“Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.”
–Walter Benjamin
Ruminant cold; clouds like machine parts, nothing fancy, a set of gears low on the horizon, gulls walking sideways in the market square.
My childhood wasn’t magical.
There were reindeer and old men and drunken sailors.
There were trolley cars filled with tough old Finns who had survived two wars with Russia and now retained entire dissertations on hunger in their heads.
Lights came on early. Helsinki. A darkness inside a darkness–weather “became” philosophy.
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” (Kierkegaard) Snow comes like a sequence of mathematical ideas.
The cold is numerical tension.
“Don’t spoil my circles,” said Archimedes. I see a very old man making circles on the esplanade–looping circles built by oversized feet in the Finnish twilight.
“Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.” (Democritus)
Look! A city of opinions!
Architectures of opinion!
But like Einstein, the snow does not believe in mathematics.
The city of my boyhood is a great polyhedron of shadows.
I have found in general that shadows are more reliable than ideas of heaven; more of scale with mathematics and poetry; shadows are the daughters of time.
Winter in the far north is a miracle multiplied beyond necessity.
Leibniz wouldn’t like it here.
Even the ravens of Helsinki know the unconscious arithmetic of winter.
This is no joke or conceit.
I once saw a raven standing in an empty baby carriage.
This was just outside a downtown department store.
The raven was lifting one foot, then the other, carefully, as though composing a stationary dance.
The mind is a question, asked of another question, the imperative, shadow asked of shadow.
When the parents came out with their baby the raven was gone.
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Planet of the Blind 