I WAS TRYING TO SEE EVERYTHING AND THIS IS WHAT I SAW: SOME TEXTS FROM THE ICELANDIA JOURNALS
february 28
I land at 6 am in iceland where it is illegal to serve liquor before 11 am, so it is good that I am able to exit the plane with at least some recognisable feminine grace intact, charming a glass of wine out of the bartender. reykjavik is a strange city, so familiar in certain ways, in tandem from the island city from where I came. I walk for a long time in the simple cold, reading anne carson, thinking about nothing, counting intersections, crossing bridges.
the fact that I have come here to write poems feels immeasurable.
march 3
driving out of reykjavik is to cross a great many planes of dissection—vertical, horizontal, psychological. I am thinking about the dichotomy of space as deleuze portioned, that not of chaos and order as separate polarities but interpretations that continue to inform one another and transform into one another. here sometimes the road is inseparable from the mountains until one drives directly into them, and sometimes it is just one long straight path that vividly dissects the land. it was bergson who posited that chaos is just the lack of finding the order that one expects. I’m always moving forward these days as a small blue light pointing forward on a screen, and it takes a certain newness to shock one out of that miserly frame. it’s strange to think of travelling long, the mind enduring and committing to a road along the same timely path as recollections are become committed to the mind. I have no memory of this place but it’s in the making. white and blue, the horses dotting the fields like figures in a child’s game. the landscape with no mediation. impossible and ancient, seeing now what I’ve only seen before as rendered through the strikings of other people’s imaginations. this is the way I like to travel most, and what makes me resent airplanes and even those abstractions of physics that ascertain we are multiple places at once. I like the hereness and hate the violence of displacement. I like feeling my body move through a place at a speed that makes sense, at a speed that respects visibility and human measurements.
when we turn off the road into a barely marked street, someone is waiting for us beside a white house with blue trimmings. we unload everything and drive around the small town (three hundred people!) as she points out the studio, the supermarket, the library, the pool facing the sea. it will take about fifteen minutes to walk from the house to where everything ends. along the black stones that border húnaflói, they provide the references and connections that I will try to fit a life into.
march 4
as with every place where the sea can be seen, I go there to see how things come together (that wonderful neologism, poikilomēsis—watery thinking). solid and liquid, mind and collective, thinking and imagining, the self and everything else. I’ve been thinking a lot about what polly said to me when I interviewed her—that she gets a feeling, when she’s in the water, that it’s not the land that borders the sea, but the sea that is connecting the land. I sit for awhile along the salt bursting, watch the familiar white foam, and feel these waves lap up and meet those of the pacific, which live so strongly inside the halls of my thinking. that is the magic of watery thinking, that fluidity, that aptness of connection, sweeping one thing into the definitions of another, and feeling both things change.
the little library is a two-floored building, egg-beige with red shutters. when I head up the stairs there’s no one there. just the shelf-lined walls, ceiling elongated with black beams, sheening golden wallpaper patterned in white wisteria, and desks strewn with belongings, testifying to a study and a devotion and that wonderful thing, curiosity. it’s a very lived-in place. half-written letters with uncapped pens resting atop them, tea bags and their yellowing strings, half-eaten packets of chocolate cookies. when I study the texts, most of which I cannot read, I find a well-maintained archive with possibly everything that has been published about this region going back a century, poetry pamphlets and academic texts on class society, bounded volumes upon volumes of the sagas, enormous heavy scrolls of maps, and fairy tales. one side of the small building faces the sea, and the other faces the mountains.
march 5
my favourite books are the ones with painted covers, a moon rising out of a steaming-bath of clouds, a feathered pollock-reminiscent cacophony, a pastel rendering of the earth’s layers as it searches above and below. it’s such a strange feeling being surrounded by words you don’t understand. ferlinghetti had compared the sensation of hearing a symphony of foreign language as a delightful experience of music, but the books are different. it’s a square rendering of privacy, a daunting history that you are barred from, but still forms the slow structure you build your days upon, in unstated symmetry.
I get lilies from the supermarket and put them in the window. (li po: at morning there are flowers to cut the heart, / And evening drives them on the eastward-flowing waters.) how do people manage to get fresh flowers here? they must come by sea. I like the idea of cut bouquets fragile and sentimental in the vast stomachs of container ships.
march 6
today I see the moon for the first time since I’ve arrived in iceland. pressed in to the clouds like a foot into snow. revealing the underside of the sky.
march 7
I’m reminded that a poet’s role is to track the static movement as time passes all around it, so I am trying to pay attention to the way people live here even though the streets are often empty when I walk them, with only a stray car passing now and again. it’s so strange the method people open themselves to when the landscape demands it from them. small vacancies of domesticity alongside an enormity that betrays history by seemingly never changing. people talk to each other across milk and tinned fish in the grocery store with the same gruff familiarity as across breakfast tables. the benches where people wait for the bus (although I’ve only seen snow sitting on these benches, never people) overlook tremendous painterly scapes of the overwhelm. the small houses seem like a game I used to play as a child, in which one would throw a handful of velcro balls at a velcro canvas, and see which ones stick.
I am working on a new project for D, an essay in voice and sounds. before I left I had sat in my mama’s living room and spoke to her about what it means to be a woman, and with what she said to me I am now rearranging with my own speeches and readings, to create an infrastructure attentive to history and the womanhood that we have somehow quilted, the two of us, with the choices we had and the choices we did not. I hear her voice, which is shattered out of her body by the forces of technology, so somehow she is speaking to me, again, in this place that she cannot picture. I hear my own voice, landing upon the leather bindings and the dark mahogany of the table. like so many of the things I work on, its larger shape does not so much take place as it is suddenly here (I know there are poets who write with idea, but I write with the motions of thinking, word by word). by the time it is finished, I realise that I was trying to say something about freedom.
march 9
sandra and I go for a drink at one of two restaurants in the town. I get carelessly drunk and she forgets to put the car in park when we get back to the house and it starts rolling back as soon she leaves it. then she makes us hot cocoas with german bar chocolate dissolved in milk and we talk about love in the kitchen until late. the walls fall away and we are living inside the words we say to one another instead.
march 10
I give a talk in the studio about sea-sight and psychogeography, opening up the maps of honshu and vancouver island dotted with light blue pins of where we have been. I tell them about the fire that seizes and unfurls right below the surface and the type of longing it takes to live in a place of imminent destruction. the mirroring pacific coasts and how the journeys back and forth across them has been the defining proposition of my life. the eastern coast of japan and its sacred nature, its bindings of fear, its human narrative. the western coast of vancouver island and its impassableness, its colonial history, the absolutions at the end of long, long, worrisome, unpaved roads. I show them the character for sea—海—and how it contains the character for mother—母, and say to those who may not be so familiar with poetry that this is a poem. and lastly I tell these women with whom I share a home about the work I am trying to do here, what sea-sight gave me in idea, about how human intelligence can attribute to landscape with a sense of generosity, the sense of making something directly attributive to the singular moment of navigation and placeness. I read a passage from anne carson’s “wildly constant”, which I love:
I stand in another world.
Not the past not the future.
Not paradise not reality nota dream.
An other competence,
Wild and constant.Who knows why it exists. I
stand amid glaciers.
Listen to the wind outsidefalling towards me from the outer edges of night and space.
I have no theory
of why we are hereor what any of us is a sign of.
But a room of melted glaciers
rocking in the nightwind of Stykkishólmuris a good place to ponder it.
Each glacier is lit from underneath
as memory is.
after the talks we all have dinner and dance wildly in the living room.
march 11
heading to reykjavik for the weekend, we all pile into the little russian car that translates this world of incomprehensible terrain into perfect motion, and we set off in the morning. in three hours (or something) we pass through snow and sun and whipping rain and gale-force winds and sun and maybe a tornado. the weather, in iceland, is operatic. in the city, I go into a bookshop to send some emails and call my mama, and after an hour or so, an old man comes up to me and asks to sit across the table—even though the place is nearly vacant. I remember reading something in a recent article of how human beings reach out for each other when the world topples, “not for a lark but out of some profound human need”. so even though the world is not toppling and is in fact perfectly still for once, I feel him reaching out to me and I am happy for it, so he sits down and I have my coffee and he has his, and he traces his fingers along the lines of an icelandic text the way I used to do when I was learning how to read english (this is how one falls in love with words, by treating them as discrete objects). when I tell him I am going to the orchestra he is tremendously happy and seems ready to pack up his things and come with. as I leave the shop I wish I could tell him in his language that I feel like he has given me a gift, a shared silence and happy, anonymous companionship that somehow occurs between two people who could only meet under the most peculiar circumstances.
harpa really is stunning, as if water was angular. all kaleidoscopic glass- and metalwork, a testament to the storytelling possibilities of geometric proofs, its sharpened nature reminding me of how, when listening to music, certain notes come at you from the peripheral. we get wine and take our seats, flush with the players, and we wait for the human symphony to be slowly overtaken by silence, then the silence to be overtaken by a sonic procession—first imagined, then written, then practiced into being. honestly, I was never really interested in live music, having always preferred to experience song as a companionship to experience, of something that adds to the thing that already is (the truth of music being, for me, the lyric)—but I think if I lived here I would be at the symphony all the time. it’s the patterns in it that interest me. the way people turn the pages in absolute silence, the choreography of bows tracing some invisible airborne calligraphy, the expressions on their faces as some emanate a worn stoicism, others a refined elegance, and others a uncontrollable tide of emoting. form and content, content and form, “for which every thought and feeling is twin-born with its sensible analogue or symbol.” it’s so strange how something like tears can be pulled out of us by a piano at work. or, actually, not so strange at all. makes perfect sense.
march 12
I am building a small textured carte du tendre. the sea clasped in a window hovering mid-air, an apartment on the top floor, a table by the window.
march 13
today we visit the museum of prophecies and the woman there tells stories of lore and witchcraft and feminism before feminism, which was really just women doing what had to be done. I’m tired so I don’t hear much of it. she reads from a rune that I pull out of a dark velvet bag, and says in that kind of voice I never believe, that voice of self-arrival and forced epiphany and a-ha!-ness, that I am recovering from some kind of betrayal and it hurts me because I am a very loyal person. the latter is true. loyalty to me is the church of love when love has nothing to stand on and knows not itself, loyalty is the liberty and the labour of love, and I value it immensely and work at it constantly. but as much as I think, there’s been no recent instances of betrayal, and anyway, loyalty does not mean the absence of betrayal but the creation of it. such is our duality.
at midnight in the library the northern lights are very “active”, as they say, but I don’t care much about them. the moon is very bright, and I find myself looking at her instead.
march 15
everyday when I come into the library I look at what has been altered in the night: new papers in the shuffle-box of the printer, chairs askew and rearranged, reading glasses propped up differently against various books. it’s a lovely feeling to fit your life parallel against a stranger’s, like watching your reflection move translucently within the window’s frame as it simultaneously opens wide to the world. the confusion of public and private, the neat categories of a silent but fortunate scheduling. I make abstract theories about the people who populate this room in the mornings, while I’m sleeping. the ones they’re writing letters to, the children’s drawings that are sometimes stranding the notes and citations, the apples sometimes left on top of keyboards. it no longer strikes me as wild or unknowable that people would seek a quieter existence, apart from “the violent jolt of the capital”, as woolf would say, which I too love and would always choose. the other women and I have long talks about what kind of a life this is, within the all-embracing triangulation of nothing but earth. one of my greatest failures as a writer (and maybe as a person) is to have misunderstood and been insensitive to the desires of others—that which differs from my own, but I think this is a good place to learn. the difference between looking into where the sea touches the horizon and looking at where the sea meets your feet—of recognising that each is privy to its own vastness. that the people who live here, what one might carelessly call the middle of nowhere, are in fact much more aware and precisely attuned to their somewhere than I might have been in the frenetic energy of my various homes. in the city you are forced into your own head, of wrestling your hours away from the days out of fear that otherwise they would be stolen. here, you can send your thoughts outwards without greed. you can let them travel onward and live a very long time.
I remember snyder:
I don’t mind living this way
Green hills the long blue beach
But sometimes sleeping in the open
I think back when I had you.
the mind is always trying to draw a circle around everything. (I’m remembering something I read by muriel rukeyser, which is that the human intuition is always to stand in the middle of something, and the sea is terrifying because it is the only thing one can never stand in the middle of.) this place, its temper, is an irresistible force that challenges that stoic fact, that impedes thinking and its imperial instinct.
march 16
we are driving a long way again, only north this time, towards akureyri. sandra is location scouting for her film so she has booked us a tour of some ice caves, which is truly something that I would never voluntarily do, but since iceland has been thus far a place of defying nevers, four of us cradle into the car and we move in the opposite direction from the one I’ve come to know. riding in the backseat always puts me out (my mama always woke me up, saying that your soul won’t know the way home if you fall asleep in the car), and by the time I come to, hours have passed and we’ve arrived.
I’m not sure why it is that the wonderments of nature has never astounded me the way it moves others. I like things that have worked out a space in the annals of poetics and the human imagination—the sea, the moon. I suppose natural forces and consequences do not strike as much of a curiosity in me because they are testaments to history, not artistry. the vital force within them have beauty but no textuality—I become wordless in front of them. I think I would rather read someone with a wonderful mind write about these places instead of visiting them myself, although I suppose now I have accrued the responsibility of being the hand at work. there are people, of course, who can find the metaphysics of nature and relieve it from the stone—to write livingly instead of thinkingly—and in description manifest the material of the description. it is a specific craft that is perhaps more similar to sculpture than what I have done. I find myself paying attention to other people looking at the thing instead of looking at the thing myself.
but the north is astounding. our guide says it’s the place on earth that mostly resembles the moon—that the astronauts practice for their expeditions here. he’s a relatively humourless man but I keep talking until he laughs, and then he is sweet to us, passing through the mysterious terrain like the hallways of a home. we walk for thirty minutes across an old lava field and the permafrost has its own mysticisms. uncurling in the light and shattering it. I get in trouble for lighting up a cigarette inside the cave.
march 17
the house in akureyri is absolutely perfect. I stay in the tub for hours and hours on end. today the snowstorm cancels all the plans for venturing into the wilderness (to my great happiness and relief), and once the winds have settled a little we go into the city, wandering. I manage to catch the liquor store before it closes (at 6!!!!!). jessica and I walk arm in arm, talking about the portrayal of the feminine, the constraints of beauty, and what it is to make a living. the small city traces a long strand of waters, and we track it end to end. we go home, I make dinner—honey, soy, a lovely long cut of fish, pomegranate, pistachio, shy green leaves—and we get back into the tub as soon as we can. the moon is so round and clear through the fogged windows, and the water in the light breaks it into sequins, into disco. the night grows long and tender with music, with affection and laughter. jessica (it was her birthday yesterday) says, it feels like I’ve known you women for a very long time. much longer than reality. we all agree, wrapped around each other on the couch overlooking the yellow constellation of the city down the hill. I think about how lucky I am, to have always found people seemingly at just the right time.
march 18
to get back we take the long way along the arctic coast, and I fall asleep intermittently, waking up for the important parts. the landscape is so present, so immediate, so insistent. I don’t have a language that can touch it, so am left with the simplicity of awe. (ted hughes: He tried talking to the sea / But his brain shuttered and his eyes winced from it as from open flame.) the mountains are painting their fingers with sea-water, with hieroglyphic white shimmering along their great bodies like sheet music. you can see the shape of the land even as you are standing on it, which is so rare. mostly we view it from above, from the presumption of human conquerings. here a human print is futile. I wish I could sit upon these precipices with my notebook, allow it the time to speak to me the way the pacific coast had, but the winds are impossibly fierce, a vertiginous wind that ices over the paths of thinking by coming in through your ears. a war-waging wind, tying words into knots, slashing words into ribbons. here you understand simultaneously the impulsivity, the potentiality, and the impossibilities of the colour blue, and blue of letters, which in chinese we call 蓝, speaking in equidistance to what grows from the ground as it does to the azure sky-heights (xun zi had said that green is taken from blue, and thus it belongs to blue). a celestial hand erupts from the clouds.
we drive towards a natural tub nestled at the foot of a mountain. the road is closed about two kilometres out so we walk the rest, sliding on the ice and holding onto elbows. I go in nude to the warm, dark, slithering waters. the black stones underfoot betray the fire just below the surface—when one moves them around, hot water streams up and scalds the feet. it is all impossible. impossibly beautiful, being nourished by the world in this way. on our way back a farmer wordlessly offers us a ride, and I sit beside him in the front seat with a large pillar—presumably used to herd some large animal—by my legs. since he’s already seen me naked I grab his hand to thank him afterwards.
merwin:
I call to it Nameless One O Invisible
Untouchable Free
I am nameless I am divided
I am invisible I am untouchable
and empty
nomad live with me
be my eyes
my tongue and my hands
my sleep and my rising
out of chaos
come and be given
march 19
new snow sends us an illegibility, white writing in the pages of the air. it is more silent than usual, only the soft imprint of a walking body against the almost-solid passageway. the sky is a swathe of singular shade, like staring into the birth of colour. everything is standing still all around me and only the air moves in its carelessly imperceptible way.
march 20
I’ve been reading roni horn’s island zombie, her collected iceland writings, and am struck by the way people are manipulated by this place. they talk about it with such a sense of reverence, of almost salvation. everything is stricken with terms of purity, deliverance, of infinitudes, of that magnetic force not humanly but earthly, in that way we would describe as heavenly. roni uses the word zombie because the song that calls her back to this island is not one she is capable of deciphering the music of. it speaks to her the way movement speaks to the sleepwalker.
talking with some of the people who live here—both those who have adopted this place, and those who are here by way of legacy—I notice that when I ask the question outsiders are prone to asking, that trailing, almost querulous why?, they often tend to respond with an ineffable, unanswering answer. that they love it. the taxi drivers. the chefs at the chinese restaurant. the off-duty ski instructor who left a six-figure job. the cashier at the gas station who was born down the road. the painters. the writers. the prophets. they all say it with the same tone, as though it were a terribly obvious thing. I want to tell them how seldom it actually is. that one loves the place they live, for its placeness and not what it brings them. I’ve heard it on my island as well (perhaps this is a quality particular to islands), but in so many places I’ve travelled there has been a deviously many number of elements at play when people are living where they live, and it so little has to do with the place, and more from what they seek, or more often, demand, from it. only when people are living apart from the human appraisal of value do they say with this wonderful conviction, I love it here. they measure it differently, that joy. I look into these people’s faces, the ones who have chosen this place, like I am looking for myself on a map. in an otherness of references, an otherness of spatialities. it is useful to ask questions about human desire, even when the answer, so often, is desire.
I am thinking of the woman who left her husband and her three children, for a man she dreamed of when she was a little girl.
march 21
reading poems aloud, in real time, to a crowd of people is to draw lines in space. from where you stand, in the front, in the middle, you can make an arrow that others cannot. you establish angles of sight, and then you cobble together words along these inclinations. you are pulling something from multiple spheres of realisations—that from when you wrote, that from when you learned to speak, that from this moment and this time in specificity, and that of all the realities that have come through the doorway—and you are holding them, briefly, only ever briefly, in the single compartment of one room. you are a vehicle of unity. sometimes the people are there but they have not really entered, and so you have to invite them, with an open hand. sometimes they do not speak the same language as you, so you have to talk above and underneath the words. this is the space in which I feel the most strange, the most apart from my custom state, because it is when I am the most open—open not in that way of giving oneself, but in the way that things are allowed to pass through.
march 22
because the north is a soundscape just as it is a landscape, I think often about listening. (alice oswald: if I want to write a poem about water, I try to listen so hard that my voice disappears and I speak water.) r. murray schafer, the man who invented the word soundscape, spoke bilaterally of music: that there is music of the flute, of which sound comes beckoned from the body; and music of the lyre, for which the sound is external and thereby sent to us from the beyond. when the wind moves here it is impossible to unlisten. sound is something we cannot escape from. we can close our eyes, and we can close our mouths, and we can fist up our hands, but sound is a state. it is linear and bound to time, and as such it is not within our grasp but travels only parallel to us. there is music that can fit into an instrument, but what plays amidst the stones and the crosses here cannot be thought of in such terms of control.
the music made in iceland is always making room for the country to enter it. dark soil riding the blue gusts, the fragrance of light, the glimmering spectral ghost-shades of streetlamps as they search wavingly out into nothing (roni’s question: does nothing still exist?). it is speaking deeply to origin, catching the scene in pieces like fish in traps. pulling a hook through the mouth of the moment. in listening, we are noticing the transitions, of one sound after another pulling along, but with certain, very lovely songs I think of a picture being built around me, layer by layer, sediment settling upon sediment, instead. the way a field can fit into a drop of water. the way the whole world can fit into an eye.
march 23
I’m not getting any better at saying goodbye to people, especially at this stage in my life where I feel increasingly vulnerable to passing through a place and never returning to it. aren’t those horrible words—see you soon—always a lie? the discontinuity is irrevocable, separations are always final, because we are not final things but ever-mutable. the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the most painful aspect of watching someone drive off into the other-places is that our whole lives are about saying I was there. even places we’ve never actually been but have only thought ourselves into—such as the lives of others. that being in the company of someone is to feel ourselves more fully, to grow in the presence of another presence. upon leaving, all that dissipates. you are robbed of a whole realm—that which you cannot build alone. I’m always thinking of those lines frank bidart wrote: you must not think that what I have / accomplished through you // could have been accomplished by any other means. because I am so sensitive and bad-tempered about people wasting my time, I feel the same kind of helpless anger when I feel time has wasted my chance with people. it isn’t that I don’t believe in reconciliation, or that I dread the missing of people. on the contrary. I understand—and recognise the value of—missing people. what I hate is when the missing stops, and you forget to remember that a part of you, the part that harvested life together with someone, has wilted. the light goes off. something is morphed into the appetite of darkness.
I hate thinking about those words—if only the night would not end, if only the morning would not come, if only the clock’s hands did not move, if only the hour wandered off longer into the future. it makes me realise how afraid I am of time.
march 25
I’m astounded by the things that people say, how often it resembles a perfectly crafted line of poetry. people are making poems all the time, really, without knowing, and I pick their words up off of the tabletop or the floor and slip them into my pocket. one of the greatest responsibilities of being a poet in the world is to make people know that the words they have are what poems are made out of (I think it was matthew zapruder that said, more beautifully: they’re just words, and you know words), that a poet is a designation we give to a specific kind of attention-paying. what poems do is help you elucidate attention, so that it is not a resource that can be depleted, but a prism that compounds everything that passes through it. how wonderful a word is, how wonderful a line is. that we can hold on to it in the midst of all other motions and use them to travel to one another. to turn the air into something that can fold! to turn the sea into something that can be drunk! to turn love into something that can be, even if only for a euphoric minute, understood!
march 26
tonight we head to the bar because tonight the bar is open, and there I get into a conversation with an icelandic woman who has, as she emphatically tells me, been to china before, at which point she enthusiastically follows up with all the reasons she didn’t like it—the people were rude, they had no manners, she found them offensive. I let her go on for awhile, before telling her, in no uncertain terms, that she is simply incorrect. I hear this a lot from people who visit china—I hear it even from certain expats, diasporic chinese. it no longer comes as a surprise to me that there is an overarching consensus that chinese people are graceless, but it is simply the human method of seeing etiquette as a higher state of being as opposed to what it actually is, a contractual, temporary obligation to wordlessly communicate class-based hierarchy. in china, a country that has a relatively prolific history of trying—and failing—to dismantle hierarchy, not to mention a density of cohabitation unimaginable for most in the west, the cultural mannerisms that arise inevitably involve more immediately interpersonal and individualised methods of communication instead of generalised ones. it tends to be direct and to the point, because to spend another person’s time with lovely ornaments of speech is to do them a disservice. it frustrates me when I’m confronted with this stereotype, because politeness, though useful, is something that I think was built so that we can avoid dealing with other people as singular individuals, and vice versa.
while I’m here I’ve had some opportunities to consider racial dynamics and the way I am used to operating within and alongside them. for me, race is a everywhere and all-the-time thing. it is fixed into the infrastructure of my understanding and of of how I interact with the world, as simple as being dressed, of having a visible body. but here, racial politics is rendered less evidential, as people are either icelanders or they are not. and I feel, perhaps, with my limited contact with this place, that people spend a lot less time thinking about themselves in terms of race than in other places (even relatively homogenous places, such as japan, for that overwhelming and distinctive history of ethnological… hostilities is very much present). it’s been a very long time since I’ve been the only person of colour in a room, yet that fact is not as pointed here as it might be in other places with a compendium of racialised history. I’m conscious of how many times I bring up race when I talk about my life, or my work, and people react to it the same way I talk about trees or sunsets. I suppose it leads to some form of cohabitation that is peaceful, but it also leads, it seems, to people telling you to your face, shamelessly and without hesitation, that they find your kind of people to be not only apart, but below theirs.
march 28
the sea has no fragrance here, most days. the cold impedes other sensations, rendering them to the fringes of the mind, and only when I crouch at the coast’s very precipices does the familiar scent of crisped, hard salt, willowing sea-plants, and light-soaked stones come through.
I walk home between the black maps, the overwhelming shadow, with the night-blue fastened to it. elizabeth hardwick had said that the first lesson of travel is to learn that you do not exist. when I think about vanishing it looks something like this, between the enormous threat of a landscape that uninvents as much as it invents. sometimes, being here, feeling listless, feeling unable to understand the language of this geography, I think about iceland as a piece of paper impossible to write on. the ink slips off of it as though it were glass. the only solution is to turn your own body into paper, to clay, to let the surroundings press in, leaving their glyphs and dictums, which do not care for your understanding but only that they have something to land upon. like when the sky, telling you about water, rains.
march 29
it is the last day in the north, so I am devoting an excess of attention to the simple method of my days. waiting for the water to turn warm, making the pot of thick, electrically strong coffee, smoking a cigarette and measuring the weather. it’s spring, as if suddenly. the mountains are undressed almost wholly for the first time, their white furs slipping from their shoulders in a beside-green daze. the green of patience. I loved the winter, I think, now. I loved the land that knew itself by the definitions of its winters, white which underlines itself as the colour of silence, so white that you are embarrassed to step into it, and the shape of the peninsula with two arms depending into the sea, sharp as the corners of the moon when the moon has corners.
when I say goodbye to the library, when I turned off all the lights and poured my coffee whistling into the drain, when I felt the books looking back at me with their paper knowledge, with their secret words inside words, when I closed the door behind me, I felt like I was leaving because I had been given something to keep safe.
the girls and I take a long walk up to the mountain, where there is an abandoned wooden building. the wind does not make its way around it, so we are there in the yellow half-circle of late afternoon sunshine. I want to be trivial these moments, to widely say how miraculous, the web of lives tapping into one another inconspicuously from all sides of everything. I want to be sentimental in the way that only travellers can be sentimental—to say look, with such wonderment in the voice that looking is able to plunge deeply into the object of speculation, anchoring it somewhere in the mind.
march 31
on the last night in reykjavik we drink so much I can barely stand up straight and collapse in my hotel room with my coat on. it’s hard to think about anything. everything is too big for thoughts. I’m bewildered by travel, coveting the life of objects, who, immersed in time in that proustian way, treats the to be not as a why, the way we do, but only as an is. accumulating time by being covered in it. who are not burdened by memory and therefore approach a different truth. it’s so sad to be driving along this same long road upon which only one month ago I had moved in the opposite direction. lighter. stranger.
the island below me looks like a lateness, a slowness, and I am in a plane stranded in the middle of the sentence like a comma. only for me it is a period. a full stop. the end—
