Today I picked up a brochure for some sort of Suomi Cultural Institution. I know it is for a cultural institution because of the gloss of the brochure and the weight of the paper, the design of the booklet, and the building pictured on the cover, which screams when it was built and why.
The simple idea that occurred to me this evening is because of the picture of this universal late 1990's to early 2000's image of a museum- all romantically reflected in some overlit pond-- that I could identify everything but place in this photo. The museum's reflection in the water is superimposed so it is a perfect vertical mirror reflection, creating sideways symmetry. The gaussian blur used on the reflection part is ever so slight, just barely admitting to be a reflection at all- however it does represent itself as 'reflection in water' enough to read as such without too much squinting and straining. So I argued to myself that the reflection is timebased and the building is more representative of space. So I cut it out. The photo of the non-reflection is real space, its mirror changes with the time of day. Architecture=space, water=time.
This seems politically correct or something. But I am looking around at these places with the descriptions on the signs I cannot read. And I know the visual lingo, though it wants to be indistinct. Colors, shapes, window sizes, landscaping... they all know what they are doing to their visitors, and it has been agreed internationally that a white box with bluish tinted windows adjacent to a well lit puddle means museum. But who knows where the museum is by looking at it? The only thing I can read is what time period it was made, I can guess who made it or what or who the design was appropriated from, and in the photo I can see that it is nighttime when the photo was taken. So it was not taken in Finland in the summer.
So phew. Now that I have achieved status as MA of the Obvious, I get to the point. Time is winning in the scheme of things. Time is a bigger force that space, and it might even have space tied around its smallest appendage. In Finland, time is very slow, which makes space bigger. Buildings are shorter but they feel taller because time is so slow that a short walk becomes long. If you find a building and look up you are so tired and cold that the building is immense. Two floors, each 29 floors high.
And this leads me to proclaim that Finland is a bright black hole.
Ever since I got lost in the big forest last week, I have been much more sensitive to the details of this place. With so much wildlife and such complex relationships between all the wildlives (I found moss that was holding a foreign dead leaf onto a living but bald tree), the interchanges between all the little lives are so dense that they take up space. There is a lot of matter here, but there is an extra layer of interaction between mosses, trees, farmers, mushrooms, bears, and ivy that fills the air. Put your ear to the ground though, and everything shuts up. Quiet. Like nothing is going on. When you step on a bunch of frozen weeds it sounds like an earthquake. There is nothing here if you are tuned to urban energy, but the silence is so filled with action that it is stifling.
A black hole happens when there is so much matter in one minute little space that the gravitational force from all directions is so strong that it explodes all the light out. That's why it is dark here. So much matter made from so many layers of conversations between teeny mosses and old trees that the whole place got yanked in every direction (for only a few months a year) and so it is now dark. The light is all other places. Luckily the snow stores up what it can during the fall and slowly and methodically releases it around noon each day so that for a few minutes Fins can go outside to pick some potatoes.
So,
Finland (FI) = bright black hole (BBH)
BBH = so much matter that the light explodes out (m(n)LEO)
architecture signifies time and evolution
water signifies space, depending on my mood.
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