Newsgroups: bit.listserv.words-l
Date:         Thu, 23 Jul 1992 18:24:17 +0200
From:         torkel@SICS.SE
Subject:      bio
Comments: To: WORDS-L@uga.cc.uga.edu

  Ho, wordslers! I think I may as well bring you my official biography.

  I was born in the far north of Sweden, way north of the Arctic Circle in
fact, in a small town called Pajala. A couple of years ago this place
figured in the world news because of a scheme people had there of
bringing women to the place from all over the world to make the
acquaintance of the local bachelors and maybe help keep Pajala
populated. I remember an English girl interviewed on TV about her
experiences: she said that the men who approached her were either too shy
to say anything or too drunk to make sense. Hey, that's my home town!
I'm too shy or too drunk most of the time, and so a worthy
representative of my home town. Not that I'm all that representative:
Pajala is in the Torne Valley, a part of Sweden where most people
speak a variety of Finnish as their first language, and I never spoke
a word of it.  As a consequence, I was considered a highly suspicious
character throughout my early school years, and went through the usual
kind of bullying, too boring to detail. As I think of the place now, I
naturally fasten onto the things that did not have to do with bullying
or unpleasantness. Here is a poem I wrote about it:


                         Moving South



       In spring the river pushed huge groaning mountains
          of ice up on the banks,
       and the bonfire, consuming the accumulated junk
          of weeks, ushered in summer.
       No one could pinpoint the moment when the snow was gone.

       In late summer the stubble of the fields, and the haystacks,
          dry and aromatic, big enough to hide in,
       led us from one safe place to the next, gray-timbered barns
          in our path. Then the pale sun
       behind drawn curtains as we fell asleep in all-encompassing light.

       After a brief mushroom autumn came five feet of snow, with passages
          and fortresses. Now they seem to me
       like something out of a Disney cartoon. Was it really like this?
          Someone is hefting a log, frozen with snow,
       and my brother in the yard opens the hatch to the cellar.



  We moved south when I was nine, and lived here and there in the
south of Sweden. One of my memories from this time is when a boy in my
class in Skane (the southernmost province of Sweden) gravely pointed
at his watch and asked me, did I know what this was? These boys also
imagined that I was an authority on reindeer and the proper
construction of huts and the making of bows and arrows. Eventually the
family moved to Stockholm, and I have been living in or around
Stockholm for the past thirty years. Hence my various ramblings about
Stockholm: I feel it by now to be my place and tend to go on and on
about it in a reprehensibly sentimental vein. I graduated from the
"Gymnasium" - the Swedish equivalent of senior high - in 1969, and
went on to study mathematics, and then philosophy, at the University
of Stockholm. A couple of years later I left home and went to live on
my own in central Stockholm, in a building that has now been
demolished.  Of course I also fell in love. Skipping a couple of
years, here is a story that tells all the essentials about this aspect
of my life at the time:




                         Ramble for Mai


        Surely the way we met was something out of a silly story!
        Me the young teacher substitute, you the even younger student,
        the one who listened to me, and whose gaze I felt
        as I drew a Venn diagram on the blackboard, the redheads
        with their partition, the policemen with theirs.
        Even then I was a bit taken aback, wondering what it meant,
        when you answered intelligently my questions about what
        implied what, the redheaded policemen at your fingertips.
        I hurried away through the corridor, your questions receding
        behind me. Only some months afterwards, you told me later,
        when you happened to see me hurrying up from the subway station,
        on my way to dine with the people from my department, to talk
        to our acting professor, chewing on a peculiar academic pemmican,
        did you form the resolve to actually call me
        and introduce yourself as one who had been my student.
        I didn't know what to make of it. Nothing like it
        had ever happened to me, but we agreed to meet,
        and as the night came around went to see that film, the name of which
        always just escapes me. Once or twice I have imagined
        as I watch on TV movies from just that period that this
        is the one, intently following its inane convolutions,
        then smiling at my silliness. Later at your place we listened
        to Beethoven played at the wrong speed before parting on the platform
        with a chaste hug and kiss, thinking perhaps of what was to come.
        You had your reasons for deciding to fall in love with me
        which I never inquired into, then or later, and I for my part
        made no decisions, but went along, baffled by  events.
        Then when I first touched your breasts I was astonished
        and when your legs first parted to receive me I didn't know who I was.
        If only for that alone I still sometimes touch your face
        in my thoughts. Three years we lived together
        as you went from dreaming to disillusionment to dreaming again,
        and I stuck sourly to the love of touching and listening,
        never doubting that we would part. Now I speak of the two of us
        to the world at large, but never to you, who alone have any reason
        to listen. Mai, your face and your dreams, I think of you now
        and I raise my hands to my own face in gloomy wonder.


  After this I went on for a number of years doing nothing much in
particular, with my Labrador, whose name by the way was Ljovusjka.
Some years after his death, which for me marked the entry into a new
and hard to fathom world, I resolutely set about babbling in a
philosophical way and got my doctorate in philosopy from the university
of Stockholm. By a most peculiar chance I also got a well-paid job at
a newly created computer science research institute, SICS, and as a
result entered into the world of international email communication.
So here I am. Greetings, wordlers.
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