hi friends! It’s April…how the heck? This year is rushing by so quickly I can barely keep up. This weekend Max and I are setting off on grand adventure, a trip we have always wanted to go on and booked last year before we knew we’d be knee deep in house stuff this Spring. So it’s a flurry of preparation, excitement, and endless packing, over here. How are you doing out there? What’s bringing you joy this Spring?
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seeing tove
She died in 2001, long after I became aware of her magic and long before I knew that I would miss her. Tove Jansson sculpted my childhood like only the daughter of a sculptor could, her Moomins were a central part of the intricate world of make-believe that I constructed and inhabited in my early years, an integral part of that constellation of touch points that formed my earliest belief system.
I’ve loved them (and by extension, her) throughout my life, only trading in that love for a kind of general affection as I became an adult, when it no longer seemed right to cling to childhood things. I didn’t know then that so much of adulthood is just finding your way back to what you let go of for the wrong reasons.
I have read every available book about Tove Jansson and every single thing that she has ever written. I have read multiple biographies and watched actors play her in biopics, framed photos of her on my dresser, my altar, my desk. But I had never once typed her name into Youtube. Tove, real Tove, existed in stills for me, in black and white or sepia tones. So when, this week, I came across the trailer for a film made by her partner, the graphic artist and filmmaker Tuulikki Pietilä (Tooti), Haru: Island of Solitary, I could not immediately hit play. What if her voice was not what I expected or there was something jarring in the way that she moved? What if, in watching 100 seconds of footage, I broke this most sacred of lifelong spells? They say to never meet your idols and she has always been a moldable ghost.
It is selfish, of course, to think that anyone owes you anything. Self-indulgent to think that anything about how this living, breathing person moved through the world had anything to do with me. It’s so easy to get precious about what and who we love. These realizations were slower, setting in after my initial fearfulness.
The clip starts slow, Tove’s voice in that Swedish-speaking-Finn lilt, like that of my mother and all of the people I belong to in that part of the world. She is talking about Pietilä’s love of her Konica video recorder. The footage is careful, colorless, of Tooti holding film up to a window. The background music is eerie and slow, almost Lynchian, and it makes an entirely domestic scene feel full of possibility. Suddenly, it’s replaced by a jaunty and almost manic instrumental that feels completely out of place with Tooti’s calm examination. After a few seconds, the view changes to one of Tove on a grassy hill dancing wildly.
She moves through the final minute of the clip, making her way down the hill in a fisherman’s sweater, arms and legs swinging and jabbing, face all grin and mischief from beneath her thick, short hair. The moment is pure, completely unselfconscious joy.
I can see her characters here, Moomintroll’s whimsy, Lilla My’s necessary naughtiness, Snufkin’s sense of adventure. All of the facets of herself that she shared with the world. But this moment is just for her. She is in a place that she loves, with a person that she loves, creating work that she loves. She looks present. She looks free.
I have watched this clip possibly one hundred times in the week since that first watching. I pull it up during the day, always to watch it in its entirety. After a few days of keeping it for myself, I showed Max. “Look,” I said, handing over my phone. “Look.”
I supposed I could have seen a clip of her giving an interview, accepting an award, or giving a lecture first. Those would have been fine introductions but its this unexpected joy I wasn’t expecting that feels like yet another gift from this woman who has already given me so many.
It wasn’t until sobriety that I really rediscovered what I knew as a young thing, that Tove Jansson was a genius. I do not mean that in the way that we sometimes call men “a genius” for creating something that will likely one day kill us. I mean that she had a particular knack for shining a light on all of the life in ordinary moments, no matter her subject matter. Life in the small moments between a grandmother and granddaughter, in the social dynamics of a Florida retirement home, in a feud amongst island birds, and art and mischief of a hotel housekeeper somewhere in Arizona.
And life is what I see in this clip. Joy that wells up and bubbles over until you no longer care if you look a little silly. The clip is a small moment in itself, and maybe that’s where the magic lives. May we all find the places and people and art that make us feel absolutely free. May we dance down all of the hills of our lives. May the legacy of our joy reach through decades and touch people on the other side. And most of all, may we remember the truest of truths, that to be an artist (and we are all artists), you have to be willing to live.
Assorted, rad thing(s):
A section of this newsletter where I share what I have been reading, watching, or otherwise consuming lately.
Notes from an Island by Tove Jansson: I am in a re-read moment as my brain is having some trouble focusing on new information lately. I have been feeling really drawn to Tove’s works about her four decades living and working with her partner, the graphic artist Tuulikki Pietilä. This book pairs Tove’s journals with Tooti’s art to tell the story of building their small cabin on a rented Finnish island (a real thing that happens!).
Fair Play by Tove Jansson: See? I just want to read Tove in a cave for the next few months please. This was another re-read, a book of essays about Mari and Jonna, partners and artists who live and work together. I love this book so much. Short essays on Mari and Jonna, artists and lovers who have been together for decades. This is the first book I can remember reading where two artists are in a healthy, long-term relationship rather than a destructive booze fest. Jansson manages to take a simple moment (watching a movie, putting up a shelf) and put so much life into it.
The Regime (show): An absurdist comedy in which Kate Winslet plays a dictator who becomes increasingly paranoid and reliant on a deeply unwell solider who she hires to detect mold in her luxury hotel-turned-palace. I absolutely love when “serious” women actresses get to play completely unhinged characters and Kate Winslet is DELIGHTFUL in this role. I also find the interpersonal enablement of systemic power (not as a cause, but as the resulting social dynamics) really bleakly fascinating. In episode after episode powerful people try to “handle” Winslet’s Chancellor who is bumbling and insecure but also deeply entitled and powerful enough to always be dangerous. In this show the absurdity manages to feel both ridiculous and true and that feels like the point.
The rest of my April dispatches will be headed you way while I am on the road so please bear with me on any delays or whims that pop up along the way. In the meantime, wishing you adventure!
with love,
lisa
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