Ajan kokeminen ja käsitteellistäminen Lassi Nummen lyriikassa

• Mikko Turunen Tampereen klassillinen lukio

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74931

Abstract

The Experience and Conceptualization of Time in Lassi Nummi’s Poetry

Subjective experiences of time and the essence of time itself are recurring themes in the poetry of Lassi Nummi (1928–2012), a Finnish modernist poet. My article analyzes Nummi’s poems in the section titled “Aivan tavallinen ilta” in his turn-of-the-millennium work Välimeri (2000). These poems play with multiple parallel ways of perceiving and understanding time.

Time is an abstraction, in the understanding of which various conceptual models can be applied. Interestingly, in Nummi’s poetry, the experience of time is structured without using systematic theories, such as time as a cyclical or linear concept, or time as a notion of movement. Yet at the same time, there are passages where concepts of time familiar from philosophy or the cognitive sciences are clearly at play. Various approaches for conceptualizing time both with traditional means, such as cyclical or linear time, and with more spontaneous ideas, such as time as music intertwine and overlap in Nummi’s poems, and can thus be used alongside each other without giving preference to any single method of analysis. Therefore, rather than simply structuring the poems around concepts of time, it would be more precise to talk about frames of thought, which in turn structure the various aspects Nummi applies to both concrete and temporal dimensions of time.

Nummi’s way of concretizing time through conceptualizing it in various ways can, in addition to his metaphorical expressions, be seen in the layout of his text, in the rhythm of his poems, and in expressions that e.g. equate time with music. Often the description of time is drawn either from a paradox or from a breakdown of experiencing time and place vis-à-vis conventional concepts. Nummi manipulates the experience of time with different imagery, in which time is described thorough concrete details while it also maintains a level of abstraction. In places, a single poem may amass multiple metaphorical ways of structuring time. As is typical to the genre, it is not sufficient to only experience time as it is; there is also a conscious effort to both conceptualize time and apply meanings to it. Hence, a central theme in Nummi’s poems is the structuring of the subjective experience (such as the feeling of time having stopped and standing still) in relation to notions of the essence of time (such as seeing the passage of time as a flow or a stream). The existence of time is made real primarily through subjective experiences.