Tag Archives: Water

Lessons from a Poet’s House

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Kristján Einarsson lived here in Djupalæk.

It’s a bit more exposed than a North American or Continental poet’s house. Here’s the kind of poem you write in a place like this:

Strings

Stones are strings.
The water makes them roar.
Its a delight to know
What lives in the mind of water…

Kristján

Mind you, water is tight these days:

Lots in the Atlantic, but for fresh water for the sheep, it has to be brought in in plastic tanks. Even though it falls, almost daily, from the sky. Isn’t this the real poverty and isolation?

The Dancing Stones of Ytri-Hvannagil

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Water or vatn, these are just words.

A trip out to Njardvik and Ytri-Hvannagil is the thing to put those behind you.

This stuff is alive.

The secret of writing books in Iceland is to stop writing them.

Here, one is written.

Note, as Gunnar did, the chain-linked rhymes of Icelandic epic verse rising from the stone itself. Atlantis, he called it.

Fair enough. Iceland, too, is only a name.

This is more.

 

Icelandic Austerity is Beautiful

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Time and again, Gunnar wrote that poverty is the greatest wealth. Here’s an example from his childhood fjord. Here, every farm i needed a source of fresh water. The smaller the farm, the more precarious the source. Here’s the water source of a small croft near Bringubakki.

Look how the water flows with life within the remains of winter’s cold, just as the life flows through the family that brings it into their house. This small, austere pleasure of this correspondence is a great richness.

Getting into the Flow in East Iceland

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Look at the Kelduá emerge from its valley. Here in the remote East, water turns to stone and back to water, and stone flows like water, then freezes, then breaks apart and flows like water again.

It is why a river in Iceland is an á: not a substance but a flow (aqua), not water but the energy that materializes as water and, as you can see, as stone. And jumbles them all up together. And breaks them apart. When you stand there and see beauty, it is that energy that you sense. The freezing energy, that is the business of frost. Keep your distance from that stuff! It’s lethal.

Rock Sorts Water

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Yesterday, I shared some pictures of the mystery of water sorting rock, and suggested that this knowledge we all know when we walk along the shore. Instantly. It works the same the other way.
Straumeyri


Stekkalaekur (x3)

Human intelligence flows out and flows in at the same time when you live on an island in the middle of the great grey sea.



Gunnar’s Journey to Atlantis (Islands in the Open Sea), Awaiting Translation