Superimpositions

Feeling: Joy, a phone call.
Doubt:  One cannot govern anything but one’s own department, 
not even, for example, in one’s own family.
Doubt 2, more generally: One cannot govern anything.
Home: bed, couch, table, sauna stove.  The child’s hair
is always matted.
She can’t even keep her child’s hair properly combed.
Message: We are strange.
Message 2: We are normal but our child has thin, woolly hair.
Milieu: the pine tree, the colour yellow, the bird.
No one taught us species.  A reform ordered by the Education
Department.  We’ll run out of plants if all of them get picked and pressed.
So they stay in nature, nameless.

Child, look, this is a flower.  I am a human being, and you are a
child.  This is a colour, and that is a material.  That’s precisely what it feels like.

Light: A thousand stars, a lap, onto which one is lifted to look at Saturn.
On the slope, a light pole, a bit like Dorian Gray’s London.
Names: Ossian, Oscar, Dorian, Dora.  Open Dora.
Names: Jenna, Jannika, Tilda, Tiona.  Aleksi, Pieno, Tobias.


From "Koko tarina," ("The Whole Story"), 2001
("Päällekkäisyyksiä," p. 11)
Translated from Finnish by Anselm Hollo.