x x x
instagram. | tumblr. | facebook. | twitter.
The distinctive Swedish blend of hard-to-penetrate cultural codes and claims to a universal culture of reason and rationality was perhaps most clearly manifest in the role of religion in Sweden. Up to the post-war period, Sweden could reasonably be described as a monolithic state-church society with a distinct and visible Lutheran cultural identity. Linked to the ideal of a People's Home was the Lutheran ideal of a People's Church, folkkyrka, originating in Germany in the 1880s and particularly cherished by Christian Social Democrats. The Church of Sweden thus came to be identified with the state and the state identified with the church and protected its interests; the church relinquished its moral and spiritual independence from the state while the state provided it with a de jure monopoly on religious affairs. Prior to 1860, the only organized Christian denomination allowed was the Lutheran. Thereafter you could leave the Church of Sweden only if you joined another Christian denomination approved by the state. Full freedom of religion was not instituted in Sweden until 1951, and the formal separation of church and state in Sweden took place only in 2000.All this made for a culturally entrenched state religion indivisibly intertwined with the national and social ambitions of modern Sweden. The Church of Sweden not only refrained from challenging the mainly secular foundations of this enterprise but largely served to support and legitimise them. The Church became progressively secularised, if you will, imbued with the emerging tenets of reason and rationality, owing its power less to its spiritual authority than to its role as the official custodian of semi-religious national traditions and specific matters of state (such as population registration). When this increasingly anachronistic position was publicly challenged in the late 1940s it triggered a fierce public debate that lasted several years and in which the church more or less conceded the high ground to its secular critics, or rather, claimed the critics' ground for itself. The church had no argument with secularism, it was said. The reason was not alien to religion but part and parcel of it. The dogmas of the church were no longer seen as incompatible with secular principles. In fact, the debate did not so much pit the tenets of reason against the tenets of faith, as it revealed the tacit cultural bonds between church and state in Swedish society. Religion in Sweden thus became the great invisible in the narrative construction of Swedishness, adding yet another component to its peculiar fusion of tradition and modernity, religion and reason, cultural exclusion and political inclusion. Although the Christian roots of modern Sweden are rarely acknowledged there is no doubt that the self-professed secular nature of modern Swedishness is deeply steeped in a Lutheran tradition of national self-sufficiency and moral rectitude. Beneath the claims to universal tolerance and cultural openness, Sweden remains a society with a historically short experience of cultural and religious pluralism and therefore remains somewhat uncomfortable in confronting cultural and religious difference. A foreign surname and a foreign accent, not to mention foreign social codes and un-Swedish manners might still make a difference between being employed or not.At the same time Sweden, perhaps more than any other European country, subscribed to an official policy of openness, acceptance, and tolerance towards new immigrants. Although labour immigration to Sweden formally came to a halt in the late 1970s, it was soon to be replaced by a relatively generous policy for the reception and absorption of asylum seekers and, eventually, of their extended families. This has dramatically changed the demographic make-up of Sweden, where 15 percent of the population, 1.4 million, is now foreign-born (as of 2010). In some urban areas, the share of inhabitants with a foreign background is approaching 90 percent. A fairly large influx of non-European asylum-seekers has thus challenged the official policy of multicultural integration by going hand in hand with a growing socioeconomic divide along cultural and ethnic lines. Unemployment and poverty have hit the foreign-born part of the population significantly harder than the rest of the population. So far the narrative of a rational, pluralistic and tolerant society open to all has prevailed over the narrative of a homogeneous society threatened by immigrants feeding off the welfare state, introducing alien religious beliefs and practices while refusing to adapt to Swedish norms and traditions.
![]() |
Власть музыки - то, что она тебе дает, что она с тобой делает, куда уносит, - это что-то невероятное и непостижимое, как колдовство или как субатомная физика, если учесть ее непритязательную простоту. Это как солнце, а потом - луна. Почему так происходит? Наверное, дело в том, что она сама приходит к тебе, в нее не надо внимать, как в слова. Она омывает тебя, как свет, только более ощутимая, многогранная, и ты весь захвачен мелодией, она покоряет тебя мгновенно - но не силой, а сопереживанием. Она все меняет. И песни: сочетания нот, и манера исполнения, и даже качество инструмента... и звук - эмоции в чистом виде. И при этом все стройно и четко, почти как в математике, и, помимо душевного отклика, она рождает некое абстрактное удовольствие от выверенной композиции. Музыка сама по себе исполнена значения и смысла, а в сочетании с текстом несет еще и дополнительную смысловую нагрузку, некое скрытое сообщение, а ритм воздействует на тебя на физическом уровне, и подчиняет себе. Она живая, музыка, она бьется и дышит, грозится, дразнит и умоляет, она пронзает тебя насквозь, омывает тебя волной звука, накрывает тебя с головой. И голос певца или певицы... это может быть голос друга или врага, сексуального идола или оракула, насмешливый, искренний, проникновенный, злой, напряженный - любой. Но если он настоящий, он проникает до самых глубин твоего существа, куда ты допускаешь только самых любимых и близких. <...> Ричард Хелл «Погнали». / / / |
1.
An all-night barbeque. A dance on the courthouse lawn.
The radio aches a little tune that tells the story of what the night
is thinking. It's thinking of love.
It's thinking of stabbing us to death
and leaving our bodies in a dumpster.
That's a nice touch, stains in the night, whiskey kisses for everyone.
Tonight, by the freeway, a man eating fruit pie with a buckknife
carves the likeness of his lover's face into the motel wall. I like him
and I want to be like him, my hands no longer an afterthought.
2.
Someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure.
I'm sure you remember, I was on the phone with you, sweetheart.
3.
History repeats itself. Somebody says this.
History throws its shadow over the beginning, over the desktop,
over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters.
History is a little man in a brown suit
trying to define a room he is outside of.
I know history. There are many names in history
but none of them are ours.
4.
He had green eyes,
so I wanted to sleep with him
green eyes flicked with yellow, dried leaves on the surface of a pool.
You could drown in those eyes, I said.
The fact of his pulse,
the way he pulled his body in, out of shyness or shame or a desire
not to disturb the air around him.
Everyone could see the way his muscles worked,
the way we look like animals,
his skin barely keeping him inside.
I wanted to take him home
and rough him up and get my hands inside him, drive my body into his
like a crash test car.
I wanted to be wanted and he was
very beautiful, kissed with his eyes closed, and only felt good while moving.
You could drown in those eyes, I said,
so it's summer, so it's suicide,
so we're helpless in sleep and struggling at the bottom of the pool.
5.
It wasn't until we were well past the middle of it
that we realized
the old dull pain, whose stitched wrists and clammy fingers,
far from being subverted,
had only slipped underneath us, freshly scrubbed.
Mirrors and shop windows returned our faces to us,
replete with tight lips and the eyes that remained eyes
and not the doorway we had hoped for.
His wounds healed, the skin a bit thicker that before,
scars like train tracks on his arms and on his body underneath his shirt.
6.
We still groped for each other on the backstairs or in parked cars
as the road around us
grew glossy with ice and our breath softened the view through the glass
already laced with frost,
but more frequently I was finding myself sleepless, and he was running out of
lullabies.
But damn if there isn't anything sexier
than a slender boy with a handgun,
a fast car, a bottle of pills.
7.
What would you like? I'd like my money's worth.
Try explaining a life bundled with episodes of this--
swallowing mud, swallowing glass, the smell of blood
on the first four knuckles.
We pull our boots on with both hands
but we can't punch ourselves awake and all I can do
is stand on the curb and say Sorry
about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.
I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.
['Richard Siken].