The house we build for our memories to inhabit sometimes is a large one, with rooms and floors aplenty and countless closets and cupboards, some of them placed there on purpose in the original blueprints, and some just having materialized there at some point, unknown to us and without our consent. These unintentional spaces are necessary too, dark and crowded corners to give contrast to the airy and cosy living rooms of the mind, to complete the peaceful and harmonious surroundings for our momeries to dwell in, and to thrive in.

But what does it matter where our memories live if we never visit them? I can’t hold memories in my head, they leak out and disappear, vanish into ether, or at the very least change shape and derange as time goes by. My being consists of things I’ve experienced, feelings I’ve felt and thoughts I’ve thought and although I don’t actively need to revisit them during my daily routines I’d still very much like to keep them somewhere safe where they can remain untouched by passing time.

And my mind definitely is not such a place. It is capable of carrying the most basic and profound recollections of experiences that have shaped me but all the nuances tend to fade away and entangle with other similar memories. These nuances are what gives hues to colours and depth to flavours, the ability to remember little details surrounding the Big Things. These nuances add flesh to an otherwise barren skeleton of the Self and breathe life into shapeless clay the lasting memories are moulded of. So these nuances are pretty fucking important, come to think of it, and these nuances are so easily and quickly forgotten, unconstant and ephemeral, that they need a warm and secure home.

The house of my memories therefore needs to be made of words. And these words need to be written down regularly enough to maintain a sense of bigger picture and to contain as much of what I might like to revisit in the future as possible. This occurred to me as I skimmed through some of my past blog entries recently, surprised at how soon the everyday things get forgotten, and how much delight they can bring later on if I was fast enough to write them down in the first place.

Thus, a conclusion: I need to update this blog more often. Each entry testifies that the past was not just shapeless and grey blur. Reading about what a particular sunset looked like and how horrible a specific wine tasted brings the original memory back, sometimes vague and sometimes sharp, but back nevertheless. And that’s what matters. Most of the things that feel too prosaic now are not so in the long run. Especially if I adorn them with adjectives fascinating and colourful enough.

This might be a good place to include a picture of me and The Loved One, on a moonlit beach after an unforgettable late night dinner in an exquisite restaurant. Just in case I forget, and because it was lovely.

There’s currently an exhibition called “Surrealism & Beyond” at Tennis Palace Art Museum in Helsinki and I was mightily impressed by at least a dozen paintings they have on display there, as opposed to my normal “easily unimpressed”-mode where I find maybe 1 or 2 items per an exhibition I visit slightly interesting, hastily shuffling through room after room full of paintings artists have shed their passion and agony into, for casual viewers and thankless ingrates like me to quickly glimpse upon while wondering what the gift shop might have on offer.

This exhibition was something else and I strongly recommend it to just about everyone. ( Just as strongly as I recommend the Kalevala exhibition at Ateneum I’ve seen twice now and have entirely failed to write anything about in this blog although I found it very intriguing and inspiring. It’s still on for several weeks before it’s replaced by a Picasso exhibition). The first artist to catch my attention was Joseph Cornell. I had never heard of him before and was most entranced by his beautiful cut and paste works. Some of his wonderful collages can be viewed here. A flash presentation of his “visual poetry” can be seen and experienced (if you don’t get lost among the waves of hard-to-locate links) at Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination.

Cunningly placed on top of the stairs leading to second floor of the exhibition was this:

It looked stupendously huge and oppressing, hanging there and sucking in my attention and I was flabbergasted by its’ visual force. It’s a René Magritte painting called ”Castle Of The Pyrenees” and, needless to say, made such an impact on me that I had no other choice than to purchase a book of Magritte’s works at the gift shop. Disappointingly this particular painting is not included in the book but it’s not exactly the only impressive thing he’s done so I’ve enjoyed some quality time while leafing through its’ pages. Just take a look at ”The Human Condition”. Pictures like this pour a generous amount of bliss into the heart of the spectator, whether he wanted it or not. Pictures like this and digging up some background information of them also takes surprisingly large amounts of one’s time if one is not careful. I just realised that I’ve spent hours writing this entry and reading about the things I’ve written about, instead of preparing the lasagne and decanting the chianti I was supposed to be doing so I need to wrap this up quickly now before I starve to death. A lot remains unsaid of what I planned on saying, about the subject of surrealism and generally about how I experience art. Maybe I’ll say it in future blog entries if I haven’t (surrealistically) forgotten by then.

Me and The Loved One spent an entirely fulfilling fortnight recently over at Fuengirola, Spain, where her father owns a house up on the hills. We had taken a taxi from the Malaga airport when we arrived, but the results were somewhat unsatisfactory, as the streets in Fuengirola are undergoing massive renewal work and the traffic arrangements were a bit on the chaotic side. Meaning the already complicated and hard-to-follow street map was now in full disarray and most of the roads were closed for cars. Our taxi driver wasn’t able to find his way to our destination even though he had a GPS navigator in the car, with us, not very helpfully, fuming in the back seat, feverishly leafing through a pocket dictionary in order to communicate with a driver who didn’t speak a single word of English.

My Spanish vocabulary consists of some 20 words that, when put together in any order, seldomly form an intelligible sentence. The Loved One has a bit firmer grasp of the language, aided by her natural tendency to emphasise her points by flailing her hands about in a very mediterranean manner while speaking. Sadly this didn’t help in finding the right route either, and finally, after many a cul-de-sac, desperate madre de dioses by the driver and a lot of consulting the locals on the streets but mostly by sheer luck, taking some 60 minutes to complete a 20-minute drive, we ended up on the right road and the right house.

This experience didn’t leave us with an exceedingly positive opinion of the local taxi drivers and their competence so, when the holiday was over and it was time to return home, I thought it’s not so bad an idea to walk to the Los Boliches station at the centre of the town and take a train to the airport instead of trying to call a taxi and see whether it arrived or not. It’s a good 20 minutes walk, at a leisurely stroll, mostly downhill all the way. So quite a long one but not entirely lethal by any means as we had taken and survived it a dozen times by then already.

During our two weeks we had hoarded much more stuff to take home than we had the luggage space to fit into, so some new luggage was needed. The biggest problem was a largish painting I had acquired. I didn’t want to remove it from it’s framing and roll it up so the only option was to buy a big enough suitcase for it. It soon became clear that luggage of required capacity wasn’t easily available and the only one I was able to find was from a clearance sale of an oriental bazaar, on the last day of our holiday. It was pink, lovely, of enormous size and hiper oferta at 25€. I loved it unconditionally, even when the handle broke halfway off after I had cautiously pulled it behind me on the streets for some 15 minutes.

Back at the house I fixed the handle with sturdy bolts and we merrily packed our bags. The Loved One had two flightbags to take care of, and I had two full-sized ones, the smaller weighing a bit over 20 kilos and my new pink one 30 kilos. We had reserved plenty of time for the procedure of leaving the premises, this including going through 3 printed sheets of paper with instructions on how to properly turn the electricity and water off, leave everything as desired and lock and bolt up all the doors and gates. Naturally checking and rechecking every detail took longer than expected and eventually we left the house in haste, huffing and puffing because we didn’t have the extra time we thought we would have, with the sun smugly shining in full force and the temperature firmly resting at 30°C.

After some 100m of advancing steadily the handle of my pink suitcase broke off completely. Which wasn’t all that surprising, considering how badly it coped with it’s own empty weight earlier in the day. Matters became drastically complicated because of this and it began to dawn on me that it wasn’t much help if the road slopes downwards when it’s made of all kinds of bumpy materials that keep regularly changing to other bumpy materials, making the tiny wheels of my bargain luggage squek for mercy. The pavements weren’t broad enough to pass all the trees and lampposts with both bags side by side, either.

It soon became apparent that the pink suitcase would be my cross and this was to be my personal Via Dolorosa, with only one station instead of the traditional eight, the Los Boliches Station that would also be the scene of my crucifixion were we to miss our train which became more likely by the minute. Whether the locals jeered at my ordeal I failed to notice for by now I was beyond observing details like that. The wheels of my pink suitcase broke and fell off and for the last part of the journey I dragged a dead 30kg weight behind me with my left hand, the other 20kg suitcase miraculously still surviving with its’ wheels intact in my right hand.

I have no clear recollection of how I managed to drag the bags up the three lenghty wheelchair ramps that lead to the station, just as the train arrived, or how I was able to buy two tickets from the vending machine getting all the required details right and still make it to the train. I had no time to collect the change as I hurled the suitcases inside the crowded train and hopped in, vaguely thinking how embarrassing it would be to collapse and die on top of our heap of crap luggage. The handle of my other suitcase then came off, as I tried to lift it out of other passengers’ way.

But we did make the train, at a sort of near-lethal half-run instead of the leisurely stroll, and a most horrible experience it was, all in all. The Loved One wasn’t overtly amused, and to be honest, neither was I. Not until the sweat had dried a bit later and the muscles had stopped aching a few days later. I believe she is yet to discover the amusing side of it all, and maybe she never will. Maybe there is no amusing side. We’ve only discussed it superficially. But I’ve made a silent vow that in the future, we will take a taxi as often as possible.

Late last night we flew back from two weeks in Spain and I haven't really recalibrated myself to operate properly at home just yet. The house we were staying in has an exquisite garden, cluttered with statues, flowerpots, trees and whatnot, and one morning, while staring at one of the statues, I found it necessary to write this:

THE INCLEMENCY OF THE SUN

She knows she’ll take the step tomorrow, and as tomorrow comes, she still knows she’ll take it tomorrow. The flowers she clutches to her chest won’t have withered by then, and her Mona Lisa smile, half chipped away already, won’t need readjusting either. She is immersed in deep contemplation of the move she is about to make and the sun will continue to set in front of her unblinking eyes, ten thousand times and counting. She is safe, in the shade of the leaves, her hand slightly raising her skirt and gently covering her vulva, to protect it, from life, for life, and no one will ever hurt her again. And she knows she’ll leave whenever she wants to, anytime now, but not today.