I started buying little packs of cigarillos
from time to time
when I lived in Tallinn, Estonia, at the
tail end of 2022.
Something about that town, finding it
hard-edged in its grayness and post-
Sovietitude. And the descent of winter,
furrowed and looming; brooding but not really brooding.
(it really is a friendly town)
Smoking—cigars—was itself
something we started doing in honor of my dad.
I don’t know when it slipped, for my mom and
her then-fiancé into an everyday habit. I’d buy me
a nice one every now and then, but some Christmas in
Florida, maybe I gave ‘em as stocking
stuffers…
(She’s since gone a bit crazy; I mean it wasn’t
from the smoking, but now I put the image
together without fail—she on her screened porch,
puckering unnaturally (still, after all these years), drinking,
and watching whatever right-wing commentator on
her phone — receiving in all the senses,
all forms of matter.. liquid, gas, physical
vibrations. Altered states, much as I know them)
I went to Stockholm and stopped smoking,
somehow it didn’t fit there — I think,
personally, the Estonians are much more down-to-earth
than the Swedes anyway…
Nor Lyon: I could ask for them in French but
the taste was all wrong along the Saône.
Nor in Hamburg: they have their round vices—
lots of beer—and angular ones—lots of cigarettes…
(I never did smoke cigs, so take all this with a grain of salt)
Now I’m—back—in Finland, and on a bit
of a lonely birthday, and in the cold and
plain and this furrowed autumnal
flâneur—the injection of a too-pricey pack.
(Living, as I do, on an island across a long bridge
from the rough-and-tumble-cum-cleaned-up edge
of mainland downtown Helsinki, I figured I’d have this
same, 3rd person stranger in a long coat in
the night thing as I did across the Baltic)
/
Tonight, after being inside all day, I thought to take
myself on a walk, at least, to … switch gears, to … yada yada.
The park leads to a land bridge to an even smaller island (itself
next to an even smaller island—like they’re hatchlings) which
is occupied entirely by a cemetery.
It’s nearly night now—dark never felt like cemetery
time for the living—do the souls need night and
day dictating the waking in their eternal rest?
You greet Nieminens and Aalbergs and Kaskis, and
it turns out it’s All Saints Day. There are single
lit candles everywhere, in honor, yada yada —
these gestures of personal care. But
most precious is the massing of these devotionals
at the foot of a sculpture of ascending swallows.
In memory of previous generations and
those who rest elsewhere.
Those who rest elsewhere — frank simplicity
always expresses it best.
And this personal gesture is made collective,
shared, collaborative. Open. This is a grave that
even I can use.
This is my first time walking elsewhere than
my home or the bus stop on this island,
and now I am weeping at the memory of
my dad — I’d smoked two by now, one
on my walk and one looking at the city lights
to the left and the quiet woods to the right across
the water from the north point of this
grave-land.
I understood, in my way, what was his
way of
sequestering himself. That his
joys were public, seen in the glint of his eyes
and the kind of grin that is both right here
and which gazes also just a bit past the middle distance.
But as an artist, dealing with the challenge
and demand of making of yourself, seeking
out, advocating, building ‘for no reason’ when
also nobody is asking for a damn thing of
you and ‘maybe nobody even knows you’re here’ —
I guess you deal with a lot of this particular
loneliness—alone. (or depression is always that way)
I asked, through tears which welled(?) as I realized
who he was not in those public ex-pressions
but in that so specific isolation. Not knowing,
not believing in yourself, ‘who gives a damn anyway?’
And feeling, perhaps for the first time,
that I know that man;
Knowing, for example, that he wrote his intention
to ‘get his work out there again, as an artist with
something to say’ the year he died.
Knowing this self-organized Fringe Performance, awkward
in its ambiguous self-awareness, finding the
script pages taped into a hardcover Beatles biography for…rehearsals?
That this being and maker-of-works I’ve been
so inspired by, may must have had these same such
defeats as I… —
/
Not by teaching but his evanescent seeping that
happens did I inherit his pursuit, his passion and playfulness,
his searching and his lightness… (and possibly also the
potential for loneliness and melancholy I have
heard about) This, I realize, is the value
system with which I carry myself through
the world. “I could have been a fucking dentist,” I
told him. Laughter through tears; I heard there’s some
Russian word for that.
For a handful of years I thought I was through having
new revelations about my relationship with my dad; by now it’s
been 11 years, almost 12.
/
I spent a moment looking around this multitude of
capped devotionals, glowing and illuminating this scene — the
sparrows, the stone and the trunk of a spruce — trying
to feel intuitively which one is the one that’d
be for him, the one he’d receive through.
I left him a smoke there, on that one.
We choose our joys by opening ourselves to it when
we can when we catch ourselves,
here,
in this moment
at the top of a wave.
The flow that life brings us to er through er on.
There is this loneliness, there are these joys. —
no answering
no telling
what [it was or what’s to come…].
Here,
for now,
for a while,
just as it is.
////
“The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.” (in Don Delillo, White Noise)