Birdfoot's Grandpa

The old man
must have stopped our car
two dozen times to climb out
and gather into his hands
the small toads blinded
by our lights and leaping,
live drops of rain.

The rain was falling,
a mist about his white hair
and I kept saying
You can’t save them all
accept it, get back in
we’ve got places to go.

But, leathery hands full
of wet brown life
knee deep in summer
roadside grass,
he just smiled and said:
"They have places to go too.”

-Joseph Bruchac

The White Heart of God

The snow falling around the man in the naked woods
is like the ash of heaven, ash from the cool fire
of God's mother-of-pearl, moon-stately heart.
Sympathetic but not merciful. His strictness
parses us. The discomfort of living this way
without birds, among maples without leaves, makes
death and the world visible. Not the harshness,
but the way this world can be known by pushing
against it. And feeling something pushing back.
The whiteness of the winter married to this river
makes the water look black. The water actually
is the color of giant mirrors set along the marble
corridors of the spirit, the mirrors empty
of everything. The man is doing the year's accounts.
Finding the balance, trying to estimate how much
he has been translated. For it does translate him,
well or poorly. As the woods are translated
by the seasons. He is searching for a baseline
of the Lord. He searches like the blind man
going forward with a hand stretched out in front.
As the truck driver ice-fishing on the big pond
tries to learn from his line what is down there.
The man attends to any signal that might announce
Jesus. He hopes for even the faintest evidence,
the presence of the Lord's least abundance. He measures
with tenderness, afraid to find a heart more classical
than ripe. Hoping for honey, for love's alembic.

-Jack Gilbert, 1994

The Book, For Growing Old

Stars moving from their summertime
To winter pasture; and the shepherd, arched
Over earthly happiness; and so much peace,
Like the cry of an insect, halt, irregular,
Shaped by an impoverished god. The silence
Rises from your book up to your heart.
A noiseless wind moves in the noisy world.
Time smells in the distance, ceasing to be.
And in the grove the ripe fruit simply are.

You will grow old
And, fading into the color of the trees,
Making a slower shadow on the wall,
Becoming, as a soul at least, the threatened earth,
You will take up the book again, at the still open page,
And say, These were indeed the last dark words.

-Yves Bonnefoy

I know, I'm late this week.

The Flower-Fed Buffaloes

The flower-fed buffaloes of the spring
In the days of long ago,
Ranged where the locomotives sing
And the prairie flowers lie low:—
The tossing, blooming, perfumed grass
Is swept away by the wheat,
Wheels and wheels and wheels spin by
In the spring that still is sweet.
But the flower-fed buffaloes of the spring
Left us, long ago.
They gore no more, they bellow no more,
They trundle around the hills no more:—
With the Blackfeet, lying low,
With the Pawnees, lying low,
Lying low.

-Vachel Lindsay, 1926

Happy Thanksgiving.

Why Regret?

Didn't you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn't it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn't you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster's New International, perhaps having just
eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of a world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid's ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
"The perfected lover does not eat."
As a child, didn't you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn't you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren't you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and then their offspring's offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn't it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

-Galway Kinnell

Tomorrow morning I get to board a plane headed south, and then another couple planes headed west to North America for Thanksgiving and Christmas. No matter how excited I am for the holidays, it makes me a little tired just thinking about the time I will spend sitting on the floor in airports, standing in line at customs, trying to sleep without reclining my chair. And, beyond that, it's strange that over the course of one day (albeit extended by time zone shifts) I can hop from Norway to Iceland to America. And then I'll do the whole thing in reverse in January, as my life continues to be split between these two countries (I don't know how many times I've said, "Oh, I have that in America": a car, snowshoes, a bike). 

But, all my globetrotting quandaries aside, we're slaloming into the holiday season, and that's something, isn't it? And I'm glad I'll be back in the U.S. for that, because Norway doesn't really know how to do pie. 

Questions of Travel

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
--A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr'dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
--Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
--And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"

-Elizabeth Bishop, 1956

Tilicho Lake

In this high place
it is as simple as this,
leave everything you know behind.
Step toward the cold surface,
say the old prayer of rough love
and open both arms.
Those who come with empty hands
will stare into the lake astonished,
there, in the cold light
reflecting pure snow
the true shape of your own face.

-David Whyte, 1993

Maybe Alone On My Bike

I listen, and the mountain lakes
hear snowflakes come on those winter wings
only the owls are awake to see,
their radar gaze and furred ears
alert. In that stillness a meaning shakes;

And I have thought (maybe alone
on my bike, quaintly on a cold
evening pedaling home), Think!–
the splendor of our life, its current unknown
as those mountains, the scene no one sees.

O citizens of our great amnesty:
we might have died. We live. Marvels
coast by, great veers and swoops of air
so bright the lamps waver in tears,
and I hear in the chain a chuckle I like to hear.

-William Stafford, 1964

Sonnet 73

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
--This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
--To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

-William Shakespeare

Homecoming

Snowfall, thicker and thicker,
dovecolored, like yesterday,
snowfall, as if you had been asleep just now.
Into the distance, the stacked-up whiteness
and beyond, endless,
the sleightrace of the lost.
Below, hidden,
pushing itself upward,
what hurts the eyes so much,
mound after mound,
invisible.
On each mound,
brought home to its today,
sucked down into its muteness: an I,
a wooden post.
There: a feeling—
blown across by the icewind,
it fastens its dove-, its snow-
colored cloth bannerwise.

-Paul Celan, 1990

Psalm Above Santa Fe
--------16 March 1987

What is it we
---------come to
----------------between mountains,

long crests tipped white,
---------dusted on their flanks, while
----------------light spreads out

before us,
---------pouring in our lap
----------------soft as iris tongues,

and
---------the lungs finally
----------------filled with freshness

unwilled
---------because unlooked for:
----------------sparse grass,

rocks
---------announcing in a weathered language
----------------something eyes

seem to have known
---------before they came to the way
----------------called sight.

Even the animals at dusk,
---------could we see them stare at us,
----------------have such souls.

-John Judson, 1987

Add to the list of books I have been reading: Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, which offered the following relevant quote: "For me, poems are presents to be exchanged within an extended family." I've wondered about the strict legality of Wednesday poemday, since I'm reprinting without permission. But I make no profit from this; but good poems seem to benefit from being passed around. 

Last week I was talking to some Norwegians when I whipped out my phone to share pictures. I don't have a Norwegian SIM card (thanks, AT&T and SaskTel for my locked phones, really appreciate that) so my telephone is basically a game-playing and picture-sharing device. Most of the picture-sharing involves pictures of my cranes, because my cranes are one (perhaps the only) goofy facet of my life for which people request photographic evidence (didn't I predict that cranes would become my wallet pictures? I'm pretty sure smartphones are the new version of wallet photographs). But there are some pictures of home on there, too, and when those came up I said, "Look! That's where I from!" because I take endless delight in sharing photographs (hence this blog).

"But where are the people?" asked the guy holding my phone.

"They're in the valley," I said.

It occurs to me now that he may've been wondering where the pictures of my family were; I'm genuinely not sure. If that's the case, my family was probably behind me. But the people--the people were in the valley, for the most part. That's where people congregate, isn't it? In valleys, along  rivers.

Still, the question and my interpretation of it revealed my own bias for the illusion of wilderness; so many of the pictures I've posted here since I returned to Norway have been of the mountains, not the valley (or, in Tromsø's case, the island, but compared to the mountains Tromsøya is low and flat and may as well be the valley). After all, I spend most of my time here, with people, and peaks only a distant silhouette. 

As I Stumble

I must make my own sun
regularly to avoid being lost
within and frozen to death.
The poem as I make it
out of the wood of the forest
in which I roam, rubbing
the pieces together--
picked up
as I stumble upon them.

-David Ignatow, 1964

"Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is continually girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles of whales defined along the undulating ridges. But you must be a thorough whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, if you wish to return to such a sight again, you must be sure and take the exact intersecting latitude and longitude of your first stand-point, else--so chance-like are such observations of the hills--your precise, previous stand-point would require a laborious re-discovery..."

-Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

The Gate

I stand here watching the light go by,
Like an old grey horse who stands in front of a gate
And watches the people go past,
And doesn’t know a way to go through.

You take trails men have been riding
Through this border country for years.
Somebody comes and puts a fence across ’em.
I made my own gates, I did.

-Drum Hadley, 2005

I've acquired a habit that I deplored when I was younger: reading several books at once. Right now I have bookmarks in five volumes (when I was younger I also refused to use bookmarks and memorized the number of the page where I had stopped instead, but that was always kind of stupid), though I would argue that at least three of them are intended to be read piecemeal. One of those three is 'The Norton Book of Nature Writing,' which I've been working my way through since last spring. The anthology is organized chronologically by author birth year which means that I've only now, around page 1000, reached Barbara Kingsolver and her essay 'High Tide in Tucson,' which I read this morning while I gave my frying pan some time to cool in between frying my bacon and potatoes and frying an egg.

These are times when a book gives you a small, perfect gift, and that's how I felt this morning with my feet kicked up on the coffee table. It's a beautiful essay. If I could I would reprint it here for you in its entirety, but it runs for ten pages in small print, and I haven't got the time or the reprint rights. As I write this I have my book propped open with my left elbow, and I'm trying to find a quote that captures the essence of this in a jar, because this morning it spoke to me so clearly, held me riveted while my tea grew cold. It said things I have tried to say, but it's better than anything I ever managed. 

Live Blindly and upon the Hour

Live blindly and upon the hour. The Lord,
Who was the Future, died full long ago.
Knowledge which is the Past is folly. Go,
Poor child, and be not to thyself abhorred.
Around thine earth sun-wingèd winds do blow
And planets roll; a meteor draws his sword;
The rainbow breaks his seven-coloured chord
And the long strips of river-silver flow:
Awake! Give thyself to the lovely hours.
Drinking their lips, catch thou the dream in flight
About their fragile hairs’ aërial gold.
Thou art divine, thou livest,—as of old
Apollo springing naked to the light,
And all his island shivered into flowers.

-Trumbull Stickley

The Sign-Post

The dim sea glints chill. The white sun is shy,
And the skeleton weeds and the never-dry,
Rough, long grasses keep white with frost
At the hilltop by the finger-post;
The smoke of the traveller’s-joy is puffed
Over hawthorn berry and hazel tuft.
I read the sign. Which way shall I go?
A voice says: You would not have doubted so
At twenty. Another voice gentle with scorn
Says: At twenty you wished you had never been born.

One hazel lost a leaf of gold
From a tuft at the tip, when the first voice told
The other he wished to know what ’twould be
To be sixty by this same post. “You shall see,”
He laughed—and I had to join his laughter—
“You shall see; but either before or after,
Whatever happens, it must befall,
A mouthful of earth to remedy all
Regrets and wishes shall freely be given;
And if there be a flaw in that heaven
’Twill be freedom to wish, and your wish may be
To be here or anywhere talking to me,
No matter what the weather, on earth,
At any age between death and birth,
To see what day or night can be,
The sun and the frost, the land and the sea,
Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring,—
With a poor man of any sort, down to a king,
Standing upright out in the air
Wondering where he shall journey, O where?”

-Edward Thomas, 1917

There are times when Norway seems difficult to explain. It's another place, but it's also where I live at the moment. I went hiking this weekend with the university outing club, and woke up this morning at Skarvassbu, a backcountry cabin I visited on ski in January. The landscape looks different without the flat coat of snow, but it's still familiar, in a fashion. The trail from Skarvassbu back to Tromsø curves around the shoulder of Tromsdalstinden, and from there on out everything is known. But this time there's a cluster of reindeer on the flank of the mountain, including one of the white ones that's sacred to the Sami. The reindeer herd undulates and flows uphill in the same way water flows downhill, but with none of the unwieldy implications of moving against gravity. They raise their tails like flags, the same way white-tails do, but they don't move like any deer I know.
That could be a metaphor, about the reindeer. People sometimes ask what it's like where I'm from, and suddenly my problem explaining Norway flips on its head: I try to describe how our mountains are different at home, but nothing seems to fully capture it the way experience does. Sometimes the mountains here seem more like the prairies, where you can see across distances greater than you can fathom, and trees are scarce enough that the sky is something live.

This morning at Skarvassbu I ambled across the rocks in the easy way you can when you've been walking for days with a pack and your body is suddenly light. Scattered about are lakes like perfect mirrors, some of which you don't notice because the reflections blend so seamlessly with the stones above. In that moment, it didn't matter one whit whether the landscape was like the prairies or my old New England mountains, whether those differences and similarities were something I could articulate. There were clouds rising from valleys in every direction. Someone came out of the cabin with two buckets to fetch water. I waved, and went to see if I could help.

Finding a Bible in an Abandoned Cabin

Under dust plush as a moth’s wing,
the book’s leather cover still darkly shown,
and everywhere else but this spot was sodden
beneath the roof’s unraveling shingles.
There was that back-of-the-neck lick of chill
and then, from my index finger, the book

opened like a blasted bird. In its box
of familiar and miraculous inks,
a construction of filaments and dust,
thoroughfares of worms, and a silage
of silverfish husks: in the autumn light,
eight hundred pages of perfect wordless lace.

-Robert Wrigley, 2007

Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

-Carl Sandburg

If you stand at almost any point in Tromsø and look east, Tromsdalstinden is the mountain you'll see. It presides over the skyline, and it looks definitive: the mountain, as if there isn't another one. In some ways there isn't; at 4,000 feet, Tromsdalstinden is the tallest mountain visible from Tromsø. I know some people who call it the city mountain.

It didn't seem like I could leave Tromsø without hiking Tromsdalstinden, but I held off in the spring because of the snow lingering at the summit. But yesterday it was sunny, so I packed a day pack with almonds and brownies and a Kvikk Lunsj bar (I should probably devote an entire post to Kvikk Lunsj, but basically, through some feat of marketing black magic, Freia has managed to transform a slightly malty Kit-Kat lookalike whose name translates as 'quick lunch' into an important provision which should be, and is, brought on every hike, skiing excursion, etc. There are even trip suggestions inside the wrappers) a water bottle and a thermos of tea (I meant to make sandwiches but my bread was moldy, which just goes to show), a sweater and a raincoat, caught my usual bus and rode it past all my usual stops and off the island to Tromsdalen, the valley that Tromsdalstinden sits at the end of (and is named for). And then I walked.
This hike is beautiful--there's really nothing else to say. You cross over the Tromsdalelva, the river that supplies the city's drinking water (if you're noticing a theme with the place names around here, you're right), and then make your way up through aspen forest until the trees melt away and there's nothing but bilberry bushes and scrub. The summit is comprised almost entirely of rock which has crumbled into rock fields. There's a hardscrabble stretch up a steep slump of rocks, but the valley below the mountain is vibrant green, and from the high ridges you can contextualize yourself within this landscape: to the south route E8 traces the crannies of countless fjords as it heads to Narvik, and west you can see past Tromsøya and Kvaløya to the open ocean, and east are the jagged peaks of the Lyngen Alps.

On the way down I stopped between two shining streams to sit and finish my thermos of tea. I have never hiked with a Norwegian who hasn't brought a thermos (usually with coffee), and I'm convinced that that's something they're doing right. Sipping a warm drink while the mountains spread around you adds just the right amount of civilization, as if this green valley could be your porch, your backyard. Norway's common access policy, Allemannsretten, literally translates as 'All Man's Right,' which means that, in a fashion, this valley is yours. So stop, pick these berries--their flavor is tart and pure. Drink this water. If you're like me, they'll be a dose of something you didn't know you needed, and you'll be better for it.

The Little Tree

It’s raining hard today.
The day is more like night,
the spring is more like fall,
and in the yard a driving wind lays waste
to the little tree that, seeming not to, stands
steady and firm; it seems among the plants
like a too-green adolescent grown too tall.
You watch it. It may be
your pity stirs for all of those white flowers
the north wind strips from it; and they are fruit,
sweet preserves we set
aside for winter, those fallen flowers spread
across the grass. And your vast maternity
aches for them, all.

-Umberto Saba, 1988

I'm back in Tromsø. I've been trying to think of something to write about this, but I've mostly failed. It's nice to be here, though. The city has changed in small ways, but it's been fairly easy to fall back into life here after a two month gap. I think it's fall already--most of the greens are tinged red, the weather is cool, it's raining a lot. I found only one bilberry, on my first full day back. I ate it. It's gone. That's the end of that story.

Poetry, a Natural Thing

Neither our vices nor our virtues
further the poem. “They came up
----and died
just like they do every year
----on the rocks.”

----The poem
feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse,
----to breed itself,
a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping.

This beauty is an inner persistence
----toward the source
striving against (within) down-rushet of the river,
----a call we heard and answer
in the lateness of the world
----primordial bellowings
from which the youngest world might spring,

salmon not in the well where the
----hazelnut falls
but at the falls battling, inarticulate,
----blindly making it.

This is one picture apt for the mind.

A second: a moose painted by Stubbs,
where last year’s extravagant antlers
----lie on the ground.
The forlorn moosey-faced poem wears
----new antler-buds,
----the same,

“a little heavy, a little contrived”,

his only beauty to be
----all moose.

-Robert Duncan, 1960

The Moment

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

-Margaret Atwood, 1995

This Most Perfect Hill

On this most perfect hill
with these most perfect dogs
are these most perfect people
and this most perfect fog

In this most perfect fog
that is the middle of the sea
inside the perfect middle of
the things inside that swing

In this most perfect rhyme
that takes up what it sees,
with perfect shelter from the
rain as perfect as can be,

In this most perfect day
at the apex of the sun
runs this most perfect
frog song that is roiling
from the mud

In these most perfect habits
of the waving of the trees,
through this imperfect language
rides a perfect brilliancy.

-Lisa Jarnot, 2003

Dave Lilly

There's a brook on the side of Greylock that used to be full of trout,
But there's nothing there now but minnows; they say it is all fished out.
I fished there many a Summer day some twenty years ago,
And I never quit without getting a mess of a dozen or so.

There was a man, Dave Lilly, who lived on the North Adams road,
And he spent all his time fishing, while his neighbors reaped and sowed.
He was the luckiest fisherman in the Berkshire hills, I think.
And when he didn't go fishing he'd sit in the tavern and drink.

Well, Dave is dead and buried and nobody cares very much;
They have no use in Greylock for drunkards and loafers and such.
But I always liked Dave Lilly, he was pleasant as you could wish;
He was shiftless and good-for-nothing, but he certainly could fish.

The other night I was walking up the hill from Williamstown
And I came to the brook I mentioned, and I stopped on the bridge and sat down.
I looked at the blackened water with its little flecks of white
And I heard it ripple and whisper in the still of the Summer night.

And after I'd been there a minute it seemed to me I could feel
The presence of someone near me, and I heard the hum of a reel.
And the water was churned and broken, and something was brought to land
By a twist and flirt of a shadowy rod in a deft and shadowy hand.

I scrambled down to the brookside and hunted all about;
There wasn't a sign of a fisherman; there wasn't a sign of a trout.
But I heard somebody chuckle behind the hollow oak
And I got a whiff of tobacco like Lilly used to smoke.

It's fifteen years, they tell me, since anyone fished that brook;
And there's nothing in it but minnows that nibble the bait off your hook.
But before the sun has risen and after the moon has set
I know that it's full of ghostly trout for Lilly's ghost to get.

I guess I'll go to the tavern and get a bottle of rye
And leave it down by the hollow oak, where Lilly's ghost went by.
I meant to go up on the hillside and try to find his grave
And put some flowers on it -- but this will be better for Dave.

-Alfred Joyce Kilmer

I meant to write this ages ago, and I didn't. Life happened, I guess. And now I'm home, after returning to Norway and a stopover in Iceland. I'm home. From Moby-Dick (which I'm still making my way through):

"Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.

"Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed."

Part of Iceland is about the sights. The place is, on the whole, strange; steam rises from the ground, and you can see where the earth has split open and filled itself in. The island itself is expanding. But it's still a small place, with a small population, and a peculiar history. But, like a lot of places, its residents are proud of it, proud of themselves. I don't blame them; I think I envy them.

Iceland is a country of settlers, but Icelanders have sagas that date back to the 10th and 11th centuries. And there's something about that appeals to an American with loose roots. I find--have found--the myths of Native Americans hugely appealing, primarily because they come from the place I'm from. But they don't belong to me, and there are times--well, there are always times. But maybe ownership isn't the most important thing. After all, I have no claim to Iceland, but I can still go there, still read the Icelanders' sagas. All sorts of things are open to me.

But for now, I'm back on American soil. There are plenty of stories here that are mine, mostly because I made them.

Sestina of the Tramp-Royal

Speakin’ in general, I ’ave tried ’em all—
The ’appy roads that take you o’er the world.
Speakin’ in general, I ’ave found them good
For such as cannot use one bed too long,
But must get ’ence, the same as I ’ave done,
An’ go observin’ matters till they die.

What do it matter where or ’ow we die,
So long as we’ve our ’ealth to watch it all—
The different ways that different things are done,
An’ men an’ women lovin’ in this world;
Takin’ our chances as they come along,
An’ when they ain’t, pretendin’ they are good?

In cash or credit—no, it aren’t no good;
You ’ave to ’ave the ’abit or you’d die,
Unless you lived your life but one day long,
Nor didn’t prophesy nor fret at all,
But drew your tucker some’ow from the world,
An’ never bothered what you might ha’ done.

But, Gawd, what things are they I ’aven’t done?
I’ve turned my ’and to most, an’ turned it good,
In various situations round the world—
For ’im that doth not work must surely die;
But that's no reason man should labour all
’Is life on one same shift—life’s none so long.

Therefore, from job to job I’ve moved along.
Pay couldn’t ’old me when my time was done,
For something in my ’ead upset it all,
Till I ’ad dropped whatever ’twas for good,
An’, out at sea, be’eld the dock-lights die,
An’ met my mate—the wind that tramps the world!

It’s like a book, I think, this bloomin’ world,
Which you can read and care for just so long,
But presently you feel that you will die
Unless you get the page you’re readin’ done,
An’ turn another—likely not so good;
But what you’re after is to turn ’em all.

Gawd bless this world! Whatever she ’ath done—
Excep’ when awful long I’ve found it good.
So write, before I die, ‘’E liked it all!’

-Rudyard Kipling, 1896

Above the Ford

The cliffs on life's swift current
are cleft by shallow valleys.
Masses have queued to cross there —
crowds of billy-goat milkers.
We'll go upstream, God willing,
to walk the hawk-high ridges
and pitch ourselves — impetuous —
plumb in the roaring torrent!

-Jónas Hallgrímsson, 1845

It Is That Dream

It’s that dream that we carry with us
that something wonderful will happen,
that it has to happen,
that time will open,
that the heart will open,
that doors will open,
that the mountains will open,
that wells will leap up,
that the dream will open,
that one morning we’ll slip in
to a harbor that we’ve never known.

-Olav H. Hauge

After my first full day in Berlin, all I could think was that this was a proper city. My second day, I could articulate it a little better: unlike Prague, unlike Vienna, my experience of Berlin was one where the city's past didn't overshadow its present. Which is saying something, because it's not like Berlin is lacking for history. And I spent one day with the history, with the monuments and memorials; I spent my second day riding the subway (u-bahn) and walking Berlin's neighborhoods until my feet were sore. It was not enough time, really, but I am increasingly convinced that there's an entire trip composed of the things I didn't do on this one, and--well, that's another trip.

'The Lives of the Others' (Das Leben der Anderen) is a very good movie, made remarkable by Ulrich Mühe's lead performance as a Stasi officer in East Berlin. I saw it for the first time in 2006, when it came out, with my college German class. I've seen it at least twice more since then. Although I'm aware of German history in the way a lot of people are--it does, after all, interface with world history rather significantly--that movie was my inroad to the history of living in Berlin. It's also a reminder that Berlin's history is not always something that Germany wants to celebrate. Which is not to say it's hidden in the city as it exists today. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is right behind the Brandenburg Gate; a memorial for the Nazi book burnings sits where it happened, in the central Bebelplatz. You can look down through a piece of glass into a sealed room lined with empty bookcases.
But consider New York City, or any of the world's major cities--New York has history, surely, but that's not why people go there. They go there for culture, vitality, for what the city is now. Berlin feels like that. The memorials to the past are there, but the city isn't so enamored with its past that the present is overshadowed. A good illustration might be the East Side Gallery: a swath of the Berlin wall, with commissioned murals lining its east side. History, painted over with something new and present. I started there before I explored the neighborhood of Kreuzberg, where I walked where the wall once stood, along canals and through parks, past neighborhood döner shops, graffiti plastered train stations, kiosks selling newspapers, bicyclists whizzing past in their red-painted lanes. And people--so many people. In my last post I mentioned that Berlin is one of the most visited cities in Europe, but most of the time you could hardly tell, because the tourists disappeared into the millions of people who actually live there.

So that was Berlin, then: a proper city, sprawling and vital. A bit gritty. Complicated public transit system. International. 'Arm, aber sexy' (Poor, but sexy) its mayor said in 2004. 'Ich bin ein Berliner,' JFK said in 1963. According to my German instructor, he was trying to say he was a citizen of Berlin, but he actually said he was a jelly donut. According to Wikipedia, that's not true, so I'll have to throw that piece of trivia out. And I thought it made such a good conclusion, too.

I Live My Life

I live my life in growing orbits,
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years.
And I still don't know if I am a falcon,
Or a storm, or a great song.

-Rainer Maria Rilke, 1899

And now, Prague. I feel compelled to pass on this bit of Wikipedia information: Prague is the sixth-most visited European city. After Berlin, where I'm going next. I didn't really realize this on arrival, and the sheer volume of tourists has been a bit overwhelming. On Saturday afternoon, I looked across to the Prague Castle from a nearby park and there was a veritable stream of people walking up the cobbled road towards the castle.

And that was where I planned to go next.

Being a tourist among tourists is not all bad--it makes being here very easy, for one, without any of the stumbling blocks I encountered in the rural parts of Austria--but there's also immense pleasure in escaping the hoards. I went back to the castle Sunday evening, and it was comparatively placid. And earlier in the day I stopped by the Ateliér Josef Sudek, or Josef Sudek Studio. Josef Sudek is one of the most famous Czech photographers, and the studio is a replica of one that burned in 1985, and sits where it sat when Sudek used it, beginning in 1927: in the courtyard of an apartment block. The street is busy, but to get to the studio you need to enter the apartment building as if you live there, and pass through a series of doors into the courtyard, where I was greeted by a small tabby cat. The information about the studio says that the reason it was declared historic was because it was the last preserved garden photographic studio. I am not sure what a garden photographic studio is, precisely, but the dark little building does sit in a garden.

When I arrived, there was one man on his way out, and I paid 10 Czech koruna--the equivalent of fifty cents--to walk through two spare rooms, one of which contained a large iron woodstove, the other which contained a green thing I presume was a darkroom sink, both of which contained several soft black and white prints with explanations only in Czech.

I don't believe I discovered anything undiscovered, but it was nice, for a little, to presume that I was in a place no one else had found, to hear neither Czech nor--more jarring--English. The photographs themselves were quiet ones, well-suited to that quiet place. I went through both rooms twice, or maybe three times, before I went back out the door, and then out of the courtyard, and then out, finally, on to the cobblestone streets to rejoin the throngs.

I left Vienna by train this morning, and my time in Austria drew to a close. I feel like I should have something to say about this, and about Austria. I managed to write two posts on Croatia, after all. And I stayed in Austria longer.

Maybe I just can't tease apart all the things I might say. I spent my last afternoon in Austria in the Wien Museum, a museum dedicated to Vienna and its history, and it reminded me of how little I know about Europe. I was supposed to take A.P. European History my senior year of high school, but because of a scheduling conflict I ended up in A.P. U.S. History instead. Not that I regret that or think a high school history class would've remedied my deficiencies, just that--well. I'm learning a lot about these countries and cities just by being in them, walking the streets and stumbling upon what I stumble upon. But the more you know, the more you realize you don't know.

Wandering around Vienna's city museum, browsing artifacts and reading the English explanations, I was reminded of what I don't know, and also of what I should've known already: these places are old. That city has old bones, and over the years it has been many things, in one place: a central part of the Holy Roman Empire, occupied by Hungary, under siege by the Turks--twice--and that's all before 1800. A handful of days is hardly enough to get a handle on all of that. Instead, about all I did was find an ice cream place I liked and eat a lot of street food.

Honestly, though, I'm okay with that. When I visited Croatia I touched on the fact that there's a surfeit of experiences I didn't have, things I didn't see, but that's not where I want to dwell. There will always be more. The world is more. I'm pretty sure there's a song about this in the Lion King, actually. But I'm not trying to do everything--instead I'm trying to do something, to throw myself into each place as I visit it and get a bit of a feel for what makes it tick, even if I haven't got the time to learn the precise workings of the clock.

What's the purpose, though? Every so often I pass other Americans, travelers, on the street. Overheard in a crush of people, someone's saying: "And that's when I learned to love Nutella." I've talked with a few other backpackers, sitting on the floor in train stations, and it leaves me wondering--is this whole thing, American-in-Europe, purely self indulgent? What does it accomplish to leave the country only to find your countrymen on the other side of the ocean?

Oh, it might be self indulgent, and it might not accomplish anything at all. It's okay for a vacation to just be a vacation. Sometimes I think we try to collect experiences like talismans, like the process of collecting them is its own end. I'm not sure that's quite right. But every process is a learning one, or might be, and we never know when we might find something that we've been looking for for a very long time, or when we might learn something that helps another piece of knowledge click into place. There is a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke's 'Letters to a Young Poet' that I first encountered on a plane bound for Alaska, what, now, seems like eons ago: 

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

Rilke, I feel like I should note, was an Austrian, but he was born in Prague, which is the city the train I boarded this morning brought me to. So. I guess that's something.