Patterns and Resolutions
Another Sunday, Another Naive Weekly — Observations From The Internet Wilderness.
Good morning,
Again this year, I blew into the new year sleeping. It seems to become a tradition for this phase of life, and I appreciate the early morning walk on January 1st, where everything is calmer. Also in the Austrian countryside.
In today’s newsletter, I share my annual resolutions and thought patterns. This is one of my favourite letters to write, and I always enjoy re-reading past editions. Here you find links to the 2020, 2019, and 2018 edition.
With care,
Kristoffer
Patterns
This year’s post is honouring books by Olga Tokarczuk, Deborah Levy, Jakob Ejersbo, Ida Marie Hede, Olga Ravn, Annie Ernaux, Merlin Sheldrake, Amalie Smith, and Vigdis Hjort. If you email me at kristoffer@naiveweekly.com I’m happy to share quotes and/or booklist.
Being alive is being caressed, being touched
I took an umbrella with me to the desert. It was huge. Big enough to swallow Uno, Ana, and I in a comforting shadow as we made our way through the sand dunes. Looking from afar, we would appear like an odd monster in the landscape. Six feet, thirty fingers, and three noses intertwined like a bowl of spaghetti. An alien blowing through foreign territory.
On the first night back from the hospital, I carried Uno back and forth between our kitchen and living room. Eleven steps forth, eleven steps back. Watching the night train pass and humming forgotten childhood songs. Those days were the longest and shortest in my life. Uno didn’t know where he was, and I didn’t know how to hold him. He didn’t want to sleep, I couldn’t resist sleep, nor keep the grey hairs from spreading.
When Uno was born, time collapsed. I don’t recall my age, only my birth year. I recognize time by counting Uno’s age in days, months, and, now, years. In December, he turned 500 days, and this month he turns 1.5 years. It is not only my hair that is fading. The generations before me are thinning out too. I find it ambiguous: sad and liberating. But there is no point in hiding, so I amplify my quirks, and I have never felt stronger, going full falsetto on the streets of Copenhagen with Uno on my shoulders.
Well done for running away
It is night in the desert. We are lying on our back, feeling the support of the ground and admiring the distance traveled by the light of the stars. One, seven, thousand, million, trillion stars lure us to branch in many directions. We make splashes in puddles, eat croissants on benches, and dance to three languages. Uno goes off to the daycare, Ana has photoshoots, and I write corporate narratives. We convene back home, bringing flowers, and giving those worlds to each other.
The internet says surf me. I respond to the calling and embed myself with the web, traveling through links, visiting neglected cabins, empty shopping malls, shelves with blooming flowers, and a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. I’m a traveler, forager, explorer. And I am an intruder, burglar, tourist, and polluter. I screenshot intimate places and expose them to hundreds of people, calling them Roadside Flowers, and impose them with unasked meaning.
As I keep going, I find myself returning to the same places. At first by coincidence, then with intention. I return to the sites where others care when people are lost, where not everything is tamed, where the water is muddy and daydreaming possible. I’m not traveling through the clear and crisp air with a serene mind, I have been touched. I carry spores and responsibilities. I’m one of the walls keeping the roof from falling.
Containing an element of chaos
The air isn’t empty; it carries tiny bits of dust that glitter in the sun. Dust that people take upon themselves to sweep away. The web might not look like much. You might even say it’s a small world, but only until you start cleaning it. Then your perception of the web dwindles, shading off into an abundance of worlds. You find yourself with the key to enter and exit, open and close, lock and unlock various foolish and profound, kind and cruel, mechanical and poetic domains.
If people you appreciate tell you differently, ask them to preserve the language of apocalypse and utopia, darkness and hope, to those balancing at the edge. Instead, guide your friends by hand, or if they can’t walk, carry them on your shoulders through the desert until you become the storm that pours down from a blue sky. Then ask them if they hear the loud rain. And if they say no, continue pouring until you are covered in muddy water. You are here now. You are the storm, make a shelter.
Resolutions
Repetition is the one word I’m bringing with me into 2022. And I have three concrete goals:
Handcode www.naiveweekly.com.
Make longish print project with Ana.
Rewatch the Studio Ghibli movies.
Hi, I’m Kristoffer and you have just read Naive Weekly — Observations from the Internet Wilderness.
Last week this letter was sent to 780 people. Thirtyone are crazy enough to chip in every month/year to support me making time to write. Logo by Studio Hollywood. Print by Luka. Photograph by Ana Santl.