Monika Fagerholm - The Glitter Scene

THE OLD SONGS (From The Return of the Marsh Queen, Chapter 1, Where did the music start?): The Summer of Love, a bench in the park. The Marsh Queen: I dont know about music, if what I mean with music, is music.

1967, the Summer of Love, a new hour of creation, we are the Woodstock Nation. And so it was Jimi Hendrix who was playing The Star-Spangled Banner. He played it like a scream, just the guitar, no words. Without wrath, without the slightest hint of being bothered or as if he wanted to beg for some kind of sympathy. He played the national anthem like it had never been played before, so that there was room for all meanings, nuances.

And DeeDee on a bench in the park, 1967, 1969? It was the summer of hate in any case, the summer of hate, and for me it wasnt just about going and watching Jefferson Airplane in Central Park and enjoying LSD. It was about sitting on a bench in the park, drinking wine and doing double hits of heroin.

And I wondered if there was some systematic plan somewhere with the purpose of fucking up people in this country, deliberately letting all of the drugs in the country fuck up idiots like me whom they saw as a burden. Everyone knew that the CIA was on the opium smugglers side so that the countries they ruled over wouldnt be sold to Communist China and become red. And because it was so profitable, drugs are money, and where did all of those orange methadone crackers come from? Was it just part of the deal?

IN ANY CASE IT IS DAMNED DISCOURAGING BEING SIXTEEN YEARS OLD SITTING ON A PARK BENCH KNOWING THAT NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING IS GOING TO CHANGE.

THE AMERICAN GIRL IN A SNOW GLOBE
(Johanna and the Winter Garden, 20042006)

The Winter Garden exists, does not exist.
On the Second Cape, a place.
At the same time. A dream, a utopia.
An island that grows inside your head.

THE CHILD, FLUORESCENT. Johanna. In the room of dreams, time, history. Pins The Child, fluorescent on the wall. The woman on the meadow with the child in her arms, a black-and-white photo, in a thunderstorm, lightning. The child of light/in the light.

An explosion, transcendence.

She is the Child, fluorescent.

Johanna in the room, looks out the window.

The meadow, which reveals itself on the other side of the windowpane in the light of the Winter Garden, dusk is now falling. A corner of the woods farther away, Tobiass greenhouse on the side of the road, like a quivering yellow spot in the rain.

Lille. Breathes on the windowpane, an island of mist spreads over the glass, erasing the view. Breathes over and over again, so that the island becomes very large and then writes LILLE in the mist in large, clear letters with her index finger.

Several times over, faster and faster, until the name is obliterated and the window is clear and transparent again.

The road, on the side, the Piss Factory.

From The Return of the Marsh Queen, Chapter 1. Where did the music start?

Patti and the factory, the Piss Factory. Somewhere, where there really was not anything, not the friendly middle-class family you grew up in. But poverty, the factory, ugly, fat ladies in the factory. During your lunch break you snuck out to the bookstore to buy your Rimbaud, and then you sat by the conveyor belt and tried to concentrate, your Rimbaud in your head: Rimbaud who was supposed to save your life but you could not know that yet. You thought you were stuck there, forever, in the factory.

The road is about thirty feet from the house where Johanna lives: one direction leading toward the Second Cape, the Winter Garden, and the main country road and the town center and the school in the other. The road: a shiny, dark line cutting through the deserted landscape.

See the road as a line