D an ecological disaster we are inevitably moving towards begins in the crib. The leaflets urged parents not to bring up the child screaming in bed but still retaining it and supply it with a pacifier. This belief in the real closeness can be replaced with inanimate objects founds a technological and body loose relationship to the world. This is strengthened by a welfare policy that requires that we leave our children to strangers after their first year of life, “the idea of women’s liberation that equates maternity with oppression.” All this according to Helena Granströms new book “What once was’, a civilization critical essay with images of nature photographer Marcus Elmer City.
Photo journalist Marcus Elmer City has taken the photographs of endangered Swedish natural environments,” What once was “. Here: Kiruna. Photo: Marcus Elmer City
Helena Granström is was born in 1983, author and writer with a background in physics and mathematics previously published books like “Hysteros” ( 2013), “Infans” (2011) and “the childish Manifesto” (2010). New “what once was” making up with the idea of our independent nature and ask how we can live with the knowledge of the destruction of our habitat. the philosophical and debating the text interwoven with a fictional story about a woman, Helena, who embarks on mountain hiking and forced to face their own conceptions of nature.
the criticism of the welfare state can be seen right now in many areas of culture, including Erik Gandini’s film “A Swedish theory of love” which is said to “examine the back of our modern living” and reveal how the Swedish welfare state created the world’s loneliest country by citizens independently. Granström staying – fortunately – not at the bad motherhood without dedicated mostly to the technological relationship to the world that she means förfrämligar us from reality. The world was once our home, today it has become our tool. The digital worlds placelessness spreading and we are rarely physically present in the places we have our attention attached.
Falbygden. Photo: Marcus Elmer City
Helena Granström wants to reestablish a view of nature as a meaningful entity, not just a backdrop, but the foundation of our existence. The culture denies, according to her, the idea that the bird that sits on my arm, one case, that the earth has a purpose in itself. The author criticizes poststructuralist theories that define “Nature” as a figure of thought that has no equivalent in the physical reality.
According Granström is the urban environment that tricks us into believing that nature does not exist, or that we are not dependent on it. Where are all non-human life wiped out, the sky is missing, million year old memories replaced by street lights and headlights. “Of course, the city is a lie, but a very convincing such”.
Even in the 1900s criticism of civilization was the idea of nature, especially the forest, a mysterious zone outside of historical time, where the industrialized society spiritual decay not reach. This applies particularly to German literature, as Botho Strauss’s novel “Der junge Mann” (1987) and Ernst Jünger “Eumeswil” (1971). In Jünger “Annäherungen” ( “Psykonauterna”, 1971) describes how nature’s rhythm is lost in cities. There cease ebb and flow, and the electric light kills the shift between day and night. There exists only the factories mechanical monotony.
Ore. Photo: Marcus Elmer City
Helena Granströms technology criticism is also close to the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who in the 1920s and 30s mourned the man lost presence in a world she has distanced itself from the technology . Granström sees television viewing, computer games, shopping, drinking, slösurfning and therapy “means to make one in the most basic sense of the inhuman life bearable.” Antidepressant drugs contributes according to her to maintain an inhuman social system, a kind of ignorant and sweeping assertion that unfortunately have become popular recently. First, it is difficult to prove that people would have felt so much better in some kind of pre-industrial state of nature, and it means a blind denial of the fact that both antidepressants such as computer games can provide people with the decisive force required them to cope to live in the world – and resist what is wrong in it.
Personally, I also difficult for Helena Granströms idea of the city and modern life that the counterfeit: her worldview ignores the beauty of neon light reflected the wet asphalt and honesty that can occur in a chat, but not the IRL; nearby amplified by the distance. Granström apparently does not see the greatness of cities where you can be anonymous, where you can be anyone, drowned in people, live many different lives. I do not deny that there exists a natural, but has a weakness for the chemical, artificial and distorted.
lake. Photo: Marcus Elmer City
While her radical critique of modern life admirable. She puts words on an urban unhappiness that I think many people can identify with, and the feeling that there must be a different life, a better, richer, more present so than we have in the city. We long away, so we burn the last oil at a low cost flight, flying over the Atlantic Ocean by a sky red with fever of petrochemical emissions simply because, when we come to the other side of the earth, to hide our faces behind smartphone screens.
Overall, Granströms text driven, captivating and lessons, though at times the weight of one language over loaded with subordinate clauses and academic references. The intellectual reasoning stands in interesting contrast to the charged portrayal of the mountain hike, a dense, evocative and extremely sad story, which, however, could have done more of. The depiction of people living in the mountains are occasionally uncomfortable objectifying. When she writes about a reindeer I think at first that he is an animal:
“First, his head behind a crest. So the body – bar down to the waist, shiny with sweat. (…) Body shiny smile wild and wide. He’s shorter than me, reaches me to the eyes. (…) And then his gaze across the table: crazy and hot, tricky and warm and strong. “
I read” What once was “as a challenge to himself as a mourning of the nature we has tried to wipe out from the city, the earth and our own bodies. It is a learned, provocative and thoughtful essay whose literary elements had served under development.
Rönnbäck. Photo: Marcus Elmer City
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