Category Archives: autobiography

Notes to self?

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Texting and mailing someone else is a normal way of communication, but what about mailing yourself?  Not quite normal, I suspect.

A few months ago, I dreamed that I spent some time with an online friend (who I have never met in the flesh).  During the time we spent together, he several times wrote something on a small handheld device.  He explained casually that these were messages to himself.  Evidently he also checked the messages from himself regularly – my impression is that he did this at the same time he wrote new ones, several times an hour.

In waking life, I am the one who mails myself.  But I don’t do it often.  Sometimes I send a message from my work account to my private Gmail account to remind myself of something I should do at home, rather than keep thinking of it through the workday.  Which would probably not be enough, since I tend to forget work when I walk out the door. Besides, it would distract me while I was there.  So better to send a mail to my home self.  Occasionally it is the other way around. And today I sent a mail to myself from my smart phone on the bus.  I sent it from the Gmail account to the Chaosnode.net account, which also shows up in my inbox after some minutes.

But I do this a few times a month at most, not a few times an hour. Perhaps I should do it more, though.

In a manner of speaking, some of the entries here are notes to myself. I write a few private ones, and there are some drafts I don’t seem to ever get around to publishing, so I guess those are exclusively notes to myself. But even those I share with others may also be of interest for my future self, if any. At least many of my past entries have been of interest to my later self.

And yet the main reason I switched to WordPress was that reading my past entries started eating up my time.  There was like 10 past entries for each day, and I had gotten into the habit of reading them all. At this point, reading my past entries took more time than writing a new one. Sometimes much of the evening. Now I only rarely see them at all. That may be a bit little again.

And there is even a religious dimension to this. In Christianity (and presumably Judaism) there is an exhortation in the Psalms to not forget God’s acts of kindness toward us.  That is easy to forget in our personal life.  For instance, when I have some kind of sickness or pain or disturbance of the body, I think about it; but once that disappears, I forget that it was ever there, unless I have written it down, and unless it was a huge disturbance in my life.

For instance, today I have some tenderness and pain in the skin on my right foot. (There is no visible swelling or discoloration though.) While talking to God, I mentioned this but added that there was no need to do anything spectacular, if it was as harmless as it seemed.  “But if it were to go away, I’d be grateful… wait, no. I probably wouldn’t.  I would probably forget the whole thing, unless there is some way for me to remind my future self of it.”

Hypocrite? Me?

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“Before I knew it, my aim of bringing happiness to everyone changed into one of satisfying myself.” Well, spiritual self-satisfaction in this case, but even so…

Yesterday when I came home from work, I found a package from Amazon.com. What could it be? I tend to forget such things over the course of the time it takes to ship it all the way from the USA. This time it was indeed The Transcendent Unity of Religions by Frithjof Schuon.

“Wouldn’t it be better for you to advance within your own religion?” asked the voice in my heart. Who needs a spouse when you have voices like that? It is presumably the voice of God, or something in that direction. Or perhaps the voice of reason, I find these hard to tell apart.

Anyway, you have to admit that this hit the bullseye.  Opening the book, it becomes clear (as I had already suspected) that the transcendent unity means that the different religions come from the same source, kind of like a spectrum from a prism. Each color of the spectrum follows its inner nature and takes its own path, but they are all light, and if we could somehow pass through the prism we would find them all to be one. Well, that is not his words, that is just the impression I get. But it is probably a correct impression of what Schuon teaches, in a rough simile.

Now, after this episode, you’d think I’d act accordingly. But no. I put the book in my bag, and today I pulled it out on the bus. Now, there is nothing evil as such about reading religious books on the bus, especially here in Scandinavia where most people are atheists and think you’re crazy (and possibly dangerous) if you take religion somewhat seriously. But even so, would I have done the same if it was something more shameful, like for instance the latest Savage Dragon comic book?

(I used to subscribe to a large number of comic books, now Savage Dragon is the only one left, and that mainly because I am too lazy to discontinue my subscription. Most comic books stop at some point, and restart under a slightly different name, but Larsen just keeps ticking like an energizer bunny. Anyway, that’s beside the point. The point is that if I wanted to give people a realistic impression of me, I have read a hundred times more comics than deep spiritual books in my lifetime. Perhaps a thousand times more, I am not sure.  Probably somewhere between those.)

I’m not exactly a hypocrite, I just don’t mind if people think too highly of me. Why does that not upset me at least as much as if they think too lowly of me?

So I may have these noble motives. I want to radiate light and love and hope and courage to people around me, or who read my journal. That is cute. But it does not count and it does not work unless it is true all the way through. Unless it comes from me actually being that transparent, so the light of the inner sun shines through.

I’m not really that transparent yet. I’m not really that kind of inspiring person I want to be.  Well, I’m quite happy and such, but that’s not really something I have deserved.  And I cannot really prove that it comes from my religion rather than, say, from playing computer games an hour or two each day as I also do.  I may feel pretty sure it is the religion, but if so, wouldn’t I spend more time on it and less on the imaginary little people inside my computer?

No dating please, we are happy

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There are some people who don’t like dating. Kazehaya-kun is not actually one of them, he is just waiting for the right girl, who is the one who thinks  he does not want anyone.  (Kimi ni Todoke is a highly recommended show btw, family friendly and edutaining.) I, on the other hand, actually don’t like dating and don’t want romance even if it were thrown after me. So what am I doing on a dating site?

I am pretty sure it was not a dating site when I joined it. It probably had another name as well, because according to Wikipedia this site was launched a month before City of Heroes, and the reason I signed up was a quiz related to the alpha version of CoH, which was changed pretty dramatically when I took part in its closed beta, more than a month before it officially opened.

Anyway, I have been hanging around since. It is free, after all, and they still have quizzes too. I have a profile there, explaining politely that I’m not looking for a date, or anything really. I must be looking cuter than in real life though, because occasionally a woman still picks me. It will probably just be more now that I have adjusted my income upward a bracket.  (It is the dollar that is sliding, if you must know. Thus my income, in Norwegian currency, can buy me more American books than before. The latest, currently in the mail, is The Transcendant Unity of Religions, by Frithjof Schuon. I probably won’t understand it for some years though.)

It is not that I don’t need humans. I need them to sell me groceries and the occasional book.  I just don’t need someone emotionally. I don’t have a human-shaped hole in my soul, and cannot remember a time I had. When I look inside, I see light, shining more and more brightly, from a tiny spark in the darkness to a roaring fire that grows from the inside and finally begins to engulf me.

Analects of Confusius, Book 2.
The Master said, “At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning.
“At thirty, I stood firm.
“At forty, I had no doubts.
“At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven.
“At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth.
“At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.”


I wish to become seventy too, and have a heart that does not desire transgression at all. My mother had it like that, or so she told me. “He who always wants what he should, always gets to do what he wants” she sometimes told me. This was how she had it. Yet her happiness was muted, it seems to me. Oh well. I will never know for sure. It is not my place to have an opinion on, anyway.

History tells us that Confusius had a mild-mannered wife who loved him, but he generally preferred to travel with his disciples instead. I am lucky to be in a position to not repeat that painful choice, which is good since I am not in a position to repeat his great work either.

Besides, as shown by my dreams over the last 35+ years, my sexual inclinations are of a somewhat Hobbesian nature (“nasty, brutish and short”), and I think we are all better off for me not actually sharing those with anyone. Besides, I have 19 nephews and nieces; my genes should just kick back and relax, leaving some space for the genetically inferior to reproduce for a little while more before the Itlands replace them the way our ancestors replaced the Neanderthals. ^_^

But I am probably going to be hanging out on that site for a while more, observing the fascinating species into which I was born, and looking for someone who has the kind of worries God would have, rather than the worries I myself had and which I have already found stupid in the past or will find stupid in the near future (if any).  And when I find such people, I will congratulate them; but I will not date them.

Reflection on my 2010

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Actually, for me the year did not just fly by. Which makes it even more embarrassing that I did not achieve anything worth mentioning, and that I am still pretty much the same person I was a year ago.

2010 was a likable year for me personally. I was not sick much, I loved my job, and no close relatives died. Overall, the year deserves praise for doing a good job, don’t you think?

On the other hand, I did not change much in 2010. That is my own fault, surely. It was not like I did not have opportunities. But compared to 2009, I pretty much stood still, or so it feels.

2009 was a year when I changed quite a bit, for an adult. In late winter I started using brainwave entrainment, and used it regularly through the year. (I don’t use it that regularly anymore, though I still use it sporadically.)

In spring I discovered Happy Science and through the summer began reading the books I could find in English. This triggered a (long overdue) realization that my job was love, and my attitude to it changed completely. (Although I am still not good at it. I guess you have to reap what you sow for a while.)

2009 was also when I started to build a library of timeless wisdom, or esoteric knowledge. Well, I guess I was moving in that direction already from a year or two before, but in 2009 I consciously started seeking out transformative literature. That is to say, the type of books that change you.  I have continued down that part in 2010, but I have not changed as much as I hoped. Words of wisdom are hard, so I tend to evade them more than I expected.

Looking back at 2010, I can’t say that much happened at all. I went to work, came home, played Sims 2 or 3 or City of Heroes, biked a little, ate noodles, watched anime, wrote some fact or fiction, and went to bed. It is a good life if you like work,  games, anime and noodles, which I do. But I had thought I would work more on my soul and less on my hobbies, compared to what I actually did. It is not like I was completely absorbed in these things, but looking back, I believe my priorities were off.

Don’t get me wrong, I had a great time. But that is when it is hard to change, is it not? If I don’t take the opportunity to change voluntarily, I may have to be exposed to some kind of crushing defeat in order to realize that I need to change. Some great loss or something.  It would be better to not have to undergo that, but realize when all goes well that this is my time of opportunity.

I have an extremely pious friend who visits me a few times a year. Last time, in late fall, he commented on how much happier or brighter I seemed lately. And that is probably true. I really feel like my life has gotten brighter. But now I need to sow the seeds for a much brighter future, and more importantly, eternity.

Magic and genius

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Screenshot from the anime Aoki Densetsu Shoot. “He was a god-like person.” In Japan’s Shinto tradition, the border between the human and the divine is still more porous than here in the West with our centuries of monotheism. So much so that even a soccer player can be seen as divine.

It is not just soccer players, of course. We all have this wonderful magic called life. Somehow, only dimly knowing how, we are able to control our own bodies to a great extent. Some people, through talent and training, are able to control them even better.

I believe without doubt that there is sports genius, just like there is musical genius or chess genius and others. And like with all of these, the genius cannot truly be brought out and made to shine without effort. Hard work through several years. But the thing is, for the genius it is not just hard work. It is something they feel called to, drawn to.

In the anime Aoki Densetsu Shoot, which set off this train of thought, the genius Kubo had a question for all who wanted to join his soccer club: “Do you like soccer?” And those whose eyes lit up when they answered “yes” were the ones who became his team.

Obviously, there was never a time in my life when I could have said that about soccer, or indeed any sport. But when I was young, you could have asked me: “Do you like programming?” and my eyes would have lit up in just the same way. I would practice it when no one was looking. I would read about it, think about it, even dream about it. And that is how, when the chance unexpectedly came, I was able to create a debt collection software suite that helped companies in Norway save millions. I did not earn millions, of course, though I did earn a few thousand for a little while, which I wasted. But that was not why I did it. I did it out of love.

We don’t think of life as magic, but if we came to a world where stones could move and grow, our first impulse would surely be to see it as magic. But because carbon-based structures do this routinely in our world, it is perfectly natural to us. In a similar way, if we had not seen genius before, we would quite likely be astounded and think it was something supernatural. Or at least our ancestors did just that. In the age before books, we did not have access to the many geniuses of the past. So when a great man (it was usually, not quite always, a man) stood up and did something remarkable, people thought that a god had descended on earth and left his seed among us.

Well, I suppose that can happen too, in a very abstract manner of speaking. But my point is that it is just a matter of perspective. We know for certain that our way of seeing things is right, and their is wrong. But what if not? What if genius really is divine and life really is magic? It is not like we can recreate these under controlled circumstances, after all, which is the essence of scientific practice.

Yes, I have also read that some scientists have recently created life. On a closer look, they have assembled DNA and inserted it into an existing cell from which they had removed the original DNA. That is creating life in much the same way as playing with Lego bricks is creating matter. Not that it is not respectable, but we are still a far cry from even understanding life, much like creating an equivalent of it from scratch. And the same is the case with genius, I think.

That is why I don’t have a problem with the notion that a genius is a “high spirit” who has come down from Heaven. It is just a different way of looking at the same thing. We need to see things from different sides. A world in which there are no wonders is not a world fit for human habitation. There is nothing heroic in creating a mental world in which everything is just the random movements of atoms. Such a world has no room for heroes anyway. Those who lose their sense of wonder lose, in a very real sense, their humanity. They become self-professed animals. What has always raised us far above the beast is our imagination. It creates delusions, but it also creates discoveries. It brings forth the madman and the genius. And sometimes the mad genius…

But genius without work is like water running into the sea, disappearing without having done any good. That is why Edison, one of the greatest geniuses of modernity, said that genius was 1% inspiration and 99% transpiration.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes music comes to me. Hauntingly beautiful melodies or even songs, in languages known or unknown, songs that I have never heard before and never hear again. If I were a composer, I could grasp those melodies and bind them to ink and irrigate the world with their beauty. But I am not, and so after a while they join the river Lethe and return to the endless ocean from which they may have come. I sometimes wonder if this happens to almost everyone, most people, or just a few. But it does not matter, I guess. I never felt a call to be a composer. If you asked me: “Do you really like music?” my eyes would not have lit up.

Aoki Densetsu Shoot!

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The moment of transition. From man to legend. Spoilers ahoy!

I came by accident across the anime Aoki Densetsu Shoot (Blue Legend Shoot) and when I heard the beginning of the opening song, I knew that it would be good. It is very rare that the opening (and, slightly less important, the ending) song does not give off a “vibe” about the anime.  If it is spooky, angry or disharmonious, you can be sure that the anime is also aiming at people who treasure such feelings. The Japanese are quite good at matching such things, I have seen only a very few exceptions to this.

(One notable strangeness though: Indecent comedies, which are popular in Japan, often have very cheerful and upbeat songs without any lurid overtones. They are simply happy. I guess the Japanese don’t have the same guilt as most westerners about sexuality – it just takes on the color of its context. But this topic is non-existent in Aoki Densetsu Shoot. There is some low-key romance, as is common in sports anime, but it is very very chaste.)

I have watched 20 episodes over the last few days, and am glad I did. It is quite old, from 1993, and you can kind of see this. It must have been a fairly high-end production at the time, I guess, but because they did not have computer assistance in the production back then, they had to use certain shortcuts to make the desired effects, and the resolution is simply lower than today. It is quite well drawn though.

The anime is about a high school soccer team. Ironically, soccer is something I have had particularly little interest in.  I grew up in a village on the west coast of Norway, and as in all such villages, soccer was the most important thing in a boy’s life until he discovered sex. For some, probably afterwards too. While Norwegians have valued sports highly since the Viking age if not before, and have many excellent players in several sports considering the sparse population, soccer has the broadest appeal. There may for all I know be only one Norwegian who is not interested in it, though more realistically there may be a few hundred. I don’t know. I knew a couple elderly Christian mystics who professed no interest in soccer, but I think they are dead now. That leaves me, I guess. Until this anime, I did not know what the offside rule was. (But I did know the name, so there is some contamination…)

In any case, the anime is nominally about soccer, but really about people and their dedication to their highest aspiration. This is something that has begun to interest me more lately.

The first 20 episodes are about the team under the leadership of Kubo. Having spent three years in Germany, he returns to find that Japanese soccer is too rigid. He wants to play “fun soccer” where each player uses his strength and where cooperation is built on trust, not on hierarchy and planning. He finds little understanding for this in Japan, but eventually gathers a small team of high schoolers who follow his path. Most of them look up to him as a prodigy or genius. But the truth, as with so many a genius, is that his skill comes from deep love and relentless training.

Tragedy strikes in episode 19. Kubo has not told his teammates that he has leukemia, and during an important match he does something unreasonable if not impossible: Taking the ball from the home goal, past all 11 players of the opposing team, into their goal. Â At the moment of his greatest triumph, his body gives up, and he dies just as he is being declared a legend.

It is indeed few people who become a legend while alive, though it does happen. More become legends after their death. And for some, it happens at the same time. This is typically martyrs, and I guess Kubo is one of them, in a manner of speaking.

I have to agree with his best friends that dying for soccer is stupid. But because they all know and share his love for soccer, they could understand him. The main character of the anime, the freshman Toshi, saw this duality: Kubo was “a godlike person”, but at the same time he was just like them, a high schooler who just loved soccer more than everything.

Having an important character die during the series seems to be pretty common in sports anime, or perhaps I just happen across those for some obscure reason. The other two sports anime that I have found worth watching were about baseball, and both of them had a main character die during the anime. There is probably some very Japanese reason for this. Or, as I said, perhaps I somehow mysteriously am pulled toward these. Even if I have never seen them before or even read the reviews, perhaps the voice in my heart are picking them out for me. Although I kind of doubt that. Or at least not much more than it picks out my Pepsi. Who knows. If life is like a dream, who is the dreamer?

“I have been here”

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“I learned to be kind because of you.” That is how Unlimited Translation Works renders this line from the song “Kimi no mama de” (YouTube link). The line has also been translated as “I was able to be kind because of you”. So anyway, what have you learned or become able to do because of me?

I have been listening several times now to the song “Read my name” (YouTube link) by Chris de Burgh. I have mixed feelings about this song, and those who know me can probably understand why. Here is the chorus and the essence of the song:

“I have been here!
read my name, read my name!
With all I’ve got I’ve taken part,
I’ve made a difference to the world.
I have been here,
just read my name!”

Chris has mentioned in at least three of his earlier songs a practice of going to the graveyards and reading the names on the headstones there. I get the impression that he considers this a kind of sacred act, as service perhaps both to those who lie beneath those stones and him who doesn’t yet. Because for each such name, there was someone whose life was just as important to them as our life is to us. Someone who dreamed, and tried to share those dreams. Where we are, they have been. Where they are, we shall be. They have been here, just read their names.

I read an article on a Norwegian computer related web site the other day. It said that only a small part of the population used Twitter, and of those who did, only half actually read other people’s tweets. The other half were only interested in sending tweets, not reading them.

My reaction was that this was probably better than in the flesh, where it seems the overwhelming majority are in love with their own voice, and will use most of the time when others speak to prepare their next “message”. In contrast, as I believe my brothers can attest, I rarely have anything to say when I converse with people lately. When they speak, I am listening to them, so I usually don’t have much of a rejoinder when they draw their breath.

Yet even I have my “dance” that I wish to perform in front of the other bees, to tell them where I found my sweet flowers. This is the human condition, I think. (And that of worker bees, or so science says.)  But what does it amount to, beyond “I have been here, read my name”? What is the difference I have made to the world?

2000 years ago, when Jesus Christ lived, there was some 200 to 300 million people in the world. A number of them are still known by name, but even your high school teacher would only know 20-30. To get up to 200-300 (one in a million), without resorting to specific books on the topic, you need a classical scholar. And even then, you don’t get much further.

That is not to say that none of the rest made a difference to the world, a tiny and local difference. And due the “butterfly effect”, history might have been drastically different if one of them had made a different choice one day. But most of those lives kind of canceled out, like the waves of a raindrop hitting the sea on a rainy day. And then there was the depth charge that was Jesus Christ, who set off a tsunami that is still making waves 2000 years later. But how many would have followed his twitter in the year 25, compared to any other random raindrop?

Not so much comparing myself to the incarnate sky-god here, as just reflecting on the scope of things, and how hard it is to say who we are until we are forgotten and only the work we did remains.

Someone else’s theory, put quite simply, is this: The Savior is the light of the great saints. The great saint is the light of the other saints. The saint is the light of the heroes. The hero is the light of the good people. The good is the light of the world. -Details may vary, but in the old days, hierarchy was considered natural, and most thinking people would recognize the expression “the great chain of Being” even if they had not heard it before.

Today, we have democracy, and those who vote depending on the color of someone’s necktie have as much influence as you. Or that is the theory. But it is not quite like that. Well, it may be in elections, but most elections are much less important than people believe. If random people elect other random people, the result will not rise above randomness. And if you cannot rule your own home with wisdom, let us not mention your own body, what will you achieve even if you rise to power or fame? Randomness. Some poor forgotten widow whose feeble life has a single direction will accomplish far more.

By resource or talent I could be a hero, one of a hundred. But apart from a brief spurt of software development, my life has mainly been a raindrop on the sea, so far. Or so it seems to me. But we won’t really know until I am forgotten. As the flesh hides the bone, so does the personal life hide a man’s work. But in time it will be all that is left in this world. (I don’t mean “work” in the sense of “employment”, of course, but accomplishment.)

Re-watching “To Heart”

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Screenshot from the original “To Heart” anime. The conservatively dressed redhead is our heroine, the young man is her childhood friend, and the robot-eared girl is one of the many who like him.

This anime is from 1999, and you can see that. Technology really is progressing, styles changing subtly as well. And I think it was intentionally a little “retro” even back then.

For me, it was one of the first – if not the first – romantic anime I saw that was not meant to be hysterically funny or dramatic. Even today this is fairly rare, it seems. And the anime is also very decent (but the PC game not at all so, from what I have been told). So, it is not funny, dramatic or indecent, what is it then? It is a calm slice of life story about four friends and some of the people at their school. But most of all it is the story of a girl and the childhood friend she loves. A love that is quiet, confident and accepting. She does not get upset when she sees him with other girls, although you can see a shadow of worry in her eyes sometimes. And he makes many friends, because he is the type who does something when he sees a need, instead of waiting for others to fix it. But in the end, she is the one he can always rely on, and she on him.

I really loved this story, but I usually don’t watch movies twice unless they are of a spiritual nature. I don’t think you can quite call this one that. A big part of why I remember it so well (apart from the enjoyable calm) is the ending song, which stirs my heart still. I guess I am wired for that kind of music, but it is even better with Anime-Galaxy’s original (and rather inaccurate) translation. I know I have quoted it twice in the original Chaos Node.

The first time I quoted it, I think, was May 19, 2003. I mention the anime there, briefly, and also says that I wanted it to be the end of my novel. Did not mention which novel, but my guess would be “Lost in Magic”, the one about the boy who is accidentally summoned to a magic fantasy world and wants to save it, but there is nothing to save it from.

A few days later, I mention it again, in connection with my Dark Age of Camelot character, but both of them in context of my drifting apart from my best friends through many years, the amazing Supergirl (later Superwoman, by her own request, but the truth is that to me she was always a girl, and that was probably one of the big differences between us.) Actually, the complete calm and rare trust that I felt in that friendship reminded me a lot of this anime, or rather the anime reminded me of real life.

Then on December 20 the same year, when I made the irrevocable decision to stop visiting. I said I had reserved this song for that occasion, and that is true. It reads as if written for just such a day.

The last entry was September 1, 2006. That’s when I retired my Dark Age of Camelot account and my favorite character, Itlandsen the overly defensive paladin. Over the last couple years at least, I occasionally have glimpses of DAoC, just a fraction of a second usually, where I suddenly am in the game, at some random place (usually in Hibernia) and then the vision ends and I am back in real life. It is kind of disconcerting. But reading that entry again, I feel the sense of closure that radiates from it. I think the game still exists though. It was pretty good. Then again, I think my best friend still exists somewhere. She was pretty good too. (And I mean that in the most innocent way imaginable.)

Reality may be especially hard to face
after spending those innocent moments together.
I remember my heart was pounding
when we played carelessly,
but we can’t go back to that place now.
It may seem cruel to use the same song for memories of my best friend and a roleplaying game. But to me the world she and her family lived in was always a roleplaying game, in which I descended, temporarily becoming a normal human, to spend time with them in a shared fantasy world. It was a great and enjoyable time, pretending that their little world was real. But I live in a far greater world, which I fear is beyond their imagination. And surrounding my world are even greater worlds, in which the world where I live is like a bubble. This is the nature of the universe. It has not only quantities but also qualities, and we can hold only so much, each of us. The limit of the world is set by the limit of each mind. What you perceive to be the limit is not the limit of the universe, but of your mind. In the timeless words of Solar: “We fail to imagine and are punished with reality.” (Namely with a smaller, more meager reality that we think is it all.)

Let’s try a translation closer to the Japanese original, I think. May still be a bit off, by all means.

Having passed through innocent times,
real life has lately hurt a little bit.
For no reason there was enjoyment
and a rapidly beating heart
but there is no returning to that.
Let us start walking away,
holding on to a shining treasure,
for sure,
with the same warmth of heart
I’ll put everything away
and do my best.

You know, that sounds a bit “raw”. Even back in 2003, it did not hurt enough to make a black entry. And walking away from that place has led me to something wonderful. But I do not want to edit the past. I don’t need to make it better or worse than it was. I want to keep that same warmth in my heart, always.

Thank you.

A dash of hyperlexia?

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While hyperlexia is overwhelmingly more common in boys, here is a fictional depiction of a girl from a Japanese animated movie. Her friend is tied up with a garland of flags, and rather than freeing her, this girl is compulsively identifying the nationality of the flags. OK, that is more “autism spectrum” in general, I guess. 

When I was still young, I half-joked that I must have the opposite of dyslexia. Today I know that there is indeed such an opposite. It is called “hyperlexia”, reasonably enough. And it is not considered a good thing.

If you look up hyperlexia on the Net, you will find it described as a rather debilitating disease. Sure, the kids learn to read while they are 2-3 years old, but they don’t understand what they read, and they spend their time performing rituals instead of asking questions or playing with other kids.

I am sure this is right – for some kids.  The ones that are “reported”, so to speak. If your child just learns to read early, and does well in school, has no disturbing tics and generally does not rock the boat, nobody will ever diagnose it in any way. So the reported cases are probably misleading. Not that they are not true, but they represent only those who lack the ability to adjust to the system, and so badly that they and their relatives can’t cover it.

Of course, that is what the name implies. Hyperlexia means “over-reading” or “too much reading”. Well, roughly. Let us not get into lexical detail. But in medical use, “hyper” is not a good thing. I guess there is a reason why Superboy is not called Hyperboy…

As it happens, I seem to only have a mild form of the same syndrome. I am not sure when I learned to read, but it may not have been until the age of 5. I started school at the age of 6, so I know it was well before that, because when I started school, I could read books and newspaper (and did so for pleasure). I could also write on a typewriter, and my spelling and grammar was – from what I am told – more like what other kids have when they finish compulsory schooling, rather than begin it. The content, however, was the utter drivel you would expect of a small boy, or worse. I was certainly not mature for my age.

There was certainly nothing wrong with my reading comprehension, and if I asked less “why, where and when” than other kids, it would be because I had already read why, where and when in the school books of my three older brothers. I was curious in my own way, but I did much time alone (although I was very vocal when I was together with others).

I did not play well with other children, for sure, but there were a couple reasons for this. One, they were idiots. Two, I was small and weak, having had asthma since I was a toddler. (This was before the current asthma epidemic – I did not have any classmates with asthma until high school, I think. And by then I did not have it anymore.) For the duration of my childhood and the next three decades, I was convince that my physical weakness was the reason why I was constantly bullied. And I was, pretty badly too. I was rather frail even when I started school, but during my first three years in school I lost 3 kg (about 6 pounds, I believe) and did not grow at all. This was in no small amount due to my mental state, I believe. School, which I had looked forward to with the highest expectations, turned out to be a nightmare, an ongoing horror with no end in sight.

Knowing those kids – and kids in general – I still suspect that they would have bullied me mercilessly even if I were a saint, simply because they could, since I was small and weak. However, the truth is that I was weird, arrogant, prone to rages despite my weakness, and reveled in humiliating others. So they would probably have ganged up on me and beaten me up even if I were some kind of child titan, simply because I deserved it. But I had no idea of that back then. I had no self-reflection at all. It was far from me. I would not even pretend humility, even if my health depended on it. No humility. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never humility.

My asthma receded sometime around the age of 10, although I remained smaller and weaker than my classmates for several more years. In high school I gradually began to catch up, and in high school I was no different from average in size, although I still was weaker than others since I had internalized my fear of ever exerting myself. (Exercise would always cause asthma attacks, and indeed still does, although it takes some serious work now.) I also had no physical confidence and was unsure of what I could or could not do, so I remained weak and somewhat clumsy. As an adult I am actually “anti-clumsy” in that I am less likely to collide with people and objects than the average adult, although I may still slip on the ice or stub my toe once in a blue moon.

I had the extremely good luck to go to high school in a place where people still considered academic prowess more important than physical strength. Today, high schoolers are much like children in these matters, and some places it was already like that. But not there. So I had my glory years. I was more or less respected, despite being a bit weird. For example, I did not notice other people’s body language or even facial expression much of the time, and my own facial expressions were exaggerated or disconnected from what I was saying. I have never really understood the need for facial expressions, I guess. After all, books do fine without them.

I have started to use facial expressions later in life though.

So yeah, a dash of hyperlexia, and a dash of being a spoiled brat probably. But it was certainly worth it. Frankly, there is no way those kids I grew up with could have been as good as the books. In truth, they would probably have been a negative influence on my life. Fairly little offense intended, but I don’t think I could possibly been happy living lives like theirs, even lives like they are living now. I was meant for another world, and the bookshelf was my gateway to it.

I guess another word than “hyperlexia” is needed. Perhaps “eulexia”? Good reading? I’m certainly willing to trade a few years of being chased around and bullied for the ability to read well. Even though I have now realized that I may not have had to make that trade in full, as much as I did. But I would probably not have been able to reflect on myself back then, even if I had read about it. Thank the Light that I did read about it later, though.

Paper cutting

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Here is one of my best friend… (sometime in the 1990es)

“Kim Larsen is forever” writes the person who has uploaded this YouTube video. That is highly doubtful, but there is a certain amount of time warping inherent in this song. Or perhaps just me.

I was certainly not surprised to hear it again on the bus radio this week.  Not just because it is enshrined as an evergreen here in the Nordic countries, but because the “vocals in my head” have performed it quite a bit recently.

Yes, there is singing inside me most of the time. Have a problem with that? It has been that way for years.  It can be a bit distracting when trying to concentrate on intellectual topics, but usually it is possible to quiet them for a while, although they come back.  Not just the earworm phenomenon (which, incidentally, is not documented in any writing before the age of Edison’s phonograph at the very least, possibly the gramophone.) The vocals in my head are most of the time not related to what I have heard recently, and occasionally related to what I will hear in the near future, as in the example above. Sometimes they are singing songs I have never heard before and will most likely never hear again, unless I record myself playing or singing them, which I stopped doing years ago.

So, the vocals in my head were singing this song, and a bit later I heard it on the radio.  And it made me remember, way back to the early 1980es, around the time when this video clip was originally recorded.

I bought a music cassette (this was before the age of the CD, though it was probably invented). If I remember correctly – I don’t think I wrote about it in my journal – this particular song was the only reason I bought the cassette. I enjoyed it greatly, although I did not agree with it in the least.  There are some songs where the music is good and the lyrics are awful (“Hey Soul Sister” by Train comes to mind) but they lend themselves particularly well to vocals. These should be performed in Simlish, in my opinion.  For you Americans, I suppose Danish does the same thing.  But this song is not actually one of them. The lyrics have power, deep poetry, although they are not true for me.  I knew that even then.

I threw away the cassette after I had a visit by some severely underage friends. Yes, they were kids, and deeply religious kids, and were shocked to find this cassette at my place. If they had been as innocent as they thought, they would not have recognized it. And if they had been as innocent as I, they would not have minded.  But they were innocent in the way kids are, which is different from the innocence you acquire after you have lost your illusions of innocence. And so, for their sake, I threw away one of my favorite songs, although my heart was not in it.

The next time I remember this song is when I got my last kiss, in the mid 1980es. A coworker asked me (insistently)  to join a number of other coworkers for a party at her place. I was set to decline, but a fellow economic conservative whom I liked a good deal was also going, and I did not want to leave her alone among liberals. So I went, albeit with a certain fear in my heart. It was while we danced to this song, the homeowner and I among others, not the conservative – it was while we danced to this song that I got my last kiss, and quite a surprise it was too.

‘So that is why the song made such an impression of me’, I thought back then. ‘Because of what would happen tonight.’ Nothing more happened that night, actually, except that I was attacked at the bus station on my way home and moderately beat up by a random drunk neurotypical.

***

“Papirsklip” does not mean paper clip, as most Scandinavians would probably translate it. It does not even mean paper cut, as in the ones you get in your fingers when you cut them on sharp paper edges. I have had a lot of those. Rather it means cutting out pieces of paper with scissors, in this case silhouettes.

“When now my world seems cold and desolate
I find comfort in my dearest treasure*
cutting motifs with dreams and scissors
paper silhouettes of the finest sort.”

(*: Min kæreste skat – the vocals in my head habitually pronounce it “min kærestes kat”, meaning I find comfort in my fiancee’s cat. You’d think they don’t take this entirely seriously… Of course, my dearest treasure is very unlike his.)

“Here is one of my father and my mother,
they who gave me to this earth:
Loving kisses and a scent of jasmine,
always sunshine and  ‘my sweetest’*.

(*: term of endearment, roughly like “honey”, I believe, when addressing your child or someone you love very much. Neurotypicals are said to use these, and kisses, spontaneously.)

“Life is long, happiness is short:
Blessed is the one who dares give it away.”

(WTH, Kim Larsen? Even in 1983 I knew that the life is short, but happiness lasts forever. Otherwise, who would dare give away anything, much less their life? Correspondingly, the vocals in my head are transposing the two: Lykken er lang, livet er kort.)

“Here is one of my best friend:
Countless cuts, again and again.
A never finished or completed motif:
Black silhouette of the woman in my life.

Life is long, happiness is short:
Blessed is the one who dares give it away.

Domine et sanctus*…
Domine et sanctus…”

(Latin for “Lord and Holy” [Ghost?], presumably the beginning of a prayer, which would be a hint well taken at this point.)

The rest of the song repeats earlier elements.

***

Listening to this song repeatedly, I am filled with a subtle sadness. I feel that it describes all too well the life of a large number of people, who live in the upper reaches of the fourth dimension (that is to say, time.) They are capable of realizing that happiness exists, but though it is prized, they cannot hold on to it. Because they don’t have the key to the fifth dimension, self-reflection, they can for the most part of their “long” life only experience happiness by mind-traveling to a happier past or a hoped-for future. Happiness is not a basic building block  of their ongoing life. And yet they persevere. That is admirable, in its own way.