The Faraway Nearby (15 page)

Everything travels. Even the story of the Buddha came to Iceland several hundred years ago like a migratory bird, another fairy tale that mutated as it meandered. The honorific term
Boddhisattva
became the Arabic name Budhasaf or Yudhasaf, which became the Greek name Iosaph and Joasaph elsewhere in Europe, and Joasaph was long revered as one of the two saints who converted India to Christianity. The story migrated from Syriac to Greek to Latin to a Norse translation of about 1250 that is credited to King Haakon the Younger, who may have done it himself or more likely commissioned it. An independent Icelandic translation from a German version was made a couple of centuries later.

Both tell the story of the prince whose father tried to protect him from the world and from knowledge of suffering, of how he finds it anyway, and goes on to a monastic life. “Thus it was,” said a caustic writer in 1895, “that by virtue of the infallibility vouchsafed to the papacy in matters of faith and morals Buddha became a Christian saint.” Which was viewed as problematic if you wanted facts with untangled lineage, but if you prefer stories to migrate as freely as birds and mingle and evolve, it's a joy.

Stories migrate; meanings migrate; everything metamorphoses. Birds flew north in the summer, the golden plover from northern Europe to Iceland, the whooping swans from Scotland among other places, the tiny Icelandic wheatear from as far as northern Africa, but the arctic terns came all the way from the antarctic realms. I wandered around my temporary home on this island shaped like a heart, the volatile ice-covered heart that occasionally beat, with lava, boiling water, and steam in its veins. The farthest point I could reach on foot was Helgafell, the sugarloaf hill around which stories were wrapped like clouds, and where Gudrun Osvifursdottir was buried a thousand years before, the proud woman at the center of the Laxdaela Saga and all its slaughter and loss.

Once a farmer who spoke only Icelandic gave me a ride back from Helgafell in a rain; and cashiers spoke brusquely to me about money in the low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit den that was the chain supermarket; and there was a librarian with some responsibility for the Library of Water who provided practical aid every now and again. Otherwise no one spoke to me because Iceland was not good at strangers or because I had landed in a small town far away from everything else that was nevertheless too much like the white suburb I had dedicated my life to escaping.

The town of Stykkishólmur had been a fishing village, but everything changes, and Iceland's small fishing-boat economy had been sold out to transnational trawlers. Everything migrates, but the old boats were mostly hauled up on land, their propellers full of dried seaweed and their windows checkered with fading permit stickers from years before. Words travel, because the word
arctic
comes from
arktos,
Greek for bear.
Cancer
comes from the Greek word for crab,
karkinos
. Memory, or one of its locations in the brain, the hippocampus, means seahorse. A bestiary is buried in our language.

The bears for which the arctic was named were traveling too, swimming long distances and floating away on the fractured summer ice, coming to Iceland and dying there, and running out of space or out of ice everywhere. That the locals were not good at visitors the two polar bears who came ashore that summer found out. The first one was thought to have swum two hundred miles from Greenland, though it may have come on drift ice some or most of the way.

“There was fog up in the hills and we took the decision to kill the bear before it could disappear into the fog,” said the police spokesman for the north coast, and the environment minister said the bear was shot because the drugs to tranquilize it were nowhere to be found quickly, and the local veterinarian said he had those drugs in his car but not a gun with which to shoot a tranquilizer dart. The first polar bear to be recorded in Iceland arrived in 890, suggesting bears had been showing up before human beings had, but they never settled and bred and became resident as foxes and people did.

A second bear arrived a couple of weeks after the first, and this time Copenhagen zoologists were supposed to take it back to Greenland. Police shot it instead, as though it had been a criminal. A twelve-year-old girl had spotted it in front of her parents' farm on the north coast, white against black lava. It had been feasting on eider ducks' eggs, so perhaps it died happy, though the happiness of polar bears takes some imagining.

I hardly felt welcomed in the town where the Library of Water was situated, but I didn't feel like a polar bear, a threat, just slightly nonexistent. Maybe like an elf. That summer, on the other side of the island, I met a drunk man in a bright muffler who began to tell me stories about the elves. Eve, he said, had several children, and one day God came to inspect them. She had been washing them, but she was embarrassed to show the grubby ones not yet washed, and so she hid them.

God, who seemed to be a fierce inquisitor, thundered, “I know all things. Do you think that I don't know how many children you have?” And he sentenced the hidden children to be hidden forever, to become the race of elves. They cannot be seen by ordinary mortals, though clairvoyants can see them. There might be, the drunk man added, twice as many people in this room as you think, and he gestured vaguely at the cavernous former slaughterhouse in which some art had been installed and some people were standing around, and maybe some elves.

In this former fishing village, actual fish were also as invisible as elves—the chain supermarket only sold frozen fish, along with fresh mangoes and avocados from ten thousand miles away—though some fresh fish must have been smuggled into the fish-processing plant on the outskirts of town. But the town still celebrated the national holiday of Fishermen's Day on June 1. That afternoon the ferry that docked twice a day on its journeys across the fjord was to take the townspeople on a free excursion and so I joined the crowd. We must have been out for hours, but no one looked at me and no one spoke to me even when lunch was served belowdecks and I sat at the same table as some of the locals. I thought of the expression “breaking the ice,” but I had been quiet so long it was hard to break.

The boat sailed out past the harbor's blocky island and toward the islands farther away. It was a fair day, with a pale blue sky full of soft white clouds, not sunny but clear. Off in the distance there was an island that looked, from the harbor, like a pyramid, the highest island in the archipelago. I had been looking at this island named Klakkeyjar a long time. We went past smaller islands that showed rough cliffs, green tops, a crowd of birds haloing each one like flies around a horse, and went onward.

As we swung around from its south to its west side the pyramid became two pyramids like a pair of breasts jutting up out of the sea. It was startling to realize that what I had seen for a month as one peak had always been two, and more startling was to see that these peaks so resembled human anatomy. When we drew nearer, I saw that they were not symmetrical in size or shape. And then the ship came so close that the peaks disappeared and we were alongside a dark stone cliff stained white with the excrement of birds who nested on its narrower ledges, while mosses and grasses grew on the wider ones.

Seen from above, Klakkeyjar didn't look like breasts or pyramids at all; with all its inlets, bays, and tiny peninsulas it was more intricate than a puzzle piece. Around
A.D.
982 one of Klakkeyjar's bays had harbored the ship of the fugitive Eric the Red before he led Icelanders to settle Greenland. In summer people still gathered eiderdown from the eider ducks' nests, as they had for centuries, and pastured sheep on some of the larger islands of the Breiðafjörður archipelago, and the bird refuge named Flatey was still inhabited. The boat went back, the island turned back into the familiar pyramid, and I returned to the Library of Water.

I read, I lived in others' lives through books and letters, I wrote, often to friends about my own life and the life around me, I slept, I stretched, I thought about the past and future, I made meals from the strange ingredients available at the grim cavelike market I thought of as the troll den, I went walking out in the awakening landscape where the crying birds and shaggy, friendly horses seemed like the society to which I had been admitted. It was peaceful but strange.

Even earthquakes are the consequence of tensions built up over long spans of time, imperceptibly, incrementally. You don't notice the buildup, just the release. You see a sick person, an old person, a dying person, the sight sinks in, and somewhere down the road you change your life. In movies and novels, people change suddenly and permanently, which is convenient and dramatic but not much like life, where you gain distance on something, relapse, resolve, try again, and move along in stops, starts, and stutters. Change is mostly slow. In my life, there had been transformative events, and I'd had a few sudden illuminations and crises, crossed a rubicon or two, but mostly I'd had the incremental.

Director Walter Salles said of his Che Guevara movie,
The Motorcycle Diaries,
“I always thought of this film as if you were walking under gentle rain. After two hours of being exposed to it, you would be wet but without having felt the heavy, imposed dramatic effect of it.” Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi said the same thing, more or less, about spiritual endeavors: “After you have practiced for a while, you will realize that it is not possible to make rapid, extraordinary progress. Even though you try very hard, the progress you make is always little by little. It is not like going out in a shower in which you know when you get wet. In a fog, you do not know you are getting wet, but as you keep walking you get wet little by little.”

Sometimes I thought Iceland was a perfect place to convalesce, because it was as serene as the seaside cures Victorian doctors once prescribed. Sometimes it seemed like a terrible place to be stuck, because it was cold in so many ways. There I changed by degree, the terrible anxiety of the past year draining away, the peacefulness sinking in. The whole episode seems like a dream now, a long phase of floating along with sudden images flashing up. Maybe this ability to live in the insularity of a dream was as restorative as sleep.

I traveled a little, and on the south coast of Iceland had one magnificent midsummer day that began with a long walk on a path edged with tiny flowers past the largest glacier in Europe, went on to a bay in which the glacier was calving icebergs that were vivid blue in a blue inlet of the sea, and then traversed a long strand of wet sand that reflected the white clouds and blue sky so that heaven and earth were indistinguishable, and the clouds overhead seemed to be almost close enough to touch and those near the horizon seemed to be very near infinity. It was as close to a vision of paradise as I've been granted with my eyes open. After that I saw another bay full of hundreds of swans and a steep valley through which dozens of thin waterfalls trickled and poured from the heights. That day ended at a robin's nest Klara showed me in the low willows in the quiet light at midnight, five small mottled eggs like turquoise stones. But mostly I stayed home in the Library of Water and its locale.

After the expedition to the islands on Fishermen's Day, I went out twice more in the archipelago beyond the Library of Water. Once, a local man who'd worked on the open fishing boats in his youth took me, his half-English niece, and a stray American photography student out in a little boat called
Snót,
and we landed on Klakkeyjar. We drifted apart, wandered the rocky and boggy expanses of it, picked bilberries. The pyramid that had become breasts and then a puzzle piece was something else again up close. Another time I bought a ticket to go out on a sightseeing boat.

We passed by the Klakkeyjar island on the same route, so that the pyramid again turned into breasts, and then into cliffs for birds to nest on. Birdshit streaked down from the nests like white branches of a chandelier whose candles were eggs, whose flames had wings. On the way back the crew dragged the ocean floor and on a steel table on the deck dumped out a load of scallops, sea urchins, crabs, mussels, and starfish, bright like internal organs laid bare by surgery or butchery, the vivid color and life hidden under the surface of the sea.

Some of the other people on the boat gulped live scallops and cut open spiny urchins for their roe. I picked up a huge, heavy red starfish with thirteen arms that looked like the sun itself and threw it back into the sea, and it dipped farther than did the actual sun during those midsummer days when night was a faintly dim phase that came for an hour or so long after midnight.

I
n the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds. The birds were mostly new species I got to know a little, the golden plovers plaintively dissembling in the grass to lead intruders away from their nests, the oystercatchers who flew overhead uttering unearthly oscillating cries, the coastal fulmars, skuas, and guillemots, and most particularly the arctic terns. I delighted in the impeccable whiteness of their feathers, the sharpness of their scimitar wings, the fierceness of their cries, and steepness of their dives.

Terns were once called sea swallows for their deeply forked tails and grace in the air, and in Latin, arctic terns were named
Sterna paradisaea
by a pietist Danish cleric named Erik Pontoppidan, at the end of a turbulent career. He had lived part of his life in Norway, written a natural history of that land, made himself unpopular enough that he had to migrate back to Copenhagen, and there composed another monumental tome, an atlas of Denmark. In that era when the Swedish Linnaeus, like a second Adam, was naming all the plants and animals in Latin, new names were waiting to be invented for all the species on earth. Thus Pontoppidan gave several northern birds their scientific names, but it's not clear why in 1763 he called the black-capped, white-feathered arctic terns
S
terna paradisaea:
birds—or terns—of paradise.

He could not have known about their extraordinary migration, back in the day when naturalists—and Pontoppidan himself in his book on Norway—thought swallows buried themselves in the mud in winter and hibernated, rather than imagining they and other birds flew far south to other climes. Of all living things, arctic terns migrate farthest and live in the most light and least darkness. They fly tens of thousands of miles a year as they relocate from farthest north to farthest south. When they are not nesting, they rarely touch ground and live almost constantly in flight, like albatrosses, like their cousins the sooty terns who roam above the equatorial seas for years at a time without touching down. Theirs is a paradise of endless light and endless effort. The lives of angels must be like this.

The far north is an unearthly earth, where much of what those of us in temperate zones were told is universal is not true. Everyone walks on water, which is a solid. In winter, you can build palaces out of it, or houses out of snow. Ice is blue. Snow insulates. Water crystallizes into floating mountains that destroy whatever collides with them. Many other things turn hard as rock in the cold. Nothing decays, and so time stops for the dead, if not the living. Cold is stability and warmth can be treacherous.

Trees dwindle; shrubs cling to the ground; and farther north nothing remains of the plant kingdom but low grasses, diminutive flowers, mosses and lichens hidden beneath the snow part of the year; and nearly every species but the reindeer and some of the summer birds is carnivorous. In winter, light can seem to shine upward from the white ground more than from the dark sky where the sun doesn't rise or rises for an hour or two a day. And at the poles themselves, there are not 365 days per year but one long night and one long stretch of light, and the sun rises once in the spring and sets once in the fall.

Their opposite is the equator, where every day and every night of the year is exactly twelve hours long. The farther north or south you go, the longer summer days and winter nights get. In Iceland, each day of spring was several minutes longer than the one before, so that in May the days went from nearly seventeen to twenty hours long, and by mid-June the sunset is at midnight and sunrise before three
A.M.
, but there is no true darkness, no night. The sun dipped low around midnight or after and there were spectacular sunsets that melted into sunrises, because the sun never went entirely away.

Reykjavík is at latitude 64 and Stykkishólmur at latitude 65, about as far north as Fairbanks, Alaska, and one degree south of the arctic circle. If you go farther north, to, say, the town of Longyearbyen in the Norwegian arctic at latitude 78, the sun rises in late April and stays above the horizon until nearly the end of August, when sunset finally comes—a few minutes before sunrise. There, winter is a night as long as that summer day, running from the end of October until the middle of February. The twenty-four-hour cycle of day and night we think of as normal and daily comes as a rush of rapidly changing days and nights, flickering like a strobe, between the great day and the great night that each lasts a thousand hours or more.

Long ago, I had read about the white nights of St. Petersburg in Russia, at only 59 degrees north, and I had once spent a couple of weeks in the Canadian wilderness at that latitude near midsummer, when night was just a blush of darkness that generally began and ended when I was asleep in my tent. I had always wanted to see the white nights farther north, but actually living through them was a little disorienting. Perhaps if you live through the long darkness, the superabundance of light makes more sense and the two balance each other. But to have the northern light without the darkness seemed askew, even if it was nothing compared with the life of an arctic tern. I had asked Fríða about it when I first met her, and she told me that for her the year was like a long day in which she was out in the world in the summer and lived more introspectively and indoors in winter.

Sometimes during that summer when the sky was often gray but never black, I would think that a task had to be done before darkness and then realize that there would be no more darkness while I was there, and it didn't matter so much when I rose, when I slept, when I traveled. I could go strolling at three in the morning here on this island of few dangers and in June and July no absolute darkness. For me day and night were time itself, and I missed the rhythm and structure they provide. I missed stars. Darkness no longer shut me in: I shut light out to sleep. It was as though I had entered a landscape that itself never slept, never dreamed, that never let up the rational alertness of daytime, the light of interrogation and analysis.

The sensuality of night had never been so clear to me, darkness descending like velvet to wrap around you and enclose you in its black cocoon, to take you to your other self and others. “Because the night belongs to lovers,” sang Patti Smith when I was young, but it's lovers that belong to the night, or rather the night that liberates them to live in the moment, in their skin, in each other. Darkness is amorous, the darkness of passion, of your own unknowns rising to the surface, the darkness of interiors.

In darkness things merge, which might be how passion becomes love and how making love begets progeny of all natures and forms. Merging is dangerous, at least to the boundaries and definition of the self. Darkness is generative, and generation, biological and artistic both, requires this amorous engagement with the unknown, this entry into the realm where you do not quite know what you are doing and what will happen next. Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you're doing, by walking into darkness, not staying in the light. Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that's where they may be seen by others, that's not where they're born.

Darkness is a pejorative in English, and the term has often carried emotional, moral, and religious overtones as has its opposite: the children of light, snowy angels, fair maidens, and white knights. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that,” said the dark-skinned Martin Luther King Jr., but sometimes love is darkness; sometimes the glare is what needs to be extinguished. Turn off the lights and come to bed.

When you spend time in the desert, you come to love shadow, shade, and darkness, the respite they give to the menacing blaze of day that burns you out and dries you up. Heat is the desert as predator, just as cold is the arctic's biggest animal. Desert light is fierce, and at midday it flattens everything into a harsh solid, but early and late in the day light is golden and every crevice and fold and protrusion of the landscape is thrown into the high relief of light and shadow. At those times day and night intertwine like dancers, like lovers, and shadows are as powerful a presence as the things that cast them, or more so, growing and growing until the sun disappears below the horizon and darkness spreads like water on the land.

There was only one dark place left in Iceland that summer, or so it seemed to me, and I went there again and again. Elín, who I had met for one meal when I first landed, who had given her mother my book after she had received it from Úlfur, the boy with the wolf's name who had died, was a young artist then but bold. She had made a labyrinth titled
Path
. In a big room in Iceland's National Gallery, with the help of two meticulous carpenters, she built a zigzag route of gypsum panels that gave off that material's dusty clean aroma. One person at a time entered
Path,
and a pair of watchers in the outer gallery monitored entries and exits and occasionally went in for a rescue, like lifeguards.

When you stepped in from the daylight and the door closed behind you, the space seemed to be absolutely dark and then your eyes adjusted to the faint, faint light. You could move forward when you were blind or wait until you could see, but placing a hand on one side of the walls helped you travel too. The path turned at sharp angles, so that you knew that you were being turned around and around, and you lost track of the distance that you were going. It felt as though it was a long way and a long time, and you were very alone.

The light that leaked through the intentional, careful cracks in the walls and ceiling was faintly lavender blue—it came from fluorescent tubes—and it streamed across the space in strange ways. It was easy to believe that what was dark was solid, what was light was spaciousness into which you could move, but reality as you bumped into it was often the other way around, with open blackness and hard pale surfaces.

Your expectations reversed, you moved deeper into the labyrinth, knowing now that you did not know what was solid, what was space you could occupy, but would have to test it, over and over.
Path
was a space in which you perfected the art of not knowing where you were, of finding out one literal step at a time. Did the path fork? Or was there only one route? How far did it go? Was the way out the same as the way in? All this would have to be found with the hands, eyes, and feet as you traveled.

All the while a subtle deep bass thump like a heartbeat sounded. It reminded you that you were deep within, enclosed, contained, unborn. On you went, and on some more, unsure, unknowing, unseeing, twisting and turning. At the end the walls began to press together and it was as dark as it had been at that first moment you stepped in and closed the door behind yourself. And then you could go no farther. It seemed as though it ought to feel claustrophobic, but I found in it an embrace of darkness, a destination, a handmade night.

There and back again took me ten or fifteen minutes by the clock, but the time inside had no such quantifiable measure. It was time apart, symbolic time, a slow journey to the heart of the unknown and the unknowable. It became a significant journey, one that had danger, doubt, a plunge into the dark side. I kept coming back all summer, seven times in all, once for so long the attendants grew concerned. I felt at home there, more myself than anywhere else in Iceland, somehow. Jules Verne's novel about Iceland was called
Journey to the Center of the Earth,
and this felt like such a journey, or such a center.

A labyrinth is an ancient device that compresses a journey into a small space, winds up a path like thread on a spool. It contains beginning, confusion, perseverance, arrival, and return. There at last the metaphysical journey of your life and your actual movements are one and the same. You may wander, may learn that in order to get to your destination you must turn away from it, become lost, spin about, and then only after the way has become overwhelming and absorbing, arrive, having gone the great journey without having gone far on the ground.

In this it is the opposite of a maze, which has not one convoluted way but many ways and often no center, so that wandering has no cease or at least no definitive conclusion. A maze is a conversation; a labyrinth is an incantation or perhaps a prayer. In a labyrinth you're lost in that you don't know the twists and turns, but if you follow them you get there; and then you reverse your course.

The end of the journey through the labyrinth is not at the center, as is commonly supposed, but back at the threshold again: the beginning is also the real end. That is the home to which you return from the pilgrimage, the adventure. The unpraised edges and margins matter too, because it's not ultimately a journey of immersion but emergence. Ariadne gives Theseus a spool of red thread to help him escape the Labyrinth in Crete (which must have been a maze by our modern definitions). You unspool the thread on the journey to the center. Then you rewind to escape.

In this folding up of great distance into small space, the labyrinth resembles two other manmade things: a spool of thread and the words and lines and pages of a book. Imagine all the sentences in this book as a single thread around the spool that is a book. Imagine that they could be unwound; that you could walk the line they make, or are walking it. Reading is also traveling, the eyes running along the length of an idea, which can be folded up into the compressed space of a book and unfolded within your imagination and your understanding.

All stories have this form, but fairy tales are often particularly labyrinthlike. Something happens, and just as to get from the periphery to the center of a labyrinth you twist and turn, turn away from the center, journey to the farthest reaches before you can reach your destination, so in a fairy tale you are interrupted, cursed, cast out, bereft, and in order to get back to the place you're in, have to go to the back of the north wind or the top of a glass mountain. The route is rarely direct, and it often ends in a return to the beginning point.