Between the lines.

The kids moved in

Lessons

2 months have passed, and the land has stretched to also become roof with the green all around. The grasshoppers have started to comment. So much life, and so much to spoil the senses with. Loads of herbs go straight from the garden into whatever´s for dinner every day. Having these circumstances is just wonderful. And at the same time there´s already a little sorrow for loosing all this in just a few weeks. The melancholic mind hates time these days.

It has finally been raining a little. That takes me back to a day last summer. Polarbear watched the shoreline with his february-coloured eyes as rain fell over Urbania. He talked about his car that he had gotten scrapped, and he said ..."Seeing it was fantastic. Everyone should experience that, the destruction of something valuable..." I wrote it on the back of a receipt, and it fell like a leaf from the space between the pages 68 and 69 a few days ago.

That same day I was baking with my neighbour, and in the evening me and Kalle, age 5, sat in the middle of the annual mosquito family reunion (everyone was there, it seemed) and waited for the rabbits to mate. A mosquito landed on the little fellows hand, and he slowly moved it closer to his face. Carefully and holding his breath he watched the animal as its mouth entered his body and the tiny parts started to turn red of the young human blood. The mosquito was just about to finish dinner, as Kalle lifted his finger and slowly squeezed the fragile insect into pieces. A mosquitos death is usually somewhat trivial, but in the head of the 5 year old something clearly happened. Just when the animal was about to succeed, he used his power. He was thrilled and excited over the squirted blood on his skin. Primitive zeal, - at this point in life still very spontaneous and utter.

There was a bit of the same enthusiasm in another local child when he described to me how he had caught a frog, rolled toilet paper around its trunk, lit it on fire and let the animal try to jump out of his burning suit. Most children get punished or taught not to do things like this, and grow out of it. Others have their perversions troughout life.



A whaling historian held a lecture in Húsavík last year, but he never got to finish his speach before he was stopped for his way to express himself. After the audience had left he said to a couple of us that stayed: "...Killing a whale is amazing. It might be more fantastic than seeing your own child be born. There´s an awe that everyone on board feels"...
He also felt that what we (in this case the ones working with conservation of whales) did to whale hunters (as a part of culture) was comparable to what the germans did to the jews.

Ethics. What a multi-faceted term. Is it an agreement to learn, or an unity to find?

Friday night fever

Long time, no writing. This weekend would also have been an urban one, but now this body is stuck to the bed because of a disease that has slowed down a part of this society. From an ecological point of view that´s probably just brilliant, - for a while we make less and feel more...

We spent the day in the heat on the lawn, - the winterdusty rabbit and I. Many tiny plants got new lebensraum in pots and jars. Later they´ll be placed in the garden. This is the first time in my life that I have a few hundred m2 to shape as I wish, - a territory where I get to do all decisions. (Suddenly a character appeared in my mind. It was some environmental artist that made new hills and reshaped the landscape in the wild, as he was convinced of that he should correct Gods mistakes. Interesting fellow...)


Last summer, before i moved to this mansion of mine, I worked with my material "needs" and dreams on a shore in the north of Iceland. Playing home as a little girl resulted in visions of what the nest of happiness would look like sometime in the future. The wooden house would have been located by the sea. Its mansard roof kept the rain out, at the same time as the huge windows framed a landscape of Sea. On your way to the terrace you could have walked through a greenhouse filled with grapevines, exotic fruittrees and herbes - the same scenery you would have seen through the round kitchen window. Lots of fireplaces, floors of oak, light and space, warmth and stability. Embracing beds, a big bathtub, working spaces...

I drew the bottom floor of this dream on a plate of concrete in a place that is about to change. In Húsavík, Iceland, there is a plan for building a stronger prosperity. The hope for the future is an aluminium smelter, and it will rise in an area that is by many considered very valuable as it is. Many welcome the smelter. Others don´t. In the spring my teacher said something about that it is difficult to exclude oneself from what the humans do to nature today. Therefore I included myself. The 103 puffin feet I had in my apartment made the ground for the work, they had to carry the concrete. Well, someone always has to. The images attached are from the place where the work was left.
Under the aluminium smelter a number of nests will be sacrificed to make nests for others. The area is beautiful, but that is of course a vague and subjective human concept...



Today I have great respect for the nomads in this world. Without the walls and windows one probably lives in peace with how fleeting life is. My need to arrange the calendula officinalis and coriandrum sativum is surely a way to create a feeling of safety and order in the wild. The mansard roof and oak floors fit in the same category. The satisfaction and happiness on that path is maybe quite different from what the nomad experiences...

Well, one more thing. In this thrill of categorising I´ll tell you what my gardening book salutes me with every spring. It lists above what we fulfil ourselves...

"A handfull of good garden soil contains:
100 insects (insekter, hyönteistä)
110 segmented worms (ledmaskar, nivelmatoa)
250 springtails (hoppstjärtar, hyppyhäntäistä)
25000 nematodes (trådmaskar, lankamatoa)
7500000 protozoa (urdjur, alkueläintä)
12500000 algae (alger, levää)
100000000 sponges (svampar, sientä)
125000000 bacteria (bakterier, bakteeria)"

(Gisela Keil, 1996)

Photos by Jyrki and s.t.

Of importance

Just shortly before night takes over...
Today one of the youngsters I get to borrow during the days sighed and said; "I´m so tired of saving the world. Can´t we do something else for a change?"

We just got an answer from the minister of the environment that we wrote a few weeks ago. In the classes for biology and geography there has been one environmental problem after another that we have tried to understand and come up with a solution for. Too many crises. And I see that the disasters that the western civilisation has built up are now thrown in the arms of the young generation. It rolls over them through every media, and it probably just makes them numb. Ok, but my intention was for once not to point out all the problems.

After young J said he was tired of saving the world I realised we have to work the other way around. Through learning to stop and give beauty time one probably saves the world a little. We all influence each other in so many ways, and especially when one has the ability to share what´s amazing and untamed in this world he or she plants a seed than can become a garden. All of you that are out there somewhere sharing what you feel is the good and beautiful of this life - I think you´re doing an oh so important job.

Tomorrow we´ll start the day on the island in the Baltic by taking a walk in the forest without analyses or reports. And guess what, fellows. The tussilagos already adorn the edge of the ditch.
Have a wonderful day!

Vie imaginaire

10 years ago I enjoyed shooting with a miniature rifle. I remember us drawing people and animals on cardboard, and then trying to hit them from 50 m or 100 or whatever it was. We used to practise behind the greenhouse, and the echo of the shots bounced back from the hills further away. There was a feeling of power and masculinity, and it felt good. Surprisingly I even did well in a shooting competition. Well ok, we weren´t that many in the womens class, but anyway... But I never felt like trying this on living creatures, so the charm of firing slowly faded away. Nowadays it´s highly unlikely that I would ever hit anything. Quite recently I´ve had to accept how much I suck at throwing snowballs...

But this with the feeling of power was what I wanted to mention. In many cases it´s the opposite of fear. You have control and strength. This can be physical or something completely different. There was lots of people with fear in "the Passion of the Christ" that I saw last night. Fear of the unknown. And I see it in the children in my work. Anger in fear of changes.
While I walked in the forest today I thought about religion. On one hand, we´re free to find our own truth today. The chains of forced religion are gone in big parts of the world. On the other hand, - there´s loads of people suffering from depression, loneliness or lack of meaning in life. We desperately build constructions that keep us safe from natures way, may it then be by shopping, drinking, organising or whatever manic hobbies, perversions or ways we have. Life is too big and complex to handle. Inside a religion we always have something to fall back on, - "It must be Gods will." Without "Gods will" life just becomes bigger in proportion to me, and it frightens. No control, no power.

Back to the forest. I met a moose-family. As the wind came from their direction, they didn´t notice me, and I could watch them for quite a while. As I stood there I came to think of something that Klaus the Whaling historian said after his lecture (that ended in revolt) last summer. With his words: ..."killing a whale is amazing. It might be more fantastic than seeing your own child be born. There´s an awe that everyone on board feels..." Interesting was how many emotions fitted inside the same walls that evening in july. I would say I recognised fear, anger and power, but also a mixture of these in something that looked like a religion. Fascinating human beeing.What strange forms our struggle takes...

Bits and pieces

The house is warm and smells of animal fat. I´ve been melting and cooking birdfood of sheepfat and seeds as it´s supposed to be between -20 and -30°C in some parts of southern Finland tomorrow morning. This day was also magnificent, but I spent it in a red and white shopping-heaven that took me over a frozen sea. Watching the ice break in the bow of the boat just never stops to fascinate. Mmh... and just some months ago there were dolphins under the bow. Not breaking, though...


Let us get back to the beast. I know my upbringing has much to do with why I´m writing this. It was as recently as the day before yesterday that my father reminded me of how much I appreciate his approach to life. He had been working for days and driving hundreds of kilometres for medicine to cure a sheep that was fatally ill. Few sheepfarmers would have done anything else than slaughtered the animal at that point. But the woolly lady seems to be getting better, and there still might be a chance that she gives birth next month.
Except for parents with respect for life there has also been a number of animals that have had an especially fine way of pointing out the differences between human and other beeing by taking their space and right and living out their individuality. It´s interesting – there has been so many sheep, turkeys, cats, dogs, lizards and snakes, geese and chickens, rabbits and doves,- but one that appears in my mind now is, or was, a magpie. He came as a dirty and injured youngster, got a new 180 cm tall mother with beard, and mainly grew up on dogfood (you would be amazed to see how much sausage can fit into the tunnel of a human ear). The bird gathered golden treasures that he found in the house (and my mother was looking for them for years) and was curious about all we did with our hands (it became almost annoying to have him between the fingers nonstop or rocking on the edge of the book as one tried to read). He certainly charmed the villagers, but was also fast to judge and show it if he disliked someone or something. What was special with him was that he learned to observe us humans and adapt our behaviour to what he learned of life. He was for example clearly trying out our way to laugh, and it became comical when he used it in situations like the cats tailpulling game. Who knows what happened to him, one morning he was just gone...

There was life, but also death. On the farm the whole family used to participate in the slaughter. I didn´t enjoy it, but learned to approve it and it became a process for thoughts concerning order of precedence, metamorphose and materia. At some point the sudden kill just felt too abrupt, and I started to work with leftover skin, the knife and the camera to deal with deconstruction. It became important to feel the change that happened as the living breathing perfect creature became pieces with accurate value. The process continues, and will appear here as well.


A girl who´s name I can not recall at the moment recently reminded me through her book that our confrontations with animals lay the ground for our understanding of their moral value. For me working with skin also feels like becoming a chain in a tradition that works meaning into material. The experience is very subjective, and I´m deeply fascinated with the form that these subjective experiences take.
I haven´t managed to get rid of my curiosity, so I will ask you what circumstances and incidents have effected your relationship to animals, may it then be fish, bird, cat, frog, cow or wolf...
How did you end up here?

Me and my-day

This has been a day of recognizing much selfishness in me. It is interesting how seeing that causes a feeling of exhaustion, somehow maybe also failure. Do you share the experience? But from a different perspective, - isn´t failing in selfishness unnatural?

To break the pattern

Professor H sat by the campfire and said something like: -A place is neither beautiful or ugly before man walks into the landscape. It just is.
He didn´t continue speaking about it much, but what he meant was (as i would interpret it) that the human defines the value of things that have no value before that moment. More precisely, there is no such thing as value without a human beeing creating it.

Professor H said this a number of years ago, and I hadn´t thought about it for a long time until a couple of loud hunters made the walls shake last evening. One of the guys started the discussion by asking if the other would go sealhunting with him sometime soon. The invited one wasn´t too eager, as he felt that the way a seal resembled a dog made him feel bad. -I could never shoot a dog, he said. -Cats, ok, but not dogs. I asked him what it was that made it easier to shoot a cat. He answered: -The cats are wily (sv: lömsk, suomi: katala), while dogs are loyal like true friends. If you hit a cat real hard you´ll see that it will run away and won´t come back. If you do the same to a dog, it will forgive you and stay by your side. I asked him: -What does this example tell about you? Also, doesn´t the animal show wisdom by staying as far away from you as possible?
He was quick in replying: -Well, I wouldn´t hit an animal, but this is just how it works.

There´s a variety of ways that we form our relationship to animals every day. We have them as pets, tools, toys, stories, in our environment, in commercials and on the stuff we buy, in and on our clothes, on the sofa and in our beds, in jewellery and accesories, in cosmetics and chemicals, on the front page of the tabloids, in glue and candy etc. Every single day we take part in the enormous machinery that has tamed and reshaped rules of nature, whether we want it or not. The moral in us humans makes us emotionally react on utilisation or behaviour that doesn´t fit the conception we´ve built up. The values we´ve given to the different creatures we share this planet with are like day and night in relation to each other. It´s just agreement. In China they eat dogs, here we dress them in Burberry-coats. Cows can be holy or mad, depending on what continent they grow on. On this island they print t-shirts with ”Fuck the union” when they get orders to stop killing eider-ducks, while I´ve been told that the farmers on a distant shore in the arctic cry as if they´ve lost a child when they find a dead individual of this same species. Relativity, culture. The conception of us colours all we have around us.

Shortly before sleep

My mother suggested that it is a little unclear what I´m aiming at with all this. I´m not surprised... It´s too difficult to try to define this big lump of half thoughts at this point, so try to bear with me and my fuzziness.

I went for a walk wih 2 fine girls today, and I listened as the discussion led to a little attempt to define the value of animals in comparison to people. The girls agreed on that there is no difference, we are all of the same energy and it has the same value.
In ancient cultures the value of an animal and the relation to its soul had a somewhat different meaning than it has today. Especially the cultures around the big archetypes is intrigueing. One took responsibility of a harvested life, either the individual or the society, and that was the ground for the hole culture of ceremonys. Surely the precautions or rituals were done with the peoples profit in mind,(not to be punished, or to be favoured also in the future) but there was still a visible process. I guess I´m a little old fashioned in that way, and have difficulties accepting the way we consume in this highly developed modern life. This doesn´t mean that I would want this species to take steps backwards. I just feel it could be good to think about it. Well, I will. Good night.

Before I invite anyone in on the blog, I believe I need to explain myself. The ones of you that know me well know that I´ve been working with themes like value, waste, the animal as material and the changing relationship between beings. The reason for doing that this loud is that I´m trying to get started with my final work for UIAH. As all of you that find your way here are people with approaches to life, I´d be happy to have you as mirrors. The page will slowly be filled with (random) writings on the issue. If you have a word, a sentence, a question or an essay to participate with, don´t hesitate to do so. Any language and any style.

The image above is a drawing that can be found in Konrad Gessners Historia Animalium from 1555, an enormous bible that had a great impact on natural history when it was released. The book is written in latin, and I understand ridiculously little, -nothing, of it. The fascinating thing about the book is that it is highly scientific, but it contains drawings of seamonsters, mermaids and peculiar creatures with what seems like detailed descriptions of the animal and fantastic latin names. This particular drawing has been meaningful to me for years as it doesn´t seem to fit in any "locker", it´s difficult to define from any perspective. I´d like to use it as one illustration for the space between biology, mythology, environmental protection, utilization, economic approach and art.

Watching the vanishing winter

I went for a walk this afternoon. The rocks were slippery and the sea ice wet and making sounds of weakness. An eagle circled back and forth above the pines. Still a little snow and ice, but not much. There was this thought that kept my mind busy while I walked. My father said earlier on the phone that one of his cats mostly just sleeps day in and day out, she´s become an old lady.

Much of this obsession with animals and human power over them, that I still haven´t talked much about, has to do with how we end the lives of animals. Earlier the approach that showed respect for the soul of the living creature involved ceremonys or rituals for the soul of the dead or dying being. Those ceremonys are gone in most modern cultures today, and we tend to treat meat in the same way as we treat all other materia. Today most of the killing, in particular the kind that is done for food factorys, is something that is supposed to be as quick and easy as possible.
Now, I wonder if I can speculate about what meaning it could have that we, both animals and humans, usually die slowly when we die of age or illness. Today, during my walk, dreams as phenomenon appeared in the thought. I´ve been watching the cats and dogs dreaming many times, and sometimes (accidentally) disturbed them in the middle of the dream. The reactions are comperable to the reactions of a human when one suddenly is taken out of a dream. My experience is that our dreams become all the more confusing, bizarre and complicated when we are sick, injured or in some other way out of balance. Are the dreams a process? Do they prepare us for something? Do beings that are dying dream a lot? What happens when we, or owls, wolfs or frogs suddenly cut the life of another being? Fatal accidents also lack the preparing for death. Does it mean anything?

Background

Or no. This was not the beginning. It all started on a farm on an island in the lovely archipelago in the southwestern part of Finland. I grew up there, and my childhood was fantastic. Gardening, building, spending lots of time in the sea, exploring the woods, climbing and poking and learning about life with more animals than people. Fruitful was also doing autopsys on snakes, cremating conedummies, drying birdwings and making pearl necklaces of moose excrement. (More about this some other night...) Now, putting it like this seems as if there was also a lot of discusting stuff going on. For a child that was hardly discusting, just endlessly fascinating. The feelings and the relationship that exploring gave birth to laid the foundation for my conception of the world.

At this point I see myself in the mirror of society, and feel that I´m supposed to be house-trained and that I should stop showing interest in self-evident, commonplace or ugly issues.
So, I´ve started this page for reflecting upon things that aren´t completely house-trained. Possibly and hopefully this could be a forum for discussion, mainly for and around matters concerning animals in human culture. I will use this as a visible process that anyone can take part in. I value your opinion and comment, whoever you are. Welcome to join in shedding skin.

It all starts with and because of this.