TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER

15 April 1931 / Stockholm

The Blue House

It is night with glaring sunshine. I stand in the woods and look towards my house with its misty blue walls. As though I were recently dead and saw the house from a new angle.

It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its timber has been impregnated, four times with joy and three times with sorrow. When someone who has lived in the house dies it is repainted. The dead person paints it himself, without a brush, from the inside.

On the other side is open terrain. Formerly a garden, now wilderness. A still surf of weed, pagodas of weed, an unfurling body of text, Upanishades of weed, a Viking fleet of weed, dragon heads, lances, an empire of weed.

Above the overgrown garden flutters the shadow of a boomerang, thrown again and again. It is related to someone who lived in the house long before my time. Almost a child. An impulse issues from him, a thought, a thought of will: "create. . .draw. .." In order to escape his destiny in time.

The house resembles a child's drawing. A deputizing childishness which grew forth because someone prematurely renounced the charge of being a child. Open the doors, enter! Inside unrest dwells in the ceiling and peace in the walls. Above the bed there hangs an amateur painting representing a ship with seventeen sails, rough sea and a wind which the gilded frame cannot subdue.

It is always so early in here, it is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real.

A motor far out on the water extends the horizon of the summer night. Both joy and sorrow swell in the magnifying glass of the dew. We do not actually know it, but we sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route. While the sun burns behind the islands.

HTTPS://WWW.POEMIST.COM/TOMAS-TRANSTROMER/THE-BLUE-HOUSE

PSA: CG is a buy up of many (all?) rare goods from the bubble. Also: Consumer Technology, Beer, Wine, Polymers, Building Fabricators, Auto Fabricators, Conductive Fabrics. Based in Facece.

https://inara.cz/elite/communitygoals/

System Permit granted at level 10 Imperial rank - Earl. [Permit seems to have been given freely.]

Has the permit been granted to everyone for the CG? [Yes]

[Extra: What is your favourite rare good and why? Diso Ma Corn and Kitten Brand Coffee are mine, so far.]

[Beware: In a Panther Clipper, activating auto-docking from 7.5km out is continually having me nudge the station, above the mailslot. Full reverse, pull back, is getting me through, still on auto. Be safe Commanders.]

The last prohibition was the first time I knew something was different, that what I learnt to call “The Oldest House” was uncanny.