Noon.
Sunset.
Dusk.
There is Iceland, the country, with cars and roads. To get around in that place, you’ll need a car.
But to get around in Iceland itself, the place where you meet the energy of the earth, right on the bottom of the sky?
Well, only your feet will take you there.
Bring boots.
Those other things tend to break down.
It comes over the mountains from the glaciers, who draw it from the sky and send it back to the sea as an image of themselves.
November 5, 2016, Viðey
It comes as a flood. It comes in a fog river many kilometres in width. It doesn’t come from the Atlantic. That is Caribbean water out there. Up in the sky, well, that is a far different thing. That is not this world at all.
Both these images of Icelandic birches were taken around 3 pm in early November. In the first, the red light is brightening the colour of the birches at Geysir.
In the second, the sun is blasting through snow at Hraunfosser, without diminishing the red of the birches.
Red is not a bright colour. That is not its strength.
Here in Grundarfjörður, a horse trailer and a boat are both parked together in the harbour on an Autumn day. Fish and horses, eh. That’s the Icelandic way.
Does that not suggest that this country is a harbour, or a series of them? Are not both journeys, into the sea of the mountains or the sea of the waves, the same journey? And this third journey, up?
It is a dangerous place of passage, a place of setting down, departure and return, and a place of harbour and shipwreck at once, but it is the only one there is. It is a tidal zone, for humans.
The sun is bright inside the ancient ice of the glacial lagoon.
As the ice melts away, the sun inside is slowly revealed.
This is an artwork written with the stone the glaciers cut out of the mountains many centuries ago.
They have come together again, in beauty.
This is the glory of the world.
Its moods are 50,000 years in the making.
Even the darkness is light.
You can see by it.
You have only a few minutes.
Begin.