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I've just had the most sleepless fucking brilliant weekend I've had for years. pardon some coyness in the account. i started out at the witchcraft conference, ended up getting drafted into some campfire witchdance silliness [as an observer, mind you. no kinaesthetic witchcraft revival crap for this monkey...] and rambling the windswept empty streets of vardø for 4 hours in the middle of the night with a reporter-photographer sent out from Oslo to cover the conference, having the longest conversation about necrophilia and cannibalism of my life. went home saturday morning, then saturday night the reporter hitchhiked west across the tundra from vardø to varangerbotn, about 150km, to get a story about my shamaness hostess. we spent sunday chasing said elusive hostess all around the varanger peninsula, ended up in the middle of freaking nowhere, at the reindeer fence of the Utsi clan who had gathered their 1500-strong herd for the autumn calf-marking. spent a couple of hours talking to herders and watching the massive herd circling clockwise around the corral, grunting and looking fucking cool, behaving to the eyes like some dense and turbulent furry liquid, then drove back to polmak. finally, monday morning we caught up with hostess at the gjestegård, reportergirl and I both received a healing and I got a little sodalite stone to help me 'see better' and abandon old patterns. drove reportergirl 150km to kirkenes airport monday night, drove home, then collapsed.

project today is washing and moving out of my gamme-hut, as the sami church council is moving in full strength for a conference and all bed-spaces are filled. I'm moving into the main house for tonight, then heading down south for a few days tomorrow morning, to witness the first slaughter of the year with the non-sami tamreinslag in the south. by the time I come back, the Smuk clan that I'll work with will be about to start gathering their herds, and thence onwards it'll be blow-to-blow til christmas.

man, it all freaking rocks.

on my way to a witchcraft conference in vardø, ground zero for a series of spectacular witchtrial chains in the 17th century. here, the over-zealous persecution of fertile females led to serious depopulation problems, particularly given the small original population. my shamaness hostess is doing a presentation, so given the continued absence of reindeer from my life, at least it keeps me off the street for the week-end. and I get to see vardø, the dying township on the far eastern coast of the varanger peninsula, where the population has halved in the last ten years and you can score a small flat for less than a thousand GBP. it also has the northernmost tree in northern europe, apparently, protected in a small courtyard cubicle of vardøhus fortress.

meanwhile, the trickle of people to the gjestegård just gets more and more... interesting, to the point where I'm almost embarrassed to refer what people tell me. light creatures bestowing secret hand gestures in the back rooms of coca reader saloons in L-America... personal encounters with trolls... a middleaged man who gets woken up by bird creatures and reptile creatures and 'fear-based energy creatures' at night, because they want help escaping the increasing frequency of earth's atmosphere and he functions as some sort of energetic launchpad...

it gets to the point where I, even I start wondering whether there might be something wrong in the head with some of these kids. man oh man. what a brave new age that has such people in it. thankfully, some of the moral reasonings these people come up with - you can imagine the angle, 'life is eternal anyway, so bombings in iraq may not be that bad after all' - are helping me get some salutary mental distance from the unresolved inanities at the back of my mind.

psychic crisis recessive for the time being. got myself a seallvve, a protective Sami brass ring used to wash babies and tend the dead, as well as for women to look through when the men come back from the bear hunt, charged with dangerous force. maybe it helped.

have also made contact with the rampant forces of global postmodernity, in the guise of a traditional sami healer in the area whose guide is a navajo indian and who was modified by aliens through reconstructive spiritual surgery. how bricoleur can you get... at least it's something to do. driving over to meet her at the end of the week with a sami girl who lives nearby, who lent me the healerwoman's book.

this part of the country has an absolutely disproportionate number of healers per inhabitant. strangely, much more so than further west in Finnmark, in the Karasjok and Kautokeino areas. at this pace, I'll have some very strange articles to write when I sit down in a year's time... I'll keep you posted as I start taking healings from people and getting messages from my spirit guides...

the weather gets progressively more intense. cold and rainy today, with mighty winds that buffeted my not-so-mighty vessel on the way down here, the '87 subary pick-up that my mother immediately dubbed rosinante, after the steed of Don Quixote. somebody who's familiar with the novel might be able to explain me why... ;-)

otherwise I am still getting more involved in day-to-day activities such as clearing the barn, firing up the sauna, sitting at the entrance to take money at the local swinging live-music clapton-chacha-cha dance-night, refitting the henhouse as a firewood shed and driving people whenever the opportunity arises. any excuse will do.

for the first time in my life I am surrounded by people steeped in, even committed to the all-too familiar interpretive paradigms of the new age - you know the stuff. synchronicity, higher selves, spiritual growth, intuition, energy fields, reincarnation... jung, patanjali, jesus, einstein and ramakrishna in motley, unholy union. everything so oversaturated with meaning that just boiling an egg in the morning becomes an auspice in bloody augury and prognostication - what is THE UNIVERSE trying to say to ME, RIGHT NOW by the way THAT EGG is boiling? 

ever since I was a wee disoriented young lad, this idea of meaningful coincidence, what Jung called the 'acausal connecting principle' is something that I've entertained at the back of my mind. mostly half in jest. you know the kind of thing, 'ha ha it started raining when I hung my clothes out to dry, doesn't it always, somebody is out to get me'... but also in the more interesting sense, like people turning up in your life just when you needed that person but didnt realize, or people dying at the same time, or calling you just when you pick up the phone to call them. that kind of thing... still, ever half-joking, uncertain but amused at the possibility and prepared to follow it up for a bit, with of course some serious reservations. 

hence, the dead serious, collective, earnest, committed approach around here is a bit of shock to the system to me. in good part because of the lack of humour or self-irony about these beliefs, but also because I hate being around people who think the same as me - it really brings out the shortcomings in your own thought when its voiced by others... even where that thought was cultivated as a back-of-the-mind amusing eccentricity of interpretation. or perhaps particularly when it was cultivated as such, because the moment an eccentricity is shared, by definition it no longer functions as such...

as jose ortega y gasset said, the identity of the massenmensch is settled by the two possible responses to a simple fact - the observation that one is similar to the group. in some, this causes a feeling of security, relief and safety. for me, in most respects it causes acute disgust. hence, the moment a cherished eccentricity turns orthodoxy, I am forced to take action out of self-loathing.

[call it pride, too. if somebody else thinks the same as me, I think 'hang on. I can be more original than that...'. :-) ]

anyway. I keep thinking of this lure of the new age mystique as the song of the lorelei, or the sirens. its probably difficult for most people to imagine quite how gutturally alluring this melody is to me - when I was a kid of 7 or 8, I used to read books about pyramids and try to move eggs with pure effort of will at breakfast tables in taverns along the german autobahn... I've read Jung, Capra, Crowley, Aurobindo, and fuck only knows how many others... I find no problem recognizing the 'acausal connecting principle' and in one way, I want to believe. really believe. all of it. auras, PSI, reincarnation, ascended masters, aliens, synchronicity, that we're all evolving spiritual creatures learning valuable lessons through hardship and moving towards high transcendental states of compassion, love and insight.

at the same time, I also think what. the. FUCK.

what a bunch of fucked-up, self-obsessed, escapist, palliative, tunnel-visioned, submissive, weak-minded, insecure, upper-middle-class, welfare-disease-self-healing BULLSHIT. opium for the people or bloody what.

I can get really angry, both reading the literature and watching people act on the guiding impulses in it. surrender to the guiding light of your higher self... god/the universe/your higher self has a master plan for you... you are here for a reason... the universe loves you... the universe is also populated by wise loving extramaterial beings who are directing your evolution and moving you towards a state of greater understanding... discover what it is you are here to do...

well, pardon me but a great big friendly unenlightened FUCK YOU to all of the above. if there is one thing I can not stand, one thing I have a fundamental issue with in life, it is fucking authority figures - I find the idea that the universe is structured as one enormous hierarchic system of patronising and absolute authority, benevolent and ever-evolving as it may be, utterly revolting. the cosmological system of the new age as it is generally outlined in the literature and the interpretations people give leaves little or no room for the exercise of personal responsibility, personal agency, personal moral choice, except insofar as lessons about this have been incorporated into the structured fucking kindergarten lesson plan of your life.. there are things you should do, ought to do, must do. things you should learn, ought to learn, must learn. the universe, from this point of view when taken to its logical [and admittedly hypothetical] extreme, is sentient and animate, constantly sending you new waves of lessons for you to graduate through. not much room for the sovereign human being struggling towards freedom or his own, chosen ideals in this oversaturated, overdetermined universe...

argh! psychotic narcissism! me, me, me, me, MEEEEEE!!!! god it makes me claustrophobic.

evidently, it is good that I am not working on this kind of stuff, as I suspect I would crack from the excessive internal polemic. I find myself in the vigil of the early hours, warding off demons like some besieged marxist hermit. 'Surrender to the floooow...The ego is the source of all eeeeeviiiil...', the demon whispers. 'Begone, foul hegemonic mechanism!!!' I yell. 'Active conscious struggle is the defining human characteristic!!!'. But no. 'The univeeerse looooves yooou...' it continues. 'The paliative lies of religion obscure the real conditions of oppression!!!' I shout. No, no mercy yet: 'You are a spiritual creature evolving towards enlightenment... Your own spiritual growth is all that matters...'. 'CEASE your demonic interpellations!!! I will not be flattered and seduced to participate in the reproduction of passivizing systems of domination!!!' I thunder... And then it disappears, just as the first touch of dawning light brightens the skies above my ceiling window.

Man, I can't wait for the slaughtering season to start. I need to get out of here.

last week has been a bit of an unaccustomed rollercoaster ride of high-oscillation bipolar disorder. wake up bright and early, manically cheerful, about to set fire to the world by saying hello to it, then by noon the noonday demon and the self-recrimination monkey both have their scaly claws in your back, and under their combined weight the air feels like its made of rock and you feel like a particularly yucky pocket of slime in that rock. presumably it is just a matter of riding it out, but still. a bit distracting.

fucked-up dreams, too. old friends shouting hatefully at me and calling me by the names of morally bankrupt characters from russian fiction. a three-hour atonal existentialist rock space opera, rehearsed in every detail [and memorized, by me] and performed by all the kids from my old primary school, plus what I can only assume must have been the national ballet of a eastern european country. full of groups of kids dressed up as angry house-sized lumps of deformed flesh, trying to eat each other, to loud atonal electric guitars and a droll french-accented voice reading gibberish in the background... and young men with bodysuits and golden motorcycle helmets, flying across the stage. and my friend kjetil, dressed up as a giant purple really hairy caterpillar or something, then as God with a thick blue beard and then as god knows what... and the director, whom I last saw behind the till in the supermarket on the other island, in a snazzy little blue face-mask veil, because she had converted to some hip and trendy 21st-century islamic movement... and thats only the stuff I remembered when I woke up this morning. no wonder I wake up tired.

still, despite some inner messed-up-ness and excess of solitude right now, the trickle of interesting people continues. I've got some brilliant stories of briberies in vodka across the russian border ['a present? for me? really? again? why, thank you...'], as well as plenty of 'tjuvslakting' and 'buskslakting'; people going out with rifles to blast the damn reindeer out of their lawns; closed borders and the evil guards who close them, then blame the people who come to complain... some people have offered to take me out hiking, too. pitying the long sleep forced upon me by the rhythms of herding. am planning to take them up on the offer. also got an offer to rent a cabin for 500 NOK (about 40£) a month... but there is no water. and no road. I think in a couple of months this might become a problem.

on the whole, all is good though. the clouds are so amazing I sat outside for an hour yesterday evening, just watching the skies and the clouds and the golden light that washed through them.

am now single again, by my own hand. after two years. relief and pain-by-proxy in not quite equal measure. to me, an exercise in marking clear limits and acting on deep necessities that contradict surface comfort: neither of which is a skill I'd get passing marks for if I were to shake this mortail coil right now. no need to go into details as to the whys and wherefores, though I swear this time I am going to bloody well take that time out to myself that I promised myself just over two years ago- however many beautiful and intriguing women a mocking universe decides to rain down upon me. goddamit do you hear me! *shakes fist at the sky in a futile manner* 

since the last time I wrote, autumn has fallen with a vengeance on this part of the world. from 25 degrees in the evening to a chill and windy 3, in less than a week. I put the lining back in my army jacket, sat down and thought 'hang on. if I'm this cold now, what the &#%! do I do when it drops to -30?'. eh. some interesting amputations from frostbite can only add to the veracity of future dinner table stories.

the landscape is sweeping and changes every few kilometers when you drive, and the sky is broad and clear and deep, lined with a turmoil of clouds, tinged with immense swathes of gold and silver. never in my life have I seen such rainbows! a bit further north you reach the jagged, razorsharp rocks that line the arctic sea around berlevåg, and the near-infinite stretches of horizon over the arctic sea. incredible, I can't wait for winter when the northern lights become visible. yesterday I also saw a rare white reindeer grazing unconcerned by the side of the road - a sign of good luck, though it seemed quite indifferent to us as we drove past.

have met some quite remarkable people in the last two weeks - the ethnographic project could, were I that way inclined, slip into a navel-gazing study of applied serendipity. healers, actors, hunters, eccentrics - the scottish chef who moved to finnmark to pick berries, the retired engineer-botanist-global-gypsy, a lovely elf from bergen, the old joiker and state-sector entrepreneur who taught himself norwegian in the 50s from reading churchill's diaries in translation ("yes, I always admired them. you know, churchill, hitler, stalin..."), the man who started drinking on christmas eve and didn't sober up - or change clothes - until september... many of them part of a tribe of wild tundra men who collect their social security and live from day to day, fishing or hunting as the season enables. a touch of sadistic glee in their promises that they will take me, the clumsy urban søring [southerner], out salmon-fishing, duck-hunting, pheasant-hunting, moose-hunting... if I'm good I'll not only get to carry the firearms, they might even let me shoot a few things... hum. what can one do but agree, enthusiastically, and secretly pray that one survives intact - in mind and body - the experience of camping out in one spot in -20C for three days waiting for something to move so one can blow it into little pieces... ach.

when I'm not meeting interesting people at random behind the tills in shops or going to the supermarket, I spend my time in waiting, trying to make myself a bit useful at the farm, driving people to airports, practicing my german, spanish etc. on dull tourists... trying to do bits and pieces. I washed the sauna tub the other day - lined with the grease of german auto tourists... the possibility of dropping out and becoming a lighthouse keeper also hovers in the periphery.

clearly, one of those disjunctive god-why-does-everything-happen-at-once, almost-more-than-you-can-chew phases, but man is it all good or what. no rest for the wicked, thank god.

have purchased a 24-hour access card on the local WLAN station at the Comfort Hotel in Tana, close [well, 20km] to where I live at the moment. thanks to kind expense budgeting from my funding body, my laptop comes equipped with built-in über-speed wirelessness. reason for purchase is locating and securing the relevant regulations and instructions for reindeer veterinarians in the slaughtering situation, which are all posted online juuust that far out of my reach these days. hence, 150 NOK forkout [£12, give or take] and a 20km drive from Polmak to Tanabru. this accomplished, my scientific task for the day is done. he he.

since I am online anyway, I started porting over some of the oldest entries from the maelstrom hypothesis, my old OD diary. am very fond of that name: it came straight out of a heated dinnertable discussion one sunday afternoon back in 2001, in the dalston warehouse I shared at the time, when crank [pseudonym. you never know with people who eat live goldfish...] spontaneously and without preamble uttered the phrase, 'but intelligence kind of emerges out of the maelstrom of pointlessness'. well, it cracked me up at the time.

now, some groceries and back to my little desk at the 'bear lodge', to walk around the lovely lawn for a few hours with a cup of coffee, then retreat to go quietly mad poring over semantically encrypted state documentation. tomorrow, yet another day in the thrilling life of the polar explorer, who gets to brave the elements [26 degrees centigrade! good god how will he survive! if he leaves his garlic butter in the car it will melt!!!] and drive [on the two-lane motorway! what dangers await him!] 60km [!] to Vadsø [home to the savage legends of the norths: nanook the barista, annte the accountant, per-morten the icy car mechanic of death...], and pick up some not-particularly-confidential reports from the local sub-chapter of the state food-monitoring agency [will he have to wrestle them out of the clawed hands of the one-eyed state-employed crone who guards their secret magic!?!? will she tear open and savage... his self-confidence!?! his identity card?!?! his very soul!?!?! who knows!!! wuahaaahahaha!!!] .

stay tuned.

for eager mapmonkeys out there, I arrived at alta airport on thursday 29 july, drove south towards kautokeino, took off for karasjok and drove up along the tana river, past tanabru to austertana. stayed there for a few days until I realised that by myself, cabin fever would entail whacketywhacking myself with an axe, rather than the non-extant annoying chick, psycho child and black cook. I bolted and am now installed in a little wooden cabin packed in and covered with earth, the so-called 'bear lodge', courtesy of my healer-shaman spiritual entrepreneur hostess who runs a healing-farm up near polmak. manned by a nice man in a sweatshirt and womanned by a girl with scratches on her arms. am writing this from the lonely computer up here, in the corner of the reception of a family campsite in an unrememberable hamlet just outside tanabru. the internet may travel at the combined speed of light and corporate profit margins, but evidently neither nor both are quite sufficient up here.

temperatures so far have been bizarre - sitting on the shore of the arctic sea in my t-shirt, with 32 degrees on the terrace was not one of the anticipated delights of fieldwork. house so warm I had to sleep with the door open. first encounter with reindeer entailed a near-fatal brake-swerve around a road-curve outside berlevåg [locus of that famous film that nobody outside norway and german-speaking europe seem to have heard of...], to avoid three-animal herd of furry hoofed mammalians grazing gently in the middle of the road. [well, not grazing on the actual road, but standing in the middle and grazing on the sides. even highways are not that wide up here.] turns out they belong to the siida of my hostess, whose brother is a herder.

not much to report 'scientifically' yet, except a tentative first interview with a couple of people, including the aforementioned entrepreneur chick and a lovely couple I helped build a staircase with, who run the field abattoir at krampenes. will try to keep updates flowing at a reasonable pace, though as darkness descends, roads freeze and the camping industry dries up for the winter this might become more problematic. wish me luck.