Here I will gather my reflections that have emerged in different places during the week after my journey in the previous acts.
Stepping on the bus, a political act
On the bus home from Hyrylä I reflect upon the choice I steadily stand by in my private life, even to humorous effect, that of being quite radically anti-taxi. If I were to organize a workshop or experiment with others as part of my research in places that would require transport, I feel that public transport would be the chosen method.
I ponder upon the words of geographer and social scientist Doreen Massey in her essay A Global Sense
Of Place regarding transportation. In it she postulates about the compression of time and space in a world where people, things and capital are transported through ever faster paces, in a phase Karl Marx dubbed 'the annihilation of space by time'. It's done by transport, from horsepower to ships, trains to cars, to airplanes. From post offices to emails.
What is it that determines our degree of mobility, she asks, finding several intersectional factors, such as colonialism, ex-colonialism, racism, wealth and gender. I think of hearing about the threatening atmosphere and fear of violence in a bus a woman experienced. As a passing young Cis-male, buses are mostly to me at their worst places of social anxiety, rather than a place where I fear violence, feel ogled at or harassed. It is also a privilege that makes the choice of taking a bus, at night-time for example, easier.
It is also true, that the time-space compression offered by technology is not happening for everyone. "It
... the mobility and control of some groups can actively weaken other people." Massey talks of the the power geometry of time-space compression. "... For different social groups, and different individuals, are placed in very distinct ways in relation to these flows and interconnections." She quotes an example written by Dea Birkett:
"'Jumbos have enabled Korean computer consultants to fly to Silicon Valley as if popping next door,
and Singaporean entrepreneurs to reach Seattle in a day. The borders of the world's greatest ocean have been joined as never before. And Boeing has brought these people together. But what about those they fly over, on their islands five miles below? How has the mighty 747 brought them greater com¬ munion with those whose shores are washed by the same water? It hasn't, of course. Air travel might enable business¬ men to buzz across the ocean, but the concurrent decline in shipping has only increased the isolation of many island communities... Pitcairn, like many other Pacific islands, has never felt so far from its neighbours. " D. Birkett, New Statesman And Society, IS March 1991, p 38.
In the face of a world where capital increasingly roams freely around the world, increasing it's power in relation to relatively immobile workers Massey brings forth the importance of politics of mobility and access.
This is when I pat myself on the back for stepping on the bus. One of the democratizing effects of choosing public transport, and in the lack of the huge infrastructure investments, buses in particular have: They offer stops, paths and method of transport for people living in rural or suburban areas, whom might not have the economic resources to buy a car. It also brings people from elsewhere visiting, creating a flux and exchange, keeping local services more viable.
"... every time someone uses a car, and thereby increases their personal mobility, they reduce both the social rationale and the financial viability of the public trans¬ port system - and thereby also poten¬ tially reduce the mobility of those who rely on that system. Every time you drive to that out-of-town shopping centre you contribute to the rising prices, even hasten the demise, of the corner shop."
In a world of increasing climate change, an increasing need for changes in our consumption and emissions are present. It is there, where preferring public transport systems over individual private cars can make a difference. In order for there to be a political and economical incentive to keep improving the public transportation system or even making choices in regards to city design where, in a democracy, the more there are users, the more political support one would assume there to exist.
Regarding the following news, thanks to the telegraph system the information not only reached European newspapers, but those 10 000 kilometers away, like the Hawaiian Star and the Mexican Herald before peripheral Finnish regions like Vasa or Mikkeli, since local newspapers didn't have the capital to partake in the international news agencies. Interesting fact: modern data cable paths largely follow the same paths of those created for the telegraphs.
Nikolai Bobrikov shot
The general-governor, who I remembered to be of national significance in the previous post was shot.
Shot by an independence activist, nationalist, freedom fighter if you were an idealist, terrorist if you were a tsarist, who has become a fundamental part of the Finnish national myth.
Here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia article describing the assassination and his shooter's last words and moments.
" Schauman specified his motivation in a text, which he had written only a few days before the murder:
Freedom is its own destination. With specific and very small restrictions it is every human beings unquenchable privilege that no outside power can deprive them of. A human doesn't have the right to relinquish it on their own part, even less so for their children. Freedom is the base of self-respect, and without it the great learning of a humans ethical responsibility would be purely a lie and fraud. Freedom is a holy matter and love of freedom a deeply rooted natural instinct in our hearts. Do you love your country? Good, keep Ibsens words in your mind: "Even if you would give your all, but not your life, you haven't given anything."
A day before his deed, on the 15th of June, Schauman was at a shooting range training. On the goal mark there was imaged a bearded Russian, with a heart drawn chest height. The target mark was moved with the help of a twine for which a young man named Edvard Ellman was responsible for. After the rehearsal a satisfied Schauman was leaving the shooting range. Ellman asked him the reason for the movable target mark, which was different from normal. It's been said that Schaumann answered: A bad enemy is they, who stay in place when shot!" "
I place myself by the memories of shooting ranges, that of the Hyrylä biathlon track, which then opens doors to those at my garrison, where one pledges the oath to never act against the constitution. Yet that constitution only exists, in part, due to a criminal act against another set of legislature.
How we talk about land and the defense of past, present and future places
Reflected upon: in our studio at school, while editing the blog about the garrison, taking part in a discussion with someone who will quit the army reserve, and then on a different day overhearing course mates discussing military service and it's monocultural lead in a negative tone, also pondering the arbitrary nature of nation borders:
I feel emotions, once again hard to pinpoint as a single one or put into words. I feel a similar clog appearing somewhere above my chest and below my adam's apple. A need to say some things is filling up my body and tensing my system, but my thoughts are contradictory, in a dialogue, polylogue, a multi-Hegelian expanding chaos of thesis's, anti-thesis and synthesis, contradictions that pull the rug of those thought up constructions. The voice of social anxiety and conflict-escaping tells me to write it down, let time, the writing and editing process distill an opinion.
I feel a despair, a cynical feeling that animals and humans have caused suffering to each other throughout history and a lack of hope that humans would ultimately be above the nature which is so. Yet I feel that if we'd were to abandon the striving after morals and ethics for the greater good, which we also have been given a capacity to, is to wave a white flag in a battle for something greater than the sum of it's parts, to give up on an utopia, to succumb in front of the ideological bullet of "political realism" and nihilistic materialist determinism.
I take a new look at that location as I edit the post about the Hyrylä garrison thanks to the discussions provided by the environment and its people. It is then, when I try to see how the positive things could be synthesized and serve something wider than nation state, its protectors and the properties it protects, that I modify the military oath into one for nature (can be read in the post below).
Hyrylän hävittäjät - one of the vast plain of suburban hell car dealerships explained
I read upon pages talking of the history of Tuusula that Hyrylä was full of gravel pits, which then was transported to the main city region for construction sites of roads etc. This gave rise to a lot of gravel and car transportation entrepreneurs, which got a nickname Hyrylän Hävittäjät due to their reckless and fast driving (not translating well, in Finnish the same word is used for fighter jets and literally means eradicator). This is possibly the original human imprint both for the "geographically unusual" plain, ie. former gravel pit, then having worked as a site for a power plant I found myself on and also offered an explanation for the car dealerships on the way. Due to the need to transport the gravel, car repair shops and stores with materials sprung up in the area.
https://yle.fi/a/20-97907 (a news clip of it, by the legendary journalist Hannu Karpo, albeit in Finnish)
Blog - An alternative of human stream-of-consciousness
While getting second hand thoughts and asking myself why I'm writing this blog, I've been thinking of the as of now, outdated structure of it amongst the current social media landscape. Blog posts tend to be longer and offer more chains of association than the shorter posts I'm used to seeing on Facebook, Instagram or similar platforms. It also feels more connected to the journaling tradition, offering a certain possibility to approach it with journalistic qualities. But at the same time it's a blog, so I have the full right to poet away, delve into personal anecdotes, thoughts and forming opinions. I was also having a particularly paranoid moment in my bed, scrolling Reddit and spiraling into the Dead Internet Theory, which simply put is the theory that almost all organic activity has been replaced by content manufactured by A.I, bots and corporations. How can I know if I'm reading human thoughts or A.I. language equations? Perhaps here, on a blog, one can trace organic thoughts as they are born, see them looming before being formulated, disappearing, changing shape and associate into wider contexts.
That is also what is very intriguing to me in the form of a blog: the chronology of it. You can move between posts as you wish, you can start from the most recent, that appears first, and scroll down to where it all began, or do vice versa, or pick one from the middle that appeals by it's outlook.
Going back
This blog also acts as an anchor, a memory of a sense of a place, which both gives birth to reflection, and is reflected upon the spaces I'm in afterwards. Rarely have I gone back to a specific place of no personal importance to this detail. In terms of this project, I have the full power to edit my posts for as long as I feel fit before publishing, or even back to old blog posts and edit them as I wish, if I feel artistically or journalistically a need to fill or change some information. It's walking a tightrope though, I hope to keep the train of thoughts clearly visible, giving space for each action, no matter how banal, on this way to a Master's thesis. At the same time I'm having a hard time to find enjoyability in the banality that I often feel appears if only writing from the present moment as a writer and reader. The present is not even physically possible for me in the current weather, my fingers freeze if I try to write down my thoughts as they appear at the locations.
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