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

The Wandering Jewess

There is a red double-decker London night-bus called the Wandering Jewess. Tickets are free but you're only allowed on board if you have Jewish ancestry. I get on. It goes out into the countryside, among big arable fields. It makes brief regular stops, but no one gets on or off. At one stop my travelling companion and I get off to inspect the wildflowers by the side of the road, along the edge of a huge flat field. The bus starts to move off and we have to jump back on quickly before it pulls away.

/MFl

The joy of not knowing where

(Pater Noster Square)


I have an appointment in a part of Stockholm which I don't know. I find it very exciting, in an ambiguous way, that there is a part of town which I don't know. I am taking a particular bus, from a terminal I know, and will go only one stop, yet end up somewhere completely unknown to me. The terminal appears to be Jarlaplan (a bus terminal in northeastern part of inner Stockholm which was abandoned and destroyed in the 70s) and thus the unknown part of town must be in the eastern parts (the quiet and upperclass parts).

During the short busride I am flirting with an ugly yet very attractive woman who is leading a crowd of little old ladies with walking difficulties.

My appointment is at Fadervårtorget (Pater Noster Square). Fascinated by the existence of this unknown square I walk back and forth, pondering the environments, wondering which one of the strange pedestrians who might be the person I am supposed to meet. Most people seem to be small women in raincoats. Like a happy child I enjoy my disorientation; since I haven't seen a map, and the sky is overcast, and there are no natural landforms, I can't even tell which direction is which! At the neighboring streets there are all kinds of small stores and some big restaurants or bars, particularly fish restaurants.

Half-awake, I start hypnagogically rationalising this remarkable dream. I'm trying to stick to the subject matter, but it seems elusive as I have to edit two volumes of Kafka stories, with all the emotional strain it involves to empathise with them in order to reconstruct their inner sequence. But Kafka always lived and wrote his stories in this tiny apartment in Helsinki, in an old building which is now accessible in the exotic eastern parts of Stockholm. I'm trying to write my signature on some applications, but all I can produce is Kafka's.

It seems like I have several times hypothethised unknown parts of Stockholm and usually in the eastern parts. I get an image of explaining the Fadervårtorget to other people, claiming that it is one of the many swiss-cheese-holes in the otherwise socially homogenous eastern parts, this one specifically being a square around which the specifically degenerate branches of the upperclass families accumulated, those branches who were declassed, badly alcoholised or just perpetually sidestepped, who all turned small-shop-owners, bike-repairers, day-laborers or public square winos; still refusing to live in any other parts than their traditional eastern ones. And then recently, there had been some preliminary attempts to gentrify this exotic piece of land, hence the big bars-restaurants.

Later fully awake, I seem to remember that whenever I postulate unknown parts of Stockholm they are always in Östermalm, the eastern parts. Indeed the quietness and often ghost-town-feeling of these parts as well as the alienation before its very distinct class character might be a good breeding ground for such ideas. In the few dreams I vaguely remember about this, there is always some larger north-south-street which marks the sharp boundary between the common central Stockholm and the Östermalm wilderness. Sometimes this border has been Birger Jarlsgatan (fits with this dream, since this streets starts at Jarlaplan where the old bus terminal was) and the unknown east is then often like a chaotic big city with old buildings, similar to parts of Paris perhaps. Sometimes it has been further west and has been Sveavägen. I remember standing at Sveaplan looking south, and the Vanadislunden hill to the left has been a "hic sunt leones" wilderness, where I have dared venture only briefly; it has always been abandoned, dry and overgrown.

/MF

Nautical miles

My friend N and I have been visiting London. He's heading back to Finland, I'm on my way to Stockholm but, because of the ferry routes, have to change ferries in Mariehamn. Bit of a daft detour, as Stockholm is closer to London than to the Åland Islands.

/IÖ

The landscape of our dreams

The cormorant council proudly announces that many of its early speculations on the theoretical foundations for its activity are now available – some for the first time in English, some for the first time openly – in a pdf anthology, which is one of the many suddenly offered to the reading public at merdarius's pdf library "Bibliotheca onthoplanctorum" at the Stockholm surrealist group site.

The continent forgotten

Another version of not reaching Africa: I actually settled down in a house in Mali – but, apart from that general fact, I can't remember a thing!
… if you manage to trespass the southern border of (Scandinavian) imagination, the memories will be confiscated?

/IÖ

Small town bar

It is winter in Mjölby. I have just got to a newly opened bar near the train station. A troubadour called Loke is going to sing some old country-classics at this place tonight. I step into a small room with a bar and a stage. My clothes are wet and outside it´s dark and the snow is falling.

I keep my outdoor clothes on because there is no place to hang them. At the bar, which is made of steel and looks like a buffet, some bearded men with leather-hats sits muttering over their glasses of beer. By my side is a tall women wearing a very short black skirt and black leather corset.

The owner of the bar is a man from Linköping. He has opened this bar especially for those who moved to Mjölby and are having a hard time to make themselves at home.

The background music fades out and the lights turns on. The owner enters the stage, he is a bit fat, wears glasses and a blue-checkered shirt. He welcomes us to the opening of his new club. Then Loke, the troubadour, comes on stage. The crowd applauds and the lights are dimmed. Before he starts the show he takes a look at the crowd and says: "I want to dedicate this song to all of you who moved here from Linköping, believing you would find a café where you could sit down with your new friends, but never found it. This song is for you…"

Ten percents of the population in Mjölby are alcoholics. I often see a bearded drunk man wearing a leather hat by the train station.

// CD

The baseline for coordinates

Earlier here, we have been asking what kind of observations, what kind of parameters, one uses in order to deduce where one is in a dream. Of course very often the actual dream landscapes are created using scraps of several different locations from memory, and the actual spatial semaphors (signs signalling where one is) used might relate to just one of these, or several – or just additional signs added without being based in the biographical landscapes the dream landscape is built upon (an example: there is the devil so I must be in hell; or, there is a sign saying Mogadishu so I must be in Somalia). But often, these spatial semaphors can be secondary to the immediate knowledge of where one is, if the location is part of the explicit execution of the dream. This immediate knowledge might also contain a delimitation against places where it's not, and it may either coincide with, take sides among, or entirely contradict, what the spatial semaphors are saying. The little dream I'll be relating is just a small example of this more general observation based on a larger dreaming experience. And furthermore, it starts nicely with a spatial metaphor getting a material expression.

As the conclusion of a long dream of idiotic joking, self-aggrandising, and amorous complications, I'm feeling frustrated over the whole mess, and in order to be able to get an overview, I take my bulldog and start climbing the steep hills of the little town. The bulldog is huge, with a spike collar and an enormous mouth; it is Maldoror's bulldog. The inclination is just like a Norwegian city (Narvik or so), but the vegetation is nemoral and the buildings are English; anyway I don't need to interpret such signs because I know I am in Greenwich, and I feel a certain need to emphasise that this is of course not Greenwich Village, New York, but the real Greenwich, the starting point of all coordinate systems.

/MF

Watch out for the pelican council

On the childhood island, I want to take a bath, or I am just convinced that the water is a good place to be, but it is frustrating that the main jetty points to the northeast, which means that when standing in the water next to it, spying out eastwards, one is standing in the shade and it gets cold. I'm standing there anyway.

A coot comes swimming towards me, and I notice common coots are beautiful birds. The next bird is a grebe, calmly sailing by me very close, and I'm thinking it's a good thing with the shade after all, when I stand there rather immobile I become like a heron and form a part of the general environment. When the grebe passes it changes, grows bigger and darker, eventually it becomes a cormorant.

I am standing there in immobility and shade. Around mere there are huge birds, continuously and diffusely uttering a low uninspired cackling, indolently yet threatfully, like when one has to make way through a crowd of lazy large gulls occupying the jetty. I thought these birds were cormorants, but they are actually even bigger and have very long beaks; they are pelicans!

A small company of my relatives comes down to the beach, and walk out into the water next to me. It makes me angry, the pelicans won't stay calm; pelicans smell so bad, and they can be so aggressive, they will raise hell for this. But my relatives have a strange ability, in their resolute hostility, to drive the pelicans in front of them, they are just swimming away, towards the northwest in the strait. A beautiful cousin forms the rearguard, she is somehow the prisoner of the others, at least she can express her dissent by keeping her distance while slowly walking through the water. I keep her company, and tell her about the danger of the pelicans, but it is so pleasant so I'm thinking that if I could wade through life with her I could stand the pelican smell. Cormorants do smell worse after all.

/MF

Towards the Tintin gate

/.../ The important thing about Tintin City is that you get there through a particular epistemological break, which is called the "Tintin Gate". The Tintin Gate is the centerpiece in a new school of mysticism, the prophet of which I will now become. The fact that I am now homeless will make it difficult for me to get into the restaurants to have breakfast and convince the tourists, but of course many other prophets have been poor and ragged creatures too. Perhaps someone will lend me a bike, and I can bike around and eventually find someone who offers me breakfast. I will have a yellow robe, and I will know six different words for snowball, this is very important.

After other adventures, in a commuter train stopping halfway between stations, I open my computer as a book and read about life in sunken Atlantis. I am somehow struck between the similarities of social and architectural organisation between Atlantis and Tintin City, and I get very enthusiastic when I read that the most holy artifact in Atlantis is the "smoking heart of motherhood", a piece of ember issuing a long trail of bubbly smoke that looks like the seaweed forming the long hair of a medusahead. This is obviously analogous to the state of things on the other side of the Tintin Gate. There are engravings illustrating all of this, with pastoral lovers running around performing strange rituals in underwater ruins (the engravings look like 18th century post-alchemical preromantic mystic christianity emblems rather than actual alchemical allegories).

/MF

In Arcadia

To complete my posts about pastoral landscapes, I once dreamt about the mythological / utopian Arcadia. The sketch above depicts a water-terrace arrangement on the slope of Mount Helicon, which the dream situated there. I have written more extensively about the dream here.

" /.../ at the vast terraced slopes of Mount Helicon (as I´ve seen it depicted in alchemical illustrations) with a bewildered look of concentration on his face, while the well-springs of the rock´s inspirational muses were bubbling and forming huge dandelion-like water globes behind him."

/NN