Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Being and Becoming

What kind of people belong to this world? Those who are quick, aggressive and talented can do their things and do this more and more and have power. But what about those who are slow, soft, weak or not so impressive by individuality? Cry. I really hate this thing. We all belong to this world.

Society today means the combination of different methods of controlling people. Communism brought the question straight to the people - either by the proletariat or the peasant revolution but got corrupted by individualism and construction of power hierarchy. Dictatorship of sensitivity is the ideal. The same pattern goes with the churches, art communities, alternative movements, hippies etc. To try is enough, process can be creative and clean but when people are clean, soft and humane the king will appear. Every corner has a king.

Life is a very complex system of traps and when the Man walks through this he either survives or gets trapped. How he proceeds is based on the decisions he makes. One might see the Room in the very beginning, but there is no short cut to it. Every time the Way is different. The Room might get forgotten along the Way and if man gets trapped, he will forget it. But Man has the possibility of looking back and to realize the trap and again, he can Decide. On the threshold he will be told that by entering the Room his deepest wishes will become true, the ones gained through suffering. But one has to believe and laugh to his passions because if he does not believe, the Room has no meaning.

How much courage does one have for what one really knows? How much truth can a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare? These are key Questions to Become and the Questions come from very far away and long ago.

Exfiltrate the house of lie and come back to the Construction Site of Eternity. Walk the Way. Loving of fate: Existing for Eternity. Loving of fat: die in the world. Fat is giving up.

As soon as man finds out that the man’s world is fabricated only from psychological needs and that he in the most inside of him has no right to it, no belonging to it - will lead to the Questions, suffering and the possibility of existing. On the other hand the disappointment and sense of not belonging can lead to disbelief of any metaphysical or spiritual qualities of Truth and this then forbids the man to belief in the True World. This will lead to a locked position with every belief, every considering something true being necessarily false because there is no true world. This is the end for meeting the challenges to be an Operator, a Constructor, a One.

One must continuously belief in Existing, Truth and personal sensing of the Way as the only criteria of Reality. Otherwise reality will only lead to a disappointment. One Exists if how ever one thinks of the world, the thinking and the nature of actuality will be an accident. Understanding the dynamics of the accident leads One further. Thoughts come when they want and not when we want them.

When Orisha / Operator / One is born the Passenger / Self starts his journey. He can be very clear and dominating when the to-become person is young but then the world starts to get to him and he forgets. Pain and suffering hurts most the sensitive ones. What is sensitive for clean and purity is also sensitive for blows of the dark, and him the dark needs to confuse. The shell that is carrying the Passenger inside is created.

During the journey the Passenger will remind the Orisha about his real qualities but the life builds up the traps. When falling to these traps layer after layer the shell gets stronger and the Self inside more blurry. It is harder and harder for the Orisha to feel the Self or to believe what was once True. Passanger can still be the place to escape from the world shell, but this is not understanding, merely self therapy, escaping the Questions.

Then comes the time to ask the Questions to meet yourself and to deal with the past and the shell of the world. If one can decide and deal with the world through Passenger the Orisha gets to be One – an Orisha / Operator to whom it is possible to operate and help the other ones who belong to this world – balance the powers and to present the clean – to Create.

One must live the life and then understand the life lived. The life lived and understood and the Passenger together will present the real you of Self and this is called immortality. I have the Horror put behind me and the Eternity is in front of me. Perfectly normal – butterfly is a worm and then a shell, stone is frozen plasma, shit is bread and before grass, yesterday is present as the future. Orishas or Operators are always here. One has to have the possibility of taking One Self 1000 years back to realize that the Questions are the same. “No Sir, you are the care taker. You have always been the caretaker.”

If the Passenger will not become together with the world shell he is traveling in he will keep coming back to the world. This is reincarnation, the recycle of suffering. When the Passenger comes together with the World shell an Orisha / divine Self is born and another level of the Way is taken. Inside the people the Passenger is called the soul. It is like a clear soap bubble. If taken away the world shells the soap bubbles can be seen floating along the streets. Not so many though for some reason comparing to the crowd. Maybe many bubbles have already been broken and gone back to the big bucket of soap. The children blow these bubbles to fly again and again.

And for me, who appreciate life, the butterflies and soap-bubbles and whatever is like them for me mostly seem to enjoy happiness. To see these light, foolish, pretty, lively little spirits flying around is great hope and challenge to continue.

It is true we love life, but not because we want to live, but because we want to love.

Suffering

There is always some madness in love, but there is also some method in madness.

Every man has his breaking point. In every man there is a struggle between the good and the evil and the good does not always triumph. The question Yes or No can also be presented by the dark side and man has a temptation to agree in order to lift up his worldly status – to present himself as a prophet and people easily follow him – so he is successful. By presenting the good one he still must obey his pay back and build up the heart of darkness, power the people to do the ritual, share the same shame. This will hook the possible operators, they through their purity will feel it but can not alone resist or to trust their belief. Evil pulls the strings in the atmosphere of destruction.

What is wrong with darkness you say and you can not see, but still you feel – it is frightening, people change in the ritual – they are only actors you say and the dark side overcomes what is the better angels of our lives – the Passenger will drown, all the Passengers present and the Demon has paid back. No longer can you say what is play and what is life. He say he only plays and you must obey. What was real life will transform into the act of play and what was the hard core of the play did not even exist, demon has got inside, humanity is transformed into humiliation. This is not worse than when a man fucks a small child. A shooting gallery – people getting high and heavenly, but destruction and loosing themselves. Massacre – mass psychosis following power drugged the commands of raising hell, afterwards denying or not even believing – forgetting. Mass rape. Orgy - rave chill out. Pushing drugs / manipulating child soldiers. Corrupting native people, genocide in the name of God. Clear cutting forest / changing jungle to desert.

When trading with darkness the gain is what people easily call inspiration, devoted to the cause, not compromising, talented, unique, has his way, people follow him, he can change the country, he is the one, he is something special and people follow and those who follow the people call the real people. Every corner has a king.

When seeing me the dark side knows who he meets. When seeing me the Orisha knows who he meets, but it is hard to believe what the Passenger says. “You can save the world”, the heaven painter says. Save from what? This is what he does not ask from himself. “He has a very special energy”, the fucked out eyes says amazed and corrupted. Why he moves by himself when I touch him, he does not ask from himself. “You have very powerful eyes”, the little princess says. Why she can see the power, she does not ask herself. “You are Satan. You are Prophet”, the judge says. Why he sees the Eternity, he does not dare to ask himself but plays crazy and crazy plays still say and articulate when asked: “I am the God.”

“Eternity”, says the Shaman, and nothing else. Questioning will never end. The Eternal Question is necessarily larger than our interpretation of it / them…so for those who asked me about the Way I did not answer, for the Way does not exist.

In the beginning of the Questions one realizes that all the sacrifices, all the working your ass of, has been vain, false and lie – what was before humanity is now humiliation. This can be too much to take and the Way disappears. This is on the other hand naturally the threshold of humanity’s transformation. All great things bring about their own destruction through an act of self overcoming. One has to die a bit to be reborn. One has to forget himself. Forget himself. One must burn in her own flame, how other wise can you become new than from ashes?

Once was doubt and questioning evil, and the will to Self. Escape, nobody and vanishing was the way to sleep. Then the Self became an invalid and as and invalid she suffered and sought the cause to suffering. The flame of subconscious jealousy turned at last like the scorpion, the poisoned sting against himself. Your very self wanted to die and turn away from life, which was nothing else but other man’s stories. You wanted to please and the more pleased they were the cheaper the life turned out. And therefore you were angry to life and with the earth. And your unconscious envy locked your Way.

Once you had passions and they were manipulated dirty. But after the Questions you will have your Self and the passions will have their true name. All the devils will become angels. Once you had wild dogs in your cellar, but they will turn into birds and butterflies. The poison that you once toxicated yourself will now become balsam for your Self. And nothing evil will no longer be able to touch you unless it is needed to conflict themselves and by purity and Self you shall prevail.

Suffering and the Questions has a double aspect: this is the tension between recognizing what is and what might be, or between what was believed to be true but is now known not to be the case. This suffering is a fact to face or to escape and the key step into Belonging and Existing. This step is the same as the question of creativity: away from here and a towards which. What your Self desires the most is to create beyond itself. Nobody in the means of loosing your self becomes the real nobody of a divine virtue. When body and mind was the instrument and plaything of the sense and spirit the Self had to stay behind. The decisions were given from outside.

Suffering + Willing = Existing. Pain, suffering and contradictions are no longer objections for existing but expressions of the tensions of existence itself. The individual does not escape from suffering but transforms her evaluation of it. It becomes a criterion of Existing. The personal terror of the suffering to exist – the away from which and the towards which is no longer objection to being in the world but becomes the experience of Existing as Present. The question of meaningless of being is set aside as the meaning of Existence is re-determined by each creative act of “yes, now, shall it be”. The creative process of Existence continually gives birth to itself. Existing is no longer the issue of question but of articulating it – Operator is born, she want to be, to become, to become more. I am nobody becomes to mean I am the one before the world.

Before the Eternal Questions one’s attempts to get higher only put the roots deeper into darkness, deep, to mud, to world, towards evil. Yeah, into the evil, cried the youth. How did you know my soul? Many of the soul will never be discovered unless one first invents it. When you go high, nobody will trust you any longer and then you are always alone.

What did I look from the heights? How tired I am on the high. Yes, my destruction I was looking for, little and big. It is my envy that was destroying me. But I was also waiting for the lightening, but went numb. Can not wait anymore. Time is up, it is Yes of No, now. No more am I free.

Trauma always has hair. Manipulation. MANipulation: take down vagina – walk to the moon.

When suffering one talks about love and traids it to cheap sex and say: Forgiveness is the core of humanity. The very core of humanity and the end of suffering is forgiveness indeed. Playing with forgiveness is giving the forgiveness towards others which is the same as blackmailing with forgiveness before the act of humiliation. One must to forgive himself. Forgive himself to forget himself. Forget himself. Love is the gratest. Resonating is bigger.

The Self will say to the ego: feel pain. For that that purpose it means: think. Lie has short foot steps.


We all belong to this world and deal with our duties based on our tools and how and when we answered the Question. Some walk alone, some join. Some are man and woman. The relationships can be many but in the end all of them are either total or not total. What is total is clean, what is not total is a compromise and you compromise the whole campaign. There is always better than this and after better is the Total.


Trickster, Hermes, El Legua, Exhu, Stalker, Horus, Gabriel
- First one of the Orishas who the other Orishas have to meet first to talk to Eternity. “How will all this end?”, a leading Russian space scientist was asked. “All this will end either by the word Yes or by the word No.
- Has the power to operate on the both sides – in darkness and on surface and so has the power to deal with the Demons and with the Orishas.
- He who waits in the street corners and on the crossroads. He who lives on the garbage dumps.
- The colors are black, red and white. Material is iron. Methods include compost and rust. Operates in the city, but is not from there.
- He will meet the people and ask the question Yes of No. The ones who believe, will survive onwards. He who can not cope with Eternity must bounce back to reality. Man must believe.
- I am nobody and will grow to be me when I meet the all of you. I am not the leader, I just present the question. The construction site of Eternity gets bigger. All the Operators are needed – the Eight Ferries must be together with their personal tools to win the Dragon. If one is missing the Dragon prevails. The all of you tell me who I am and I do believe, but do you believe who you are? This is the question.

I am a railing alongside the dark falling. Whoever is able to grasp me may grasp me! Your crutch, however, I am not. Not by anger, but by laughter shall I kill. Come, let us slay the spirit of gravity, let the Demons go and you, take off and fly.

With the Demons: I have no right to judge you, but I have the right to kill you. I can raise up hell and people know it is necessary. The valueless society of today will be filled with ethics – the corners are windy and in there we stand and clean of the king.

She who now turned sick, the evil overtook: he needs to cause pain, to know to do wrong, to repeat the pain that caused him pain. He is the first one to cry. He suffered and became the king and now seeks to cause suffering.

Always to look towards the dark ages: then indeed were illusion and faith something different. Raping the reason was likeness to God and doubt was sin. Too well, also, do we know what the king believes in. The darkness of the blood drops of the lost bodies but believing in his own body – the thing it self. But it is sick for him and gladly would he like to get out of his skin. Therefore he has to preach for the death and confuse the life.

What is right and what is wrong? So simple and we all know this even when we ask and we ask simply because we do not dare to believe. And if we do not believe – what is right and what is wrong? It can take a lot to believe, ones own personal history might not be a pretty sight. Horror has a face and you must make horror and personal terror your friends – otherwise they will be your true enemies. You must be proud of your enemies. Resistance, that is the distinction of a slave.

The wild dogs want liberty, they bark in their cellar for the spirit to open all the prison doors. It seems to me you are the prisoner, the soul that was poisoned by all the false liberties. Cleaning is necessary for the freedom of the spirit and dealing with the past. Much of the stink is still down in the stomach, much of the hate behind the eyes. I know your danger, but by love and hope you get your Self: do not throw love and hope away and do not humiliate love.

You still feel noble to yourself and also others feel the noble in you, but still they look at you with the evil looks. The very people you call the real. For the evil the noble stands on the way and therefore they must put you aside. They push you to loose you highest hope. Trouble and terror is the hero for them.

To fail to shape the suffering within us into a tolerable meaningfulness condemns us to the terrifying prospect of the endless return of our suffering. Failure to redeem everything that belongs to the it was and therefore failure to secure the meaningfulness of what has yet to come guarantees bouncing back to world and personal terror.

A thought an idea is one thing, another thing is how to follow your own thought in the world of other man’s thoughts, men who’s power overcome the questioner and another thing is what really happened. When putting all this together and making a final honest statement turns the suffering into a compost of energy to grow more. If not dealt with, the compost will suffocate and the mind ends to tragic. An idea made this pale man. So was he following his idea, but the end result was nothing like the idea and he could not endure it, when it was done. He lied to himself, made a story of his idea, but because he had the idea and now had to eat the other man’s telling his soul became mad. His mind is clear, but his soul is mad. Nothing really happened, but they raped his idea. They raped him.

Creating – that is the true salvation from suffering, and feeling of not existing. But for the Operator to Become suffering is needed, and much transformation. Where is Innocence – where is will of generating new life. Where is beauty – where is the true will of the true man. What the moment of suffering questions in each and every one of us is whether we have the creative capacity to attribute a meaningfulness to our pain and thereby redeem all that has flowed into it and all that will flow from it. No more nothing bad has ever happened to me but more I learned my lesson. Fail to do so and be condemned by your weakness to remain within the same cycle of eternal meaningfulness, nobody in world sense. Fool shall you say, but not sinner. Fool shall you say, but not dirty. Fool shall you say, but not no-believer.

Now, we are on the threshold. This is the most important moment of your lives. From here you can enter the Room and your deepest wishes may become true. The most sincere ones, the ones gained through suffering.

What are the heaviest things. Is it not this: To humiliate oneself in order to try to show some pride? I can take this, I am the only one - to exhibit ones foolishness in order play for the wise man.

Or is it this: To escape your purity when it is about to celebrate its triumph? To take the heaviest blow when they say just be your self.

Or is it this: To suffer of eating the other mans truth for hunger of soul?

Or is it this: To be sick and damn the ones that will care of you? Make friends of the ones that want you to be even sicker?

Or is it this: Bathing in the dirty water when they say it is clean and looking for the horizon of the clear ocean next to you?

Or is it this: To love the ones that use you and despise you and give your hand to the demon not looking at the cold snakes and frogs around him? Do not be afraid, we must open our minds. Sleep.

This never happened.

Eternity

What we know about Eternity is that it exists. It is the great Abyss and the rest we should just leave alone. There is no God, to start with. In Eternity one can see the ultimate horizon and this horizon is radiating the original Qi as always. When seeing this man gets touched by Eternity and he believes. There is special characters who are destined to be able to sense Eternity, to look for Horizon. They can present this for the rest of people and this is important, they are the Operators.

All the people can sense Eternity. Depending how clean they are the closer they live to the truth of creating. A blacksmith can be in straight connection to Eternity when forming the Iron. A farmer feels his work to be in the Eternal circle of cultivating the Soil and to bring the others bread, part of the Eternal circulation of Nature. A fisherman brings the fish from the other side of the surface and the fish is real.

One can feel the base resonating of the Eternity. The resonating that is behind the singing of the birds, the resonating what comes out of trees. Child can have an orgasm produced by the resonating of a tree and people can also resonate together. But then again afterwards – do they believe. This was just a trick of my mind. Wrong, this was the state when you forgot the forgetting and met again the Surface. The Surface, the clean edge – the edge of the straight razor. I saw a snail crawling on the edge of a straight razor. Crawling, slithering and still surviving. This is my dream, this is my nightmare. In the dream a horrible monster comes to a man and he asks: “Who are you?”. “What do you mean”, the Monster says, “I am your dream.”

This resonating is contemplating to Eternity. This takes form in for example in the Om -mantra, the Joiku -singing of the Same or the pray calling of the Muslims.

The native people are in straight interface with the Nature and so feel the powers of Eternity through it – the man is part of Nature. Nature is a face of Eternity and man can mirror himself on it. The city people will dominate the natural people, they must obey but they can feel the memory of the Connection and so the song is sad. He still sings in bare feet and the city people will imitate this…they are fools and they lie and we have to be merciful for those who lie? We have to kill them. Pig after pig, cow after cow. Village after village, army after an army and they call me an assassin. What do you call it when the assassins accuse the assassins? They lie and people follow those who lie.

The native people meet the Shaman, because he can go to the other side. The Shaman will take the form of an animal and say to the people, what animals they are. When the Shaman shows to the people who say they do not believe they brake in pieces and hide under the carpet. The Shaman will can drag the city man from under the carpet and shake him like a can of objects inside, pour out the things and show them to the man. The man can wake up, go crazy or just simply lie to himself – this never happened. When a man lies to himself to forget this, the Shaman has gained a victory. The native people are people who believe. All of the people can be this.

The Chinaman believes same time to the time before society when the Immortals ride the dragons and to the present time of money and social control. Same time he calculates the price of a house to be sold and to make business with and value his own house by Feng Shui and the presence of Ghosts. He believes in acupuncture but pollutes his city and kills the nature.

Plasma. People are part of the big plasma and longing to get attached back to it. This is the Eternal energy, the Qi, the Abyss and mystery and this meets the surface everywhere. Acupuncture is penetrating the hard surface of the world to get in touch with the Qi, give it possibilities to flow, find out new ways, release away poisoned Qi of the dark. Give possibility for people to feel the Plasma. It is perfectly understandable to worship the sun.

People want to believe. Fortune telling is not needed other ways than just giving the people possibility to believe. It does not matter to which church people belong, if they want to believe. Church in its theologies goes always wrong and presents shortcuts. Mysticism is the opposite of theology – a personal belief through sensitivity and feeling. People don’t question love, kindness or friendship – real realities that can not be speculated and so it is also useless to articulate them. They exist through sensitivity, subconscious and feelings – this is mysticism. Control and hardness are deaths companions. In nature everything that becomes hard will die. Accident is great.

In the World today it is like this: If you think good things, good things will happen – if you think bad things, nothing good will happen.

It is said the Eternity reviles in the state of ecstasy, whether it is in the form of the spinning dance of the Sufis, speaking in tongues, meditating, drugs or fishing. This has nothing to do with believing. If a man believes, he can articulate the meeting of the Surface. There is living things and dead things on both sides of the surface and there is things that float. These are objects to be observed but then again, without realizing the presence and the meanings of the Surface, these objects will not reveal their true nature. “The Phoenix has not come and the River has not reveled its true nature – this must be the end of me.” The greatest creatures of our world live kilometers below the surface and they communicate by singing.

Operator can fix an image of that what should be, even Eternity. They are productive to the extent that the process is the real transformation itself, unlike men of knowledge who leave everything as it is. The works of the Operators can fundamentally change the humanity’s understanding of itself. Eternity is the inspiration of the works of the Operator.

The Operator is only a mouthpiece or merely a mediator of overpowering forces of Eternity. The connection to Eternity comes with suddenly indescribable certainty and clearness, something unspeakable becomes visible, able to listen, something that shakes the Operator to his very depths and throws him down. One hears, one does not seek. One accepts, one does not ask who gives. Like a lightening a vision flashes up, with necessity – it has to come, without hesitation and the form can be what ever – the Operator will never have any choice, everything happens involuntarily in the highest degree but still the feeling is not locking or frightening but a feeling of freedom, absoluteness of Eternity, power and divinity.

Must we not suppose that the highest and indeed the truly serious task of art – to save the eye from gazing into the horrors of night and to deliver the subject by the healing balm of illusion from the spasms of the agitations of the will. Saving this our lived world from being denigrated by other-worldly values and remaining true to the world. Art can build an instrument for Eternity to play.

The creative act is the moment of Becoming itself and has the most intimate quality of individuality and presence in Eternity. The creative act is an accident, a vision of fatality, a determination of what will be. Operators are the engine of Becoming.

Not the Operator or the end product, but the construction, the creating is the Eternal being of all Becoming. Just get into the cage and ask: “Why I Am A Destiny”.

Write with blood and find that blood is spirit. Try to please no-one, have no expectations, let out come what is to come out.


XXX

When the brother of my grandmother died they cremated him and took his ashes to his lake in Lapland with a rowing boat. The lay the ashes to the Surface of the lake and soon a couple of swans appeared on the skies. They landed on the ashes and stayed there a while, then took of with ash on their feathers and flew away towards North. My grandmother told me the story. She is grown up in Lapland and has a strong connection to Nature Mysticism. My grandfather is from south and never talk of this things. I was silent and waiting my grandfathers dooming reaction. He just said: “I was there too.”

After this he told me that during the war one of his soldiers had gone into a grenade shock and locked into a psychosis. My grandfather thought it was good for him to ride on his horse, so the soldier was put on back of the horse and my grandfather walked the horse to a quiet lake far away from the noise of the war. It was full moon and they stayed by the lake. Soon the moon changed to the face of my grandfathers brother. My grandfather know the sick brother was dead. Also the other man woke up from psychosis.

When my aunt died my mother woke up in the middle of the night and felt a wind traveling past her. She woke up my father and told her sister just died.

One day in the war I was sitting alone on the top of a mountain, or actually the highest point of a mountain ridge. Suddenly a white mist rose up from the valley and quite fast I was sitting so that my upper body was on top of the thick mist and my lower body in the mist. All the war stopper. The tanks could not drive and the gunners aim. It became so silent. I was looking a while the quiet surface of this mist, then got my kit together and walked down.

In Winnipeg running naked in the white out in the -60 in the prairies I understood immediately that this is the death and so the death came with a face and feeling – like in war before, but I saw that also this time the death is not total, but a choice – some sort of a trickster. If I would say Yes, which was the easy and comfortable choice, the death would be quick – maybe ridiculous for sure too. When I said No, the death disappeared immediately and I continued running. I run a long time and did not die.

I was trapped into a crossfire of a sniper and a PKM –machine gun. They were not exactly shooting at me, but troops behind me. Nevertheless the bullets were flying in some centimeters in front of me. I was pressed towards a sand wall of a street cutting, could not move and was waiting the hit any time. The cold presence of death came. I felt that dieing like this was such a waste – not really fighting in a battle, but being trapped and getting some lucky shot. I felt sorry and regretted that I was there – it was the end of the line for me. I promised, that if I survive I will go back home. Then the sniper hit a plant above me and a beautiful bright colored flower fell down on my belly. I looked at the flower a while and then stood up and walked slowly back to the troops behind me. People were staring at me and could not believe that I didn’t run or take cover.



Construction sites of Eternity:
- The Pyramids
- The Valley of the Kings and the construction sites and cities of the construction workers attached to it
- The cosmic wells of the North India
- The cities of the Inca
- The pyramids of the Maya
- The cities of the Aztec
- Alhambra
- Kaba, the monolith - Space Odyssey 2001
- Kappadokia and Petra
- Tower of Babylon
- The medieval cathedrals
- Stonehenge
- Taiwan Faust
- Zen Gardens
- Igloo and other dwellings of the nomads
- The Viking boat.
- The boat of Tom Suuronen
- The Red Square
- Jerusalem
-

The movies of the Question and the Way:
- Stalker
- Apocalypse Now
- Tin Drummer
- Happy People International
- Baraka
- Space Odyssey 2001
- Clockwork Orange
- Man Without the Past
- 1001 Days of Sodoma and Gomorra
- Leningrad Cowboys Go America
- Shining
- Illusion Travels on Tramway
- The 7th Seal
- The Day of Wrath
- Rosemary’s Baby
- One Flew Ower the Cocoon’s Nest
- Ivan the Terrible
- Andrei Rublyev
- Solaris
- Angels Over Berlin
- In the Realm of Senses

The books:
- Mawlana Djalaladding Rumi
- Tolstoy
- Dostoyevsky
- Tora + New Testament + Koran
- Tao Te Chin
- The Little Prince
- Kalevala
- Iliya and Odyssey
- Hieroglyphs
- Berthold Brecht
- Nietche

Dance
Performance
Construction Work
Making Tools
Art
Writing
Movie
Being with Nature
War
Drugs
Death, Love
Pregnancy / Child is borne
Farming
Accident


The Shaman / The Mystic
The Constructor / The Farmer / The Fisherman / The Hunter
The Doctor / The Documenter
The Man Who Does Not Talk / Monk / Guru / Fakir / Assassin
The Venus / Maria – Maria Magdalena / Matsu / Aphrodite
The Errand Boy / The Messenger / The Trickster
The Poet / The Writer / The Artist
The Professor

This Is This and This Ain't Something Else But This Is This

Taipei was an ideal place to build up society – a fruitful valley with a constantly flooding river bringing rich mud to the fields and heavy rains washing energetic top soil down from the mountains. The sea was close and the river full of fish. The Chinese brought with them the agriculture from the Mainland while the aboriginals continued in a more animistic connection with the nature. Anyway, the man and human nature was very much part of nature.

Now Taipei is a rock. The original qualities of the site of the city have no meanings anymore, the nature is treated either as an enemy or as a sewage and a garbage dump. The rock is understandable - people like to live in caves.

When the energy plasma of the city reaches a certain level the people start buzzing around it like bees or ants. There is no name for this. If we would talk about human body, this energy would be described as Qi. Seeking to be engaged with this urban Qi is natural for human but also the atmosphere where personal and common decisions easily get twisted and the connection to the nature can be lost.

There is nothing much good to say about the rock city of Taipei, the ultra violent traffic infrastructure solutions, the more or less criminal treatment of nature – specially the rivers, cold official surroundings of politics and money, pollution and asphalt. This city exists in the maps and official data for urban planning. When you ask people about Taipei, they never talk about this city. When I start remembering how Taipei is, this city does not count. Because a parallel city exists. The Para-city that creates the Qi of Taipei. The city of People.

Like no place else the parallel city has sucked itself into the surface of the official city. The co-existence and same time contradiction is the same as with Dao and Confucianism or as with Taiwan in general as an efficient economic power and business partner same time not officially even existing as a country. The Para-city Taipei resonates in straight connection with the spirit world, nature, humanism and a peculiar mix of the present moment as its ultimate and then eternity is to be found.

This book reviews how the Para-city operates within the official cityscape of Taipei and traces down the private human actions to their origins in the countryside by mirroring Taipei to the country town Yilan on the other side of the mountain ridge. The private building and operational solutions of the Taipei citizens are from the same field as the solutions of the farmers in Yilan. People brought the ideology from the country towns in Taiwan and Mainland China when they moved to Taipei. On the other hand the highway between Taipei and Yilan is soon to be ready and the rock city will come to the fruitful delta or Yilan, the ideal place to build up society.

Shortly about the cases studied in Taipei and Yilan.

TAIPEI

Pigeon Architecture
The roofscape of Taipei is dotted with pigeon houses. Pigeons circle around the city training for the races. You eat pigeon and the pigeon eggs. The pigeon house constructions have developed into a special field of architecture. There is no architect in there. The client is the pigeon and the caretaker is the man who builds the illegal construction by himself or lets a pigeon house construction specialist to handle the case. Living together with the pigeons in the modern city and trying to make their living conditions as good as possible builds a bridge between the modern man and nature.

Human Layer
As the attic is the memory and subconscious of a house Treasure Hill is the attic of Taipei. The settlement is an enclave inside the hectic city preserving old Chinese ways of urban living yet having nothing to do with the laws and solutions of the modern society. In Treasure Hill people farm their vegetables, have a common open air cinema and an illegal landlord – renter hierarchy according to ones living place in the Hill. There is no cars in Treasure Hill and every house, fence, step or street is build by hands. Treasure Hill harms nobody, yet it challenges the whole system of the modern urban context. In a way Treasure Hill is dangerous, anarchistic and even a stronghold of terrorism since it don’t obey or even care about the official structures of economics. Treasure Hill is not alone. Similar kind of illegal settlements can be found around Taipei bringing the Human Layer into the city.

CityZen Garden
Small private gardens are everywhere dominating the no mans land and bringing inside the city an axis of forever going private cultivation of land for fresh vegetables, Chinese medicine, herbs, fresh air of just for beauty. Cultivating the private illegal gardens can be seen as a therapy for the modern city dwellers. When tending to the gardens or bringing some fresh vegetables as a gift to your neighbor the people feel happy and they feel clean.

Local Temples
When you set up a farm in the hills and build your house you do also build a small house for your local God, a small local temple. You ask the God blessings for the farming and your family. In this state maybe the God is just a stone from your fields. People took all this with them also to the city. Since you don´t farm anymore you pray for money. The local temples in Taipei color the grey streets. Usually together with the local temple is a couple of trees or even a small park, anyway the setting is very much different than the surrounding city. No matter what you pray for the local temple is a safe haven from the artificial time, stress and hectic rhythm of the city.

Night Markets
The ultimate battle field of more or less illegal private enterprising and official stiffness of the city is the night market. The astonishingly colorful and energetic night markets are as acupuncture needles in the urban body releasing the Qi to meet the surface. This has to be, even the police knows it. He has to do his duty though, but for sure not too effectively.

Illegal Architecture
The city must be a compost and the Para-city Taipei is. Illegal constructions are everywhere recycling material and space. Small houses rise on rooftops. Parasite structures grow to the facades of apartment houses. The ad-hoc shops occupy street corners and so on. The official city maybe exists along the big streets but inside the city blocks the situation is dominated by private illegal constructions. As ants the people bring material to where the official city can not see and add a piece to an organic structure. Sometimes the structure grows to be a whole settlement. Sometimes the official city wipes out the settlement or cuts brutally through it some official streets.

Pin-Lan Vision
A taxi driver spends 500 NTD every day for pin-lan. The nut gives him a small high and keeps him awake. The nuts are addictive but so is the whole circus around the nut – the beetle nut vision. The pin-lan culture offers the construction worker, taxi or truck driver or who ever a short escape from the grey city to surroundings or glamour, sex and mysteries. The beetle nut girl is hot, she lives in a small neon light princess castle only to serve her prince, you.

YILAN

Clean Up Center
The water is Yilan is clean and it runs everywhere. Either the water comes as rivers or streams down from the mountain or straight from underground as mineral rich ponds and springs. The Yilan people construct shelters to wash their clothes and vegetables in community washing places. In these places they meet each other, gossip and tell stories. The clean up place is an honest forum of the citizens. No money exists there and everyone is expected to fix or modify the shelter. The architecture of these shelters is shocking. Everything is done by hand and carried to the place. The dimensions are human and the way of material use organic. Nature is everywhere and the whole ritual of washing the clothes or vegetables almost holy.

Hot Spring
Hot springs is a good business. During the Japanese era Yilan was famous across the Empire. Now city people come to enjoy the drive in hot springs. Still there is also places to get really clean. No money out there. In these hot springs the Kamikaze pilots took their last baths before the Eternity. In some villages around Yilan there is families who do it every day. These fine clean up springs are small secrets of the communities and only the most necessary constructions are added to the natural spring – a place to change clothes, a fence around the deep part of the spring keeping the children from falling to deeper water, a sheltering for shadow and maybe steppes down to the spring. When any of these springs is found the disaster is close, one can make money with this. And that is good for the community.

Urban Nomad
Taipei trades on wheels. And so does Yilan. Where during the day was a normal street in the night is a market. All kinds of foods, drinks and objects. All this came to the place just like that – on wheels. Any kind of manpowered and motorized solutions on wheels for moving food stands, carrying vegetables, burning the God´s money, collecting cardboard for recycling, moving the rice straw stacks and so on. The private people are highly mobilized and the small business will find its place, a small city on wheels will be set up. These people are the urban nomads, something very Chinese mixing the agriculture, urbanism and the movement of the nomads.

Farmhouse or Villa
You couldn’t dream of a better place to farm rice than the Yilan delta. Glorious green, endless paddies with running water systems. In the middle of the fields the house of a farmer or now more and more actually a villa of the bourgeoisie. The city people are coming. They buy farmland and then bring in a villa. Soon the highway from Taipei is here and this land is worth fortunes. As the city Yilan is a rock in the middle of the rice fields the similar kind smaller rocks in the form of city dwellers villas are now dropping to the rice fields. Comparing the building methods of the farmer who lives from the nature to the villas of the bourgeoisie is shocking again. Yilan has now the change to turn into an after city rehabilitation center and drive in nature, to turn its original qualities into business.

Marco Casagrande