Poetry & Jazz – Journeys

A poem and a monologue, recited within The Finn-Brit Players' production Poetry & Jazz – Journeys:

http://www.finnbritplayers.com/productions/past-productions/pnj-journeys23

Back to Normal

Set is one of the oldest Egyptian gods. He’s often portrayed as a baddie, but that’s much later in his career. Long before that, he’s responsible for deserts, storms, chaos, foreigners (wink, wink), trickery, and, in general, your all-round weirdo in the Egyptian pantheon.

Even the animal associated with Set is a subject of contention. While most of his brethren don the head of something quite familiar – a jackal, an ibis, a crocodile – Egyptologists cannot agree on what Set’s face looks like. Is it a donkey? An okapi? The elephant-snout fish? An aardvark? The punk brother of Anubis?

So, they’ve just named it the “Set animal”. Very… scientific. I’d like to see one in the Helsinki Zoo, though.

Such kind of oddity, however, is not akin only to the gods of old. Oftentimes, this weirdness, this feeling of being a stranger in a strange land, comes from within, from the very depth of ourselves. Even though we know there are no Egyptian gods in there, the sensation is just as epic.

Similar to the Egyptologists, stumped by the Set animal, so are we by our own conflict. We turn and toss, trying to determine what is the nature of this beast. Is it a bad guy, a good guy, or just our guy?
“Back to normal” is a poem that explores this internal dialogue… or trialogue… multilogue? It treads on the many pathways and spaghetti junctions of this self-odyssey, anxiously looking for the final stop.

Relative Flight

Do you remember your classes in physics back in school? … I don’t.

That’s mainly for two reasons. The first was the monotonous, equation-heavy, mind-crushing, post-soviet style of education that was the prevailing fashion amongst the physics teachers when I was a student. The second was that clearly none of them followed the same sci-fi TV shows as me.

What a world, nay, a universe of difference it would have made if any of them talked about black holes or the grandfather paradox. If only once our homework would be to build a functional hyper-space drive. Or a time machine. Just a small one. Enough to rewind a few days, armed with the knowledge of what the problems in the final exam will be.

The laws of physics, the proper ones, could have taught me so much more than how nature operates when zoomed below the size of an electron, or beyond the mega-parsecs of intergalactic space. How relativity works, how easy it is to flip a motion, or a whole journey, upside down. How falling turns into flying, and vice-versa.

How one day I’ll be seeing a beloved Starfleet captain go into space again, but this time in a very different context and company. How conflicting the whole notion of space exploration will feel on that day…

Additional credits:
The first image is originally from The Finn-Brit Players' webpage for the production, and the third is by Sven Bachström via Pixabay.