I keep seeing a strangely shaped balloon in the distance. Spying from the bedroom window of the apartment where I grew up, I notice that the balloon is shaped like a grand piano, and it is moving fast. The fact that it is not an ordinary commercial balloon makes me interested, and I realise I can fly with my boy bedroom, so I take off with it. It takes some effort to gain height, and I am surprised how hilly this part of town is, I have to steer away from colliding with mountain sides and tall buildings all the time. Soon I lose track of the balloon, and I land at a table in an outdoors restaurant, on a hill in Göteborg, next to a big hospital. I ask the guy who already has the table if he minds, and he doesn't, so I pick up the menu and study it.
MF
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Two references:
The flying boy-bedroom played a central role in a danish Science Fiction tv-series for children from the mid-80s, I think called "Crash", other parts of which I was fascinated by and pulled into my own mythology at the time.
I was extremely disappointed after waking up not to have been able to board the grand piano balloon, which would have presented a magnificent spaceship view inspired by what could be considered the great classic of Hollywood surrealist musicals "The 5000 fingers of Dr T".
Maybe this has to do with some early child-hood memory? Small children often improvise words when they can´t find the right one.. Grand Piano in swedish is "Flygel" which sounds close to "Flyga"= Fly. A child that can´t find the right word for balloon may transform "Flyga" into a non-sense-noun "Flygel".
Yes there is an obvious connection (though I must confess slightly embarrassedly that I hadn't yet thought of it). A "flygel" is something used for "att flyga". In german it is still the same word "Flügel" for "wing" and "grand piano". Swedish has "flygel" for the wing of a building and for the grand piano, but "vinge" for the wing of an organism or vehicle.
There is some other association in the background here, some of Tintin's sea travels, where Captain Haddock in the swedish translation is talking about a "konsertflygel" while flying fish is surrounding the ship, unambiguously creating an associative link via canned sardines ("sardinkonserv") and the visual image of the lid of a sardine can folded up like the lid of a grand piano, with the sardines singing as if they were "tonfiskar" (tunas). (Quite obviously this again works fine as a psychoanalytical symbol, with the wing of the grand piano (or the can) representing the "fly" of the trousers, with something fishy inside.)
Andy Warhol created a balloon-room, a room filled with silver balloons shaped like pillows. The balloon is floating outside the bedroom. A flying bedroom makes me think of the movie "Don Quixote" from 2000. In the movie (not sure if it´s also in the book), Don Quixote is told his library has been stolen by a wizard. The escape from the balloon is somewhat like Quixote´s battle against the windmills.
Post a Comment