kirjailijaresidenssi Sysmässä / writer's residency in Sysmä, Finland
I have never been surrounded by
So many books I couldn’t read
Surrounded in Finnish is ympärillä
Hopeless is there anything
I’ll be able to understand
A few appear here and there
They could easily fit under one arm
The more I look around
The more they reveal themselves
I will never have time to read them all
I open one and read:
« He returns to bed
There is possibly
Someone there »
My stay at Villa Sarkia was of the solitary kind. Thankfully, I thrive in solitude. And so does my work.
A heavy blanket of snow (not to mention a global pandemic) kept the town of Sysmä at an arm’s length. Inapproachable. Desolate. It wasn’t a question of not feeling welcome but of not knowing where the people that might welcome you were hiding out. But as a fellow Scandinavian, I knew. At home.
I’m the last person to condemn anyone for a need to hibernate. I understand. That’s why I’m here.
Time passes at a different pace in Villa Sarkia. You look down at the page in front of you for a moment, and when you look up again three hours have passed. The next time you look up, daylight has slipped away and you go for a walk in the dusk, letting the snow shine for you.
It wasn’t until two days before my departure I had company at Villa Sarkia. And so, I got to pass the torch. I had reassurance that Villa Sarkia will indeed live on after I’m gone. Villa Sarkia isn’t a product of my imagination, but the sort of place that exists as long as it is inhabited.
That’s a comfort. Because that means I can return someday.
Randi Lindholm Hansen 27.2.2022
A blog post. A blog post. A blog post?
Now what, in the devil’s many names, does one put in a blog post?
The morning of my penultimate full day in Villa Sarkia is moments from dawning as I sit down in my room to ponder that question. My windows are too caked with frost to see outside, but having returned from my first cigarette of the day a handful of minutes or two ago, I know that Sysmä is still covered in snow, though the snowfall ceased some time yesterday evening. The snow is different here. This observation has crossed my mind often over the past four weeks; I have shared it with friends, shared it with family, shared it on Facebook, even. Ever since I first thought it, it has seemed somehow important, this curious, putatively innocuous nugget of Finland trivia: the snow is different here. Why does this feel so relevant? What does it reveal, beyond the circumstance it describes? And most importantly: is it blog-worthy?
What to put in a blog post? I have written stories—short, novella, novel-length; I have written stage plays, seen them gain in reality and independence as they came alive in the interplay of director and ensemble; I have written poems, though I’m not much good at it; I have written diaries, and e-mails, and letters, and essays and theses and synopses; I have written social media posts, mostly to promote my work and assert myself as an artist in these trying, hybrid, digital times, though I consider social media to be both tedious and dubious—worrisome, at the least, and superfluous at best. Out of these genres, the last would be most akin to a blog post, I presume: they’re online, they’re “posts,” they’re fiercely public, they’re by definition self-centred to some extent. But if I went about it the way I would a Facebook entry, it wouldn’t be much fun: the rules of effective social media posts are nebulous to me, but it seems obvious that there are rules, possibly too many of them, and too much of their successful implementation removed from the writer’s creative control. Maybe I’m going at this the wrong way. I probably shouldn’t be asking, “What is a blog post?”; should ask instead: what have I got to say?
Which brings me back to that sentence which has kept recurring to me, kept looping from the relaxed ebb and flow that my thoughts have become here in Villa Sarkia, kept rising to the surface of the cool, bright, tranquil river in my head to surprise me with its ongoing perceived properness and succinct clarity: the snow is different here. Because it really is.
Is it?
Different how? Different why? Different from what? Questions that sound every bit as simple and harmless as the original observation. Here’s an answer: it’s different from snow back home in Austria, probably due to differing climate conditions, in that thick flakes are rare even in heavy snowfall, each individual flake looking much like a tiny crystal or shard of glass instead—diamond dust, indeed—and the resulting blankets of snow scintillate in the sunlight, twinkle like a spangled sky at night. “It sparkles like excited stars, silly from a joke the moon told” is how I put it on Facebook … and here I was thinking I had no knack for poetry. (Is that poetic? I seem interminably unable to wrap my head around the category.)
And all of that looks both exhaustive enough and rudimentarily pretty, like there couldn’t possibly be more to say on the subject. Like no more should be said on the subject—less would have been preferable, even—for as we all know (or at least have been told repeatedly), brevity and concision are the writer’s friends and objectives; only amateurs lose themselves in verbiage. But exhaustive and pretty though it may be—it just doesn’t cut it. There’s something missing. There’s more to the snow’s otherness than what can be said about it descriptively, or explained factually. It isn’t just prettier, and it’s not just the atmosphere (climatic or otherwise). The residency has taught me serenity, has returned fluidity and ease and quiet to my agitated brain, and for that lesson I am ineffably grateful; but maybe it’s time to stir that mellow stream once more, to turn a placid pool into a bubbling soup, and the soup into ink; to sharpen the mind, sharpen the pen, and stand in the river to look at something in particular, as long as it takes, instead of going with the flow and taking in whatever comes along.
So I will look at the snow, and look at myself, and ask: what does that mean, that the snow is different here? What does it mean to me? (A blog post is supposed to be personal, no?)
I return to that first shot at an answer above, that the snow here is different from that at home, and I stop and think, and I ask myself: when was the last time I noticed, really noticed, the snow back home? Looked closely, paid attention to it? I love snow—have loved it all my life, as far as I recall—but that doesn’t guarantee that I’ve been mindful of it. When something beloved returns whether one embraces it or not, it can become commonplace, a matter-of-fact. One might still love it, but one forgets to appreciate it. Before Sysmä, when was the last time I truly appreciated snow? What am I comparing this new snow to? A fact? a memory? a distant memory?
A complete fabrication?
In recent years, it hasn’t snowed all that often in my little corner of Austria, or when it did snow, then not for very long. Things change, as we know; sometimes irretrievably, and sometimes for the worse. Maybe that is why the snow’s otherness strikes me as so impressive, so crucial, at this place and time in my life: it brings home the message, in tiptoed curvatures of thought, that change is inevitable. On some level, we’re all aware of this, and usually I don’t mind—embrace it, even. But maybe comparing the present snow to something I cannot quite fathom—comparing it and finding a bewildering unspecificity, a vague lack, in the position of the second “comparee”—I am reminded that sometimes, change means loss of something one didn’t want to let go. That change is perpetually in motion, and it won’t stop no matter how politely you might ask it to.
But knowing this—that things change, everywhere, constantly: how do I know that snow here, around Villa Sarkia, is always the way it is now? Maybe the snow is different not just from snow in Vienna, but from last year’s snow in Sysmä; maybe this is the first time snow here behaves the way it does now, and not knowing it, I have fallen into the traveller’s trap of associating everything I see and experience with the country I’m visiting, inducing from a particular observation to a general rule, when I can have no idea if that rule really exists or not. What a shameful fallacy! Does “the snow is different here” not just evoke my exposure to change, my “thrownness” into the world, then, but also my foolishness in the face of it? Does it reveal how narrow my mind is at its core, when—as a writer who has devoted almost a decade of his life to a philosophical education—I like to think that, whatever else I may be, narrowminded I am not?
So maybe the reason why I keep revisiting that sentence is that, as much as it imposes itself on me, I can have no idea if it is accurate. What are my frames of reference? A frightfully brittle memory of a generalised idea of what snow once looked and felt like to me, or even “is supposed” to look and feel like, in a world according to my frightfully limited perspective … and another illicit generalisation induced from a series of observations made over a very short amount of time that is very specific to one location and one month in one year? Is it okay, is it in any way feasible or tolerable, to work from that and arrive at the conclusion: the snow is different here?
… why, yes. I suppose it is. I suppose what I’m forgetting, or have been ignoring in my eagerness to be precise, critical, and extensive (so sorry for the length!), is that no matter if the thought is true or not, it is a thought of mine. And it hasn’t “imposed” itself on me so much as it just rings a little louder, and clearer, and truer, than the other notions chortling in the stream. And, perhaps most importantly: until I sat down to stare at the sentence, to debate it as though it (or I) were trying to make a point, it had always been accompanied by nothing but pleasure. It had been a joyful thought, merry, happy, giddy. I think—I choose that—I will let it be that again.
I suppose the sentence even contains all of the above, all that verbose speculation and (let’s be honest here) quite pointless elaboration; holds all of it, says all of it, “verdichtet” all of it. I suppose brevity is sovereign, a multitude of words but a sign of insecurity or narcissism, or both. So that should be my blog post, then—I will write nothing but the words: the snow is different here. Let the reader draw their own conclusions, the way good writers do. Chances are their conclusions will be more interesting than my preludious cogitations …
But that wouldn’t be enough, then, would it? Why? Because I’m a writer. I write. I tell stories. That is what I do. Consider this the story of how I decided that my blog post should contain nothing but that sentence, and how it ended up the blog post’s title instead. The story does have quite a bit to offer! Childlike wonder—at a weather phenomenon that seems both mundane and mystical; quasi-philosophical contemplation of a shyly metaphysical tinge (Finland’s snow, or Sysmä’s snow, or this point-in-time’s snow, or none of the above?); an excess of aesthetics, moulded into logical shape; twists, as my attempt to organise my thought process pulls me in various directions at once and makes a mockery of the very idea of the attempt; and even romance: mine and the snow’s love story is one for the ages. Perhaps it isn’t the most riveting material I ever produced … but it is sincere; sincere, and necessary. I can think of no better way to trace how important my time in Villa Sarkia was to me. How unique in the context of my personal history, how filled with marvels and deliberation, with freedom to think and do as I see fit, with writing, writing, writing, and with snow, snow, snow.
While I’ve been writing this, night has turned to day, and for an hour or two the horizon was a peaceful pink. Pink used to be my least favourite colour, but that was before I saw the Finnish dawn. There’s pink dawns in Austria, too, but still—still … it isn’t just the snow that’s different. The colours in the December sky over Sysmä are intriguing. A blue so clear and bright—so blue—you’d think the sky was frozen … and winter pink, a colour I’m not sure I knew existed. Winter morning pink—December’s Pink, Rising Sky’s Pink, Rose of the Heavens—which might possibly count among my favourite colours now. Time will tell; time, and the eyes I bring back to Austria, which I hope have permanently recovered—and not just re-encountered—the ability to observe.
Thomas Kodnar, 26.12.2021 (happy birthday, brother!)
Tosi harva ihminen tietää, miltä punainen mekko tuntuu
Eikä sitä voikaan tietää
Voi vaan yrittää eläytyä ja olla myötätuntoinen
Seassa on kuitenkin omia ennakkoluuloja ja vähintään kourallinen arvailuja
Sekin vaikuttaa, jos on itse sellaista ihmistyyppiä
Että paahtaa aina menemään ja kiertää kaukaa kaikki punaiset vaatekappaleet
Ikeassakin kurvaa täyttä vauhtia punaisten koriste-esineiden ohi
Siis käytännössä on niin omistautunut punaisen värin olemassaolon kieltämiselle
Että näkyvän valon spektri päättyy keltaiseen
“Eikö sen jälkeen tule vain pimeää?
Tai että ihmissilmähän ei kai edes näe sitä?
Eikö ne taajuudet ole joidenkin kummituseläinten juttuja?”
Minä seison vieressä valtavassa punaisessa mekossa
Sen seitsemänkymmentä metriä pitkä helma ympärilläni kuin vuorenrinne
Hihat ovat lyhyemmät, mutta painavat sata kiloa
No ei nyt oikeasti
Mutta ne luovat uskottavan illuusion siitä
Pahinta punaisessa mekossa on se
Kuinka se sumentaa ajatuksia
Lyhentää pinnaa
Pyyhkii lähimuistia puhtaaksi
Tekee yöunesta haperoa
Kutistaa ajatukset kireäksi kehäksi
Punainen mekko imee voimaa
Energia virtaa vain yhteen suuntaan
Ulos
Se kuluu
Se vuotaa
Sitä menee koko ajan johonkin
Mekko estää akkuja latautumasta
Tankkia täyttymästä
Joudun kaasuttamaan moottoritiellä
Tietämättä koska on käytössä viimeinen pisara
Seuraavaan liittymään on pitkä matka
Kohta minulta loppuu bensa
Mistä olinkaan puhumassa?
Teistä saatan näyttää ihan normaalilta
Mutta jokainen ajatukseni punertaa
Varokaa hyvät ihmiset
Punainen mekko on ihan saatanasta
Ottakaa tosissanne jo ensimmäinen oranssi kajo T-paidan hihassa
Vierailin Sysmässä jo vuosi sitten. Blogiin sain kirjoitettua vasta nyt. Syistä, joihin viitataan tekstissä.
Kiitos residenssistä, Nuoren Voiman Liitto, Villa Sarkia ja Sysmä!
t. Veera Hintsala
I have found a playground in Sysmä. No, I begin again. Because if you want to understand it, you have to hear a little blood-freezer.
There is a teeny-tiny country in the middle of Europe called Hungary. I am a Hungarian. Several thousand years ago our people and languages were relatives, now it is gone and only few old roots are quite similar. „Kala”- „hal”, „veri” – „vér”. In Finland there is a lot of fantastic people and in Hungary, too. But on June 15th when I was here in Sysmä since two weeks, the Hungarian parliament accepted a horrible bill. They said it is about the judgment of pedophilia but in the last second the politicans of our largest party complemented it with another detail: a shamefully homophobic one. Now the bill declares that no one can „promote” the LMBTQI orientalism in Hungarian schools, media products and magazines (some of us are scared that it will include books, too) for children under 18 years. We don’t know what „promoting” means exactly. We don’t know how they wanna manage it. We don’t know anything just the fact that we have another inhuman and heartless law and we just can’t understand why. I was sitting in the kitchen of Villa Sarkia on June 15th, read the hungarian news and cried.
But at the same time I was lucky because at least I had all of this. When I felt that I can’t handle my sadness and rage anymore, I could have a long, long walk. I could wander in the forest, I could go to the lake and go and go and go on and on till I finally found some peace. Although it lies everywhere in this area. In the sound of laughing seagulls (one of my housemates Klaus told me their name), in the whirling water, in the swishing pine trees. In the amazing cinnamon buns, in the smile of the konditorei lady, in the sound of a man choir which was rehearsing some music piece in the patisserie when I was walking by. In the kindness of people when we went to check how a real finnish Juhannus-night looks like. It was fantastic, with the most gorgeous May Queens and Kings I have ever seen.
Now back to the playground. I have found it on my third week, somewhere between the beautiful summer cottages. It was totally empty. The wind was blowing, the sky was grey but I did not freeze at all. I just stand besides the swings and tried to figure out if it is allowed for an adult to use them or not. But no one was within sight so I took off my backpack and sat in one of the swings.
My feet barely touched the ground. My hands clutched on the swing chains. The wind rumpled my hair. I closed my eyes and tried to hold back my tears. Or tried to cry, I really don’t know. I tried to do exactly what comes from inside. And unexpectedly I started to smile.
In that moment I understood that there always will be a playground. For everyone, everywhere. Sometimes between the trees and cottages in Sysmä, sometimes in the eyes of a crazy girl from California who was the best housemate I could imagine. There will be playing tools and air you can breathe in. There will be wind and sun and grey sky or bright sky and there will be us who just wanna play. In the press of the most evil laws we will still have the right for it anyway. And that is what no one can take away from us.
Take care of your playgrounds.
Kalapos Éva Veronika
kiitos Villa Sarkia
(15:27)
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
tractor
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
great tit (parus major)
nothing
nothing
nothing
blue car
older lady
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
(19:12)
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
(forgets to check the clock)
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
(realizes that the minute was done)
(23:43)
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
there’s only one country separating Finland from North Korea
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
Of course we come to right. The intention is there, beside a growing need for silence, solitude, time with the self… away from the self.
But travel is always at war with our intentions. We set out with purpose, maybe even with vanity and an unwavering vision of how we imagine ourselves behaving in new places. Then the road greets us at the other end and makes a mess of all our delicate arrangements.
And so we are left, instead, with the image of us as we are, and I was left with this: a foreigner who has come thinking she will find here what she could not find at home. That here, in your town, among your people, your silence, she will find it.
And what is it she’s looking for? If it’s a quiet place she needs to write, where does all the unnecessary philosophy enter, all those existential wanderings in the mind? Why make tragedy of something so simple?
It’s a question of travel, more than it is of writing, of poetry, of the temperament and need of writers and poets, the question of why we leave, and why we arrive at the places we do.
I came to write, and from my anchored place of writing, I was led down other roads, far from here, decades far from here, where I sit as a child in my father’s home, on the red carpet beside the telephone, phoning of my mother, asking to see her. I traveled down that gravel lane in the ghettos of America, and again, stood by the padlocked gate, watching a male goat gone crazy with his time of the year bang his horns over and over against the red barrier.
Sysma. A town of quiet roads, of departing Fall where the leaves send farewells from precarious stations in a song of color I’ve never seen before. It is the furthest I’ve been from my childhood, the crumbling white house, mama’s long brown hair, her dance, the house she took me to at the end of the cul-de-sac before she left. Sysma, with its timid gaze, its timeless avenues spilling into the empty country… it has led me through the years, all the way down to the other side, where I stood by the curved shore, watching the years gather into a poem over the still lake water.
Water. It holds the reflection of the thing, minus its weight. It’s what gives life to the reflected object, the glass-like image, freed from the burden of its heavy form.
And a poet, by the banks, watching her childhood, minus its weight.
tila tuntuu syliltä
kuin olisin juuri tullut humalaan
sen ikuisen 20 minuuttia, kun kaikki on hellää kirkasta
kun kaikki on alkamassa
ja se alkaa juuri minussa
kirjoitan vähän ohi, kierrän kohti
keskustaa
(olen tottunut kaareviin katuihin)
silittelen kirjahyllyn kerroksia
läpättelen säkeinä
Kiitos tilasta, kauniista päivistä,
t. Maiju Pohjola
Viikko, viisi arkiviikon päivää, ovat kantaneet mukanaan vuosikymmeniä. Miten aika omalakisesti määrittyykään keveäksi, huokoiseksi tai painavaksi sen mukaan, missä olet tai miksi olet.
En ole varma haluanko käyttää sanaa energia, mutta joku sen kaltainen, paikan oma henki ja lataus, on ollut käytössäni Villa Sarkiassa. Se ruokkii kirjoittamista ja sanoja. Olla täydellisesti yksin (toiset kirjoittajat omissa huone-eristyksissään), kuunnella ei vain korvilla vaan kokonaan, koko olemuksellaan mitä maailma sanoo, mitä nämä henkilöt puhuvat miksi he näin puhuvat ai tuonko takia.
Juuri nyt olen tilassa, jossa en tiedä mitä olen tullut kirjoittaneeksi, mutta voin aavistaa jotain, olen havainnut menetyksen jälkiä, kiitollisuutta, ymmärrystäkin.
Syyskuun lopun viikossa on ehtinyt puhaltaa voimakas puhuri, vaahteran lehdet ovat kuivuneet käpristyneet ja raapivat asvalttia. Villa Sarkian yläkerrasta, vaikka ikkuna välillä onkin raollaan, olo on seesteinen, kirjoittaminen ei ole tekemistä vaan olemisen jatketta.
Hyvässä kirjoittamisen tilassa, fyysisessä ja henkisessä, alkaa maailman nähdä eri tavalla. Voi olla että horisontti hyvällä tavalla vinoutuu ja oppii kävelemään kaltevalla pinnalla, kunnes ei kohta enää huomaakaan että ympäristössä on mitään erilaista, osaa vain katsoa ja siksi näkee.
Tähän on pakko lisätä vielä kuplasta: näkymätön mutta yhtä kaikki oleva henkilökohtainen hengitystila. Kupla ei synny kaikkialla, eikä se synny pakosta, mutta kun se syntyy teksti etenee omalla painollaan, rytmillään omaa rataansa, eikä illalla, kun nurinkäännetty mieli halajaa unta, kirjainjonoa saa poikki, vaan pitää lähetellä itselleen tekstiviestejä, jotta varmasti muistaa aamulla että näin se jatkuu.
On siis tärkeää poistua välillä kotoa, kirjoittajanurkasta/-kammiosta, lähteä aistimaan toisenlaista tuulta, kävelemään toiset kadut. Sanat tulevat kyllä kun niitä kutsuu, mutta toisinaan ja tietyissä paikoissa ne tulevat tulvimalla.
Kiittäen,
Villa Sarkiassa 24.9.2021
Eeva Vänskä
Kiitos for the good times! Thanks Sysmä, Villa Sarkia, András Gerevich, Luise Boege, Laura Serkosalo and Nouro Voimann Liito, Suvi Valli, everybody from Runokuu Poetry Moon Festival, Riikka Junttila, and Sysmän kirjasto for having me.
I just can’t get enough of this beautiful, beautiful light!
Here’s a piece from my Runokuu reading with Suvi Valli:
ZERO SHADOWS
flimsy
the lightest things worldwide:
threads in old films
lines on your hand
a hair in the milk
threadbare shine jusquʼà la corde
seams time-lined
VILLA SARKIA 