Belisa Crepusculario

Belisa Crepusculario lived selling words to people. She travelled all around the country. Everywhere she was known for the good quality of her merchandise. Her prices were fair. For seven cents she improved the quality of dreams, for nine cents she wrote love letters, for twelve cents she made up terrible insults. She sold also stories, long reality based narratives which she told fluently, without leaving anything out.

Belisa´s narratives brought news from one village to the other. People paid her to add a couple of events into her narrative: a child has been born, our children have got married, so-and-so has died, the harvest has got burnt.

Wherever Belisa went people gathered around her to hear her talk. This way they learnt about the life of others, about their distant relatives and about events in the civil war.

Whoever paid Belisa Crepusculario fifty cents could buy a secret word that frightened off melancholy and sadness. It was not the same word for all people - of course not - because that would have been a collective betrayal. Everyone who received his or her own word could be sure that no one else in the whole universe used the same word.

I have long admired Belisa Crepusculario. We are colleagues. She is a role model for me. Lately my normal life has meant that I spend my days searching and collecting ideas, dressing them into words, phrases and sentences that would make pictures and films in other people´s minds, and all the time making my best effort to get everything wrapped up in a nice marketable form - ready to sail on the blue ocean markets of organizational training. The central topics around which all this has been taking place are tacit knowledge and theories of learning and teachning. The language is English. A special tribute is paid to Ikujiro Nonaka, Barbara Czarniawska, Kenneth Gergen, Vilma Hänninen etc.

As human beings we look for meanings. If none is found, we start inventing some. We enter in the world of plots and stories. The real trick happens when we, as human beings, set our stories side by side and start comparing them. A Finnish poetess Edit Södergran refers to this in her poem

You looked for a flower
and found a fruit.
You looked for a well
and found a sea.
You looked for a woman
and found a soul -
I disappoint you.

Buscabas una flor
y encontraste un fruto.
Buscabas una fuente
y encontraste un mar.
Buscabas una mujer
y encontraste un alma -
estás decepcionado.

Edit Södergran reminds me of Belisa Crepusculario. She lived in the Finnish speaking countryside, but her native tongue was Swedish - the variation of the Swedish language that is spoken in Finland and that has been strongly influenced by Finnish. In these circumstances Edit Södergran learned to weigh and appreciate individual words and their possibilities to be related to one another. - Sometimes exactly the things you do not have become your long-term treasures.They may even last from one generation to another.

What does all this have to do with normal life in Finland? The quickly and steadily approaching winter goes on undressing the nature and emptying space for itself to settle in. Everyday Finland resembles more and more the poems by Edit Södergran and Eeva-Liisa Manner (maybe you still remember her poem "If grief smoked earth would be shrouded in smoke."). As a result of this we will have a lot of emptiness and space where you can install your meanings. However, one interesting aspect of this is that your cerebral and sensory-motor systems will simultaneusly become slow-motion operated. Because of this you may not find any reasons, why you should be actively looking for the special excitement of establishing new connections between what is and what might also be.

Anyway, if you want to have some concrete usefulness of reading this text, it might be a nice idea to know one more thing. Provided you are spending your youth as an Erasmus student here in Finland and provided you would like to fall desperately in love with a girl having an academic background, it might be worth remembering a couple of sentences from the poems by Edit Södergran and Eeva-Liisa Manner. They have a certain exchange value in the market of affects and emotions.

It is also worth knowing that Belisa Crepusculario´s family was poor. They were so poor that they could not even afford having names for their children. This meant that she had to search for a suitable name for herself. One day she found the name Belisa Crepusculario and she dressed it on.

In case you want to know more about my colleague Belisa, you can meet her in the book Cuentos de Eva Luna by Isabel Alende ISBN: 84-8450-509-X).

What you are dressed in might be worth exploring as well. Have a nice weekend!