ACTA NORVEGICA

My last days in Norway will be spent communing with the sheep, goats, and ghosts. There is a lot of strength that can be gathered from the contemplation of what the inarticulate can say. After visiting the local bygdetun today, an old gathering of wooden houses and church dating back to the 17th century, I rather enjoyed the 80 bleating sheep right outside the community. As soon as I approached them, they all jumped on their four and started singing in a choir. Even the completely atonal ones got totally into it. That was quite marvellous and exquisite, especially since I detected that what the sheep were performing was a quote from the English satirist and caricaturist Max Beerbohm: “Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.” Indeed, I nodded at the sheep, and they nodded back making sounds louder and louder. People claim that this never happens to them, have sheep come to them, and compete for attention. Why it always happens to me, I cannot explain, but then so it goes with some of life’s mysteries. Ultimately it is the mystery of it all that enables us to engage in performing acts of literature, acts of religion, acts of love. Figuring it all out, as it were, is also commanded by the first rule of epistemic creativity, namely the demand that epistemic cognition, contingent on creativity, is interactive. Where writers and readers are concerned, it is often the case that a reader reads not with view to understanding the author – unless one reads an autobiography, and even then – but to acquire knowledge about himself or herself. A writer writes for pleasure not politics. If a writer’s pleasure can become a reader’s truth, then something is achieved. What this something consists of, I leave it to you to decipher and decide. If you can’t, go to Norway. Or don’t go to Norway.

So, this rather ad hoc Norway log stops here. Thank you all for the great comments (many through Facebook) and for soliciting pictures. More updates on Norway will come soon enough, if not from Oslo and what else they serve at the Caribbean restaurant, then definitely from Tromsø in winter.