You know when one is fully immersed in a natural environment, as we have been up here these past two weeks, then some sort of quietening occurs. This is no surprise and happens on my every visit to this lake and these cabins but this time it has rendered us unproductive. We have but eight sheets, none of them ink and they were all executed in the first couple of days before the forest had the chance to bring us down a peg or two, our blood was still hot, our head filled with work plans; thinking big. Then a brief artistic 'bums rush' and the old quietener was put on us.
You know Helen curated an event up here called The Middle of Nowhere in which artists were invited to come and respond artistically to the isolation, it worked very well and when we attended on one occasion we had a go at a durational performance in which we dressed as a UK bobby1 and spent the event surveilling the other artists, the trees and some ducks I believe. I even bought some toy handcuffs in the local ICA and to my amazement only scored a barley perceptible smile at the checkout, perhaps they get a lot of people playing the fool in costume, who knows, but my attention seeking did not register and I learned a lesson about Sweden. In any case I only mention this because the isolation has a way of changing people and that made for some interesting artistic journeys for the participant, the most dramatic being a young Scottish painter who had gone to considerable expense to have his equipment shipped over here (a crate full of professional oils) and for two weeks he didn't paint a stroke, instead spending the days making a giant easel out of driftwood!
Well, we have made our excuses but the bottom line is that we have none of the productivity we had imagined and now can only hope that we have benefited by the deep calm that has infused into us from the forest and lake in the traditional sense of the holiday recharge. Aside from catching a clip of Trump at the hospital, the wider world of crisis and politics has not been able to penetrate us. But look here, it is not that we have forgotten or not thought about events, indeed, we have even finished reading the Wedling account2 which I can tell you contained more than enough to disturb the mind, but it is more like events are even more abstract and dislocated somehow, they're further away, they're something else, and perhaps that is healthy, perhaps that is where they should be kept, perhaps that is where they are kept for regular working families. Is this what it is like to be unaffected by the socio-political dimension? Is this the blue pill? No stop that! The blue/red pill is, forgive me, a really foolish idea, it really is. So is 'woke' for that matter. To speak like this is to speak of conversion to some tribe. This is not right, becoming aware of something is about education, the gaining of knowledge, discovery, learning, is it not? It is about being influenced and becoming convinced but as we have discovered once again there is a deeply felt dimension that can effect ones thinking to the extent that the process of learning is replaced by the mast and nailed colours.
The life here is a genuine pleasure and once again I still get the feeling that someone may pop up and ask to see my ticket! Such is the feeling of privilege at experiencing this place. We are right on the water here and tucked around a corner and facing across the width of the lake. There is a main cottage built in the traditional, no nails style, painted red with an added conservatory room which affords a panorama close up of the moving water. This is where one cooks and eats. The cooker is gas which we get in canisters, the only running water is from the lake which is pumped in via a submersible. All this is very familiar from our days at the boat yard.3 One could drink the lake water you know, at a push, but there is a fresh source a few hindered meters away where a healthy stream of cold clear runs straight out of the land and onto a drainage pipe, all day every day. There is a 12v electricity system powered by a petrol fed generator which provides energy for lights, refrigeration, pumps, tv and charging. Recently a some sort of 240v socket has been established, again for charging. I do not posses the knowledge to tinker and maintain electrics but I can see very well that it is not out of ones range to learn. There is another smaller house split into two for sleep with a workshop in the middle and a secret little loft above which is just the cosiest little reading cell imaginable. There is a dry toilet which one simple empties at a local facility on the road. There is a boathouse which also contains the final necessity of a bathing area. It is a simple explanation of a simple way of living which I believe contributes along with the general surrounds to the mental quietening.
When here in Bräcke living becomes a pleasant project; one must fetch the water, one must light the fire, one must chop the wood, one must do this and do that. Tasks which on the surface are spirit crushing domestic chores but out here are a tonic. Now I am well aware how this may sound; the semestering Stockholmer playing the homesteader while the going is good in summer, some tourist harping on about the simple good life after but one week..."live like this in winter then talk about the tonic of the simple life." Yes, we tiptoe up to the line of some lifestyle merchant selling the old days to the cosmopolitan city dweller. Yes we may but we have never been the latter and of course the grounding effect of the rural chores will turn to graft toot suite,4 yes yes but I remain convinced that this time spent allows one to slip into a different dimension of living, a different temporal scale and that is a good reminder if one needed it that other living creates different feelings, different priorities and perspectives.
My favourite activity out here is to paddle on the lake and for this I insist on the sturdy wide Canadian kayak rather than the selection of canoes available, and last night I travelled further out than ever before. I was in fact brushing my teeth on the jetty having elected to adjourn for the night early in order to awake the fresher and take an ink of the trees, but on seeing the calm of the water and the intense orange of the setting sun I thought of the Japanese proverb; 'half an hour in a spring night is as valuable as 100 gold coins' and took to the kayak at once.
I clambered in and paddled round the boat house then with great zeal took up the road layed down by the setting suns reflection. When the great disk finally left the stage, slipping behind the distant tree line, I found I was perhaps a couple of kilometres from the place. The road back was made of the pale yellow reflections of an enormous full moon that with Van Gogh as my whiteness5 was not there before. The lake was a mirror, the sun down one end, the moon up the other and us in the middle! As we studied the miraculous darks of the luna surface we felt a creeping feeling of existential fear mixing into the sense of wonder at the actual moon, and we thought of Tiel, Musk and Bezos; those three muskateers of the coming space Reich, but those fools were under glass so it didn't matter. Peace of mind reigned
But that was last night and this morning we are sitting on bench, lid open, starring through the risen steam of our second cup and we are back to the troublesome asking. Is it this dimension of mental rest, the hazy escape and disconnection that lets the far right creep further over us or is it the hyper confrontation which boons them more? Again the same question. One can well take the wide view of sun and moon and instantly be content to ignore all worldly struggles in favour of some zen Buddhist brain balm, but to do so, and I believe many people do just that aloof, is to 'let it happen'. But to live in full engagement with the ongoing weaponized insanity of the present, participating with vigour and commitment to the fight against, does that not feed the far alt right beast? One thing alone is clear from this and that is that our thinking is confused and the reason perhaps is our own position as one who is in neither of these states, neither engaged completely or completely aloof. Wavering between two magnates so we are (this seems to be a fate of sorts) and here we bobble and ponder; kaleidoscopic postulation. Perhaps this second season was not such a good idea after all. This whole set up is designed precisely to hunker down, (between those magnates) in shelter, piecing together some ideas gleaned from our peeps at the Borg but what good is that other than as some curious obscurity some years hence. But I know that part of this DS shooting match is the cultivation of sanity through doing and it is possibly the case that we simply must Do more. That after all is the source of the real quietening.
You know, it seems that if the radical left did not exist the alt right would have to invent it!
From the lake,
John
PS
The magnates we speak of are not left and right by the way but more committed/aloof, outraged/philosophical.
1 Police.
2 Alt Right From 4Chan to the White House
3 John lived in a boatyard in Torpoint. See Torpoint Art Service.
4 Correct spelling is 'tout suite'. French translates as 'right now'.
5 Typing error, should read 'witness'.