The romantic and the pervert

I have never had a particularly close relationship with nature. According to a definition I developed as a young man, it is a place where you can't get a taxi. I have always lived in the city. In my schooldays, it's true, I lived in Espoo (near Helsinki) which is widely known as a non-city.
     I recognised myself in the scene in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain in which the main character gets lost on a skiing trip and notices what an unease-provoking place nature is. He realises that trees are more terrifying than criminals or animals: you can always threaten a villain that the police are on their way, and you can try to coax even a wild beast, but if a tree is going to fall, it just falls. You can't communicate with nature, it doesn't understand jokes or philosophy. And what sense is there in that kind of existence! Surely it cannot avoid being strange and threatening?
     Urbanity is not, however, a very convincing explanation for the lack of a wonderfully intimate relationship with nature. One can, indeed, argue that it is only urbanism that creates a relationship with nature as nature. The aestheticisation of nature into landscape, for example, is the invention of the urban intelligentsia. Local inhabitants have a practical relationship with their environment: to them, it is their back yard, the basis of their livelihood, a world of danger and utility. The landscape – in the aestheticising sense of the world – is the creation of the daft graduate who arrives in the countryside for his holidays.
     The idealisation of nature as something original, untouched and beautiful (or sublime) is called romanticism. The term is generally used in a disparaging sense. And it is indeed easy to demonstrate that the romantic is in error: the agrarian community living in the midst of virgin nature is a product of the romantic's own head. Not, however, in the sense that a return to the past is impossible because of the irreversibility of modernisation, but because that past has never existed.
     The romantic, in other words, idealises something that he supposes he has lost, although it is precisely that idealisation that produces the 'lost' object in the form he knows it. It is precisely the loss of Karelia [a region that formed part of Finland before the Second World War] that creates 'Karelia'.
     But does the romantic really want Karelia back? Does he not, rather, enjoy the absence of what he interprets as lost? Holding an object as lost is one way of holding on to the object. The romantic does not have any cake, but for that very reason he can eat it.
     In fact, if the romantic were very clever, he would give up what he has in order to be able to begin to miss it and idealise it! This would be perverse romanticism.

For this reason, the romantic is a very different gure from the nostalgic, who may genuinely wish to have some lost object back.
     What then does the nostalgic wish to have back from the past? The future of the past. Man longs for the past, when he still had a future. If some former left-winger yearns for the Seventies, it is because the future was then still his.
     We remember the tragedy that took place in Sweden a couple of years ago: a Kurdish father murdered his daughter because the 'honour of the community' demanded it. Did it indeed? The act may have been a kind of magic, the incarnation of the hope that the longed-for Genuine Kurdish Community would be born through that deed. This was a case of perverse nostalgia.
     Melancholy, on the other hand, is the anticipation of loss rather than the mourning of loss. The melancholic person has something, but he mourns its loss in anticipation. In this sense melancholy is nostalgia adopted in advance with respect to the present: grieving of a future time when there will no longer be a future to look forward to.

It is not, however, enough to remark that the romantic himself creates the object of his romanticisation. For perhaps what is genuine is not so much the genuine itself as the romanticisation concerning the genuine. It has been said that the Egyptians themselves were Egyptologists. I believe it to be possible that lumberjacks themselves are lumberjack romantics. Similarly, children, too, are at their most 'childish' when they are acting out the role of children – either in order to fish for attention or just because it is 'what they do'. And young people always know how to act the role of contemporary youth suffering from the lack of facilities provided for them.
     Or let us consider the way in which Finns are Finns. Few are woodsmen or 'rednecks' by nature. They are adopted and maintained figures. The sentence, 'I'm a woodsman and a redneck and I'm proud of it' actually means that the speaker has chosen this identity. When an ice-hockey fan dresses up as a redneck, this is an adopted role which contains a kind of romanticising reference to the gure of a redneck. And, who knows, it is only in this sense that the redneck exists.


Between Nokia and the pismire

It is said that Finland is the world's leading information society. If so, the reason may be as follows: Finland is the world's most European country. For it is located on the periphery, and Europe is nothing but periphery: it is the lack of central power that characterises Europe. Finland's culture is young and thin, just as the culture of Europe is, in spite of everything, compared to the ancient cultures. Finland is a country whose own identity is the object of constant pondering and sometimes even desperate searching – just as Europe is a continent characterised by the question, 'What is Europe?' (Unlike Asia, which is not characterised by the question, 'What is Asia?')
     And, in sum, it is clear that there is nothing more European than the country which is in the lead in terms of the level of its standard of living, its education, its library network and its information technology – Finland.

Finland is the world's most non-European country. In Paris, even the punks apologise if they bump into you, but here lives a people who just says 'oops', a nation that growls in buses, pees in stairwells, laps up beer and vodka, and whose urbanism still hangs by the finest of threads left behind it by 'city culture'.
     Finland is inhabited by the most backward, forest-living geeks of Europe, who existed silently in the wilderness when Iceland, for example, had already had a literary culture for centuries. Yes – Iceland!

Two clichés. Which of them is true?
     Both, for clichés are always true. It is essential to see the close connection between supposed Europeanness and supposed backwoodsness.
     Pre-literary archaism and international high technology fit together well. When, about a century and a half ago, Finland was invented, myths, modern literature and money were created in the country at the same time. That is why Finland has only a little space between nature and technology, only a modicum of well-rooted national literary tradition and the modern culture that might arise from it, whose breathing and basic rhythm might soften the arrival of economic modernisation and other foreign influences. In Finland everything passes through like a basketball through the basket. There is no friction, resistance, counterforce, hindrance achieved by the symbolic legacy, created by tradition or modern literary culture. In Finland, there is nothing between Nokia and a pismire – and that is why we have Nokia.
     If everything that is stratified, archaeological, historical, symbolic is foreign to Finland, this also means that the same applies to all the dimensions of urbanity that do not derive from technology.

Culture is an area that lies between production and the national way of life: a 'held over' area, or suspension, as a musician would say. It is an area in which one can freely practice activities that are not bound to production and one's immediate livelihood.
     If today's 'shortened childhood', the ideology of management by results and the aestheticisation of mass technology threaten to limit the breathing space of culture, this is not a sign of antagonism toward culture. It is, on the contrary, a question of a thirst for culture: a desire to suck culture into production – to develop ideas, create signs, codes, advertisements and designs, to build theoretical models and visions, invent business philosophies, compose lift music and design pleasant environments.
     Design always makes a deep impression on us barbarians. Correspondingly, design needs barbarians either as its enemies or as its noble savages.
     Finland is like the city of Oulu in the north: a techno-village, the proximity of Lapland, and an enormous cultural centre with active figures too few in number. Finland is Espoo: a techno-village, the proximity of the forest and an an enormous cultural centre with active voluntary figures too few in number.
     The lack of tradition can, however, as a side-effect, produce broad-mindedness and fresh eclecticism. And articial cultural resources offered from above can, as a side-effect, produce – resources. Finland has cultural life because its people are educated and its elite vernacular. In many traditional centres, life and culture are more strictly sectored apart.
     There is thus nothing schizophrenic about Finland's basically bipartite nature. Finland is a clone of a Europe that does not exist.


Translated by Hildi Hawkins


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