Forest Man

(The same ingress again:) Every spiritual teacher has some disciples. Or many. I am a spiritual teacher, have been that since 2005. Who are my disciples, then? Must have been some, throughout all these years of public teaching on the internet and in lectures on libraries. 

 

I now want to present to my readers some of those I think possibly could be candidates to being my disciples, although I do not think that they always recognize themselves as such. Okay, I do not want to force them to think of themselves as being my disciples, I now only want to speculate about who I think might be, or who I would like being my disciples. 

 

Jesus had 12 close disciples. I think I have at least 14 candidates of people who could be my disciples. Here is part 5 (the next one of the candidates) of a list and presentations of every name (I will continue the list tomorrow):

 

 

 

Of all my poet friends (I have many, especially in Stockholm), there is only one who has a poem of which I have thought that this poem would probably fit well into an anthology over the best Swedish poetry throughout the history. And that is the veteran poet Walter Dan Axelsson (his literary blog is here). The poem in question I shared on this blog some time ago, it's here. I loved the poem so much that I set it to music (you can here me playing it on youtube here), and I have to say that it is the most beautiful melody I ever created (I have created several dozens, mostly to my own poems), which tells a lot. 

 

But yet Walter is not recognized by the mainstream media and the establishment. Why? Maybe it is because he socializes with wrong people. You have to be friends with the right people if you want to make a career, you know. Who are Walter with? People from the friend-network of the Romantic Society (Romantiska Förbundet) in Stockholm, mostly. Where I also belong. We never get any publicity to speak of, people from this network. We are systematically silenced to oblivion, all of us. But in my opinion the best poets usually gather around us.

 

Walter is the most educated of my poet friends. He is so educated about Swedish literary history that he has written a collection of poetry full of poetical portraits of famous Swedish poets. To my knowledgde it has not been done before in Sweden. 

 

Walter is a retired teacher of the English language (in high school, if I remember it rightly), and he is so good at English that he has written a collection of poetry with poems translated from English to Swedish, samples from many of the great English poets throughout history. You have to be really good at English to be able to translate well very old English poetry, and to my knowledge Walter's translations are excellent. He has also translated Shakespeare's sonnets and published them. Also an excellent translation. But Walter always publishes his books himself, at the self-publishing firm Nomen förlag. Apparently nobody has been interested in publishing his books. Maybe it's the same problem again: Walter is not enough ambitious, aspiring, he do not socialize with the right people. He hasn't enough hubris, so to say. That's a big problem in the literary climate in Sweden today, where virtually everything circles around status and fame, and where poets literally read status, not words anymore, when they read a collection of poetry. It's the same decadent culture that creates these insane poetics of obscurantism and mystification and anticommunicativity that I wrote about when I presented Helena Leijd. Walter is totally uninterested in such things, unaffected, like an unspoiled child. You see it in his poetry. He writes verse and rhyme. Almost always. Writes like poets wrote in the nineteenth century. For such things you just get the contempt of the establishment and the Swedish Academy. Like the literary critic Magnus William-Olsson called it: to write in an anachronic idiom, or like the Finno-Swedish author Paul von Martens said when I read one of my runebergian, nineteenth century style poems to him: "That's already done!".

 

Crazy, novelty-worshipping Socialdarwinian poetics. It's like looking down on most of our poetical heritage. We should learn from our ancestors, from the good and beautiful things they have done, not worship novelty for novelty's sake. That's the poetics of a devil. 

 

Walter has published much, even though he began to write poetry at an old age. That's also a mystery, because usually poets write their best poetry in their youth. So it was with me. My best poem I wrote 2007 (the poem "Du levs till blomma"). I have never after that come even close to the level I was on then. 

 

All this disdain and contempt for his lifework has left its own marks on Walter. He is a bit plucky (morsk) and barren (karg), reminding a little of Vilhelm Ekelund's being at his older days, a man that faced the same fate as Walter; writing only for a small group of readers, being himself despised by the masses. 

 

But Walter has not become bitter or cynical. He has a good sense of humour and is a gentle and warm elder, with something of what has made people from the Romantic Society unpopular; "out-of-fashion-ism" (mossighet). Actually it is a attribute that describes most old people. Old people are not popular in our fascistically youth-worshiping, father-murder society. Most of them end up in cold, impersonal institutions, despised by their family and relatives. 

 

But I love the out-of-fashion-ism of old people, also that of Walter. I am like an old chap (gammal gubbe) in my soul myself, very out-of-fashion. I have suffered so much.