Sergels torg was chosen as a lunar spot, craterlike and also possibly designed to reflect the reflection of from the blank metal plate planted on the moon in order to measure the distance from earth exactly with a laser, and that glass obelisk, originally intended to be a complex mirror for various lightsources but then quickly polluted.
We found nothing at Sergels torg. A very small dog behaving erratically may have been a werewolf. Walking and walking, we eventually found a small relief sculpture at the corner of the old mainpost office, a heraldic image of an elk being attacked in its hindquarters by a bird (or probably a bird, very vague and also torn, we discussed whether it was an eagle or a cormorant) and simultaneously in its forequarters by a dog (we thought it was to small to be a wolf). A few blocks away, two relief sculptures on either side of an entrance, two human figures, natural size: to the right a male figure with a strange haircut and a big toy boat in his arms (we had been talking about big toy boats and the game "ett skepp kommer lastat" - it seems like it is called "when my ship comes sailing in" in english), and between his legs a fish looked as it was just hitting the ground as he had given birth to it. More interesting, to the left, a female figure carrying a sickle, on her way kicking a beehive with her bare foot!
But the moonlight was beautiful, one of these moonlights which you really miss something when you experience in city light so you never see it alone and the remarkable shadows it casts.
After the first attempt to summation, additions started pouring in:
EL, the first to sneak off from the group during the search, went to meet some friends and conducted a search on her own as to whether menstrual cycles tended to converge towards full moon, and with poor precision they certainly did. “Jo då, visst sammanföll de alla med fullmånen, eller föregick den, eller tog vid, men helt klart ringade in den. En visade sig dessutom vara gravid i 12:e veckan, en annan led av att för första gången inte vara i menstruell fas med månen, men bedyrade istället att alla hennes flickvänner alltid haft mens just när månen varit full.” The place they went to, Mosebacke, was pasted with photographs of swedish celebrities through the ages with wide wolf smiles. A guy named Björn (=bear) said he was going to Tumba later the same evening in order to bite people.
EL dreamt “att jag hoppade nerför ett stort stup och hade hemligheter för världen. De var efter mig för det. Så plötsligt stod jag utanför porten till kyrkan i Luleå när hela församlingen tågade ut. Rakt emot mig, med min mormor i spetsen. Hon rabblade en framsa om satan och kristus och förbannade den skyldige. Jag trodde de skulle ta mig. Men mormor var kortväxt och hade solglasögon och svart lockigt hår och hon blinkade åt mig och ledde dem rakt förbi. Lurade dem att jaga en annan djävul.”
EB had difficulties falling asleep. “När jag väl har somnat vaknar jag av ett tyst pipande från köket. Martin har spekulerat över att vi kanske har möss, och jag går på upptäcktsfärd. Månen är full, och ungefär en femtedel av den är täckt av något mörkt som inte riktigt verkar vara ett moln.
När jag kommer in i köket så ser jag att ett antal av våra köksskåp är borta, och att där istället står tre öppnade plastburar. Golvet är täckt av vad som ser ut som musbajs och sågspån. Någon slags jättesmå, pipande djur springer av och an över golvet, men jag kan inte se dom i mörkret. jag går in i mitt rum, stänger dörren och slår på lampan. Lampan, som visar sig vara månen, lyser genast mycket starkare och utan att vara täckt av något (som jag nu förstår är musbajs). När jag kommer in i köket finns inget spår av djuren, oredan eller burarna.
Jag går in i mitt rum igen, och släcker som ett experiment lampan. Mycket riktigt - köket är återigen fyllt av pipande, sågspån och musbajs. Istället för att tända lampan igen sätter jag mig på Martins säng, och försöker urskilja vad det är för djur. Efter en stund inser jag att det är pyttesmå gula kycklingar, stora som min tumnagel. Jag somnar om, mycket lycklig dels över att mysteriet är löst och dels över att vi nu har en massa små kycklingar.
(Jag vill betona att det månljus som alstras när jag slår på ljuset i mitt rum är mycket mindre "månlikt" än det gråblå ljus som den förmådde producera utan min inverkan när den delvis var täckt av gnagaravföring.)”
In eagerness to round off, the first conclusion:
When my ship comes sailing in in the moonlight,
it will be filled with an elk carcass
and a lot of mouseshit,
and then barefoot I will kick the beehive.
The second conclusion, “Descriptive anthropology” by EB:
1.
Each full moon the man is big. The dog is small or very small, almost empty, only vomiting single sheets of advertisements. As the moon shrinks, the man shrinks too, and so the dog (through the leash) slowly grows. The man eats in vain everything it finds – workout equipment, cars, apartments, food, newspaper attachments ,etc – but everything eaten is now sucked through the very elastic and hollow leash. When the moon is at its smallest the dog (now larger than a cow) gets a hickup and vomits during the following half month special offers. As its stomach is successively emptied, the man (the clothes of which never crack or fall off). The stream of paper is interrupted only by small agitated barks. Some kind of utility person walks behind with a wheelbarrel, but it soon gets full. Brooms try to keep the streets clear, well lids from being covered and the traffic to run more or less normally. Finally, just before full moon, the paper exercise is running out. The dog wags its tail and only coughs up single sheets of advertisements.
2.
At fullmoon one is barefoot and stumbles over a beehive. The bees are insulted by the stumbling, which due to their small size will appear as a periodically recurring – and very meaningless – catastrophe. Not even the very traditionality of the stumbling calms them, rather the opposite. In their anger they blow encrustments of wax which they drop into the honey. The honey looses its smooth and homogenous character. The dependence of the bubbles on the lunar cycle allows experts assess the speed of the satellite around the earth by measuring the distance between the bubbles in a piece of well preserved honey.
But additions kept coming in.
JE dreamt the following:
A vivid encounter during the night was with a half meter high hare, with raindeer legs and huge ears. The top of the ears where made of the same material as dogs noses.. The hare was standing in a blurry forestlike environment.
Suddenly we received a contribution from the second JE in Harvard, without even knowing he was still on our mailing list:
“Det drömde jag inte alls. Nej, i natt drömde jag att jag skulle ut med min kompis Ilja för att flyga drake. Vi skulle till stranden där i Grekland där vi råkade vara, under en enorm klippa där vinden var starkast, så att draken skulle lyftas rakt upp och tråden bli parallel med klippan. Det var en jättefin drake, i lila och vit, och gjort av nylon och päls, bara den hade gått lite sönder och måste fixas med gummiband först innan vi skulle kunna gå ut och flyga den. Som tur var hade vi en fin gummiband, men det var mörkt där i stugan där vi var och vi var inte vana mot sånt arbete och vi koncentrerade oss och arbetade utan att prata.
I stugan där vi arbetade bodde tre bröder som medan vi arbetade skrev för oss med krita på en griffeltavla vad de hette i mellannamn (varav de verkade ha gott om). Mellannamnen blev så hära:
COLIN KIKKET OMELIOS / VERY SUCCESSFUL / JACKSON I O
När draken hade blivit fardig så forklarade bröderna vad dessa namn betydde.
Colin, förstod vi ju, var ett vanligt namn. Men OMELIOS, fortsatte förste brodern, var på grekiska, och KIKKET var ett engelskt ord och det var därför vi inte fattade dem.
Den andra brodern sa stolt att han hade valt sitt mellannamn själv och visade dokumentet från sjukhuset där han föddes, där han hade underskrivit med förnamn och mellannamn och efternamn i sin barnslig handstil, sådana bokstäver som man skulle kunna förvänta sig frän ett nyfött spädbarn.
Sedan frågade vi sista brodern vad betydelse av „I O‰ var. Vi hade läst fel, svarada han: det var inte „I O,‰ utan „1 0,‰ det vill säga inte bokstäver utan binära talsystemet, och de betydde „2‰ i decimala talsystemet och „delivery‰ på engelska.”
Then the third attempt to sum up was the most ambitious, but received some harsh criticisms and is here transformed into a fourth one:
1. Findings relating to hunting, to animals related to hunting, and specifically to to boreal mammal game): hare, deer, elk, reindeer, dog, bear.
2. Thoughts, observations and reveries about moon and periodicity.
ARTEMIS works as a matrix.
In the ancient greek cult of the moon/hunt-goddess Artemis, the female cultists referred to themselves as bees (matriarchal organisation) or bears (savagery and bloodthirst). When Kallisto broke the chastity rule, Artemis transformed her into a real bear. Aktaion was turned into a dear. A whole fleet was once punished for having shot a hare. That’s the way she was. So, JE:s skvader dream about the reindeer-dog-hare in the diffuse forest may very well have been a real meeting eye to eye with the hunt goddess.
Artemis had the power to regulate the menstrual cycle. As presumably wormwood, from which absinth is made, absinth implying absence, namely that of wolves. And the swedish name is “malört”, which the botanists say is because it was used against moths in the clothes, but we know it’s the “fleur du mal”. If the resistance towards natural cycles implies a homoerotic or phallic stance this collapsed already in the old sophist saying “homo mensura”, connecting measuring with menstruation – furthermore, in swedish, measure as a substantive is “mått”, which is homonymous with “mott” (which is the same stem as “moth”), which in turn for most people is synonymous with “mal” (the little moth appearing in the wormwood name as a coverup for the herb of evil).
The wolf seemed like an overexposed celebrity, impossible to change into anything else than back and forth between clichés of freedom and evil. The pubic furballs which often work as signs of female sexuality were more dynamic, bees, werewolves, small dogs, mice, hares, the devil. But its probably also true that the fallic order (the advertising bureaucracy) in its pedantic obsessions with easily surveyed order in itself breeds (and gets very frightened by) such flimsy distractions as the imbecille dog. Even the distant Harvard dream comes in here: rhetorically an bureaucratic attempt to reclaim ones name, but then entering new images like the furry kite (werewolf on a leash as well as the sail of the moon coming in) and playing in Greece. Even the name delirium, since the most “successful” “Jackson” did transform into a werewolf during the peak of his carreer, and Omelios seemingly referring back to honey. Melissa was Artemis’ second name on Crete, meaning “sweet little honeygirl”. But there are more greek stems in this vicinity, and thus the connection is also made between the honey and Meles, which is the badger, that furry steeljawed moonlight burglar, certainly the successor of the werewolves if they have gone extinct.
A certain liberating desertedness was on its way to start shining in the text when the paperwork of bureaucracy were running out and the moonglow intensified, the cold hand of the moon squeezing the banal activities approaching warmth death, this sublunar serenity where the dizzy wanderings of the little dog is just doodles scratched into the ice surface. The monstrous beauty of this escaped us as our all-too-mammalian body heat regulation systems were panicking. Our vain little complaints were just marginal comments to the musical pirouettes of the dog. But after that we would be allowed to bathe in honey. And hopefully this does not only refer to the warm sweetness of the flesh that is spreading in the experience of freezing to death-
So instead of dwelling on these boring old female/male dichotomies, why don’t we focus on the more interesting ambiguity of the honey, the very image of homogenity and sweetness, but now with the wax bubbles interrupting this homogenity, not as sugar crystals but perhaps rather as so many moons-
EB, JE, MF, EL, NN (+JE)
