Extract

Jakob Ejersbo

Revolution / Revolution

Night Watchman, Helsinki
The day’s lecture is over – I didn’t make it there; I’m sitting in a coffee bar with a cigarette and a newspaper. It’s winter. A night watchman has been run over and killed by a lorry loaded with stolen video recorders at the harbour. This morning the ambulance people had to hack the body free from the tarmac. Body heat had melted the snow. Afterwards the water froze to ice. I have to go to work. Five days a week I sharpen ice skates at a skating rink from four in the afternoon until ten at night. I can’t skate.
    Helsinki is white. Snow and skin. The university is crap. Philosophy. Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer. Big notions, ideas – but the world … no, not the world; people – we’re the same. People are neither good nor bad – it’s opportunity that makes them what they are. 
   It’s not what I thought before: that I was on my way to forging a new path through life, something real. I’m walking in well trodden tracks. I’m not shining the way. I’m shadowing others. Why? It’s impossible for an action to be only be good. Utopias are utopias. Humanists shouting at everyone else, telling them to behave properly and then the world will become a beautiful place. Fascism in disguise. Philosophy victims. Humbug. I still have to eat, shit and sleep. Compared with experience, reading has no value. Words are the dust with which our flesh has to be united. And inside me lurks the reptilian brain. It’s only interested in three things: sex, food and power. 
   We’re all different; what’s good for one person is destruction for another. No One Love paradise on earth; no Zion. Only Babylon. Fear; dread – it’s growing out of my scalp. My dreads are coming back. I snipped them off four months ago because I was having problems.  In the summer they were fine – I played golf, and I was the Lion of Zion. A couple of girls were interested. A drunk came up and grabbed one of the long locks. ’Is that real hair? Or have you had it made somewhere?’ I said: ’It’s genuine’. He said: ’How does it get like that’ – not in a polite way. I said: ’It grows. I just leave it alone.’ That was what I did. Left it alone. I separated the locks that were too big. Otherwise the hair starts tightening on your skull – I suppose it can pull the skin off. Later in the summer I got a scalp rash; had to get rid of the lot because my scalp was bleeding. There were sores and scars. Probably just dandruff and filth. It was a hot summer. I played golf and also drank loads of beer. It’s not very healthy. A shower doesn’t wash your head if you’re getting fat and drinking beer and you’ve got masses of chemicals streaming out of your pores. You shouldn’t pretend to be a natty dread if you drink. It’s part of the basic philosophy. And logical: what you put in has to come out. I collected the dreadlocks I had cut off and plaited them into a short piece of rope. Reduced my beer intake. Now my dreads are growing again. They should grow until I can plait three metres of rope. Enough to hang myself. If I start breeding before the rope is long enough I’ll tie a car tyre to the branch of a tree with it: a swing for my offspring. A child. What for? To remove the dread? Or to pass it on so that it can be experienced anew. Or I can swing on it. Dreadlock.

Translated by Don Bartlett