"...He was just a seed that had to be planted. We brought it food, and it gave us dreams as presents. They showed places where you really are immortal, or live many lives at once. I don’t care about what the elders say. I don’t care about knowing the fifty names of ice. I want to live. I want to see the Inner System. I want to see the sky cities on Venus. I want to see Earth."
In Mieli’s koto, the children told stories about Earth. The burning place, the place of pain, where tuonetars bind the damned dead with viper ropes and whip them with iron chains, where you drink dark waters and forget who you are. Where the Great Tree grew and was cut down. Where the people of her koto lived until Ilmatar carried them away.
Mieli preferred stories about Seppo the megabuilder who sang a starship out of ice and sailed to another galaxy to find his love, the Daughter of the Spider, or Lemmi the thief who stole one of Kuutar’s twelve lives, ate it, burst open and became the first of the Little Suns.
The Earth stories always gave her nightmares, troubled dreams where she would crawl along the shores of a dark river, her body pressed down by the heavy hand of gravity, face scraping against the black rough gravel, certain that the tuonetars were just behind her but without strength to run or fly.
‘Why would you want to go there?’ she asked.
Hannu Rajaniemi (2012-09-26T22:00:00+00:00). The Fractal Prince (Kindle Locations 2439-2449). Hachette Littlehampton. Kindle Edition.
For aeons it took us sailing, we never sank,
a thousand times we changed captains.
We never paid account to cataclysms,
we went full ahead, through everything.
And on our mast as eternal lookout
we have the Great Chief, the Sun.
From “The Crazy Ship” by Odysséas Elytis
=-=-=
Orion
Far back when I went zig-zagging
through tamarack pastures
you were my genius, you
my cast-iron Viking, my helmed
lion-heart king in prison.
Years later now you're young
my fierce half-brother, staring
down from that simplified west
your breast open, your belt dragged down
by an oldfashioned thing, a sword
the last bravado you won't give over
though it weighs you sown as you stride
and the stars in it are dim
and maybe have stopped burning.
But you burn, and I know it;
as I throw back my head to take you in
an old transfusion happens again:
divine astronomy is nothing to it.
Indoors I bruise and blunder,
break faith, leave ill enough
alone, a dead child born in the dark.
Night cracks up over the chimney,
pieces of time, frozen geodes
come showering down in the grate.
A man reaches behind my eyes
and finds them empty
a woman's head turns away
from my head in the mirror
children are dying my death
and eating crumbs of my life.
Pity is not your forte.
Calmly you ache up there
pinned aloft in your crow's nest,
my speechless pirate!
You take it all for granted
and when I look you back
it's with a starlike eye
shooting its cold and egotistical spear
where it can so least damage.
Breathe deep! No hurt, no pardon
out here in the cold with you
you with your back to the wall.
-Adrienne Rich
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