Sjon Larsson
Sjón Larsson To Tell the Truth
I am a resident of Norway North above the 65th parallel, called the Davvi-Norga, where I plumb the arctic birch for miracle Chaga, as we so call, an old tradition among the Sami. I publish this statement in case it is my last will and testament before we are cut off by the powers of quarantine spreading north, for it is in the air conditioning ducts, but in my Brain are studies & Chambers filled with books & pictures of old, which I wrote & painted in ages of Eternity before my mortal life.
The first few paragraphs are important for a writer who we translate, and agonize over finding the right words. I sit reading aloud to myself. The first page has twenty drafts to see the spirit of the original produced, particularly first-person to find the right voice. Once I hear, or think I have, I go on. These works of translation are not from one language to another, but from thought to language where the text is uncertain and only exists after it is made. The translation is arbitrary and could come another way at a different time with a different prompt, yet the version that exists cannot be other, even if that is denied.
This future that walks through the past leaves a trail. The present is shadowed, a ghost and airy with sightings of the future which arrives dressed with what we think we know, since it is costumed in the old. I think we know and feel the present but it is gone fast. I forget it and our memory of it we call the present, for by then it is the past. Catch the future walking on a roof, on a slab, in the grain of tree cuts that seem concrete events when finished, but are decisions and timings, predated, postdated to the next keeping.
Whoever is standing on a flat roof surveying the broken skin of the bare south spots where water pools, and cracks in the scuppers are a kind of beach where we come down either to do our work or not. Wash the roof, patch, coat again elastomeric paint, start to finish. Up and down the ladder without knee operations, workouts or stretches, over the city the translation of the roofs stretch as roots of organic structures from invisibles above. With a flat roof there is nowhere to fall, but why don’t they build a better pitch?
I slipped on the silt and took a fall in the drive during rain, fell on the right hip. I don’t feel the fall. The heel slipped and I ended up in the water wet. Another time I fell against a rock with the chain saw idling, but there is a disconnect in the fall from the moment it starts, which comes awake at the end. The fall is a fulcrum where the body is spun, lifted to another direction so that where the head was first pointing is reversed and to the side. It completes a neat 180 degree turn in the air and lands with what it was on top. I have done this consummately so can say that if a city were imagined to be conscious as it lays there like me in a heap of itself it first feels embarrassed. I hope nobody saw that, as it looks around for spectators. Then the shock dusts off and proceeds on its way. It doesn't ever know how bad it's hurt. This adrenalin in the body politic of shock and awe, taking of a city, ready or not they said, it has a gender too. We can call it a privilege to be in one of these. Please add your own experience here.
Whatever thought is, whether any thing, it is touchy, so let it go. Forget about perception, forget about other worlds. None exist. Too hard isn’t it? We throw a bone. Get the Tractatus Preface and begin, but I am well north of Wittgenstein’s cabin in Skjolden. Here is our guide. The very thing we have been advised not to say, that all the facts are not known, and the case is obscure, which we puzzle and conject, where any one can either be the case or not the case, and everything else remains the same, this which we should not say, we say, but in terms that do not show what we mean. What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent. In order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit [but don’t talk about it] (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought). The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.
This is what we say of anyone who wants to be anonymous, who spends whole weekends making up different names in seclusion, but believes in none of them enough to use.
I saw a river meandering pleasantly along in a dream, was standing above it on a walk when it began to increase and course with large swales of current around the bend immediately above. Great muscular torrents, clean and deep looking, seems to endanger my position so I moved up the swale and crossed to a stair where I lived and went up. This river is the aural map of sounds and a visual sights I see when I close my eyes. The visual disappears then I open them and identify. But if I see the world by not seeing the images shake and disappear I don’t like it. Connected thought occurs just below the level of awareness, heard but not heard when I slip up. It is therefore lost, meaning unremembered, unless I learn to listen better. This requires me to be honest, but to be honest I am dishonest, which means stop pretending.
The connectedness of the present, when things that happen at the same time interpret each other, is the way I know in actions not words. It leaves causation inferred, contracted from the moment of greatest brightness. Further contracted, in decay, with more understanding of these moments, but without the moment, the paradox of our lives begins. To have a thing but not know it until I am without continues until I am completely opaque to light, like a rhymed tightness, itself formless. These shapes can take a form as in trees, or cracked skin, stout limb. A sapling gets to that. The circulation beneath lives and minds drives me to do what I don't know, while I think I am doing something else, and for different reasons too. This is literally true. In cave psychologies they have filled in the entrance too with a thin layer of hard earth on top but loose soil further down. Further down, as if writing stone letters in shale below creeks, and further under factories, the identity held on only by wax is not pretty to admit. I have seen many things, but paid no attention I admit. My ears have been open, but I hear nothing, But I hear something else. It’s like reversals in the timpani of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony when I pick up a phrase, invert it, splice it, reverse it at will. So the beginning words become a drum and what might have been WHO MADE THE DECISION, BOOMAY DECISION, ON, ON which becomes a word with a BOOM echoing ON, ON.
I don't conceive it, I translate it and write down as best I can the image of the vision. Like the translation of the text is arbitrary, edited, too big for the piano of space and time is not important in vision landscapes. What if somebody makes something that's not a vsion, in a playful-weary tone and almost-spoken tone, whatever it might be, inferred from the words? That maybe is why we're on a recon mission, maybe fiction, maybe real. The difference it makes is we must believe to survive. Pride enters it too. Do you want to the world class sucker of your time who wrote of its past, and now it's being brought back?
So this guy lands right off of Betelgeuse, comes down out of the womb and into this-THIS reality. If all the basket cases believe what they believe, and you, from the land of the far away, who come with your own illusions as nuts as those who inhabit the place when you arrive, think maybe you wake up, at least think you do, why not a little hyperbole to lighten the load in this galactic you wake up in the middle of, as long as waking up means gradually, like before seven, but that’s the end of it till there is a hurt in your mouth from speaking it and a laugh out loud in the telling,
I started out on this planet myself. You say sarcastically, what better? I had no more idea of what it was was than a state of sleep in forgetfulness. Does it seem, by means of a finger to illustrate, that a finger is not a finger? Much of this narrative suggests language foibles on the edge of prophetic to its audience. The Aristarchians of the moon had that unusual glow to consider in the ultra-violet range. So if I manage these multiple paradoxes and construe them like amphibians have to constantly deal with land and sea, out of this uncovering nothing includes the not, so a no that's not measures what I saw, a soul for good or ill. This stretch of broken boundaries, as though passed on the street by themselves we fail to recognize, live in a world surrounded by ourselves, that we could not see. The formless doesn't explain change. Any shaping thought includes all utterance. The opposites of fire and water in air, male / female undivided, lips light and dark have no middle state. In a cubicle of doors nothing sought is heard except we find ourselves in the other.
Of course the amphibian can swim so is a prime land combatant at sea. A colonist is at home on land though, like some clam, admirable for its failure to open, although this failure nourishes opposites it frets between. Colonists see only what they ask for advice when they don’t ask. but do not dare to take it when they do. Offer will induce pout, despair. The reason for sea legs and hard coats with soft viscera beneath is these beings are no diamond, ho ho, or pure spirit that you know. As if to hide the hidden too big for us to see up close, we want to show people about escaped shadows of light and come back believed. Colonists ride the back of these torrents from the singing rhythm and image of the word itself that tells them who they are.
It’s like a blind man and elephant are the terrain that lives in sea and air and then itself. When fancy penetrates to the core we call this amusement an acronym even if it continually says it isn't. Much of the possibility of being biped criticizes these high figures and their fires off the Roman Camp at Ynys Môn, where sea and sink holes attribute to Merlin and Old Salisbury Sarum the snowy owls that hang like low mist of mountain above flint middens, or creeks and Madrones, where all soldiers fall beneath the bracken and we have to live among the furrows where they translate the bird song. Elk and deer speech voices, inner and outer, maybe we call it that, or mental speech through the mouthpiece of this passive dictation. Mind you, with one memory extant, one record transfiguring the originary unspeakable, is as if to say thought became, but failed then and became language. The voice of all that forged the anvil bear, bird, and cat philosophers write themselves.
Don’t take symbolically the literal people who dress as colonists while the adjectives pile up. They are nouns on the table in the foyer, or smart talk on the rug. That is, ambiance, not symbol. Facts please and then open the cabinets of liqueur that keep the surface.
To recognize this story of the ineffable turned some form or other, accompanied to simple train whistles at night and the eager flap of one’s tongue moving back and forth, not just in birth and death, but in the accident of contradiction after the lightning phrase that begot the fire takes to produce the desired. All that matters is that after alternatives that would have been, the shape of a head, a cross, a tree, stems of flowers of internal shapes, there is language to describe the internals, so the aspirant flies out of a world to live in pure praise.
Does it come clearer to call it palimpsest, a writing over writing where parchment in such short supply, bleached or not, is overwritten in a different ink? This "new writing," maybe lists of things over top of ancient texts obscures old precepts, resonant with the past. You can scrape them off and see what's beneath to retell the telling over centuries, told and retold in the middle of a night, the man who speaks for himself so that we at all points can consider him underlying and surrounding all that is said in archaeological strata the same way that the unconscious we cannot name. Everything built on top of everything else, the word coat you wear and give away, that transfers by your will to extend. You're going to say you've been praying all these years to extend.
I was the sample and the sampler of trends predicted of my own, long after, unthinkable, unacceptable, susceptible to arrest. But there I stand naked, exposed, like a dozen or more events to which the child is exposed, unthinkable, and only by that singular grace that always accompanies these travesties rescued at the last second. I want to know what the symbolic acts mean, because they swim in consciousness during day then dive back down again, until one day they all stop and new ones contend with these.
This is written in my own hand which I Sjón