Island of Lightning by Robert Minhinnick

nerve and imagination at the highest political level. Stupidity and self-loathing demanded that the extraordinary be replaced with the anonymous. Abject indeed.
    But who is the second man? The artist, surely. The Dunlop architect. The campaigner to save the domes. In Wales, that ‘country of employees’ as a correspondent writes, the second man remains a rarity. So save the second man. We need the trees.
    As these things do, our theme expanded to include the role of the writer in a stupid society. How should writers, even stupid writers, live? The writer has one duty, a delegate said. To live the writer’s life. That is not a teacher’s life. Neither is it an academic’s life. And in case you are beginning to worry, he added, it is not an ascetic’s life. Skol , he added, cupping a Koff.
    A writer’s life should be a life of the imagination. A life of thought and idea and impression. Then of learning how to put these into words. Then developing structures for such words. As simple as that. And if a writer has to teach it is not to teach the mechanics of poetry.
    A poet who teaches poetry is a serpent swallowing its tail. The poet must convince the pupil that the imagination is a midnight sun. It never goes out. Then he must instruct the pupil how to read. Because reading dresses us. Reading feeds us. Reading warms us in a hostile climate. Without the life of the mind that reading provides we are naked and unnourished. Without the life of the mind we have no life at all. We are frail and impotent, at the mercy of fashion and politics and nationalism. Etcetera .
    Was it night? Was it day? That titanium light might have brought dawn or dusk. For once, outside, the voices were stilled. The only sounds were the liturgies of the birch, the primaeval birch and spruce that have always covered this country.
    Back in Helsinki, I roamed the city. It seemed deserted except for the poor and the very poor, the drunk and the very drunk. Everyone else had left for the lakes. For the trees. The nights were darker here, but stayed the colour of cigarette smoke. The only sounds were the wail of the Estonian ferry, the clinking of passing trams like a toast of vodka glasses.
    Holed up downtown on Bulevardi with an enormous television, I watched MTV and BBC World. Eminem was the star of the former. Bad as I am, he raged. Bad as I am. Caged in computer music, he incited phoney hysteria. Behind the din he spat the rhymes. Yet his words seethed with a racked, if remote, intelligence.
    Bad as it was, I’ve heard worse. BBC World, meanwhile, claimed it was volcanoes, not asteroids, that had done for the dinosaurs. And will do for us too, some day. Make no bones.
    Then came a programme about Tirana. I was transfixed. How it has changed. Even the inhabitants cannot recognise it now. At home, I have framed a photograph of the tomb of Enver Hoxha. The grave of that absolutist bears a jamjar of weeds. When I visited Albania the first time it seemed a country from a fairytale. The people despaired under the enchantment of evil. Everything was broken.
    And then, overnight, Ryan Giggs was ascending in a silver elevator. What was hot on the street were not samizdat poems or blackmarket loaves but Levi’s and Nike ball caps. In the end, nothing could keep capitalism at bay. Not ignorance, not paranoia, not a million air-raid shelters. The invasion of Albania happened all right, but it came down the wire straight into the pleading soul.
    From a great stupidity to a small stupidity. From stupid stupidity to clever stupidity. And hardly time between to look around and ask what kind of country Albania might have been. Or still might be.
    Exhausted by the screen, I tried the bars. Leningrad Cowboys was closed, an unsprung bottle of Finlandia in every booth. Next was Erottaja. Wash out.
    In U-Kaleva, spartan, local, I thought about where we had left the Lahti discussion on writers as teachers. There had been a woman standing behind