A true story, all
details as accurate as possible within the limitations of historical and public
record.
A man in
1971 Iowa City watches his wife bite into an apple and he hears the sound and
finds an answer and maybe a purpose as he sees a forest buzzed low by
helicopters and an ex-soldier trapped as a man in Gothenburg walks among the
low slung early morning fog up the side of a hill, his body buzzing slightly
and his eyes all protracted about wrong as a girl’s last kiss still burns where
it fell when his body and mind still felt as his as in 1640 a young man comes
alone to New Sweden in the land that will someday be called the United States
but is now just untamed wilderness, residents original forgotten to their
contemporaries as but savages and we disregard them here because the young man
and his descendants were building civilization up anew from the earth itself
and as yet another young man lies late in bed on a cool Edinburgh morning and
he remembers a night past and then he begins to write but before he begins to
write he hears a song and the song it belongs to the man on the hill and he
belongs to the hill and what he writes becomes too of the hill all at once as
the hill is born up out of shifting plate tectonics in a time long unbecome and
the man with the apple belongs too to the hill and as that young man takes his
footing in a new land with no past to withhold him to the old codex of a city
that would come to be known as Gottenberg and he sells himself and his family
forever to the hill so too and the hill owns the words now before this page
black on white and it seeps into the hands that turn the page and bleeds out
across history from now till eternity, that soulless thing now possessed by a
most spectacular human spirit, granted the immortality of love and loss and
being young and then not being young and then not being and it all exists at
once as yet each relies wholly on the existential precondition of the other.
Kid. Still
a kid as he just comes off the gangplank, hard journey, harder life in front of
him and he wanders about still lost finding legs for land and eventually he’s
told where to go and the voice is gruff but it becomes as a guide on this
unbleached soil, new world, just have to build it, and he mutters his name
“Peter
Gunnarson” and then he’s asked for another name and he doesn’t quite understand
why, but he goes with what first comes to him and he sees a hill in his home
town and he remembers a girl he once kissed under the trees on the hill’s top,
farmland stretched out in all directions forever but here on the hill, free,
and then he thinks of the name of the hill and he speaks out a word, taken from
the hill but not belonged entirely to it, as all the young men the hill takes
and keeps and becomes
“Rambo.
Peter Gunnarson Rambo.”
He’s
supposed to be a musician but he doesn’t feel like much of anything, not
anymore, and the album is done and it’s not enough but it’s supposed to be,
this was already what made him free, the guitar, the words, the truth, it was
supposed to be the truth but can it really be the truth, corporate trash rock
but he’s not corporate, not by half, and he tips the bottle back between his
teeth and it runs through him and now as again some fourteen year old, died
hair, cheap guitar, he feels free as he feels forever lost and there was a girl
here somewhere sometime but now there is nothing but trees and the hill and the
grey winter sky hanging low and something here with him and the something used
to mean something but now it is just a face to hide his own fear behind. And he
once had friends and they tried to save him and now he’s here, up on his hill,
city on a hill but not this one, they would build one some day
It was
called New Sweden and he scratched about in the dirt, tobacco planter,
indentured servant, at first, but eventually he would build something out of
that dirt, out of a few seeds in a box, a mind not allowed to fall away and
One day a
girl unsure of herself gets lost in this place and they don’t call it New
Sweden any longer, and she’s forgotten here by those meant to love and keep her
but then some day a boy who will yet be saved by the hill will save her.
He wakes up
but he shuts his eyes again but he can’t sleep for the thoughts trying to take
him, carry him off to some deeper sleep, razor blades, bridges, voices telling
him it won’t get better, not now, not ever, and then he can’t he can’t for the
voices for they overwhelm and then there is nothing left but ashes and waking
dreams of blood on white sheets and he know he can’t for there are still those
who would mourn him but then he scrabbles about on shelf for headphones and
puts on music and a song, it captures him, and he sees the name but it means
nothing to him, written in Swedish, and from the name a word, a single word,
and it captures him, and he knows not why or what, not yet, but he sees the
razor blade again, but more words now, from the word, and from the words,
faces, the immortal left behind, who we fail when we fail as we all fail
eternal, forwards and back and the song belongs to the musician on a hill and
as the writer takes the word from the song he takes the name of the hill and it
becomes a part of him as the older author back in Iowa City but both captured
the same way by the name of the hill even before either knows of the hill and
maybe it’s not the hill but it’s name, infectious somehow, or maybe it’s
something called fate but these are rational men all, builders, artists,
thinkers, not men of God, but how else to frame such connective tissue among
those inherently disconnected?
The earth
and the sky and the sea and New Sweden and his father's letter and the girl
said she would write but she writes not so all he has is this place unclaimed
and he feels himself sinking each day deeper into the earth and he one day
enters a tavern and one screams at the barman, one last drink, a plate of food,
something, nothing but something please but anything, what are we supposed to
do this is a land without yet a people or a purpose, you can’t eat tobacco but
there must be something to build and still he has his apple seeds and yet still
he has years, pre-pledged to the voice and the voice owns him but he knows some
day he shall own the voice and then the land itself, hundreds of years down
history the seeds will blossom into trees and trees will bear fruit and the
fruit will take his name and it shall also be the name of the hill and the song
and the words of the boy and the hero of the man
As the
man’s wife bites into the apple he looks up at the crunch, eyes bleary,
distracted but then nothing and she looks to him and asks how it’s going and he
puts up his hands and says how can he teach this shit if he can’t write this
shit and she smirks at him as he slips over the repeated word and she leans
down and kisses him and he shivers slightly at the taste of apples on her lips,
reminding him of a girl who once he knew but now there stands a woman and he
can’t remember if they were one in the same but then the hill slips down to him
as it came to the young man on young earth and he asks his wife what the name
of the apple is for the taste is unexpected and she mutters out some quiet,
forceful name and it sounds like a hill in a place called now Gothenburg.
He hangs
his head, sweat dripping past his eyes, all his body pulled down towards the
earth by some impossible weight and he says that was the one, he’s done with
this fucking song, ready to be done with this fucking album, almost ten years
and it’s not enough, and about him his bandmates exchange glances for they feel
the gravity that pulls him and they want to pull him back but they find it so
increasingly hard and they do their best but they too remember the words he’s
just sung and one of them asks him almost to fill the empty air, if he has a
name for the song yet and he speaks quietly, in Swedish in a studio used now to
recordings in English, somehow universal.
“Från Ramberget ser jag allting som någonsin hänt oss
här.” and then one asks if everything is alright but
nothing is ever alright not if you feel what he feels and so does he feel as he
writes, words to the page and they are trying so hard to save him and they
think maybe this album, maybe it can and he mutters that it’s his life work and
they trade uneasy glances for he still is young but for how long can one so
weighed upon be young?
Saving a
life is a most peculiar institution. But then so is fate.
On a rocky
bluff looking out over the seas towards where he estimates, somewhere beyond
eternity, lies what was once his home, a young tobacco planter ponders the
rocks below, but then a woman finds him there and she speaks to him and then
eventually he speaks back and she doesn’t really say much and neither does he
but they need not.
And from
the name of the apple he finds the name of the hero and he defines his hero and
from his hero he finds his story, the pieces, fills them in, and it kind of
just writes itself and there are patches in his memories but it writes itself
and he sees the students before him during the days and he remembers being them
and he remembers when he thought the world was his and he remembers the moment
when it wasn’t but he feels himself laying new claim on it and it’s the name
and the name becomes something more than a name and the hill possess him and
the wife sees it and she does not loath it or envy it, proclaiming rather an
admiration upon it for what it gives her husband, and his purpose.
The hill it
is born alone but it dies altogether as so all we dream and yet it is not dead
yet as still young people climb it every day to fall in and out of love and
drop and shoot up and drink and live and write and play and dance, bonfires
against cold nordic nights and the hill has its brethren in so many cities,
Edinburgh, Arthur’s Seat the name there, another name infectious, taken from a
king out of a legend/our greater history, a little suburb called Highlands
Ranch that no one remembers but still the hill in Gothenburg has encompassed
into its legacy, it too has its hill and it too is the scene of youthful
excisions and there is a young man who belongs to the hill and the hill in
Highlands Ranch and from the one overlooking Edinburgh he reads out some words
that he wrote and gave to which the name of the hill before he knew it as the
hill as the girl who was taken by New Sweden but back by him listens, along
with a few others, and his eyes flicker in and out of focus and the musician,
he too looks across a city from a hill and he finds himself alone though he
knows he is not but he can’t let them in as the writer across Europe slowly
finds himself unalone, knowing deep dark that alone he shall be again shortly
if only for a bus ride, as the planter back in Earlier America finds himself
able to as in 1647 he marries and he’s no longer but a planter, respected now,
a member of the community, then deputy to the governor and as the land changes
hands, Swedish to Dutch to British still he endures and the land is no longer
New Sweden but the apples which now grow across the earth bear yet his name and
the name of the hill.
The writer
walks younger through the halls of a building that looks like a prison next to
a girl and she says while looking deep at him that he saved her from killing
herself and he hasn’t yet met the hill but he will and she’ll help him but so
will the hill and from that moment he’ll never really again be alone for he
ascribes to a particular philosophy about saving a life.
Sometimes people
say distance brings individuals closer together and this is true and it is true
of both geography and time, but in the vanishing moment just before security in
an international airport, those structures made to flip round the world, heart
and time with it, can ever a statement seem more false? as you say goodbye,
even for the illusory blind spots mortal time, something celestial, to a
considerable part of your best self and then she’s gone and you think on the
bus back to the city how she would have loved this sunrise but now it is yours
exclusive though sunrises are always collective and you get home and see the
couch where she slept and you sit down hard and cry soft and you don’t want to
sleep because every time you do the absence will seem but further even as it
draws you closer to your next reunion.
Your best
self, the life you save, the life you lose and we all find that point where we
see our few true brothers begin to slip away, and what may we do, how can we
save those who don’t want to be saved? and yet
Swinging in
a circle back and forth under pale sunrise, pointing past and future east and
west and north and south and he will be found and the finder will not know him
and know not what his words will mean to a boy in Edinburgh, what the hill over
which he swings will mourn as the apples grow into a nation, an empire, as it’s
name become another name and that name will be a symbol of those left behind by
nation built on the apple of its name.
Can we be
haunted by a word or many words or all words? and the word catches us off guard
in even the most sacred of places, penetration, but is it the word or the idea
or the idea of the word and can we truly be haunted or is it eternal a
conscious decision to let us be defined by these outside ghosts of worlds
dreamed of only in the abstract and can
the haunting be cast off with simply the decision to forget the words razor
blades hills in Gothenburg or do they possess us, waiting only to cast us off?
and what if the word captures more than just the one, the individual, become
instead legion, contagion possessor of a protracted generation across time tied
together by common existential angst, passing the word between them like an
immortal fever?
The man in
New Sweden, he dies old, beloved, rich, respected, from the dirt, something, a
new formed nation.
The
authors, they two, fates intertwined with a word, lives built on words, money
power purpose all from the words all begun with the one word.
And yet the
musician his body twists at the end of a rope and his chords live on and in
them the name of the hill and deeper they infect anew another generation of
lost young men.
