The white gaze of light

The white gaze of light

Suite for Heli

An Island on Längelmäves

Clambering into a boat feels odd, like the moment

floating leaves the earth, or spinning yanks a child’s

kinaesthetic; the engine kicks the body into riding

spray shoots the bow mowing swarms of long-necked lilies

budding thick sepals and coiled petals, a succulent engine

powering stamens, the flesh fused yellow. I search for

common beauty, Nymphaea alba alba opening its heart

on a sleeve of reed-green fur. The grass is always greener . . .

A rusty surface wedged open by turtle-rocks gulls use as shoes.

The cool north-westerly unrolls the lake carrying a handsome

Grebe towards us, his honeycombed bones are hidden

by muscle, skin and feathers though vision seems extreme today

as if we have turned into hunters once more. Each island

is a reticent lyric without an address. We land on their favourite

footprint on the beach, a minute’s walk from remains of their fire.

Two pale shapes buoyant as helium in air light as light, soar

on this flawless unending day. They sweep overhead into any space

the birch discard, unfold their barred tail into a fan, hovering

on fingerless wings into the expansive wind. The kestrels

(called mouse hawks) use rhythm and muscle to repel the force

of molten iron, they drift effortlessly into mobbing a tardy gull.

Vision on a flat earth becomes excessive, we should practice

as children, play blindfolds to listen to what the trees say.

We haul the traps and toss the small fish back. It’s too hot.

The world remains concealed even in summer’s communal light,

the large perch are sheltering in the trench that carves this dark body

(the waters are crystal when plankton succumb to pollution and sink).

Midnight Sun

You can’t see it, you just feel it.

You can see in the dream what has

eluded sight: summer’s winter.

‘Winter’, Veijo Meri

I honour multiple libations - chilli vodka from the Ukraine,

Vana liqueur from Tallin and the home-made ginger vodka

which send me behind the unripe blackcurrants beneath

berry-coloured clouds hanging like wet washing off weightless light

drawing interest on days winter will compact. A smudge of thin darkness

clothes the birch trees, the pines contour a grey crust of silhouette.

I feel too early or too late, not ready for the phrase ‘at first light’.

In archaic relief I notice the luminosity of certain leaves, and wonder

if the promiscuous light is superfluous, and whether birds become restless too.

Driving to Kangasala

Heli is showing, the top of her trousers unbuttoned.

She has just checked her appointment, needs a full bladder

and we are only twenty minutes away, she asks for water

surrounded by lakes, we pass over our bottles and she drinks.

The ultrasound is fine, she says, the photograph disappointing

but then she’s an artist. I imagine motherhood is like listening

to an old fairy story and not remembering the ending. Her Russian

is far away to the north sculpting a large rock. What he makes is shared.

Kangasala observation tower

Onko kriisi todellinen vai johtuuko se siitä,

että tutkimus jo alun alkaen ajautui harhateille?

I run around the top of the world, the landscape

coalesces, a stereoscope morphs into brochures

sailing blue-green dioramas, holidays losing balance

as if not too little light but too much, as in a white out, when

light travelling in one direction at a certain angle has the same flux,

or strength, as light travelling at any angle in any other direction.

There are no shadows. Space has no depth.

There is no horizon. The bottom of the world disappears.

Or too little, as if night traps you into sleep increasing to over

half the cycle, diminishing exercise, an appetite for rich fat – a spiral.

Subjects were shut in a ganzfeld . . .

the effect is much like staring into a formless fog.

After a quarter of an hour or so of such blankness,

most people begin to experience brilliant dream-like images . ..

Chicken sexers, Finish folk songs, guessing a horse, new star signs . . .

millennia of world destruction.

A plaque marks the Baltic shoreline ten thousand years ago

when this land was Finwater, the situation is reversing, sweating

in mid-summer at 35°, unable to forget global warming yet nervous of

winter to come and the one after that when glaciers will slide into the rising sea.

A Summer’s Day in Kangasala

1. Kirkkoharju

When Zacharias Topelius, a leading Finnish writer, stood on a high ridge admiring

the shimmering blue waters of the surrounding lakes back in the 19th century,

nobody would have predicted that his poem would one day make this view

one of the most famous Finnish sceneries within the lyrics of a song called

'A Summer's Day in Kangasala'.

Steps climb into the picture Topelius fixed as Finland -

inspiring Romantic artists to indulge the scene for generations.

Pine trees grow like pubes around a jigsaw of shorelines,

not a cloud tacks the flat corners of the melted topography.

Whichever way you look it slips from your grasp like water,

an incoherence for anyone wishing to walk to the Pole.

Flying in the dilated land looks autonomous,

an unmanaged wilderness of branches wired to reflected sky,

distance, further than raptors trace the land’s fine filigree

of rodent urine trails, but the Elk totem has migrated north

and been replaced by saunas and holiday homes teeming

through the margins of the fresh-faced horizon.

The bible black back of the church shunts a roof line

down dragmarks of engine noise on the road to town;

tree-trunks fence a weather-worn floor, requests for

a dance flashback to flowery dresses and dull tense trousers.

Valkeakoski smokes paper factories on the horizon and boasts

a museum of Finnish football, through lightly spun glass-blown transparency.

Poems blear such fierce clarity and cannot argue with light.

Just five per cent of ancient snowforest survives.

2. Vehoniemi Ridge

At the end of the 19th century there were eight observation towers in Finland,

four of which were in Kangasala.

This old wooden tower has a balustrade to stop you falling

into the triumph of trompe l’oeil, an ambition Mr Barker invented

while sketching on Calton Hill. To reassure cynical Londoners

Edinburgh’s provost provided the first panorama with a written

guarantee of authenticity, the year the First Fleet sailed south

with audacious orders and a ballast of misery. Specialists in stone,

air, even water pursued maximum illusion through continuity

of the apparent horizon line. Faithfulness regained control

of a spiralling world whose imperial wealth and poverty drained

into suburbs of stone, bricks, and mortar. These lakes, floating in

their hundreds of thousands elude them; a nightmare of ground-truthing.

Light skates on the picturesque elements but poems blear in

such fierce clarity, words cannot argue with the light so seek shade

in the coniferous zone designed for crossbills, owls and nightjars

beyond a convex edge of farmland the crakes and lapwings use.

Martti guns down the dirt road through an intimate landscape

of hand-made barns painted in dried-blood (iron-oxide mixed with

flour and water), wood pigeons trapeze over round cows; wheat, oats

and barley fill the hollows, responsive like water to the slightest breeze.

Athletic flowers scribble summer frame by frame over the littoral field.

3. The Artist’s Home

The house kneels deep in forest. Swallows nest in corners

and art breeds in the garden like weed. Ceramic bones

thread metallic spines while terracotta nudes founder in the grasses.

We walk to the lake on a path scythed from wildflowers and nettles

slender rods of white birch reinforce walls of silver

laddered with dark scars constructing a sculptural space

adding to the pleasure of the simple existence of matter

more meaty and more resonant than secular ply

It ends where the shoreline snags on fishing rods, fish-traps,

a boat, barbecue, children’s sleds (one rusted, one freshly painted)

and a chair facing midnight’s luminous sky that’s soaking the water.

I face away as if a Claude Glass is to hand (my battery lifeless)

unsatisfied as Fox-Talbot sketching Bellagio. He used light to find

form shadowing the contours, but all the time coveted a fix

on the lake. Beating off mosquitoes I mention I live inside a city

by the sea, Anitta recoils, “I don’t feel isolated here”.

No longer herding reindeer, tracking elk, or trapping beaver

it’s as if having sawn a hole in the ice, she drops a line and waits,

perched on the luminous rim in her plastic chair

she draws conclusions as if about to solve light’s speechless logic.

Making a Living

1. A Hunting We Will Go

Sunk forty metres on an old sea bed, nowhere near

the freedom of the sea, a Greenland seal wears

a four thousand year old bone broach pinned to its ribs;

survival skills fired a harpoon-head that noosed

this species to extinction soon afterwards.

We would not escape starvation without the know-how

to hammer flint or think in fur, talking round a fire

of the scarcity of a kind on one specific sleep of ice,

singing loudly, banging the drum for the next hunt,

the next working day, the next instant of living.

2. Tools of the Trade

Stone-age arrow-heads arraigned behind glass

on velvet, aligned like magnetic jewellery

or ballet in the classical style, delicately work

their flint faces through spring and autumn colours;

such reverence would astonish the knappers.

What makes these instruments of death so beautiful

compared to the glinting coinage I pour into the butcher’s

pink plump hand, or the knife and fork set on the table

beside the empty plate? Beauty, indifferent to truth,

labour or the future seems to favour scarcity.

3. Working Conditions

Taking a fresh approach to life after death

the man inhabiting this red-ochre grave bequeathed

his precious objects. Instead, he took shreds of rock

from some mountain and a whetstone to work them

to make a decent living and raise a family.

Work needs to be done to cast real shadows. Forget floating

on clouds without clothes, or lounging in walled gardens

with virgins working the beds. Today and today after tomorrow

work awaits. The future is double-edged and the past,

despite its extraordinary effect, a blunt instrument.

4. The Sami Drum

One round Sami drum – used. The skin with a faint

decoration, an ochre figure, but there’s no English translation

of the signage, in any case it’s untranslateable.

For fun, or more than fun, for art?

Or more than art, sings the Shaman.

Tampere

In his garden Martti proudly compared his tan to my Aussie skin,

the shade of difference finds him hassled in the streets, a Finn

who was in the air force, told to go home. Colour seems important

to a nation state, that and sites where something might have happened

like Tintern, Kangasala or Sydney Harbour, territorial imaginings in the global

centrifugal mix pulling in the Opera house and the Sydney Stock Exchange.

In the main square women scrubbed blood from the cobbles, more white

than red, thousands of years before green Finns from Siberia massacred Lapps.

Losing track of time

The guide books concentrate on cities, hotels and museums

neglecting the supermarkets chockfull of weird dairy produce

and the scarce bear scats. Forget the books, follow the trail

of mischievous beavers, or the manoeuvres of men handy with an axe

in search of light to see through winter, severing the arboreal tracks

of flying squirrels for millions of shingles, each wafer of wood

burning fifteen minutes of slivered lux between the days of St Mathew.

A Shoreline of Mirrors

The country is very flat and quiet,

still the lakes are surprisingly horizontal;

without height or depth

the graves must be shallow.

Tuska

tuska ‘pain’ from Old Russian

The Tuska festival thuds through the weekend getting louder each day,

youngsters in black some scalped, headbang to Destruction, Apocalyptica,

Primal Fear or the busker giving Jimmy Page a run for his money,

Stairway to Heaven at midnight outside the station nightly.

We pass the huge statue of Marshal Mannerheim and Kiasma’s outdoor café,

the grass outside is littered. A bearded man, my age, beer to hand

sits high on a giant chair made of chains with a toothed iron back.

He looks at me as I study the furniture, finally asking, ‘Have you seen my dog?’

I look blankly, is he drunk? ‘It’s a Schnauzer’, he explains gravely, so serious

and so pissed, I realise he’s alcoholic. ‘What do Schnauzers look like?’

I’m about to ask when Heli, who is pregnant, averse to alcohol and already losing patience with him points, ‘There he is’. Two metal dogs are barking

from the edge of Kiasma’s curved roof of solid zinc lined with patinated titanium

and copper darkening incrementally each day, part of a sculpture,

‘pako Impivaarasta’ escaping from epic nationalism and enzymes, beaches, beserker genes?

I think it’s to do with the long black night ahead.

Notes

for Martti, Majia, Heli & Miiko Makinen

Kangasala observation tower

Onko Teuvo E. Laitinen, ‘arapsykologia ja psi - hengen ja aineen viimeinen taistelu?’ http://www.pcuf.fi/~msiivola/para2000/artikkelit/teuvo/tiede_rajatieto_skeptismi_2.html

White out . . . Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, New York: Bantam Books, 1989

Subjects . . . John McCrone, Roll up for the telepathy test’, New Scientist 15 May 1993, p30.

A Summer’s Day in Kangasala

And God said, "Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." Genesis 1:6

The Panorama

Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600, Cambridge, 1997. . p229.

The Greenland Seal

NB. The Harp Seal, also known as the Greenland Seal, is a different species)