Heating and defense of dream city

"The big house" is in a rundown industrial area near the water, Norrköping or London. Above all, it has a magnificent ceiling height. The building didn't cost much, but heating costs are tremendous.

Olof's sister is a beautiful and wise Iranian of zoroastric heritage. She knows that one's DNA can be stored in a bucket of raspberry juice. When the day finally comes, there will emerge a homunculus. He will take care of our interests.

It will all work fine even when we are under attack, because the gutter system of the city is fully functional. If the sewerage is inverted it could be lead out through the gutters, creating an effective barrier of dirt, a moat.

And even though the social habits in "the big house" is a bit stiff at the moment, people are rather overdressed, and it all feels like an official birthday reception a summer afternoon in a rented mansion, or like a visit to the Thiel gallery, still there will take shape something meaningful from here.

MF


(When I told Christofer D about "the big house", he immediately recognised it as "Värmekyrkan" - a huge old heating boiler station in the industrial area in Norrköping which has served as a venue for cultural events. I have never been there awake and can't remember having heard of it before.)

New York er eyja í Atlantshafi

The plot is set. Years after my father’s death his top secret research project coincidentally is being revealed; and the intrigue evolves in a familiar thriller fashion:

In our family’s summer house a hidden door has been found. After making the decision that it should be opened, it leads us down to an unknown basement where we make the discovery of a clandestine archive, full of dust and documents. The research material maps out the mysterious circumstances of the disappearance of a number of important persons. Now, unexpected facts come to our knowledge and formerly unknown connections of historical events emerge. As we study the material, including some shimmery, blurry images of old video tape recordings from the seventies, on which different, obviously nervous (and perhaps frightened) people appear, talking about strange matters, we slowly become aware of the proportions and the magnitude of our discovery, which leads us to the conclusion that—yet to hesitate—we must travel to New York.



Stanislaw Lem's Futurologial congress as percieved while being riddled by a nightmare


New York. A gigantic cosmopolis, even bigger than what the latest records show (apparently not quite up to date); it has failed to seize growing throughout the years, indomitable and heedless, in spite of governmental restriction programs, continuously striving upwards in celestial vain. Within this urban dream shape we experience an overlapping city landscape with ground floors reaching higher grounds and street levels interconnecting through exquisitely engineered pipe-tunnel roads enclosed with chrome and glass, spiraling their way through the sky. We stay in a luxurious hotel, thousand stories high, surrounded by equally high buildings. Our hotel room, at first glance, has a modest design—less furniture than space, more room, less gloom—yet exclusively ultra modern futuristic; the room shifts in colour, blending perfectly: from white to beige to grey, with a slight resemblance of mosstone. The shape of the room, not easily to define, could be described as a trapezoid semi-superellips and has an entire wall section consisting of a large window glass, and thin white draperies. The room goes with an Italian balcony; un letto matrimoniale, a royal wedding bed; and an original Steinway, white and shiny. Built into the walls is an intricate system of small rippling rills of water flowing through lightly lit panels of frosty glass. A surround speaker system is part of the interior architecture as well: down from the beautiful cupola roof different sound environments and atmospherics are spreading out and filling up the entire room, mood by listener’s choice: Scottish highland, German forest, African savanna, Mediterranean coast, Catalan monastery, Swedish midsummer, misty moor with dancing fairies, deep ocean life on Mars … We fill our glasses with champagne and drink a toast to the bride and groom. The wedding cake is made of love, hope, cream and strawberries.

Out in to the Jungle. Since we are newly married and hypersensitive, we are overwhelmed with the enormous traffic intensity; but what strikes us even more is the fact that the air is clean and that we can joyfully breathe. We fill our lungs and blank our minds—from that moment on our mission is forgotten. At first relieved, but then suddenly troubled again, it seems that what now is at stake is our marriage. However, that is a worry we chose to ignore. Futuristic figures of all sorts pass by, among ordinary 21th century people, as we stand there on the sidewalk, in sunshine and gazing amazement. The street, so it appears, is a reconstruction of S:t Eriksgatan in Stockholm. Not knowing what the next step should be, we decide not to make up any plans but to submit to the spur of the moment, and so it happens: we found ourselves involved in the rather dodgy act of following a queer-looking gentleman wearing white clown makeup, a red and yellow-striped sweater and purple trousers with blue suspenders, who is riding a 16 feet high unicycle northwards … in the direction of Brooklyn! Soon we are confused; the lack of bridges and water is what puzzles us, while the biking clown disappears around the corner of a fashionable and impressive brick stone building. As we compare reality with our own map, we come to the conclusion that we are no longer on an island in the Hudson river, called Manhattan as we presumed, but that this future version of New York city actually consists of a conglomerate of islands, a pseudo-continent, like a reversed minor Pangea. As a matter of fact, large parts of the North American east coast has been torn off from the mainland, melting together with other parts and nearby islands and then been drifting away, out to the sea. All of a sudden I remember the first line that I learned in Icelandic: “Ísland er eyja í Atlantshafi”—“Iceland is an island in the Atlantic”.

At this point there is a shift of perspective: high from above, while the sun is setting, we look down on our dream named New York, where it lies like a tiny dark spot in the grand shiny ocean. One long, single railway bridge leads out over the water, away from the black island/continent.

/μσλ


Paul in Paris (syrup and carbuncles), 1978

Sacred Geography Headwear

A great atlas lies spread all over the table in front of me. A map of the lower and central Norrland, with creamy yellow fields and bright green lines. I study the map with interest, almost aware of its fleeting nature. I look in vain for the name Cat Sand, which I think is either the name of a city or a mountain. Instead, I make a completely different discovery: a few tens of mil east of the Great Lake in Jämtland lies a lake which has remained hitherto unknown to me. It is about the size of the latter, and according to the map it is called Ural.

The map turns into reality in front of me. Now I can look out over Ural from a location at its closest beach, while the lake imperceptibly must shrink; for a black Volvo car is emerging in the growing forest silhouette on the far shore.

Two male persons get out of the car. One has a head which consists of the flame of a candle, the other's head also emits light but is white and round as well, like a snowman's head. Recognizing them as my brother and a friend of his, I wave at them.

Right then I hear a voice from out of nowhere:

The eyes are washed by a new water, from outside, from the air.

The lake between us is gone and I can talk to my brother and his friend who owns the car. By now they have ordinary heads. We are in a forest of tall pines, which are so thinly spread out that they could drive through with their car and park there. Patches of snow lie between the pines which make me think that it's April. They tell me they gather the snow and build pyramids of it around the pine trees. I doubt it, but a look at the nearest pines and I can confirm that it is true: each bole really has a snow pyramid around its foot, about as high, wide and sloping as an ordinary snowball lantern.

I ask them if it is not difficult to build these pyramids.

"No, it's similar to blowing one´s nose," my brother answers unassumingly and looks away.

"Yes," his friend agrees, "or to a dog covering up its excrement."

For some reason or not, my brother takes up his driver´s license and shows it to me. It is a "dual" license: on the same piece of plastic there are two different names with different photos. The first name and photo is my brother´s, but the second photo is just a black box, and beneath this box it is printed:

Robert Frost: The Mending wall.

This is an American poet and a famous poem by him, which I recall having read in an anthology a long time ago, but I do not remember more than the title right now. In my hands the driver´s license is then transformed into a LP record sleeve. A blue pyramid and a blue face against a star-strewn night sky. The band name, or disc title, which I have never seen or heard before,

Jxploited

makes me associate to a quaint blending of cultural styles : New Age and Punk. I contemplate the picture on the cover, especially the head. Could it be, I ponder, that the face of this image in some emblematic fashion is using the rock-crystal-topped pyramid as a wig or a hat? And I think:

"The face is interestingly crafted, since it neither looks entirely male nor female, neither entirely European nor Oriental or African ..."

Then the voice from nowhere is there again. It feels closer this time, as it takes up my train of thought and embroider upon it with kind of enigmatic lyrical stanzas, of which I am only able remember the last two lines:

The judge before his sword
Smiling before the last water

/ NN

The chimney house

More vertical geography:

I've just moved into a new apartment. I live on the upper floor of a converted house, and my friend SD lives on the ground floor. A chimney runs up one side of the house, and we each have a window which opens into the chimney.


The inside of the chimney is airy and well-lit, and lined with bright books. If SD ever happens to be by the window downstairs, or is looking for books in the chimney, I can attract his attention by waving a shiny pencil, and he will climb up the bookshelves to come and say hello.

Later on, while we're inside another building, there's a frightening episode when deep fissures open up in the ground, and angry vampires hurl human bodies back and forth. But the verticality is less pronounced during this episode, in that I'm not able to see very far into the fissures, and certainly not about to try climbing down them.