— George Mackay Brown, Hamnavoe
* * *
The first time I took that road north, I was too young to understand what I was walking into.
In 1988, the map was smaller—not because the distances
were shorter, but because I didn’t yet know how far a person could drift from
themselves. Back then, Mayhem wasn’t a legend, just a name passed
between tape traders and whispered in letters that smelled faintly of ink and
cigarette smoke. I followed it like a rumor you wanted to be true.
I remember the grey light over Oslo, thin as a
blade, and the way the city seemed to hold its breath in late winter. I arrived
with a bag full of demos and the kind of certainty only the young possess—the
belief that if something felt intense enough, it must also be meaningful. That
was the currency of the underground: intensity mistaken for truth.
Now, shortly after my fifty-sixth birthday, with my
second Saturn return approaching, I was going back.
Not out of nostalgia. Nostalgia softens things, wraps
them in a glow they never had. There was nothing soft about those months. If
anything, time had stripped them further, leaving only bone.
Back then, the journey had felt like ascent. North meant
closer—to something purer, harsher, more real than the gray repetitions I had
left behind. Coming from communist Poland, the West was supposed to be an
opening. Even its margins held promise. Even a crumbling hostel, even hunger,
even cold—these could be reframed as temporary, as the price of entry.
I believed in that price.
I believed in a kind of invisible ledger, where suffering
could be exchanged for belonging. Endure enough, prove enough, and eventually
the door would open—not just to a place, but to a circle, a recognition, a name
spoken without hesitation.
What I didn’t understand then was that some doors only
open inward. And some circles exist only to define who stands outside them.
The road looks different now.
Or maybe I do. Age has a way of flattening myth. The
forests are still dense, still dark in that particular Scandinavian way—light
filtered into something colder, more distant—but I no longer read them as symbols.
They are just trees. Silent, yes. Indifferent, certainly. But no longer charged
with the meaning I once forced upon them.
Astrologers say the second Saturn return is a reckoning.
Not the dramatic kind youth imagines, but something quieter, more structural—a
balancing of accounts you pretended did not exist. The first time Saturn comes
around, you are still becoming. The second time, you are confronted with what
you have become.
And what you have not resolved.
The ferry terminal in Gdańsk looks nothing like it did in
my memory.
Or perhaps it does, and I no longer have the eyes to see
it the same way. Back then, everything carried weight. Every departure felt
symbolic, every threshold charged with meaning. I remember the anticipation
more than the place itself—the sense that by stepping onto that ferry, I was
crossing not just the Baltic, but into another version of my life.
Now, the act feels almost procedural.
Ticket. Passport. A short queue. People scrolling on their
phones, families managing luggage, fathers carrying bags while children drift a
few steps ahead, already half-absorbed into their own worlds. I watch them more
closely than I expect to.
I think of my own father.
Of what I understood of him then, which was almost
nothing. Fathers, at that age, are obstacles or absences—figures defined by
what they deny you. I wanted distance from that gravity, from the expectations
that seemed already written for me. The underground offered an alternative
lineage: not father to son, but noise to listener, will to will.
Now I am a father myself.
And the symmetry is uncomfortable. I wonder what my
children see when they look at me—authority, distance, failure, care? Some
combination that refuses to settle into a single meaning. I wonder what they
will need to reject in order to become themselves. Perhaps that is the quiet
inheritance we all pass on: something to push against.
I board with the others.
The ferry smells the same, or close enough: fuel, salt,
something metallic beneath it all. I find a place on deck despite the cold. The
wind cuts through my jacket, immediate and unsentimental.
Scandinavia was always described to me as beautiful.
It is. But beauty here has a temperature. It does not
embrace; it withholds. Even the sea seems restrained, its movements controlled,
its surface rarely surrendering to excess. I remember thinking, back then, that
this emotional coldness was honesty—that warmth was a kind of lie, a softening
of truth.
Black metal grew well in that climate.
We spoke of rebellion, but it was a particular kind: not
against power in general, but against the father. Against authority, structure,
inheritance. Against the idea that anything should be given rather than seized.
It was a music of refusal—of Christianity, of society, of softness—but beneath
that, something more intimate pulsed.
A refusal of being shaped.
And yet, the scene itself reproduced what it claimed to
reject. Hierarchies formed quickly. Authority condensed around certain figures.
Approval mattered more than we admitted. We spoke of freedom while orbiting new
centers of gravity.
I think now of Pelle. Of Euro.
Two young men, each in his own way at war with what had
made him. Pelle dissolving into an identity that erased the given self
entirely, as if becoming “Dead” could sever every prior bond. Euro constructing
himself in opposition, sharper, louder, more absolute—as if by declaring
enough, he could overwrite whatever paternal script he had inherited.
Rebellion, yes.
But also longing.
There was an intensity between us all that I did not understand then. We rejected softness, but craved recognition.
I have thought about them more than I expected. Not out of reverence, and not quite out of forgiveness. Something closer to responsibility. The dead do not change, but the living do, and sometimes that shift creates an imbalance—a weight that needs to be set down properly.
To visit a grave is to acknowledge an ending.
But also to renegotiate your place in relation to it.
I do not believe I can help them rest in peace. That is
too grand, too final. But perhaps I can quiet something—not in them, but in
myself. The part that still vibrates with unfinished tension, with words
unsaid, with gestures that never found their proper form.
Maturity, if it means anything, is not the erasure of the
past.
It is the willingness to stand beside it without
flinching. To see its structures, its repetitions, its hidden inheritances—and
to choose, where possible, not to reproduce them.
I think again of fathers.
Of mine. Of myself as one. Of Pelle and Euro, in their different refusals. Of how easily rebellion becomes imitation when it is not examined closely enough.
The train continues west.
I follow the same route, station by station, not to
relive what happened, but to place it within a longer arc. To see it not as a
defining rupture, but as one movement in a larger composition.
A harsh one. A formative one.
But not the final one.
As the landscape slides past the window, I feel something
shifting—not resolution, not yet, but alignment. A sense that the journey
itself is the gesture required. That by tracing this path again, deliberately,
I am acknowledging the weight it carried—and redistributing it across the years
that followed.
Paying, if not a debt, then an attention long overdue.
The road west does not promise anything.
But this time, I am no longer asking it to.
And that, perhaps, is the only peace available to the living.
As the landscape slides past the window, I feel something
shifting—not resolution, not yet, but permission.
To remember.
To speak.
And, eventually, to let the ghosts rest—not because they
demand it, but because I no longer need to keep them alive in silence.
The towns are quieter now. Rain falls gently, erasing
footsteps in seconds, and I am struck by how fleeting our presence is, how
little the world cares for the passions that once seemed infinite. But memory,
stubborn and tender, keeps its own vigil. It whispers of mistakes, of rage, of
the reckless poetry of youth—and it whispers of mercy, of survival, of the
small grace of being alive when others are gone.
I stop sometimes to look at the water, the fjords that
run like dark veins through the land. I feel the pulse of the world still
beneath the cold, and I think: the past is not a burden, not entirely. It is a
teacher. It is a mirror of what we were, and a guide to what we might become. I
honor them in silence, in empathy, in acknowledgment. I honor myself, too, for
carrying on.
And in that quiet, I understand something I could not
then: that survival is not triumph over death alone, but the courage to return,
to remember without being consumed, to close the circle and finally see the
story whole.
The ferry back to Gdańsk is calm. Wind drifts lazily
against the rails, and I read through my journal again, tracing the emotional
arc of the journey. I understand now that survival is not simply avoiding
death—it is the willingness to return, to remember, to honor the past without
being consumed by it.
I carry with me the echoes of Pelle and Euro, the
northern wind, the cold and the fire, and a sense of closure that I could not
have imagined in my youth. The circle is complete, not with triumph, but with
understanding. And in that, there is grace.
The Baltic wind presses against my face like a reminder that some things endure longer than we expect. In 1988, I was too young to understand what I was stepping into. Now, decades later, I walk deliberately, retracing steps that once held confusion, fear, and the raw energy of youth. Here, at the edge of the journey, I acknowledge the past honestly: its pain, its dangers, and its lessons. Redemption begins with recognition, and recognition begins with stepping forward.
There comes a season when memory ceases to be narrative
and becomes terrain. You no longer tell the story—you walk through it again,
but this time with a lantern.
At twenty, I mistook proximity for understanding. I stood near the fire and believed myself initiated. But fire does not explain
itself to the young; it only consumes, dazzles, and leaves marks. Now, decades
later, I return not to feel again, but to read the scars—to decipher
what was written into me without my consent.
Midlife is not a crisis. It is an audit.
Not of success or failure, but of truth.
What did I inherit?
What did I survive?
What still speaks inside me that is not my voice?
* * *
For years, I carried other voices.
I translated not only language, but atmosphere—rage,
ideology, aesthetics, fragments of identity that were never fully yours. I became a medium for intensity that did not originate within me, yet passed
through me, leaving residue.
There is a quiet violence in that.
To speak in borrowed tongues for too long is to forget
the shape of your own mouth. You begin to confuse echo with origin. You mistake
fidelity for authenticity.
But something has shifted.
Now, standing at the edge of this journey, I feel it: a
resistance to repetition. A refusal to merely recount. I am no longer
interested in being accurate—I am compelled to be true.
And truth, unlike translation, does not require permission.
* * *
He is still there—the boy stepping off the ferry in 1988,
eyes wide, unguarded, walking into a landscape he cannot interpret.
I do not pity him.
I do not envy him.
I approach him carefully, as one approaches a wild
animal: with recognition, but without intrusion.
He believed intensity was meaning. That proximity to
darkness was depth. That to stand near the abyss was to understand it.
I know now: the abyss does not reveal—it absorbs.
And yet, I do not reject him.
Because without his recklessness, I would not be here.
Without his blindness, I would not now see.
So I do something radical:
I forgive him for not knowing.
I forgive us all.
Trauma does not reside in memory alone. It lives in the
body as syntax without grammar.
It repeats, not because it wants to be remembered, but
because it has not yet been understood.
What I am doing now—this journey, these graves, these
photographs—is not remembrance. It is translation of a different kind.
Not from one language to another,
but from sensation into meaning.
From shock into structure.
From chaos into form.
I am giving my past the dignity of articulation.
And in doing so, I alter it—not by changing what happened, but by changing its place within me.
* * *
There was a time when everything had to be loud to feel
real.
Music, emotion, presence—everything pushed to the edge,
as if silence itself were a threat.
But now I understand:
Silence is not absence. It is integration.
The graves I visit do not scream.
They do not perform.
They do not demand.
They remain.
And in their stillness, they offer something the past
never could: proportion.
The noise of those years shrinks in the presence of time. Not into insignificance—but into clarity. I begin to see what was signal and what was distortion.
* * *
I am not here to make peace with everything.
Some things do not deserve reconciliation.
Some acts remain irreducible.
But healing is not agreement. It is placement.
I take what was once overwhelming and I situate it—within
history, within context, within my own evolving self.
I do not carry it the same way anymore.
It no longer defines my movement—it becomes part of
my foundation.
And then, almost quietly, something happens:
I begin to speak.
Not as witness.
Not as translator.
Not as participant in someone else’s mythology.
But as myself.
The voice may feel unfamiliar at first—lower, slower,
less eager to impress. It does not shout. It does not seek validation. It does
not perform darkness or enlightenment.
It simply names what is.
And in that naming, something completes itself.
* * *
A circle is not closed when you return to the same place.
It is closed when you are no longer the same person
standing there.
I will step onto the ferry again.
I will see the same waters, the same northern light.
But the axis has shifted.
The boy walked outward, toward intensity, toward
dissolution.
The man walks inward, toward coherence, toward authorship.
Nothing is undone.
But everything is re-understood.
The fjord stretches dark beneath March skies, a river of ice and memory. I remember the boy who came here first, reckless, craving the fire of chaos, drawn to shadows he could neither name nor understand. Each wave that strikes the hull now echoes that reckless pulse—the surge of black metal fury, the thrill of transgression, the terror of being alive amid forces too vast to control.
Persian poets speak of the soul as a mirror reflecting both light and shadow. I see now how my own reflection trembled then, cracked and jagged, and how the flames of violence and grief burned across it. Survival was not escape but recognition: a cruel, exquisite awareness that life would demand both endurance and reckoning.
The music of those months—distorted, furious,
uncompromising—still hums faintly in memory. It was not entertainment; it was
exorcism, a ritualistic attempt to bend the world to a will untempered by fear.
Every chord, every scream, every fire-lit night carried the weight of a hunger
I did not fully understand: to confront death, to confront fate, to confront
the self.
In the black metal of those days, there was a poetry,
jagged and raw, like frost cracking against stone. And I, lost within it,
learned what madness could be: a hall of mirrors where the self and shadow are
indistinguishable, where moral and natural law are suspended, and only the
pulse of survival keeps one anchored.
The ferry rocks gently over cold northern waters. Nynäshamn awaits, patient and indifferent, yet within its calm, I sense the chance for understanding and reconciliation.
At Pelle’s grave, I offer empathy and gratitude. I feel the weight of my younger self’s confusion, the reckless fire we once carried, and I begin to see it with clarity. The act of witnessing, of honoring, becomes a gesture of self-healing, a small reconciliation between the person I was and the one I am now.
Later, walking the quiet streets, I notice life continuing around me—the ordinary rhythms of existence—which reminds me that the world does not punish us for our grief, nor does it erase the past. In learning to coexist with memory rather than fight it, I restore balance within myself.
The shadows are no longer menacing; they are guides. The
fire of youth, the recklessness of the past, the grief and rage—I embrace it
all and find that understanding softens its sting. Here, the journey
transforms: confrontation becomes acceptance, and acceptance becomes the first
step toward self-healing.
Later, walking through streets that are calm but alive, I
sense balance restored, at least in this place, at least in this moment.
The cemetery does not announce itself. It receives.
I find the grave without ceremony. No revelation, no sudden shift—only a recognition that arrives without language.
He died young, but not simply because of youth.
There was something in that world—something we all
touched—that did not negotiate. It demanded, absorbed, consumed.
I stood near it once, believing myself untouched.
I was wrong.
Trauma does not declare itself at the moment of impact.
It embeds quietly, waiting for a time when it can be understood.
What I feel here is not grief alone.
It is translation.
For years, I carried impressions without structure,
intensity without comprehension. Now, standing before this grave, I begin to
give form to what was once only sensation.
The wound does not close.
It speaks.
I stand not to mourn alone, but to acknowledge that I, too, walked that
edge—and stepped back.
The journey west deepens the early-spring landscape: fjords, forests, and the long shadows of late afternoon. Oslo is quiet, reflective, a space where confrontation with memory feels safe. We make our way to Euro’s grave. The tragedy of his life, and the violence that followed, cannot be undone. But by facing it directly, I take the first steps toward coming to terms with trauma. Survival, I realize, is not simply living—it is choosing to carry memory with compassion, to integrate it rather than be haunted by it.
Walking along the fjord afterward, I sense the circle completing itself. The cold water reflects both the past and the present, and I feel a quiet alignment within: the reckless, fiery youth and the reflective, tempered self now coexist. Balance is restored, and the journey toward healing continues—but in this moment, it is enough to pause, breathe, and witness the whole.
The train cuts through landscapes that seem
indifferent to human memory. Forests pass, cold and self-contained. Lakes
hold the sky in stillness.
Movement creates distance.
Distance creates perspective.
I see him sometimes—reflected faintly in the glass.
The boy who made this journey without knowing its weight.
He believed in immersion, in surrender to experience, as if meaning would
emerge from proximity alone.
He was not wrong.
He was incomplete.
To be young is to mistake intensity for truth.
To mature is to recognize that truth often arrives
quietly, after intensity has burned itself out.
I do not reject who I was.
I reinterpret him.
The train cuts through the land again, March light refracting across the gray, and I see the past mirrored in the waves. Shadows linger, yes, but they are no longer threatening—they are teachers. This reprise, this next step, is an intentional confrontation with the currents I once drifted through unwittingly. It is a journey not into fear, but into acknowledgment, not into chaos, but into completion, balance, and quiet redemption.
The city lies ahead, a web of streets and silence, and I
know that every step carries the weight of years unspoken. Shadows of the past
move beside me, not to trap me, but to illuminate.
I am older now, and yet I feel the same thrill of uncertainty—the strange intimacy with a world that holds both beauty and cruelty. The river of life is long and cold, and it is mine to navigate with reverence, with courage, with remembrance.
Somewhere, in the frost-lined streets and silent fjords, I meet the echoes of my younger self, and for a moment, we walk together. The darkness no longer consumes—it instructs.
Back in 1988, the train cut through the snow-covered northern landscape like a
knife through fog. Each stretch of frozen water seemed to whisper warnings I could not
yet understand. The city’s edges appeared distant, half-formed, as if I were
approaching a place suspended between memory and fate. I was too young to know
that the river of life is neither straight nor forgiving, that shadows drift
along the banks long before we reach them.
In Oslo, the streets were silent in that early winter
light, yet something hummed beneath the stillness—a rhythm of tension, of
unspoken danger, of destinies colliding. I moved among it as a stranger among
strangers, unknowing, unprepared, carrying within me a restless curiosity that
would soon be tested by fire and grief.
The darkness was not merely outside. It followed in my
own chest, in the spaces where hope and fear entwined, and I sensed that some
stories are written before we even arrive, waiting in silence for the first
footfall to awaken them.
Decades later, I walk the same streets with eyes tempered by time. The darkness has not disappeared—it has merely been understood. At the graves, I touch the cold stone, and offer words that my younger self could not have voiced. The fury is gone; the music of chaos now translates into meditation, empathy, and acknowledgment.
In Persian verse, the reed cries for separation from the reed bed, yet longs to sing the whole of its sorrow. I too am a reed, cut and scattered, yet still able to channel grief into song, memory into wisdom, loss into light. My path to sanity has been forged in the same crucible as the madness I once courted; understanding has become my only sanctuary.
The shadows I once feared are now my guides. The streets, the fjords, the forests—they hold memory, but they also hold instruction: that chaos, death, rage, and grief are not enemies to obliterate but truths to face. Black metal’s violence and poetry were teachers; so too was the silence of loss, the patience of survival, the cold reflection of northern light.
I am no longer the boy who walked Oslo unaware, nor the mind unmoored by rage and fascination. I am a witness to my own story, a pilgrim across time, a vessel through which memory, madness, and reconciliation pass. Each step is both homage and exorcism, each pause a meditation, each breath a reclamation of sanity from the edge of darkness.
The river bends, the snow drifts, the graves endure. I walk, I observe, I remember. In the interplay of fire and frost, of black metal and poetry, of madness and reflection, the circle closes: acknowledgment of pain, recognition of survival, integration of loss into understanding.
It is not triumph. It is not absolution. It is the quiet articulation of a life that has passed through darkness and returned, scarred, humbled, and lucid. The past does not vanish; it sings, it instructs, it reminds. And I am still here, listening.
“The chaos we once worshiped was a mirror of ourselves, a hall of flames and shadows in which youth tested its limits. Every scream, every chord, every flicker of light through smoke was a prayer for reckoning, for recognition. Madness was a teacher; fear was the curriculum; survival, the hidden reward. Now, years later, I walk the same streets not as a disciple of chaos, but as its witness, tempered, wary, aware.”
Oslo feels both familiar and estranged, like a place
remembered through another person’s eyes. The journey to the cemetery is
subdued, almost procedural.
And then: stillness again.
Another grave. Another axis.
What followed those years was not inevitable—but it was prepared.
The atmosphere carried within it the seeds of escalation.
What we perceived as aesthetic, as rebellion, as expression, also contained
something less controlled.
Something that would, eventually, act.
I was gone by then.
But not untouched.
It is not.
Survival is the slow recognition of proximity—how close
one stood to becoming something else entirely.
There are versions of myself that did not make it here.
Not because they died, but because they would have been consumed.
The forests hold no judgment.
The wind does not remember.
But I do.
but as orientation.
“The river stretches ahead, dark and patient. The storms of youth, the fires of music and madness, the nights of grief—they drift behind, reflected in the waves. The chaos no longer commands me; I command my remembrance. Survival is a quiet ritual, and closure is a circle walked deliberately. The echoes of fire become light, the shadows of rage a guide, and in this balance, the soul finds its home.”
The return journey feels different—not lighter, but more
defined.
Stockholm again, but altered by passage through memory.
Even if this time I do not meet Nicke of Nihilist, who offered me shelter for the night on my way back.
And yet, there is something profoundly important in that continuity: a gesture of kindness that survived the darkness.
Amid everything—noise, chaos, ideology—there were moments
of simple humanity.
A place to sleep.
A shared space.
An unspoken understanding.
These are the details that endure.
For years, I translated worlds that were not mine.
I carried voices, rendered them faithfully, gave them
shape in another language. But in doing so, I postponed something essential:
My own articulation.
Now, I no longer wish to translate.
I wish to speak.
The chaos we once revered now appears as distance—not diminished, but contained.
What remains is not the fire itself, but the knowledge of having stood near it and chosen, finally, to step away.
Returning the same way, I pause in Stockholm, where I meet Pelle's brother, Anders. He welcomes me warmly, and we talk. The city, once a threshold into uncertainty, now holds echoes of redemption. The journey—through memory, through loss, through reunion—reveals that closure is not a single act, but a series of intentional gestures: remembering, reconciling, and accepting.
The sea again. The same crossing, reversed.
But no return is symmetrical.
A circle is not closure in the sense of ending.
It is alignment.
The past is no longer ahead of me, unresolved.
It has taken its place behind me, integrated.
Healing is not forgetting.
It is reordering.
What once dominated becomes one element among many. What
once defined becomes contextualized.
I do not leave this journey lighter.
I leave it balanced.
The water is dark, but no longer opaque.
It reflects.
The boy crossed toward the unknown.
The man returns with it inside him—named, measured, no longer sovereign.
The fire has not gone out.
It has found its place.
And in that place, it gives light.
The ferry back to Gdańsk drifts through muted northern light. Rain falls gently, erasing footsteps yet preserving memory. I read my journal again, tracing the journey of both body and spirit. The circle is complete—not through erasure of the past, but through understanding, empathy, and reconciliation.
I feel a quiet redemption for surviving what others could not. I feel maturation in acknowledging both the beauty and the danger of youth. I feel self-healing in offering grace to Pelle, Euro, and to myself. And I feel restored balance in knowing that memory, pain, and gratitude can coexist, guiding the steps of the next chapters of life.
They speak of that time as legend.
I remember it as weather—cold, immediate, indifferent.
Myth simplifies.
Memory resists.
Most knew them as symbols.
I knew them in rooms without an audience.
No stage lights.
No distortion.
Only silence, conversation, and the strange gravity of being young and already circling something dark.
Pelle is remembered as an image—corpse paint, stillness,
ritual.
But I remember hesitation.
Moments between gestures.
A presence that withdrew even while it stood before you.
Not a figure of death.
A man negotiating with it.
Euro spoke in absolutes, as if certainty itself were a
weapon.
But certainty is often a defense.
A structure built quickly to hold something more unstable beneath.
What others heard as doctrine,
I sometimes heard as construction.
Stories harden when they travel.
People become positions.
What was once proximity becomes threat.
What was once shared space becomes narrative territory.
And so, I was rewritten.
There is a peculiar distance in hearing yourself
described by someone who once knew you.
You recognize the outline.
But not the voice.
It is like seeing your reflection in broken glass—accurate in fragments, false in total.
I was not there as a fan.
Not as a historian.
I was simply present—
before the myth had decided what to keep and what to erase.
The dead become pure.
The living remain complicated.
This is why the dead are easier to worship.
And the living, harder to trust.
I did not understand what I was seeing.
But I saw it.
And sometimes, that is enough to make memory heavier than interpretation.
Silence protects myth.
Speech complicates it.
I am no longer interested in protection.
I was too young to deserve that access.
Too unformed to interpret it.
But I was there.
And presence, even without understanding, leaves a mark that does not fade.
For years, I existed inside other people’s versions of
events.
Now I step outside them.
Not to correct everything—
but to say: this is how it was for me.
Icons do not hesitate.
They do not contradict themselves.
They do not sit quietly in small rooms.
People do.
I knew the people.
They became legend.
I remained.
And remaining is its own kind of testimony.
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
