Tag Archives: Iceland

Creativity in Iceland

Iceland was long isolated from the rest of Europe and maintained ancient, pre-industrial modes of creativity, economics and land use long after they had been rendered obsolete elsewhere. (What follows is an extended version of a post that appeared here a year ago, with new insights, text and images. It is part of a series on creativity I am exploring on my site www.okanaganokanogan.com, as part of an exploration of repairing human-earth relationships.)

The Beauty of the North, Skagafjörður

Many parts of Icelandic culture did not leave an indigenous sense of land until the Second World War, when occupation by American and British military forces completely transformed the economy.

ruin

Abandoned Turf House, North Iceland

The wind, I promise, is unforgiving here. The house is built directly in it, on the crest of a hill above the Greenland Sea, so that the wind will take the winter snow away. The rest of the year is scarcely warmer. I would have left, too. And I love the wind!

For one thing, in Iceland you’re always under the observant eyes of ravens, who range out to the left and right of the god Oðin, acting as the harbingers and scouts of all identity: thought and memory. Here’s one keeping an eye on me.

You Are Never Alone in Iceland, Hengifossá

One of the technologies that Iceland brought forward into the present is Nordic Mythology. It was preserved here, although lost everywhere else, and provides an alternate world view to all others. For one thing, it has humans dwelling on Middle Earth, between worlds of Fire and Ice. Middle earth is where they battle for dominance. The fire …

cone

… and ice are never far, and come from beyond the world.

skaftafell

Snæfells, with Reindeer and Geese

This is a complex and deep heritage, which contains such creative technologies as haying …

hay

Haying is the Art of Creating a Book out of the Sun

You can read it all winter long, or your sheep can. My book The Art of Haying explores these mysteries.

… the string …

horsefences

Icelandic Horse Obeying The String That is a Human Will

… non-human personhood …

Icelandic Horse Scratching Its Head at the Mystery of It All

… the self living in the forms of the land…

holl

Elf City, South Iceland

…in union with ancient story …

hrafn

Raven Mountain, North East Iceland

… and creativity rising not from person but from space, in an ancient conception called the Tun.

Cow, Calf and Tun

All these technologies and many more meet in the culture of Iceland. The culture is their expression. Humans pass through this culture’s forms, in the same way they ride (or walk) across the land.

golfing

Golfing With Elves and the Dead, Too

In Iceland, nothing gets thrown away.

It’s the tun I’d like to talk about in terms of creativity today. A tun is something that you can observe (and take part in) everywhere in Iceland (and in the North). Here’s a tun in Denmark (the former colonizing power, grrr):

Half-Timbered Danish Farmhouse

Den Fynske Landsby, Fyn, Danmark. The working courtyard in front follows the ancient Norse (and thereafter Icelandic) architectural model of a tun, an open air working room between buildings.

A tun is a building without walls or roof, where the money-making activity of the farm took place, and where the manure (the dung, a variant of the word “tun”) was stored, which could be spread on the fields to create future wealth. It is the source of economy.

Horse-drawn Wealth Spreader Waiting for Re-use

Hedge fund version 1.0.

The tun usually connected to the track to the next farm, or out to the world of trade. Here’s a variant on a tun, from East Iceland…

Landhus Farm Barn, Fljótsðalur

In this case, the tun is the road itself. It’s the architectural space (within the landscape rather than the farmyard) that carries forth the energy of the tun.

Icelandic Highway 1 in March, Mývatnssveit

Park your car here on the way back home from work.

The word “tun” is the German for “to do”. The English word is “doing.”

A nice triad!

It is a place of energy that creates the economy and trade and activity of a country (or a farm), or lets it efficiently take place. It is the place where the future is created. Without it, the activity of humans would not be as organized as it is, nor could it be efficiently packed up and exported from the farm (or the country.) Iceland, of course, is a sophisticated modern country, so we can expect this source of energy to take many forms today. Here are a few:

Parking Strip.

Art Project in Downtown Reykjavik

The pattern of tun-in-the-pasture is reversed to pasture-in-the-tun. (The tun is Reykjavik.) This pasture, though, is in the shape of a disused turf house. Clever stuff!

Movie theatre.

The Reykjavik Movie Theatre is Also a Place of Exchange.

Note that this is a re-purposed building. In other words, not only is the movie theatre a contemporary tun, but the building acts as one as well.

Church.

Vik Church, South Iceland

A very useful tun for work with souls. In this case, the houses of the village take the place of the buildings of a farmyard.

Forest.

Summerhouse in Kirkjubærjarklaustur

The trees are part of a nation building program of the Icelandic government. They represent not only shelter and beauty, but future money in the bank. In this sense, they operate as a dung heap in a tun. The land itself has been separated from itself into a special tun space here. Here’s something different…

Youth.

A Movable Tun

This tun represents a combined cognitive, social and bodily space. It moves around and around through Reykjavik, invading people’s dreams and re-shaping them into effervescent images of mineral water. Not into the dance scene? No problem…

Farm.

Icelandic Farmstead.

Note the elf house in the foreground. It’s good to live close to your neighbours.

From the perspective of a capital economy, this capital has depreciated to the point of needing to be replaced with a new depreciation sequence paid for with interest. In a tun-based economy, the expense of taking wealth from the land in order to build structures upon it is a debt that will be erased only when the creative (tun-ish) potential given from the land and embodied in the building and the tractor are mined dry and these materials (dung-wise) rot back into the earth. They are, in other words, a fertilizer. You don’t paint fertilizer. You also don’t throw it away. Want something more adventuresome? Iceland has that too.

Glacier.

Svinafellsjokul, Skaftafell National Park

A glacier is part of the common wealth of a country, that which belongs to all of the people and brings water and energy to all. It’s not just the people, either. It also brings energy to the land itself. Here, you can see what that looks like, on the other side of the glaciers.

Strutfoss

Aka glacier turning into light. Very good for the soul.

A glacier can attract tourists (and mine them for wealth), provide healthy recreation for the people (an idea of nature, imported from coal-smoke-choked industrial England), and even provide habitat for fish …

The Laugarfljót, with a view to Snæfells

These are both tun spaces. The mountain generates snow, which generates water. The lake collects the water, to provide habitat for fish. By concentrating energy in this way, mountain and lake make it available for human harvest. (Not that this is their plan.)

Unfortunately, capital-intensive economic systems can mess with that and simplify the idea of a tun almost to unrecognizability, like this:

This is propaganda in the service of art.

Or art in the service of propaganda. Or a statue in the middle of a hydroelectric dam outflow channel that has diverted the water from Snæfells into the wrong fjord. Something like that. Here, here’s another look: See that? The ship steams upriver, loaded with generic manufactured goods, towards the economy created by turning Snæfells’ life-giving properties into cash, that can pay for electric toasters and Swedish toilet paper. It never, of course, arrives. Here’s its goal…

The Heart of the Mountain

The statue was erected on the notion of eternal wealth, just before the economic collapse made the whole notion questionable. Here’s a construction site (abandoned) in Reykjavik, based upon the economic version of this dam …

OK, So Maybe Not Such a Great Idea After All

If you get too abstract with your tun, you run the risk of running out of manure. Good to know.

Ah, perhaps you’re tired of farms by now? Well, here you go, way up in the north…

Boat.

A Sea-Going Tun Space

Powered by human energy (doing). Any fish brought into the boat (the tun) are instantly converted into wealth. Well, as long as your arms are strong and the weather holds.

This particular moveable tun has been sitting on the shore for a long time, but the principle still holds. When you start powering that boat with diesel, then a good chunk of the fish you bring in are not wealth, but payment for an operating debt, and, if you bought the boat on credit, a capital debt as well. If you’re not careful, the whole thing becomes a debt. Instead of organizing the wealth of your labour on the sea (very wet common space) for delivery to social space, the tun organizes social relationships for delivery to you. You have, in other words, lost your tun (doing.) Here’s a solution:

Garden.

The Akureyri Botanical Garden

This garden is planted in Iceland’s northern capital to see what plants will grow in a cold, northern climate. The concentration is on decorative plants. That is part of Icelandic nationalism, a way of dunging the country so that it brings forth wealth (in the sense of a tun economy, organized around human relationships to common space (land and water, mostly), beauty and fecundity are both forms of wealth.) So is this:

School.

Hotel Edda, Akureyri

In the summer, the richly-endowed residential high schools of Iceland are converted into hotels, serving travellers. This doing (tun) allows for them to be sheltered and fed without capital-intensive infrastructure on the land, that would not turn a profit (dung) and would be a drain on the community (a kind of field.) In other words, without the Hotel Edda concept, travel in Iceland would be greatly reduced. That is pure tun! In the winter, the schools are tuns of a different kind, gathering Icelandic youth together for their common education. It would be best, however, not to think of these multi-use spaces as either schools or hotels, but as a space which allows for and serves both relationships to the land. See? Pure tun! Similarly…

N1 Gas Station in Blondüos

In sparcely-populated Iceland, a gas station is like a city in itself (Icelandic Staður, German Stadt [city] or Staat [country], English State, and in land terms a Stead, as in a farmstead. Here it’s a gas stead.) Everyone stops (where else?). Everyone eats (hamburgers, chicken, pizza and hot dogs, the national dishes of Iceland, and for the lucky soul a liquorice ice cream bar [available only in Iceland] if you root around long enough in the freezer.) The places so interrupt the roads in a tun-ish kind of way that even the police stop here. Rather than waiting at the side of the road trying to nab people of interest, they just hang out at the N1 and interrogate people while they’re filling up with gas.

Here’s a somewhat more esoteric tun from Kirkjubærjarklaustur:

A Window on the Tun …

… is part of the function of the tun, even when it’s a bit wonky from a stone cast up by a weed eater or, perhaps (judging from the repaired state of the wall) earthquake.

Similarly, a piece of propaganda-art (or is it art-propaganda?) in downtown Reykjavik provides an anchor point for tourists wandering down to the waterfront (very tun-ish, that)…

Tourism.

Leif the Lucky’s Aluminum Ship, with Modern Adventurers

If I was crossing the North Atlantic in a longboat, I’d want it to be a made out of aluminum, too.

… while reminding the Reykjavikers that the money that built their glittering waterfront…

City.

Reykjavik: Iceland’s Tun

It interacts with other national tuns to create the worldwide tun network.

… came from the aluminum smelter (and glacial-melt electricity) across the mountain in Whale Fjord.

Smelter.

Aluminum Smelter with World War II Airstrip (aka bird sanctuary), Hvalfjörður

Leif’s ship points straight this way. This is a capital tun. That it needs space (Iceland) is rather incidental. It might have been British Columbia. Oh, wait, they’ve dammed rivers and diverted them through tunnels and extirpated salmon for an aluminum smelter in British Columbia, too! Like tuns, capital is everywhere. Sometimes it flows right through a tun and obliterates it.

Here’s Reykjavik’s most interesting tun, right on the waterfront …

Harpa.

Harpa

The Reykjavik opera house and performance centre. It also houses a CD shop, a cafe, exhibition space, practice space for dancers, fashion shows and classical, folk and rock concerts. In other words, it provides a space for the concentration of cultural activity of all kinds in sufficient quantity and quality that it can be delivered to the people, the country, and the world. It’s also a beautiful piece of architecture that captures the sun light and casts it in coloured rectangles on the concrete plaza at its base, like sketchings made out of chalk. Tun all the way.

Not all tuns are so complex. Here’s one of the most basic (and powerful) of them all…

Graveyard.

Right Between Church and House

Note the road that comes directly to it. The tithes that came to a church accrued to the landowner who had built the tun space for the people and were, as such, a major form of wealth for Icelandic farms. The byproduct was the dead, who were planted in the tun — a kind of social dung, fertilizing the future (Heaven) or the present (built as it is on human memory, the more the memory the richer the present.)

In this conception of wealth, capital (and money) aren’t exactly the goal, but a product of the tun space. The carefully-bounded space below, on the other hand, added to the tun space…

Field.

Stallions at Skriðuklaustur

Without the line that bounds this field, there would be no inputs to a tun space. It would only be a potential space. Never underestimate a line, in Iceland or anywhere else.

Here, this image may illustrate that more dramatically. Here we are at Myvatn (you may recognize this image)…

Volcanic Slag, fenced and dunged = Field = Horse

Simple math.

If we lift the camera just a teensy bit, we get some perspective…

Volcanic Slag + Capital + Cleverness = Geothermal Power

Our horse is behind the rock.

You see how that works? The land has potential. It has a form of potential energy. The application of a particular technological approach towards defining it as space allows for different forms of energy to come out of it. A line gives us a field, gives us a horse. It will be brought into a tun, where this elementary relationship is retained. Capital gives us a geothermal power station. It will be brought into a city, where it’s own elementary relationships are retained. In the first case, the earth is full of life and living relationships. In the second, humans are separated from the earth, which is a field of energy, that can be harvested. The interrelationship between these two ways of being is complex, but at all times the elementary principle remains: creativity comes from the space that is outlined by technology; the outcomes are predetermined. In other words, we who are humans are not separate from technology and cannot just direct it to our will. All we can hope for is to create spaces, which create energy flows that lead to where we wish to go, but we should be very clear as to where they might lead. Here’s a kind of tun that got its start in Iceland over a thousand years ago:

Thing.

The Thing Place in Þingvællir

The world’s first parliament convened on this spot at the confluence of the walking trails of Iceland in the year 930. All the people came and collectively decided their social arrangements, then followed the trails back to their home farms. This is the tun of tuns.

On the principle that space creates function and energy is latent in the land, some tuns are geographical spaces. Like this…

Fjord.

Arnarfjörður, from Hrafnseyrie

This was the view that Jon Sigurdson, father of Icelandic independence, took in as a child.

Here’s a slightly altered version:

Harbour.

Stikkishólmur Harbour

Here’s an example of a common Icelandic tun: a ruin of a lost farm. The people of Reykjavik come from places like this that were no longer tenable in a capital-fueled society. They do, however, remain.

Ruin.

Ruined Farmhouse near Arnarstapi

The mistake should not be made, despite the astute and chilling observations of Iceland’s Nobel Laureate, Halldór Laxness, that such buildings were a betrayal of the debt of humans to their land, as they were too capital intensive and not constructed within the flow of seasons and fate. Instead, it’s better to think of them as graveyards and memory artefacts, that continue to bind people to the land, although only in potential, and offer the chance of return. The energy that was squandered (as Laxness saw it) on these buildings, remains in them, as it also remains in the land, and can be mined again. Only in the sense of capital is it lost.

Well, there are many other forms of doings in Iceland. Cataloguing them won’t add to that appreciably. But perhaps this image might sum it up:

Bridge.

Like the string that defines a field and allows for concentrated activity, a bridge is another technology both similar to a tun and connected to its energy. It allows for improved delivery of material to the tun, without the contamination of important water sources with the mud generated by foot traffic. In this case, perhaps not so well, but, hey, I used this bridge on my way to the Dwarf Church in Seyðisfjörður, and it did its thing. Oh, and as for bridges, here’s one…

Golf Course.

Slowly, a people who have lost their connection to tun space are refinding it, in the golf course surrounding a church which was set up next to an elf city in the lava fields south of Reykjavik. Humans are like horses in a field. They really can’t wander that far.

Well, that’s the tun (our contemporary ton, or town), in many of its forms. It is in this space that Icelandic creativity takes place, because the tun (not the individual self, not God but focussed activity rising from location, here in Middle Earth, between cataclysmic forces) is where creativity takes place. In Iceland, it is Middle Earth, Miðgarðr, that is creative space. A similar set of illustrations can be worked out for the other technologies (string, etc) with which I introduced this post, but for now, I think you get the point: in Iceland there is a form of creativity and a corresponding land sense with little if any connection to American, French or German land senses. The culture, however, is more creative than those others. That’s worth sitting down in for awhile and getting to know. So, until next time when I will speak about Indigenous creativity on the Columbia Plateau, thank you for spending some quality time with me among the elves.

Harold Among the Elves on Miðgarðr

Goðafoss

The Art of Haying

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This is about a book, that has come out of this blog, and Iceland. In Iceland, I learned that one of the ancient arts, older than poetry but as old as the art of knitting, is the art of haying. Here are a couple of Icelandic sweaters in their natural form outside of Stykkishólmur, hard at work turning hay into yarns. I was picking bilberries for lunch. They seem kindly, I think.

And here is the cover of my new book, The Art of Haying: A Journey to iceland (Ekstasis Editions, 2015), which is all about that, and the future of books, and a lot more. No bilberries. That will have to wait until my next Iceland book. A few bilberries on a Stykkishólmur park bench, a tub of Skyr, and thou. That kind of thing.

This is a love story, for a country, for a woman, and for a way of life in which the old is new and the new is old and a man frees himself from the walls that books have made in his mind — walls that he previously didn’t know were there. It’s a scary thing, to have been kept by books my whole life, and then, one day, to step outside their pastures, but that’s what happened. The Art of Haying, is about drawing a line through grass and making a new beginning from it, not just for me but for culture on the northern shoulder of the world. Here’s a glimpse of one of the books I talk about in The Art of Haying.

The book is gorgeous, and contains over 200 photographs from three seasons around all of Iceland. It has the mare of the sun on the Reykjanes Peninsula..

… and a Keltie in Kopasker, luring Icelandic fishermen in to the books’ pastures.

It has so much more. Don Quixote of Reykjavik, for example.

Sometimes it’s worth getting up before dawn! The veils of the world are lifted and pushed aside! The Icelandic imagination was formed from life in houses such as the turf house at Hólar below, and the scripts of darkness and light they wrote for the body and the mind that followed it like a hand.

The Art of Haying is a travel book, a book of gentle, playful philosophy and wit, a love story, and a story of spirit. Horses are human souls here, like this one in its bookish pastures in Reykjahlíð.

If you’ve never met an Icelandic horse, that might seem merely a poetic device, but if you have, well, I’ll let this horse at Hófstaðir in the Skagafjörður show you how to drink at that trough.

And, of course, it’s a real book, told in the play between words and photographs, so it has a back cover too…

There is a unique form of creativity on Iceland, that in my three visits I had the privilege of glimpsing and at times even walking within. It’s a kind of playfulness within things giving their full dignity, not as objects of commerce, but as presences with which one shares the world, and which have within them creative energy, always ready for release, if one leads them to the right pastures, or out of them. Here’s the god Oðin’s horse Sleipnir, for example, waiting for his master on the Hverfisgata in Reykjavik.

What is a world beyond books like? Well, I think you’ve guessed it: much like the one with books but completely different. Books are not going away. The Art of Haying is one, after all, but it is a different sort of book, one which escapes the barbed wire fences of textual dominance and does what the horses of Iceland do. All summer men work round the clock to put up hay for them, such as here, out the back of the Víðimyri sod church …

… and all winter the horses live in societies of their own, fed by men and women. This is considered by all a solid foundation for an economy. Here’s a group of Icelandic literary critics up to their own business on a spring day by Sóleyjarbotnar Farm in the Sturlufljöt, for example.

And here’s what Theresa Kishkan, the author of some of the most exquisite essays and lyrical novels in English or any other language, has to say about the dance that is this book:

There are prose works married to image that redefine the way we think of language and its visual correlatives. Bento’s Sketchbook, by John Berger; Kathleen Jamie’s Frissures, with Brigid Collins — windows thrown open to unexpected places. The Art of Haying is one of these books. Its windows look out to Iceland, its farms, its trolls and horses, and the curve of its hayfields created out of craters and rain. Read it for its weather and its lyrical attentions. “Words, words, words, words, words. You may, if you want, listen. You may, if you wish, hear yourself think. You may, if you go out into the dark, hear the crackle of the Aurora over Husavik when the sun has gone down behind the hill.” Every page is memorable, even in the dark.

Ah, yes, there are trolls here, in a place where the human imagination is not bound but is out on the land itself and is read there. Here’s one at Klausturhamrar early on Easter morning.

There’s a secret about the trolls in the book, but you’ll find that out when you read it. Here, though, I’d like to introduce you to the incident that sparked The Art of Haying. I joined my wife in Reykjavik on the second of two trips across the old Iron Curtain into the former East Germany. It was that experience, which broken down the walls that the Twentieth Century gave to me, and all of us who lived through it. When I arrived in Iceland, I was ready to see, and I did. A part of that two-way pilgrimage on the Northern Camino is in my new book of poems Two Minds, because it’s there I met Khezr, the Sufic Green Man, who graces the cover of my book.

The story of that remarkable encounter is here: http://haroldrhenisch.com/2015/10/06/khezr-the-hidden-prophet-and-my-two-minds/. So, there you have it, two journeys that become one, and two minds united, outside the walls, by attention to words and what is more than words.

A Crown of Rowan’s for St. Brigid’s Day

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Today, I praise the rowan tree. This is her season, as ice breaks to the season of water and birds.

Rowans with Elf Stone, Eyjafjörðursveit, Ísland

She’s a tree, yes, but look how she wants to lie on the ground. None of the towering heights for her.

Rowan, Skriðuklaustur, Ísland

And when the light comes, ah, then she is a torch.

Good Friday Rowan, Valpjofstaður, Ísland

The Rowan is sacred to Brigid, Saint of Holy Ireland, and to Bride (or Brigid), who came before her (and was no saint), and to Mary, Mother of Christ, and to Thor, god of lightning and thunder. The gender crossover is no big thing. Don’t give it a second’s thought. There was a time on earth when all things that signified the earth’s power most strongly were considered hermaphroditic, neither male nor female, and, after all, don’t humans, who come in several genders, tend to unite and make unions that are neither but are one?

Male and Female Fruit From a Hermaphroditic Pacific Mountain Ash

Wells, British Columbia

Unlike those sly sumacs and gingkos, a rowan has neither male nor female trees.She knows where she is. Look at her, earth tree, reaching up for the spring moon, with her feet planted firmly on the ground.

Skjaldarvik, Ísland

Wherever a rowan is found, it signifies the presence of her deities, who might have many names but are also one.

Thor, Brigid, Bride

For all of you who are of an empirical bent, don’t worry. Gods are just names for powers of the earth. The powers are present, even without the names, although perhaps not yet empirically defined. It’s just a kind of short hand. For those of you who follow the stories of the gods and goddesses, you know what I don’t have to say.

Rowan in the Birthplace of the Gods, Ásbyrgi, Ísland

Much of (nearly treeless) Iceland was one treed like this: a few rowans, and a lot of willows and birches. Then people got cold.

There’s more to the story of the rowan than is written down in history books, but not more than meets the eye. A lot of it has to do with environmental sustainability. A lot of it has to do with her name: in English, rowan, for red; in German, Eberasche, or red ash, or, more precisely, “red spear”. More on the spears in a sec. First, here she is, surprising us and all.

Pacific Mountain Ash, Quesnel Forks, British Columbia

Mountain Ash, Rowan, Eberesche, Bird Berry, Thrush Berry, Sorbier, well, you get the idea: a rose all dressed up.

She is glorious in summer, but look at her in her winter time, just last week…

Rowan has a profound story. Don’t look for it on Google, though. This is one you have to learn from the birds.

Yes, Today the Cedar Waxwings Have Come Back Home to the Rowans! Yay!

The story of rowans is a story of sacrifice, androgyny, magic, Christianity, nationalism, survival, life and hope — always hope. It is also one of the oldest stories of all. It begins with a Himalayan god of the air, Thor. He’s known today as a Nordic god, from Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Germany at the north of the world, but he started out far to the east and south, and migrated with his believers across the continent. Thor has a hammer, that’s sometimes an axe, and, as you can see below, blood spatter, a phallic spear, and a weird right hand, and, yes, he’s been repainted with good old-fashioned wheelbarrow paint.

Thor at Lilla Flyhov, Sweden (c. 1000 – 1500 BC) Source

That blood spatter? Well, look:

Rowan Berries in the Snow

They don’t call these bird berries for nothing!

That weird right hand? Here:

Rowan Berry Cluster After the Feast

And that axe? Well, Thor, remember, is a thunder god, from a time when thunder and lightning were the same thing. This is where he lives:

Dragon Tales in the Sky

People used to be able to read this language. It was a kind of writing not in words.

Thor used the axe to split that sky apart, so that out of its unity came lightning (on the one hand) and thunder (on the other). That is the moment in which consciousness is born. Into this air, that is all one (and out of which thunder and lightning come)…

… a spear …

Rowans Were Traditionally Used to Make Spear Shafts

… is thrust. It’s a curious kind of spear…

You wouldn’t want to thrust something like that at a wild boar or something. I mean, how pointless (literally). Sure, if you’re thinking of weapons being physical things, with pointy sharp bits, ya, but weapons are also extensions of the mind, and for Thor, and people who believe in him, this is mind, given body in the world…

You might want to have that magic and balance on your side when you go out to stick a wild pig that’s intent on sticking you (especially if you have the other kind of spear from the other, straighter, kind of ash (spear) tree. The darned things grow in thickets, ready made. You just need an axe to cut one from the ground and you have a weapon that extends your range and does your will at a safe distance from your body. A rowan spear, though? It’s both the thrust and the moment of reception, which is to say that it is a kind of symbolism or visioning, which practitioners call magic. Look how the boar’s blood and the spear are both present at once, and how the weight of the blood lowers the spear.

The tree is the embodiment of action. The mountain ash doesn’t make a great spear, but it certainly is a great way of focussing mind and body on the act of spearing.

There is, however, another angle to this story (as there always is in the world of indigenous thought and the language that speaks it best, poetry.) The red blood is the blood of a victim, the blood of a virgin, menstrual blood, and both life and death in one. Thor of Lilla Flyhov said it perhaps as simply as it needs to be said: the spear and a phallus are one. It thrusts upward, pierces the belly of the sky, and rains blood

Wells, British Columbia

Sacrifice and birth, male and female, action and reaction, in one representation: this is Thor’s presence, the concept of creating action out of stillness and seeing in stillness the potential for action. It is consciousness, for sure, but it’s also the body. Look again at that weird right hand.

It’s a placenta. The tree has many of them. It bursts out into them all over. The rowan is drenched in the blood of life and death. It is Bride and Groom, or Thor, in one. He cleaves unity to bring it together in a different form. This is the ladder one climbs to the stars.I hope those of you reading this post for science aren’t scratching your heads at all this poetry and wondering when the science is coming. It’s coming. It’s just that this poetry thing, well, that was science once. I don’t mean bad science, full of childish explanations of the root of physical processes, the ones that science has done such an amazing job of parsing, or cutting part, after Thor. I mean, poetry’s way of finding correlations and moments of doubling, uniting seeming opposites or creating them out of thin air, applied to the world, is a powerful tool for understanding it and for manipulating it — not through manipulating its physical stuff, as contemporary applied science does, but through manipulating the minds of the people acting and living within it, and changing the earth through that energy. I know so many scientists with such deep concern for the earth, all looking for a way to bring their message across and effect meaningful change. Poetry, written out of the earth and with the language of the earth and human bodies, has always been able to do that. The other kind of poetry, the one written with words on a page, can do it among people highly trained to cast their selves within books and to bring back, so to speak, the fish of thought, but it’s not completely the same thing, and might just be the reaction to a passing technology. The thing about these sky gods, though, like Thor, is that they are embodiments of a central knot within hunting, butchering, and its ritual form, sacrifice: the act of killing in order to bring life. Thor’s not the only one. Christ stands in this tradition. The god Mithras, who also came from the East, and whose cult very nearly won Rome over in place of Christianity, was one. With his dagger, he slayed the sacred bull and created the universe. We are sprung from the drops of the bull’s blood.

And, like Thor, he had an axe (and a dagger, which is kind of a short spear, but does the trick.)

Mithras Killing and Creating

Relief from Heidelberg-Neuenheim, Germany, 2nd Century AD Source These placentas, though. That’s where Bride comes in, the Goddess. If the spear is androgynous, and holds in time both the fertilizing thrust of a phallus and the blood quickening in a placenta, then this is as much the goddess’s tree as the god’s. It has that power of transporting one from one state to another, like the Roman god Janus, who was a doorway, that went both ways equally and transported you from one state to another every time you passed through him (and who, dear scientists, wasn’t a god in a simplistic sense but a way of remembering that cognitive power, and focussing it, for what could come from its development), and, more than Janus, of being both states, male and female, killer and victim, at once. It is also, as you can see, drawn to the sky, and bowed down to the earth as a consequence of this grasping, which always ends in feminine fruitfulness. That is a good lesson. Another is how this tree’s lightning bolt shape ……ends in a flowing (quite the different thing), which is a hand, that has the capability of grasping.

What does it grasp? The easy answer would be that the early church, needing to gain converts from celtic practitioners (the Celts, too, came from the East), simply replaced Bride (or Brigid) the goddess with Brigid, the Saint of Kildare.

Brigid, Saint of Kildare Source

St. Non’s Chapel, St. Davids, Wales

The better answer would be that the Christian shepherd’s staff, and the rowan were recognized as one …

The crook is there, with Christ’s blood, at the intersection of Earth and Heaven, life and death, and Christ cleaves them with his presence and the axe of his love, so to speak. This is no distance at all. The movement to Christianity wasn’t a conversion but an enlightenment, like the scientific Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, a kind of purification, extension, or manifestation of what was already known.

For this reason as well, rowans were considered an effective charm against witches — not against practitioners of the old arts, but against practitioners who hadn’t moved over to the new understandings of them, finding flower and fruit in the Christian story.

Rowan, Hólar, Ísland

I’ve shown you all these images of Iceland for a reason here, beyond my love of rowans and the beauty of the place. In Iceland, where the trees were all eaten and grazed away, independence from centuries of exploitation and misery under a regime of Danish traders came about through poetry, and the replanting of lost birches and rowans in Iceland. The attempt was to make the country a poem again, to rebuild, so to speak, the first moment of settlement, and reclaim that creative potential and independence. It worked, or at least it helped. Today, Reykjavik is still rich with these nationalist trees …

… that are kind of in the way, but no-one wants to cut down such magic.

They might try, but they just can’t go through with it. The trees have that much of a hold.

Reykjavik

The churchyards are rich with rowans, too. They signify not only the transfer of energy from pagan to Christian understandings of Thor’s axe and Christ’s Word …

Mårten Eskil Winge’s Thor (1872) Source

Note that cross that Thor is wielding there, the clever lad.

… but the balance struck between them …

Icelandic Stallion Grazing on an Elf Hill Under a Nationalist Agricultural School Churchyard Rowan (Laugar, Ísland)

In Iceland, you throw nothing away, because it is all alive in time. That is the balance, too.

The result is a way of being in balance in the world we live in and the world to come.

The Rowans of the Reykjavik Graveyard

Graveyards aren’t for the dead. They’re for the living. They focus the mind and so change the world. Every rowan does that …

… not just to those who know its stories, but to all who know how to read its language in the wild. By bringing that into our social structures, we become the world. We become changed, and the world we imagine becomes changed in turn, and so it comes to pass by the action of our hands. The ancients knew this, and worked hard to protect these relationships. For young men, Thor’s axe might have been there to gain advantage by cutting through the wisdom of the world and recreating it as action, but there were large social structures to guide that strength into productive and ultimately feminine forms.

In historical terms, it means that in the lands of the rowan, the Christian staff can be a magical one at the same time, with no contradiction. The rowan’s staff, or bloody spear, has led to such concrete social acts as the creation of states, science, and female power.

I hope you will find a rowan on Brigid’s Day and find your balance by being in its presence —for personal development, if you need that, for spiritual purposes, certainly, and for social development and renewal of the principles embodied in this tree and in the powerful, earth-altering symbolic life to which it has been dedicated.

A Dictionary of Atlantis

Creative Space in Iceland

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I started this blog a year ago, talking about tuns. Here’s the result of a year exploring them or just wandering through them (under the observant eyes of ravens.)

You Are Never Alone in Iceland, Hengifossá

(Well, unless you’re always looking for humans for company. In that case, it might be best to stay in Reykjavik.)

Today, I’d like to illustrate an observation that it’s not people who are creative, but space. Ah, you might ask, what is a tun that it might lead to an observation like that?

Icelandic Horse Scratching Its Head

A tun is something that you can observe (and take part in) everywhere in Iceland (and in the North). Here’s a tun in Denmark (the former colonizing power, grrr):

Half-Timbered Danish Farmhouse

Den Fynske Landsby, Fyn, Danmark. The working courtyard in front follows the ancient Norse (and thereafter Icelandic) architectural model of a tun, an open air working room between buildings.

Horse-drawn Wealth Spreader Waiting for Re-use

Hedge fund version 1.0.

The tun usually connected to the track to the next farm, or out to the world of trade. Here’s a variant on a tun, from East Iceland…

Landhus Farm Barn, Fljótsðalur

In this case, the tun is the road itself. It’s the architectural space (within the landscape rather than the farmyard) that carries forth the energy of the tun.

Icelandic Highway 1 in March, Mývatnssveit

Park your car here on the way back home from work.

The word “tun” is the German for “to do”. The English word is “doing.”

A nice triad!

It is a place of energy that creates the economy and trade and activity of a country (or a farm), or lets it efficiently take place. It is the place where the future is created. Without it, the activities of humans would not be as organized as it is, nor could it be efficiently packed up and exported from the farm (or the country.) Iceland, of course, is a sophisticated modern country, so we can expect this source of energy to take many forms today. Here are a few:

Parking Strip.

Art Project in Downtown Reykjavik

The pattern of tun-in-the-pasture is reversed to pasture-in-the-tun. (The tun is Reykjavik.) This pasture, though, is in the shape of a disused turf house. Clever stuff!

Movie theatre.

The Reykjavik Movie Theatre is Also a Place of Exchange.

Note that this is a re-purposed building. In other words, not only is the movie theatre a contemporary tun, but the building acts as one as well.

Church.

Vik Church, South Iceland

A very useful tun for work with souls. In this case, the houses of the village take the place of the buildings of a farmyard.

Forest.

Summerhouse in Kirkjubærjarklaustur

Youth.

A Movable Tun

Farm.

Icelandic Farmstead.

Note the elf house in the foreground. It’s good to live close to your neighbours.

Glacier.

Svinafellsjokul, Skaftafell National Park

Strutfoss

Aka glacier turning into light. Very good for the soul.

A glacier can attract tourists (and mine them for wealth), provide healthy recreation for the people (an idea of nature, imported from coal-smoke-choked industrial England), provide habit for fish …

The Laugarfljót, with a view to Snæfells

Unfortunately, capital-intensive economic systems can mess with that and simplify the idea of a tun almost to unrecognizability, like this:

This is propaganda in the service of art.

The Heart of the Mountain

OK, So Maybe Not Such a Great Idea After All

If you get too abstract with your tun, you run the risk of running out of manure. Good to know.

Ah, perhaps you’re tired of farms by now? Well, here you go, way up in the north…

Boat.

A Sea-Going Tun Space

Powered by human energy (doing). Any fish brought into the boat (the tun) are instantly converted into wealth. Well, as long as your arms are strong and the weather holds.

Garden.

The Akureyri Botanical Garden

School.

Hotel Edda, Akureyri

N1 Gas Station in Blondüos

Here’s a somewhat more esoteric tun from Kirkjubærjarklaustur:

A Window on the Tun …

… is part of the function of the tun, even when it’s a bit wonky from a stone cast up by a weed eater or, perhaps (judging from the repaired state of the wall) earthquake.

Similarly, a piece of propaganda-art (or is it art-propaganda?) in downtown Reykjavik provides an anchor point for tourists wandering down to the waterfront (very tun-ish, that)…

Tourism.

Leif the Lucky’s Aluminum Ship, with Modern Adventurers

If I was crossing the North Atlantic in a longboat, I’d want it to be a made out of aluminum, too.

… while reminding the Reykjavikers that the money that built their glittering waterfront…

City.

Reykjavik: Iceland’s Tun

It interacts with other national tuns to create the worldwide tun network.

… came from the aluminum smelter (and glacial-melt electricity) across the mountain in Whale Fjord.

Smelter.

Aluminum Smelter with World War II Airstrip (aka bird sanctuary), Hvalfjörður

Here’s Reykjavik’s most interesting tun, right on the waterfront …

Harpa.

Harpa

Not all tuns are so complex. Here’s one of the most basic (and powerful) of them all…

Graveyard.

Right Between Church and House

In this conception of wealth, capital (and money) aren’t exactly the goal, but a product of the tun space. The carefully-bounded space below, on the other hand, added to the tun space…

Field.

Stallions at Skriðuklaustur

Without the line that bounds this field, there would be no inputs to a tun space. It would only be a potential space. Never underestimate a line, in Iceland or anywhere else.

Here, this image may illustrate that more dramatically. Here we are at Myvatn…

Volcanic Slag, fenced and dunged = Field = Horse

Simple math.

If we lift the camera just a teensy bit, we get some perspective…

Volcanic Slag + Capital + Cleverness = Geothermal Power

Our horse is behind the rock.

You see how that works? The land has potential. It has a form of potential energy. The application of a particular technological approach towards defining it as space allows for different forms of energy to come out of it. A line gives us a field, gives us a horse. It will be brought into a tun, where this elementary relationship is retained. Capital gives use geothermal power station. It will be brought into a city, where it’s own elementary relationships are retained. In the first case, the earth is full of life and living relationships. In the second, humans are separated from the earth, which is a field of energy, that can be harvested. The interrelationship between these two ways of being is complex, but at all times the elementary principle remains: creativity comes from the space that is outlined by technology; the outcomes are predetermined. In other words, we who are humans are not separate from technology and cannot just direct it to our will. All we can hope for is to create spaces, which create energy flows that lead to where we wish to go, but we should be very clear as to where they might lead. Here’s a kind of tun that got its start in Iceland over a thousand years ago:

Thing.

The Thing Place in Þingvællir

On the principal that space creates function and energy is latent in the land, some tuns are geographical spaces. Like this…

Fjord.

Arnarfjörður, from Hrafnseyrie

This was the view that Jon Sigurdson, father of Icelandic independence, took in as a child.

Here’s a slightly altered version:

Harbour.

Stikkishólmur Harbour

Ruin.

Ruined Farmhouse near Arnarstapi

Well, there are many other forms of doings in Iceland. Cataloguing them won’t add to that appreciably. But perhaps this image might sum it up:

Bridge.

Golf Course.

Kjarval and the Children of Iceland

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Today I’m walking through the social ecology of Iceland, by way of the popular artist Kjarval. Here’s a hint of what’s coming later in the post…

Beautiful Human Monster, Kjarvalstaðir

Recycled, too. With teeth!

In Iceland things are what they are. For the earth, this is a pretty standard state of affairs. Luckily for all humans, it can be pretty beautiful, too. Like this:

4×4 Jeep at Church, Hallgrímskirkja, Reykjavik

Great matching colours at Reykjavik’s showpiece church! I think this approach might clash at the Vatican if you tried it there, though.

In Iceland, things are usually a little different than they first look. That red vehicle above, for instance, is not a 4×4 in the sense that its Japanese designers intended it. It’s more like a cross between an American military runabout and an Icelandic horse…

Pre World War II 4×4 Vehicle Putting a Fence to Good Use

These specifically Icelandic rules of social sculpture are largely unvoiced. I find them liberating — as another creature awkwardly domesticated by a colonial legacy: a Canadian.

Second Hand Furniture Emporium with Droopy Flag, Vernon, Canada

In Canada as well as in Iceland, the remnants of past economies provide fertile ecological niches for new economies. The land (often talked about but always distant) is not the point.

The kind of social sculpture in the above image is found wherever humans settle down, of course. What makes it different in former colonies (such as Iceland and Canada) is that the technologies are all foreign. That might sound a bit obvious, but consider it this way: at installations like this …

Antique Store Window, Vesturgata

Selling the world’s junk back to the world.

…in France, French people get to largely root around in their own heads. In Iceland or Canada, people are largely rooting around in someone else’s head. Not the same thing.

Store Window, Reykjavik

Lures for humans looking for a new image for their bodies. Important note if you want to try this at home: the realization that the human is the body is not part of this aesthetic. You can only do that with impunity in colonial centres, not at their peripheries.

Canada has its own approaches to power and to its colonial legacy (Largely, Canada is a social rather than a geographical location. It has replaced social and economic growth in “geographical place” by luring immigrants from other former world colonies, whose comfort with living in dis-placed lines of force is more attractive to Canada’s elites than is the costly rootedness of former immigrants). Iceland, too…

Slot Machine Casino Window Advertisement, Reykjavik

Giant drugs? Concrete money? A clever nordic pun for “real money”, I’d say, and presented in a colourful larger-than-life artifice, too. Top marks for this dynamically-energized street art-political installation and its recycling of images of contemporary global colonialism. Note the pink paint — a kind of dog-like territorial marking made by humans partially resistant to the human entrapment technology called “advertising” and its tried-and-true sexual lures. Imagine: wild humans, among us, even now in 2013. One hardly dare breathe, lest one scare them away!

Just as in Canada, human political elites (the A-type power personalities that usually dominate human relationships) really like this kind of stuff. It supports their power structures well. There are variations on this model, though. In Canada, as I mentioned, they experiment with mass immigration as a means of forestalling change. In Iceland, however, they lure people foreign to the culture for temporary visits (tours), during which they are offered images of their own culture, such as this street-side bar offering English drinks for English visitors (seen here through its window) …

… and, still on the English theme, this other bar, up the street and down the hill towards the water…

England, Denmark, and the United States in One!, Reykjavik

(American beer slogan graffiti, English musical icons, and Danish Carlsberg beer.)

The key to colonial societies is the almost random recombination of multiple foreign influences, none of which are home-grown. It leads to exquisite and exciting (and beautiful) temporary art exhibits like this…

Construction Site, Reykjavik

Although only the most powerful of these sculptural objects is Icelandic (the rock holding up the corner of the palette), the combination of elements is pure Icelandic (in the sense of Iceland as a social space.) One learns to navigate one’s own colonization. One makes a home in it, so to speak.

This, the wisdom of urban people worldwide, finds its perfection in colonialism (including its new face, migration.) Intriguingly, in this art form mechanized reproduction is not an infringement on individuality. You can repeat the same Háspenna advertisement on all sides of the same building (and probably, if Coca Cola is any example, around the world) with impunity.

Aren’t you glad, though, you can’t hear the screaming?

As a part of global culture, this casino (and its copy writers) is relying on the concept that an individual human is a moment of emotional and biological energy — a wordless animal that delights in colour and scripts that it can move into, inhabit and ‘flesh out’. It is up to dominant social humans to write those scripts in such a way that when biological humans enter them, their accompanying social humans believe they have written them themselves. It is best to maintain such illusions of individual identity. Humans are a little touchy when it comes to identity issues.

To recap, I’ll try to simplify that into an image. It shows a couple biological humans in a piece of performance art directed on the fly by the social humans who fill them like spiritual water. Here it is:

Humans are Mightily Attracted to Work, Laugarvegur

Excellent colour work here, especially the inner hallway carpet’s lush mauve, pulled out to protect the concrete from paint spills. The bubble gum that already has used it as an abstract expressionist canvas shouldn’t be spoiled carelessly, should it. No, it should not. That’s deep respect, that’s what that is.

Now I’ll try to return that to words: because human identities are crafted by contemporary political elites to appear as attractive homes for social and biological humans alike, such art as the Háspenna advertisement above is a form of sculpture or building. If you think “stable”, you’re pretty much on the mark. Here is its physical corollary:

Biological Care Facility (Apartment or Stable), Reykjavik

Complete with climate control. No price is too great. After all, no social life forms are possible without the biological humans they carry around with them. Such complicated art works! So delightful!

Simply, you just can’t have social power, or a national state and the benefits of security it brings, without socialized (domesticated) humans. Wild ones are just trouble.

Wild Humans Causing Trouble in a Bankrupt Construction Site, Reykjavik

They missed the socialization that was supposed to teach them that domestication and culture are the same thing. Poor things.

For the purposes of nationalizing humans, art is absolutely essential. It is a kind of engineering much akin to the construction of bridge girders. Here, for example, are some temporary Icelandic residents (tourists) training themselves in this technology …

Skógafoss (Forest Falls), Iceland

This beautiful waterfall is in the process of successfully luring these humans to its lair. Don’t let the lack of a forest spoil your experience with that exquisite retro-art form, “nature”. There was a forest once. People got cold. They burnt it. Wouldn’t you do the same for your body? I know I would.

I’d like to introduce a term which describes this effect. It is this: Photographic Acclimatization. You use it in a sentence like this:

The people in the above image are training themselves in the contemporary art technique of Photographic Acclimatization.

Here are some more humans hard at work at just that …

World Humans Meet the Earth

And then stand there, far, far past where language can lead them, staring. Sometimes they meet their biological selves for the first time in this way. Being generous and merciful, Icelandic tour bus drivers bring them here by the busload. If you drive real fast, you can make it from Reykjavik to here and back in a day, which is, frankly, wayyyyyy too far and hard on the bus drivers, but, as I say, they are generous and merciful.

The popular art form of photographic acclimatization is an updated version of the 19th century science of butterfly collecting, something which I’ve been trying to make into a new science of late, although without a net.

Western Swallowtail in Some Feral Alfalfa

This turkish forage plant was left behind in the faeces of some cattle, back when this part of Oregon Territory was an updated version of the Wild West. The alfalfa decided to stay. In the 19th century, I would have had to catch this beauty with a net and pin it on a card. It would then be usable by modern human art-makers, as an image of past human-earth interfaces. As a wild butterfly, it is relatively invisible, as is the undocumented weed ecosystem it now inhabits. It is like a brand new earth out there!

Photographic Acclimitization is based on the principle of traveling the country (or the world) to capture images of things that you have seen before in advertising material. It is absolutely essential to modern society. It allows socialization processes to ‘gel’ into the complex social sculptures without which the society could not exist in a stable form.

What Happens When Photography and Other Furniture Are Used for Asocial Purposes: Rogue Art!

Look at how these poor beasts are chained up night and day. Poor things.

Plato, the Greek philosopher who pointed out that each chair is a projection of a perfect chair in Heaven, would turn over in his grave. This approach will not lead to nationalism. The following is a more appropriate photographic subject:

Icelandic Tourism Display: Endless Night Land

This will lead to nationalism. A year ago, tourists from around the world were asked to submit their photographs of Iceland and to coin a new term for the country which expressed their experience. The ones in keeping with the promotional goals of Iceland’s copywriters were chosen, lavishly photographed, and turned into a “new” (or at least re-cycled) promotional package. It’s the casino all over again!

After all, it’s not just horses, sheep and cattle who are domesticated in the process of creating a society out of farmers.

Teenage Art, Hallórmstadur

Tasked with the job of leading young children to exploration of art in a wooden hut in Iceland’s national forest, teenagers practice the social art instructions of their Walt Disney-style drawing pad.

Note the Arrows

They aid in the process of refining the complexity of the human body into simple, infinitely reproducible lines.

The goal is the sculpting of readily portable masks, called identities …

Identity Creation Materials Skólavörðustigur

… which can be worn as display objects in public.

Checking for Traffic. Vesturgata

Individually sited, using a mass-produced stencil. Now that’s about as good a definition of colonialism and migration as I’ve ever heard.

Identity masks for human bodies come in many types, all attractive to social humans. They include clothing, hair styles, facial expressions, language, apartment furnishings, art and, of course, footwear. You don’t want your favourite human to wander the streets unshod. He or she might step on a nail, right? And, besides, they’d have a hard time getting into restaurants to be wined and dined, and then where would you, a social human, be with a cranky, hungry animal tethered to you?

Reykjavik Graveyard

A reason to keep your body shod.

The image above looks like the mass-produced, flippy-flappy Swedish flat-packed style shoe racks that can be found in houses, apartments and closets worldwide. It’s not. It’s Icelandic art.

Icelandic Shoe Choosing Rack for Two

A pair for each identity mask.

No doubt, the other millions of shoe racks worldwide are also completed with a sterling collection of globally-sourced, mass-produced shoes, but that’s not the point. The point is, of course, the flare, or gesture, with which one installs it. For example, construction sites are also part of artistic display worldwide …

Reykjavik Harbour Art Installation

This is a form of process art. It is, after all, called a “building”, not a “built.” In such subtle ways, a language directs the humans that it occupies.

… but turning them into playgrounds for children, complete with turf, tires, and repurposed fish boat tubs, well, now that takes flare. Lots of flare.

Imitation Elf Village, Reykjavik Harbour

This Icelandic art form incorporates such a keen eye for the beauty of artistic line and colour that it makes the fantasy character creation materials window (art supplies store) above seem a lot like a visit to the dentist. I mean, don’t just gawk at all this beauty … walk around in it!

Reykjavik Harbour Construction Site

Children encouraged. Look at the magical rope boat anchor cross angel talisman, eh! Such an exquisite turquoise. There’s no way you could squeeze colour like that out of a tube.

If you walk around long enough, you might find the materials to build a sculptural representation of your body, like a ghost from long ago, and even move into it and sleep and dream…

A Good Place to Go on a Rainy Day

The children, however, are all in school. Poor things.

Neighbourhood School and Canadian-Style Child Socialization Device, Seljavegur

Like many play places in Iceland, the playground and its accompanying school (socialization device) are situated on a plot of land set aside for “the other people”. In most cases, this means elves. In this particular case, dwarves.

It is socially acceptable in Iceland to allow children to play and learn among the other people. This is a primary rule in Iceland, and why not. After 1100 years of crippling poverty, the Viking settlers of Iceland lost so much — almost everything, in fact. What remains are a few sturdy humans, horses, dogs, sheep and the other people. All are granted almost unbridled respect as the spiritual creatures that they are. Accordingly, a village of the other people is also a good place to build a church …

Elf Houses Among the Crocusses in front of Hallgrímskirkja, Reykjavik

That’s a statue of Leif the Lucky, donated by “The People of the United States of America” after World War II. Excellent playground! Sadly, the dutch crocuses and the elves, which have both gone native here, don’t get a plague.

… but you can never build a house on elf rock …

Alf House and Human Housing, Reykjavik

It’s tricky to decide who has the better deal.

A popular saying in Iceland is “You never know.” It’s used to describe the Icelandic love of slapdash construction and the lack of interest in cleaning up old junk. The reason for it is “you never know” whether elves exist or not, or even God, so you keep churches and elves around because it might prove useful some day. You also “never know” when the economy is going to collapse or a volcano is going to blow its top, so there’s no point in settling down too comfortably, either. One’s home is Iceland, not some particular private property within it, because “you never know.” Actually, you do…

Farm on the Snæfells Peninsula

Once very nearly wiped out by a) a lava flow, b) a cinder cone, and c) the ash that came along with them. In Iceland, this kind of thing happens all too often. Icelanders know this.

As a result, in Iceland one’s home is not in a ‘place’ but in a community. In the past, displacement was so rampant in Iceland that most people were less than indentured servants, continually on the move from one side of the country to the other, looking for some point of entrance into secure social structures (Hint: there were none.) Icelanders tell themselves (and the world) that they created their country for themselves by throwing off the yoke of Danish colonization. As the above examples of contemporary colonization should demonstrate, it wasn’t the Danes (or any other country) that was the real yoke. The yoke was separateness. It was broken when Icelanders gained enough perspective on their situation to realize that to be properly socialized they would have to participate in their own socialization, so they took to it with great enthusiasm and earnestness.

One Manager (Labouring) and Two Workers (Supervising) Spend Two Hours Fixing a Door to Nowhere Reykjavik Skate Park

One Canadian is most enchanted. No skaters, mind you. Lots of Italian graffiti art, though.

This basic rule of human socialization applies as much to individual as to group humans (families, communities, corporations and other social identities, not all of them friendly.) In capitalist societies, it takes the form of “economy”, a kind of language that attempts to profit from exchange and, indeed, makes an entire artistic language out of it, all the way from the Icelandic banking industry (a form of gambling) to the Icelandic gambling industry (a form of banking).

I Bet You Were Wondering Where That Gold Got To!

This would be tricky for iguanas, but fortunately it’s dead simple for humans. As you (a social sculpture) and your biological human (‘your’ body) explore this art form, do keep in mind that self sculpture is often built around sculpture designed to shape you, and if you’re anything like normal you’ll chafe a bit at that.

Abandoned Farmhouse, Suðurdalur

“What? Me stay poor in the middle of nowhere, while everyone else in Reykjavik has television and Wienerbrød (a Danish, colonial pastry)? No way, Jóni!

And what do half wild humans do in Reykjavik? They learn the ropes. And the half-wild children of domesticated humans, what do they do? Most of them live in places like this …

The Hamburger Factory Cow…

… and her people going to work. Later they’ll come back for some hamburgers with the family, while she, in her lovely Icelandic sweater, looks bovinely on.

… and then get restless, which looks like this …

Art, Open Air Gallery, Frakkastigur

These restless humans are intent on adding a touch of wildness to the contemporary city, using the very elements (imported technologies, concepts and rituals) which they appear to be rejecting. Such is the paradox of people whose cultures have grown in colonial situations.

Tractor Hiding Behind a Fence, Ingólfstræti, Reykjavik

Like the troll under the bridge in The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Note the excellent use of colour and the rather fraught respect given to the rowan trees — once a potent symbol of nationalism and now a no-less-potent symbol of ‘home’ and ‘place’.

For most Icelanders, the tension between the 19th century romantic story (the imported concepts of wild nature, wildflowers, waterfalls, beauty, landscapes, nationalism, and all that fine stuff, which enabled Icelanders to see their country as something larger than a net of social relationships, and which eventually led to the kind of post-colonial independence it has today) …

Strutsfoss, Suðurdalur

The invention of the colour blue. Pure 19th Century! Yes, it is possible to travel in time in Iceland. Wear sturdy shoes. A walking stick helps. Watch out for snow drifts (5 feet deep).

… is easily enough merged with newer imported technologies and old forms of social integration, into their communal village, contemporary Reykjavik…

Reykjavik, Old Town

A typical neighbourhood view. This is what time (1945-2013) looks like when viewed all at once.

Culture creates a form of time that doesn’t move. Instead, it sculpts it into a complex dynamic. In the Icelandic case, this dynamic is a series of modernized replacements for turf houses for biological humans.

Two Kinds of Modernized Turf House, Reykjavik

The social decisions of humans over time and the ways in which they choose to animate space with their bodies and minds, including what they retain and what they discard, is a form of art.

In this case, the genre might be called: Stairways to Heaven. Or even, Jacob’s Ladder:

New Edition of the Holy Bible, from the Period Before the Banking Collapse, Skúlagata

There’s so much to learn and celebrate, but, as I said, it’s not always what it seems. Take this older art form, for instance:

Litlafoss, Hengifossá

Nice waterfall, for sure. The raw power of nature. Pure beauty. Etcetera. We all know this romantic, 19th century story, and it’s worth telling and walking into. But there’s another story. About a century ago, there were five poles to North European culture: Nordic, Anglo-American, Middle European (including German and Jewish), Eastern European and French. Today, there is largely just a rump of the Anglo-American and a sliver of French. War will do that. In the forgotten Nordic version, though, the earth of men, or Middle Earth, was a point of balance between an earth of fire and an earth of ice. The waterfall above is just this balance. So is the one below: Detail of Waterforms by Kjarval

His friend, the writer Gunnar Gunnarsson, was also deeply attentive to Middle Earth.

Another way of looking at Middle Earth is to describe it as The Middle Way. For example, Iceland chooses to support certain of its artists, musicians and writers for life, as they are considered important parts of the national fabric, as essential for the support of the people as roads and electrical transmission lines and law courts.

Icelandic Artists Pointing the Way to to the Aluminum Plant

Make no mistake: this too is nature.

To support the arts in Iceland, sometimes you build an art gallery for a popular artist, such as Kjarval, which includes living quarters for both the man and his paintings. Such museums are scattered around Reykjavik. With the passing of the artist, they become full-fledged galleries … based around the achievements of an individual who serves as a model for citizens of the national state. If you were a poet, though, you’re more likely to get this:

Memorial to Jónas Hallgrímmson, Öxnadal

Long before Gunnar Gunnarsson, Jónas went to Denmark for an education. He came back with the idea of planting trees — an important contribution to Icelandic independence, as it helped Icelanders start to create their landscape, rather than just experience it. As a reward, Jónas has been planted among the trees. That’s his bust on the rock, there, within sight of the turf house of his childhood, high on the mountain in behind.

Artists have been a bit luckier. In the case of Kjarval, he got a museum. It is even called Kjarvalstaðir, or Kjarval City. In it, you will find this (waterless) waterfall…

Detail of Kjarval’s Technique

You get the idea: oil paint on canvas, brush strokes, and all the markings of modern art. Except, it’s not what it seems. It’s not really modern art at all. It’s folk painting that looks like modern art.

Now, before you read why I think this is an example of an old Nordic tradition living on into the present global art installation, let’s pull back a bit and look at the waterfall in its context.

Kjarval’s Waterfall

Pardon my camera’s wonky understanding of light and colour. Luckily it’s the lines that are intriguing here. Look at them all. All kinds of squiggly this and that, eh.

Critically, Kjarval is an enigma. From the point of view of modern art, he was obviously a skilled practitioner (although it’s usually mentioned that he was self-taught — which is code-word for “Hunh? Whah? Why?”).

Church Bazaar Art Elevated to World Gallery Status

That’s Kjarvalstaðir for you! If you think this is a criticism, think again. It is, among other things, a form of deep respect. For another thing, there is no Platonic law that states that a work of art by an individual can’t find its fullest expression socially (such as in the social frame of an art gallery.)

Kjarval is also frequently described in the art world as an oddity, because he never settled on a personal style, nor developed all of his skilful interpretations of world art traditions and techniques into a language of his own, which is de rigeur for a modern-art-scientist-individual type, like, say, Klee or Picasso. Kjarval remained colonial to the end, as in this energy diagram resulting from a cross between Gaugin and a German woodcut (Without wood, the medium of choice became paint imitating wood’s recording of solar and water energy — very clever.)

… or this incomplete pencil crayon fun, lovingly framed by the gallery’s architecture and lighting …

In terms of the art world, these deviations from an elaborate intellectual language are the signs of an amateur, even a child or even, gasp, a non-artist. Now, that just can’t be. How are you going to have a national artist, when there’s no art? It does certainly leave the Icelanders with a bit of a problem: not only is Kjarval the most popular of all Icelandic artists, bar none, but there’s a whole architecturally beautiful museum plunked down in Reykjavik devoted largely to his work, and in a display as sophisticated as any small town display of amateur works by a local painting club, too…

Bit of an embarrassment, really. Ah, but it’s not what it seems. For one thing, you can serve food. That works. Keep the bodies fed and magic may follow. You never know! Actually, you do…

Viewing the Art is Not the Point.

Living with it, and within its display, is. Why, one can be as easily framed by the gallery as is the art. That is, actually, a pretty profound experience. Icelanders know this.

For another thing, take a look at some of those marks below and to the right of that waterfall I showed you above…

Kjarval’s Paint Gouging

It’s like he set his cat onto it, with claws. Or let his pet raven wander over it, scritchy-scratching, or started playing x’s and o’s with his subconscious. I wonder who won.

Now we’re getting somewhere. In the world of individualistic, über-scientific modern art, child of the Enlightenment, god daughter of the intelligentsia, brush strokes, scratches, gouges, lines and other marks are part of a sophisticated texture … which somehow doesn’t include these. These look rather formless. They’re not, but the impression holds, nonetheless. That’s because, they’re really this:

Kjarval’s Elves

…and this…

Kjarval’s Trolls !

Poor art critics! The Icelandic people love looking for the faces within Kjarval’s paintings. The art critics just scratched their heads at the childishness of it all.

Well, one can forgive the art critics. For one thing, they didn’t go to school in an elf village, did they. For another, no one built them a playground in the harbour. For another, they might not have seen this:

Trolls, þingvællir

Looking down over the World’s first parliament (965 AD).

So, let’s recap: a country that retains its folk animals and its folk beliefs because the land is unstable and “you never know” (although they do), does not build houses on fairyland but raises and educates and plays with its children on it instead — and not because they’re children; because they’re equally valued and are socialized by exposure to non-human energy. The country’s favourite artist interprets world artistic mark-making within this context and replaces sophisticated intellectual mark with sophisticated folk marks, in which the non-visible energies of the other people are everpresent and revealed …

… as if they were a language (a spiritual language, which is one step up the ladder from a. physical, b. individual, and c. social). The country responds by completing the art work in a social context and then proceeds to do a most amazing thing. It brings its children here, a place now as sacred and powerful as the elf houses themselves, and proceeds to educate them into sophisticated artistic responses. Method includes a room for parents and their children to make art together and post it into frames on the wall after viewing the galleries, in a process as capable of social completion and change as Miro, say, or Klee, within their non-colonial contexts (and which would function as colonizers here, if not released from that role by this truly Icelandic process, with its roots in the Middle Way of ancient Nordic culture) …

… and a project in making art out of recycled materials, which includes small people less than three years old, whose innate art-making has not been otherwise rewritten by elite codes …

Icelandic Artist’s Collage

(Name with-held for privacy. Available on request.) Age 2 yrs, 11 months.

… sophisticated portraits …

… elaborate portraits of dwarves …

… a Coast Guard Ship …

… the family cat …

… Diaper Day Mom …

… Enough ribs to make ribs fun again …

… and an elaborate, high-art contribution by parents and teachers, helping to stage the show …

Beautiful! It Almost Upstages the Kids…

… but not quite.

This is what the Canadian approach to a colonial past misses: a past before the colonial past that it can reach into and transform the colonial experience into merely a passing fancy. In Canada, cultures are continually replaced. In Iceland, children are brought to make art in the country’s national galleries, and the art they are asked to view there is of exactly the same kind of material, intent, and subject matter as what they produce in response to it. And so the cultural loop is closed — partly because “children” are viewed as equals to adults, if not superior to them, which is definitely not the Canadian way. In Canada, they are educated to be adults. In Iceland, they are already adults, just very special ones. Is Kjarval’s art “world class”. No, not in the way that is meant. But does “world class” art find fulfillment in the following image? (Hint: no, it does not. It might look like modernist Dutch art, but it is not.)

Typical Reykjavik Housing

1000 years of clustering together in the Bath Hall (the only heated space) in their houses have made Icelanders eager to live very closely together. It also helps to keep out Nature, which is great retro stuff for attracting money from tourists who grew up within its 19th and 20th century images …

Hverfjall

… but it can kill you. It is best to make something out of it.

Turf Barn, Landshús, Norðurdalur

So, Icelandic art and literature can sometimes appear childish and a bit awkward (Gunnar’s sure does, at times, and the contemporary situation is no different), but they work within a very specific social context, that is still in touch with the Nordic roots of contemporary Western life, roots which most of the literary and art worlds have completely lost. Next, I’ll explore those roots a little, but for now, thank you for spending some quality time with me among the elves.

Harold Among the Elves

Goðafoss

True Love in Reykjavik

Heading Out

1 Reply

The two travellers set sail again.

The Language of Birds

6 Replies

I was thinking of lines and circles and how all stories start there, when I noticed these circles of ice, each with a yolk, leading in a line to this little fall below a long-abandoned turf house at the end of the valley. Next stop the glacier.

I thought they were very nice indeed and stopped all my rushing around for a moment just to breathe in the same place as them, and then the whole world kind of stopped and fell into focus …

Long stories of birds tracks, leading everywhere, even …

… onto the ice floes! In this kind of talking, birds definitely have the advantage. For a while I followed the lines and sentences and song lines and line dancs of this story…

The birds were writing a beautiful music. I felt I could almost read it …

… and I knew it wasn’t random. There were too many stanzas and too much fine drawing work centred on stones, and I thought, well, isn’t that a beautiful thing: the delicate footsteps and the cold, hard stone …

Somehow, it made the stone a lot more like air… really fascinating air. All this time, I was meditating on lines, of course, because Ken Blackburn, sculptor, put me up to that, and circles, so I thought, in my human way, that it would be a fine thing to follow those lines and learn the dance steps, so to speak. Who needed a mind. Let the body do the dancing, I thought. Well …

… I could have paid more attention to this, I guess. But I was happy and out by the falls, with the water singing away, so I pulled my ball of wool out of my pocket, that I have been using as a very slow walking image-making tool — not a camera; something more physical and human than that, and I dipped it into the water …

… and starting unwinding off of its bobbin. If you’ll remember, when I wound it there, I pulled the energy out of the Skriðuklaustur well, through the monastery garden, around and around the axle of the earth, through the church, and up to the carving of Mary (?) on the hill. Now I was unwinding that energy among the birds …

… ah, yes, as you can see, the spiral of the first winding stayed with the wool. That made me realize I knew close to nothing. Then …

… the wind demonstrated that I wasn’t going to follow the birds, no how, no when. The birds, for all their, I dunno, 90 grams of weight, could outgust the wind better than I. Maybe that randomness …

… was a way of harnessing the wind. So, I thought, OK, I’ll be the human here, and let whatever lines I can make by pulling on the string, and whatever lines the wind teases out of it, lie against the lines of the birds and see what that’s all about. Well,

… my line was awfully straight at times …

… and retained a lot of memory at other times, and …

… ooops!. But eventually my rather straight but colourful line seemed to frame the bird tracks nicely enough …

… and sometimes even followed the birds …

… even improvised …

… and soared on flights of fancy …

… in its own conversation with the rocks. Up into the rocks I led the string as it led me …

… and when I looked back, I thought, well, I’m going quiet all over again, and I thought I had gone quiet before…

Onward, up onto the sand …

… and the grasses …

… I went. Now, the thing about having 70 metres of Norwegian wool is that it has an end, and when you’re unwinding it off of the axle of the earth and get near that end, you start looking for a place to land, a place that has some physical meaning. The little birch trees, I thought, just like the spindle, but living, not dead! Well, I thought it, but the string ended here …

Wool, Spindle and Moss

at the end … or the beginning … of the line of blood and fire?

Yeah, which? Should I wind the spindle back from the water to the sky, or from the sky to the water, I wondered? Should I bring the well, through Mary, to the mountain stream, or the mountain stream, with Mary and the well, up to new life? Well, that was a no-brainer: to life! This story, I felt was not one that repeated itself three times to make a tight spell. It was going somewhere, although I did not know where. I had to trust it. So, I did, and I rolled that yarn up, slowly walking the path of the birds among the stones, over the thin ice, with the thinner creek below, and this time, I noticed this …

… I didn’t make the first line in this place.

Or the second! Well, not counting the lines of the birds, but I think they were making more than a line, or a series of lines, but that’s skipping ahead in the story. For the moment…

Life! Richer than it was before.

The well in the Garden of Eden, the Monastery Church, the Baptismal Font, the Axle of the World, Mary (?) and now a flock of unseen birds, all right there, burning.

The physicality of this method of slow photography charmed me: the wet wool on my fingers, the feel of the sheep’s hair on my fingertips, the cold, and the repetitive, meditative motion of winding it, and matching my footsteps to the winding had helped me to see this valley, and my place in it, intensely. And then, just when I thought I had been as quiet as I could be …

… the birds came!

They came by the hundreds, on and on, in a fast river, winding with the river upstream, weaving in the air, landing briefly, lifting, an tumbling on…

… and I went so silent that I just put my camera down and raised my arms into the stream of birds, as they came at me, materializing out of the water and the light, and laughed out loud. And then, as quickly as they came …

… they flew away over the fields. And that’s why it took me two days to get to the falls.

Strutafoss, Iceland

And that’s partly why they left me wordless with wonder.

The story of the wool comes to a powerful climax tomorrow.

Alchemical Coffee at the Cloister Farm

3 Replies

Ah, for the writer who has it all, a dream month in East Iceland and all that Icelandic Light, when the weather breaks and it’s time for a dash to the sea in a Japanese car so small that it fits on half the width of an Icelandic gravel road but which is no good in snow or wind, what one needs is an early cup of coffee before heading through the narrow dark line cut through the drifts to the sea. This, my friends, is not what you might expect, and demonstrates some of the improvisation I have learned from Iceland in my time here. Let me lead you through the ritual of matins:

1. The Beans.

Only the Best that “Plus” has to Offer Will Do

The body is a spiritual vessel, remember. Spare no expense. $8 instead of $6. You must.

2. The Sacred Tools

No! Don’t Touch That Thing. It is There to Deceive!

Well, actually, it needs a diaper (Third drawer down. You’re welcome.), but it’s your choice: pour in 12 cups of water to get 4 cups of coffee… and where do you think the other water goes, hmmm? Your socks will find it.

3. The Choice of a Lifetime

Oh, oh, oh, oh, How?

Spiritual choices are not supposed to be easy. And look at that cup. What a tease.

4. The Choice

This is a variation on the Norwegian Coffee on the Back of a Canadian Stove in 1931 Method Perfected by My Grandmother, Who Was Only an Honorary Norwegian, But When You Were Starving You Were Starving, so You Look Like You Need a Cup of Coffee, Dear.

In the original method, a few drops of cold water settle the grounds and you are there! But, it proved to be rather lukewarm coffee, so… improvise!

5. Add the sacred Icelandic waters…

6. Do what Earth does when she spins wool and fate…

7. Attach A Fancy Fishing Net Kind of Device to the Other Coffee Pot…

Well, it’s a bit of a strain and a shaky balance. You’d think it was meant to go in that temptress of a machine in the back or something. Be firm! Be resolute! Have faith!