Figment

AWFULLY GOOD My mother is telling a story about two boys who made stew in a tin can. They'd used water and potatoes and one of them added bits of sausage. They held the tin can between two sticks over a little bonfire they'd made themselves. Afterwards they ate, enjoying themselves. My mother had asked them if the stew was good, and they'd answered that it was awfully good. Was it awful or was it good? I ask. It definitely wasn't a good stew but it tasted good to them, my mother says. But why did they say it was awfully good? I say. That's just something people say, my mother says. But awful means not good, I say. That's true, you're right, she says. So was it awful or good? I say. It was good, it was awfully good, my mother says. I don't understand. It doesn't fit together. And there's no point asking any more questions. That's just how people talk, my mother says. @figmentera #jon_fosse #scenes_from_childhood

"In 1901. the British, the French, the Russians, and the Germans, who were enjoying at the time a position of global military, political, and medical dominance, believed that plague and cholera spread to Europe and the rest of the world from Mecca and Medina and that the people who brought these diseases to the West (to western Asia, southern Europe, and North Africa) were Muslims who came on pilgrimage to the Hejaz. In other words, the sources of the world's plague and cholera epidemics were China and India, while their distribution center was considered to be the Hejaz Province of the Ottoman Empire. Doctors and quarantine experts working in every corner of the Ottoman Empire, be they Christian, Muslim, or Jewish. knew deep down that from a medical perspective, this claim was sadly true. But some of them, particularly the younger Muslim doctors, also believed that Western powers exaggerated this contention for political purposes and used it toward the intellectual, spiritual, and military humiliation of the peoples and nations of the world outside of Europe. When the British declared, "If you cannot protect our Indian subjects from disease while they are on the hajj, then we will!" everyone in the Ottoman camp-including Sultan Abdul Hamid himself-knew that this was not just an expression of disdain toward the Ottomans' handling of medical matters, but a military threat too. This was why Abdul Hamid ("Your uncle!" said Doctor Nuri, looking into his wife's eyes) had spent so much money on setting up quarantine facilities in the Hejaz. He had built new quarantine stations, military outposts, and docks on Kamaran Island at the mouth of the Red Sea and sent his brightest doctors to work there." - Taken from "Nights of Plague" written by Orhan Pamuk @figmentera

THAT WEIRD GUY After several years of going to dances at various community centres and mostly dancing alone, I realized one night it must have been late, and I'd probably been given a lot to drink - that I was supposed to ask a girl to get up and dance with me. I'd seen her so many times. She rarely danced. She looked shy. She looked different from the other girls. I probably thought that there had to be a girl for me. And maybe I also thought that she liked me. Anyway, I liked her. I asked her if she wanted to dance. She bluntly answered no. And then I heard her say something to a friend about that weird guy. @figmentera #jon_fosse #scenes_from_childhood

God takes pity on kindergarten children, Less on schoolchildren. On grownups, He won't take pity anymore. He leaves them alone. Sometime they have to crawl on all fours In the blazing sand, To get to the first aid station Dripping blood. Maybe He will take pity and cast His shadow On those who truly love As a tree on someone sleeping on the bench On a boulevard. Maybe we too will spend on them The last coins of favor Mother bequeathed us, So their bliss will protect us Now and in other days. - Yehuda Amichai @figmentera #poetry

My mother baked the whole world for me In sweet cakes. My beloved filled my window With raisins of stars. And my yearnings closed inside me Like bubbles in a loaf of bread. On the outside, I am smooth and quiet and brown. The world loves me. But my hair is sad as reeds in a drying swamp- All the rare birds with beautiful plumage Flee from me. - Yehuda Amichai @figmentera #poetry

IT HAS STOPPED SNOWING It has stopped snowing. Geir and Kjell are out in the new snow but they’re not going skiing, no they’re busy with their snow shovels, pushing the snow around and beating it down flat and hard. I’m standing at my window spying on what they’re doing out there. I ask my mother if I can go outside and she says OK. I bundle up, gloves and everything, and go outside. I run over to Geir and Kjell and ask them what they’re doing and they say they’re going to play car and make streets and a tunnel and everything in the snow. I run home and get two cars. I come back and Geir and Kjell have finished with the snow shovels and they’ve already started working on the construction. And then Geir and Kjell and I build a tunnel, and a garage, and a house. This is going to be great. Geir loads snow onto the truck with an excavator. Kjell drives the snow in the truck, then dumps it out. I build a road. We are working and building. We don’t know what will happen next but we crawl around in the snow, humming and whistling, driving and dumping. Snow is falling steadily on us, light and white, so that the road has to be cleared again and again. We work and build and clear the road. Time passes, but we don’t notice. We plough the road and gravel it with the lightest new snow. We don’t notice that some slightly bigger boys, boys we barely know even though they live only a few houses away, have come walking up to us through the yard. The boys don’t live far away but we don’t know them. They stand and look at us. They ask what we’re doing, and we say we’re playing car. They ask if they can play too, and we hand them our cars, our excavator. Then we stand and watch the other boys play. They yell louder and push the wheels down into the road, they laugh and shout. Crappy road, they say. You can’t fucking drive on a road like this, they say. They have to repair the road, it’s a bad road, Geir says. You can’t fucking repair a road like this, they say. These road workers are useless, they say. Making such a crap road, they say. I want my car back, Kjell says. Your crappy car, they say. That car’s useless too, they say. It’s all a bunch of shit, they say. What’s that? they say. A car park, Geir says. Huh, a car park, they say. You can’t park there, they say. @figmentera #jon_fosse #scenes_from_childhood

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At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man's power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant. - Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace @figmentera

"So she stood up and, rising, she had the sensation that she had gradually become a container for herself. You get old, your heart, your liver, your lungs seem to expand in size, and the walls of the body give way outward, swell- ing, she thought, and you take the shape of an old jug, wider and wider toward the top. You swell up with tears and fat. She no longer even smelled to herself like a woman. Her face with its much-slept-upon skin was only faintly like her own-like a cloud that has changed. It was a face. It became a ball of yarn. It had drifted open. It had scattered." - From "Leaving the Yellow House" by Saul Bellow