Leave-taking: Embracing a New Chapter

Our final day has sunk

From the sky to the salty main.

That moment will never return

Which once has been.

From ‘Our final day has sunk’ by Halldór Kiljan Laxness,

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In the end I left Iceland almost as suddenly as I arrived there. Hard work was pushing my nerves to the hilt and I wanted to bed down for my PhD.

Somehow I missed the homeland, but more than the homeland itself, or friends or even family, I missed the language. I missed the easy way of talking with people, the easy way of laughing.

In the end it was a strangely twisty road that led me to where I am now, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Cardigan Bay. After two weeks in Manchester I turned down the PhD there and moved to Wales, a place I felt would make me more happy.

I suppose I was following the heart’s way in the hope that like Frost, one day I will be able to claim:

I took the [road] less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

It feels difficult now for me to distil what exactly I learnt from my brief time in Iceland. In a way it felt like a dream, a kind of Auden-like picaresque. Then there was that magnificent ending, that night of meetings, that made the whole of my future seem to glow.

I suppose I felt ready for the next adventure, to throw myself back into academia and writing. I longed for space to read and think. You can track my progress on my new blog about life in Wales and contemporary nature writing, but I’ll also keep a record here.

Here is something I wrote on the bus back, it completes the circle:

Transformation and change are the essence of life. Every essential thing is a dream as J said. I will meet my dreamer, the one I found in a pile of snow                on the edge of the glacier in the middle of the arctic tundra. Onwards, to another new life.

If love is a lie, a fallacy; then one of the basic pillars of existence falls down. We can still be engineers of each others balanced contentments.

A whiteness like the unfolding of a new page birds out upon my brain. Every word is new. Let’s connect new synapses, let’s reshape our realities. Let                    the car and the leaf hold hands.

 

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It Wasn’t Meant to Snow that Night

It wasn’t meant to snow that night –

but it did;

and what remains is dim, vague, distinctive

as a pocket-full of snow.

Four characters, two pairs: her, you,

Him, I: each at our own points of exquisite crisis

Each feeling the violent edge of beauty, fancy

Meeting Fate’s appointment like that,

In the night-light of a remote Icelandic refuge hut

For July snow.

Except for the absent moon, it was like a story:

There was trade and exchange

of dreams, anecdotes, feelings;

traveller’s stories and impressions,

the pushing and poking about of

words like ‘nature’ and ‘paradise’

and discussion of what a country is and

what it could be.

Poems were recited, songs sung

Whisky poured, eyes stung

I thought I saw him cry

In the middle of Halldór Laxness

And I wanted to lick the tear from his cheek.

Suddenly the glacier cracked.

And a riffle of dirty ice appeared,

Verse sucked up the smoke from my cigarette

And alighted upon the lips of a white promise.

I heard him say from outside:

Her? She’s just a hick,

came in with the fog from the sea

A changeling, a woman-child –

She means naught to me.

Let the lie ring out until you don’t believe it

Allow me to complicate your mastery.

Grind up lava with ice

Blast together rose-red and black rock

Let tephra ring out against the proud mountainside

And Hildebraught gyrate like a Japanese sea.

Unreal one, re-mystify me:

engage with paradox, this elemental entropy

and how much realer the dream

can be than money, power and your brain;

that strange and solitary dancer.

Sin again. Let the wind singe again,

Change its course, overturn this mini ice-age

What our ancestors whispered about

The coming of winter in the long-awaited spring.

Ache with lust in the temporary snow,

Where the drift, paddle-footed as hounds feet

is the very flag to his song and the

welter of blood in my vomit is like a hand waving at me

Saying do what you want but don’t think twice,

Life is just a dream.

 

Because nothing cuts like the ice.

July 2015

Once Upon a Snowy Night

It’s almost midnight: the point at which I must definitely turn off the lights and sleep. Yet, my feelings and thoughts are still quite disturbed by what happened last night. It felt like entire ages passed by in one evening, a night which in its decadence and sheer extremities made a fitting goodbye to Iceland, for now at least. To try and set it all down now, coherently, seems like an almost impossible task. Every moment contained so many subtexts and an audience, for once, capable of understanding all of them.

The setting as he pointed out to me was like a ‘fairy story’, a ‘fairy story of Iceland’. B had driven across along four by four tracks through the central highlands, to a small mountain refuge hut beside Europe’s largest glacier. It wasn’t an easy journey, but it was vigorous, brisk, active. I’ve never been in car that swooped and lurched like that, more like an animal than a machine, swimming through rivers – with water creeping half-way up the car chasse – diving around sculptural lava fields, outcroppings and ridges of rock. However, B made it look easy and setting his brows into a frown he ferried us – like a demented Sharon – across these rivers of rock.

Somehow the elements conspired to do something very strange that day, something almost alarming for this advanced a date in July. It snowed. It snowed, ‘hounds dogs feet’, large swollen snowflakes, that were large and flat enough to sit on the palms of the hand like leaves. The mountain refuge was built in the crook of a small double-ridged mountain near Vatnajökull glacier. We could see the enormous shattered semi-translucency of the glacier gleaming nearby – a sheet of ice stretching off as far as the eye could see. Then, if you looked closely enough, far out in the distance you could make out a band of black. It was fresh lava field forming according to B, or ‘God’ as I jokingly referred to him the whole weekend, owing to his omniscience.

So we had snow, ice and also fire, I thought as I peeked at the small spindles of smoke threading into the air far away. The ground was on fire here. Snow rolled out of large grey clouds, iron blue mountains were striped in snow. Roseates of red rock bloomed on coarse black lava field. There are no polarities or sets of paradoxes that can compass the contradictions of the landscape in Iceland’s central Highlands, its air of playfully disturbed reality, the juxtaposition of colours, textures, elements. Anyway, to this blasted desolate lava desert B the bold had driven us, with a grim determination that seemed at moments almost hysterical, certainly a little strange. As he drove, I sat beside him in the front passenger seat and spun David Brubeck records. I suppose I was flirting with him. I couldn’t help it. He is the kind of man that I think almost every woman would be attracted to, though three quarters of them would hate to admit it.

Then the night. He was already drunk before we had finished the French onion soup starter. After the volunteers went to bed we went to join a travelling couple who were eating behind us. The ‘Welsh couple’ seemed unassuming at first, but it turned out that they weren’t Welsh, not even really English. At first I thought she liked B, her eyes were doing the whole shiny thing whenever she looked at him. Heck, maybe she did, I’ll never know. Was I jealous? Honestly, a little.

What happened next? I think I better write a poem about it, but I will do what I can to create an impression now. Imagine how good wine tasted to my lips – because of the heavy import duties and my own poverty I hadn’t drunk wine for months. We had bottles of wine that evening, a glut of wine, that glowed from the table top to my eyes like lusty jewels to a thief. One green bottle, then several later, it turns out that the company was very articulate: 2 PhDs, one soon-to-be doctor and one IT professional. It wasn’t just about education, it was language itself, the exhilaration of trading ideas, letting them ping about the empty wooden-panelled canteen and thud dully against the snowy glass of the windows. I hadn’t spoken English like this for months. I was in heaven and rushed upstairs to get my copy of Bernard Scudder’s translated edition of Skaldic Verse in English. So we had poetry, B insisted on reading it in Iceland and English, saga verse that stole moments in time, transporting us back via a wormhole in the snowy sky to ancient battlefields and the reception halls of kings. I remember the head ransom poem, Iceland’s equivalent of A Thousand and One Nights – a very beautiful testament to the power of verse. In this case it saved the writer’s life, and in unmanning him of his pride (he sung praises to his enemy’s battlefield prowess), also cemented it. Poetry segway-ed towards that all important discussion of Iceland itself; its strangeness, its beauty, its ‘wildness’. I think that in a wine-jumbled way I told them everything I had learnt in the past four months about this fabulous country and the sweet wine-candy made me feel like a queen of words.

Then a strong hand pouring glasses of Chivas Regal, more secret and sad conversations about the passing of time and marriage. Cigarettes, first one in ages. That old sweet familiar sensation of poison. Crunch of snow beneath feet. Every kind of truth was uttered. It was like a dream.

What next?

Quite childish actually, but touching too. The childish sensation of touching hands, oddly solemnly.

Things were traded and bartered that night. It was more than just words. Worlds and loves were made and lost in the snow.

The Wall: A Prose-Poem

Our currency is buried in soil. Rock cleaved to the ground. Our hands pick through striated, warm earth; crusts of rock, the soft clumps of moss and saxifrage, root and earth. Behind us, the crystal tinkling of the brook, ahead the mountain top, striped black and blue, lashed with snow.

We dig for rocky ore in the muck. Our hands are maws: pink, worm-like, blind. They pause to consider a piece of white antler or horn. Horn, wood and bone are all as one here; ebbed down by permafrost and howling winds, cast in fragment-like desolation against the stark, strange mountainside. Behind us, the wall is a beading jaw. We lever and ply rocks out of soft molasses-black ground. Orthodontists popping out teeth. Then we place them into the uneven crown of the wall.

It’s an edifice both fragile and strong: a primitive feat of engineering, a golden cow, a temple, replacing a pig-sty long gone. It’s only time that makes the hazard of rock piled on rock become the certainty of a wall.

An Icelandic Shepherd: What a Wall Means

to stay human is to break a limitation

– from The Beauty of a Husband, Anne Carson

This journal entry concerns the work we were doing on my final ‘work-camp’ in Iceland – constructing a dry-stone wall at the top of a 500m ‘mountain’, often in very difficult weather conditions. Our hosts during this period included a district manager called Thorvaldur and his brother. The men had grown up beside the mountain and were putting us up in the traditional-style cottage where they had been born. The cottage and mountain were located in a very wild and desolate area of eastern Iceland.

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What does a photograph mean? A wedding photograph? What does a stone mean? Or a wall? Nothing if you can’t read the signs. There are signs everywhere and people who can read them, but lots of them can’t. Most of us don’t ever really take the time to really observe the things that surround us in ordinary life, but for some people that’s all they ever do.

Take Thorvaldur for instance; he is a very quiet man. He spends most of his time, I realise now, doing what we do every day, but for amusement and for, yes, love. What we call work, even hard labour, is for him just another morning’s jaunt up the mountain. What is he looking for? That I will never know. He is like a sheep. By that I do not mean that he is a follower, rather that his silent manner, his wide, roving eyes with their huge discy blue irises, remind me of a sheep. His way of looking at his feet as he trudges up the mountain, the way he laughs at jokes only he hears, the way he casts his eyes up towards the sky and out across the heath, are not behaviourisms that you can learn. They are acquired, acquired from long experience of life outside of the comfort of the place most people call home. They are outside, even, of language. For Thorvaldur, even Hverhagi – a place that he clearly adores, and will always be his final resting place – is not really his home. His home is the moor and heathland outside, it is the rocky mountainside, the mossy bank. Tap water will never be the good enough, only the pellucid water from the gurgling brook so fresh that you can still taste the rock in it, is real water, and thus, inherently good for you.

His quest with us up the mountain each day to the stone-yard, is at heart a very mysterious business to me. It represents a journey he has done a thousand times before. It is a recapitulation, a ritual, a repetition; but it is also an open process, which admits for new possibilities. Each time I walk behind him, up another invisible mountain trail that only he can see, he points out new things to me: do you see that patch of light green grass? That’s what they used to turf houses with in the old times. They were rush grasses. Do you see these light patches? He pointed to clearly visible patches of nude scrubby mountainside, denuded of moss, flowers and shrubs. That’s were the reindeer have eaten the grass. Do you see this plant? He points in a particular direction at the ground, I must kneel to discover what he wants to show me, a microscopically small, furry item of flora. The sheep love it, so it is very difficult to find. If you let sheep onto a new piece of land, it is always the first thing they eat.

His understanding of this place, his habitat, it almost total; or at least as complete, I guess, as one person can understand that land in which he was reared. He is his father’s son; the shepherd, the husbander, the odd-job-man; not like his brother, PhD in Civil Engineering. I can only guess at how suffocated F must have felt here; outgrowing the place as quickly as his adolescent feet pushing up against the bedposts. Two brothers could not be more different. Yet they are both very powerful men, with enhanced spheres of influence. One is rural, the other is a kind of bucolic academe. I am writing at his boyhood desk. A desk he must have towered over. On the shelves by his bed, the books that have survived the pogrom of literature that lies trussed up in cardboard boxes in the pantry, makes for some curious reading: I see some classics, A Short History of Nearly Everything, for instance, other titles, strictly historical, biographies of Churchill and Roosevelt. He has a politician’s winning way. A big smile, inviting strong arms. He is urbane, natural and capable.

I seem to have gone off on a tangent. I suppose what I meant to write about was the realisations that I have been having on the mountainside: about education and what the wall means. One morning I called it the purest metaphor for teamwork I knew. I think this poeticism was lost on everyone but Maisa who is not one to miss a subtlety. What we are dong on the wall is anti-modern. It is in a way mad. I could write an essay about this wall, about the cost of moving one rock, about how it almost appears to me now to be genuinely the most beautiful structure I have ever seen. I begin to understand why people want to build the houses that they live in. Nothing can be as beautiful as the thing you build yourself and with those you love. Each brick means something, it has cost something. It has a literal blood price, a toll.

Feet up in the Old Farmhouse: A Memory

I was resting in the farmhouse after a hard day’s work on the wall. I had just finished baking a chocolate cake for the group. I was tired but my head was buried in a book: in Carson’s book. Suddenly a line ‘like peacocks stepping into the kitchen of God’, sparked-off a memory that was so luminous that I quickly went to write it down. The memory concerns an evening in Suffolk, where I had been on summer holiday with a school friend. We were returning by foot to her cottage after an evening of good company, by a long, old track by the sea. The night was delicious, spiked with gorse and stars, wild and fragrant. It was cold but we had plenty of layers on. It felt like life had never been so good. 

A Memory: The walk back from Southwold to Walberswick at night.

It was a hard cold winter night. The stars were hard as flint, the air was smoke-fired, full of burnt wood and drifting fog. Because of the darkness and the brightness of the stars, the sky felt like a magnificent tent above our heads.

In was a fen landscape, a water world sliced through by river estuaries, bogs and shallow lakes; filled with glossy moraines. River and canal boats lilted in the tidal waters. I could smell the sea, and hear the silence that sleepy night-filled birds leave behind them.

It was the end of the summer – the promise of autumn awaited. We were at the tremulous edge of something. The hip-flask passed between pinking cold fingertips.

We carried on walking along the flat salt-marsh, past silhouettes of low scrubby trees cowed against hedgerows and dry stone walls. Fields without cattle. I remember the sensation of feeling at that moment that apart from us, no one else existed in the entire universe. I remember the fuzzy orange tips of cigarettes and the sound of three pairs of feet grinding lightly into the night. Go softly, tread softly.

Adolescence. Alcohol fumes, whisky sluicing down the throat and warming the stomach. Good friends. Sex: pale lambent as a bonfire. That summer was a beginning and an ending. The end of innocence and a leap towards adulthood or a new kind of life. But still the sensation of invincibility and security of knowing that nothing could touch the utterly beautiful pact of faith that existed between her and I, was a kind of bridge vaulting me towards the sky and the glittering stars themselves.