Above – The Sky of Varkaus

Abstract

Reflecting on the reality of language, this study investigates the meaning and nature of an era of 'embroidered culture' and cultural multiplicity. In language, this embroidery is manifested through English terms such as 'coloured', 'mottled', 'pied', 'diversity', and 'multiplicity', all of which correspond to the Finnish word 'kirjo'—used in describing a rainbow trout, a harbour seal, and the magical artefact in the national epic Kalevala—while 'broad-spectrum' medicines similarly carry a 'broad embroidery' in Finnish. The age of cultural multiplicity is inhabited by two existential figures, who can also represent different facets of the same individual: multi-face man and one-look man. To counteract multi-face man and achieve sufficient depth and dimensionality for examining things, one-look man is brought into the world as his inverse existential partner. Multi-face man is born from inwardness and existential interiority; containing elements beyond the reach and control of external will, his interiority makes him an existential mystery and the independent subject of his own life. Conversely, one-look man exists purely as an externality guided and led by an external will. Marked by rote-learned fashionableness and the predictable repetition of the once learned, one-look man lacks surprise and exists as a non-independent subject whose externality, devoid of self-illumination, reflects the will of an external interiority.