Sunderby Trilogy with Cage & Feldman
Reading Time: 5 minutes
1. Unwritten is Best Sitting in a slowly cooling car at Sunderby Hospital's large staff parking lot September 21st at 07:27 AM I am a ticking detail in the vast machinery of the present, with its branches rooted deeply in future & past, inserted between the boundaries of white lines in the parking grid's distribution of time & space, in the endurance of waiting in a here-and-now geometry All vehicles - except those just arriving or backing out to depart - are silent, empty, still; like tombstones in a cemetery or an attentive chamber ensemble before an endlessly raised conductor's baton on the event horizon Nothing happens and everything weighs heavily I am a kind of organic interior in the car in which I arrived; the temperature inside the bodywork steadily dropping towards the ideal +4 C° of the outside, which it for sure can never reach as long as my body heat resists it, while the dashboard RPM and speed indicators both rest at zero, and time - which I keep enduring - continues its steady descent through space; thoughts rising like waste heat from a district heating plant; ink falling from the pen a reminder of relativity & quantum states; each poem proving that unwritten is best 2. Atrium The double pinging of elevators up & down in the building's central, longitudinal atrium, running the full height & length of the complex, in the whirring of kick scooter tires and the spatial clicking of hard-soled shoes, wrapped in the flocking right-left passages of voices, creates an airy John Cage composition about itself - much like ”Lecture On Nothing” - in an exquisite meta mindfulness, while my personal time, as I'm sitting on a bench by the wall with Michio Kaku's book ”Quantum Supremacy” at hand, floats at eye level, like a jellyfish in the North Sea, confident in its stubbornness, illusory independent of physical laws and cultural taboos Descending elevator counterweights rise inside the elevator shafts like nuclear-armed missiles out of Nebraska's monocultures Tight teams of employees, moving from their meetings to a common luncheon, rush past, shoulder to shoulder, marching like Roman cohorts in tight testudo formations; ladies with round buttocks and men with sexual intent; determined atrium movements at noon on a workday The elevators continue to speak to deaf ears about floor levels in muffled mantras of remoteness, without comprehensible meanings or identifiable emotional states Solitary, swift-footed figures in white attire float by in silent stiffness with gazes locked in hypnotic smartphone screens 3. Afternoon Heavy curtains of rain sweep in over Sunderby's free parking lot like the horsemen of the Apocalypse at 1:30 PM, the whole ruthlessness of a foreign power over the fleet of parked cars in immeasurable numbers in the gloom; yes, like an army of stoned American draftees on the shores of Da Nang, the foam-ridden torrents swallow everything audible Waiting in the car on the outskirts of the patience narrative on the rain-soaked asphalt beyond the hospital's ominous shadows, which resemble Manhattan's skyline in a downgraded tropical storm coming up from the Gulf, seen from the other side of the river, in New Jersey, parts of my field of vision dissolve into the numbness of a migraine aura, while I think of myself as waiting in the car on the outskirts of the patience narrative on the rain-soaked asphalt beyond the hospital's ominous shadows Occasionally, I hear the muffled thuds of isolated car doors slamming shut somewhere in the bumpy, tortoiseshell mass of vehicles, as someone arrives for work or an appointment, or departs I sit in the identity-alienating migraine aura on the more roomy, steering-wheel-less passenger side in the noise of the rain and the broadsides of wind, in the grip of the migraine, the windshield nearly opaque in the cold, irregular downpour, when someone pulls in and parks diagonally across from me, to the right, without getting out, intruding on my privacy, my personal sphere, my comfort zone, in the same way someone entering an otherwise empty bus, might sit down next to you, and I immediately feel hostile toward the unknown/unseen person that I cannot even make out through the rain and the wet windows, and who certainly hasn't noticed me in the darkness of my car, behind windows that only let through distorted, incomprehensible, constantly changing forms in the rivulets trickling down the glass, while my migraine attack slowly completes its undulation through my brain, and leaves behind a sense of depersonalization, weakened cognitive coherence and unsteady motor coordination, while my personal integrity continues to be violated for at least another hour, though I, in the gradually receding phase of the migraine incident - fortunately - experience the situation in the car out in the parking lot among hundreds of anonymous vehicles and the few scattered thuds of car doors closing, plus the sight of a few hunched shadows disappearing into their disappearances, as a long, sparse 1980's Morton Feldman composition, at around 3 PM in the rain in one of Sunderby Hospital's large parking lots © Ingvar Loco Nordin 2023
Thoughtful and wonderful poem.
You can certainly see your writing skills in your work. All the time go after your heart.
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