Hello again. I hope you will permit me this additional sun flower study and final thought or two, then that really is it. I'm out of paint in any case.
You know all this stewing over the alt right pot can get on top of one, (that's the idea isn't it?) however I did uncover an inkling of relief through something that happened the other day at the höstmarknad1 of all places, something that just may take the sting out.
This market as you know is full of stalls: toys, tools, clothes and gadgets of all kinds, a great many stalls for olives, salamis, specialist cheeses, the obligatory hot dogs and there was even one little Persian woman selling fried fish (which was frightfully good). There was music, games, a small fair with rickety rides and generally a great deal of wholesome fun, nothing political about it at all. And presumably that is exactly why there was a very large and gregarious SD stand right in the centre of all this merriment.
It was manned by three of the most ordinary looking white blokes I have ever seen each wearing the familiar mixture of enthusiasm, guilt and defiance which seems to exude from alt right activists. What's more their stall was surrounded by a group of some thirty children who could not seem more excited if the SD were giving away free popcorn and goodies and it was not until I was much closer and could peer between row after row of young shoulders (our future generation) that I discovered that the SD were indeed giving away free popcorn and goodies! Well! Does that not say it all?
It is appalling of course that a party with well documented neo-nazi roots should decide to hand out sweeties to children but that is what has become of us in our post financial crisis world and specifically the post 2011 world, our point of breakage.
Imagine young Ebba chewing away on her tenth goodie asking one of the activists:
"What is SD anyway.?"
"Well Ebba it's like this......do you like Sweden?"
Did we not state in the TAS that 'whatever farce we are treated to in future could be traced back to the year of breakage?2 Well, the SD in the höstmarknad is one such farce! How can it go on? Should I have done more to protest, to shout? I feel like I should have but there are many reasons not to, not least that I had my children with me and the toffee apples couldn't wait, so I put all my energy instead into silently crushing the discarded SD paper cups with my new Jula boots. One must say though that the SD stall in the otherwise political free setting of the höstmarknad is in keeping with the anti political elite chestnut of the alt right and as far as it goes it seems like a smart move, but the sheer gall of it though was hard to stomach. My anger, however, was soon replaced by dismay then dismissal as I began to see this shameful spectacle as a fitting analogy to the success of the populist alt right. I never wanted to believe that so many people could suddenly turn far alt right but perhaps they too have been attracted by the candy? My feelings rather settled on a more pragmatic idea, that what we see with the populist right, if looked at with a cool head, is perhaps to be expected following a financial crisis. Has it not happened many times before that crisis ushers in a period of support for the far right? They say anything to get the people to gather round their stall and when life is bad the people will gather. (The left do it also but without the umph and the racism) So instead of apocalyptic notions of a contemporary fascist global uprising perhaps this is all just economics and by the way I have heard it said that economists are more focused on the dreaded or god sent (depending on your outlook) era of automation that is due to engulf us.
Perhaps then what the Dignity Scholarship advocates in shelter, repair and rebuilding, for those of us feeling the stress of the age, is the ticket after all? It is but a bulb of hope but let us plant it, water it and see what grows. While we're on the subject of bulbs I could not resist this last quick still life of infant sunflowers and look here I may be aping the great dutchman but unlike the followers on display at the Tate, I am not daft enough to tackle the sunflowers in bloom; they are his after all. We can however tackle the opposite end of the scale to his symbolism of sunflower decay and so in our study of the saplings we have a symbolism of unrealised potential, of being cut off before the prime, of never being able to express oneself and for me that is perhaps even more melancholy. And look here, what began as our rational of breakage in the TAS has in one way become a more plausible proposition at least in our return to traditional pictorial symbolism. What I am driving at is this, thanks to social media technology it seems as though we are a small world again, all actors in the same movie so to speak and as such perhaps our revived personal pictorial symbolism could well be steered once more to describe a collective or popular state? Just a thought. Conversely if our collective psychological world has shrunk, precisely through becoming networked, then perhaps we must use our symbolism to expand it, to punch some holes or perhaps more appropriately cut some cables. Two choices then...Zakhar! The secateurs.
Vi ses,
John
PS
I do not know how it passed me by on my last sweep but I have just this minute pinned old Holmes to a dutch conference that he attended back in March of this year and by the grace of god the dutch institute produced a recording of his lecture which they have published on The You Tube Video Service. I have him on hand literally right now, poised and ready to speak in another window, so following this, my second last word, I will let him commence: With the Burrows list on hand and with the fresh scent of Old Holmes back in our nostrils there is every reason to hope for progress on the five themes if you offer a second season.3 I pledge to tackle it with fresh notions and the more down to earth approach that I believe will be essential in what will probably be a year of greater crisis than the last but perhaps also the year where the shoots of a new left imaginary finally begin to sprout.
1 An autumn market we have here in Norrtälje.
2 See TAS Work 21, Still Life With Escape the Overcode
3 Decisions are made in October.