plum seven
mynälahti bay, finland, re: largeness, the sun, residency hello
Moi! Greetings from scenic FINLAND!
I’ve been here at the Saari Residence since mid-January, cozied up in the cold southwestern countryside, about 30 minutes outside of Turku. I’ll be here until the end of February, wanted to write a little email while this body was at rest. Lots of commotion to come in the coming month-and-a-half, hopefully more plum with that.
I’m here at Saari ostensibly to work on a performance about the hammered dulcimer and queerness. I have done that, although there have been lots of detours. I’ve been walking in the snow! I’ve been drinking juniper tea! I’ve been waiting for it to get windy so I can stethoscope-microphone a tree and hear the creaking inside! This is what I’m spending my time on, instead of, say, memorizing my lines or practicing with a metronome.
I had anticipated that my experience of Finnish January would be one of darkness darkness darkness darkness darkness darkness1. On my arrival, the sun rose at 9am and set at 3pm2. I brought industrial vitamin D supplements. At first available opportunity, I bought candles in a futile attempt to romance the night.
And the beginning of my stay was, indeed, very dark! The day was precarious, evaporating if you didn’t cling to it. I made sure to get up early and linger at the window, trying to slip myself into my new circadian envelope. Once the sun went down, the day was obviously exhausted, and I found it hard to do anything at all. I huddled in the tiny studio apartment and read Queer Phenomenology until I fell asleep.
This pattern didn’t hold as expected.
In fact, once the first week was over, my Finnish winter has been an experience of (continuous and noticeably changing) light. Now, mid-February, the sun rises at 8am and sets at 6pm3 — the day has really truly stretched out before me. Have you been in a river with a strong current? The days feel like that — you are just inside of it, without a lot of agency or option, but can sense that it has picked up course.
This leads me to an interesting thing I’m running into with “time.” Let me explain it to you by cutting time up. Was it Plato who said the gift of humanity was the ability to cut things into pieces? Here are some for the purpose of a plum:
Very Tiny (seconds)
Tiny (minutes)
Small (tens of minutes)
Medium (hours)
Large (days to months)
Very Large (years)
Astronomical (too big to think about)
Now. I’m a musician. To understand what each bit of time is about — what it feels like, what it means — I’d like to translate my taxonomy through musical examples.
SO!
Very Tiny (seconds) — Not a lot of “music” at this scale, but there are a bounty of truly wonderful moments. (see, idk, a salt shaker. Or: a bird. Or: a bell?! Ugh, a bell, wow.)
Tiny (minutes)— Lots of music here, hard to pick (see, idk, Naked in Manhattan — inexplicably trapped in my head.)
Small (tens of minutes)—A good deal of music here, maybe a little less than tiny (see, idk, your favorite album or Become Ocean.)
Medium (hours)— Some music here, but I don’t engage with this scale super often due to my fried attention span and need to eat every five hours (see, idk, Einstein on the Beach or maybe near an upper limit, 9 Beet Stretch.)
Large (days to months)— [see below]
Very Large (years)4 — I can think of just a tiny collection of very inspiring very singular works of art here (see Organ² / ASLSP or Dream House or, if you want to stretch “music” even further, Tehching Hsieh’s year long performances.)
Astronomical (too big to think) — This one is your birthright, although nobody has lived long enough yet to make a song this long. If you think about the Earth as a cosmic composition we are all in the early middle of it right now.
Here’s the hangup: I struggle with that Large category.5
And to start, I can’t even find simple language for a duration like this. Longer than a day, shorter than a season. That’s a long time! But also not that long. A little bit of a long time. Who asks me to really, really encounter something for a little bit of a long time?
Most public art doesn’t count, you have too sustained an engagement with it.6 Not much music is a month long, and god bless you if you try. I’m looking for an alien spacecraft that hovers over the city for a business quarter and then mysteriously leaves. Not many alien spacecraft in Q1 these days!
All this brings me to the weird time-thing I’m experiencing: over the course of my Finnish month-and-a-half, I have felt the day genuinely metamorphose. Each day is imperceptibly longer, but after a week it’s very much perceptible. And two weeks, I’m in a new country entirely. The light here in Finland has changed at a Large scale and it’s confounding.
It’s so hard to describe this feeling! It’s bizarre, it’s LSD. It’s semantic satiation, repeating a word until it’s just mouth sounds. Hallucination before your very ears! Except! Except! Finland is doing this with the concept of “a day.” It’s trippy as hell. I just didn’t know you could semantically satiate light.
The seasons move so slowly in the Midwest that I often feel like I’ve been hypnotized into them. It’s not that winter hits all at once, it’s just more and more days you wear a sweater and then a coat every few days and then a coat every day, and suddenly you are trudging through the dark under your nuclear parka and you have the terrible annual thought: “When was the last time I wore only a t-shirt?”
This Finland thing is different in that I remember before vividly. I remember January when the desperation stuck to the day! I remember the candles and my failed crepuscular romance! I remember this in my bones.
And now, my solar marriage is all of a sudden rock-steady. I can trust that she will still be around after a handful of hours in the studio. When she leaves, the goodbyes are long and luxurious and colorful and we all coo at the sky.7
I imagine you could carry these words towards politics or toward the self or toward some very exciting aesthetic investigations at unconventional scales. But those are half-baked thoughts emerging from my delirious, sun-stalking head, and I need to practice the dulcimer.
Meantime, I’m sending love from the Archipelago Sea, in submission to that river of light. Here are some Finnish birds in the morning outside my door:
And here is that same clip but slowed down so the birds sound FREAKY
<3
c
This part of the year is, I’m told by the Finns, way better re:light than you’d think. The really intense darkness hits at the end of the calendar year, and it’s apparently stupefying in a concussion sort of way. January is much softer (especially with snow freshly on the ground, brightening everything up), but still, everybody Finnish carried a January look on their face. I can’t describe it. You know that feeling when you get hungry after eating an entire bag of Trader Joe’s Elote Corn Chips? Full on emptiness, still empty? Like that.
15:00 for the Europeans playing along from home. For the record, I can’t keep any of this straight. You write the military time, but you pronounce 15h as “three?” And you dorks say the imperial system is confusing.
18h
The work of my life operates at the Very Large. The cleanliness of my sink is a performance piece that takes place in Very Large and is bounded by the moments when I move apartments.
The point of Very Large is that you see it and then you leave and you then you come by later and then you leave and then you come by later still. It changes with you and it changes you and, to some extent, the dishes are always there, even when they’re not.
Another frame, perhaps: the scale of Very Large is that of a human relationship, be it acquaintanceship or marriage or lifelong cult membership.
I mean, okay. I can come up with examples because I have an MFA. The Artist is Present, sure. Bob Wilson’s early work in Iran took a week to perform. But I haven’t interacted with these works at scale, at least not really. The closest I can think of is MOCREP’s Work Week. I watched the live stream in real time while at my desk job at Northwestern.
And still, these aren’t even approaching “continuous viewership for a month-and-a-half,” which is a very unusual span of time to feel.
What I mean by this is that the bean has witnessed me as a VERY different person. And it still accepts me, having seen me as a 21-year-old! Can you imagine.
That is, when the sun decides to visit! The cloudiness is another thing I could write about, but I’ll spare you more Weather Thoughts. Thanks for being here, footnote pal. I do it all for you.