Håkan Hellstorm

“Identity is a dream that is pathetically absurd. You dream of being yourself when you have nothing better to do. You dream of yourself and gaining recognition when you have lost all singularity. Today we no longer fight for sovereignty or for glory, but for identity. Sovereignty was a mastery; identity is merely a reference. Sovereignty was adventurous; identity is linked to security (and also to the systems of verification which identify you). Identity is this obsession with appropriation of the liberated being, but a being liberated in sterile conditions, no longer knowing what he is. It is a label of existence without qualities. Now, all energies - the energies of minorities and entire peoples, the energies of individuals - are concentrated today on that derisory affirmation, that prideless assertion: I am! I exist! I’m alive, I’m called so-and-so, I’m European! A hopeless affirmation, in fact, since when you need to prove the obvious, it is by no means obvious.”

Touch me, hold me, sorrow and sorrow, the emptied, emptied again, touched again. / The hunger, the rising, again and again until again itself seemed to be need and hunger[.]

People who feel empty never heal by merging with another incomplete person. On the contrary, two broken-winged birds coupled into one make for clumsy flight. No amount of patience will help it fly; and, ultimately, each must be pried from the other, and wounds separately splinted.

You spoke of things they didn’t see: they laughed But to row the dark river with the current against you to go blindly an obstinate traveller by the unknown road and to seek words out rooted like the knotted olive trunk— leave them to laugh. And to long for the other world to inhabit the suffocating loneliness of our days in this vanished present— leave them. The sea winds and the cool of dawn breathe without their asking.

We saw something in each other that neither one of us liked, or maybe we were just looking in the mirror.

“From tiny experiences we build cathedrals.”

i’m gonna make it through this year if it kills me

Every love poem, I think, is a poem of grace. Because you can spend years in silence not knowing how to say I love you. Because you can spend years knowing what you need but not asking for it. Because you can spend years lifting, only to realize that you spent years lifting the wrong thing. Because someone’s hands can spend a lifetime in the blistered existence of the everyday only to spend a minute, years later, making calligraphy out of your skin. Because it only takes a second to be brought to your knees. Because it only takes a second for someone to lift you.

So he lent her books. After all, one of life’s best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves: Now she is reading or has just read the scene with the mirrors; she who is so lovely is drinking in that loveliness I’ve drunk.