The new homeless. We are establishing our own landmarks, naming places, finding poetry.

Everyone knows you in Haukivuori. That is what I have been told. Everyone knows I am here, they know where I live. Haukivuori was its own town but as it has been bereaved of its independent status. The end has been mourned in the blogs I have read, and by the last mayor (at the christmas fair in the public gym) who will preside over Haukivuori as an independent town, autonomous and proud, with its own town meetings. When I got into the Saksala Artradius minibus from the bus station in Mikkeli, the first topic of conversation was all about the new Haukivuori, which is now being taken as part of Mikkeli, the larger town on the block. The new buildings, oh the ugly new buildings. The bureaucracy, it is so much! The colorless powerpoints that go on for hours, the focus outward on tourism, the lack of funding for the arts! And then there are those barking dogs. Oh the dogs, they are so bored. No one is taking care of them. Listen to them barking all night. Why can’t they bark on the other side of the house. And the son of the woman who owns the dogs, he is so clever but once when he was late for school, it was unearthed that no one helped him wake up! A mother and a father who don’t wake their son up! And he doesn’t have any good winter boots!

“The ensuing exploitation soon demands airports, military, and paramilitary bases to defend what is being siphoned off, and collaboration with the local mafiosi. Tribal war, famine, and genocide may follow.

“People in such zones lose all sense of residence: children become orphans (even when they are not), women become slaves, men desperadoes. Once this has happened, to restore any sense of domesticity takes generations. Each year of such accumulation prolongs the Nowhere in time and space. -Ten Dispatches About Place by John Berger


Everything is changing. The story of Haukivuori sounds like the story of the everyplace, and everyplace is boring. It won’t be a village, it will be a zone. It’s ok! It will have wi-fi! This is the conemporary struggle. Don’t you want to go organic now that you read about what that is on your aunt’s wifi in Mikkeli? Then surrender your cute well built homes for shipping containers that can be easily stacked and floated in the many Finnish lakes after the forests are cleaned out and the earth is shipped elsewhere to build mountains for indoor waterparks in post-climate change tropical Canada. No one I have encountered has complained about the massive deforestation that is taking place on the edge of every forest. It seems to be a fact of life that is not worth talking about. What about the lakes? People are draining the lakes!?

“The Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant puts this very well: “the way to resist globalisation is not to deny globality, but to imagine what is the finite sum of all possible particularities and to get used to the idea that, as long as a single particularity is missing, globality will not be what it should be for us.” -big B

Another note of advice as given by two locals: Don’t read the news, because you can’t do anything about it. It is unrelated to your actual life here in Haukivuori. Sadness of other people will ruin your experience when you should be writing your own story unaffected by exterior affairs.
If you did read the news, you might celebrate the fact that there was only one piece of trash to be found on the street during 6 hours of wandering.


I will be establishing landmarks, naming places, finding poetry.
Give up on the way things were, Haukivuori: “We can foresee a whole new geography, a kind of pilgrimage-map in which holy sites are replaced by peak experiences” Hakim Bey, TAZ