SUBJECTIVE REALITY IN EVERYDAY LIFE

The last couple of mornings have been so bitter cold at 0 degrees with wind, I feel for the donkeys unable to get out of the cold. I recall my own need for a long hot bath after enough days and nights of being cold. I realize the need for the sauna in Scandinavia. Cold all the time, it is refreshing to bathe in heat, soak the heat into the bones, warm them, relax the whole body from bracing against the cold. I like the sanity of the Scandinavian countries. I've seen that Sweden has closed down their last prison. Nobody wants in. In Norway, the prison amounts to an apartment complex without walls, without guards carrying guns. Going out in zero weather not just a few days, but for months could get real old real fast. I want to do something for the donkeys, the squirrels, the birds, but there is nothing I can do but feed them, keep them warm on the inside, help the chickadees and the snowbirds make it through the long nights. The temperature is predicted not to rise above 29 for the day. I'll spend as much of the day in bed as possible and tell myself to pretend I'm in Finland, accustomed to it, no problem, it's like this all the time. It actually does help a little bit. It relaxes the body from bracing so much against it. I feel warmer relaxing and receiving the cold than bracing against it. I tell myself it's another lovely day in Helsinki. Sometimes when I go outside to the mailbox and don't want to put on a coat, I relax into the cold on the way out there and back, return to the house feeling fine and my clothes are freezing cold everyplace they touch flesh.

I've noticed in a few Scandinavian films how casual the people are with the cold. In an Icelandic film, I saw a woman putting gas in her car wearing a tshirt and it snowing. I've seen them go into a house and leave the door open, it snowing outside, below freezing, my idea of cold, and nobody has an issue with it. In one of the three Swedish films of the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I saw a man go into a small shed kind of building, it snowing outside, the door open, and build a fire in a little stove. He used no more wood for the fire than I would use for kindling. I thought that little bit of fire isn't going to heat anything but the draft in the stovepipe, and it very little. Outside the window, I see the calf standing still beside the gate, one side in full sunlight, chewing its cud. Ground must be too cold to lie down on. Donkeys, too, are standing still, soaking up the sun on one full side. It's the still time of day after morning grazing to soak up the sun and lie down for a rest. I saw Jenny yesterday lying down. The ground is frozen solid. If I were out there all the time, I'd acclimatize, too, to some extent. Back in the summer, I would sometimes sit on the ground talking to Jack while he grazed. Not long ago, one day when it was cold, I sat on the ground beside Jenny grazing and talked with her. The cold ground was not so bad to sit on. Didn't do it very long. I'd like to spoil the donkeys, keep them comfortable all the time. However, this is what it does in the world they live in. Same as I need a motorized vehicle to get around in because the world I live in is built around motorized transportation. I'd be arrested for going about in a buggy pulled by a donkey.

I'm remembering a sentence I saw that my friend Susan McCachren posted on facebook, the image a Tibetan lama, the words, "We are prisoners of our own egocentrism." It is about the most obvious thing to see. I know it, see it in a wide variety of ways, but don't think to house it in so obvious a straight-forward sentence, nor think of it so succinctly. In a way, it's what I'm addressing in these daily writings, approaching them subjectively, owning up to my own egocentrism, seeing it in relation to the world around me that I interact with. We all do everything in first person. Objective depends on controlled laboratory conditions. Out here in the world, it seems to me the closest we can get to reality is the subjective. Reality is a difficult word to give a realistic definition to, so I'll jump in and see how close I can get. When I start with only God is real, this means only love is real. If that is so, then reality is found in the love feeling in every living being. It has little to do with mind. In human society, we value mind above all else. We've come to believe that a head full of information is knowledge, which it is, though it is not the end in itself. After working the farm with old man Tom Pruitt for several years, he introduced me to an old boy of his generation, Lef Wagoner, saying to Lef, "I taught him everything he knows." It told me he was proud that I'm a learner. But the first thing that popped into my mind was he did not teach me about the poetry of WB Yeats or the films of Bernardo Bertolucci. I knew, however, that he meant in their way of knowledge, how to do things, how to fix what's broken, how to work with cows, how to cut down a tree so it falls exactly where you want it to, even when it's not leaning in the direction you want it to fall. It's a very clever trick that is easy as a thought and it works every time. He taught me how to make a rail fence out of locust trunks. He taught me how to put a fence post in the ground so it will never wiggle, and to stretch barbed wire so it will stay taut for many a year. He was thinking one kind of education and I was thinking another.

Tom's way of teaching was by doing. Fresh out of a culture that thinks teaching amounts to telling information, in class lectures, assigning reading, explaining and testing, there came a time I was frustrated with Tom because he wasn't "teaching" me. We'd spend the fall months cutting firewood for four houses, two of which burned it like it was trash. He would now and then tell me something like cut the tree level with the ground instead of leaving a stump. I don't use wood anymore, but I see my friends cut wood and everybody leaves a stump. It runs all over me and I want to say something, but it's not my place. I see a stump as eight more sticks of firewood left to rot. Tom, with no more than a seventh grade education, had more wisdom than about anybody else I knew. The most important word in the language for Tom was "experience." He taught by experience. I helped him do the work at first, watching him, following his lead, and paying attention whenever he told me something. Eventually, I learned wisdom comes from experience, first hand knowing, whereas knowledge comes from second, third and fourth hand information, which may or may not be true per detail. Experiential knowledge, learning by doing, affirms the old saying that experience is the best teacher. There I was, Mr college educated intelligent, in a world where my knowledge from another world, another belief system, had no meaning whatsoever. I came into Tom's world an over-educated ignoramus. I didn't know anything, the same as I say now of the college educated middle class moving to the mountains, who know how to work the remote for the television, and that not very well. By now, I have education by gathering information and by experience. I feel like it is a balance I live well with. I like having both book learning knowledge and common sense, which I think of as experiential knowledge. I see the knowledge of accumulated information is something on the order of objective, while the knowledge of experience is subjective. Experience teaches the heart. Information teaches the mind. I need both for a balanced life.

  

 

 

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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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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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