Olli didn’t want to remember the Blomrooses or have anything to do with them.
Grandpa Notary once said, “Never poke at the past with a stick, because you never know what you’ll stir up.” Olli knew that his grandpa would have hated Facebook. Life was made up of meetings and partings. You get to know people, and then you forget most of them, often for good reasons. When you change locations, you change people, too, and that’s a hidden blessing. But Facebook shrinks the distances between people with a couple of clicks and forces them to stay in touch forever. In that sense it’s like something out of Dante’s vision of hell.
Of course, he could remove the Blomrooses from his list with a few clicks. He could make them invisible on Facebook. Virtual world magic.
On the other hand, doing so might only draw their attention to him.
Olli wanted to be careful not to leave any trace on the Blomrooses’ profiles. He hoped that the silence between him and them would remain unbroken.
At the film club they were watching F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu.
Vampires were discussed in A Guide to the Cinematic Life:
Vampire movies offer a vantage point on life no other genre can. A vampire is an ambivalent creature, both hideous in his destructiveness and tragically beautiful. When we look into a vampire’s eyes we see a person who is awakened to the emptiness of everyday life and aware that when that illusion is abandoned, all of us are alone, eternal outsiders. That is why he sees only emptiness when he looks in a mirror. It makes him a free being. He can be anyone at all.
When we accept this outsiderness and refuse to be one with our everyday image, we can surrender to life in a deep, cinematic way. This will, of course, terrify anyone who clings to the everyday, to the face in the mirror, unaware that the light of day, far from helping them to see the truth, actually dazzles them and prevents them from seeing it.
There had been more people than usual at the past few screenings. Maiju from the office was sitting in the front row. Olli waved at her. She didn’t see him. Olli thought he saw Mrs Valkeinen, the conservative Lutheran mother from the parish council, come in. Maybe he was wrong, but he had seen her at the bookshop buying a copy of A Guide to the Cinematic Life.
Halfway through the movie, Olli fell asleep. In his dream, the girl in the pear-print dress was sitting in the seat next to him. She laid a hand on his thigh, bared her neck and asked him to bite her.
Two weeks later he received the first thirty pages of the Magical City Guide by email.
Greta wrote:
I hope and pray that you like it, because I’ve done my best, but if you don’t then promise me you’ll be honest. We both have to be proud of the book. We’re doing this together.
Olli printed the pages, got in a comfortable position, and started to read. June was turning to July. Sunlight flooded the office. It splashed on the floor in a hot puddle. Olli remembered wading in puddles as a little boy in his bare feet with Grandpa Notary smiling down at him fondly. Olli whistled a little tune. The portrait of Olli Suominen, Publisher looked on with approval.
The Magical City Guides could be as big a hit as Cinematic Life. The focus on Jyväskylä would affect sales, but the concept had potential. If Greta wanted to write the first book about Jyväskylä, so what? It was her attachment to Jyväskylä that had led her to Book Tower Publishing.
Vilho Torni called and congratulated Olli on snapping Greta Kara up. They talked about the upcoming project. Torni advised him to turn the localness of the first book to marketing advantage however he could.
Olli suggested a collaboration with a travel agency. The Magical City Guide could be sold to tourists as a package with guided tours, and would, of course, be of interest to locals. Torni liked the idea.
Future Magical City Guides would deal with bigger, more internationally known cities, so their potential market would be considerably larger. Thus burnished, Vilho Torni thanked Olli again for the excellent recruitment. He stressed that it was Olli’s job as publisher and Greta’s personal editor to make sure that she was kept happy, and kept publishing through Book Tower in the future.
“I’m relying on you completely in this,” Torni said, and ended the call.
Olli looked out the window at the old church park. He was secretly worried about the first book in the series. When he was a child, Jyväskylä was an interesting place. Not any more. There were fewer and fewer interesting places all the time. The old Reimari service station on the next block had even been torn down. And a couple of days ago when Olli was walking through the park he noticed that the old blue-bottomed fountain from his childhood was gone.
But Greta Kara believed she could find the magical side of the city and be able to write a whole book about it.
Olli tapped his fingers on the windowsill. Then he sighed, went to get some aspirin and told Maiju and Antero that he would be going out to read over the manuscript.
In A Guide to the Cinematic Life I stated that some people are more naturally cinematic than others. They radiate meaning fulness particles that can momentarily elevate the cinematic level of those around them and thus enrich their experience of life.
Places can also radiate meaning fulness particles. Some places, in other words, are cinematic, while others are marked by commonplace meaninglessness.
There are places—rooms, buildings, streets, landscapes, neighbourhoods, towns—whose unaesthetic ordinariness numbs a person so that they can’t even imagine doing anything cinematic. But in other places it feels natural, if not unavoidable, to transcend the boundaries of the everyday self in our thoughts, speech and deeds. These are places with a particularly high concentration of meaning fulness particles.
These particules imaginaires, which are called M-particles, work in such a way that when they permeate a person’s inner being, they activate the inner filmic self and temporarily increase one’s cinematicness. In other words, they can raise the everyday above ethical normativity in both thought and deed, construct a character for the self purpose-built for its context, and manifest their own existence through cinematically aesthetic means. (This is described in greater detail in A Guide to the Cinematic Life.)
One example of such a magical place is Puistokatu, the Jyväskylä street lined with linden trees that borders several city parks. It has one spot with particularly high levels of meaningfulness particles. Numerous natural elements combine there in ideal relation to one another and create an experience of cinematic meaning fulness.
You can find the right spot by following these directions:
Start on Kankaankatu with the cemetery on your left and Taulumäki Church on your right. Turn onto Puistokatu and walk south towards the centre of town. The wall of the cemetery will stay on your left. Walk on the left side of the street. Keep your gaze focused forward, but also be aware of the right side of the street. Stop when you see a building with a large Goodyear tyre advertisement painted on the side. Carefully adjust your position a couple of metres in different directions until you feel your experience of time, place and yourself begin to grow more concentrated.
Olli did as the guidebook said. The linden trees along Puistokatu cast their dappled shadows over him. But it was still hot.
The text of the book needed to be clarified, both in its ideas and their expression, Olli thought. And of course the whole theory of meaningfulness particles was entertaining but basically silly—though in a saleable way. Greta had, after all, introduced the idea in A Guide to the Cinematic Life and proved that her ideas could hit home with an audience.