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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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.

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.

Beside the Dynjandi Waterfall,

The Cataract

Westfjords June 2015

I look up at the vast Dynjandi waterfall and I realise that all creative acts are linked. Writing is like the plastic arts: there is first an overall sense of design & then gradually the piece is mark-made into being – it is a relief, a carving, an accumulation of strokes.

I threw three twigs into the ravenous cascade: one symbolised the false accusation, the second my own sense of injustice and anger, the third my need to put past events behind me. All that matters here is the thunderous deluge of water pouring at an incredible speed and volume over those terraces of volcanic rock. Dynjandi is like a foam-laden pineapple, a profusion of black rock terraces bristling with bubbles and foam. The water-foam is more like snow than liquid; the waterfall’s roar blocks out all other sounds & turns the quiescent landscape (a landscape indented with steep fjords and gravel roads) into a cavalcade.

The rocks scattered about me are spotted with moss, lichen and bacterial growths that thrive in the damp, waterfall-misted air. A rainbow: tremendous, evanescent, contingent, flickers mid-drop. It is a rack of colour beneath the lizard-like stoop of the waterfall which disappears off eventually into a boisterous river concourse joining the Ariafjorður. The impression of volume and speed is astounding.

Roni Horn: An Icelandic kind of Artist

“Big enough to get lost on. Small enough to find myself. That’s how to use this island. I come here to place myself in the world. Iceland is a verb and its action is to center.”

                                                                                                                 – Roni Horn

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I know what you’re thinking, Roni Horn isn’t Icelandic. And you’re right, she isn’t, she’s American. She grew up in upstate New York and travelled extensively throughout Iceland from the 1970s onwards. In fact this shouldn’t come as a surprise, it is not very Icelandic to be preoccupied with Iceland. Of course Icelanders are proud of their country and even the most timid of them are patriotic, yet an artistic preoccupation with Iceland is more of a foreign phenomenon. In a way this is normal: what local spoke as warmly of Venice as Ruskin or of Rome than Byron? ‘Extraordinariness’ is usually the perception of an outsider, for the locals these environments are just their homes. Of course there are exceptions to this, some of the England’s greatest nature writers such as Wordsworth, Edward Thomas or Roger Deakin, were inspired by the locales they knew and loved. It was precisely because they understood their environments so well that they cherished them so deeply.

Summertime: Sitting on a blanket outside Talknafjörður playground

The Playground

I want this weekend to last forever. The word’s from Guðmundur Böðvarsson’s poem float seem to float about in the windless air:

One summer’s day

One summer’s day more.

This is the kind of summer day that Icelanders dream about in long, cold winters. This is the kind of summer’s day that they compose poems about. The chuckling of the brook washing down the mountainside, the soft pash of sunlight swamping my breast and face with light. The grass is lush, its leaves are rubbery and strong. Each cell is tough with life.

The sky is a pate of blue, the mountains are no longer the ice-violet I had come to find normal but a soft green-grey. The veins of snow are receding every day – they are just lacings now. The absolute clarity of the air, the purity of the sunshine the chill, naked view: it is something to strike wonder deep within.

This weekend has been a kind of gift from God, a gift after the later part of last week which was lacerated with sadness and tension. From out of that hell a heaven has miraculously appeared as abruptly as the dormant heads of Icelandic flowers in the botanical garden. The pastoral atmosphere that now surrounds me is the symbol of this metamorphosis, the long winter of the heart is over and now it is time to play.

For the past few days I have been chauffeured around the Westfjords from hotpot to hotpot, sinking into deep bubbling lagoons of bliss, fed, watered and looked after. It is enough to make me laugh a thousand times over. Out of the icy shame of last week, this flower has budded. I see blessings everywhere. The birds chirrup in the trees, the roads are clear and safe and possibilities for exploration seem endless. I am coming to really know this region. Yesterday, surfing along the road on the way to Isafjörður and watching the wavelets scissoring the coastline, I suddenly felt awash with great rippling sensations of happiness. I was completely sober. This was genuine euphoria: my whole body was alive and pulsing with happiness. Andrea was coming, I was going to meet Valentine, it was Saturday night, we were all going to go to the hot pot together. Everything was potential, fun, and full of the heady reckless abandon of summer frolicking. I was free and at liberty to enjoy nature’s bounty in one of the most beautiful places in the world.  The midnight sun did not set for me that night, light and life and were everywhere.

Iceland, The Midnight Sun

At Erikshuis, late spring

My love, sometimes the night are lonely.

They are stark.

The arms of thin, bare trees are wands

flying like wings in the dark.

At least it should be dark, but instead

the sky is white as a popsicle;

wet and ice-light.

My longing feels deeper

set against this forever-day,

when the blackbirds and redwings

don’t know when to stop singing

and the grass grows twice as fast.

The old poets warn us:

Life is slippery as glass,

Beware what comes to pass.

What contradiction can I brook

against these words or the mauve slab

of sky I glimpse beyond a dusty window frame?

Only a name: lauguatunga,

the beautiful babbling tongue.

Iceland’s South Shore, May 2015

Iceland: South Shore Panorama

Ecriture Automatique

I wake up this morning to a world bathed in soft pale light. Long low brushstrokes of thin clouds pattern and edge the sky. Hillocks spotted in tufts of moss and plaited long grass rise up around me. There is no even ground anywhere – it is the remains of a once boiling volcanic broth, now petrified earth, pulling down the gravity of the surrounding hills. I grasp for the right words to describe the summits to the right of me. They are too small to be mountains; too irregular to be hills. They are like moon craters whose pits and declivities are packed with dirty, mottled snow. Their banks are steep and threatened daily by the corrosive powers of the wind.

This landscape is not dead, it is alive. It reminds me of Nan Hudson’s Cairngorms.

The road continues.

Another Night In

Saturday night, 12.04.2015, Miklabraut

Relaxing in the Living Room of Miklabraut

Sara is playing the piano, gently, ever so gently. A string of rainbow-coloured origami birds that we made together as a group, lilt and turn round slowly above her head. Her hair falls on her shoulders  in delicate waves, suddenly she stops. The room is quiet, we have turned off the main light. Now it is only the bunch of fairy lights hooped on a nail in the corner and a hurricane lamp illuminated with several tea lights which gives light to the room. Our bodies are tired and pleased to be at rest on the sofas; it was the thermal baths, the heat and bubbles which drain and soften the skin and cajole the muscles into a state of blissful inertia. I feel the way I do after a long day of hiking – the same sense of satisfaction from the day that has passed – the same joyful tiredness. Yet it has not been a day of over-exertion. It has been a successful day – a day of community strengthening. We have all relaxed into each other – a new trust has settled over the group. We know each other, we like each other, we are friends.

The morning’s yoga session was followed by a lengthy lunchtime meal attended by all the long-term volunteers here – both camp leaders and office workers – the so-called ‘logistics team’. Homemade lemon sorbet and coffee ice cream was followed by chocolate cheesecake and a hearty baked dish of potatoes and chicken. Many of us knitted or fiddled with paper. I can feel the ties between us slowly strengthening – between those I now know well and those I have just met. Each bright pair of eyes gives me more faith in the world, each beautiful story that I hear clears aside the brush obscuring the path.

There is Elsa, the strong, eager Latvian volunteer. She told me wonderful stories of her volunteering experiences in Jordan: using improvisation and drama techniques to connect with a group of young sixteen-year-old Jordanian school girls. I lapped up these stories hungrily; what positive and strengthening alternatives they proposed to the draconian top-down methods of school room instruction I had been coached in at my comprehensive school in London! I realised then that the basis for all group development – in education and learning also – is community. After community there is trust, after that there can be anything, especially learning. But I really believe now that community – in its widest sense – is fundamental to everything. Establish community and the bonds of love that this word signifies – and you establish a foundation for all development to build upon. It is a kind of soil, is community, a common wellspring. Education, creativity, the environment – they can all connect together, but only if you establish community first.

To have community you need to have leaders that the group respects and loves. To be a good leader you need to love. Not just superficially – you cannot just love the one who understands, you have to love all especially the one who doesn’t understand. If the leader is the conductor – the musical maestro – the convener of governance; she needs to be an integral part of the thing that she creates. She must love and judge but her interests lie with those of the group which also guides and sculpts her.

These are the kinds of positive models we need to help us discover how to build learning in the classroom. You cannot fake being a leader just as you cannot fake caring from those about you. It has to be there:  care and love and a sympathetic and faith-driven view of people which transcends particularities but is also fastened to them.

It is the organ. Now it is the strings. We were playing the wonderful Irish folk tune Bold Fenian Men earlier. The voices of the Yamaha piano ring out like a choir of ‘yeses’ in my mind. I realise why I am here. I am here to connect together the things I care about: social action, art and the environment into one organic unity. I am here to learn to be a ‘social artist’. \

Sleep now, think later.