Yesterday was certainly the blackest day in my life for a very long time, for years in fact. With nothing bad concretely happening but all of the nagging depression and tiredness I’ve been experiencing lately peaking sharply and somewhat unexpectedly. I took a day off from work to visit my grandmother in a hospital in my hometown. She’s 81 years old and has been, quite astonishingly, living on her own until only very recently when her memory has started to perform nasty tricks on her. Now she’s being treated for early stages of dementia and her condition keeps wavering to and fro. Sometimes she recognises no-one and the things she speaks of are very unsettling. I’ve been putting off visiting her, probably because I’ve been wanting to ignore her sickness and the effect it has had on her, but since she’s been asking why I haven’t visited and since the doctors said her passing is only a matter of days I had no other option than to go.

Luckily her condition has improved a little since the “only a few days left”- sentence was delivered. When I entered, she was sitting in a hallway, tormenting the nurses with a colourful recital of the dream she had had last night. This recital wasn’t lacking in volume in deliverance because she’s almost deaf and her hearing aid keeps malfunctioning. This recital wasn’t lacking in digressive bypaths and sudden changes of subject either. Which was kind of heartwarming and encouraging because that’s the way I’ve come to know and want to remember her. She recognised me and seemed very pleased with me being there. I kneeled beside her, put my head on her lap and wept bitterly because she looked so frail and her voice had lost so much of its’ previous timbre and strenght. She stroked my hair and told me everything will be fine again once she gets better and gets back to her home. This only made me weep more.

I spent an hour in her company and thought it better to leave when she started getting sleepy and mistaking me first for my brother and then for a doctor. Upon leaving I had a very strong premonition that this was the last time I saw her alive. This is the woman who practically raised me since my mother was working a lot. We lived in a big house, my parents and my brother, my mothers’ parents and my grandfathers’ mother. So there was never a problem with finding someone to look after the kids. I guess I had a good and healthy childhood because I can’t remember anything of it. I was loved and cared for and of the four cousins I was the eldest and grandmothers’ favourite one. She was already retired from work when I was a kid so she had a lot of time for me and my brother. Unfortunately she divorced my grandfather when I was eight years old and moved away. That was probably the end of a magical childhood for me but she didn’t move very far and we continued to be on close terms all the way until puberty entered the picture and started whispering all kinds of things in my ear, about independence and growing up. I moved to Helsinki and lately have been seeing her a few times a year.

Now her time seems to be up and I’m taking this even harder than I thought I would.

My mornings are usually somewhat complicated affairs. The alarm clock goes off at an unearthly hour of can’t-even-mention-it-here, more often than not coming as a devastatingly unexpected surprise and therefore not very fondly greeted. Sometime later I’m to be found sitting at the kitchentable, staring at the pictures and words on the morning paper, reading the articles but not really grasping what is actually said in the text. Headlines and captions may penetrate the fog of my brain still waiting to wake up properly but any other arrangements of letters beyond those is just that, randomly arranged sets of letters and therefore mostly unintelligible to me. During the ensuing day, after I’ve reached proper mental functionality again, some of these things may trickle back to my mind, form into coherent sentences and start to make sense.

This is how daily news are processed in my private quarters of the head. I regularly have my moments of Eureka when some interesting piece of news comes filtering back to me in the afternoon, all vague and elusive because the details were too much to handle in those fragile early morning moments, and I can barely contain myself for the rest of the day until I get back home to read more carefully the article and quench my thirst for knowledge upon that particular matter. Often only to find out that The Loved One has already taken the newspaper out to trash on her way to work.

Naturally all this doesn’t apply to weekend mornings when I have plenty of time to spend with the newspaper and digest the information contained therein. And this doesn’t apply to the next item either, for it was so curious and interesting in the first place that I read it immediately with thought and care, snapping up one level unusually early towards daytime consciousness, and as a result was late for work. Which didn’t really matter since my work mostly involves only me, labouring away at my own pace. Here’s the item of interest.

Caravaggio was an Italian artist who lived, painted, romped around and generally made a difference briefly at the start of 17^th century. To the left we see his self portrait where he poses as Bacchus, looking utterly disturbing and disturbed. Antero Kahila, on the other hand, is a Finnish artist who has worked since 2003 on reconstructing a Caravaggio painting called “St Matthew and the Angel” and has now finished this gargantuan undertaking. The result is being displayed at Sinebrychoff Art Museum in Helsinki. The original painting was destroyed in a fire during the bombing of Berlin on 1945 and only black and white photographs of the painting remain to this day. But now it’s reconstructed, using those photographs and, to define the colours, other works by Caravaggio and the “consultation of the highly acclaimed international group of experts.”

Hip hooray. Now what on earth might drive a person to do such a thing? Especially a person whose original works clearly have a spirit of their own and show the artists’ talent and vision to be far removed from themes used by Caravaggio? Why would someone spend years in trying to create as accurate as possible a copy of something already done by someone else? And by someone so alien who comes from so different a background, presumably with values, opinions, instincts and lifestyle so different that were these two people put in the same room together they would hardly find anything in common between them. I bet Kahila doesn’t sleep his nights fully clothed with a sword on his side. And Caravaggio would probably have some very sharp things to say about (not to mention poke at) the impersonator, as he reportedly had in his late years been in the habit of going around mercilessly mocking other painters he felt were lacking in talent.

Talent should be used to express your own visions, not to replicate someone elses’. I’m drawing a far-fetched analogy here, but this somehow reminds me of the recent interview with a current Guns ‘n Roses drummer where he tells how he replicated exactly, note-to-note his predecessors’ drum parts for 30 songs in the studio, taking seven months to do so. The cost of two days in that studio equals the whole budget for the upcoming Sinisthra album. The absurdity of this goes way beyond the limits of my understanding.

On the positive side, this has resparked my interest on Caravaggio and I’ve now examined his works a bit more closely, something I’ve been meaning to do since I saw a documentary of him on TV some time ago. As a person he seems to have been the classically unbalanced not-fit-for-society type, of the kind most often responsible for most attractive artistic creations. This here Wikipedia link is a splendid starting point on everything related to this fascinating artist.Here’s a list of his known paintings. Check out the tremendous amount of emotion and expressiveness he’s crammed into his works. Some of them look like photographs, the use of contrast and painstaking detail is at times just stunning and most of them have characters with eyes that lock gazes with you and pour their hurt and misery upon you, ignoring the timegap of several centuries.

I’m too worked up now to babble about wines or music or anything else anymore so I’ll just stop writing and stare for a while how Holofernes gets his due below.

The autumn races on, almost completely devoid of any positive sides a season might hold concealed within the veils of its’ cloak. Almost, but not totally. There’s something about the crisp, dry and bright autumn afternoons, something uplifting about going outside and sauntering around the full blown colours of nature getting ready for its’ beauty sleep. Soon it will be replaced by wet sleet pouring from the sky and general all-round greyness and lightlessness of which it will be very very hard indeed to find any positive sides at all. Apart from the fact that it too will pass in due time but this fact is so firmly labelled under the tag “cold comfort” that it doesn’t really count. So for now I will imbibe as much enjoyment from this season as possible. Mostly by utilising my carefully honed technique of observing the changes of season from the warmer and cosier (i.e. inner) side of my kitchen window.

THIS WEEKS’ GLIMPSE INTO VISUAL ARTISTRY:
Daniel Kessler is an American artist who churns out endless variations of a handful of naivistic themes he has developed. He lists among his influences “the 17th century Dutch masters and the Italian Renaissance painters”, somewhat hilariously I think, looking at his renderings of a baseball or the flag of Texas. His art prints are massively popular, practically sold everywhere and I’m unsuccessfully trying to avoid an uncalled-for (as well as unaccounted for) elitist, whiny and snobbish stance here because his art to me conjures up terms like “lowest common denominator” and as a person he radiates the kind of slick American qualities I categorically abhor. His smile is disgustingly jovial too, and he has a bad haircut. Just look at the picture here.

His dog paintings are lovely, though, and that makes it all ok to me. I have two of his framed prints adorning the single wall we have in our bedroom (don’t waste your time trying to figure out how it’s possible to have only a single wall in a room) and there’s something utterly heartwarming and irresistable about a picture of a group of totally expressionless dogs, particularly if they happen to have an apple on their head. Just look at the gallery here and see if you are able to disagree after witnessing those eager blank staring eyes, the soothingly geometric shapes and the warm and nicely contrasting choice of colours. A stroke of genius in my opinion. Shame about his overexploitation of the topic and not-so-successful attempts at broadening the palette with other creatures.

Recently I’ve grown more and more fond of his Geometrics too. Now I need to carefully keep in mind his (allegedly) displeasingly American values and looks so I won’t inadvertently start to like his works too much.THIS WEEKS’ SOURCE OF DELIGHT:
This week I’ve been mostly focusing on different ways to raise the quality of my everyday life. Which wasn’t exactly lacking anything significant to start with, but it’s nice to acquire things that make life easier in their own specially designated way. While it’s still possible, what with The End Of The Age Of Prosperity drawing near and the banks collapsing around the world. So I went out and bought a Kokki casserole pot, for stewing all kinds stuff in the oven, and a stupendously sharp Victorinox chef’s knife, for chopping up the stuff before putting it in the pot. The stew is brewing in the oven as I’m writing this, emitting all kinds of odours hinting heavily at such adjectives as delicious and mouthwatering.

The wine will be served from Riedel Vinum Bordeaux glasses I also purchased, from the same store as the aforementioned equipment. This store had an exotic way of pricing the glasses: there were no pricetags on the boxes, just the one on the shelf stating the price of a box. Some boxes contained a single glass while other boxes contained a set of two glasses. I arrived at an outrageous conclusion that included taking a box with two glasses (as I had intended in the first place) instead of a box with a single glass. So I kind of got two glasses for the price of one. This was nice because the price of a single Riedel glass is close to 30€ and numerous are the occasions in the past when I’ve stood in front of a Riedel shelf, sorely wanting to purchase some but, daunted by the price, not doing so. Now I’m contemplating upon the possibility of returning to this particular store in the near future because it’s becoming increasingly hard to stay alive nowadays without having proper glasses for sparkling and white wine as well.

So, welcome, Recession. We toast you with our lead crystallic glasses before succumbing before you.

THIS WEEKS’ BOTTLES OF CHOICE:
Fazi Battaglia Rosso Conero is an Italian red wine of mediocre magnificence having most of the characteristics I associate with (and like about) Italian wines: a hint of what I assume to be cherries and a fair amount of watered-downess in the taste (although its’ labelled as “full-bodied”). Montepulciano and Sangiovese are both the kind of grapes you can’t go utterly wrong with, in my opinion, and this was a treat with Spaghetti Bolognese I prepared with extra care and attention to detail. If such attributes are applicable to plain bolognese, and in this case they are. In fact in my mind almost anything is attributable to anything else if it feels right on an universal level, no matter how unconventional it may seem at first. This approach often leads to interesting and occasionally inedible results in the kitchen.

Anyway, this was in no way an exceptional wine (as can’t be expected in this price range) but still nice enough to leave a positive memory. And the label looked pretty with no information at all of the kind I could inform myself with because it was all in Italian.

Piedemonte Reserva is a surprisingly lovely red wine from Spain. My past experiences with red wines from Spain haven’t been exactly earth shattering but this one was a treat, especially at such a low price. Charmingly full-bodied, but in an elegant way, as opposed to the overflowing richness of taste in some of the in-your-face new world wines I’ve had. I’m usually somewhat lost for words when it comes to describing a bouquet but this had an aroma of liquorice I haven’t spotted in any wine this clearly before. It complemented wonderfully a casserole of beef and root vegetables and held its’ ground on its’ own as well. Usually a bottle of wine lasts for several days and dinners in our household but this one was empty within hours of its’ uncorking.

I haven’t been very fascinated with Tempranillo before but this forced me to slightly readjust my views. The label also looks very stylish so it further cemented the overall positive impression.

I’ve been labouring away with this Kalevala project for weeks now, using up all my limited free time and am still only roughly halfway through with it. The waves of desperation casually roll in too deep onto my beach of ataraxia but I’m soldiering on. It’s rewarding to have so many different sources to draw from but it can (and will) also cause me to sidetrack pretty easily. I have the original, actual text that looks at the Kalevala storylines from an slightly different angle, then I have a Kalevala in Finnish, as well as three different English translations. Leafing through the translations I often see a sidetrack presenting itself and I can’t help sinking into the well of endless comparisons of how this person has seen and described this particular situation and how it differs from this other persons’ view of it. When I snap back from these comparisons, I sometimes find myself having thrown the entire evening away on folly with no actual work done and bedtime looming just around the corner. It’s fun, though. Here’s an example:

In chapter 10 Ilmarinen is treacherously tricked into climbing a tree, despite his eternal smithness and other gallant qualities, and the tree expresses its’ sentiments about the nature of Ilmarinen’s stunt like this: "Voipa miestä mieletöintä, äkkioutoa urosta!” This caused some amusement to arise and lighten my otherwise hefty burden of translational aspirations, “äkkiouto uros” being such an entertaining previously unheard-of expression, literally translating as “steeply strange male”. The amount of amusement gradually increased as I dug out different translations for the sentence. The oldest one seems to be "O thou senseless, thoughtless hero, thou hast neither wit nor instinct” which is a kind of an so-so effort, not really catching the mood of what’s happening. The next one, from the year 1963, was “Woe is a foolish man, a quite inexperienced person!”, a much more accurate and apt take on the subject and my amusement deepened considerably. It reminded me of “You son of a silly person!”, a classic Monty Python insult. Now we’re talking, I thought; National Epic infused with occasional Monty Pythonisms predating Monty Python.

The newest one from 1989 is "Alas for a mindless man, an utterly strange fellow!” and this really hits the nail on the head in my opinion, being a very good translation, as well as having been a complete and royal waste of time with no practical advantages to me or to the text I’m trying to churn out. This Keith Bosley version, where the quote comes from, seems to be the best one of the translations. Unfortunately my copy of it is a smallish sized paperback version with almost 700 pages so it’s very irritating and impractical to deal with. Because of this, and to decrease the amount of frustration caused by having to wrestle with a book that’s too small for its’ content, I’m mostly relying on the much more comfortable-sized version by Francis Peabody Magoun. Which also is quite good, but in a different way. And it opens neatly, and stays open neatly without cracking its’ spine. So, if the lyrics on the next Amorphis album fail to live up to the expectations of an casual, ardent Amorphis fan, it’s not my fault at all, it’s because the best available book for source material was an Oxford World’s Classics version and therefore way too hard to read through properly.

THIS WEEKS’ SOURCE OF DELIGHT:
Well actually not the actual delight of the whole actual week as such. I chanced upon the lyrics for an Irish folk song “Three Drunken Maidens” some time ago, appreciated them quite a bit, what with all the pushing about of jugs by a trio of jolly wenches who clearly enjoy their states of inebriation very much, and just now stumbled onto this here video:




THIS WEEKS’ BOTTLES OF CHOICE:
Cono Sur Pinot Noir is a red wine from Chile that got rave reviews in a Finnish wine magazine. I found nothing extraordinary in it. It was flat and one dimensional on the first try, probably because I served it cool as it says on the label, got better after having gasped for air overnight but still failed to reach any kind of magnificence. Substantially ok and helped in fortifying my resolution to look more towards the reds of the old world.

Grüner Veltliner Lössterassen is a white wine from Austria with a horribly cheap-looking label that promises a lot less than it actually delivers. This was my first take on this grape and a much more successful one than the recent disaster with gewürztraminer. However, it seems to have failed in making a significant mark on me, since I had it only a week ago and can’t now recall any kind of distinctive qualities anymore. Could be there wasn’t any to start with. Could also have something to do with my overall capability of not really remembering that well what has happened recently. Nice, but not remarkable at all and won’t be purchased again.