Who’s the daddy?

Oedipus - the sequel

“Mourning is regularly the reaction of the loss of a loved person, or the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on. In some people the same influences produce melancholia instead of mourning and we consequently suspect them of a pathological disposition.”

Sigmund Freud

“Flames to dust
Lovers to friends
Why do all good things come to and end?”

Nelly Furtado

I remember watching a panel talk on YouTube (now removed) in which a writer (now dead) talked briefly about Oedipus Rex being the oldest text in the western canon. To me this is almost too good to be true, but since fact-checking often ruins a good story I’m just going to run with it. Regardless it needs to be true for the purpose of this text, as this text, and I’m guessing here, for a few nanoseconds will be the newest text, although by no means part of any canon. But this is to try to frame what kind of time span I’m trying to deal with throughout these pages.

Give me back my broken night

My mirrored room, my secret life

It's lonely here
There's no one left to torture

Give me absolute control

Over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby

That's an order.

Oedipus is just a story of a young man who fucks his mother, kills his father, and goes blind. I think it’s safe to say that Oedipus just wanted to save his people. But if one takes just a quick look at history, people who just wanted to save their people usually end up like tyrants. Or rather, people who think they “have” a people to save are usually tyrants to begin with. That is to say, Oedipus was blind long before his eyes were gouged out.

Give me crack and anal sex T

ake the only tree that's left

And stuff it up the hole

In your culture

Give me back the Berlin wall

Give me Stalin and St. Paul

I've seen the future, brother

It is murder.

What is History?

We live in a time in which the last holocaust survivors are dying, and on the news I just heard that 1 in 20 europeans have never even heard of the holocaust. At the same time the Swedish government just approved the construction of a final repository for all the country's nuclear waste. Which is to remain sealed for the next 100.000 years. As if a bunch of Swedish social democrats, or anyone else for that matter, could even begin to grasp 100.000 years of future; but this repository will be filled and then sealed shut. And all that will stand in the way of the total demise of humanity and all life on earth at any point in time over the next 100.000 years are some thermoses made of copper, a block of concrete, and a Swedish mountain.

You don't know me from the wind

You never will, you never did
I'm the little Jew
Who wrote the Bible
I've seen the nations rise and fall

I've heard their stories, heard them all

But love's the only engine of survival

Your servant here, he has been told

To say it clear, to say it cold
It's over, it ain't going
Any further (do, do, do)
And now the wheels of heaven stop

You feel the devil's riding crop

Get ready for the future
It is murder (do, do, do)

So I ordered Oedipus Rex to be delivered to the bookshop for pickup. I always do this as it allows me to emulate going to the bookshop to buy a book, rather than having it delivered to my door. But somehow the order got fucked up. I eventually went to the bookshop to try to figure out what was going on, and I was told that it’s a print on demand and there’s no way of telling if it’s already printed, half printed, already on it’s way or if it’s going to be another 3 weeks until it arrives. And since I don’t read pdf:s I now find myself in the awkward position of really wanting to write a text about Oedipus, without being able to actually read Oedipus Rex in the first place. A poet, who’s now dead, and who was also part of that panel talk mentioned in the beginning, once said in an interview that she got herself a bigger apartment just to be able to fit all of her books in her home, as they are like her conversational partners. And she adds, “To have my books around me is to have access to my personal history, and I don’t think a computer or a tablet can do that.”

There'll be the breaking of the ancient

Western code
Your private life will suddenly explode (ooh, ooh)

There'll be phantoms

There'll be fires on the road
And the white man dancing
You'll see a woman
Hanging upside down (ooh, ooh)
Her features covered by her fallen gown (ooh, ooh)

And all the lousy little poets
Coming round
Tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson
Yeah, the white man dancin’

The same poet said in another interview that she used to take her daughter out for walks together with their hoover, pretending it was a dog. Stopping once in awhile to pick up non existent dog shit and sometimes shouting “Buster! Buster! Come on! It’s time to go home!”. This is my favourite poem of hers:

I’ve always been as if missing.

From my own body.
I have never fit the narrative.

In my own life.

I’ve always believed that the artistic craft

is a way for the exposed nerve.
To grow new skin.

I’ve always wondered what it would be like if

my mother and my father or Erik Lindegren.

With great speed would run in here.
And without preamble simply

crush my nose.
Then I would wake up, perhaps.

And become a bit more expressive?

What if my father and my mother
or Moa Martinsson.
Would suddenly kick the door open to my decrepit

writer’s-workshop at the flats in the far-away.

And without delay beat me to death.
Would you be sad then?

Actually this poem isn’t my favourite poem of hers . But since I couldn’t find a translation of my favourite poem hers, or possess the ability to translate words like “syjunta”, this one had to suffice.

Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima (do, do, do)

Destroy another fetus now
We don't like children anyhow
I've seen the future, baby
It is murder (do, do, do)

When I read I Love Dick by Chris Kraus I thought to myself: Autofiction is probably the most radical and the most annoying thing that has happened in literature in the last 40 years. Thing is once you start it’s hard to stop, no drug is as addictive as your own personal history. Once you cross that boundary and start splaying it all out, once you start treating yourself, and consequently everyone else in your life, as an excavation site there’s no turning back. You’ve entered the K hole of your own ego and it’s warm inside. It appears vulnerable, and to some extent it is, but it is also an endeavour to attain vindication and reparation. It’s inevitably self-righteous but with a subversive potential, and it is the attempt to take control over the narrative; and we do live in a time so obsessed with owning the narrative. History isn’t written by the victors, but to write history is the actual victory. I’m certain however that the person who first said that history is in fact written by the victors, was on the losing side. Then again I’m no authority on literature, or history for that matter. I am however an authority on my own personal history (like everyone else) and I’m also obsessed with it (like everyone else), and I’ve always had an almost incessant need to talk about it. About how every and any indiscretion or injustice I feel I’ve suffered affects me today. Awhile ago I visited a friend in Prague who’s the complete opposite. I know almost nothing about him from before we were friends, and throughout our friendship I’ve taken it quite personally that he never talks about it with me. About two days into the visit and a few drinks into the night I pushed, hard, for him to talk about his past. Which resulted in a fight that ended with him saying to me a final time that he simply doesn’t feel that his past defines him. Just the thought of that is incomprehensible to me, but nevertheless something I’m forced to accept. In the end the frustration I’ve felt about him withholding his past throughout our friendship is probably just jealousy, because I let nothing go and I lay nothing to rest and I so wish I could. There’s a quote often used in the 12-step programme that goes like this: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference”. There’s a line from a book by Herta Müller that I’ve written down a thousand times in various notebooks over the years that goes like this: “The coffee tasted of quarrel, I said it didn’t matter, but it did matter. Just like everything else I cannot change or affect.” I left Prague the following day, and it was on the train back to Vienna that I started reading I Love Dick. I wrote down the following in my notebook: I guess whether you look at history as a grave or a dig site is in the end just a matter of disposition.