In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and, therefore, enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also, when looking at the object, I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses, and, hence, a power beyond all doubt.
I grew up eating “gryn og melk” (rolled oats and milk). Together with a good spoonful of brown sugar and sometimes a sprinkling of raisins, it was what I fed myself when I was alone in the house, in the hours after I returned back home from school and before dinner time. It was for me what people call “comfort food,” but I only called it “gryn og melk.”
The rolled oats came from a paper bag — Bjørns havregryn — and I never gave a thought to where that bag came from, other than “that bag comes from the store.”
“Gryn og melk” was prepared and eaten cold, refrigerator cold. Sometimes we also ate oatmeal, which we called havregrøt. This we would eat with sugar and cinnamon sprinkled on top, and a glop of butter melting on top of all that.
A few years back I became aware that the American grocery stores offers two alternatives for making oatmeal: it’s either steel-cut oats or it’s rolled oats. I was told steel-cut oats are better, and with better I understood “nutritionally better.”
But it turned out there are more than two options, because a further few years down the road I bought some oat groats directly from a farmer, delivered to me in a big cotton sack. Groats are what is called, on other types of grains, berries, but on oat they are called groats, they are the whole kernels, and only that: They are minimally processed, and consequently full of nutrition.
I soaked my oat groats in water and then I rolled them through a pasta maker machine, and I got rolled oats, the same rolled oats that I use for my “gryn og melk.”
I ran the oat groats through my fingers, and my soul tingled, a path that had been invisible — overgrown by grass and covered in fallen leaves — suddenly became visible, a light lit up the fallen leaves from below, made them glow, showed me once again the way back to my childhood’s “gryn og melk.” The path snaked its way on the side of a hill, and when I ambled along that path I could look down into the valley where the oats are grown, and the store where that bag of oats came from was no longer of much importance, the feeling of anomie less intense.
It is for the same reasons I make Refilstigr — to make something that I can look upon, to have “the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses, and, hence, a power beyond all doubt.”
Sources:
- Marx, Karl. “Comments on James Mill, Éléments D’économie Politique”. In Collected Works: Vol. 3. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975.