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.