some themes
posted by Riika on 14 May 2013

The landscape seems to be moving constantly, slowly, slowly . Yet it is still and silent. For it is I that am moving and the mountains , they follow me and are present. I look at them and they look back at me as living creatures do. One day last week I walked up to Saana. It was cloudy but very, very bright and I began my walk with no wind at all. First it was only I and Saana and the traces of the others who also had walked forth and back. After I got more company, soon there were all the other mountains in Sweden and Norway, looking back at me, coming and becoming closer. Yes I am like the romantic traveller in Caspar David Friedrichs paintings feeling tiny and overwhelmed in front of the vastness and beauty of the landscape, at the same time being a center of it. But yet, that is just a picture. For anyhow, in my way, I’m taking part in this entity, I am here, my substances connect with the substances I’m walking on and I feel, somehow, the flood or flow or simply movement that has its roots somewhere deep in the earth and in the depth of time. A movement that manifests itself also in the smallest detail . I’m thinking about the space. High up on the top of Saana the whole total almost endless space for a moment becomes my room. There is the lower Kilpisjärvi to sleep on, just the size of my body. There is Malla that I can touch and almost feel in the palm of my hand. But wind has started to blow harder on the top and I seek myself towards a more solid and closer sheltering element. The landscape as a room is a room in my imagination, it is a reflection, a combination of reflections, a space that breathes around me. It is created partly of my perception, sensations, partly by losing sense of scale and partly by the attempt to a dialogue between the matters inside and the matters outside. Descending I’m suddenly in the middle of a whiteness so white that I see no objects, nor a slightest form on the ground. It is as if there were no dimensions. I can only feel my standing on something and I can see that there is a line where this nothingness of the whiteness ends. One could lose oneself here, even though it is but a rather small area. Just very close by, at my feet I can faintly detect the path, the traces of other feet, and it gives me safety. Just there the snow has a slightly different complexion and I’m glad that the snow has this memory that here reveals itself. Going further down I meet the reindeer again. They seem to be home in the wind. There is a calmness and warmth about them. All right. I’m searching for a language to speak or write about the experiences of space, and being in or part of or beside it, a language that could maybe also reach beyond the too poetic description - though going through it. There is the outside world I’m in, the movements in the space, the time, the volume - like a light transparent tent - around every creature. Then there is the life and home here, in this place, of which I am outside, the occupation in the space that I can, if I can, only see from outside. Still, maybe, some themes we can share.