An epic of Finnish psychiatry
for Neil Goldberg and cat
Steadfast old Vainamoinen / uttered these words:...
"Bear, apple of the forest, / chunky honey-paws!
When you hear me coming, / hear the splendid man stepping along...
throw yourself flat on a tussock, / on a lovely crag....
Then, bear, turn around, / honey-paws, turn yourself about,
as does a ruffed grouse on her nest, / a wild goose about to brood."
--Kalevala, Poem 46
"I have longed for you my whole life, honey-paws, have engaged your freak visage, woods-apple, in those furtive rompings and stompings down lanes of mind that speak wider and bolder of love than the keenest sacrifice by a tender-lapped virgin," says Vainamoinen, big kingly Vainamoinen. "And now that you're here, I know it was you I was seeing, those years, bundle, because of your dimples, firstly; next, the signature whistling and whingeing of fortune, the sound of it rushing through brambles of last year's finessing, wrecking all pretense; and finally the spine of my lust jutting harsh at my torso, only on sight of you abated. Your calm figure ennobles the years of my wait, supports my pattest displeasures with others, every cliche of annoyance become now fast buttress for this, our union--and I feel a pressure to forebear further shrinking from shunning the bustling world of men and effects with its manifold damaging fixtures."
"My bear, my darling, / honey-paws, my beauty,
do not get angry without any reason. / It was not I who killed you;
you slipped from a shaft-bow, / you misstepped from an evergreen branch,
your wooden pants torn through, / your evergreen coat ripped across."
--Kalevala, Poem 46
"This opening song of mine is getting harder and harder to sing, bear," says Vainamoinen, burdened by depthless tradition. "I know how you rap the formica, these days, and that makes things just so much starker, the relief more wicked. But this is how it has always worked, continues to work, and may do so always, the skill of men willing. And lest you be shivered to answering lesser elaborations than mine, be clear that my skill with cliche is no fart of abhorrence. There is a strict difference between the stinking of airspaces as mark of disinterest or worse, on the one hand, and rolling the epithets glib as a dysentery from the hard-narrowed tongue. My tongue is narrow, no doubt, and glib; sincerity I angle only towards what I love, and what I love is subtle and weird, like yourself, and thus my love always needs to be angled weirdly. For what is glibness but ellipticities, and what is that, at best, but a roundabout aim at something too strange to bear reasoning with, such as yourself and my feelings for you? Love your basking beneath it, and never let it be said within earshot of you that your basking beneath it does nothing to liven your endless dreary, despised-of-men moments, pudgy-feet. And never, ever doubt the thrust of my apings. All this to say, gold, dear one, that without these formica-relieved addressings of mine you might never know of my yearning. A more modest formula could more easily cover a mean-hearted flatulence; mine, never.
"Now. I would like to suggest, honey-paws, that something is amiss between us," says Vainamoinen, who is as reasonable a Finn as any. "It hasn't been off the whole time of our friendship, so I can't assume it's my killing of you that did it. It could be, rather, the stench of my recent affair with the Countess's leaf-boy from on down the lane, whose habits and lusts are not seemly, I hear, in the bear world; I can only counter that here such ways are de rigueur for those who would make a killing of more than literal force--for us, the pressured, it 'lets off steam.' Or it could be my eyeing of other large game--but a hunter, I might tell you, is beholden to shove his craft down the gullet of seemliness, for the village must eat, the toddlers swell, the old folks creak a bit longer, regardless of fondness the hunter may have for one particular trophy.
"The problems we face are thus twofold, and sides of one coin," says thoughtful, logical Vainamoinen: "I must kill, for simple reasons of frame and tradition; and I must make a killing and thus break your heart, for complex reasons of frame and tradition. Your troubledness renders this finicky coin."
Then old Vainamoinen / uttered these words:
"Where shall I take my guest, / lead my golden one?
Shall I perhaps take him to the shed, / put him in the hay barn?"
--Kalevala, Poem 46
Vainamoinen makes his way through a grand hallway decked with photos of his ancestors, for his family is big in this land. He is giddy with anticipation of meeting the grand-dame of Finnish perceptivity, Dr. Kainulainen. "Hello," says the receptionist. "Dr. Kainulainen is five doors down on the left. She is ready." Vainamoinen walks five doors down, to the door with the little green tassel that symbolizes life's winch, life's grand, alive winch out of murky confusion, the confusion of non-science in today's grimy world. He pulls out his door-rap, an intricate iron bequeathed on a forebear by leaders of Goths, and raps on her door.
Dr. Kainulainen is sturdy, dark, a sheen of nomenclature bathing her slapstick-stock Finn-in-the-library look, which she tries to dispel a bit with a zany green St. Jude. She beckons to Vainamoinen. Vainamoinen shudders. The session lasts an hour; afterwards, Dr. Kainulainen agrees in the interest of soul-besieged humanity everywhere to do me a play-by-play of Vainamoinen's troubles. Out of respect for Vainamoinen, who it must be said has an embarrassing set of attributes, I will not repeat it, but only Dr. Kainulainen's summary:
"People in extreme situations are known to have a recalcitrance about changing. People in cities, astronauts, technicians, seamstresses delivering goods twenty miles, soldiers for God, drunks in lots, United States citizens--and hunters supporting their villages. Vainamoinen has difficulty accepting things into his life that contradict the habitual brutality and murderousness of his hunting world, which includes much of his past, his cronies, his psychic make-up. This difficulty of acceptance would extend, paradoxically, to that which he hunts; so that even though his avidity in pursuing his game is sincere, once he obtains it, has it 'in the bag' either literally or figuratively, his reaction is often one of repugnance--a repugnance so fierce it becomes physically based--like a psychosomatic illness--and at that point, of course, there is really nothing he can do about it without the help of thoroughly trained, completely developed and unhastily accredited experts from the institutes rightly in charge of the minds of our citizenry.
"Now, of course, we are facing the thing that, in Vainamoinen's own words, he has labored his whole life to find. I do not mean to make this object of Vainamoinen's want--let us call it (please take no offense at the impersonal pronoun), let us call it his rug, for in psychic terms it is that, and I do not mean to cause offense thus, or demean it--I do not mean to make this rug sound like a problem--forgive me if I do--though in psychic terms, it is--it is something, certainly, that challenges many of Vainamoinen's comfortable assumptions, premises, and operating mechanisms--but of course this doesn't demean it--it would be hard not to evince a certain awe in the face of something so... inanimate, as they say, being so capable of causing a major distress in such an important figure as this Vainamoinen, who is, let us say, very large.... In any case, it is the traditional pillows-versus-whips dilemma."
Then old Vainamoinen / uttered a word, spoke thus:
"My bear, my bird, / honey-paws, my bundle,
you still have ground to cover, / heath to clamber upon.
Set out, now, gold, to get going / dear one, to step along the ground,
black-stockings, to go along boldly, / cloth pants, to go ahead."
--Kalevala, Poem 46
I know what is coming. "I have told you, cloth-pants," says Vainamoinen, "that I feel a pressure to forebear further shrinking from shunning the bustling world of men and effects with its manifold damaging fixtures. This is true. And it is equally true that your coming has jolted me headlong from certainty. But at root it remains, in deep, deep ways it is firm and unbending: there is you, fuzzy bundle, black-socks, and there is the rest of the world which, for me, is not you...."
Only one thing remains to be said: while I do not understand Vainamoinen and cannot condemn him entirely, I am only somewhat enjoying my more mercantile life of the last few weeks, and miss his feet, his gaze, his appreciation, his odd, joyous epithets from the speech of the Finns. There is nothing else to be said. But I would like to thank the government of Finland for its solicitude in these matters, its proper esteem for the meshing of this one and that one, and would encourage it to continue those efforts, despite the necessarily endless stream of failures like ours it is sure to encounter.