Tag Archives: Art

Poetry and Technology in Iceland

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The approach of winter on northern earth is described by the angle of the earth to the sun, but look …

… is it not a story of light rather than mechanics? Here in Grundarfjörður, is it not a story of the light  …

…separating from the dark earth and so revealing it?

It is not a scientific description, and yet as the light falls the earth becomes more purely light, and more purely cold.

Light is cold, in other words. This is wisdom, too. If we’re going to beat global warming, that light is going to need the respect now given to mechanics and technology. So is the cold, because they are the same. It’s not a linear understanding; it’s a global one. It is earth-thought.

Technology is not the end to science. It’s great stuff, but it’s not the goal, whatever the goal might be, or if it is the goal, then the goal is not of this earth, and that is a judgement humans have no right to make.

These are hard ironies. If technology is the path away from the cold,  it is the path away from the sun.

Akranes

It is the path away from the earth.

Hveragerði

The knowledge and traditions of how to live with the earth are not lost. Here are two operating manuals. There are more.

The poets still know something of the earth.

Breiðafjörður

It can be read by the sun. They know how to do this: how to read the sun, the earth and themselves on the body’s face.

Breiðafjörður

They embody the sun. Fences aren’t for the light, and yet they cut it, nonetheless, …

Breiðafjörður

… until the world becomes a series of fences. These are hard ironies, but not causes for despair; they still catch the light.

Grundarfjörður

We can still follow it, but one thing remains primary. We have a right to the sun, to the earth, and to the cold.

Grundarfjörður

The cleverness of ancient methods of mediation between earth and light are a richness of capacity rooted in ancient verse forms.

Egil

Make no mistake. This stuff can be read in detailed literary ways, and that’s an important tool for entering this technology. Read more by clicking here. Still, until you can read it in the earth, you have not entered its light.

Goðafoss

Discarding this light, simultaneously of sun and earth and cold and warmth and mind, for physical technology is exactly what it sounds like: discarding them, and all their alternative forms of warmth…

… for physical technology, which is important.

But the path remains the old one.

It is to make people out of the earth. It is to bring the wanderers home.

Here’s one manual:

Here’s the obligatory legal warning to users.

Here’s another one of the manuals.

Here’s Gunnar’s quote from the title page, expanded in its original context:

He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber. 2 But he that entereth in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. 3 To him the porter openeth; and the sheep hear his voice: and he calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out. 4 And when he putteth forth his own sheep, he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him: for they know his voice. 5 And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him: for they know not the voice of strangers. John 10:1-5

Here’s its expansion:

11 I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. 12 But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep. 13 The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep. 14 

In other words, look after your sheep; look after your land; be a man about this:

Gunnar left his hireling life in Europe

… and went to farm sheep in Iceland, from this house at Skriðuklaustur …

… after writing that. Was it a mistake? Well, he didn’t last long there, but the commitment was real.

And so Easter comes.

And so light comes.Gunnar meant that poetry and the land and honour were one. It was not literature. It was not a metaphor. This is not a metaphor.

The end of tools is to erase the tools.

How Iceland Became a Modern Country

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Iceland entered modernity with a group of artists who did nothing more or less than express their pre-modern selves in modern forms.isle

Sker and Stampur (?), off Dyrhólaey

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Ásmundur Sveinsson’s “Music of the Ocean, Magnifier”

Icelanders did it themselves, with nothing but their rock in the ocean, in other words with everything that they had. Inspiring.

Moods of Light in Iceland and Canada

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What if the Earth were a sphere, continually focussing the sun into moods of light, like these in Breiðafjörður in November, with a very low solar angle…borgarfjordurwater

… or these in Okanagan Lake, between the Rocky Mountains and the Coast Mountains on the North Eastern Pacific Shore, in December (today!)?p1420577

To know how the planet was feeling, we would need to gather information globally and integrate it into a unified image.p1420581

With arts and sciences of dissection, we wind up talking about the arts and science of dissection, which does the planet no good at all, nor us. Let’s not forget the Icelandic sculptor Ásmundur Sveinsson, who saw his task as reducing the complexity of surfaces to elements the eye could see before the mind, and then the construction of technologies that the eye, not the mind, could think with. Things like this:

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Of course, he kept the mind busy at the same time, which is always polite. Following his principle, are two eye-poems for your eye, which I showed you yesterday. They are not word poems:

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Jökullsárlón

And because we are hospitable here and like company, here’s something for your mind. It is not an eye poem.p1320233

Kirkjubærjarklausstur

Book poems and mind poems are different things again. Poetry, though, ah, that’s a thing of the world.

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Kirkjubærjarklausstur

It is our home, but would we not be blind to call it our own? Let us just give praise.

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Kirkjubærjarklausstur

And thanks.p1390341

Breiðafjörður

And help with the braiding …

vatn

Solheimajökull

… and the weaving of the fibres of this poem …

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Rushes in Lower BX Creek, Okanagan Lake

… together.

Playing Chess with Water in Stykkishólmur

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In Breiðafjörður, the wide fjord of West Iceland, people know a lot about water.p1360548

They live with it.

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One can presume water knows a lot about people, too.

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In Stykkishólmur, halfway to the far west, where land ends, people know about harbour, where land and water and people mix and voyages begin.

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On the hill above the harbour there is an old library.

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From it, you can read people reading the water and read the water writing the world.

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You can also play chess.

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This is the Library of Water.

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Water from Iceland’s glaciers is here to be read.

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To reveal itself.

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Shelved with the shelves of the world.

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Among houses for water.

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And houses for people.

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Water reveals itself here.

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People come to be written by it.

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And to see their world with new eyes.

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They come to see with the eyes of water.

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And to play a little chess.

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Your move.

 

A Thought on Creativity

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In contemporary culture, creativity (a rather new term) is a word used to describe a vast array of impulses. The New World Encyclopedia sums it up like this:

Creativity is a process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts, and their substantiation into a product that has novelty and originality. From a scientific point of view, the products of creative thought (sometimes referred to as divergent thought) are usually considered to have both “originality” and “appropriateness.”  Source.

Well, shall we apply that, then? And where better than Kopasker in North Iceland!

kopasker5 The farming industry has modernized. The fishing industry is bust. An earthquake split the town in two. But they have a nice new lamb-processing plant. What on earth is a town to do? Why, welcome guests by standing in the fields waving, that’s what!

kopasker It is most charming and folksy and as non-Reykjavik Icelandic as it gets, but is it creative? Is it, gasp, the product of …

a process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts, and their substantiation into a product that has novelty and originality.

Well, yes, if we maintain a human bias on the situation. No other conclusion could be drawn — if, that is, the definition is correct. Let’s look again. Are these really original figures? Or are they copies? Are they mirrors of human form, seen elsewhere? Are they projections of the human subconscious?kopasker2 I think so. I think humans are acting as lenses or catalysts for energy. I also think that seeing the issue in this fashion breaks the idea of creativity in just the way the earthquake broke Kopasker apart. That was a lousy thing for Kopasker (it is a very small place and, really, has no infrastructure for dealing with a body blow like that), but maybe it’s good for humans to get knocked off their pedestal a bit. And then there’s this ..kopasker3 By golly, the woman is made out of discarded fishing floats and what is that, an early IKEA sheet set and Grandma Karin Thorsdottir’s blouse? Oh, shucks, not to worry, it’s not just her who’s doing the disused-fishing equipment thing but Thor himself! Whew!

kopasker4Here’s a suggestion: what humans have made here, most charming that it is, is not creative. Creative lies in the energy held within the used articles. Humans mine them by recombining it in age-old forms, such as Thor and Grandma Kirstin. The design and effort and patina of use that adheres to and is present in articles is used over and over in Iceland. Maybe that’s common human experience everywhere. That seems likely. Here’s a humanized view of a disused gas station in Iceland’s far north. This is like Gas Station Version 1.0.

gasIt looks like a human form, too! Well, at least in the way I’ve framed it. Maybe that’s what the human eye does all the time: finds the human body out there and maps the world according to the physical shapes and processes it knows well. That this, and all art works, is a map of the human mind, and what isn’t a human artwork? Well, what about this, then?

blueStrutfoss, Iceland, in April

The invention of the colour blue! I swear, it didn’t exist before I walked up the valley and through the snow drifts and over the hill to find it here, glowing like a blue sun.

Is that creativity? Since contemporary culture has given the study of natural phenomena to scientists, because they took it, mostly, is it like they say? Is it this:

From a scientific point of view, the products of creative thought (sometimes referred to as divergent thought) are usually considered to have both “originality” and “appropriateness.”

Well, no. It’s not the product of creative thought. It’s a waterfall. Ah, but is it? Is it not an image of a waterfall? But, leaving that aside, might it be that it is full of energy, just as the fishing floats are? And that this energy can be mined, just as the energy of the fishing floats can be mined, instead of them being capitalized, as is the dominant economic model today? Why, perhaps, yes. Take a look at Reykjavik and see what the city has been fiddling around in while the Kopaskers have been gluing their town back together with plumber’s cement and fishing floats and good humour.

harpa

The Harpa Opera House!

It catches the light, concentrates it, and projects it, just like Strutfoss does.

The apparent difference is that it is human aesthetic and social light that it gathers into itself and projects, as  this is the main display space for most of Icelandic “creative” culture, while Strutfoss projects elemental energy, but I dunno. They look much the same to me, once this pesky ‘creativity’ word is divested of its human bias and given to the world. Or to a horse.

myvatn2Horse in a Field Created Just for Him and Him Alone, Myvatn, Iceland

Giving energy away, in other words passing it on rather than keeping it, now, that might be creative, but only in the sense that we are defining creativity as just that: passing energy on. The forms aren’t new. They are just recombinations of past energy use and the relationships inherent in it and its products. The energy, though, and the life it can create, in all senses that there are life, that is creative. Humans don’t create life, but, like the Harpa, they can create the conditions for it, and then they can stand back and marvel.

hunterGreat Blue Heron Hunting for Mice in a Hayfield

Constructing Iceland

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For the last month, I have devoted almost my entire time to completing my Iceland project about Gunnar in World War II. The whole effort is like fitting together a puzzle, or the way in which on my last day in Reykjavik, I witnessed some Icelanders attempting to build a forest in the middle of the city …P1590085

A Forest in Process

Sometimes words just won’t do.

Canada is not a country in which art is so closely combined with public and private life, and that’s too bad for Canada. It speaks to the kind of wealth that comes from a colonial history of buying things, rather than building them. Iceland has a good dose of the same colonial disease, but, the outcome of the election this project was designed to influence aside, has a better chance, I think, of coming out the other side into the earth and greater human richness than does Canada.

P1590078 Danish Post-Colonial Dining Room Furniture Taken Outside for Some Fresh Air

Over time, this forest construction effort brought many thoughtful and happy onlookers. The whole process filled people with delight. And why not. Look at how trees and scrap wood are brought together to make a model (a kind of 3D map) of Iceland itself, right in the middle of the city…

P1590027 Look as well how the effort requires fashionista colour coordination between man and tool, and the union of hiking footwear with workman’s gloves. Reykjavik mornings can be like that in the spring time! In fact, isn’t that an image of the Icelandic economy as a whole?

P1590015It is also the work of a community, of which there appeared to me to be no leader. It was as if the sculpture itself, the new forest, was directing the humans…
 P1590016I had to get on a plane and leave, but these are the images I took away with me, and which I continue to expand in the work. I believe that the images show something uniquely Icelandic. It is a kind of creative energy, with very specific roots deep in Nordic culture, on the one hand, and in the Icelandic settlement experience on the other, which is ongoing, and not historical. “History” is just a word. This is a living thing. In the next few weeks, I plan to show some other examples of this energy at work in modern Iceland, and by then I think it’ll be time to show you how I have been fitting them together, like a delightful jigsaw puzzle, into my story about Gunnar. Bless bless!