In the middle of 1950s Tove was very, very lonely. Her letters of that time are melancholy, as she desperately yearned for true love. By this time she was very interested in dating women (as to her, Atos Wirtanen was in a way the last man she wanted to love). But circles were small in a small town, where homosexual acts were both a disease and illegal.
It was 1955, when Tove met Tuulikki Pietilä. They knew each other vaguely by looks. They had attended Ateneum’s art school at the same time but Tuulikki was few years younger and usually students spent time with their own language group (Tove spoke Swedish, Tuulikki Finnish).
The love story which lasted until their deaths, almost half a century began at Pikkujoulu party (”Little Christmas” in Finnish, a party traditionally held in anticipation on Christmas, usually among coworkers or friends) arranged by Finnish art society. Tove asked Tuulikki to dance, but she declined – probably out of propriety. But later Tuulikki sent Tove a card picturing a striped cat and asked her to visit her atelier.
Next summer Tuulikki visited Tove at an island. Love was born. Tove wrote; “I have finally come home to that one person whom I want to be with”. The picture of a striped cat was always and still is on the wall of Tove’s atelier. The couple spent their summers together on an island and winters working in their ateliers, which were right next door from each other.
It can be said that Tuulikki saved Moominvalley. By the time they began their relationship, Tove was absolutely tired of Moomins. Tuulikki’s support restored Tove’s belief in Moomins and they became an important hobby to them both.
Moomin book Moominland Midwinter (1957) is a book about loving and falling in love with Tuulikki. And it really shows. In the book, Moomintroll (who is an avatar of Tove Jansson) wakes up in the middle of unfamiliar and eerie winter, facing loneliness and death for the first time. In the middle of all cold and silence Moomintroll finds Too-Ticky, who’s calmly watching a snow lantern. Too-Ticky is robust and strong with blonde hair and a knife at her hip; everything Tuulikki was.
Too-Ticky becomes Moomintroll’s calm and supportive mentor. She never gives ready answers and instead gently guides Moomintroll as he grows and learns. It is Too-Ticky who says the phrase which Tove repeated often in her interviews and which was seemingly one of her most important philophies: “Everything is insecure and that makes me calm”.
After Tuulikki’s first visit Tove wrote; “I love you both enchanted and very calm at the same time, and I don’t fear anything that might await us”. After finding Tuulikki, Tove described how much calmer and safer she felt. Whole living felt easier.
in the wake of that horrible youtube video, it’s important to support suicidal people and remember suicide victims. i don’t know who that man was but his life shouldn’t be a footnote under the event of this scandal. his life was important.
yo click that link from op. it’s a really amazing and very respectful 20 minute Vice documentary that goes into this forest, its history, its significance, and the topic of suicide. if you can handle the subject matter, it’s a very enlightening piece that gives much needed context to this whole youtube mess.
I just wanted to reblog this with a quick warning, while the video in the link I believe is respectful and significant, it does show a quick montage of images of suicide victims in the condition & places they were found from 4:39 to 4:52 so please watch out if that kind of thing would catch you off guard like it did for me.
2. you know, we have fun here, with the word “meme,” but according to meme theory, which is an actual thing pioneered by reptilian human impersonator Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, most of what we call memes are very unsuccessful memes. A meme, in the scientific sense – if one is generously disposed to consider memetics a science on any particular day – is an idea that acts like a gene. That is, it seeks to replicate itself, as many times as possible, and as faithfully as possible.
That second part is important. A gene which is not faithful in its replication mutates, sometimes rapidly, sometimes wildly. The result might be cancer or a virus or (very very very rarely) a viable evolutionary step forward, but whatever the case, it is no longer the original gene. That gene no longer exists. It could not successfully reproduce itself.
The memes we pass around on the internet are, in general, very short lived and rapidly mutating. It’s rare for any meme to survive for more than a year: in almost all cases, they appear, spread rapidly, spawn a thousand short-lived variations, and then are swiftly forgotten. They’re not funny anymore, or interesting anymore. They no longer serve any function, and so they’re left behind, a mental evolutionary dead end.
This rendition of Freddie Mercury’s immortal opera Bohemian Rhapsody is about the most goddamned amazing demonstration of a successful meme I’ve ever seen. This song is 42 years old, as of 2017. FORTY TWO YEARS OLD. And it has spread SO far, and replicated itself across the minds of millions of people SO faithfully, that a gathering of 65,000 more or less random people, with nothing in common except that they all really like it when Billie Joe Armstrong does the thing with the guitar, can reproduce it perfectly. IN PERFECT TIME. THEY KNOW THE EXACT LENGTH OF EVERY BRIDGE. THEY EVEN GET THE NONSENSE WORDS RIGHT. THEY DIVIDE THEMSELVES UP IN ORDER TO SING THE COUNTER-CHORUS.
“Yeah, Pyrrhic, lots of people know this song.”
Listen, you glassy-eyed ninny: our species’ ability to coherently pass along not just genetic information, but memetic information as well, is the reason we’re the dominant species on this planet. Language is a meme. Civilization is a collection of memes. Lots of animals can learn, but we may be the only animal that latches onto ephemera – information that doesn’t reflect any concrete reality, information with little to no immediate practical application – and then joyfully, willfully, unrelentingly repeats it and teaches it to others. Look at how wild this crowd is, because they’re singing the same song! It doesn’t DO anything. It’s not even why they showed up here today! If you sent out a letter to those same 65,000 people that said, “Please show up in this field on this day in order to sing Bohemian Rhapsody,” very few of them would have showed up. But I would be surprised to meet a single person in that crowd who joined in the singing who doesn’t remember this moment as the most amazing part of a concert they paid hundreds of dollars to see.
And they’re just sharing an idea. It’s stunning and ridiculous. Something about how our brains work make us go, “Hey!! Hey everybody!! I found this idea! It’s good! I like it! I’m going to repeat it! Do you know it too?? Repeat it with me! Let’s get EVERYBODY to know it and repeat it and then we can all have it together at the same time! It’s a good idea! I’m so excited to repeat it exactly the way I heard it, as loudly as I can, as often as possible!!”
This is how culture happens! This is how countries happen! Sometimes a persistent, infectious idea – a meme – can be dangerous or dark. But our human delight at clutching up good memes like magpies and flapping back to our flock to yell about them to everyone we know is why we as a species bothered to start doing things like “telling stories” and “writing stuff down.”
“That’s a lot of spilled ink for a Queen song, Pyrrhic.”
Man I just fucking love people.
When an intergalactic mission reaches a critical point that threatens the life of the crew, when all is hopeless, and no other option is in sight, the captain of the crew must – if the crew includes a “human” – activate the WT protocol.
This measure should only be used in extreme circumstances, as its consequences are, despite impressive effectiveness, destructive and highly unpredictable.
If, however, the crew’s life and wellbeing are in danger, then the captain should turn to the “human” and clearly speak the following words:
“This is it. We will die here. There is no way out of this.”
The “human” will immediately direct their attention to their captain. Their answer should approximately be: “There’s always a way”, or “I’ll find something.”
It is crucial, then, that the captain performs the next sentence with as much condescension as can be mustered. They must look at the “human”, and say:
“What can a weak human like you even do?”
Immediately, distance must be brought between the remaining crew and the “human”. The protocol, if successfully initiated, will begin with a show of the “human’s” teeth in something called a “grin”, and the protocol words:
“Watch this.”
at this point, cats will either save or kill all of humanity in the future, and honestly? honestly? just surprise me.
In the Encyclopedia of Living Organisms to Be Found within the Milky Way, humans only lead the ranking of all species in a very few traits. These, however, are most curious and still considered to be insufficiently explored and mysterious in their nature.
For how can a species be simultaenously leading in curiosity as well as the ability to establish emotional bonding with any known complex-brained organism turn into a force that unites or destroys entire planets when faced with the simple expression of you can’t do that?
human nature is fascinating. for example, some people think they can just take my glasses off my face and then live to see another day.
“Tell me the truth,” the human demanded.
The universe rippled, almost like a smile. “I grant you permission to ask any question, and this is what you want to know?”
The human glared a little bit. “Tell me. Unless you’re breaking your promise,”
“Of course not,” said the universe. It pulled the human closer, made the space around it warm, slowed time into a gentle river.
“Well? What’s the truth of if all? The one thing that’s always true, no matter what?”
The universe held its human for a long or short while. Then, it said:
“There’s no always.”
“Okay,” said the human slowly, “okay, but – ”
“The only truth is change.”
For a tiny or an endless while, the human said nothing. When it looked up at the universe, its eyes were shining with tears (maybe happy ones, maybe sad ones; the universe couldn’t be sure. Nothing was certain with humans, and how magnificent that was).
“So even if – no matter what – ” The human couldn’t speak anything else. It curled against the universe and held on tight.
A pulse of light wove around the human as it dissolved. The universe watched its way back to the stars, back to its home, and whispered a little something after it for when it woke up again.
Indeed, my human… you’re right. No matter what, even if something and anything happens, change is true, and truth will always come.
maybe the darkest parts of the universe, the most unimaginable of creatures, unspeakable in any other planet’s thousands of tongues, stay away from earth because they’ve seen what we’re capable of when we fight each other, and they don’t want to find out what we would do to something that threatens all of us.
Moami 