I have to finish renovating the master bedroom by the time the wife comes back from the Navy. So after work yesterday, I drove out to the IKEA up in Stoughton to do some research. Don't worry, this isn't one of those blogs about crazy Swedish product names or putting together furniture with a hairpin, you'll have to go elsewhere for that.
After two hours of walking around the showroom making measurements with the flimsy paper ruler and marking down jumbled notes in a cahier, I took my supper in the IKEA restaurant. Their dining operation is the seventh largest chain in America in terms of volume sales, I think I read that somewhere once. I sat facing a wall so I didn't have to look at all the annoying kids, and ate my meal. It was apple glazed salmon with a side salad.
The wall directly in front of me was a screenprinted mural, photographs from the capital city of Sweden, the homeland of IKEA. A helicopter shot from above, a few boats, a street market. In the middle, a few words printed in a Scandinavian sans-serif:
The waters embrace the beauty.Isn't that something? They have these giant travelogue panels in every IKEA from Covina to College Park, but on this day "Stockholm" just hit me in a very real way in a very special place. Maybe it was the sentimentality that only comes with extreme fatigue, but I may even have choked back a secret tear.
Salt water from the east.
Meets fresh water from the west.
Yesterday somebody caught a trout
just outside the king's palace.
Tomorrow someone will prosper
from an idea no one has thought of before.
The beauty on water sparkles.
The promise to the future is bright.
From the capital of Sweden.
I want to go to a poetry slam (if those exist anymore) just so I can read this out loud to a rapt audience... and possibly even claim it as my own work. I want to go out an obtain an education degree, just so I can take on the mantle of authority and share these words with my very own English class. I know I've learned more from this one piece than I did from the stodgy professors who forced their narrow-minded aesthetics on me at the University of Oregon.
This prose poem -- and it really does straddle the line between the two mediums -- begins with the grand sweep of elemental forces. That's always a good way to capture people's attention right off the bat. In an instant, the camera swoops down to capture a snapshot of an everyday, mundane moment. But then, then! Just as suddenly, the canvas spreads out wide beyond the limitless universe of possibility and dreams. Then the three final sentences, like triple cannon shots, echo the tempo of the piece's beginning. The bad English grammar and bizarre sentence structure just make the message sound exotic -- as if it emanated a strange and far-off place, translated from a mysterious language. Which it probably was.
These 56 words, written by a wordsmith as anonymous as those before the Renaissance brought about centuries of selfish signatures, resonated deep within my soul. Nothing I have ever written, for money or pleasure, matches the pure power of "Stockholm." Nothing I have written so skillfully wields Occam's hungry razor, or achieves the simplicity so often credited to Ernest Hemingway. It renders my work verbose, painfully highfalutin and irrelevant. It's enough to make me want to give up writing altogether.
But if I did that, I probably wouldn't be able to afford any more IKEA furniture. And so I muddle on.
