Posterity

Tikka päätään puulun nakkaa
muttei loukkaa
koskei lakkaa
(Lauri Viita)

I'm out of the woodland for a while, visiting Tampere, but the woodland isn't out of me.

Tampere is an interesting place. Here, two lakes almost meet, one fifty-nine feet lower than the other: Näsijärvi and Pyhäjärvi, only the town, squat on its landmass keeping them apart.

That fifty-nine feet led the Glaswegian James Finlayson, a Quaker Victorian capitalist to build a cotton mill here in 1823 - the mill race and enormous factory bearing his name in stone are still here. Finlayson is the man credited with bringing the Industrial Revolution to Finland - a dubious distinction.

Tampere's also the place where Stalin first met Lenin at the Bolshevik Party Conference of 1906. During the Finnish Civil War Tampere was a Red Guard stronghold; the last Reds were killed in 1918 at the highest spot of what was then a small village outside Tampere: Pispala.

Pispala was built to house working men and their families, high on the moraine ridge between those two lakes. I'm here as guest of the Scottish poet Donald Adamson, who lives at Pispala. Which brings me back to the woodlands.

Donald's house is next to the house of Lauri Viita, the carpenter; a son of a carpenter, and a poet steeped in that socialist and working class tradition that
seems to pervade Tampere and Pispala still.

I can't help wondering about the wood Viita used in his daily trade; what timbers his father built houses from. I know that they will have used both pine and oak. Oak, being scarce and locally confined in Finland, likely will have come from around here at Tammimäki or perhaps even from Ruotsalainen, the island once owned by the king and which was his oak preserve for war-fleets. I like that circle of a working man reaping the benefits of a monarch's belligerent paranoia.

Later, after fighting in the Winter War and the Continuation War Viita wrote his first book, never losing sight of his political allegiances:

Some voice is explaining:
– This is that sick head
in which the lunacy is bread.
Is it a leak in the mould, a blast
in the alloy, or a fault in the cast?

At the end of his life he wrote sometimes in the Kalevala metre; maybe something of those oak beams and Väinämöinen at his heart.

There's a museum to Viita in Tampere; the building in which it's housed was built in part by his father.

There's a museum to Lenin, too; I don't know who built that.

Finlayson built his own museum - a cotton mill - and had his name carved on it.

The Viita part-poem I started with: Tikka päätään puulun nakkaa, I love the sound of. It roughly translates (I'm told) as: the woodpecker bangs his head, but never hurts it.

This morning early, down in the oak wood, I saw a green woodpecker, sitting as though she'd had enough banging for one day already.
While there's no official museum for the woodpecker, the tikka, this whole oakwood serves that purpose. Lauri Viita, poet and carpenter, would understand.