in the end, I backspace to correct mistakes, erasing up to 20 letters while I sit, surrounded by a group of Japanese tourists, men, maybe on some kind of promotional or business-related travel. they are animated. can I bridge the gap with them? what would be the point? like the drunk guy on the ferry (again) today. he comes to ask me something, but I freeze up. people look through him or away from him, ignoring his singing and talking all the way into Market Square. Niko got me to the ferry at the last minute -- his car was stuck in the snow which was falling all day today, heavily. It is about 20C warmer now. but by the time I get the the north, it will be the same there as it was here yesterday. what is it when I sit in the airport, waiting for a flight to board, and just noodle around with this machine. positioning the self. not needing the language of modernity (a hyped-mix of pixellated images and cyber-texts. intervention. processing. wired.) ears popping now. above clouds. horizontal lineations of sky etched in red and blue-grey. leaving Light behind. it was getting bright in Helsinki this week, despite the intense cold. only one more month in, Finland before breaking from Scandinavia for seven weeks. it will be full-tilt springtime when I return. another winter going into the Light. still nothing conclusive with Sanna: the dance of personalities becomes. what. exhausting. no, it is conclusive. I should conclude it. period. yep. that's it, in making art, I have consistently made the fundamental error of not applying a technique/tool in a research-oriented way. like using a particular medium -- my photography as a way of digging into reality and spirituality. not following the classic way of art research.

long day, a short stop at NIFCA to check on a few things, then on to Media Lab to have lunch with Samu. bloody cold in the wind. walking to the ferry, I have to fumble with my hood for all of 20 seconds, and my fingers are burning cold by the time I get my gloves back on and into my coat pockets. two pairs of long underwear keep my legs from freezing. over lunch Samu and I speak on the contingencies of the body and measures of corporeal and intellectual linkage and disconnection. after lunch, things progress into mappings of cognitive energy-transmission, and measuring a stance on oppositional politics -- against the apparent hegemony of pan-global capitalism. I propose that resistance -- a direct oppositional energy is counter-productive -- that the best resistance is to either create a new way of going at the personal level, or at least effect a passive side-stepping to allow the energy of the beast itself to roll, to orbit the self, imparting its energy of angular momentum to the centered chi of self. and rather, as a strategy, to deal humanely with the absolute least common denominator of the beast -- individual humans. discussion of the characteristics and strategies of resistance and opposition need not occupy the same scale that the term pan-global capitalism implies. keeping the discussion at the level of formalized discourse reinforces a key aspect of the system -- that part of it rooted in institutionalized relationships between people as controlled by the inherent heirarchy of linguistic operation. another positive strategy is the conscious praxis of maintaining a human scale on the resistance -- this alone has a radical effect on the entity resisted! at the core of my belief is the essential nature of human-to-human interactions, and the absolute risk one takes when one leaves that sphere of action in the stead of language/cultural-based interventions.

Sanna misses the ferry. -20C today, with some wind and that special crystalline fog/snow blowing all around at ground level with the sky overhead a pale steel blue. the harbor is so packed with ice that the ferry grinds to a halt almost -- stops processing the VR data projection that tells us we are traveling through a crowded harbor outside of the iced-over windows. already the telephone becomes a more active techno-tool in my life (can I remember when I started email?) getting calls, making calls. from wherever to wherever. Café Soucis for lunch, walking around is a brisk event that holds a bit of seriousness in it -- will I make it to the next warm point? checking into Finnish tax situations. filing in many countries this year, with MB's help in Iceland.

slow start to the day, but then things accelerate in such a positive way that I can hardly understand it, meeting Riita at NIFCA, speaking about many things, Sonja, Anders, making phone calls to Lily, Philip, Ari, Marjanna, and Samu, ending up at MUU to do some work, email has piled up, but all interesting communications that pull me back into my beliefs, things that I believe in with a gusto, that when Sanna calls into the evening, I can hardly stop, but do for the sheer pleasantness of another enjoyable conversation and presence. a Guiness I reward myself with, at the same time, making movies in our heads. it is the next day -- 0030 when I catch the ferry home. it is winter, beautiful winter. and the cold does not bother me. it is nice. and I can't believe I am saying/thinking this.

an exhausting day that totally depletes the spirit and leave me wondering what I am doing, yet again. doubting Thomas. I need first to have my body sliced open, then to be able to jam my own hand deep inside and feel the warmth. am I alive? but passing through this phase quickly after a nap, I recover, surprising myself with a calmness and fast a return to centered being. cook a dinner. rice, onions, garlic, tomatoes, olive oil, kidney beans. and go to bed.

heavy snow, wind, and cold here in Helsinki after the mildness of Oslo this morning. a nice, though short visit with Kenneth and Vibeke.

Tide er et produkt. Time is a product. -- advertisement in Gardermoen Airport

says it all. it has come to an end. time as a unreachable object. and at the same day, in the early-morning haze of weariness, waiting for the rest of the house to stir, I scan a book on Artificial Life. full of comments that somehow presume that humans have the secret of life almost within their grasp to technologize. it's just a long joke. ending the day with a bang. back on Soumenlinna. Niko is kind enough to give me a ride from the ferry to the guest flat, a nice gesture, as the snow and wind is intense. exhausted some from the previous evening.

So, if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred as a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers. Will you teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth. This we know. The earth does not belong to man. Man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. -- from a speech by Chief Seattle

up early to pack, walk to the airport bus.

dinner this evening in my flat. four bottles of wine appear. I make pasta, Alexander brings an abundance of things including a tape deck on which he tapes much of the dinner. and gives me the tape and a bottle. so it goes.

Sunday. St. Olavs cathedral is over there. as I look out the sixth-floor windows of the Academy office. sunLight coming over the hills to the south illuminates the row of buildings along the fjord. the far side of the fjord is bright, too. mind is flat. with all the activities that churn and churn the mind. silence is broken by whining hard drives and other high-frequency beings. outside is behind glass. AAAS (the American Association for the Advancement of Science) is undertaking its last meeting of the 20th Century. I recall going to one of those meetings in Boston when I was just 14, accompanying my father. photographing the Vice-President, Rockefeller, giving the opening keynote speech. later going to see Arthur Fiedler perform with the Boston Pops (he was sick, so had a replacement, could it have been Seiji Ozawa?). we ended up sitting next to Dr. Harold Edgerton, the famous physicist from MIT who developed the electronic stroboscope for making ultra-high-speed photographs. he gave me a signed copy of a postcard reproduction of the famous image of the milk drop frozen like a royal crown.

Helgi is visiting from Akureyri, so we have lunch, and otherwise I am working on THE SITE and dealing out communications about the avalanche of activities in the next three months. faxes, email. remote presence. what about being here now? well, the here and now is insistent. later, bumbling around, trying to get to Jeremy's place for dinner with Helgi. finally taxi it after mis-reading the map that Jeremy gave me. I never confirmed the location of north, and instead made a wrong assumption about the geometry of things.

morning, cool night (inside) cold (outside). my sister Janet, the family historian, transcribes and sends this story written by my grandfather, George Blodgett Hopkins, of an incident from his childhood in Linn, Missouri in the late 19th century.

Sometime between 1875 and 1877, when I was ten or eleven, a terrible tragedy occurred. My father, sister and older brother had been in California for some time. Mother, brother Walter and myself were still living in the old home. The new Linn courthouse that I had mentioned previously, was completed and part of it was occupied. The basement, composed of numerous rooms, 16 or 18 feet square, was not occupied. The rooms were located on either side of a long hall that extended east and west, the full length of the building. As I recall, the ceilings were about 10 feet hight, the walls were plastered, painted and nicely finished.

There was a family of four, composed of a father, mother, one boy and one girl. The girl was cripple and used one crutch. They came to our home and were anxious to secure rooms. I don't know what the arrangement with Mother was, but they were occupying one room at the time of the disturbance. All they had were a few grips and sachels, etc. The man, I can't recall his name now, was rather an elderly gentleman, probably 60 years old, quite good looking and I think was a lawyer. He dressed well and made a fairly good appearance. The woman was in her late 40's, good looking and dressed rather attractively. The girl, the oldest of the two children, was about 16-18 years old. They called her Addie. The boy was my age, sort of a rough youngster, full of mischief, and was hard to manage. His name was Steve Jefferies. It turned out that the man with this group was not the husband or the father at all. The real husband and father was a Mr. Jefferies, though he was not the father of the girl. The woman had married the man she was now living with and the girl was his daughter. After some time, the couple had separated. The woman had then married Mr. Jefferies and had her son. Later on, they separated. I never knew if the woman had a divorce from either man, all that we ever found out was that the family that had come to our house was trying to keep out of the way of Jefferies. They had come to our little town thinking it would be a refuge for them. Unfortunately, Jefferies was hot on their trail. Only a few days had passed when he appeared on the scene, carrying a rather small hand satchel. Shortly after arriving in Linn, he came directly to our house. The elderly man had gone into town or was away when he arrived, however he made a terrible racket. The woman and girl screamed and cried and finally Jefferies left the house and headed for town. The next we heard of him he had gone to several places in town and finally found the older man in a harness shop across from the courthouse. There were some words between the two men, the older man ran out the front door of the shop and up a slight incline past the corner of the courthouse and possibly 60-70 ft. From out of the harness shop came the younger man, Jefferies, with a big pistol. He laid the pistol across his left forearm, took careful and deliberate aim and shot the old man in the back of his head, close to the top. The wound did not prove to be fatal at once, but the man had fallen and was unconscious. Willing hands soon came and carried him into the southeast corner room of the basement of the courthouse. A cot was procured from somewhere and bedclothes and a pillow were brought from our house to make the old man as comfortable as possible for the time being.

I remember going into this room before the old gentleman passed away. There was not a thing in the room but the couch and the body laying on it. The white painted walls and ceilings of that cheerless, cold room with its victim of a tragedy just enacted not long before lying there before me, brought cold chills all over me. I had expected to find some other people there when I went in and had made several steps before I realized I was there staring at a man that had been shot and was near death, perhaps close to the very moment life was going out. I seemed frozen to the floor for a moment, then realizing where I was, I turned quickly and hurried away, chills running up and down my back. The old man died in that cheerless room. His body lay there until he was buried a day or so later. The woman, girl and boy left our house soon after. Whether they left town or moved somewhere else, I don't know. I never seen them again. Jefferies was put in prison and after due process of law, was convicted of murder and sent to the state prison at Jefferson City, Missouri. I never saw this man, Jefferies, and don't remember how long he was in prision, as we left Linn for California a year or so later. I don't remember ever hearing this tragedy discussed in our family, though that corner room in the courthouse is vivid in my mind today.

-- George Blodgett Hopkins

swimming this evening in a very crowded pool. still thinking of this whole issue of how I have used my personal energies to imprint my personality on my environment. something very much outside the needs of survival, very much obsessive (in mostly small rather harmless ways), but accumulating a force that exclude an Other from occupying that same space. is it possible? domination of landscape -- the title of a work done several years ago. a simple image, printed as a postcard and sent to an exhibition in Texas, somewhere. a fragment of a landscape, I think on the crest of Tennessee Pass? with two square fence-posts, a heavy chain draped between them. but this analog illustration seems to be acted out everytime I enter a space. organizing it. it is a form of finding comfort -- same way, in a working space, I have to straighten it up before getting to work. kitchens, workspaces, and especially, computers! Ugh. what about not making ANY imprint at all? is it possible?

back in Norway after a period of several years away. finding out what is up. the school here is well-funded. oil is still flowing (at a reduced price than before). the North Sea. there is a creeping feeling of the country being hemmed-in, although active in the EFTA (European Free-Trade Area) and in the now-fractured Nordic Union, economically, Norway feels isolated. it is noticeable by the contents of shop-shelves which don't reflect the same variety as those in, Finland or Sweden. aside from not being ego-centric, any foray into socia-political observations are based in vague and passing whim of mind, not soul.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is "I desire you" and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure. -- Roland Barthes

all things unravel. and I am in planes, busses, and taxis. south to north. plus or minus. no messages on the phone as I leave range for word to come. hauntings. futures compress, pasts well up, present reifies into words that fall like rocks to the floor, gouging everything living, and scratching everything dead. that's it. ending so quickly, so pointlessly. absolutely no reason for ultimatums about hurt and pain and. so on. fictions churn out. where readers bring wholesale chunks of being into print, neither lost nor found. but set to float in a inner harbor glazed with rainbow oil slicks, half-empty coke cans, and spent condoms. left a pot of black-bean chili cooling on the stove: when it is cool, then there will be nothing more. bags of hot chili powder and basil, corn meal in the cupboard. birch-smoked salmon in the fridge, and everybody is starving for what they don't want or can't get. it'll end up in the garbage. maybe there will be a general cleaning that will take into account the Indonesian Liberation tee-shirt that I threw on the floor in the rush to get out to the taxi to the rail station to store the two bags that I simply couldn't carry all the way to Trondheim. rolling thoughts of what to do next time in Helsinki. flight back is in two weeks. fourteen days to arrange something. Imatra probably afer that. re-arrange Eindhoven. fill out plans for Tornio. give in to the fear. icy fear. or keep going? head south? head west? US for the summer? what's best for Loki? Iceland, maybe not. the initiative to be mobile to better keep contact with him seems to be receeding in the need to get grounded again. the time in Iceland served to point out the serious crisis in the production curve. how things are made, why things are made. and the role of the powerful ego. how did it get so strong, and how does this compare to others'? don't matter, comparison -- that is actually a function of feeding for the ego -- that consumptive looking-at-the-Other. that can't be written out of this script. but most of time previous, I have identified the ego-center of other people's work, and ignored the spiritual component -- made easy and quick judgements based on a limited and possibly falicious criteria. realizing that pursuit of material interaction (that is, using the material world to "make art,") along with my developing sense of dematerialization, I must not reject physical manifestations. to do that would reject a certain class of commuications that are attenuated by time, space, and possibility. in Oslo at the moment, hoping to get online this evening for a jolt of email to deal with. and to ponder what to begin tomorrow. Trondheim. the first roadsign I see is to Hell. if I am correct, hell means bright? or...

tomorrow Trondheim. day begins at midnight, looking out at the city, power plant to the south: cloud-factories I call them. belching clouds. work one hour into the new day and then quit. bad night sleep. complications with the schedule in Netherlands in March already. fragile, each little complication threatens to unravel the little security I have achieved lately. and is just a bother when plans go awry. ooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. center, center, breathe, breathe. blow-up.

back here. but only in time to head to the next destination. and a little time to live in dreams and aspirations before heading to the next destination, again to the far north, Trondheim. it becomes abundantly clear that my traveling retraces the Vikings more often than not. maybe I need to visit the Orkneys and the Faroes, and breath the air on the strand of Jutland, and move up the Volga to Moscow or across the Mediterranean to Constantinople. travel like that is nothing and everything in this age. easy in time, but not. to pay for the few moments in the screaming air high above the Gaia-skin surface one works and saves the little trade-notes for a week, a month? so the labor of travel is not the ease of stepping on a riveted and welded tube of alloyed metals and sitting in an engineered chair receiving drinks and food from plastic-faced souls. instead, it is woven into the routine of life in the largest scale. it is a way of being, travel, and has gotten neither harder nor easier in the intervening million years since folks have been cruisin' around, bipedal. broke down finally and bought a mobile phone. Nokia. why. couldn't live without it.

already my time here is gone. today vanishes into the strong north wind that blows all day. french toast for breakfast, Loki likes that a lot. we play on the computer for a time and MB comes to take him to see Peter Pan at the children's theater. I go swimming, as I usually try to do the day before I leave Iceland. soak in the water that was one of my only refuges when I lived here. driving around town is strange. for a second I tried to picture living here again, but couldn't. just too small and I could never integrate into the culture. but I don't know the meaning of that phrase anyway -- integrating into the culture.

When we have loved, my love, Panting and pale from love, Then from your cheeks, my love, scent of the sweat I love: and when our bodies love now relax in love after the stress of love, ever still more I love our mingled breath of love. -- ancient Sanskrit verse

another special dinner at Simmi and Hildur's. this time their traditional New Years Eve meal of wild (grey) goose, two of them with an incredible sage stuffing. fabulous! driving home, through the city, past the harbor, huge fishing trawlers, port windows reveal green house-plants inside. strung with Christmas Lights (Light tubes are the most popular item this year, aside from the traditional candlabras in windows). fireworks still going off regularly, although nothing like the madness of midnight when the entire area erupts in a madness of explosions and Lights. emergency signal flares (expended often before expiration, just for the hell of it) slowly drift seaward in the Light breeze, creating drifting constellations that are punctuated by thousands of greater or lesser explosions.



Loki finally retreats into the house, and when I go back in some minutes later, after the boys have spent their collections of pyrotechnics, I find him crouched in the living room by the couch, sobbing. ever since his first New Years, he has been terrified by the noise. later that same day, I find myself looking at this website again, wondering just what to do with it. I find the older sections like the portrait works, and other documentation work to be just too dry. yet I don't have an idea of what to do -- either just scrap them or somehow integrate them with other areas of the site. it is just that the writing is too glib and amateurish to have much soul. something akin to how it is when Loki asks me to tell him stories each night (or during the day when there is a chance) -- I make long ones up (sometimes based on stories that I have read, like the C.S. Lewis' Narnia books) that span several days and feature some of his best friends as partners in adventure. but in the end, I don't think I am much of a storyteller. although it is something that he connects with in me -- I think mostly because the combination of my absence in his life, and the long series of audio tapes I have made for him of either reading stories or occasionally telling ones. he listens to the tapes, and apparently gets a bit obsessed by them at certain points, listening over and over to a particular one until he has it memorized. so when I read him something when I am visiting, he can mouth the words and now is beginning to pick out the written words on the page. I try to peer into him, to understand what the conditions of our relationship have imposed on his spirit, but I cannot see clearly. he is an Other. and the only way I can cope with the whole thing is to show him what little I have come to understand is something called love.