 100 best films of my lifetime. Suzanne Bier, Lars von Trier, Bille August, Ole Christian Madsen, Jacob Gronlykke, I won't go on listing; these people make films that knock my sox off. I watch Danish films in awe that I've never heard of Copenhagen as a place where great films are made. I took Bille August's film, The Color of Freedom, for one of the most important films I've seen. It was the story of Nelson Mandela's prison guard over most of the 27 years Mandela was a closely watched prisoner. Ralph Fiennes portrayed the man, who started his job as racist as a white man can be, the kind of racist that never thought about it, took it as the way things are without questioning it. Over a period of about 20 years the guard's respect for Mandela got him in some trouble, but he lost his racism along the way and gained self-awareness. I say the film is important, because I mean it is important telling of the time Mandela was in prison. I regard Nelson Mandela with infinite respect.



I've learned by googling that Norway, Sweden and Finland have different language bases. I wondered why Finnish was so full of double t's, k's, v's, long words with complex pronunciation. Or so it appears until hearing the words spoken. Finnish is a Ural language like Estonian, the northwestern part of Russia and Hungary. I have tended to think of Scandanavia as almost a unit, like Central America. It's not, but somehow the map makes it look like a unit. They're up there with Alaska where it's cold all the time and there are long periods of time when the sun never sets. Sweden is famous for its suicide rate, but it's no more than Alleghany County in percentage of population. Estonia took a terrible beating from the Nazis, as did Belarus, Ukraine and the other countries along there. When Lenin returned to Russia to set the revolution in motion, he entered through Finland. Finland's border with Russia is about like our border with Canada. One whole side of Finland connects with Russia.



I like looking at my wonderful Oxford Atlas of the World, 2009 edition, that has satellite maps without lines. The countries with lines are on topographical maps. I notice Finland is largely flat as a table top and above sea level about like the NC Piedmont. Norway is about all mountains with mountains going over into Sweden in it's northern two-thirds. I see one big city in each country, Helsinki, Stockholm and Oslo, and all the rest little dots with highways between them sprinkled over the land like stars in the sky. It tells me these countries are almost entirely rural, hundreds of communities of country people on the mainland and the hundreds of islands, more like thousands. I hadn't thought of Scandinavia with so many islands in the Baltic. Gdansk, Poland is on the Baltic. Norway has rivers running everywhere through the mountain landscape and the highways run alongside the rivers. Now I understand why Norway has so many mountain climbers and skiers. Finland has lakes like Canada north of Minnesota. Wet country. Sweden has some large lakes too. I'd guess in the northern parts of these countries it's winter year round. Maybe in the southern parts they have a 3 month growing season. To heat by wood in that part of the world would keep a man cutting wood about all the time.


I like to look at my atlas while watching a foreign film. I saw a Finnish made film today, Jade Warrior, directed by Antti-Jussi Annila. In the beginning it told what part of Finland the story took place in. Later I saw Helsinki in the background over marsh and water, went to the atlas to see points of land and islands that could have been where that part of the story was filmed. I see landscape and city scapes in foreign films. I like seeing landscape all over the world. China and Africa are perhaps the most interesting landscapes. No, South America has some great landscape, too. USA has great landscape. My interest in Scandanavia was kicked off by seeing some Bergman films, finding my temperament in the nature of the Swedes, wondering how it got that way, then remembering the preacher in the church I grew up in was a Swede who went to Kansas City from Minnesota. I grew up in Swedish Protestantism in Kansas City, Kansas. This may be why in places I've been in Europe, I'm told again and again, You're not like other Americans. This Swedish temperament may be part of the answer why. Plus, I read books and don't watch television. Very unAmerican inactivities.



Denmark sticks up from Europe above Germany into Scandanavia from below. Denmark is flat as East Texas. Studying the atlas this week watching Danish films, I've studied the map of Denmark like never before. It's an archipelago of islands. I've seen Copenhagen in several films and find it a beautiful city. I found pictures of Tallinn, capital of Estonia, a place I'd never heard of. It's a beautiful city on the Gulf of Finland, directly across from Helsinki. Evidently it was not destroyed in WW2. The Nazis killed all the Estonian Jews that didn't escape into Russia. StPetersburg is just over the border, Moscow a straight line from there.   


We seldom hear anything of a Scandanavian country on the news. When we do, it's a freak event, like 2 paintings by Edvard Munch stolen from a museum in Oslo. Not too long ago a guy who styled himself a "terrorist" killed fifty-some teenage offspring of Oslo liberals. He was stopping the next generation of liberals before they started. Stupid people are everywhere. These countries appear to me to have sane governments. Their prison systems are possibly the best in the world, where incarceration is for rehabilitation, not punishment. The punishment is being removed from society. The purpose is rehabilitation. That's unheard of in our prison system except in denial. Scandinavia also seems to be a group of countries where the people matter. I think my inner self is searching around the world for places where they don't have a colonialist history, where they don't attack defenseless countries and get bogged down in wars with all the people of the country. And most important, a place where the people of the country matter to each other and their government. I wonder if it is possible to find such a place in the Age of Television.



One of my greatest fears for my next lifetime is to be set down in front of tv as a baby and raised in front of it. That makes me not want to come back. I don't know what I want for next lifetime unless it would be no television. I can do that anywhere. Television is a matter of choice. It has an on/off button. I'm leaving my next lifetime to the Master. He knows far better than I. I've never been good at knowing what is good for me. Getting a little better at it now by letting go and letting God. I'm alone much of the time and even suspect I have found my flow, am flowing with it like supine in a canoe. I've slowed way, way down. It's occuring to me that our natural human flow is much slower than television has us spinning. Since I've slowed down, I feel like I've found my flow. I want to stay with it, so I've begun to pay attention to it, note it when I feel like I'm out of the flow, and note it when I feel in it. I like being in it, because everything works out. I've reached a place in the life where there is little to nothing I want. I don't need to rub elbows with anybody for influence. By now I know nothing rubs off from elbow to elbow, unless it might be cooties. I want to stay with my flow. That's about all I can think of that I want in this time.


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