|HYLKYLÄINEN|

iltamien aika on ohi

[rawheadex]

From a loo in a Toronto bar, summer 2025.

[rawheadex]

This cracks me up every time.

(Steve Jackson Games: Murphy's Rules, 2003)

[rawheadex]

What does it matter if A-bombs rain down us again. All I desire is beauty. [Yukio Mishima]

(Image from The Equalizer S1E9)

[rawheadex]

Man always forgets

That it is governed and separated

By the same axioms that separate

The weak from the strong

The capable from the incompetent

The ingenious from the dumb

The brilliant from the foolish

This certitude never dies

This certitude never beckons

But forever lives on

That is the law of Nature

Everything lives by this rule

And dies by this rule

Mankind is no exception

The only exception is that

Mankind believes to be beyond

This rule of natural selection,

And which ultimately will lead

To mankind's inevitable self-destruction

[Ordo Equilibrio: Man Always Forgets]

[rawheadex]

Another perfect movie about killing real life baddies. And a good, no make that GREAT, female lead character for a change.

[rawheadex]

Perfect violence, have to turn the sound full up every time for the closing battle scene. I wish someone made a similarly cathartic film about Hamas and Hizbollah.

[rawheadex]

In every wood in every spring

There is a different green

[J.R.R. Tolkien]

There is an unfathomable gulf between the people to whom trees are a resource and those who find aesthetic, spiritual and mythological fulfillment in forests.

[rawheadex]

At the first light of dawn

I'll get my clothes out of pawn

As we grow older

The rats grow bolder

[Rome: Lullaby for Georgie]

Old boots, my best, trustworthiest friends. Been with me through more great times than any human being.

[rawheadex]

Oh you, my lowland brother

When did we lose each other

For you were but a boy with the freedom of falcons in his heart

[Rome: A Country Denied]

Wrapped in solitude and private mythologies and the stark howling of the spring's birth.

[rawheadex]

This guy knows more about life than all humanity combined.

[rawheadex]

Long lost to where no pathway goes.

[rawheadex]

Columbarium at Friedhof am Hörnli.

[rawheadex]

Random graves from Friedhof am Hörnli, Basel.

[rawheadex]

We need another dark age. Waste the complacent, the ungrateful, the... in short, everyone but me and a handful of others who remember what existence is all about.

[rawheadex]

I want to trudge through snow, feel the wind, the blizzard, see only white and dark green, taste the cold spring water, know that the night is coming, that the winter will never end, to not hear a human voice or the noise of their machines ever again.

[rawheadex]

Even in the economically managed woodlands of southern Finland one can find beauty. Snow covers the worst atrocities of the cutting season. It is essential to get away from the noises of the city, and people, and it is still possible, albeit on a thin line. Today was good. A real old-time January day, frost and snowfall, silence and time to wander.

The myth of Finns' "special relationship" with nature is just that - a myth. Most people couldn't care less for what is done to our forests. They use it for background for their hobbies, if they ever even visit them. The people who own and decide about them do not seem to do even that. For them it is just a source of money, to be cut and sold when they need to buy something.

I am experienced enough to recognize the fact that my aesthetic/spiritual relationship with forests is no more "real" or "right" than the view that they are only a resource. Yet the destruction of places which were somehow important to me, safe, beautiful, mystical (not in some hippie sense, but as in part of my personal mythology), have molded me. Made me more critical of humankind, misanthropic, detached, alone, stronger. It has been an interesting journey.

Finnish has a word metsäsuru, which means the sorrow one feels when personally important places (in forest) have been destroyed. That such a word exists is a consolation, it means that sensitive people exist. Yet is often that those who are not sensitive control these places; they have spent their lives not wandering aimlessly in winter woods, but collecting money and resources, and by their disposition want more of those. They have no eye or soul for the deeper nuances of trees, nor any internal mythology that they would need to nourish in untouched woodlands. And why should they? Any life is a struggle to survive. They feel they need the currency, I (and some like me) need the touch of out-of control nature, mosses, stones as old as the bones of the earth, windswept snow, cold winds, calls of ravens...

Fortunately these things can still be found. It is not as bad as it could be.

It was a good day.

[rawheadex]

I wish I could have the year's first breakfast with Rainer and Hanna.