Horn herself wrote of how weather itself is the dangerous beast in this otherwise mild island: “Weather with its apolitical, amoral, and wanton violence is murderous if you don’t pay attention to it, murderous if you don’t respect the magnitude of it. Weather moves rivers, and makes them too. Weather blows roads away or turns them into mud. Weather washes the rocks out of the mountains and dams the roads. In the interior, near the glacier, for example, the winds get so bad you crawl on the ground to get past them. You can’t open your eyes, not even slits, because the fast air lashes them, lashes and burns like small sharp whips. Sandstorms stop visibility a foot in front of your face; this is a way of being lost without having gone anywhere. When the glaciers melt, just a little, the earth trembles to the gushing violence of engorged rivers. Water is picked out of the ocean and thrown in the air, whole fields of water are thrashed out of lakes. Statistics show weather is a leading cause of death on the island.”
You could read “The Snow Queen” as a story about primordial forces versus animal empathies or even cold versus warmth. The boy with the ice in his heart, Kai, disappears into the north on his sled, and his friend Gerda, from the adjoining attic, misses him, weeps, waits for spring, kisses her grandmother good-bye, and walks to the river to begin looking for the boy. She gets into an oarless boat that isn’t tied securely and the current carries her a long ways away. An old woman who is an enchantress pulls the boat to the bank and brings the girl to a cottage in a flower garden where all the year’s flowers bloom at once, a garden outside time. She forgets her quest until she weeps and her tears water the earth so that a rosebush springs up and reminds her of the roses at home.
Tears are her magic; the roses wake her up to her task; months had passed, so she escapes into a landscape where autumn is spreading, and falls in with a talking crow, and then a prince and princess, and then a robber girl, who unties her captive reindeer for Gerda to ride. The talking reindeer, who is himself a marker of how far north she is, carries her deeper into the north, into the country of winter, into her quest. On his back she reaches the home of a second old woman, a Laplander who sends her on with an introduction written on a dried cod to a third, a Finnish woman farther north. This third fate or fairy or crone lives almost naked in a saunalike house and puts ice on the reindeer’s head to keep it comfortable.
Even the reindeer implores the short grimy Finnish enchantress for aid for Gerda; it’s a fairy tale in which everything helps the humble and openhearted, in which each creature, save for the trolls and the Snow Queen, serves the principle of warmth in its own way. But the Finnish woman replies, in this story of women and animals with hardly a man, “I can’t give her any greater power than she already has. Don’t you see how great it is? Don’t you see how people and animals want to serve her, how she has come so far in the world in her bare feet?”
The reindeer takes her onward to the palace of the Snow Queen, where the frozen Kai is playing the Ice Game of Reason with flat shards of ice. If he can organize them into a pattern that spells out “eternity,” he’ll become free, but he never can. It’s not reason or pattern but emotion that will free him, in the form of more tears from Gerda, whose grief makes him remember, so that he weeps out the speck of glass and is himself again. Weeping like ice melting, like winter snow turning into spring rivers, a spring that comes as grief, as waking up to suffering that is the beginning of doing something about it, weeping tears of affection and loss that are always hot and sometimes make roses grow.
In Blindman’s Buff and Pin the Tail on the Donkey and piñata-smashing parties, the surrounding group directs the blindfolded child with the words “warmer” and “cooler” as she gets closer to or farther from her destination (and it’s the same in Spanish “caliente, caliente, frío, frío”). The goal in these games is to make contact, and coolness and distance are equated, as though the destination, the thing desired, were radiating heat. If you go far enough south toward the tropics, coolness is an ideal, as it is in Buddhism, the subtropical religion. There it represents calm, equanimity, the opposite of the heat of passion, of the burning world the Buddha talked about in his Fire Sutra soon after his enlightenment, the sermon that preaches that everything is burning.
The coolness of Buddhism isn’t indifference but the distance one gains on emotions, the quiet place from which to regard the turbulence. From far away you see the pattern, the connections, and the thing as a whole, see all the islands and the routes between them. Up close it all dissolves into texture and incoherence and immersion, like a face going out of focus just before a kiss. Let me get some distance on it says a person begging for what we call perspective. Cool as in jazz cool: “marked by steady calmness and self-control,” says a dictionary.
The Buddhist nirvana, or paradise of the mind, comes from the word “to blow out,” as with a candle or flame; it’s an extinguishing of the heat of passion; an exhaling breath, a letting go. The Buddha’s key memory of childhood happiness under a roseapple tree is a memory of coolness; and he sits under another tree to achieve enlightenment. When the demon Mara comes with his armies to tempt and intimidate him away from this destiny, flinging storms and challenges at him, he asks the earth to bear witness for him, because he has no one else to ask. Stay cool. The earth roars, and the demon’s army flees. It’s a volcanic earth that speaks, that breathes, that roars, like the body affirming its existence against the phantasms of the mind.
Everything travels. Even the story of the Buddha came to Iceland several hundred years ago like a migratory bird, another fairy tale that mutated as it meandered. The honorific term Boddhisattva became the Arabic name Budhasaf or Yudhasaf, which became the Greek name Iosaph and Joasaph elsewhere in Europe, and Joasaph was long revered as one of the two saints who converted India to Christianity. The story migrated from Syriac to Greek to Latin to a Norse translation of about 1250 that is credited to King Haakon the Younger, who may have done it himself or more likely commissioned it. An independent Icelandic translation from a German version was made a couple of centuries later.
Both tell the story of the prince whose father tried to protect him from the world and from knowledge of suffering, of how he finds it anyway, and goes on to a monastic life. “Thus it was,” said a caustic writer in 1895, “that by virtue of the infallibility vouchsafed to the papacy in matters of faith and morals Buddha became a Christian saint.” Which was viewed as problematic if you wanted facts with untangled lineage, but if you prefer stories to migrate as freely as birds and mingle and evolve, it’s a joy.
Stories migrate; meanings migrate; everything metamorphoses. Birds flew north in the summer, the golden plover from northern Europe to Iceland, the whooping swans from Scotland among other places, the tiny Icelandic wheatear from as far as northern Africa, but the arctic terns came all the way from the antarctic realms. I wandered around my temporary home on this island shaped like a heart, the volatile ice-covered heart that occasionally beat, with lava, boiling water, and steam in its veins. The farthest point I could reach on foot was Helgafell, the sugarloaf hill around which stories were wrapped like clouds, and where Gudrun Osvifursdottir was buried a thousand years before, the proud woman at the center of the Laxdaela Saga and all its slaughter and loss.
Once a farmer who spoke only Icelandic gave me a ride back from Helgafell in a rain; and cashiers spoke brusquely to me about money in the low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit den that was the chain supermarket; and there was a librarian with some responsibility for the Library of Water who provided practical aid every now and again. Otherwise no one spoke to me because Iceland was not good at strangers or because I had landed in a small town far away from everything else that was nevertheless too much like the white suburb I had dedicated my life to escaping.
The town of Stykkishólmur had been a fishing village, but everything changes, and Iceland’s small fishing-boat economy had been sold out to transnational trawlers. Everything migrates, but the old boats were mostly
hauled up on land, their propellers full of dried seaweed and their windows checkered with fading permit stickers from years before. Words travel, because the word arctic comes from arktos, Greek for bear. Cancer comes from the Greek word for crab, karkinos. Memory, or one of its locations in the brain, the hippocampus, means seahorse. A bestiary is buried in our language.
The bears for which the arctic was named were traveling too, swimming long distances and floating away on the fractured summer ice, coming to Iceland and dying there, and running out of space or out of ice everywhere. That the locals were not good at visitors the two polar bears who came ashore that summer found out. The first one was thought to have swum two hundred miles from Greenland, though it may have come on drift ice some or most of the way.
“There was fog up in the hills and we took the decision to kill the bear before it could disappear into the fog,” said the police spokesman for the north coast, and the environment minister said the bear was shot because the drugs to tranquilize it were nowhere to be found quickly, and the local veterinarian said he had those drugs in his car but not a gun with which to shoot a tranquilizer dart. The first polar bear to be recorded in Iceland arrived in 890, suggesting bears had been showing up before human beings had, but they never settled and bred and became resident as foxes and people did.
A second bear arrived a couple of weeks after the first, and this time Copenhagen zoologists were supposed to take it back to Greenland. Police shot it instead, as though it had been a criminal. A twelve-year-old girl had spotted it in front of her parents’ farm on the north coast, white against black lava. It had been feasting on eider ducks’ eggs, so perhaps it died happy, though the happiness of polar bears takes some imagining.
I hardly felt welcomed in the town where the Library of Water was situated, but I didn’t feel like a polar bear, a threat, just slightly nonexistent. Maybe like an elf. That summer, on the other side of the island, I met a drunk man in a bright muffler who began to tell me stories about the elves. Eve, he said, had several children, and one day God came to inspect them. She had been washing them, but she was embarrassed to show the grubby ones not yet washed, and so she hid them.
God, who seemed to be a fierce inquisitor, thundered, “I know all things. Do you think that I don’t know how many children you have?” And he sentenced the hidden children to be hidden forever, to become the race of elves. They cannot be seen by ordinary mortals, though clairvoyants can see them. There might be, the drunk man added, twice as many people in this room as you think, and he gestured vaguely at the cavernous former slaughterhouse in which some art had been installed and some people were standing around, and maybe some elves.
In this former fishing village, actual fish were also as invisible as elves—the chain supermarket only sold frozen fish, along with fresh mangoes and avocados from ten thousand miles away—though some fresh fish must have been smuggled into the fish-processing plant on the outskirts of town. But the town still celebrated the national holiday of Fishermen’s Day on June 1. That afternoon the ferry that docked twice a day on its journeys across the fjord was to take the townspeople on a free excursion and so I joined the crowd. We must have been out for hours, but no one looked at me and no one spoke to me even when lunch was served belowdecks and I sat at the same table as some of the locals. I thought of the expression “breaking the ice,” but I had been quiet so long it was hard to break.
The boat sailed out past the harbor’s blocky island and toward the islands farther away. It was a fair day, with a pale blue sky full of soft white clouds, not sunny but clear. Off in the distance there was an island that looked, from the harbor, like a pyramid, the highest island in the archipelago. I had been looking at this island named Klakkeyjar a long time. We went past smaller islands that showed rough cliffs, green tops, a crowd of birds haloing each one like flies around a horse, and went onward.
As we swung around from its south to its west side the pyramid became two pyramids like a pair of breasts jutting up out of the sea. It was startling to realize that what I had seen for a month as one peak had always been two, and more startling was to see that these peaks so resembled human anatomy. When we drew nearer, I saw that they were not symmetrical in size or shape. And then the ship came so close that the peaks disappeared and we were alongside a dark stone cliff stained white with the excrement of birds who nested on its narrower ledges, while mosses and grasses grew on the wider ones.
Seen from above, Klakkeyjar didn’t look like breasts or pyramids at all; with all its inlets, bays, and tiny peninsulas it was more intricate than a puzzle piece. Around A.D. 982 one of Klakkeyjar’s bays had harbored the ship of the fugitive Eric the Red before he led Icelanders to settle Greenland. In summer people still gathered eiderdown from the eider ducks’ nests, as they had for centuries, and pastured sheep on some of the larger islands of the Breiðafjörður archipelago, and the bird refuge named Flatey was still inhabited. The boat went back, the island turned back into the familiar pyramid, and I returned to the Library of Water.
I read, I lived in others’ lives through books and letters, I wrote, often to friends about my own life and the life around me, I slept, I stretched, I thought about the past and future, I made meals from the strange ingredients available at the grim cavelike market I thought of as the troll den, I went walking out in the awakening landscape where the crying birds and shaggy, friendly horses seemed like the society to which I had been admitted. It was peaceful but strange.
Even earthquakes are the consequence of tensions built up over long spans of time, imperceptibly, incrementally. You don’t notice the buildup, just the release. You see a sick person, an old person, a dying person, the sight sinks in, and somewhere down the road you change your life. In movies and novels, people change suddenly and permanently, which is convenient and dramatic but not much like life, where you gain distance on something, relapse, resolve, try again, and move along in stops, starts, and stutters. Change is mostly slow. In my life, there had been transformative events, and I’d had a few sudden illuminations and crises, crossed a rubicon or two, but mostly I’d had the incremental.
Director Walter Salles said of his Che Guevara movie, The Motorcycle Diaries, “I always thought of this film as if you were walking under gentle rain. After two hours of being exposed to it, you would be wet but without having felt the heavy, imposed dramatic effect of it.” Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi said the same thing, more or less, about spiritual endeavors: “After you have practiced for a while, you will realize that it is not possible to make rapid, extraordinary progress. Even though you try very hard, the progress you make is always little by little. It is not like going out in a shower in which you know when you get wet. In a fog, you do not know you are getting wet, but as you keep walking you get wet little by little.”
Sometimes I thought Iceland was a perfect place to convalesce, because it was as serene as the seaside cures Victorian doctors once prescribed. Sometimes it seemed like a terrible place to be stuck, because it was cold in so many ways. There I changed by degree, the terrible anxiety of the past year draining away, the peacefulness sinking in. The whole episode seems like a dream now, a long phase of floating along with sudden images flashing up. Maybe this ability to live in the insularity of a dream was as restorative as sleep.
I traveled a little, and on the south coast of Iceland had one magnificent midsummer day that began with a long walk on a path edged with tiny flowers past the largest glacier in Europe, went on to a bay in which the glacier was calving icebergs that were vivid blue in a blue inlet of the sea, and then traversed a long strand of wet sand that reflected the white clouds and blue sky so that heaven and earth were indistinguishable, and the clouds overhead seemed to be almost close enough to touch and those near the horizon seemed to be very near infinity. It was as close to a vision of paradise as I’ve been granted with my eyes open. After that I saw another bay full of hundreds of swans and a steep valley through
which dozens of thin waterfalls trickled and poured from the heights. That day ended at a robin’s nest Klara showed me in the low willows in the quiet light at midnight, five small mottled eggs like turquoise stones. But mostly I stayed home in the Library of Water and its locale.
After the expedition to the islands on Fishermen’s Day, I went out twice more in the archipelago beyond the Library of Water. Once, a local man who’d worked on the open fishing boats in his youth took me, his half-English niece, and a stray American photography student out in a little boat called Snót, and we landed on Klakkeyjar. We drifted apart, wandered the rocky and boggy expanses of it, picked bilberries. The pyramid that had become breasts and then a puzzle piece was something else again up close. Another time I bought a ticket to go out on a sightseeing boat.
We passed by the Klakkeyjar island on the same route, so that the pyramid again turned into breasts, and then into cliffs for birds to nest on. Birdshit streaked down from the nests like white branches of a chandelier whose candles were eggs, whose flames had wings. On the way back the crew dragged the ocean floor and on a steel table on the deck dumped out a load of scallops, sea urchins, crabs, mussels, and starfish, bright like internal organs laid bare by surgery or butchery, the vivid color and life hidden under the surface of the sea.
Some of the other people on the boat gulped live scallops and cut open spiny urchins for their roe. I picked up a huge, heavy red starfish with thirteen arms that looked like the sun itself and threw it back into the sea, and it dipped farther than did the actual sun during those midsummer days when night was a faintly dim phase that came for an hour or so long after midnight.
The Faraway Nearby Page 14
