A Wild And Tumbling Wind

Fools gold in a universe of riches

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

1.

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” — Antonio Gramsci

To our left, as the dog and I walk north along Skeppsbrokajen, umbrelled by the flocks of seagulls and crows that perpetually scout the sky above Stockholm, the Swedish Royal Palace squats like a great headless Sphinx looming over the waterfront. 

And to our right, across the water flowing out toward Östersjön, the copper green roofed Grand Hotel, pungent with the theatrical opulence of days gone by, like an ostentatious cream cake, eyed the Sphinx from its respective shore. The vulgarity of money, hammy and nonchalant in the face of blue blooded advantage.  

(For this flow of grandiose depictions to make any sense, you’d have to be well versed in the elaborate social intricacies of status and ego. Unfortunately, we all are).

We continue to wander into an icy wind blowing down from the Arctic, until we reach Strömbron, the bridge that links Gamla Stan to Norrmalm. The dog rolls onto his back into a small dune of snow and, wriggling like a beached salmon, forms yet another dog-angel, a string of joyous dog-angels trailing behind us through the city. I pull my scarf across the bridge of my nose and wait, taking in the view from this pontoon. 

There’s the parliament building with its self-important, authoritative demeanour, shamming along like minor royalty in the shadow of the Palace. Along the tree lined avenue lurk the Banking Houses, disguised as commonplace and functional buildings, belying their radical and gambling personalities, only an accidental madness of lions heads on their facades silently roaring out the reality of their carnivorous personalities.

And there is the tiny island of Skeppsholmen, the traditional centre of military power, when military power meant canons and horses and innocent young men forced into oversized blue coats to be bayoneted for King and Country. Along the shore are the low-slung butter-coloured barrack buildings, feeding into the salmon coloured Admiralty House, a strangely dainty and frivolous mansion seemingly designed by some exhibitionist vampire. 

I look back from where I came, the wind biting as I’ve dallied too long, and there up upon the rising cliffs of Södermalm, is the sunflower yellow Katarina Church, casting its eye across the city, ever watchful to entrap any lost or wayward souls.

And then I look up, heavenwards, and if I could have seen through the duvet of light porpoise and charcoal cloud that is perpetually billowing above the city, I’d have seen nothing but the dark universe spanning infinite light years in every direction. And below, if my sight could have penetrated the 2 billion year old Precambrian granite layers, I’d have seen the molten iron core boiling in hellish fury as the planet continues forever circling the sun like a roulette ball locked in its gravitational spacetime groove.

The dog shakes off the snow with a corkscrew wriggle and glances at me before trotting on, oblivious and satisfied, casting his hunter’s eye towards the tufted and mandarin ducks and the coots and the elegant mute swans as they cram themselves along the jetty, daily piled high with seed and feed during these long winter months.

2.

The dog and I continue on through the icy city, wandering past those pompous buildings from which the power to patrol and police the world oozes like putrid treacle, those buildings that regulate and manage our lives, those gatekeepers of our minds and souls. And as the wind blows I find myself imagining other ways of embracing and dancing with the world, deeply human metaphorical and allegorical ways that we now shy away from, ways that have been all but abandoned in these soulless days.

As the dog and I push ourselves against the glacial winds, these metaphors and allegories grow and flourish and I am suddenly pummelled by a wilder wind that whirls and tumbles from the past, through generation after generation, blowing into this present day, a slippery and elusive wind that evades detection or capture because we choose to not see, or notice or acknowledge the existence of this spellbinding wind that pulsates through our blood and genes and our minds and whips through our societies and our cultures and each and every one of us. A Great Wind that blows a storm through the epochs of humanity from the deepest history to the far distant future. 

And now this stormy cyclone of thought encircles me and lifts me into the heavens and I see generation after generation of Stockholmers, like a great rhythm of cherry blossoms, unfolding in the ever flowing current of time. I see 10,000 years rolling backwards into deep antiquity as the towering ice sheets recede and people lope into this newly unfurled land, following the herds of aurochs and bison and moose and deer. And I see people not yet torn from the world, but unified with the flow of the mysterious rhythms of our Mother Earth.

And then the cyclone returns me momentarily to Strömbron where I am suddenly crushed and claustrophobic and imprisoned by all the instructions and rules and violent orders that emanate like a stinking odour from these pompous and overblown buildings. I am furious with the shameless egomania of the blue-blooded Palace and enraged by the parochial parody of the Grand Hotel and appalled by the violent parasitical banks that rip us apart, and finally I am broken by the parliament building that has abandoned us to the vampiric market we now call home.

The cyclone then carries me over teeming oceans where I see men greedily conspiring to possess the world with their creaking wooden ships that plunder and destroy, sailing like knives to slice all those embryonic possibilities, to silence songs now never sung, to throttle thoughts now never birthed, and to extinguish the loves that now will never cast their tender spells. I see a constellation of flourishing futures strangled by these men who must own and dominate and force their brokenness upon the world.

And I see fires blazing in the past and great billowing clouds of smoke blowing through the present where I see more men taking bellows and feeding the fires and fanning the flames so even more smoke chokes into the future where I hear voices of confusion and despair shouting over each other that all is lost, all is, all is lost.

3.

And while I was being carried through time and space, I dared to look as hard as I could, and I saw that things need not be the way there are, that everything is but a shimmering concept, an agreement, a human theatre in an enforced and arbitrary pretend kingdom. And as I drifted over the snowy mountain ranges and the great forests and the mighty oceans I dared to follow other thoughts that have been accumulating for an eternity, sculpted by winds blowing from the past, thoughts that can not be unthought, sounds that can not be unheard, feelings that cannot be unfelt.

And then I know this life is but a fleeting moment, a twinkling of time, and I know there is still an abundance of love to harvest, but right now we are being held down on the rigid tracks of men. I know that with their scant words, they try to diminish the sublime landscapes that lie beyond their reach, within ourselves, forever fertile and bountiful and waiting, such hallowed ground that we let them triumphantly extinguish because we will not open our eyes. But I opened my eyes, and I looked. And I saw the emptiness we’ve hollowed out of the spectacular enormity of potential. And now my eyes can never close, for I have seen the truth that can never be unseen. Look over yonder. Look into yourself. Just look. For the fertile and bountiful within you is waiting.

And then, as the dog and I turned back toward home, the cyclone began to subside, but it always blusters and blows, forever on the horizon, forever in the atmosphere, forever ready to lift us all beyond these childish things that are but fools gold in this universe of riches.