On the Anniversary of that Inevitable Day


*** **
East and West reach across to touch at the freeway.  On both horizons: windmills so far away that look like toys, whirligigs gesturing at the edge of the earth.

*
I read a poem once premised on the idea that once a year we live through the day on which we will die – a date just as real and distinct as the date on which we were born, but unknown to us.  I think the poem may have been by W.S. Merwin.  That day is like the prime meridian, a silent, featureless landmark accessible only to the imagination (if accessible at all) – as our lives revolve, we pass over that line unaware.

**
I bought tickets to see the Des Moines Opera Company perform Alban Berg’s Wozzeck.  My companion was unable to attend and, so, I went alone.

***
Perhaps, I have driven around Des Moines twenty times in my life.  The capitol building with its taut, constricted dome is the first thing you see.  The freeway makes a loop to the west and, then, south.  Empty zones full of jungle and gravel pits with aggregate pinnacles and tilted, ladder-like conveyors funnel inward from the north toward the city.  Huge brown rivers are coiled in those empty spaces, fetal-shaped oxbow lakes and marshes full of white birds with long stilt legs flank the muscular streams – it floods in these places and, once, I drove past Des Moines when the city was a mere island, surrounded on all sides by enormous expanses of glittering water, rivers hidden under the vast bland lagoons made by the deluge.

****
Three or four times, I have exited the freeway and gone into Des Moines.  Once, I was with a law partner and we met with claims representatives in a downtown tower to discuss our firm defending liability cases brought against the insurance company’s policyholders.  The chief claims manager was a little bald man who smoked a pipe and had owl eyes under thick glasses.  On another occasion, I was going to Kansas City, but was ahead of schedule and so searched the downtown area for a used bookstore – without success if I remember correctly.  Once, I went to the art museum in a renowned building by a famous Finnish architect.  After a long drive, one evening, I pulled into Des Moines and ate spaghetti and meatballs at a restaurant at the edge of the modest skyscrapers downtown.

*****
I was surprised that the opera tickets were for a performance space in Indianola, another river valley town 15 miles to the south of Des Moines.  Indianola has about 14,000 residents but there is a college there in a leafy residential part of town and the opera was sung at the concert hall on campus. 



*** **
I was born in Chadron, Nebraska.  I can tell you my birthday.  I will leave it to my readers to research my deathday.  My father attended Iowa State University at Ames, 33 miles north of Des Moines.  As a baby and, then, toddler, I lived with my parents in Ames.  My father studied mathematics.  We had a German shepherd dog named Frieda.  The dog had to be put down for some reason that I don’t know.  I was relieved when Frieda went away because the dog was big and, when she jumped on me, I went sprawling to the ground.  The vet station was part of the college.  The floor was concrete, incised with gutters in which water was running. 

*
I have a Labrador Retriever named Frieda now.  I walk my dog every day.

**
On the road to Indianola, I listened to a compilation of ballads called “People Take Warning”.  These were songs, mostly recorded between 1925 and 1933, about natural disasters, fires and floods and great ships sinking at sea, locomotives hurled off the tracks, bridges collapsing into rivers, droughts and celebrated murders.  The music was sizzling in a hot grease of static.  I listened as hard as I could, giving my ears good exercise, but could only decipher about half the words yowled by the old banjo players to guitar and jug band accompaniment. 

***
The Rest Stop midway between Des Moines and the Minnesota border was dedicated to Iowa boys killed in the Civil War at some forgotten battle in Louisiana.  Strange black bulbs, like the heads of asparagus, germinated from the hot field behind the toilets.  It was some sort of art work wrought iron sculptures around a small slab of limestone carved with these words:  On Fame's, camping ground / The tents are solemnly spread / For here will be found / The silent bivouac of the Dead.

****
Off Interstate 35 at the second Ames exit, west-bound on 30 toward Boone.  Grey buildings nudging one another and the deck of a big stadium cantilevered over a lower slope of seats, all empty now: Jack Trice stadium.  Jack Trice was a black athlete, an animal husbandry major.  He played football as a tackle for the Iowa State Cyclones.  On October 6, 1923, he was badly injured in his first football game, stomped and punched by members of the Minnesota Gophers.  Minneapolis doctors thought Trice was fit to return by train to Ames.  But he died of a collapsed lung and pulmonary embolism two days later.  Accounts vary as to exactly what occurred in the game.  It is clear that Trice stayed at the downtown Radisson Hotel in Minneapolis the night before the football game but was not allowed to eat in the restaurant with his all White teammates.  ISU didn’t play Minnesota again for fifty-two years in protest of murderous behavior by the Golden Gophers.

When he was dressed to be put in his casket, a neatly folded sheet of paper was found in Jack Trice’s suit pocket.  The paper contained words written Radisson Hotel stationary:

My thoughts before the first real college game of my life.  The honor of my race, family, and self is at stake.  Everyone is expecting me to do big things.  I will!  My whole body and soul are to be thrown recklessly over the field tomorrow.  Every time the ball is snapped, I will try to do more than my part.  On all defensive plays, I must break through the opponent’s line and stop the play in their territory.  Beware of mass interference!  Fight low with your eyes open and toward the play.  Watch out for cross-bucks and reverse end-runs.  Be on your toes every minute if you expect to make good.  Jack

*****
Is there a Ballad of Jack Trice?


*** **
There are many ballads about train disasters.  One of the most famous is “The Wreck of the Old 97.”  The Old 97 was a mail express that derailed on the Danville line.  The song refers to a real crash that occurred in 1903 on a curve uphill from the Stillhouse Trestle.  In the ballad, the engineer is pressured to speed in order to make up for earlier delays.  When he loses his air brake, we learn: He was goin’ down grade makin’ 90 an hour / When his whistle began to scream! / He was found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle / All scalded to death by the steam.  Ballads of this sort must point a moral and, so, the balladeer ends with these lines: So come you ladies, you must take warning / From this time on and learn / Never part on harsh words from your true lovin’ husband / For he may leave you and never return.

*
Kate Shelley (or Shelly as she sometimes wrote her name) was shanty-Irish born to a tenant farmer in County Offaly, Ireland. When she was 1 ½, Kate came as an immigrant to the United States.  Her family settled on the frontier, in Iowa near the village of Boone, in 1865.  The country was wild then, with Indians and wolves, and the Shelley family homesteaded 163 acres near Honey Creek, a little stream that runs in a deep ravine down to the much larger Des Moines river.  Farming was difficult and the crops failed several years and Kate’s father, Michael, went to work on the Chicago and Northwestern railroad, then, laying track and building trestles over the rivers near the homestead.  Michael died of consumption in 1878.  Kate and her mother worked the farm, plowing and harvesting, often without the labor of draft animals.  Kate had four siblings, but her youngest brother, James, drowned swimming in the broad muddy waters of the Des Moines River.

**
On the night of July 6, 1881, when Kate was either 16 or 18 (her grave’s dates don’t match the baptism records in County Offalay), a savage thunderstorm darkened the skies.  The wind blew down trees and there were torrential rains.  People reported that timbers from a railroad bridge were floating in the Des Moines River.  The station master thought that the high trestle over the Des Moines River might be down and so he telegraphed for a Pusher locomotive to come out and inspect the line.  The Pusher never made it to the Des Moines River – the small trestle over Honey Creek a few dozen rods from the Shelley cabin had collapsed.  The locomotive crashed into the swollen Honey Creek.  Two of the men on locomotive drowned and the other two clambered up on top of the engine, seizing hold of the branches whipping overhead while the warm, muddy flood waters fanged with fallen trees rose up around their ankles.

***
Kate Shelley heard the crash of the locomotive into Honey Creek.  She ran to the side of the swollen stream and saw the men trapped on the engine.  She said that she would bring help and, then, dashed across the wooded promontory where the Des Moines River curves around the point of land.  Through the driving rain, she saw the high trestle, a hundred feet or more above the dark, turbulent river.  Another train was scheduled shortly and Kate was afraid that it would also plunge into Honey Creek where the bridge was down.  In the flashes of lightning, Kate could see that the high trestle, about 220 yards long, seemed to be still intact.  So she started across the rail bridge.   The wind buffeted her and she had to drop to her knees and crawl across the open trestle.  Debris in the river was battering the bridge and she felt the timbers trembling under her.  Wind-driven rain blinded her and, several times, she couldn’t see to go forward.  She clutched at the rail, but, slowly, inched forward.  Of course, if she couldn’t clear the trestle before the train arrived, the locomotive would run over her.  In the distance, she heard the wail of the locomotive’s steam whistle.  She continued her crawl and reached the opposite bank of the river just in time to hail the locomotive and bring it to a stop.  She reported that the bridge was out on Honey Creek.  The train inched across the high trestle, stopped on the other side of the river, and Kate, then, led a rescue party to the creek where the bedraggled survivors of the wreck were pulled out of the foaming flood. 

****
Photographs show a lanky girl with a horsy pig-tail and big teeth.  She has dull, unimaginative eyes.  I suppose that if she had been a person with a vivid imagination, she would never have attempted her crawl across the deadly high trestle bridge.  The Chicago and Northwestern rewarded her with a barrel of flour, 100 dollars, and a lifelong railroad pass. A few years after her exploits, a temperance reformer paid her tuition to college.  She didn’t do well in school and returned to the shanty near Honey Creek.  A Chicago bank paid to have the ramshackle farm improved and lifted a mortgage that was in arrears.  In 1903, she was appointed superintendent of the tiny train station at Moingona, two miles from the farm near the creek.  Kate Shelley didn’t marry and died in 1912 from complications of a ruptured appendix. 

*****
People wrote ballads about Kate Shelley’s adventure on the trestle over the Des Moines but the songs have been forgotten.  In 1991, a children’s book was written about her exploits.  But it is now out-of-print.  The Boone County historical society maintains the abandoned station at Moingona as a museum in her honor.  But the roof leaks and the collections have been spoiled and the museum is never open, even by appointment. 

*** **
You can’t really tell the story of Kate Shelley without falsifying it.  In my account, I describe her crawling across the trestle in the direction of the oncoming train, the Scranton occupied by 200 souls.  In fact, she crawled across the trestle in the opposite direction toward Moingona so that she could alert the station master there.  He sent a telegraph halting the Scranton before it reached the high trestle. She carried a lantern onto the trestle but the wind blew it out.  I imagine the lone girl staggering down the tracks and waving a lantern in the face of both storm and the black iron jaws of the locomotive.  In fact, she crossed the trestle so that the stationmaster could alert the oncoming train to the collapsed bridge at Honey Creek.   A map displayed at the Moingona Station, now the desolate Kate Shelley museum explains the story – but it isn’t really very clear. 

*
Moingona is a tic-tac-toe grid of gravel roads on the hillside over the Des Moines River.  In mid-summer the trees and foliage are thick and you can’t see either the river or the famous high trestle – the old iron girders now doubled by a modern viaduct that runs alongside the old structure.  The station house is pushed into a notch of clearing cut out of the undergrowth.  There are no tracks nearby – either the place was moved or the spur into Moingona is now gone.  Some outdoor exhibits tell the story of Kate Shelley.  The building smells of defeated, collapsing timbers and rotting shingles.  The drive-way to the building ends at the green wall of the jungle.

**
A sign marks the trail to the Mill Creek Bridge.  I follow the trail down hill.  It has been raining daily in this part of the world and the trail in the green shadow is slick.  Mosquitos make a froth around my eyes and my wrist wears a bracelet of them.  The air is steamy, congested, tropical with rot.

***
Below the hill, a turbid stream exhausts itself in deep mud.  Someone has thrown a plankboard bridge over the stream – it’s a couple of parallel two-by-fours spanned by boards, about eight feet long and simply lying in the ooze.  About a third of the cross-members are rotted-out.

****
I venture out onto the plank walkway.  The boards groan and feels spongy underfoot and so I’m afraid to take more than a couple of steps on the little plank bridge.  The forest is tangled on all sides and swarming with mosquitos and the breeze-less air is steamy.  I’m no Kate Shelley – this eight-foot long bridge has defeated me.  I step back onto the slippery mud bank.

*****
The Mill Creek bridge is overhead.  It’s so entangled in vine and underbrush that, at first, my eyes have to adapt to the boreal shadow to detect the structure.  The bridge was built in 1871 from crumbling fieldstone and it is high as a house, a tawny vault of rock that looks like an Etruscan tomb.

*** **
You can’t see the either the Shelley High Trestle or the old Wagon Wheel bridge over the Des Moines from Moingona.  Highway 30 ducks down into the river valley and crosses on concrete piers about forty feet above the tense-looking angry brown flood.  In this area, the river bends sharply in one direction and, then, another. Presumably, the Wagon Wheel bridge, one of the oldest spans in Iowa, juts across the river somewhere around the hairpin bend. 

*
My receptionist, Angie is from this part of Iowa and she’s familiar with the railroad trestles over the Des Moines River.  When she was in High School, kids drank beer on the sand bars sheltered by the big skeletal structures. 

**
About ten years ago, Angie’s brother was with some kids under the Wagon Wheel bridge.  This span was built in the 1870's for cart and wagon traffic.  It was a long deck, just wide enough to support a single lane of traffic, fenced by iron girders bolted together on both sides of the thoroughfare.  The bridge was old by the turn of the century before World War One and clumsy-looking, but it served its purpose.

***
The boys drinking under the bridge in August 2010 found a book bag with some papers, notebooks, and toiletries.  The book bag was lying on the edge of the river under the span.  A few yards away, the boys saw something round, about the size of a chicken carcass, and englobed with flies.  It was someone’s head.  A heap of rags covered a torso with arms outstretched nearby.  The kids were horrified and ran to a nearby farmhouse to call the cops.

****
The head and body proved to be a suicide.  Someone had tried to hang himself from the side of the bridge.  But the drop was too long and the suicide’s neck was pulled apart so that the corpse fell in two parts under the Wagon Wheel bridge.

*****
The suicide wasn’t identified for more than a week.  No one local was missing.  The dead man turned out to be someone from Chicago, a resident of Cook County, Illinois.  Angie told me that her brother still has nightmares about that afternoon to this very day.

*** **
I drove around in the countryside near the brawny-looking Des Moines River.  But I couldn’t find the Wagon Wheel Bridge.  Later, I learned that an ice dam under the bridge’s piers had taken the span down in March of 2016.  Today there’s no trace of the bridge remaining.

*
I took Highway 17 south past Madrid, the location of another renowned high trestle – it’s now part of a bike path – and, then, onto the freeway west of the City.  The opera was in Indianola and so I drove down to an exit in the green, sweltering country and went east through tropical-looking valleys toward that town.

**
Signs by the roadside: When you die, you will meet God and The World will end soon.  More enigmatically: End Eminent Domain Abuse!

***
Out of Oskaloosa or Iowa City, a radio show called Daddy’s Doghouse, broadcast from the VA hospital: “When a Man loves a Woman” and some tunes by Janis Joplin.  My car catches the radio signal only on the crests of the hills.

****
At the Warren County Fairgrounds in Indianola: a Monster Truck Rally.  Girls in bathing suits washing cars for a fundraiser in the Hy-Vee grocery parking lot. 

*****
The opera is performed in a auditorium on a college campus in the middle of town.  The campus occupies a couple of acres in the middle of a residential neighborhood with quiet sidewalks and two-car garages.  I park between some classroom buildings with steeples and mansard roofs.  The sidewalk leads along a greensward under old trees.  Ahead of me, an elderly man forges forward confined in his walker while his wife trudges dutifully alongside.

*** **   
Johann Christian Woyzeck served in the Prussian army until he was 38.  He, then, retired to his home city of Leipzig – this was around 1818.  In Leipzig, Woyzeck began a relationship with a woman named Johanne Christiane Woost.  The former soldier supported himself by serving as a barber and making wigs.  Woyzeck had a son with Fraulein Woost.  But he suspected her of infidelity and beat her up.  The police arrested Woyzeck.  He served eight days in jail for domestic abuse.  Released from jail, Woyzeck had nowhere to go.  He begged on the streets.  On June 2, 1821, Woyzeck cut Fraulein Woost’s throat, killing her.  He was immediately arrested and confessed.  Woyzeck had been hallucinating before the murder and some of the authorities thought he was insane.  A physician, Dr. Clarus, was commissioned to examine him and write a forensic report as to his criminal responsibility for the murder.  Dr. Clarus met with Woyzeck five times and, ultimately, concluded that the former soldier was sane when he killed his common law wife.  An appeal from the murder conviction followed, another doctor saw Woyzeck, and, then, Dr. Clarus met with him again for another five sessions.  Once more, Dr. Clarus affirmed Woyzeck’s sanity.  The criminal was executed by beheading in the Leipzig city square on August 27, 1824.  This was the last execution in Leipzig prior to the Nazi period.

*
Georg Buechner was born in 1813 in Darmstadt.  He is one of the greatest prodigies in German literature.  While studying medicine, Buechner wrote a vehement revolutionary tract, Die Hessisches Landbote (The Hessian Courier) – he was only 21.  The tract calls for immediate revolution and begins with instructions that any person caught with the brochure on his or her person will be imprisoned and, possibly, executed – so readers are advised to destroy the tract if apprehended by authorities.  Buechner followed this political agit-prop with two plays, Danton’s Tod (“Danton’s Death”) and Leonce und Lena, a comedy a bit after the model of Shakespeare’s As You Like It.  Both plays are monuments of German literature and were published before Buchner was 23.  He, then, wrote a harrowing, partly non-fiction account of madness, the prose piece “Lenz” – the novella describes the German poet and dramatist Lenz, who went mad, suffering a breakdown in the mountains.  Buechner also published scientific essays on the cerebral nerves (he wrote in a letter “I spend my days dissecting cadavers and my nights writing plays”) and on the nervous system of the barbel or catfish.  (He also translated two plays by Victor Hugo and wrote hundreds of letters).  During his last year, Buechner became interested in the case of Johann Christian Woyzeck, read the trial transcript, and, also, studied the competing forensic reports as to Woyzeck’s state of mind when he killed Fraulein Woost.  Ultimately, Buechner prepared four manuscripts comprising scenes to a play about Woyzeck.  He died before he could assemble the fragments into a definitive edition.  Typhoid killed him when he was 25.  Woyzeck is a play that exists outside of its time – it is more fierce and didactic than Brecht and more despairing than Beckett.  It also seems a kind of dead end – nihilism has no place to go after Woyzeck.

**
Woyzeck was rediscovered in the 1870's on twelve sheets of paper densely covered with tiny, illegible handwriting.  Various editors have stitched the fragments into different editions.  The play was first performed under the direction of Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1914 – that is, a hundred years after Buechner’s death.  The avant-garde composer Alban Berg saw the play and forged it into an opera that was first presented in 1925.  The opera is atonal, written according to the 12-tone row system, and requires a large orchestra.  The music is either a whisper or a shriek. 

***
Berg’s opera is called Wozzeck.  This is because no one had reliably deciphered Buechner’s handwriting and missed the “y” in the name.  Because the name was spelled wrong, many years passed before the Leipzig trial records that Buechner used for his material were identified as relevant to the drama. 

****
The question that Woyzeck and the opera named Wozzeck consider is the much-vexed issue of free-will.  Did the murderer act as a result of free-will decision to kill his common-law wife?  Or was he the victim of forces, including the onset of mental illness, that stripped him of any ability to resist the hallucinations and savage jealousy urging him to kill the woman.  Buechner imagines his title character as a kind of automaton or marionette – a man programmed, as it were, by misery of various kinds to commit the murder that resulted in his execution.  The military has turned Woyzeck into a robot designed to follow orders.  Religion has filled his head with apocalyptic imagery.  To earn money, Woyzeck has agreed to serve as an experimental subject conducted by a physician – he has been eating nothing but beans for the past six months and this diet has weakened him.  Sexual jealousy further tilts poor Woyzeck into a state of madness in which he cuts his Fraulein Woost’s throat.

*****
In an early scene in the opera, Wozzeck and his friend, Andres, are gathering sticks in the forest.   They come upon a sinister-looking pond surrounded by mushrooms growing in strange circular patterns.  Wozzeck recalls that someone was wandering in this clearing in the woods once and saw what they thought was a hedgehog.  When the wanderer approached the creature, he saw that it was actually a severed human head.  The head gnashed its teeth and slowly levitated into the air. 

*** **
Strangely bright outside after the gloom of the opera.  Old people on the sidewalks walking in the green shadows cast by the trees.  Even the shadows seem radiant so brilliant is the light. 

*
North to Des Moines through verdant valleys – small farmsteads, fields of corn and soybean, ditches decorated with wild flowers.

**
South of downtown Des Moines, the highway becomes a long avenue running through old, dilapidated neighborhoods.  Most of the signs are in Spanish: Zacatecas Motors and Aztec Car Repair.  The heat has emptied out the streets.

***
Eight-hundred yards from the capitol building, the road runs over a long viaduct.  I expect to see a river in the broad green channel below but instead it is simply an empty space, a kind of campagna, with groves of tattered-looking trees, mounds, a road running below toward a single rotting grain elevator poking up from the fields like a broken tooth.  This area was once, I suppose, lined with many railroad tracks and, presumably, there were a dozen or more grain elevators next to the sidings, switching lots, and rows of taverns and whorehouses next to the huge trainyard.  But the tracks are gone and the grain elevators torn down except for that last structure standing utterly alone in the strange, empty valley where the wind blows and the tall grass trembles along the deserted rights-of-way.

****
My CD, People Take Warning, has ballads about crime: rapes and murders, enraged women killing their lovers, bandits gunned down by railroad cops.  Sudden death is all around

*****
People all take warning / And don’t forget to pray / You may well meet your maker / Before the break of day.

*** **
Floyd Collins died in a lonely sand cave:   Young people all take warning from Floyd Collin’s fate / And get right with your maker before it is too late / It may not be a sand cave in which we find our tomb / But when we go to the Maker we will meet our doom.

*
A school burned down: You could hear the children screaming / As the flames were rising high / Oh Daddy get your baby / Don’t let your baby die.

**
A plane crashed: On a happy-go-lucky flight they went / Alaska’s not so far away / Light-hearted Will Rogers and brave Wiley Post / Never dreamt fate would call that day.

***
I stop for supper in Clear Lake, Iowa.  Signs lead me to the Surf Ballroom, a flat windowless box of pale brick in which the half-circle of a vault makes a cresting wave over the famous dance floor.  After Buddy Holly played here, he boarded a small plane for a flight to Fargo.  The plane crashed in a cornfield a mile or so away and Holly, with most of his band was killed. 

****
When you reach my age, every road that you travel may be your last.  I wonder if I will ever drive to Des Moines again.  Was this trip to the city the last time I will go to that place?  The city will be in its valley surrounded by floods, the highway will run straight and true, people will still await the curtain’s rise in a crowded theater, the fields will remain green and grey with tall corn and soybeans, the brown river will still nudge the concrete pylons, but I will be gone.

*****
An outlaw bold encounters a female sheriff – the woman points a Thompson submachine gun at the bad man: I’ve had my worldly pleasures / I’ve faced down many a man / But it was down in Texarkana / Where a woman called my hand... Young men, young men take warning / Oh take my last advice / If you start the game in life wrong / You must surely pay the price.


July 2019

On the Work of the Critic

In his Laws, Plato decrees:

In regard then to every representation, whether in drawing, music or any other art, he, who is to be a competent judge, must possess three requisites: he must know in the first place what the imitation is, secondly, he must know of its correctness, and, thirdly, that it has been well-executed in words and melodies and rhythms.  (669 a, b)

Several aspects of this declaration deserve further consideration.  In Plato’s dialogues, the work of the artist, particularly the poet, is disenfranchised and, even, regarded as potential inimical to the well-being of the City.  The sensuous world is already a copy of the invisible Ideas or Forms.  Therefore, the artist or poet operates at a second remove from reality – he copies what is already a copy.  His activity is superfluous and a distraction from the political and metaphysical realities that Socrates endorses: human participation in the city as a place in which justice is enacted and the ascent from the shadow realm of every day existence toward the radiant domain of the Ideas.  (In this scheme, the critic would operate at a third remove from the Truth – he contemplates and describes a copy of a copy: that is, his criticism is representation of what is already a representation of a representation.)  Plato’s prescription as to the work of the critic in his Laws seems much more benign.  Unlike Socrates, Plato seems to think that there is a valid place for the arts in the City and that the critic, further, has an important role in assessing the work of artists.

The critic’s first order of business is “recognizing” what is being “imitated” – Plato uses the word gignoskein for this cognitive activity.  Second, the critic must assess whether the representation is “true” – he uses the word “orthos” for this faculty.  Finally, the critic must assess whether the work’s form is beautiful and properly tailored to the thing imitated – the Greek prefix eu is here deployed as in eurhythmic (beautiful rhythm).  Observe that these three canons all relate to “imitation”.  All art “imitates”.  We might question this fundamental assumption: what does music imitate?  What does a painting by Jackson Pollock imitate?  But, I think, these objections can be readily met: music imitates the motion of the soul or spirit as it progresses through various intellectual states and emotions – music imitates, therefore, ecstasy, resignation, sorrow, joy and the various transitions between these states of being.  Similarly, one might observe that an abstract painting is, also, a depiction of the artist’s state of mind, his or her emotional response to physical or spiritual stimuli.  Therefore, the concept of imitation, probably, is elemental to the arts.

Also problematic, I suppose, is the distinction between the first two cognitive faculties that the critic is required to exercise: what is the difference between “recognizing” the imitation and determining if the imitation is “true”?  Presumably, if the imitation is not true, the critic won’t be able to recognize the subject of the imitation.  Thus, on first analysis, the notion of “recognition” and orthos (or truth) seem be so closely aligned that it may be difficult to draw an exact distinction.  But I think recognition has a different broader meaning.  In my view, recognition is categorical.  The critic must determine the category of thing offered to his analysis by the artist.  In a sense, I think this consideration involves genre.  What type of art work are we presented: is the play a tragedy, a satyr-play, or a comedy?  Are we dealing with an opera or a musical comedy?  Is the canvas a nude or a history painting or a still life?  Are we dealing with a lyric poem, a sonnet, or epic verse?  Accordingly, I think, Plato means that the critic must initially discern the generic category to which the art object belongs as a predicate for considering whether the representation is “true” or “orthotic.”

In this context, the final category seems clear and readily understood: once we know the genre into which the art object fits (that is, we understand how it acknowledges and embodies the historical tradition of this sort of representation), then, we can assess the truth of what we are shown, and, finally, how the form and stylistic parameters of the work embody its meaning.  Viewed in this light, the three species of cognition that Plato urges are (1) historical (how does the work conform or differ from previous works of the same general sort) (2) moral – is the work true? Or does it lie in some way? and (3) stylistic – how does the way the work is made embody its genre and meanings?

Let’s apply these criteria to an art work: consider the 1956 Western, The Fastest Gun Alive, a modest and relatively low-budget B-movie starring Glenn Ford. 

If I am right that the first element of criticism is categorical, then, we must ask: What is the nature of The Fastest Gun Alive?  What is its genre?  Of course, the film is a Western and must be understood within the grouping of films (and writings) of that kind.  Westerns share family resemblances – that is, no two Westerns are identical, but many of them will demonstrate similar themes and bear a resemblance to other works of that kind.  Fundamental to the Western is the distinction that these films draw between the wilderness and civilization.  The mountains and the desert, inhabited by outlaws and Indians, besiege the enclaves of villages – in the wilderness, men must be self-reliant and ready to defend themselves and their kin without recourse to the law.  Conflict arises when the wilderness encounters the village – that is, at the intersection between the wilderness and the town.  The settled land represented by the town is peopled by women, children, nuclear families – the periphery is where bands of outlaws and tribes of warriors roam.  Women and children represent civilizing forces.  In towns, people pursue commerce and live according to economies involving money, wages, and exchange of goods for currency; in the wilderness, people forage for gold and treasure and rob one another.  The town represents community; the wild territory is inhabited by nomadic outlaws, stoic, aloof, and dangerous individuals.  Of course, from the outset, the definitions informing wilderness and civilization, and the moralities associated with the two places, are mutable – in fact, in later Westerns, that mourn the passing of the wild country, the values invert: the city is corrupt, dangerous, full of cowardly bourgeois who lack the means to defend themselves (for instance the  in High Noon or the politicians in Peckinpah’s later films); by contrast, the wild places of desert and high sierra are pure, suffused with the old virtues of self-reliance and pioneer rectitude.  It doesn’t matter whether town or wilderness is morally privileged.  The essence of the Western is the clash between the values of the frontier and the self-reliant morality of the wilderness.

The Fastest Gun Alive begins with a shot of a angular peak bisecting a wedge of cloudy sky.  It’s black and white and an image of the wilderness.  Next, we see three bad hombres riding across the desert after emerging from behind the ridge of the mountain.  The bad men enter a town, threaten one of the people there, and the leader of the bandits shoots the man down, after invoking the archaic code of the West to force his victim to draw his gun.  George Temple, the gunslinger in retirement, is a man of the town.  He has been civilized by his wife, a beautiful statuesque woman who announces that she is pregnant in the first scene between man and wife.  Like innumerable frontier hamlets, from the village in William S. Hart’s Hells Hinges (1916) to the mining camp in McCabe and Mrs. Miller,(1971) a church with steeple occupies the center of the town.  The church symbolizes both the blessings and discontents of civilization: the church signifies organized religion and community spirit, but can also represent hypocrisy and the herd mentality of the town-folk.  George Temple precipitates the film’s crisis when he demonstrates his virtuosity with his six-gun – he has become bored with his profession as a dry goods merchant, a job that requires him to sell candy to children and respond to the petty complaints of female customers.  Genre exists so that the artist can reverse polarities with respect to fundamental values and devise variations on well-established themes.  For these ingenious complications and fugue-like reiterations of themes to be effective, however, the critical eyes must recognize that the film operates within the parameters of the classical Western.

One sequence in The Fastest Gun Alive demonstrates how far a film can stray from its genre while still remaining rooted in the Western form.  About fifteen minutes into the film, the narrative pauses to incorporate a spectacular dance number performed by a minor character, really a figure who has no real role in the narration at all, a young man (Russ Tamblyn) courting a woman at a barn dance.  The dance sequence involves elaborate gymnastics, trampoline-like effects implemented courtesy of a see-saw, and a stomping hoe-down executed by the young man perched atop stilt-like shovels.  This sequence can’t be reconciled to the generally earnest and psychologically acute tone of the rest of the film – this was an adult Western and involves speeches in which characters agonize over earlier psychic trauma.  The scene is like an archaeological artifact embedded in the movie – it reminds us that Westerns, even those with pretensions toward seriousness, were intended as entertainment for all categories of viewers.  Thus, the form admits song and dance numbers – anything is admissible, more or less, so long as it entertains the viewers.  In the comedy Western, Way out West (1937) with Laurel and Hardy, there are carefully choreographed song and dance numbers; many Western heroes play guitar and sing around the campfire (think of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers); even some John Ford Westerns feature musical interludes, ballads and lullabies sung to restless herds of cattle.  With their overdetermined and stylized elements, and the generally fantastical mood that prevails in many Westerns, these inserted song and dance numbers remind us that the Western is not fundamentally realistic but, in fact, derives from ballads and bears some kinship to the movie musical – in fact, the athletic dancer in this scene, Russ Tamblyn had earlier achieved fame for similarly muscular dancing in the Western musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954).  The elaborate dance scene in The Fastest Gun Alive reminds us that genre films are never pure:  they can incorporate any number of extraneous elements so long as the basic requirement – that the audience be continuously entertained – is achieved.

Having recognized The Fastest Gun Alive as a Western, we, then, turn to the question of truth.  Is the movie “truthful”?  Since the film is a genre picture, there’s no point in asking whether the movie is true to the historical realities of the old West.  The old West establishes a system of oppositions and clashing value systems that define the film’s narrative.  But no real claim to historical authority or accuracy is made – in fact, this picture remains self-consciously vague as to where it is set.  Nothing really defines the year in which the action takes place, nor does the plot or script tell us where the town is located.  We are shown a map but this is merely to establish that the bad outlaws are close to the village where the story is set and will arrive there shortly.  The imminent arrival of the murderous bandits (and, then, the posse that is determinedly chasing them) set up a “ticking clock” – the action has to be compressed into the time represented by the film (which is essentially an Aristotelian “real time” during the last hour of the movie; in other words events unfold without edits suggesting the passage of time – this is made manifest when a crisis is announced and a threat made to burn down the village “in five minutes”.  The screen time that lapses is, then, in fact, five minutes.)  The need to create urgency that will impel the action to its climax explains the shots showing a map and the progress of the bandits across the open spaces between the little isolated village.  But the map doesn’t tell us where the action takes place or, even, the State or territory where events are happening.  We aren’t shown anything to explain why the town exists in the middle of nowhere or how its economy works.  Details as to date, time, year, and location are left conspicuously ambiguous.  We know generally that the action occurs after Wyatt Earp and other famous gunmen clashed in Dodge City – but, beyond that vague reference, no effort is made to correlate the film to any of the truths that history might establish.

So how should truth be defined in the context of this film?  With respect to The Fastest Gun Alive, the notion of truth has a psychological inflection.  Truth means a truthful representation of human emotion and impulses.  More broadly defined “truth” here means fidelity to group dynamics – the movie purports to show us not only psychological truths but also truths that are descriptive of how men and women in a community act in forming a moral consensus and, then, implementing the values that they proclaim themselves to hold in common.  The truths explored in the film relate to how psychological trauma if not resolved leads to violence – George Temple has witnessed his father’s death and failed to avenge him; he has suffered psychic violence and bears the scars of that trauma, scars that constrict and limit his ability to act.  Even the vicious gunslinger suffers from past trauma – his wife left him for a gambler and the film suggests that the bad man is motivated by sexual insecurity: he has replaced his phallus with a gun.  Those to whom injury has been done, do injury in turn.

The villagers are pious and conventional in their thought processes.  The film shows them swearing a vow to God to never invoke George Temple’s deadly prowess with his gun.  But when the villains threaten to burn down their town, almost everyone reneges on their earlier oath and urges Temple to duel with the villain.  Group rectitude only goes so far before being sacrificed on the altar of the common good.  Groups are fickle – they can be undoubtedly sincere and well-meaning, but, when threatened, the group reverses course and shows itself willing to traduce communal oaths taken only a few minutes before.   This jaded view of group dynamics is one of the elements of “truth” that the film explores.

Finally, the movie dramatizes how competition becomes obsessive and, even, deadly.  The bad hombre played by Broderick Crawford is desperate to show that he is the titular “fastest gun alive” and is willing to sacrifice everything to this end.  Male competition has a dark side – men will compete to the death unless they are prevented by more rational people from killing one another.  The awful logic of competition is that there can be only one winner – and the man who sets out to prove that he is “the fastest gun alive” is willing to insanely sacrifice all of his ill-gotten treasure (the loot from the robberies), the safety of his outlaw henchmen, and, ultimately, even his own life to demonstrate proficiency and superiority in a pointless, even futile, pursuit – pulling a gun out of a leather holster and firing it as quickly as possible.  The bizarre dance number that intrudes on the movie’s first half-hour illustrates the madness of male competition – Glenn Ford reportedly was outraged that Tamblyn was allowed “to do a Donald O’Connor all over (my) movie.”  Tamblyn’s not the hero and has a small part and he doesn’t get to fire a six gun, but for five or six minutes he takes over the film to the complete exclusion of Glenn Ford.  Accordingly, the dance number rips a hole in the fabric of the film – it’s a like shotgun blast tearing open the movie’s narrative.  Who owns this film?  The ostensible star, Glenn Ford, or this upstart kid with the fantastic dance moves?  The notion of competition, accordingly, is highlighted as a truth integral to the film – providing an extra-narrative (or supra-narrative) commentary on the destructive nature of masculine competition.

Thus, the film addresses certain themes as truths: Men are competitive and will compete to the death; trauma makes men violent; sexual betrayal and jealousy can be displaced into destructive and, even, lethal competition; the townspeople are never better than a mob – a mob can be good or bad or indifferent, but it is always sublimely fickle.  (It should be said that Glenn Ford’s problematic performance is inadequate to the film’s depiction of psychological truth.  Ford imitates James Dean, an actor whose style and emoting are wholly inimical to Ford’s stalwart, sober, and staid persona.  Thus, Ford’s performance, designed to highlight the emotional truths that the film presents, fails – Ford seems to be straining for melodramatic effects and pathos beyond his ordinary range and timbre; the inauthenticity of his performance, therefore, undercuts the canon of truth as it applies to the psychological issues that the movie embodies.)

Finally, how does The Fastest Gun Alive embody the ideas that it dramatizes in its artistic form?  The clarity of the film’s fundamental conflicts are established by clear, carefully focused, and authoritatively posed compositions, all lucidly presented in austere black-and-white.  The film is abstract and, even, geometric. in the sense that it avoids any form of expressionism – action is rendered clearly and efficiently by an objective camera placed inevitably in a position with the best, and most informative, perspective on the events staged.  There is nothing colorful, artistic, or, even, particularly personal about the way the film is made – art is a feminine indulgence in a world that is starkly masculine.  Although people behave ambiguously, there is no ambiguity in the way the film is shot and edited – we are not forced to discern events through webwork of shadow or chiaroscuro.   Everything is clearly presented within a clearly defined, even Cartesian framework of space and time.

The psychological grace notes intrinsic to the new adult Western require tight close-ups.  The audience must see the character’s faces so as to scrutinize them for traces of inner turmoil.  Thus, close-ups are interpolated into the shots showing groups of people interacting.  Even the villain, played by Broderick Crawford, is exposed as conflicted, even, fearful at the film’s climax – he is accorded his fair share of angst and the camera focuses on him tightly to show the sweat on his forehead and the worry in his eyes.  Since most of the group shots are prosaic, the score by Andre Previn is over-emphatic: sound cues trumpet conflict and anxiety.  The score dramatizes what the film maker and actors do not.  These cues are particularly excessive with respect to images showing George Temple’s pregnant wife – the actress, Jeanne Crain is profoundly inexpressive, even inert, with a limited range of expression: she’s more a mannequin than a performer and, so, explicit musical emphasis must be used to express emotions that are beyond her range.  The climactic gun battle is intentionally obscured by a flurry of Soviet-style montage – guns being drawn, pistols fired in close-up, with no long or master shot to show us what is happening.  This technique is designed to create suspense about the outcome of the duel and, later, to even misdirect the audience.  Finally, a sweeping crane shot lifts the camera up above the graveyard at the side of the church, providing us with an aerial perspective on the village – George Temple is now just another member of the community, men, women and children that we see walking on the town’s street.  This contrasts with the opening scenes in the film in which George is alone, blazing away at a targets, in the wasteland of the desert.  The film ends with him integrated into the village that he has saved. 

Analysis never ceases.  Works of art, even, rather humble ones are inexhaustible.  Once, the critic has directed his thought about the art work through the three inquiries mandated by Plato – recognition of type, truthfulness, and style – then, the process can (and, probably, should be) repeated.  Our tentative responses to those three inquiries can be cycled back into thought about the art object under consideration.  Hermeneutics is circular – what we have learned or proposed as a hypothesis can now be used to refine our thinking as to genre, an analysis that will likely reveal additional truth-propositions in the work, and, that will more clearly illumine the technical and stylistic devices used to embody those propositions in the art under consideration.

A noteworthy element of this analysis is that, consistent with the New Criticism, the intentions of the artist, his or her quirks and obsessions need not be central to this interpretative work.  In other words, the Platonic system for criticism outlined in this essay represents an alternative to the auteur theory – auteur analysis compares individual works by one “author” or film-director for the purpose of establishing signature traits.  These traits may be linked, then, to the auteur’s obsessions or psychological characteristics.  The Platonic mode of interpretation treats the work as defined more exactly by its genre – that is, the phase of recognition – than by the unique personality of the creator.

In a 1979 lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, Manny Farber comments on his critical practice.  Farber seems idiosyncratic in that, contrary to the auteur analysis then current, he regards film as more anonymous – film, Farber, argues is more the product of the cultural environment of its time, than it is a system of intentional meaning inscribed by a specific auteur.  The film-author’s intentions may are registered on the surface of the work, readily visible and mostly intelligible, but always superficial – the deep strains and stresses in the art work are cultural and historical.  A script may proclaim a timeless truth, but the make-up, hair styling, the costumes, and set design are always rooted in a specific period and, indeed, undercut the claim to timelessness or eternal verity that the dialogue may propose.   The film critic should approach the work as an archaeologist, excavating down through ideology and surface appearance to discover the cultural substrate in which the art object is located.

Considering a lurid crime film from the early seventies, The Honeymoon Killers, Faber says:

(W)hat I’m trying to suggest is that you can read a movie differently.  If we get rid of the aesthetic pursuit, the arty pursuit, finding what is artful and what is continuous in artfulness and read them as though they were something that wasn’t produced by artists.  They’re just products... and all of society is based on building a priceless item and making people feel that they live through products and good products are the things to have, good bodies are the things to have and so everything has been distorted away from reading a movie just plain, reading it the way you would read a sports story in the newspaper, or the way you would see a TV show...The Honeymoon Killers is like a transparency of your own life, a transparency of the period, which was 1970, right on the money.  It wasn’t later than 1970; it wasn’t earlier.  And it was exactly on the money in relation to what other artists were doing at the moment.  In a sense it was too good for its time, but who cares?  I’m not interested in what was good.  It should have been read as a period movie, as what it was sociologically, politically, in terms of women, in terms of sex, in terms of mortality, killing sadism – whatever.  It should have read in that way, and I don’t think it was...

Farber is arguing on the “recognition” axis in the three-fold system that I endorse in this essay.  He says that we must recognize what the film reveals, inadvertently in many respects, as opposed to what it’s creators think that it is telling or showing us.  The Fastest Gun Alive is showing us the exhaustion with the Western that prevailed in the mid-fifties, the anxiety about heroism in the wake of the World War and the subsequent futile conflict in Korea; the film suggests that the generation of men raised on war (and experiencing war through the lens of their own private cowardice) is about to explode, that these men are no longer satisfied with peace and that they are ready, now ten years after the fighting, to turn away from their families and escape into empty displays of virtuosity and alcoholism.  The film uses the Western to express discontent with the life of selling and buying, commerce and advertising.  But the film also demonstrates that this discontent simmers in a highly conventional and ideologically constrained society – the group is omnipresent and governs the options available to the hero.  No one knows whether to duel to the death and dance insanely, ricocheting off the square corners of the box in which everyone is trapped.  What does it mean when the Western quietly goes mad?

On the Katanes Monster

Katanes is a loch, a deep icy lake near the Hvalfjurthur (“Whale Fjord”) on the west coast of Iceland.  In 1874, a monster about the size of a large dog emerged from the lake and trotted around, disturbing the sheep grazing on the heath above the lake.  The shepherds threw stones at the monster and it retreated into the lake.  A year later, the monster was seen again – it was now larger, the size of a calf, and looked more ferocious.  When the sheepherders approached, it again retreated and dived off a boulder into the lake.

The next year, the monster was back, this time killing and half-devouring two sheep.  Many people saw the monster (dyreth) – it was a big as a bull, reddish in color with a crocodile’s jaws and the droopy ears of a beagle.  It had six sharp claws on each foot.

The local farmers sent a representative to Reykjavik, a day’s travel away, and asked that the local Danish governor send them help.  The governor, thinking self-help the best, offered to pay a substantial bounty to anyone who killed the monster and brought evidence of its death to Reykjavik.  The farmers were excited.  They hired a professional photographer to stake out the lake and retained a sharpshooter to patrol the banks of the water. 

This is the expedition to take the monster shown in the postcard that I bought at Iceland’s National Museum in Reykjavik. 

One night, two men were patrolling the lake shore.  It was a very dark night with no moon.  The next morning, the two men were found injured among the rhyolite boulders on the edge of the lake.  One man had both eyes blackened and his jaw was broken.  The other man’s fists were raw and bloody.  The two men had been walking along the lake shore, moving in opposite directions and listening intently for splashing in the water, noise signifying that the monster was up and about.  The men each claimed to have been attacked in the darkness by the monster, but admitted they couldn’t see what was hitting and kicking them.  Since they were found sprawled on the edge of the lakeshore within a few feet of one another, a few members of their party formed conclusions that were not exactly flattering to the monster-attack victims.

The monster refused to show himself.  After a month, the sharpshooter presented a large invoice for his services.  The local farmers refused to pay and a lawsuit ensued.  The photographer went back to his portrait studio in Reykjavik.

A proposal was made to drain the lake.  The lake proved to be too deep.  I saw the lake on the edge of the Whale Fjord when I drove out into the country to visit  Borganes and some of the western fjords.  I didn’t see any monster or sign of any monster.  There were a lot of sheep, however, rambling around the still, cold waters. 

The locals believe that the lake has a subterranean passage to the sea or, perhaps, to a lake in mountins called Skorradalsvatn.  A monster haunts Skorrasdalsvatn too.  I drove by that lake and didn’t see any sign of a monster. 

Stockholm and Reykjavik

Arrival

Travel is travail, even when it is for pleasure.  With my daughter, Angelica, and her friend, Andrea Ramirez Hernandez, I traveled to Stockholm and, then, Rekyavik in the summer of 2019.  

We left Austin mid-day and drove to Eden Prairie, a suburb of Minneapolis.  When I was a teenager, Eden Prairie was at the very edge of the lens of densely populated metropolitan counties comprising Minneapolis - St. Paul and its suburbs.  Today, fifty years later, Eden Prairie is nested within concentric suburbs, a bit like one of the interior shells now deep within a Russian doll.  You used to be able to see the edge of the country, the unpeopled acreage where farms lapped up against one another and with rail-stop towns at predictable intervals – generally spaced at the distance a man on foot could walk during a morning and return in the long, bright afternoon.   But, now that edge is nowhere in sight and, even, a trip to the airport an hour or so before suppertime can be daunting, a dash through plodding bumper-to-bumper traffic on the freeways.  This decade, Uber drivers in Minneapolis are all Africans, pitch-black and invisible except for the palms of their hands, teeth, and eyes.  Our driver re-routed repeatedly, plunging on and off the freeway to maneuver on congested surface roads around places where the crush of cars had halted on the interstate.  The man drove silently, skillfully, with uncanny aplomb and it was cheap – I don’t understand the economy of Uber.  

We were airborne an hour before sunset, went up over the top of the world, and pitched down in the eerie noon-time radiance of Iceland at six a.m., 66 degrees north as the duty-free shop is named.  The change in time-zones has upset your stomach and intestinal gas expanding and, then, compressed by the fluctuating barometric pressure in the plane comes burping out of you, escaping from all orifices.   The change in time-zone makes your stomach upset – is it time to eat or sleep or defecate?  Your body doesn’t know.  The airport is cheerless, lonely as can be for hours, and, then, suddenly plunged into chaos when several planes land at once.  The toilets make no sense and the duty-free shops have inscrutable rules as to what you can buy and under what circumstances.  Perhaps, your credit card won’t work as expected.  Everything is surreally overpriced and the food is terrible, cardboard sandwiches with mystery meat, wilted salads, dangerous local yogurts full of bacteria with which your guts are unfamiliar.

After four hours, we are in the sky again, three hours on uncomfortable, flimsy seats over the North Atlantic to Stockholm.  Again, the cab driver seems to be from north Africa.  He has a great nocturnal lemur eyes.  What day is it exactly?  Sweden is lush with enameled green meadows and dark and cool forests of evergreens that are almost black to the eye and the houses have red tile roofs.  White high rises hover like clouds over blue lakes that don’t show even a speck of algae.

By this time, your head is aching and your bowels crabby and you have the sense that you are terribly hungover.  The rooms aren’t exactly as expected or specified.  Someone is playing abstract and frigid jazz in the hotel bar.  The food at the café across the street (closed to serve as a pedestrian walkway) seems remarkably good – but this is because you haven’t eaten for hours.  Concrete lions keep traffic from turning onto the street on which the hotel is located – it is Nybrogaten (gaten is cognate with “lane”).  If you wander even two blocks, you will get lost because your sense of direction is impaired.  The sun isn’t where it should be located.  Landmarks make no sense – they rotate uneasily around you like an impaired compass. 

You have to pull down the black-out curtains to sleep.  I look at my phone.  There is a text message from my wife, Julie – she has fallen down the steps at home, feels sore and unsteady on her feet, but thinks she will be okay.  This is disheartening.   The night outside the hotel windows is white with pale diffuse light and seems endless.

The next day, the news is worse: by text message, Julie tells me that her knee-cap is broken and that she can’t really move around.  She says that her knee is locked in an immobilizer – this prevents her flexing the joint where the fracture is located.  At this point, it’s clear that she needs assistance, but I am across the ocean in a foreign land.  I send her a message asking if she wants me to make plans to fly home from Stockholm on the upcoming Friday when, in fact, I am scheduled to depart for Rekyavik for the next week in Iceland.  She tells me that she is making some progress, although her leg has been very painful, and that she doesn’t want me to return from Europe.  But, of course, this response is what I expected.  Some times, you must do the thing that is obviously necessary, although not overtly requested.  Julie tells me to wait for a day or so – so that she can learn the result of her doctor’s appointment scheduled for the next Wednesday (“Wotan’s day).  The time difference is confusing and muddles communication.  She can’t get to the doctor because she can’t drive – she will have to call the Smart Bus, an erratic service that is not really dependable.

Of course, in Austin where the vicious and rapacious Mayo Clinic holds a monopoly on medical services, no doctors are available.  When you seek medical attention, you find yourself consulting with a physician’s assistant, someone who is well-meaning and, even, perhaps, empathetic, but not qualified as a medical doctor.  (The Mayo Clinic bills exorbitantly regardless of the qualifications of the person that you see.)  Julie reports to me by text that she has seen a Physician’s Assistant again not an M. D. – in fact, as I write these words more than a month after her accident, Julie has never been allowed to see an actual medical doctor let alone an orthopaedic specialist.  Those kinds of physicians are unavailable if you live in Austin, medical doctors are a luxury which our population, largely on Medicare, is neither afforded nor deserves. The P.A. has told her that she doing fine, although it’s not clear exactly how this is known – the X-rays, also enormously expensive, were taken from the wrong angle and reveal nothing at all.  Still enduring significant pain, Julie has been told to treat her symptoms with Ibuprofen – the Mayo Clinic now shies away from the stronger pain medication that it dispensed like candy in a Pez container only a couple years ago.

I suppose I should have arranged to fly back to Austin.  But I didn’t.  Julie was stoic, took the hero’s part and didn’t complain.  So I stayed I Scandinavia.  

We have bad steps in my house.  We have lived there for 27 years now and I suppose will die in that residence – indeed, perhaps, murdered by the stairs.  These steps leading from the living room upstairs have always been perilous.  They are covered in old beige-colored carpet that has ripped loose in places and that, sometimes, moves dangerously underfoot.  Furthermore, the last several steps possess a geometry different from the rest of the stairs – they are shorter in tread, I think, and slightly higher, although these deviations are concealed by the floppy carpet.  I have fallen myself several times on these steps and am afraid of them – I descend always with my hand on banister rail, sideways, putting my foot down so that it’s parallel to the tread and not at a right angle and I take each step one at a time, no longer moving fluidly as I descend but, rather, in jerky increments, step by step by step.   But, even so, an element of distraction arises.  The stair comes down from the second floor bedrooms and toilet, dropping four or five steps to a little landing where the descent takes a left turn.  Below the landing, balusters covered in crumbling green-grey paint provide a rail.  But about half-way down the steps, something curious always happens – you become distracted: perhaps it’s the bulbous insect-eye of the Tv, catching reflections, or the glimmer of green and bark-brown beyond the windows and white porch, perhaps, it’s the front door at the base of the steps or the coat-rack with its sad burden of limp jackets or the upholstered furniture beckoning at you like a familiar beast of burden or, even, the dog sleeping on the couch.  In any event, something seizes your attention and you pause, and, although your descent was arrhythmic and halting before this moment, now you are dangling between steps, off-balance and, then, you move your foot before your mind has caught up with your exact position in space (your proprioception, to use a fancy term, is disrupted) and, suddenly, you are in free-fall, dropping through the empty air, to crumple into a bundle at the foot of the stairs.  Something seizes your attention and knocks you off-balance and, then, anything can happen – the fall occurs in your mind first, as a sort of fog or disorder, a disturbance in your bowels... the fall happens before it happens when you become distracted and disoriented and, of course, the same thing can occur in a foreign country: you are on ancient cobblestones, polished by twenty generations of pedestrians, and there is a church tower overhead or a looming monument or a statue signaling to you from its pedestal and the dimensions of curb and street width are not exactly what you expect, different from the way space is ordered at home, and, then, suddenly, you trip, you fall and your face hits the paving and your glasses are broken and your vacation is spoiled.  When this happened to a close friend of mine, in London, I think, his health was ruined, in fact, quite destroyed, and a few months later he died – this can be the outcome of a fall while on holiday or, of course, a fall that happens in your own house, on the tiles in your bathroom or on the familiar steps...

Stockholm and Reykjavik: 105 (an odd number) paragraphs comparing the two places

1. 

The name “Stockholm” originates in wooden piles sunk into the waterway leading from the Baltic Ocean inland to Lake Malarna.  The city is built on an archipelago of islands surrounded by green velvet forests. (“Holm” means “islet.”)  The stockade of piers was constructed to keep raiders from attacking the Romanesque church and its village rising above the central island in the maze of salt sea channels and inlets. 

2.

“Reykjavik” means “smoke bay”.  “Reyk” is an old Norwegian word cognate with “reek”, originally a word that meant something like smoke.  Here “Reykjavik” refers to hot springs spewing a fog of steamy vapor over the fjord indented into the stony mountains and lava plateaus of the island.

3.

Modern Stockholm calls itself “the capital of Scandinavia” – it has a million inhabitants and extensive suburbs of white highrises and townhomes with red roofs.  When I was in the city in early June 2019, foreign dignitaries came by limousine to one of the grand hotels on the harbor.  A red carpet was unfurled for the dignitaries and helicopters hovered overhead while media with cameras on tripods and sound booms stood on the steps of the baroque white hotel in the drizzle.  I never learned who was present or why, but glimpsed rotund, red-faced men in tuxedos nervously hurrying toward the hotel under elegant, black umbrellas.

4.

The gravel road in Iceland ended at a two-lane highway looping along the fjord.  At the extremity of land, a small snow-white church with a squat steeple dipped its reflection in the sea.  The roof of the church seemed to be made of zinc.  The asphalt highway climbed a hill and the fjord dropped out of site.  Lava mountains spat stony, wrinkled tongues across the upland valley where a sheep were grazing in the folds of volcanic rock.  Then, the road dropped into a valley between ridges that looked withered and brown as the flesh of an Egyptian mummy.  In the fold in the hills, an orchard marked the farmstead where the Nobel prize-winning author Halldor Laxness once lived.  A public bath stood on a stony terrace and a collapsed barn crowned a hillside blue and red with wild flowers.  The top of the next hill revealed Reykjavik.  Ten miles away in a puddle of silvery light where the sun shot down through clouds, I could see slate-grey waters, white buildings scattered across the hillsides, an eroded mountain with a filigree of snow along its brow, the big Lutheran Church at the highest point in the vista, aimed like booster rocket up at the rift in the sky.  

5.

Harald was a Norwegian sea-king with a fleet of swift, lethal long-ships.  He fancied Gyrda, the daughter of another sea-king who controlled some bays and villages nearby.  Gyrda was beautiful and headstrong.  When Harald sent her embassies requesting that she travel to his kingdom and become one of his concubines, she rejected these overtures with scorn.  “I will not go to Harald unless he rules a land far larger than his present stronghold,” she said.  Harald’s advisors urged the young man to mount a raid on the town where Gyrda lived, kidnap the girl and, then, after raping her, send the young woman back to her father in disgrace.  Harald rejected this advice and said that he would not cut his hair or his beard until feats of war had made him the ruler of all the Norse-speaking people.  So he went to war and such was his fury that, within several years, all of coastal Norway was under his rule.  Harald brought Gyrda to his court and she became one of his concubines – he had twelve women in thrall to him at that time.  Because of his vow, the king was now called Harald the Fair-haired.  

6.

The fiercest of the sea-kings defeated by Harald Fairhair refused to submit to his authority.  Instead, these men put their families, sheep, and tough little ponies on their long-boats and set sail for Iceland.  In reasonable weather, the crossing from Norway’s fjords to Iceland can be made in three days.  These rebels founded settlements on Iceland.  These events occurred around the middle of the 9th century after Christ.  

7.

Stockholm’s Tunnelbana or subway system is swift, not overcrowded, and immaculately clean.  The stations are decorated with art emblazoned on the curved walls across from the platforms.  But there is a confusing aspect to this Metro: each station has two entrances and they are often separated by underground shopping arcades that span five or six city blocks.  (It’s cold here in the Winter and the underground walkways serve the role of skyways in Minneapolis.)  For the first-time traveler in the city, you can easily become lost by choosing the wrong exit from the system – the station and both of its exits bear the same name, but, on the surface, you may find yourself blinking up at unfamiliar buildings at an unknown intersection.  Therefore, you must not assume that the way that you leave the underground is where you entered – even though the name of the station will be the same at both places.  Stockholm’s streets are all prosperous and all look alike.  This may add to your disorientation.  Almost every street corner has a 7-11 store.  Swedes smoke and you will see them in front of the convenience stores, red lighters in their breast pockets inhaling nicotine like Loki, the Norse god of fire.

8.

On the flight to Iceland, the blue sky turned light grey over Greenland.  As the jet climbed the icy ladders of north Labrador something like night approached, but our eastward progress at 913 kilometers per hour dissolved the darkness.  Rekyjavik’s airport, Keflavik, is about 45 kilometers from the city.  Local time at landing was 6:08, but the sky was a featureless blue that looked like noon.  Distant mountains improbably jagged hovered on pale bluish pedestals of mist.

9.

Harald’s vow to seize all of Norway was made during a session of Heitskining – that is, while drinking, men will adopt a posture of command, raise one booted foot onto the bench in the hall, and make a boast (beot).  If a man were suitably valorous, such boasts became behaet (“promises”).  When things were slow or warriors felt confined by the rigors of Winter, they got competitively drunk and engaged in Heitskining.  These boasting competitions were intended to stir up trouble and, often, led to homicide.  Vikings fought one another for the fun of it.

10.

There is no history in Iceland before about 870 AD when the island was discovered.  Before that time, no one lived on the island.  Except for polar bears sometimes stranded on the north coast, the largest mammal in Iceland was the Arctic fox.  The oldest man-built structures date 874 and the period between that year and 900 AD is called the Settlement Era.  This is when Vikings exiled from Norway fled with their families to Iceland.  From 900 to 1262, Iceland was inhabited by about 4000 independent farmers – the farmers formed a commonwealth that decreed laws and settled feuds annually at the so-called Althing, the outdoor parliament at the Thingvellir (Thing meadow).  In 1262, the people of Iceland agreed to ally themselves with Norway – this is the Old Covenant period.  The Old Covenant obliged Norway to send Iceland, at least, six ships annually with trade goods in exchange for taxes collected from the farmers.  In 1397, Denmark defeated the Swedes and seized control over the Scandinavian countries.  Thus, Iceland was ruled from Copenhagen.  This relationship endured for more than 500 years – Iceland achieved independence from Denmark only in 1944.    

11.

Gustav Vasa, as he was later called, was the king in Stockholm about the time of the Protestant Reformation.  Vasa was born Gustav Eriksson.  His father, Erik, was part of a faction in Sweden that  opposed union with the royal power in Denmark.  Fighting broke out in Sweden and the anti-unionist forces lost.  The King of Denmark declared a general amnesty and, to show his good faith, invited the anti-unionist forces to Stockholm for conciliatory feast.  When the anti-unionists were drunk, they were surrounded by Danish troops and held in a square near the cathedral in the old city.  The next day, the Danes murdered all of the anti-unionist noblemen, more than 80 men, in an event prosaically called “the Stockholm bloodbath.”  Erik was hacked to death.  Gustav, his son, had sensed trouble a few days earlier and fled to the ancient Viking stronghold at Uppsala.

12.

Ingofer Arnaldson had lost many family members in a blood-feud in Norway.  This was at the time that Harald Fairhair was king.  Harald was allied with Arnaldson’s enemies in the feud and so the Ingofer loaded his family, slaves, and domestic animals on a long boat and made for Iceland.  Everyone in his neighborhood knew about the island – a seafarer blown off course during a voyage to the Faroe Islands had discovered the place a few years earlier.  After several days, Arnaldson sighted land.  He, then, pitched the wooden columns supporting his throne-like seat on the vessel into the sea.  One column was carved with the image of the Midgard serpent, the dragon that coils around the earth, and the other pillar displayed Thor hammering at the clouds.  Arnaldson vowed that he would establish a homestead where the columns drifted ashore.  A storm buffeted the boat and, in the morning, Arnaldson sent two slaves in a skiff to locate the columns.  It took them several months, but, at last, the columns were found in a stony inlet where hot springs gushed into the icy Atlantic water – this place Arnaldson named Reykjavik (“smoky bay”) and here he built his home. 

13.

Gustav Eriksson fled north, the direction in which people travel to seek freedom in Scandinavia.  He raised troops, made alliances with local chieftains and led a revolt against the Danish forces that had slaughtered his father.  After several years of warfare, the Danes capitulated and Eriksson was elected King of the Swedes.  To put it bluntly, Eriksson was fat – a huge stocky man with a vast patriarchal beard.  People called him the “bullock”.  Sometimes, he accepted the nickname as a compliment.  But it could be dangerous to make jokes about his girth.  When someone called him “the bullock’s butt”, referring to a big cask from which a bullock might drink, Gustav resented the witticism and had the wag killed.  

14.

When I arrived in Rekyavik, sunset was at 11:56 pm with sunrise at 2:58 am.  On the day that I left, sunset was 12:02 and sunrise at 2:52.  The temperature hovered around 50 degrees.  Sometimes, the wind blew with the utmost violence, filling the air with tephra, a kind of pumice-like and abrasive lava sand.  With the wind blowing at gale force, the treeless heath and the rocky mountain passes were bitterly cold.

15.

Gustav Eriksson is the founder of modern Sweden, the man who unified the various fortified villages and harbors into a common nation state.  He made peace with the Protestant reformation and decreed that the Swedes become Lutherans.  After his death, he was named Gustav Vasa after the family dynasty.  A huge polychrome statue of the King sits in the Nordic Museum – the statue is four or five times life-size and suitably huge in celebration of the massive fat man who founded Sweden.  The statue shows Vasa with a forked beard and Beatles haircut, that is, bangs cut close across his forehead.  A scroll intones Vasa’s motto words that translate to the imperative: Be Ye Swedish!

16.   

When Harald Fairhair was making war to unify Norway, he sent his princes to negotiate with a cantankerous old Viking named Kvedulf (“Evening Wolf”).  Kvedulf was a hamrammar, that is, a shape-shifter and, based on his name, a werewolf as well.  Kveldulf had two sons Skallagrimmur (“Bald Grim”) and Thorulf.  Harald Fairhair demanded that Kvedulf join his army in the battle to unify Norway but the old man was too proud to pledge fealty to anyone and he told the king that he had little interest in fighting on either side – he simply demanded that he be left alone.  Harald reluctantly agreed on the condition that Kvedulf send his son Thorolf to serve as Fairhair’s retainer.  Evening Wolf agreed to these terms, dispatched his son to Harald Fairhair’s court, and kept his distance from the fray.  Somehow, Thorolf was killed.  Kvedulf demanded weregild – that is compensation for his son’s death.  When Harald rebuffed this claim, Kvedulf with his surviving son, Skallagrimmur, seized one of Fairhair’s best long boats and slaughtered everyone on board, butchering 50 or 60 men while running “berserk”.  Harald Fairhair sent more ships to punish Kvegulf and, so, the old Viking with his family and livestock fled to Iceland.  

17.

One hundred years after Gustav the First (Vasa) became King of all Sweden, his grandson built a mighty war ship.  This vast ship, the very antithesis of the razor-sleek Viking longboats, was constructed as an enormous engine of war, a floating fortress and siege-tower garrisoned by a whole village of soldiers (about 340).  This mortal engine was hewn from a forest of immense oak trees and equipped with dozens of ornate bronze cannons.  The ship, the 17th century equivalent of a nuclear bomb, was intended to make a decisive nautical intervention into the Thirty Years War, then, raging in Germany.  Gustav Adolf, the Lion of the North, otherwise known as Gustavus Adolphus had just been killed in the Battle of Luetzen in Deutschland and the mountainous battleship was intended to avenge his death.  In 1628, the towering vessel was launched from its drydocks and shipyard in Stockholm.  Unfortunately, the ship was seven stories tall, a wooden skyscraper perched on the waves, and no one knew exactly how much ballast would be required to keep the vessel upright.  A calculation was done, but inaccurately, and 3000 feet from shore, the battleship was caught in a squall and rolled over, plunging to the bottom of the harbor.  

18.

The ship-board massacre of Harald Fairhair’s sailors exhausted Kvedulf to the point that he was near death.  Infirm, the old man lay motionless and inert in the keel of his long ship fired like an arrow toward Iceland.  Running berserk while shape-shifting requires a lot of energy and Kvedulf was now dying.  When the pinnacled shore of Iceland hove into sight, the old Berserker died.  Skallagrim Kvedulfson put the grizzled corpse in a coffin and pitched it overboard.  Where the coffin came ashore, he vowed to build his farmstead and the forge on which he worked iron.  The wooden box bobbed on the sea-surge and, then, went aground on a black stone beach under pyramidal black mountains.  Skallagrim named the place Borg, a word that means “refuge.”

19. 

Stockholm’s Vasa Museum, erected around the towering hulk of the drowned battleship, is on every guide-book’s “must see” list.  And so, obedient to the guidebook that I was carrying, we hiked to lake-front canals and, then, hoofed it a weary way along the waterfront, weaving between the lobster soup and beer cafes and piers where the sightseeing vessels docked.  Across the boulevard, a row of majestic buildings with finials and onion-dome steeples lined the waterfront road.  Limousines came and went and there were literally red carpets spread on the sidewalk for guests at the harbor hotels.  The Vasa Museum is on a leafy island, beyond a causeway.  I went there out of duty but, of course, was astonished: the massive war-ship is 97% preserved, an intact behemoth stranded inside an enormous eight story vault of iron and concrete.

20.

Borg was located near a fen (myr) and the Skallagrims were called mry-menn (fen-folk).  Skallagrim had two sons, Thorolf, who was tall and well-favored (and, perhaps, a little stupid) and Egil who was squat, swarthy, and ugly.  When Egil was only three, Skallagrim and his wife, Berd, were invited to a banquet at a neighboring farm.  Egil was left alone at home, Skallagrim remarking to the toddler: “You’re enough trouble when you’re sober” – suggesting that everyone, including the children, was expected to drink ale to excess at such affairs.  Egil’s brother, Thorulf, accompanied his parents to the feast, an indignity that the little boy left behind refused to accept.  Uninvited, Egil burst into the banquet, stood at the head of the table and demanded to recite a poem that he had composed on the hike to the farmstead.  The host demured and Egil spoke his piece, ending the verse with the line: “you’ll never find a better craftsmen of poems three winters old than me” – a boast that seems pretty much irrefutable.  The host was suitably impressed and gave Egil three shells and a duck’s egg for his efforts.

21.

The Vasa swarms with elaborate wood carvings, bas relief of dragons and other sea monsters, each rib carved in the form of elongated Roman emperors, the prow of the ship supported by crouching Polacks with long beards and fur pelts.  Bare-breasted sirens with enigmatic smiling lips are chiseled into the structural timbers of the ship and the forecastle tower, a great oak wall of wood, rises overhead, displaying a great dense screen of deeply incised sculptures showing all the people of the earth supporting on their shoulders the vast coat-of-arms of the House of Vasa.  The impression given by the ship is both menacing and horribly beautiful – the Vasa destroyer was a baroque instrument of war.  For the kings of Sweden and the North, war was the sport of royalty, the great game, and the Vasa, like war, is both terrible and magnificent.  

22.

When he was seven, Egil played stick-ball with several much older boys.  One of them bullied him and, so, Egil took his axe and split the older boys’ skull, the blade cutting through the teenager’s skull and face and splitting his jaw to wedge in the bully’s esophagus.  This was the first of dozens of people, men, women, and children, that Egil was to kill in his lifetime.

23.

The Vasa is like a oak-sculpted fugue by Bach.  The ship’s fifty or so cannon portals are each covered with a hinged wooden lid on which a regal, gilded lion’s head has been attached.  The cannons arrayed on the cramped gun-decks have cast-iron wolves protruding around the muzzle.  When the weapon was fired, the iron wolves would lunge forward in the direction of the enemy.

24.

Egil’s best friend was Thord.  When he was 12, Egil and Thord challenged Egil’s father, Skallagrim to a game played something like hockey.  The game took place on a frozen lagoon under a glacier.  In the Winter in Iceland, there are only about three to four hours of sunlight.  While the sun was shining, Egil and Thord beat Skallagrim badly – the old man was in ill-temper and punches were thrown and blows landed and curse’s exchanged.  Skallagrim was exhausted, although as a Viking he refused to concede the contest.  In the twilight, Skallagrim’s strength returned – we must remember that his father was a werewolf and one of his grandmothers was a full-blooded hill-troll.  Skallagrim began to score and the two boys became angry.  Thord tripped Skallagrim so that he fell on the ice.  Skallagrim knocked Thord over and strangled him to death.  Then, he ran berserk after his own son, Egil.  A neighbor woman, Thorgerd Brak, saw the carnage and intervened.  She was a volva herself, that is, a sorceress and she distracted Skallagrim from his son.  Skallagrim chased the volva to a rocky headland and the witch-woman dived from a boulder into the frenzied sea.  Skallagrim picked up a ram-sized boulder and hurled it after the woman so that the stone pinned her to the bottom of the bay.  Then, his fury subsided and he spared his son’s life.

25. 

Kvinnen is the Swedish word for “women” and there is an exhibition about them annexed to the cavernous hangar where the Vasa is imprisoned.  When the great ship toppled, two or three women were on-board and discovered entombed in the wreckage of the vessel.  The skull of one of these women was sufficiently intact to allow her features to be reconstructed – she was blonde, gaunt, with high cheekbones and a pinched, thin-lipped face.  About 26 or 27 when she drowned, the wax effigy shows a woman who looks far older than her chronological age. (She is said to have suffered from anemia and chronic diarrhea.) The show is densely placarded with text declaring the inequity of conventional history: the contributions of Kvinnen should be more known and better celebrated.  There is a sour edge of acrimony to Swedish discourse on the sexes.  Both genders seem prone to caricature one another.  The ghostly face of the dead woman hovers like an emaciated and accusing angel over the display cases.

26.

It’s about an hour’s drive from Reykjavik to Borgdanes, the village where Skallagrim is buried in a green mound with his grandson, Bodvar.  The highway skirts glacial-carved ravines clogged with lava, big charred-looking peaks scabbed with snow towering overhead.  A long tunnel dives under the Hvalfjorthur (“Whale Fjord”), about 6000 meters long and descending 541 feet below sea-level.  The tunnel is shaped like a half-barrel and curves under the fjord, a disorienting occult stretch of highway that seems much longer than its actual distance.  Beyond the fjord, the road curves across another lava terrace under more desolate mountains, then, rounds a headland where a great river of glacial run-off, wide as a four-lane freeway strikes across a grassy, horse-delighting plain, pale silver threads of ice-water flowing into the turbulent bay.  Borganes is built next to the estuary, under steep mountains with thousand-foot high cinder-black scree fields.  Near here, Skallagrim and Egil lived about 1100 years ago.    

27.

On the flight from Minneapolis to Rekjavik and continuing after a four-hour layover to Stockholm.  I read plays by Strindberg.  This was a reprise of a sort of my trip a couple years ago to Norway.  On those flights, I read Ibsen and was thoroughly entranced by his theater works.  Strindberg, as it happens, seems more acerbic and there is an acrid odor of madness about some of his writing – I found his plays dauntingly weird and alienating.  The author’s misogyny, which is scarcely concealed, is profoundly problematic and verges on the insane.  In Miss Julie, a hoity-toity upper-crust woman demands that her fiancee bend the knee – at last, he rebels and strikes her across the face with the same riding crop that she proposed to use on him.  Then, Miss Julie seduces her brutish servant, regrets the encounter, and promptly kills herself.  Julie’s behavior is over-determined – she has about ten motives for this self-destructive caprice including being “on her period” (as Strindberg tells us).  The wife in The Father gaslights her husband and drives him insane.  Then, she seizes his assets.  Her primary tool in inducing madness in the poor fellow is asserting that her husband is not the father of their child.  The young hero in Ghost Sonata, after saving people from a collapsing house, is tricked into marriage.  His wife is a vampire, perhaps, literally, and the rest of the people in the gothic household are mummies and corpses.  Dream Play is undigested Schopenhauer with the female principle representing calamitous procreation and, also, perhaps, some specious form of salvation.  The husband and wife in The Dance of Death are male and female archetypes locked in a waltz of mutual assured destruction – the play is two hours worth of nightmarish vituperation set on a claustrophobic island where the only other interlocutor is an ambiguously symbolic quarantine officer – the reader has the sense that the quarantine in place should be to prevent the infernal couple from infecting the rest of creation with their brutal hatred.  Although sometimes amusing, these works are so savagely misogynistic that the mind reels and, at least, responding to what is on the page, rejects the premise upon which these plays are based.

28.

The stewardesses on IcelandicAir wear black form-fitting blouses and tight skirts.  Perched atop their heads are little black pill-box hats, really nothing more than dark fezes.  This odd Retro appearance is incongruous with their severity: these stewardesses will not help you for love nor money and seem completely impervious to your suffering.  On the six-hour, middle seat, flight from Minneapolis to Rekyavik, no one offered me so much as a pretzel or a single shabby peanut, and I went without drink for so long that I felt curiously liberated from thirst – a stagnant fever raged behind my burning eyes (ravaged, of course, by reading Strindberg) and, comfortably occupying, the aisle seats on both sides of me, part of large family traveling en masse passed sandwiches and bottles of pop and Toblerone over my head.   My ticket included a meal but no meal was offered.  The stewardesses had bright, inert button eyes and cherubic apple-shaped cheeks and, under their arcane fez-shaped hats, glared at their passengers with inscrutable, malevolent hatred.

29.

Ingmar Bergman absorbed Strindberg as mother’s milk.  He is credited with many productions of Miss Julie and other Strindberg plays.  Strindberg hated women with his entire being, making in his later plays, it seems, an exception only for Indra’s daughter in The Dream Play – and, even then, Indra’s daughter symbolizes in broad terms the sources of desire that bind men to illusion and, therefore the Wheel of Suffering.  Bergman’s case is more complex: he seems to have worshiped at the altar of Woman while despising and viciously mistreating actual women.  His cruelty toward Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann was legendary.  In Fanny and Alexander (1982), someone mentions Strindberg and another character cries out: “That nasty misognynist.”  Bergman was married five times and had innumerable affairs with the most beautiful women in Sweden and, yet, of course, he never found anyone adequate to his needs.  Some of Bergman’s films, particularly Cries and Whispers and Scenes from a Marriage are semi-hysterical and seem scribbled in male menstrual blood.  (Perhaps, you think I have been exaggerating Strindberg’s misogyny.  Brandes, Strindberg’s friend, gave the writer a copy of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.  Strindberg greedily devoured the book.  Then, he wrote: “The uterus of my mental world has received a tremendous ejaculation of sperm from Friedrich Nietzsche so that I feel like a bitch with a full belly.”) 

  

30.

Borganes consists of three streets trisecting a stony point of land jutting into the turbulent Atlantic.  A park occupies a green acre blessed with some half-dozen mature trees, very rare in Iceland, and a coil of sidewalk that runs among disheveled flower gardens.  Skallagrim’s grave is a breast-shaped mound, slippery with deep green grass and wild flowers, behind a cast-iron fence.  Egil is buried at Borg.  In the 19th century, a grave was discovered there containing the bones of a man with heavy, scalloped excrescences on his skull, the skeletal evidence of Paget’s disease.  Paget’s disease may explain Egil’s troll-like ugliness, his strange fits of passion, and the fact that in his final years, the poet complained that his head was too heavy for the weak stem of his neck.  Egil’s much-beloved son, Bodvar, is also reputedly buried within the green dome of grass and flowers in the little park in Borganes. Down the street there is a two story cottage, formerly the home of fishermen, where for fifteen dollars, you can walk among wax figures displaying famous scenes from Egil’s Saga.  

31.

Some of the mortal remains left behind by Strindberg can be seen in the Nordisk Museum, the place where the grand atrium is guarded by the giant Gustav Vasa with biblical beard, a mountain enthroned on a vast oak chair.  A white plaster death mask, bland and inert, watches over a gloomy gallery where there are some handwritten drafts of Miss Julie, a thicket of interlineations, stricken phrases, and tiny clouds of pencil-corrections.  Strindberg was a gifted painter and a few of his semi-abstract canvases are on display, rocky landscapes with odd trellis-shaped forms embedded in the boulders, small images and intense with heavy, corrugated impasto.  Strindberg’s so-called "Occult Diary", a memoir of spiritualist experiences written under the influence of Swedenborg is also spread half-open in a dusty vitrine.  In another gallery, where gems are displayed, there is a tiny cameo of a grinning skull, a memento mori that Strindberg gave as sardonic jest to his doctor.

32.

Where water meets land, thermal springs hedge the shoreline with clouds of sulphur-smelling steam.  People in Iceland have exploited this phenomenon since the Settlements, carving out baths next to the seeps of boiling water.  For this reason, every village in Iceland is equipped with a Lauvatne or public bathing facility.  Today, these places are indistinguishable from a large YMCA.  Typically, amenities include several swimming pools of various depths enclosed within a structure and, then, a concrete deck surrounding three or four large oval tubs.  A superstructure of pipes, often leaking steam at their joints, pumps water from the boiling springs.  The whole place smells of steamy rotten eggs. Until the mid-sixties, Icelandic houses were built with toilets but no showers or bathtubs.  People went to the Lauvatne to bathe and, as in Japan, this activity was a social occasion – people visiting with their friends and luxuriating in the hot tubs chatting and just dozing.  Apparently, it’s a special pleasure in Winter to dash across the chilly concrete under Iceland’s perpetual dark skies and the flickering aurora borealis to lounge with just nostrils and forehead above the steamy water whilst the icy wind howls overhead.   

33. 

It’s raining when I hustle across the causeway toward the island where Stockholm’s Moderna Museet is located.  I’m already wet and a bit shaken by something seen a couple minutes earlier.  At least three islands or peninsula decorate the city’s main harbor and, to a visitor, they all look alike – green and leafy enclaves with pleasure palaces and exotic Kremlin-styled steeples; they still look like what they once were – hunting preserves for the royal family.  It’s easy to confuse the islands and I have already crossed the bridge to one of them; alas, not the one bearing the Modern Art Museum and, so, my glasses are blurred with rain-droplets and my shoulders and hair soaked and, erratically, the drizzle tightens up into a dense smear of rain, before relaxing again.  The museum is a white sail-shaped building atop a stony prominence of black, fractured basalt – nearby, there is an old quarantine hospital (islands are handy for this use) and brick dormitories for the garrison that defended the point.  The Modern Art Museum is vast and almost empty.  The galleries are as big as a barn but have only a few works scattered across the immense white rooms.  In the lobby, Gilbert and  George have made a mural sixty-foot long and thirty feet high cataloguing all uses of the word “fuck” in English – undoubtedly, a worthy undertaking, but more than a little irritating.  Swedish house-husbands are pushing prams past the various affronts to the eye offered by the place.

34.

To use a Lauvatne, you must pay an entry fee – about four dollars – and, then, find an open locker.  Remove your shoes before entering the locker room.  Icelanders don’t think shoes belong indoors and, when visiting your friends in that country, etiquette also requires that you remove your footgear at the front door.  Take the locker key attached to a sort of fortified rubber band and wrap it around your forearm.  Strip naked and stand under a shower.  The shower head will dump lukewarm water on your head and shoulders.  Lather up with soap provided in dispensers mounted next to the shower and thoroughly wash yourself.  You don’t want to convey any grime or filth into the spotless pools of thermally heated water.  Avoid casting a glance at the massive Viking endowment of the Icelandic men bathing their immense purplish genitals before transporting them gingerly into the hot tubs.  Then, put on your bathing trunks and go outside.  The wind is wet and strong on this point of land and the sea is toppling against the rocks in white breakers and the cold is shocking, just as shocking as the scalding hot water in the pools.  Take care to not talk unnecessarily to the Icelandic folks in the tubs.  They have come with their friends and don’t want to waste time chatting with you.

35.

As I walked down the highway-wide corridors of the Modern Art Museum, I heard Dylan’s song “Just Like a Woman” playing in a gallery.  Curiosity drew me into the great white hall, empty except for a wall-sized TV screen turned discretely away from the corridor and the gallery’s entrance.  On the screen, an impish scamp, a little rogue with long yellow hair, is cavorting and prancing on incongruous black high-heeled shoes while ranting and raving.   The little animated scoundrel looks similar to a figure in Japanese anime – he as round cow-eyes and a bone-less physique and a disproportionately large purplish penis.  He makes wholly unreasonable demands to an off-screen woman, probably his lover, and says outrageously sexist things and, then, pisses like a fountain pouring a golden flood all over the screen, himself, and the white void in which he is weightlessly suspended.  The gold from his urine becomes a golden screen behind a dignified, gilded Buddha.  This installation is called “Riverboat Songs”.  In this setting, it seems to me some kind of efflorescence of Sweden’s charged and hostile relations between the sexes, more of Strindberg’s hysterical misogyny.  This characterization is unfair – the art work, in fact, is the labor of Jordan Wolfson, an American from New York and LA – “Riverboat Songs” refers to his assertion that the puckish, foul-mouthed cartoon figure has something to do with Huckleberry Finn.  Like the Gilbert and George “fuck” mural, “Riverboat Songs” wasn’t made by a Swede.   

36.

When in Iceland, guidebooks admonish you to avail yourself of the hot baths.  This seems odd to me since the thermal pools are really indistinguishable from an overheated natatorium operated by the YMCA.  The most famous of the thermal baths in Iceland is the so-called “Blue Lagoon”.  This huge lukewarm pool, neither blue nor really a lagoon, will cost you $92 dollars to enter.  The pool was created in the mid-sixties by the discharge of water from a hydro-thermal power plant on the volcanic ridge above the bay.  The so-called “Secret Lagoon” is $25, an open-air pool with some hot pots adjacent to a gushing thermal river – blazing engorged pools of scalding mud line the stream and its gravel edges leak foul-smelling steam into the air.  One pot-hole offers up, as in an open palm, a small, but fiercely agitated geyser that is, more or less, perpetually erupting.  Austere and barren stony ridges rise over the boiling river.  Angelica and Andrea Ramirez, with whom I was traveling, swam in the pool at the Secret Lagoon.  These places are all equipped with cafeterias and coffee shops and so I sat at a formica table.  I planned to buy a little bag of potato chips but the price repelled me – it was 4.50 cents, something like 6000 Icelandic kronor.

37.

I suppose I was out of sorts in the Moderna Museet because of my wet hair and clothes and the encounter on the Strombron.  Maybe, I was just hungry.  I ate in the museum cafeteria.  The food in Scandinavia is inscrutable – even when it is very good, the ingredients and preparation are enigmatic.  The cafeteria was self-serve, offering (according to chalked-up blackboard menu) either vegetarian Thai curry or Texas-style chili.  The chili consisted of beef pulled into stringy tough fibers and soaked in sugary barbecue sauce, some fried onions and a few huge kidney beans garnishing the stuff – good, but nothing like any chili that I have ever eaten, Texas or otherwise.  The Thai curry was green and full of floating bedraggled bean sprouts and florets of broccoli and carrots.  Side dishes included the ubiquitous mashed potatoes, fried parsnip, and stewed tomatoes served with savagely hot kim chi.  With a full belly, I toured the museum again.  The Moderna Museet’s signature work is Rauschenberg’s “Monogram” – the stuffed goat with war paint on his snout rammed through a raw-looking Goodyear tire: someone once called this object the “wittiest tribute to anal sex” ever made.  There’s an unpleasantly colored Bacon triptych – the male nudes are the color of pink cotton candy – and a horrible Cy Twombly canvas, almost devoid of markings except for some pencil scribbles: it’s called “Orpheus” and I can see the point of the thing, the way it embodies meaning but that doesn’t mean I need to like it.  And it’s still raining when I leave the museum and a long wet hike to the subway.  

38.

We stopped at another Lauvatne at Fontana, a crossroads with some evergreen trees shielding a few modest houses and a typically laconic rural church.  The place lies under a great escarpment, the lower scree fields bracketed by fields of invasive blue lupine.  This is Nootka lupine brought to Iceland seventy years ago as a ground cover with roots to stabilize the sheer stony sides of the hills.  The plant is waist-high with exuberant, tightly clenched blue blossoms and it now grows everywhere.  Fontana’s Lauvatne is below the terrace where the tiny town is located, on the edge of an absolutely still tarn, a great placid expanse of black water cupped between equally black shores made from puffed-up and cracked basalt.  Next to the Lauvatne, a rather posh place, black mud bubbles along the beach, although it’s uncertain whether this activity is the result of compressed gases escaping the mire  or heat boiling in the water.  A fog of misty rain momentarily obscures the tarn.  The highlands are grey with lupine – for some reason, distance turns the bright blue blossoms into a greenish-grey smear against the naked rock of the mountains.  Andrea dips her toes in the water and describes it as lukewarm.  A few minutes later, she discovers a small, delicate-looking leech, black as everything else here, sucking at the side of her great toe.  She shrieks and peels off the leech.  The Icelanders are appalled and insulted: there are no leeches in Iceland, one of them says implying I suppose that we have imported these pests into their green and pleasant land.   

39.

Swedish museums are exquisitely curated.  They follow the example of state-of-the-art exhibitions in other European capitals, for instance, the Jewish Museum in Berlin – only a few items are shown, but they are very carefully selected to be representative and, even, emotionally compelling and the artifacts are theatrically displayed with dramatic lighting, suspended, it seems, in a way to defy gravitational force.  To deny gravity within a field of glowing light is also to defy time.  Of course, the artifacts are intensely contextualized – an ugly word that means that the objects are surrounded by acres of placards written by curatorial committees anxious to present everything in the most modern and politically correct way.  A display of old fractured bones and grave goods is contextualized by essay-labels asking the viewer questions such as “What constitutes a family?  Who gets to define a family?  How are families formed?”  The pleasure at gawking at ancient skeletons richly arrayed in gold rings and bearing bronze breastplates is undercut by the glowing bones of a fetus tucked underfoot in a tiny display in the floor, the gristly yellow cartilage attended by hundreds of words on the museum walls.  The Nordisk Museum has preserved an entire suite of rooms representing the Volkshjemmet era – the several decades after the Second World War in which Sweden, as a functioning socialist democracy, replaced archaic housing with brand-new apartments, worker housing after the Weimar model, scrupulously regimented but also cozy and comfortable enough.  The little well-equipped Volkshjemmet rooms reminded me of the small house in New Brighton north of St. Paul where I lived when I was a child.  In the whole museum, neither displays nor labels depict Sweden in World War Two.  This is because Sweden was neutral and, therefore, functionally, an ally of Nazi Germany.  When the Denmark was occupied, Finland mauled by the Russians, and partisan warfare raged in Norway, the Swedes did nothing.  No one in Sweden yet knows how to present this period in history and, presumably, the committees entrusted with writing the long and sententious wall-labels can’t agree on what to say – the “context” is still in dispute and, so, the museums simply ignore that period.  

40.

During World War Two, Iceland was a part of Denmark.  In Iceland, the Second World War is also a subject shrouded in evasion and silence.  Some argue that Iceland enthusiastically supported the Nazis, although this seems improbable to me.  Certainly, one would not necessarily expect little Iceland, with Ireland and Portugal, among the poorest countries in Europe to plunge into the bloody fray.  And Iceland is already half-way to North America, a long way from the cockpit of battle – at least, if you disregard the submarine warfare and the Battle of the North Atlantic.  But whatever was going on in Iceland between 1939 and 1945, it seems the less said, the better.  In one respect, World War II benefitted Iceland.  In June 1944, government officials in Rekyavik wrote to Copenhagen and politely announced the island’s independence.  Copenhagen was otherwise occupied at the time – indeed, literally under German occupation and was in no position to protest.  And, so, little Iceland became independent.  2019 marks the 75th anniversary of Iceland’s independence and I was present in Rekyavik for the National Holiday on the 17th of June.  

41.

Swedish museums dutifully profess shame about the treatment of the Sami, indigenous tribal people living near and within the Arctic Circle.  The Sami (sometimes spelled “Saami”) are the folk once called Laps or Lapplanders.  “Lapp” is exonymous and seems to mean something like “wilderness-dweller”.  (In the sagas and Edda, Sami were called skridfinn, meaning “striding Finns” – Finn means to find and refers to these people’s semi-nomadic existence.)  Curiously, people in Finland call their nation Suomi, a word cognate to Sami and meaning “the land.”  The Sami herded reindeer and were great fishermen.  Paintings and old photographs show swarthy people hunkered down in front of teepees – at least as portrayed by painters, the Sami seem cousin to the Plains Indians.  Where Sami rights conflicted with those of the Swedes or Norse, the Sami were displaced, cheated, and, in a some instances, killed.  Most notably,  Scandinavian countries made efforts to educate them out of their language: when a culture loses its language, it is doomed.  Reasonable legal rights for the Sami were only belatedly instituted.  The first Sami reservations in Sweden were established in 1993.  In 2010, UNESCO, with Swedish cooperation, recognizes a tract of Arctic glaciers and fjord-land, Laponia, as a Sami self-governing territory.  About 2800 Sami persist in their ancestral reindeer-herding economy.

42.

A sparkling lake lies among green lawns next to Rekjavik’s humble downtown.  Three principal streets carrying traffic from the suburbs to the central part of Rekjavik cross the park, one road each skirting the lake on both its north and south shores and another two-lane thoroughfare crossing the water on a causeway.  The lake is not very large, but it is blue and glitters in Iceland’s perpetual summer daylight.  Perhaps, a half-dozen booths selling cotton candy, psyllam (Icelandic hot dogs), and Coke products have been set up for Independence Day on the meadow on one side of the lake.  A kind of trapeze and swing erected for circus performers stands like a scaffold at the end of the meadow and there is a long table, folding sections neatly joined and reputedly “one mile long.”  In fact, the table is only 75 meters in length, one meter for each year of Iceland’s independence and, on this table, there is sheet cake with white frosting and Iceland’s coat of arms emblazoned in the icing at intervals of two or three feet.  Women with braided blonde hair and wearing peasant garb, frilly white blouses under black wool bodices and skirts (the dark fabric embroidered in floral patterns) stand behind the cake.  The women are stationed next to the cake at five foot intervals(fifteen of them therefore) and, poised in their hands are silver spatula-shaped knives with which to cut the cake.  Napkins are tucked behind the cake and the women rest a hand on them to keep the napkins from blowing away in the brisk breeze.  The media is present, two local stations with pretty girls taking turns interviewing a man wearing a chef’s cap – presumably, he is the baker who made the cake.  A helicopter circles lazily overhead.   

43.

The Sami exhibit contains many examples of crafts perfected by these people.  Placards ask: What is a Swede?  How do we know someone is a Swede?  Are the Sami Swedes?  Reindeer bones sing – the Sami carve them into all sorts of useful and decorative objects.  Exquisite textiles are displayed, colorful patterns woven in the cloth that look abstract to us, of course, because we are familiar with modern abstract art – these patterns were traditional, intricately meaningful and anything but abstract to the people who made these fabrics.  The most forlorn object in the exhibit is a Siedi, that is, a man-sized image of a spirit or a god.  The Siedi is roughly hewn from a tree and, once, was stabbed into the ground by its base whittled into a sharp point.  The figure stretches out spindly root-like arms and has a featureless head, a carved turret slightly smoother than the rest of the sculpted wood, the thing’s textures splintery and coarse.  On the flank of the personage, someone has cut a big “X” and there’s a fork in the trunk from which another pointed appendage droops, either a leg partly outstretched or a penis.  The wood-creature has a certain sullen ferocity.  The labels besieging the old Dryad ask: Where is the proper place for a figure like this?  Do we have a right to display such a thing in a museum?  Siedi were posted like sentinels at burial sites, sacred springs, holy bogs.  The figure seems caught in the throes of some kind of malevolent transformation, a water-nymph turning into oak to avoid rape.  

44.

Iceland’s anniversary cake will be cut at 1:30.  The women bend forward, aiming their utensils at the white frosting.  A crowd has gathered, four or five people deep all along the serving side of the sheet cake.  The helicopter idly circles and a brass band is playing clamorously at the other end of the park.  The suspense builds.  Someone clangs on a cow bell and the women in their traditional garb start cutting the cake and serving small slices on their napkins.  The cameramen zoom up and down the long white cake that is now being dismembered.  One of the women remarks to another lady at her side: “It’s awfully hot.”  She speaks in English and nods her chin down at the woollen bodice at her breast bearing its bright embroidery pattern.  Icelanders are bilingual – from pre-school they learn English as well as Icelandic, which is Old Norse.  It is not unusual to hear natives speaking among themselves in perfectly fluent English.  There will be no fireworks for Independence Day because it will be light at sunset, a little after midnight, the sky full of a fading glow that will, then, seamlessly brighten into dawn. 

45.

At Siedi, the Sami performed rituals.  In old Norse, the rituals were called Bloet (the “o” is umlauted).  Bloet is cognate with “blot” in English – the meaning of the word is “to splatter”, a verb that gives one a sense for what these rituals were like.  Bloet also means “to strengthen.”  The Vikings sacrificed horses on their holidays and ritually offered the meat to their gods (who politely declined the flesh having been sated with the blood)  before devouring it themselves.  Sometimes, they killed unwanted babies or slaves, mostly red-haired Irish women.  The Sami butchered reindeer and offered them to their Siedi.   

46.

The people who were too violent and aggressive to live peaceably in Norway were outlawed and, therefore, fled to Iceland.  The people who were too fierce to live in Iceland went westward to Greenland.  Feuding in Greenland forced a significant number of outlaws from that place, fleeing to the Labrador coast and Newfoundland, Leif Erikson’s Vinland the Good.  The Norse-speaking emigrants to Vinland, by a process of selection, were the most savage, cruel, and quarrelsome of their kind.   In North America, the Norse devoted themselves to killing the native people, skraelings (“wretches”) as they called them.  In one notable encounter as described in the Vinland Saga, Indians attack a company of Vikings and kill a man, Thorvard, crushing his skull with a stone hurled from a sling.  Freydis Eriksdottir, said to be a “large and resourceful woman”, refuses to retreat from the place where Thorvard’s body has fallen.  Freydis is pregnant and not well, but she is also very fierce.  She draws a sword, pulls down her blouse to expose her breasts, and slaps the blade across her belly and naked bosom.  The Indians are appalled and think that she is some kind of monster and, so, they flee in terror.  Freydis, who is insanely avaricious, is, in fact, a monster.  A year later a dispute erupts between Freydis’ family and a newly arrived group of emigrants to Vinland from Labrador.  There’s a fight and the men in the emigrant party are all slaughtered.  This leaves five women cowering in the long-house.  Freydis’ husband refuses to murder the woman and the men all agree not to touch them.  This forbearance angers Freydis who takes an axe and kills all five of emigrant women.  The Vinland colony ultimately collapses not because of pressure from the Indians or weather or famine.  Rather, the colony can’t survive its own endemic violence.  

47.

On the day we visited, the Royal Palace in the Gamla Stan (“Old Town”) district of Stockholm, much of the premises was mostly closed due to a State visit.  I was relieved – generally, royal palaces are dispiriting places, vast buildings filled with rooms that soon seem indistinguishable from one another: opulent furnishings, man-sized ceramic stoves, often ornately gilded, posted in the corners of the room, walls pointlessly adorned with floral curlicues and arabesques also gilded and the color of paper in a legal pad, generally no ventilation at all with air stagnant with the smell of humid rot in the walls – you sweat in these places and can scarcely breathe and the vistas are just one luxurious chamber after another in an endless, futile succession.  The royal apartments in Stockholm were no exception – the rooms that we toured had been retrofitted with glass display cases itemizing the innumerable orders of distinction and chivalry and their embossed, silver medals.  There is the extinct order of Jehova, the Order of Seraphim once for royal chevaliers but now limited to distinguished women, the Order of Reindeer Husbandry, Medals of Valor for Sea, Land, Field, Amphibious operations, Cavalry, Orders of Merit for esteemed accountants, scientists, leaders in business, the Orders of Neptune, Svea, Coldin, the Geatish Society Award, Prince Eugen’s medal, and the Royal Order of the Polar Star, to mention just a few.  Each medallion is displayed with ribbon and sash-cummerbund and so it goes, room after room until we come to marble stairs, a grand theatrical space with balustrades encumbered by Greek gods and goddesses and an allegorical aerial fresco tremulous with creamy cloud-colored nudes, broad if slippery steps leading down to a courtyard where an orchestra of be-plumed musicians is playing martial music, blaring trumpets and cornets, as they parade on horseback.  It’s all very grand, tedious, and childish. 

48.

Iceland’s Independence Day is much less pretentious.  In a pleasant cemetery, a handsome woman with flowers in her hair and wearing a brocaded peasant gown is declaiming at the grave of Jon Sigurdsson.  Some graceful trees bow their branches in the gentle breeze.  Trees are a rare luxury in Iceland and it is nice to stand in the liquid green shadow listening to someone speaking in a language that sounds like Beowulf.  Sigurdsson (1811 - 1879) is the kind of national hero that I can endorse.  He lived most of his life in Copenhagen, did no deeds of valor on the battlefield, was never imprisoned for his views, was neither a nationalist nor a romantic – he merely suggested, in a polite manner, that it would be better if Iceland were independent of Denmark.  (His visage with impressive mutton-chop sideburns is on Iceland’s 500 kronar bill – in the current economy, this will buy you a can of soda pop.)  A color guard flanked the lady orating at the obelisk grave impressed with Sigurdson’s profile.  The color guard was comprised of girl scouts in uniform, most of them ignoring the speech and sending text messages on their phones.  On the avenue, a parade passed.  Elderly musicians in robin’s egg blue vests and trousers played on horns and saxophones as they strolled down the street.  They didn’t try to march in step.  Icelanders won’t even queue in an orderly manner let only synchronize their stride as they march.  After the band, a group of kids on stilts hoisted a forty-foot long Chinese dragon with fierce forked tongue and glittering segmented flanks.  The dragon looked like a prop from a road-show production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado.  (I later learned that the dragon symbolizes the Northern Lights.)  We stood on the curb among the happy crowd waiting for the rest of the parade.  But there was nothing more – the marching band of superannuated musicians and the dragon was the whole thing.      

49.

Drottningholm Palace is six miles from Stockholm at the far end of a green maze of rocky wooded islands, stone-ribbed beaches, bays rimmed with dense evergreens, and channels spanned by freeway bridges.  You approach the palace over the blue water of Lake Malarna, the big and intricate Baltic Sea estuary that penetrates deep into the rolling wooded countryside around the city.  The tourist excursion to Drottningholm leaves by steamship from the pier next to the strange mosque-like towers of the Radhuset, the big brick fortress of Stockholm’s city hall where the Nobel Prize dinners are held.  In the old days, the hour-long trip was enlivened with champagne and a buffet featuring so-called Steamer Biff (stringy over-cooked “steamship beef”) but we weren’t fed.  The last half-mile traverses inlets and narrow channels where picturesque rock domes furred with evergreens reach up out of the blue water.  It is like a lake in northern Minnesota with split boulder shores and dense underbrush shadowing the marshy edges of the water, a sort of wilderness.  But, once the steamship docks, it’s clear that there’s another route to the palace – a causeway crosses over to the island where the neo-classical mustard-yellow buildings were raised, now 275 years ago.  The word drottning means “queen” and the residence was built by Adolf Frederick, as a wedding present for his formidable bride, the sister of Frederick the Great of Prussia, the Princess Lovisa Ulrike.  

 50. 

There were never any palaces in Iceland because no kings ever reigned in that land.   The absentee kings in Norway, at first, and, then, Denmark knew enough to stay away from the violent and primitive island near the Arctic Circle.  Until about 1770 when Reykjavik was incorporated, Iceland didn’t even have any towns.  It’s people lived on farmsteads, all of them ancient settlements dated back to the first immigrants from Norway.  Each farmstead was named and, indeed, these names persist to this day.   As you drive in Iceland, you encounter neatly lettered official signs pointing with arrows to the red-roofed white lodgings and barns, the structures generally located under the shelter of a looming whale-back of volcanic rock.  Old Norse is an outlandish-looking language with bizarre combinations of letters – words begin the way Beowulf starts, that wild inaugural Hwaet! that summons our attention to a frieze of warlike “Spear Danes”. It’s tiring to the eye and mind to drive past so many signs bearing words that not only look utterly incomprehensible but that you have no idea how to even pronounce.  In Iceland, every farmstead is marked and named – after all these are 1100 year old dwelling places.  By contrast, often, the small villages, generally consisting of an Olla or NT gas station, a café and an austere stark white church with graveyard remain unnamed.  The farmsteads have neat bales of hay stacked around them like giant marshmallows and there may be a warren of primordial-looking sheep pens built from stacked volcanic pumice.  Next to the farm residence, there is usually a small cottage, a guest house for tourists.  The whole country is one vast AirBnB – 335,000 people live in Iceland but the place has 3.5 million tourists per year.  

51.

If one looks across the bay, turning toward the impenetrably dense evergreen woods and stony shoals in the icy lake, there is something melancholy about the view from Drottningholm island.  And, indeed, the place is a kind of monument to homesickness, Heimweh to use the language of the Prussian princess, Lovisa Ulrike.  The Prince of Sweden, Adolf Frederick, was a mere placeholder, an inept scion of the houses of Schleswig and Gottorp.  The lineage of the Gustav Vasa culminating in the Lion of the North, Gustavus Adolphus, was extinct and the state had become the plaything of absolutist monarchs in northern Germany – Adolf Frederic was from Luebeck, and although his lineage was to become significant (his dynasty is the source of the Russian Czars in the 18th century), he was a weak ruler of an impoverished nation.  Adolf Frederic avoided exercising his royal prerogatives and ceded authority to the parliament, the Rjiksdag.  Lovisa Ulrike embodied the enlightenment in some respects.  She was well-educated, spoke French to her court, and was unhappy to be exiled to a backwater –“Swedish artists are all blind, their dancers crippled, and their musicians tone-deaf,” she reportedly said.  Adolf Frederic hired northern Europe’s greatest architect, Nicodemus Tessin, to built the Slott (“castle,” cognate to “Schloss” in German) on the little island in the deep woods.  This gift, representing culture and reason, was to assuage his queen’s homesickness.  Poor Adolf Frederic spent his days bent over his work table where he made miniature snuff-boxes.  This was his passion.  In 1771, His Royal Highness ordered a feast of lobster, caviar, kippers, and sauerkraut down with copious quantities of champagne.  For dessert, he had 14 servings of hattvag. (Hattvag is a cardamon-spiced wheat bun filled with whipped cream and almond paste served in a bowl of fresh milk.)  It was Shrove Tuesday and King Adolf Frederic was about to embark on his Lenten austerities.  But the hattvag, it is said killed him.  His death was much lamented by the nation – his burden had been light and his yoke easy.  His motto seems to have been he rules best who rules least.  

52.

Rain splashes my face, blurring my glasses.  I’m lost among the bridges in Stockholm harbor and the wet map at hand is hard to read.  The first causeway that I choose goes to a promontory where government buildings crowd a canal.  The falling rain blisters the surface of the shadowy waters contained by the canal’s masonry block walls.  Tourists are huddled under a gateway opening into the courtyard between the large administrative buildings.  This is obviously wrong – another elevation, although unfamiliar, of the vast Royal Palace and, so, I retrace my steps.  The Strombron is unsheltered and rain pelts down on the pedestrians, all of them holding black umbrellas over their heads.  A dozen yards ahead of me, I see two men approaching, equally unprepared for the rain.  I cast a curious glance in their direction and observe them sharing the sidewalk where I walk, striding directly toward me.  The umbrellas are like shields turned to the gloomy skies, pointed and bellicose, and the rain hisses in the dark water under the causeway.  The two men have wet faces running with water that sluices down from their matted hair.  They have been abroad in this rain a long time and seem drenched but are undeterred.  The men move confidently, their gait sure on the wet pavement, and they are not exactly tandem, but, rather, the smaller fellow a little in advance of the other larger man.  They are ahead of me six steps, then, wet and heavy at my side, then, behind, a presence like a caisson, marching toward the Royal Palace as if to prosecute important business in that place and their appearance is remarkable enough that I would swivel to watch them go except that this would show disrespect and the thunder is rumbling over the onion-dome towers and green rafts of the islands so that I am urged that it is best to keep to my path neither pausing nor turning my head.  The smaller man has a satyr’s tangled red hair and short brushy beard – he is sinewy, built like a wrestler in his dirty jacket and, where I can see his chest, he displays a cigarette lighter blood-red in breast pocket, his face animated and derisive, lips twisted to laugh at something that only he can see.  The bigger man’s face makes me blink with shock – his right eye and some of his brow are missing: there’s a pinkish pocket next to his nose where his eye should be and his hair is also tangled, a swimmer’s hair set in glazed waves with briny salt.  This fellow is a brawny giant, looming large, fierce, frowning, his one-eyed gaze going ahead of him like an arrow fired by a bow or a javelin let fly, arms swinging rhythmically at his side like great cudgels, his chest, adorned by red beard, as solid as the prow of sea-going ship.  Two black birds quiver in the air behind the men, fleet-winged, accompanying them through the falling rain.  

53.

Rekyavik has no skyline.  The city clings to the rock shelf around inconspicuous harbor.  Fishing boats are small and don’t have much profile and the wind traditionally kept structures low and close to the ground. From the desolate mountain passes overlooking the town, the traveler sees the booster-rocket silhouette of the big Lutheran church mounted on a bubble-shaped dome of rock downtown.  The church has sleek aerodynamic fins and seems poised to blast-off into the clear, cold sky.  Another church, this one Catholic, stabs a couple of pointed steeples over the tin-roofed buildings and four-story townhomes huddled around the prominence where it stands.   These are not ancient buildings – the Catholic cathedral was erected around the turn of the century and the expressionist monument of the Lutheran church (it has the brutal, hulking mass of Weimar architecture) was built over a period of forty years, ending in the early sixties.  Below the church, near the park and lake, the parliament building is two-stories, constructed of rusticated basalt ashlar with a barn-like metal roof.  The building is so inconspicuous that I walked past it a dozen times, always assuming that it was the home of some important local family.  

54.

To please Lovisa Ulrike, Adolf Frederic built a theater in the courtyard next to the rigorously symmetrical and geometric royal palace at Drottningholm.  The theater survives mostly intact to this day, one of the few fully functional rococo-era venues in the world.  Sweden was poor when the theater was built and its interior, although seemingly sumptuous, is as fictional as the stage scenery – the marble walls and boxes with brocaded velvet curtains are all trompe le oeil, painted illusions on the wooden walls.  The little jewel box of an auditorium holds as many as 300 audience members, although the narrow benches without backrests are purgatorial, miserably uncomfortable for the ladies and royal courtiers ordered, of course, to attend the operas and plays presented in the theater.  In the first row, at the exact center of all sight-lines, there are two high-backed seats upholstered in red velvet.  This is where the King and Queen sat, thereby, imposing a rigid discipline on the performing artists – no one was allowed to turn his or her back on the monarch and, so, actors edged off-stage curtsying or bowing when they had spoken their piece.  Hidden under the stage, a capstan can be turned by stage-hands efficiently moving painted flats on trolleys into position next to the deep performance space.  At the rear of the stage, a mechanical sea could be made surge in emerald-blue waves made by rotating rollers arrayed against the back wall.  The players lived in small apartments enclosing the auditorium.  Today it’s an airless dark barn within the theater, smelling a little of rot, and the tiny rooms occupying the two levels of the building around the auditorium show damage from leaking water that has stained the carpets and the sumptuous textured wallpaper.  Ingmar Bergman wanted to stage his famous filmed production of The Magic Flute at the Drottningholm Slott and his movie commences with idyllic shots of the wooded grounds and gardens around the bland yellow facade of the theater, noble-looking trees bathed in the radiant light of Sweden’s midsummer.  But the theater was too fragile and, for his cameras, Bergman had to recreate the entire stage, complete with its rococo machinery – the secret hoists and trap doors, the suspension swings on which gods descend from above, the toy sea with its toy waves, and the flats, one of which can trolleyed out as a backdrop showing Drottningholm Palace itself haloed in mellow golden light.

55.

The largest public building in Rekyavik is the Harpa, a new concert venue that overlooks the harbor.  The building is a couple of crystal rhomboids that look like ice floes colliding on the edge of the water.  The second largest building in town is the National Theater, near the little parliament building.  This has a fluted facade consisting of eight or nine flattened columns rising three stories into the air.  The columns are separated by ten-foot tall art deco ornaments that protrude from the facade and that may represent torches.  The National Theater has a bar and grill annexed to it.  This place was famous for its rowdy patrons in the 80's.  When I was in Rekyavik, an exhibition at the tiny National Gallery, featured art by Hulda Hakon.  The show was called Hverra manna ertu? meaning “Who are your people?” – this is the way Icelanders greet one another always on the assumption that they will know members of your family and, indeed, your saga or family history.  Hakon lived across from the National Theater thirty-five years ago and one of her witty bas relief plaques is called “Heros” – it shows a bunch of men and women in formal clothes stretched out on the pavement, passed-out drunk after a night of carousing the National Theater tavern.  The icy Harpa complex is said to be very beautiful at night – but the Midnight Sun kept us from seeing the place illuminated against the darkness.  There simply was no darkness.    

56.

Adolf Frederic’s son, Gustav III, consulted with his bellicose father-in-law, Frederick the Great, about imposing order on the unruly Riksdag.  Frederick the Great was an enlightened man – after all, he had sponsored Voltaire’s extended sojourn at San Souci in Potsdam – but he was also a firm believer in the Divine Right of Kings.  He counseled Gustav to dismantle the parliament, coerce the nobility into submission, and reassert his royal prerogatives.  And, obedient to his uncle’s command, Gustav undertook these measures, greatly alarming the Sweden’s many nobles and estate owners as well as guilds in Stockholm.  

57.

For roughly eight-hundred years, Icelanders attempted to govern themselves by announcing laws and issuing decrees at their mid-summer Thing (“assembly”).  During some of this period, Iceland was nominally ruled by Norway or Denmark, but these political arrangements were more in the nature of trade and tariff agreements and there wasn’t much of a local constabulary – thus, the farmers scattered around the island at their homesteads looked to the Gothi (“chiefs”) meeting at the Thing meadows for law and order.  The Thingvellir (“Thing meadows”) are about an hour’s drive from Rekyavik, more or less centrally located, although representatives from the northwest fjords or the far northeast might have to travel by pony more, then, ten days to reach the assembly.  (Travel in Iceland is difficult – the central highlands comprising most of the island are impassable, glaciers slump into mountain passes, and there are numerous fierce, icy, and swift rivers, difficult to ford.)  The Thing occupies a bleakly momentous landscape: a cleft in rock creates a fissure-canyon with fanged cliffs and dikes of black and reddish lava swell upward into ramparts flanking a river that spills out of a great grey loch.  The lake shows black or white depending upon the quality of the light, cradled by featureless barren mountains.  There are arctic char in the lake and big salmon and the delegates to the Thing pitched booths in the meadow below the fissure-canyon and feasted on mutton, goat, and fresh fish.  Approaching the Thing meadows, the narrow road crests a wasteland of lava and, then, you can see people, sightseeing tourists, lining the black rampart, some sullen pools surrounded by lichen-spattered boulders, and the jet of waterfall like a white pennant hanging from one of the cliffs.

58.

Gustav III is an ambiguous figure.  He ruled with an iron hand and dissolved Sweden’s parliament, but he was a dreamer and poet also, embodying in some ways his mother’s melancholy aesthetic interests.  He built a Chinese pavilion in the woods next to his large French garden, a geometric world of topiary and carefully contrived vistas unified, like Versaille, by great marble basins where fountains lunged and splashed melodiously and where nude nymphs gazed with inert marble eyes at the harmonious and perfected landscape.  At the Chinese pavilion, playacting prevailed – lords and ladies dressed in Chinese silk and danced in exotic ballrooms wall papered with scenes showing jade mountains and Taoist sages.  Gustav wrote and staged plays in the theater his father built for Lovisa Ulrike.  He forced his courtiers to arm themselves as knights and engage in tournaments of jousting.  In his outdoor extravaganzas. Gustav built lathe castles only to burn them to the ground.  He added an English garden, wild with groves of sheltering oaks and elms forming a natural amphitheater about a water-meadow where delicately colored ducks and white swans patrolled the limpid sky-reflecting pools.  His architects added a great salon room annexed to the Slott Theater, a place with bright frescos on the high ceiling, a gallery where concealed musicians could serenade guests, and wall-high formal windows separated by cream-colored stucco pilasters overlooking the carefully contrived and artificial wilderness of the English Garden.  Gustav was a friend to the peasants in the neighborhood and he invited them to breakfast with him in the salon.  Theater was foremost.  The peasants were ordered to appear in spotless, colorful tunics and blouses – stage peasants paying homage to their play-actor King in a beautiful enclosed loggia next to a toy theater.

59.

Although the Icelandic chiefs who met for 800 years at the Thingvellir weren’t aware of the fact, the narrow black canyon descending like a ramp from the basalt plateau is geologically significant.  The jagged castellated cliffs on the right side of the fissure (as you descend from the Visitor Center) belong to the European tectonic plate.  Forty five feet to the left, the cliffs are part of the Laurentian shield, and, therefore, Canadian.  The Thing meadows are on the Mid-Atlantic ridge where magma is surging up between the place where the two plates are pulling apart from one another.  At the bottom of the rift, a hunched up mound marks the location of law rock – this was where laws were debated and judgments announced.  The rock is gone – all that remains is the mound of turf where it was located.  Perhaps, time has buried the big pulpit-shaped boulder.  Some low rock walls made from shattered lava enclose a little green chamber, lush with velvety grass and wild flowers.  This is said to be the remains of one of the chieftains booths, although, it is equally possible that the low walls are the ruins of an abandoned sheep paddock.  In the gloomy fissure sliced across the edge of the magma butte or plateau, some cracks appeared next to the sidewalk – this was a couple years ago.  Geologist sounded the cracks and found that they opened into an abyss 250 deep below the canyon – the gash-wound in the living earth where the plates are pulling apart.   

60. 

Drottningholm Slott reminds us that war was the sport of kings and, even, the poetic and gentle Gustav III indulged himself in this game.  The grand entrance to the palace, the so-called Queen’s staircase, is a waterfull of marble in a porphyry gorge of polished stone the color of a flayed corpse, all white gristle and blood-colored tissue interlineated with black veins.  Frescos that are deadly to view – you must crane your neck, with the risk that you lose your footing, and fall down the steps – decorate spandrels and ceilings overhead with plump  allegorical figures tumbling through space, innumerable Virtues with neither sin nor vice in sight.  At the top of the grandiose stairway, the twelves Caesars in their marble splendor are ranked as busts, hawk-faced emperors with smooth faces of mirror-like white stone set amidst the alabaster balusters. The man who made this stairway is a Caesar as well, a warrior and autocrat: this is what the statues proclaim.  And in the long galleries flowing like an ornate river into one another, the King has wallpapered the chambers with representations of his battles.  We see toy-like battalions marching in tight formation toward horizons congested with the frothy smoke of burning villages.  Phalanxes of cannons fire toward the pale blue horizons and each battery, each mounted officer gallantly waving his sword in the air, each unit of infantry in this choreographed mayhem is labeled with a letter or a number.  Beneath the murals, dark, lustrous cherry-wood sheathing rises hip-high from the floor to a yard-wide band like a scroll in which the identifying numbers and letters on the battle diagrams are indexed to the names of commanders and military battalions, these descriptions set in exquisite cursive calligraphy.  Here is war in its splendor, terrible and majestic, the exquisite sport and game of thrones.  In one wall-size mural, we behold the Swedish army, a procession of miniature battalions marching across a featureless white expanse toward a horizon lost in fog.  It’s an eerie, futile-looking image depicting the famous Sea-Belt campaign, the Swedish army marching across the frozen sea to ambush the Danes.

61.

The poet and old raider, Egil Skallgrimsson, didn’t think much of the Thing.  As far as he was concerned each homestead should be a law unto itself.  During the last year of his life, Egil had trouble holding his head upright and said that “my third leg just droops and drizzles.”  Old age humiliated him and he wished that he had died feuding or looting monasteries in England.  His son Bodvar drowned and he found the corpse battered on the black pebble beach.  He carried the body to the headlands at Borganes and put the corpse under the blister of green turf where Skallagrim was buried.  Then, he wrote his famous elegy, “Lament for my Sons,” probably the greatest of the old Norse poems.  Egil thought the lawgivers at the Thing were hypocrites and decided he would expose them with a sardonic gesture.  He plotted to bring his chest of Byzantine gold and silver to the Thing and, then, told his family that he was going to hurl the coins into the canyon and laugh derisively as the parliament of chiefs squabbled and, then, hacked one another to death over the booty.  But this plan was logistically too complex and, so, he hiked up into the highlands with two slaves dragging a sledge carrying the treasure chest.  A day later, Egil came down from the frosty mountains alone and without his silver and gold hoard.  He died a few weeks later, a “straw death,” that is expiring in bed surrounded by his women and thralls.  A man who died a “straw death” was barred from Valhalla – he was deemed insufficiently courageous to aid Odin in fighting the Midgaard serpent and Fenrir, the wolf,  when the last day came, Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods.  Instead, Egil went to Hel, a dark place where the shades are unable to feast and wander restlessly in the gloom.  

62.

The Swedish nobles conspired against Gustav III, derisively calling him the “Theater King.”  Probably homosexual, the King had become more erratic, devoting a sizeable part of the State’s revenues to his lavish theatrical productions and mired in an endless war in Russia.  Revolution was afoot in the rest of Europe and the New World.  In 1792, Gustav ordered his Court to attend an elaborate masked ball at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm.  Gustav wore a simple black mask but was easily recognized by the grandiose starburst of silver on his chest, the  Royal Order of the Seraphim and, in this instance, a sort of target.  One of his noblemen accosted him saying Bonjour beau masque (“Greetings handsome masked man.”)  The King bowed and, then, was shot in the chest by the other masquer.  Gustav died slowly over the next ten days.  He was a great advocate of opera, particularly the works of Christoph Glueck whom he greatly admired.  Therefore, it is fitting that Giuseppi Verdi in 1857 composed his opera, Un Ballo in Maschera (originally known as Gustavo III) on the subject of King Gustav’s assassination at the masked ball.  Verdi’s opera was thought to be both provocative and subversive and the censors at the royal court prohibited its performance until changes required by the King were made.  The opera premiered in 1859.

63.

A frigid pool at the Thing is where 18 women were drowned for killing their unwanted babies.  The pool is a sad place, a deep shaft brimming with peat-colored ice-cold water.  Records tell us that between 1600 and 1750, eight murderers were beheaded in the swampy meadow by the river below the Law Rock.  Fifteen thieves were hanged from the pinnacle rocks at the black jaws of the fissure.  Nine sorcerers, eight of them men, were burned alive.  The Volva or female sorcerers were too powerful to apprehend and none of them were executed – the fact that the authorities were able to burn one woman at the Thing for sorcery was, more or less, evidence that she was not really a witch.  Njall, the great lawyer was Speaker at the Althing around the year 1000 – Njall is the protagonist of the most majestic of all the sagas, Burnt Njall.   It was at the Thing on a session on Thursday (“Thor’s Day) that Thorgreim decided that Iceland should become Christian  – this was also in the year 1000.  Two-hundred years later, Snorri Sturlasson, the author of the most famous sagas, was Law Speaker – he argued that Iceland should agree to annexation by Norway.  This was an unpopular position and his enemies hunted him down at his farmstead in Reykholt about thirty miles away from the Thing meadows.  Snorri was not as heroic as his Viking characters – he hid with his swine in the barn buried beneath his living quarters.  When his assassins cut him down, Snorri cried out “Don’t strike!  Don’t strike!”  To this day, Icelanders debate whether he was imperiously ordering his murderers to leave him alone or pleading for mercy.  

64.

Gustav III’s son, predictably named Gustav IV, became King of Sweden after his father’s death.  There is doubt as to this ruler’s paternity.  Because of unspecified “anatomical problems” afflicting both the King and his Royal Consort, Count Adolf Munck, a notorious libertine (among his lovers was the Queen’s kammerfru, her chamberlain and lady-in-waiting) was hired to provide sexual instruction to the married couple.  Munck was stationed in an adjacent chamber and summoned by the King when the two encountered obstacles to consummating their marriage.  Munck reported that he had to “physically lay hands” on both participants.  He seems to have done more than simply guide the king’s virile member – it’s generally assumed that Gustav IV was, in fact, Count Munck’s son.

65.

Gunnhild was the wife of Erik Bloodaxe and the daughter-in-law of Harald Fairhair.  Harald was the ruler who united Norway and drove the unrepenitent outlaw Vikings to Iceland.  Gunnhild was a volva, a powerful sorceress.  She came from the far north, an uncanny place for the Vikings, and was said to have slept naked between two Lapps (Sami) to learn their secret magic.  Gunnhild knew the future, could change shape, and directed the course of arrows in flight.  She hated Egil who was a sworn enemy of her father-in-law and husband and, so, she dispatched two of her sons to murder him.  Of course, Egil prevailed in the fight and both young men were killed.  Gunnhild, then, harassed him by changing into a sparrow and hovering around Egil’s councils of war.  Egil butchered a horse and set its head on a shaft – a so-called “shame pole” – and pointed the effigy at Norway’s rocky coast.  He carved insulting runes in the ash shaft of the pole and, then, set sail for Iceland.  Later, Gunnhild betrayed her husband Erik Bloodaxe with a lover named Hrut, an Icelander.  Gunnhild and Hrut went about publicly, displaying their affection for all to see.  This created a scandal and Hrut left Gunnhild to return to his fiancee Unnr in Iceland.  Jealous, Gunnhild pronounced a spell that caused Hrut’s penis to swell to an immense size so that no woman could have pleasure from it.  Hrut was unable to consummate his marriage to Unnr and she divorced him.  This led to a blood feud that claimed dozens of lives and lasted for generations.  It was this feud that climaxed with the great lawyer, Njall being burned to death at his farmstead.   

66.

Verdi was fascinated by the death of Gustav III at the masked ball primarily because of the Ulricke Arfvidson.  This woman was a soothsayer, heiress to the volva witches from the far north.  She owned a shop in an alley in the Gamla Stan, the old medieval city at Stockholm, frequented by old and destitute widows who were mostly blind.  People could come to her shop and seek her counsel without being seen by prying eyes.  In 1786, Gustav III disguised himself and, with Count Jacob De La Gardie, visited the volva.  A servant, a veiled woman from Morocco, served the two men strong Turkish coffee.  Then, the witch studied the coffee grounds in their cups.  Ulricke Arfvidson said that the King should beware a man that he would see that evening wearing a sword.  Then, she told him that he must flee from a man wearing a mask.  Returning to the Royal Palace, Gustav met a courtier, Ribbing, leaving the rooms of his lover, one of the Queen’s ladies in waiting.  Ribbing looked gallant, wearing a sword on his hip. Six years later, Ribbing conspired with Count von Anckerstrom, the man who assassinated Gustav III at the famous masked ball.  Soothsayers and their dire prophecies made good operatic material – Verdi has a similar scene in which a gypsy fortuneteller pronounces imprecations in his Il Trovatore.     

    

67.

Reykholt, where Snorri lived, is a crossroads where a several groves of evergreens intersect near an old church and its graveyard.  Snorri’s homestead is marked by two large white building bearing steep red-tiled gable roofs.  A separate lance-shaped steeple rises to another red roof pointed like an arrowhead.  Beyond the barn-shaped white buildings, incised with little windows like portholes on a ship, there is utilitarian hotel with unadorned concrete block walls.  This complex of buildings is the Institute for Medieval Studies, a place largely devoted to the analysis of sagas and their ancillary texts.  The valley at Reykholt is a green channel between austere rounded bluffs of naked rock, bubbling with steam along their boulder-strewn bases.  The valley inclines upward, ramping toward a glacier at its head.  Icelandic glaciers droop down into valleys, sprawling indolently atop buttes – in the endless, infinite light they are blinding, great mirror-reflectors casting radiance in all directions.  The glaciers are called Jokull, a word with umlauts over both vowels – this word names both the ice-caps and the frost-giants from whom the world was made.  At least in south Iceland, these great pillowy cushions of white snow and blue ice always hover on the horizon – you are never located in a valley where there is not a glacier eight or nine miles upstream of the white lethal-looking rivers burrowing down from the ice through the lava-fields.    

68.

When you tour Drottningholm Slott, the guide at the theater will tell you that after Count Anckerstrom shot Gustav III, the rococo stage was closed.  The doors were boarded shut and the windows also and, for more than a hundred years, no one ventured into the theater.  Although the alacrity with which the theater was closed is exaggerated, the story is basically true.  Within a generation, the palace theater was abandoned.  The uncomfortable benches were salvaged for their wood and farm equipment was stored in the big, empty room.  The salon overlooking the English garden, the ceiling painted with airy, whipped-cream frescos was closed and the room was used to store furniture and art works no longer needed in the nearby palace.  In 1921, Agne Beijer, a Swedish historian, was looking for a painting listed on a royal inventory from the 18th century.  The painting wasn’t in the collection at the Palace in Stockholm and so Beijer took the steamship to the Slott on the islet six miles from downtown.  Beijer was told by custodian at the Slott that old pictures and antique furniture were stacked in the storehouse building across the way from the palace.  Beijer found that bales of hay were piled in what had once been an elegant room with a fresco on the ceiling faintly visible above the farm tools and silage.  He picked up a crowbar and used it to pry his way into a nearby room.  In a little airless space, Beijer saw an 18th century bed and some old settees – the satin and velvet wallpaper was drooping from the walls and both floor boards and roof panels were warped and stained by leaking water.  Beijer pried open another door and found himself in a large completely dark room – when he lit a match he saw trompe le oeil decorations on the wall, precious stones, marble, and gold simulated by painted wood, decaying stucco, and paper-mache.  Then, he turned his eyes toward the end of the big room cluttered with plows and harrows – a deep opening beckoned to him: it was an ancient stage.  

69.

A couple miles from Reykholt, a white column of steam rises over the valley.  A vicious-looking river skitters over stony rapids spanned by a long, single lane bridge – you must take great care in crossing these spans.  In a rounded crater, a twelve-foot high hump of extruded magma belches steam. The air stinks of sulphur as you approach the magma extrusion, a mass of fractured black rock that looks like a whale stranded in the navel of crater.  This is Deildartunguhver, the largest hot spring in Europe.  The basalt whaleback is cracked into niches and each of these alcoves is occupied by the furious deity of a little geyser, a whirling dervish of boiling water that spatters scalding droplets in all directions.  Rivulets of steaming water flow in a spider-web pattern away from the barren soot-colored heap of rock.  A small hydro-thermal plant with its characteristic triangular-hood stands along the river at the center of radiating network of barrel-diameter pipes.  Uphill, on a naked butte there is a premium laugevatn with big glass windows and a terrace with tables shaded by umbrellas marked Perrier and Tuborg.  

70.

Stockholm’s subway, its Tunnelbana, runs three levels deep beneath the city.  Lines radiate away from Centrum, a central hub under the train station.  From Centrum, subway lines run along the harbor – it’s a short line from T-Centralum (Centrum) to Kungstradgarden (“The Royal Gardens).  At this stop, the subway tunnels are hewn into the solid rock, exposed to create a great paved grotto.  Crystals flare like constellations in granite arches and, in watery pits, there are koi ponds with globular gold fish, secret terraces-grottos where you can buy beer and pastry, niches where chaste Greek goddesses raise their arms to expose their round breasts.  On the surface, far above – you ride dizzing escalators to reach the daylight – there is the Royal Opera building, an ugly Victorian era hulk with soot-grey neo-classical facade decorated with embedded pilasters and a sort of scalloped diadem opening like a cupped hand above its pediment.  Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North, sits comfortably atop a huge bronze horse in the plaza under the pillars and scalloped diadem of the Kungliga Oper.  Before this building was erected, a structure called the Ballhuset (“Ball house”) stood on the site – this is where Count Anckersholm shot Gustav III at the masked ball.  Needless to say, his son, Gustav IV, didn’t like the place.  He thought theater and opera were frivolous pursuits with unpleasant associations in any event and, so, he closed the building.  

71.

The road up the valley from Reykholt ends next to a shallow gorge gouged by the White River through the porous, bubbly-looking pillow-lava.  The cliffs opposite the viewing platforms over the canyon are frothy with diaphanous veils of falling water, hundreds of them dancing over the lethal-looking white bore of the river.  The canyon wall is fractured in innumerable places and the underground water spills through these fissues coursing through basalt siphons in the lava.  Another hundred yards upstream, the river surges over some forty-foot ledges, plummeting through an arch of basalt and turning sharply in a zigzag groove cut in the rock.  Slender columns of stone, standing rocks, rise over the river tormented by the rectilinear corners in its groove.  This is the Barnafoss, the Children’s Waterfall.  Several centuries ago, a brother and sister tried to cross the river on one of natural bridge arching up over the narrow gorge.  The adults had gone to Christmas mass but the children had been left at home to tend to the family’s flocks of sheep.  The children had been warned to stay off the slippery, spray-drenched arches of black rock, but, perhaps, a lamb had strayed onto the stone span.  In any event, the children ventured out onto the natural arch, fell, and their battered bodies were found downstream, bobbing in an inlet under the gently falling braids of water foaming from the cliffs.  The legend is that the children’s mother attacked the stone arches with her bare hands and drenched in the spray from the falls tore one of them down.  At the Barnafoss, the road ends, although a rutted four-wheel drive track runs over a hillside all jagged with lava toward the amorphous, bright sprawl of the glacier at the head of the valley.

72.

With Angelica and Andrea, I attended a performance of a ballet, The Trial, based on Kafka’s unfinished novel and choreographed by a Czech, Jiri Bubenicek.  The ballet was danced by the Royal Ballet Company and featured throngs of performers in elaborate and surreal costumes.  In Europe, arts are subsidized and no limit seems to be imposed on expense – I was astonished at the curtain call to see that the huge cast didn’t double or triple parts: each role, no matter how small and inconspicuous was performed by a separate dancer.  The theater is gold and red velvet with ornate balcony boxes.  Sight-lines are excellent – there seem to be no bad seats in the house.  In the lobby, marble busts nod reflectively at the visitors.  The toilets seem to me to be completely inadequate.  But cultured Europeans eat little, sip water only to remain hydrated, and, presumably answer the call of nature at most once a week.  All toilets are unisex to avoid grappling with uncomfortable issue of gender identity.  You enter a corridor with sinks and towels: the toilets are small cubicles with locking doors and small stainless steel basins.  As on an airplane, green means open; red is occupied.  Characteristic of refined Stockholm bellies, there are no unpleasant smells or sounds in these celibate-looking places.  The ballet program advertised an opera called in English Myriads of Worlds – this opera, according to the prospectus, is designed for infants 18 months to three years in age and will acquaint these children with “the forms and tonal language of opera”.  Stockholm is a progressive, intensely liberal city, and, of course, there aren’t many children (there seem to be far more well-groomed and plump dogs), but those children produced here are cradled in a system intended for their welfare from pre-natal care to the grave.    

73.

The river plunging through the falls above Reykholt is called Hvit (“white”) because it is milky with glacial powder ground out under the abrasive flanks of the Jokull.  There are hundreds of rivers like this in Iceland, most of them very dangerous to ford.  In many places, a variant is told of this story: a comely farm girl went to the river to draw water every morning.  Across from where she plunged her bucket into the swift current, a shepherd was tending to his lambs.  The shepherd stared at the girl and, sometimes, waved to her.  One day, the girl shouted to the shepherd: “If you would like, why don’t you wade the river to come see me.”  Of course, the river was seventy-feet wide and very deep in its canyon channel, a terrible obstacle that no one could possibly wade.  But, taunted by the girl, the shepherd made the crossing.  Icelandic stories are terse and eschew melodrama.  The story always ends the same way: “No one knows how the girl greeted the shepherd after he swam across the river.  But the descendants of that couple are now numerous in this valley.”

74.

In a dimly lit case in the Stockholm History Museum, a thumb-sized gilded Buddha answers your glance with serene indifference.  The little Buddha was found in a Viking long-house built a thousand years ago.  Other display cases present gold and bronze bosses, circular adornments that may represent miniature shields – no one is sure exactly how these were worn; perhaps, they were ornaments on belts.  A prehistoric sun-chariot with spindly long-legged horses and a fragile-looking chariot occupies another glass case.  Music, a piano playing a duet with a violinist, sounds: two musicians are rehearsing an intricate score in a Baroque hall lined with chairs for the afternoon concert.

75.

There’s not much art in Rekyavik.  At the National Gallery, you can see some vapid Impressionist paintings of fjords and glaciers.  A gloomy expressionist work shows a girl standing next to a turbulent river, presumably an illustration of the folk tale about the shepherd urged to “wade” the stream.  An excellent exhibition of plaster bas reliefs by Hulda Hakon occupies two sizeable rooms.  One of the reliefs is a plaque about three-inches deep of a highrise painted the color of boiled salmon and pierced with many square windows.  People nude and clothed gaze out of the windows and the entire plaster medallion seems suffused in a mellow pink light: scrawled in cursive in the plaster are the words: Enjoying the Midnight Sun.  Several reliefs show Icelanders in lines – these are ironic because people from Iceland refuse to queue.  Here no one is allowed to be set before any other person – all people are strictly equal.  (Icelandair boards its jets according to this principal: children, the sick and lame, and First Class get on first; for everyone else it’s a general free-for-all.)  One little relief shows a cocky-looking lad facing a jagged wall of lava, a formation immediately recognizable as one of the ubiquitous magma dykes that extend for miles across the heath land.  The lad sees an orange glow coming from a crack in the cindery stone wall.  This is a reference to the Hulda, the so-called “Hidden People” (and, incidentally, to the artist).  The Hulda live in grottos richly supplied with treasure – the glow emanating from the stone fissure, perhaps, represents the glitter of gold lit by torches.  The Hulda invite you to enter, drink mead with you, and enjoy a banquet of roast lamb and shark meat.  Of course, you can’t resist the temptation, enter their subterranean palaces, and are never heard of again.  

76.

Rain falls outside the National Gallery in Stockholm.  Anxious guards strip you of your umbrellas when you enter – no one wants an unfortunate accident to occur, your bumbershoot to pierce the canvas of a priceless painting.  Paintings by the Danish master, Christian Kobke (put a slash through that round “o” in his name), are on display.  Kobke is a great master and his paintings featuring noble-looking castles and limpid, gilded lagoons are very beautiful – the calm seas and fruitful fields of hay golden between groves of solemn oak and elm remind me of the Luminist school, the canvases made in America in the bewitched calm before the American Civil War.  Paintings by other artists of the school who gathered around Kobke are featured in the show and there is much to admire – it is all very calm, precisely rendered, with exquisite gradations of northern light and shadow.  In the painting by Christoffer Wilhem Eckensberg “Langebro in Moonlight with Running People” (1836), we see a crowd of bourgeois on a causeway gesturing at something and running – it’s impossible to know whether they are running toward or away from whatever is happening out of sight.  The picture unavoidably reminds me of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”, also, set on a bridge with cadaverous people in the distance and some sort of awful perturbation in nature.  This motif of well-dressed, portly bourgeois inexplicably running seems to have fascinated the artist – in 1845, he revisited the theme in his “View through a Door toward Running People”.  What has motivated these sober folk with their placid countenances to this uncharacteristic panic?  It can’t be a natural phenomenon – nature is bright, beautiful, rational, either park or park-like, without any elements of the sublime or awful.  In most paintings, particularly Kobke’s sublime studies of Frederiksborg Castle, a bit like Monet in that we see the edifice under varying conditions of light, nature is subdued to human ends, as gentle as the caress of breeze on a midsummer’s evening.  

77.

Along Iceland’s southern coast, great ramparts of obsidian-colored stone rise over a flat windswept heath rolling out to black sand beaches along the sea-coast a mile away.  The ramparts jut over meadows tilted to forty-five degrees and splashed with house-sized boulders.  In some of the rock falls, natural caves open their inky mouths and some of them are partially bricked-over: are these the habitations of the Hulda, the hidden people?  One stone fence is lined with brassieres, wind-tattered or swollen by the rain, a thousand or more of them, the pelts of some strange animal, selkies, perhaps, or modest mermaids.  Great white waterfalls lunge off the ramparts of polished volcanic glass.  One of them features a trail that leads you up a slick slope to a howling cave behind the plunge of heavy, ponderous water thudding into the pool below.  Behind the waterfall, the rain scours your face and hands and it’s a slippery ascent up the opposing rock fall, an avalanche arrested in place nest to coils of falling water.  Through the falling water, you can see the line of the coast and the grey breakers beating on the hollow rocks.

78.

Sweden’s National Gallery in Stockholm possesses a number of fine Rembrandts.  The artist’s largest canvas, “The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilius”, hangs among other Baroque paintings, displayed against the gallery’s deep red walls.  The painting was made in 1642 for Amsterdam’s Town Hall, but it was too uncompromising and feral for that space.  The City Fathers didn’t like the painting and what it represented – the fury of rebellion and brute force – and, so, they contrived to have the canvas returned the artist.  Rembrandt was supposed to re-touch the painting (it had been damaged), the Amsterdam’s city council refused to pay him additional fees for that work.  So he kept the picture and, later, sold it to a rich trader from the Hanseatic league who lived in Stockholm.  The picture is imposing, a great mountain range of barbarous warriors seated around a mutilated, one-eyed chieftain.  Swords flare, lit as if by Klieg lights, among the gloomy, brown shadows.  The picture depicts the warriors vowing to fight for their freedom from the Romans, illustrating, in the most memorable way possible, a passage from Tacitus.  The one-eyed king looks like Odin, shaggy in his fur coat, red-bearded, inscrutable and implacable.  The picture arrests your attention.  You stand before it appalled and feel the cold, nightmare breath of the ancient German forests exhaled from this bog of brown paint.  It’s more than a little unnerving.

79.

One of Hulda Hakon’s bas reliefs at Iceland’s National Gallery shows a modest Jugendstil manor house with mansard roof encircled by the coils of a great green serpent.  This is Hakon’s image of the Hofdi, the British consulate located on the outskirts of Rekyavik.  Here President Reagan met with Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev on October 10 and 11, 1986 to negotiate the nuclear disarmament pact.  (The negotiations made good progress but collapsed at the last minute over Reagan’s Star Wars initiative.  The final treaty was negotiated a few months later in Geneva.)  Hakon shows the Midgaard Serpent, one of the creatures of Ragnarok, the apocalypse as described in the old Norse Elder Edda.  Here, the Midgaard Serpent denotes the threat of catastrophic nuclear war.  The Hofdi burned in 2009 and the objects salvaged from the fire are now located in the Culture House, a handsome old palace a block away from the Parliament and the National Theater.  The Hofdi was famously haunted by several ghosts – they were most active, it is said, in looting the liquor cabinet at the consulate building.  The Icelandic government has issued a statement that “it neither confirms or denies the presence of spirits in the Hofdi”.  

80.

Of course much of the National Gallery in Stockholm is devoted to pretty paintings made by local versions of the Impressionists and grandiose landscapes in the style of the Norwegian masters such as J. C. Dahl.  (The gallery has several small, but spectacular paintings by Peder Balk – his image of predatory-looking Arctic seas blasting against towering black cliffs are the most uncompromising and brilliant images in that genre.  He seems to have conceived of the Arctic as a kind of hell.)  Most of these landscapes are mediocre, technically proficient and, perhaps, historically significant but eminently forgettable.   Hidden away among furniture and decorative vases is Julius Kronberg’s “Nymph with Fauns” – this is a quasi-pornographic nude that was Strindberg’s favorite painting, “the triumph of painting” in the playwright’s words.  “Nymph with Fauns” features a canvas length voluptuous nude, the sort of whorish figure that might grace the wall over a tavern’s wet bar – it’s a creepy image with caterpillar-like putti and a leering satyr peering through pubic ferns at the woman’s face.  She is caught in the throes of an erotic dream with her lips parted and teeth bared like a rabid animal.  It is, of course, exactly the kind of image that Strindberg would have endorsed.  A few galleries away, the rooms are full of elegant bent-wood, the IKEA exhibit, one might say – it makes you uncomfortable just to look at these things and, of course, there is no place to rest your tired feet.

81.

Probably, the greatest conventional art work in Iceland (I am excluding from consideration the many grotesque but uncomfortably impressive Viking and early Christian objects) is located among the artifacts of the Reagan - Gorbachev summit in the Culture House.  In a little closet-like shrine, Thorvaldsen’s “Ganymede” is on display.  There is no one in the Culture House – the front door is guarded by a formidable paunchy Hill Troll with a dozen jowly chins and you need to pronounce a special shibboleth in his furry ear to be admitted to the place.  (One of the Hulda that I met in the country whispered the word to me the day before.)  If he lets you enter, you may stand alone in the shrine, only inches from “Ganymede”, the graceful figures hewn from a delicious-looking piece of spotlessly white marble.  The sculpture looks like it has been molded from soft-serve Dairy Queen ice-milk and it would be fantastically cool and smooth to the touch if you dared to put your fingers on the creamy stone.  The boy’s face is angelic, sweetness that somehow doesn’t become cloying.  It seems a privilege to encounter this figure, Zeus’ cupbearer, in the attic of the old building and I stared at it for a long time.  But there is probably a better version of Berthel Thorvaldsen’s masterpiece in the Minneapolis Institute of Art, a statue that I’ve seen all my life but never really approached and, certainly, never admired.  This is the benefit of travel – it educates us to appreciate things that have always been present, even familiar, in our lives.  By providing a new context for these objects, by making them seem strange and wonderful to us, they bring to life work with which we may have been familiar, even intimate, but never properly appreciated before. 

82.

Swedes, at least as encountered in Stockholm, are remarkably handsome people.  In the city, they are suave, elegantly dressed, cosmopolitan, and self-assured.  Many of the women have willowy figures, lean, with the muscular, rounded buttocks of dancers.  Their hair is blonde, their faces aloof and haughty, their carriage upright and regal.  The men appear to comprise two races.  Some are dark with swarthy complexions – these men are doe-eyed with soft-looking brown beards.  Others are blonde Vikings, broad-shouldered and athletic with almost white hair and girlish pale complexions.  Both groups are strikingly handsome, boasting movie star good looks.  On the Stockholm streets, physical perfection is the order and serenity -- no one seems hurried or suffering from stress, angry or distracted.  Each man or woman is diffident, height-weight proportional, with confident stride.  Often these people are seen  on their expensive well-maintained bicycles, cruising nonchalantly through traffic that is never too light and never too heavy but just right for these gracefully appointed city streets.  If you happen to see a man or woman who is overweight, dressed in frumpy clothing, with a bad complexion or poor posture, invariably, you are looking at a Russian tourist.  The city is crawling with Russian tourists and they have pock-marked, lesion-lined faces, smoker’s hack, bulbous red noses from too much Vodka, and great paunchy beer bellies.  The Russian tourists look even worse than the Americans and this is saying something.  In the pale white nights, we come from the subway and pass a Ferrari dealership with sidewalk to ceiling windows – fabulous-looking Swedes are drinking champagne among the sleek, mirror-smooth cars.  It’s impossible to tell the difference between customers and salesmen.  Everyone is tattooed from head to foot.

83.

The people in Iceland are somewhat like the Swedes, but seem, in fact, to caricature them.  The women have high cheekbones and clear eyes, but they dye their hair orange or green or neon blue.  Some of the women have cute scrunched faces like trolls.  They are not quite as slender or well-muscled as the Swedes but, somehow, look stronger and more likely to endure hardship successfully.  The men are bulky with crusty-looking beards and they tend to have more porcine faces with little button eyes.  Men and women alike are tattooed from head to foot.  People in Iceland were once the hillbillies of Scandinavia, the region’s beleagured White Trash – Rekyavik is to Stockholm as Little Rock is to Minneapolis. When I was in Rekyavik, a couple of fishermen caught some sharks, hacked off their tails, and, then, used their cell-phones to film the poor creatures flopping about in a stony bay, unable to swim straight without the rudders of their tails, and leaking plumes of gore behind them.  No one in Stockholm would ever even imagine doing such a thing.  But Iceland is not Stockholm.  Of course, there was a hue and cry over the torture of the sharks, but, characteristically, the Icelanders took it too far – people posted a thousand threats urging that the two men be castrated or have their feet sawn off.  Icelanders hunt and butcher Minke whales.  They don’t eat much whale meat and, in fact, sell the flesh to the Japanese.  To kill these whales, the Icelanders had to withdraw from the International Whaling Federation, an organization that they were instrumental in founding.  Why do the fisherman in Iceland kill whales despite 26 countries lodging formal complaints against the practice?  Because no one can tell an Icelander what to do or how to live.  The Icelanders kill whales simply to demonstrate that the rest of the world has no right to urge them to the contrary.   As Halldor Laxness would have it: they are independent people.   

84.

The ABBA Museum, a mirror-lined suite of underground galleries, is tucked under an ABBA-themed hotel next to an ABBA-themed bar and grill and an expensive ABBA-themed restaurant serving Mediterranean specialties, the cuisine of the Greek islands as featured in the movies Mamma Mia! and 

Mamma Mia! Here we go again!  In the crowd packed into the museum, you will glimpse, I think, another aspect of Sweden, a more rural and blue-collar place that is neither as handsome nor as splendidly worldly as Stockholm.  These Swedes like heavy, loud American cars and they tend to be a bit more husky than their brethren in the art museums or seated at the upscale cafes along the harbor and, in the line waiting for admission to the museum, they are all smoking vigorously, little red Loki bics in their breast pockets. These people are boisterous, also, more friendly and gregarious, with red faces and red necks that might be the result of working outside in all weather or that could be from too much beer and booze.  It’s claustrophobic jammed into this warren of basement rooms, tight almost beyond endurance, particularly in the first couple salons that tell the story of pop music in post-war Sweden (remembering that there was no war in that country) and the legend of how Bjorn and Benny, a couple of hep-cat crooners met Agnethe and Frida Ann, each of them stars in their own right, combining initials to make the iconic name for the iconic band.  To get to this story, which seems to have something to do with a park bench, making love in the White Nights, and partner exchange, you first have to elbow your way through an anteroom devoted to the movies, costumes resplendent with tassels and sequins displayed in cases next to the LandRover featured in the films – you can get your picture taken behind the wheel as sequences from the movies shine as hard and bright as the Greek sunshine on overhead screens.  It’s all disorienting but one message is clear: this is the music of the people, on wall labels declared as unlike the “folk songs” from performers like Bob Dylan “so heavily promoted by the extreme Leftist government.”  In these glittering rooms, the halls of the Mountain King, there’s a hard-right turn, a celebratory pro-Trump kind of populism that you hear in the rolling thunder of big American muscle cars painted with rebel flags and Harley-Davidson scooters roaring across the green Swedish countryside.  

85. 

Picturesque little ponies graze patches of heath on Iceland’s vast rubble-strewn plains.  The horses came from Norway and they are the purest breed of equine on the planet, all genetically related to a herd of dozen brought to the fiery island with the first settler.  The ponies are everywhere, famous for their four-fold gait – the horses walk, trot, gallop (Old Norse: toelt) and skeith (fly).  Their skeith gait  is so swift and smooth, like water pouring over the brink of a cascade, that the animals seem to fly – they are like Odin’s steed Sleipnir with his six legs.  Sometimes, you see tourists mounted on the little horses and riding uneasily across the barren hillsides.  When W. H. Auden visited Iceland with the poet Louis MacNiece in 1936, he camped in the wilderness and rode an Icelandic pony – Auden was a very tall man and, in photos, his feet seem almost to drag along the sides of the stoic little horse on which he is mounted.  Auden and MacNiece wrote a book called Letter from Iceland that is excellent in all respects.  Auden said that Iceland is remarkable for its quality of light – he thought that the light is immense and all-encompassing and that it actually seems to magnify the jagged plateaus and ice-fields sagging from the low mountains into the valleys.  It seems, Auden said, that your powers of vision are vastly enhanced and that the distance is illusory, crags and sills of lava miles away seem to press up against you with vivid dream-like insistence.

86.

Most visitors to the ABBA museum linger in the first galleries, the exhibits that tell the meteoric rise of the quartet – here there is lots of music, garish videos, the ultra-tight second-skin costumes worn by the performers, everything resplendent in the brilliant light of fame.  Abba excelled at inventing what the Germans call “Ohrwuerme” –“Ear Worms” – and many of their international hits, when you are reminded of them, bore into your consciousness and can’t be displaced: you’ll be hearing these jaunty tunes for the rest of the day, the rest of the week, maybe for a month or more.  For me, the later galleries were more interesting.  As they say about happy endings: if it’s happy, it’s not the end.  The band broke up, the members went their separate ways, the women aged to the extent that we don’t really have pictures of them after about 2000 – a bit odd, since the Internet, shows that they remain beautiful.)  Benny Anderssen wrote an opera about Swedish emigrants to America – it’s based on Vilhelm Moberg’s novels and called Katrina from Duvemala.  Some reunion tours are documented, all of them described as splendid successes.  Benny has a big band that still tours Scandinavia – he plays accordion while elderly people (now his age) dance sedately.  Posters outside the ABBA museum announce several upcoming performance at ballrooms in Stockholm.  The entire enterprise was a triumph of marketing from beginning to end – the performers were attractive, performed in skin-tight body suits to emphasize their desirability (Agnetha was reputed to have the nicest ass in Europe), their music is infectious, almost to the point of being irritating and the four singers made a fortune – one of the labels next to a room full of gold and platinum records tells us that “the far Leftist press disdained the group’s appeal”, commenting how many “big American cars do Benny and Bjorg need.”   When their appeal faded, the band dissolved, waited 25 years, and, then, promoted their catalog of songs to the nostalgia market in upscale juke-box musicals, thereby earning even more big American cars. (And the appeal is not just to the nostalgia market – the movies have attracted new fans, most of whom weren’t even born when the group disbanded.) One is tempted to say that this is all sad, even a wee bit pathetic, but it’s about money, hard cash, and, in fact, there’s nothing remotely sad or pathetic about ABBA’s story.  Beautiful young people got old.  So what?  We all get old and most of us without millions of dollars. 

87.

It’s a puzzle: there seem to be far too many tough little Icelandic ponies for the number of people available.  Even with the tourist season in full spate in August, the horses would certainly much outnumber the people paying to ride on them.  The riddle is solved at the supermarkets, either the Kronar or Bonus chains.  Freezers are full of meat, mostly lamb and beef, but, also, hundreds of pounds of vacuum packed “Fresh Foal.”  People eat horse-meat in Iceland.  This was a bone of contention in the year 1000 when the Gothi at the Thing debated whether to adopt Christianity.  The disputants to the controversy were heavily armed and violence seemed about to erupt when the Speaker, a man named Thorgeier (“Lance of Thor”) said that he would retired to his booth to consider the problem and reach a compromise.  Thorgeier slept on it and the next morning announced his solution: everyone in Iceland would be baptized Christian but three rights were reserved to the new converts: they could still dispose of unwanted children by drowning them or leaving them on icy hilltops, they could celebrate rituals sacred to the old gods so long as they did so in private, and they could continue to feast on horse meat.  Horse meat is sacred to Odin and equine sacrifices to that god were accompanied by banqueting.  The Christians petitioned to outlaw eating horse meat, but this was throwing out the baby with the proverbial bathwater – better to allow the pagans to retain their ceremonies and ritual feasts so long as they practiced these customs inconspicuously.  As the years passed, the neck pendants of Thor’s hammer that people wore elongated – the hammer’s handle became longer and narrower as did the cross-piece of mallet.  Slowly but sure, the mjoelnir (hammer) of Thor became Christ’s cross.  

88.

Gustav II Adolf was a boy when his father, the staunchly Lutheran Duke Charles of the Vasa dynasty, usurped the throne of the Catholic King Sigismund.  Duke Charles ousted Sigismund with the connivance of the Riksdag, the Parliament that had been locked in a power struggle with the monarchy for several decades.  Sigismund fled to Poland and there launched a series of wars against Sweden.  These wars long outlasted their original belligerents – Poland and Sweden were still at war sixty years later.  Charles died and, at 17, Gustav became the king.  He understood that he had to reign in cooperation with the parliament to whom his family owed its power – and, in fact, he proved to be a very successful and effective administrator of the State.  Three wars were pending when Gustav Adolf ascended the throne: conflicts with Russia, Poland, and Denmark flared from time to time.  But these conflicts were soon dwarfed by the Thirty Years War, an enormous and terrible conflagration between Lutheran and Catholic princes that devastated Germany.  For reasons that remain disputed, Gustav Adolf intervened and led Swedish armies for years fighting in central Europe against the Catholics commanded by Generals Tilly and the Austrian master-mind Wallenstein.  Gustav’s troops were fleet, with swift cavalry and highly mobile light artillery and he was renowned as a great general.  The King rode at the forefront of his cavalry clad only in a leather cuirass – he refused armor declaring that “God is my armor.”  Predictably, Gustav Adolf was shot repeatedly.  In 1627, he suffered a wound to his right arm that disabled several of his fingers – his surgeons had been unable to remove the bullet impinging on nerves to his right hand.  The Battle of Luetzen, the decisive fight in the Thirty Years War, took place October 1632.  Gustav Adolf recklessly charged into the battle, became separated from his cavalry, and was beset by the enemy.  He was shot in the left arm, the ball shattering his forearm below the elbow.  At the same time, Gustav Adolf’s horse was hit in the neck and ran wildly through the streets of the burning village, half-hidden by fog and rain and black powder smoke.  The King was now behind enemy lines.  He was shot in the back and, then, impaled by a lance so that he fell under his horse.  The animal fought free and plunged into vortex of smoke and fire.  Someone, then, shot Gustav Adolf in the forehead, finally killing him.  The Lutherans won the battle and later the war but the great King of Sweden, the so-called “Lion of the North” was lost.  The Swedish Riksdag granted the dead warrior the honorific title Gustavus Adolphus Magnus, “Gustavus Adolphus, the Great.”  For a few generations, Sweden was a great power on the World stage, but the fortunes of nations rise and fall – a hundred years later, Sweden was so poor that the royal theater at Drottningholm had to be made from wood painted to resemble marble and fragile paper-mache balconies too delicate for a doll, let alone a human spectator.  

89.

In Iceland’s National Museum, a grim-looking axe is propped against a thick brown log scored with several deep cuts.  These artifacts are a souvenir of the Protestant Reformation in Iceland.  Christianity was accepted by negotiation and compromise on the island, not an ounce of blood was spilled.  The Reformation was a bloodier affair.  Guerilla war wracked the country.  The fortunes of battle alternately favored one side or the other.   First, the Lutherans prevailed, acting under a Royal Decree from the Protestant King of Denmark, at that time the remote ruler over Iceland.  But the Catholic bishops were powerful and controlled economically important monasteries.  At the Thing assembly, the Catholics were successful is securing a decree denouncing the reformation and restoring the Roman Catholic church as the official religion.  But Bishop Gissur Einarsson at Skalholt was a crypto-Lutheran (he had studied theology in Hamburg) and he worked to reform the Church, adopting Protestant teachings.  Gissur died in 1640.  More fighting ensued.  The charismatic Bishop Jon Arason led a war party against Skalholt, seized the church and monastery there and, then, had Gissur’s corpse dragged out of the grave and mutilated as a heretic.  Bishop Arason with his sons dominated the 1650 Thing Assembly and, once again, Catholicism became the official State religion.  The Lutheran forces rallied and besieged Bishop Arason at a farmstead called Sauthadal.  The Lutherans had some imported guns and used them against the Catholics.  Of course, this was a small scale affray – about a hundred men were involved and fighting was incompetent.  The Lutherans didn’t know how to manage their muzzle-loading rifles and accidentally wounded their leader by friendly fire.  But the Catholics were alarmed by the fire-belching guns and surrendered.  Bishop Arason was taken to Skalholt and beheaded with his two sons, Ari and Bjorn.  (One of Bishop Arason’s daughters led a brief, unsuccessful insurgency).  Ari and Bjorn were executed because the entire affair had more in common with a typical Icelandic blood feud than a war involving religion.  Indeed, the somewhat unconventional nature of Icelandic Catholicism is obvious from this history.  The handsome Bishop Arason had a majestic beard and noble demeanor and was a great cocksman – it is said that half of the children in his north central diocese, Holar, were his illegitimate children.  And, indeed, the executioner, Christian Skriver, the King’s bailiff, was murdered by a cabal of fishermen on the urging of Arason’s daughter, Thorun Jonsdottir and one of the Bishop’s longtime mistresses, Helga Sigurthadottir.  So the Reformation in Iceland was conducted according to the implacable rules of the Blood Feud. 

90.

One-hundred yards separates the arched gateway into the courtyards of the Royal Palace and Stockholm’s cathedral, the Storkyrken.  One side of the big, unprepossessing structure walls the square marked at its center by a monument to the Stockholm Blood Bath.  The monument is a round sooty cylinder chained-off from the tourists with a draped bronze urn at its top, a dismal-looking thing surrounded by Japanese cruise ship visitors who seem more interested in the various ye old Gift Shoppes lining the plaza.  The old Stock Exchange with baroque gables at its corners and over the entrance has been converted into the Nobel Prize Museum – this summer it is celebrating the legacy of Martin Luther King.  Within the Storkyrken, St. George atop an armored horse skewers a writhing dragon.  The sculpture is twice-life-size (at least as far as steed and Saint – who knows how big dragons were?) and carved in a robust manner from dark wood and moose antlers.  The dragon is assembled from plates of antlers, a spiny, jagged thing that twists and turns around the fetlocks of the great black horse like a giant centipede.  The Saint is rigidly upright – he’s like a cadaver stiffened by rigor mortis – and his lunging horse is all plated with armor.  This monstrous effigy was made by a Luebeck woodcarver to celebrate a victory in 1471 over the Danes – it seems dropped into the church as if an iron meteorite fallen from outer space.  The Saint’s face is improbably gentle, smooth, and without emotion, a bland mask of the sort that one expects to see in medieval lime-wood Madonnas.   

91.

A gravel byway leads off the main highway and over the grim dome of a moraine once lateral to the valley in which the foaming white river runs.  Beyond the moraine, another valley holds a narrow loch, a stone fissure filled with still icy water, chest-high underbrush crowding the tarn.  Little lanes lead to cottages among the diminutive jungle of ferny shrubs.  The lake itself is undisturbed, grimacing at its edges with lichen-spattered boulders, a motionless white mirror under the leaden skies.  Beyond the valley and the many driveways leading to cottages, the gravel lane loops up to an overlook on the opposing moraine.  Glaciers have pick-axed the mountains into jagged pinnacles at the head of the valley.  The is Draghals  Pass, a saddle between two cirques full of crumbling stone rockfalls.  Two waterfalls, shaped like opposing parenthesis marks droop down, cascading a couple hundred feet below a hammock-shaped snowfield.  The road leads between barren cairns of rock, nothing growing on the windswept heights only a few hundred feet above the country road.  At the top of the pass, the vista opens to the imbricated Hvalfjorthur, a fjord between peaks that crowd closely around the long blue inlet.  There is a good two-lane asphalt highway at the edge of the fjord, a road that clings to the steep shore, but it is deserted.  The tunnel boring under the Hvalfjorthur has made this drive superfluous for most drivers, but it is pleasant way to return to Reykjavik.  The sea and sky merge beyond the rocky pillars of the fjord and there is a great radiance in the air, a luminous void over the water such as one might see in a landscape by Claude.  Sheep dot the hillside meadows and fat rams as squat and close to the ground as dachshunds.  A whaling station occupies an old U.S. military base – some quonset huts  under a cliff and dull blue-green swaths of Nootka lupine unscrolling down the hills to the long piers and sinister gallows-shaped cranes on the water.  “No trespassing” signs glower at the traveler and a couple of malign pick-up trucks manned by Viking hillbillies are parked among the tin shacks at the site – stay away! the place mutters.  Apparently, protestors have come here and the locals are wary.  The road twists and turns.  You pass by the whaling station and, then, see it a mile away from the other side of the fjord, twenty minutes later, and high overhead some waterfalls are churning away soundlessly in the distance.   Then, you are under Mount Esja, the high ridge that looms over Rekyavik’s harbor and, crossing a low saddle wild with heath, the big downtown church is visible, miles and miles away, on its white launching pad.

92.

On a wall at one end of the Storkyrken in Stockholm, a painting shows a strange celestial scene.  On the canvas, the little medieval city, a cubist mosaic of brown brick structures, clusters around the big syringe-shaped steeple of the church.  The Te Kroner (“Three Crown”) medieval castle with its low barrel-shaped round towers seems interlocked with the church and the houses with their steeply pitched roofs.  The waters around the island freighted with the church and buildings are clogged with trellis-shaped structures – these are the stockades sunk in the bay to protect to the village.  There are two remarkable aspects of the painting.  First, beyond the wooden stockades the sea is shingled with white-caps.  And the water seems to lap up to the very edges of the house – in fact, many of the structures on the island seem partially drowned in the deep emerald green of the harbor.  Even more extraordinary is the sky-show over the city: the sun seems almost entirely eclipsed, but it is surrounded by schematically depicted orbits on which golden globes, painted with sharp yellow rays to suggest scintillation, are rotating around the occluded solar orb.  There are at least six sundogs, all of them defined by perfectly circular orbits, glowing in the sky.  This is the so-called Stockholm perihelion, a celestial phenomenon said to have happened on April 20,1535.  This spectacular light show gave fodder to preachers claiming that the end of the world was nigh.  (To me the picture seems to show a solar eclipse with almost total, but not complete, occlusion – the bright prominences shown orbiting the annulus of the sun appear to represent the so-called “diamond ring” effect, that is the “third contact” phenomenon of a sudden brilliant prominence at the sun’s rim.  The number of glowing orbs shown in the picture, I think, traces the progress of the eclipse and the prominences and flares observed during that celestial event – as is often the case in medieval art, all phases of the eclipse are shown simultaneously.  Of course, eclipses can be predicted and my hypothesis could be readily checked – but the painting is now known to have been made sometime after the event and, probably, incorporates references to other observations made at other times in the image.  In fact, when the painting was cleaned recently, it was discovered that canvas is much later than earlier attributions and seems to be a copy made two-hundred years after the 1535 event.  The whereabouts of the original picture that this canvas allegedly duplicates are unknown.)   

93.

Was anyone living on Iceland when the Vikings made landfall around 874 A.D.?  The first person known to have beached his long boat on the island was Hrafn-Floki (Raven- Floki).  Early accounts suggest that there were Pape (Irish priests) living in rock cells on the headlands.  But no one has found any trace of these monks – no structures, no burials, no artifacts.  Raven-Floki’s account of discovering Iceland is clearly based on Genesis – the Viking releases three ravens to see if land is nearby and, of course, one returns with a sprig of green grass in its beak.  Therefore, mythological elements predominate in early accounts and there is no tangible evidence to suggest that anyone was living on the island before the Settlement era.  There were no large mammals on the island – foxes hunted mice and, of course, birds were legion, vast colonies of them on the rocky coast line and skirting the thermal lagoons.  Millions of penguin-like Great Auks clustered along the black sand beaches and in the glacial harbors where mountainous pillars of blue ice bobbed in the waves.  (The auks were hunted to total extinction by the first couple decades of the 20th century – you can see bone-mounts, skeletons the color of withered leaves hunched over the bird’s short scissor-like beak in several of the museums.)  At the end of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald rhapsodizes over the Dutch sea captains who beheld the new world for the first time: the “fresh green breast of the new continent”, the transitory, enchanted moment when, for the last time in human history, men contemplated something “greater than their capacity for wonder.”  But, of course, the New World wasn’t destitute of people and not an empty space open to be seized and exploited – millions of people were already living there, many in great cities along the Mississippi River.  Iceland was, in fact, devoid of human beings, lush with forests once, a great natural paradise that opened its arms to embrace the people who came to settle its shores.  For the first two-hundred years, travel was by rivers only because the sea-coasts were said to be so densely wooded that they were impenetrable – this also seems to me to be mythical, a tale of a paradise lost as soon as discovered.  The rock-girt coasts of Iceland are cold and furious with destructive winds laden with sooty volcanic ash.  I don’t believe in Iceland’s lost forests.

94.

A dozen kiosks with touch screens line the Nobel Museum corridor.  Visitors can use the touch-screens to access information about various Nobel laureates.  The information is mostly superficial, a thumb-nail sketch with a few photographs.  Martin Luther King’s voice loops on his “I have a dream speech” and there are some good exhibits on the Civil Rights movement in a gallery at the back of the building.  Artifacts relating to the life of Alfred Nobel are kept in an annex.  Of course, Nobel perfected the ideal instrument of war, dynamite, and, then, spent half his life atoning for the havoc caused by his invention.  He seems to have been a morose man prone to melodrama and there is more than a little Strindberg in his relationships with women – his first two serious love affairs ended abruptly.  There wa something about Nobel that women didn’t like.  For 18 years, he courted Sophie Hess, a woman from Vienna.  That relationship ended when Fraulein Hess became pregnant with another man’s child.  Upon being asked to write a short autobiography for the Swedish press, Nobel scribbled these words (on display) at the museum: Alfred Nobel – pitiful creature, ought to have been suffocated by a humane physician when he made his howling entrance into life.  Greatest virtues: keeping his nails clean and never being a burden to anyone.  Greatest weakness: having neither wife nor kids nor sunny disposition nor hearty appetite.  Greatest single request: not to be buried alive.  Greatest sin: not worshiping Mammon.  Important events in life: none.  Nobel admired Percy Shelley’s closet drama The Cenci, a lurid horror-show full of incest, murder, and torture.  A few months before his death, he wrote his own version of the story and had it published.  There was a scandal as a result of the sexual violence in the play and the book was suppressed.

95.

Another Hvita (“White”) river plows its way through canyons and desolate trough valleys beneath a leaky slovenly glacier.  In the valley’s lower reaches, the river passes Geysir, a reeking travertine bowl full of green oval springs over which delicate veils of steam waft and Stroekkuer, a big geyser that froths in its ceramic vase of sinter, periodically exhaling a plume of boiling water like a whale’s spout.  (Geysir is formed from the Old Norse verb geys – “to gush”).   Conical volcanic spatter cones line the valley, fierce-looking but dormant sentinels and, under the glacier, the river plunges over a sixty-foot high black block cliff and, then, takes a ninety degree turn, sheer columns of water roaring into a narrow fissure canyon that intersects at a right angle the palisades of the broader river channel.  This is the Gullfoss (the “Golden Waterfall”) and it’s a thunderous spectacle.  Falling water, whether descending in braids or massive jets, is hypnotic – it is the essence of becoming, a pattern that never changes but that is, of course, constantly and exhaustively mutable.  But the huge waterfall’s enchantment is compromised by the tour-buses navigating skittishly the double parking lots – one atop the fluted basalt mesa and the other on a terrace in the gorge.  A trail crowded with cackling tourists leads to a viewing platform on the brink, the approach exhilarating with drifting curtains of cold mist that dampen the asphalt path.  In the early 20th century, the farmer who claimed this tract of the valley leased the river and waterfall to a British hydro-electric company.  A dam was proposed across the great bore of water above the brink and sluiceways were designed to harness of river’s force.  The farmer’s daughter spent years in court and bankrupted herself fighting to annul the lease and block the hydroelectric project.  She ultimately prevailed and there is a bronze bust of the woman both atop the canyon and at the trail-head in the gorge: “Why would I sell my old friend?” the monuments proclaim – this was her motto during the many years of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits.  The woman’s name is Sigridthur Tomasdottir and she is a hero to the Green movement in Icleland.

96.

Outside the large Riddarsholmkyrke, a little square reminds me of Prague.  A nearby freeway with roaring bridge decks isolates this hilltop from the Gamla Stan and the plaza is empty except for a bronze saint lifting his metal eyes to heaven atop his stylus-shaped column.  Tall, gaunt medieval tenements with pointed roofs lean into the square as if peering into a barrel and there are mysterious alleyways crammed with steep steps and a breach in the wall of old houses through which the visitor can see blue waters, the Stockholm estuary where white boats are gliding over the waves.  The Riddarsholmkyrke has a cast-iron steeple, a scaffold of metal-filigree shaped a little like the Eiffel Tower set atop the dour brick church.  Inside the rather grim-looking and severe structure, the space is surprisingly bright and empty, a clean Romanesque interior like the inside of a freezer.  The floor is ancient and embossed with tombstones and, within pale rounded alcoves, the sepulchers of the Swedish kings have been raised like marble and porphyry altars.  Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North, rests in sarcophagus of purplish stone, gilded letters spelling out his name, and a fussy-looking gold tray with what looks like a tea-service surmounting the tomb.  Little princes and princesses in tin boxes are pushed up against the white stone walls.  The vast lyre-shaped tomb of a 19th century king, carved from polished granite the color of beef heart, was so heavy that no technology could lift the thing – it was quarried several hundred miles to the north, carved and polished in situ, and, then, dragged over the ice on sledges to be installed mid-winter in this chapel alcove in the Riddarsholmkryke.  

97.

With a stop to swim at the Secret Lagoon, it’s a long four-hour drive to Vik on Iceland’s south coast.  Like all towns on the island, Vik is tiny, a scatter of chalk-white houses washed-up like sea shells in a hollow niche between jagged Arctic peaks.  For us, it’s just a place to turn around.  Here, the Myrdalsjoekull looms over the peaks like a storm front, a huge white tidal wave about to inundate the coastline.  The glaciers create their own weather and serpentine clouds boil up over them.  On the opposite side of the cliffs overlooking the town, a narrow road encircles the mountain to reach a black sand cove.  Some improbably narrow and fragile-looking sea stacks (Hraukr), columns of black basalt stand hip-deep in the surf and a stony fortress of an island looms against the horizon encircled by white vapors of sea birds.  A cave has been etched into the cliff and it looks Moorish, a stack of polygonal basalt columns rising up to a pointed vault, the opening into the mountain as geometric as if planned by some great, if eccentric architect.  Big signs warn you not to turn your back on the sea.  “Sneaker waves” sometimes ten times the height of the regular surf can suddenly crash ashore, grab you by the legs and waist and drag you far out to sea.  Many people have died here – at least, so the sign admonishes.  Iceland is level at the sea-side, but waves can kidnap you there – everywhere else there isn’t a foot of flat land: it’s all precipice, jagged stone, and gorge.  

98.

Although Stockholm is a beautiful city with thoroughfares worthy of Paris, and although it has a majestic harbor, an archipelago of green islands bathed in crystal blue water, its attractions are by and large interior – you tour museums and palaces.  Here are the places that I saw in Stockholm: the Vasa Museet, the Nordiska Museet, the ABBA museum, the Moderna Museet with the ArkDes, the Kungliga Slottet (Royal Palace), the Nobel Museum, the Viking Museum, the Kungliga Oper (Royal Opera), Storkyyrkan, Riddarsholmkyrken, the National Museum of Art, the Stadhuset (City Hall), the Historiska Museet, Drottningholm Slott and the baroque Drottninholm Theater.  

99.

Iceland is experienced as the outdoors – enormous spaces walled by black cliffs from which waterfalls plummet.  One-hundred and forty of its volcanoes are active, many of them seething under the white turtle-shells of the vast glaciers.  In some places, the glaciers, particularly the mighty Vatnajoekull, the largest ice-field in Europe, topple down to the sea, shattering into innumerable icebergs in the huge roaring amphitheaters of glacial lagoons.  The lava plateaus and the impenetrable interior highlands are radically unstable.  In 1783, a fissure opened in the heath country southwest of the Vatnajoekull glacier – lava surged out over a landscape tremulous with earthquakes.  Where the magma scuffed up against the towering walls of ice, vast floods scoured the land.  Then, the acid rain began, weeks of poisonous downfalls that killed crops and left whole herds of lamb and goats dead and rotting in the devastated fields.  Poison gas surged in yellow clouds over the farms and, ultimately, one-fifth of the population died.  In Iceland, I traveled on the Golden Circle route out of Rekyavik to see the chess-master Bobby Fischer’s grave (it’s in the middle of farm where someone unseen was singing an opera aria), Skalholt (destroyed by the earthquakes in 1783 and where the last Bishop of Iceland was beheaded), the Geysir geysers, the Gullfoss waterfall, Fontana baths and laugevatn at Lake Apavatne, the Kerith crater with its limpid blue pool under a scarlet scoria rim, and the somber Thingvellir.  On the South Coast driving loop, I saw the Seljalandrfoss, Skogafoss, Reynisfjara (the Black Sand beach), and Vik.  In West Iceland, we drove through Hvalfjorthur tunnel to Borganes, saw Skallagrim and Bodvar’s grave, toured the Saga Center, drove to the Deildartunguhver hot springs, then, east to Reykholt and the waterfalls at Barnafoss, then, back toward Reykjavik over Draghals Pass and around the Hvalfjorthur (“Whale Fjord”) to Mount Esna and the capitol.  In Reykjavik, we saw the Settlement Museum (the remains of an excavated Viking long house circa 900 A.D.) the National Historical Museum, the National Museum of Art, the Whale Museum, the Maritime Museum, the downtown Church called the Hallgrimskirkja, the Culture House, the Einar Johnsson Museum of sculpture, the Perlan, and attended Iceland’s Independence Day festival as well as a Viking festival in the nearby harbor town at Hafnafjorthur (heavily tattooed young men with braided blonde hair fighting in a grassy ring with broad swords and axes – this performance at the center of a circle of booths where people sell hand-made crafts, mostly jewelry with runes inscribed on them and shawls.)

100.

The Stockholm history museum houses a grisly exhibition, skeletal artifacts from the massacre at Wisby in Gotland.  Human bones are auratic – they possess an austere charisma, an elemental kind of presence.  Displayed under the title “Viking Massacre”, the Wisby bones are perversely beautiful.  The dead were exhumed from a mass grave and are clad in silvery chain-lace tunics and head-gear.  Yellow snarling teeth extrude from an elegant shroud of metallic lace tightly embracing a skull.  Half of an arm with fingers clenched is wrapped in abstract-looking chain mail.  Grimacing skulls and fragmentary feet seem fused with the light metal armor that the men were wearing when they were cut down.  The contrast in textures between the fragile-looking grey and yellow bone and the impermeable, densely wrought scales of leaden chain-mail is intensely tactile.  You feel these things with your eyes. The men died in an uprising about 750 years ago, slaughtered by Danish mercenaries.  The killing occurred on a hot day and, by the time the sweaty work of butchery was done, the corpses had swollen, bloating and oozing under their chain mail so that the task of stripping the dead was too noisome to be accomplished.  Two-thousand corpses were dragged into adjacents pits, covered with six feet of peat, a stone pillar carved into a cross to mark the place.  The military historian, John Keegan in his The Face of Battle, calls the five mass graves “one of the most fearsome revelations of a medieval battle known.”  Of course, the curators contextualize the exhibit, although it can be appreciated in its own right as a powerful, if morbid, aesthetic experience.  Two paintings expanded to mural size occupy the anteroom to the display: one of them, from the 19th century, shows the Danish king, Valdemar IV, receiving tribute from the citizens of Wisby – a mother with her children stares pathetically upward while an army of men clad in grey-silver chain mail (the same stuff into which the bones seem to be metamorphosing) haul away golden treasures from a looted church.  A dog sniffs curiously at a urine stain on a wooden cask apparently left by another canine.  In the other mural, the plump and complacent burgers of Wisby stand on the defensive wall and gaze down on the slaughter at the city gate.  The luridly expressionist painting was made in 1944 and is widely viewed as an outraged critique on Swedish neutrality during World War Two. 

101.

No one is touring the Culture House in the center of Rekyavik.  I’m alone in silent room under the building’s gabled-roof.  A slab of wood has been carved into an angel.  Wood is precious in Iceland and so the winged being chiseled into the substance is a thing of value.  A wax effigy of a pink-faced and handsome young man beckons at the angel.  The young man drowned at sea and his grief-stricken father commissioned the life-size portrait sculpted in wax.  In Iceland, death at sea was common and corpses were often not recovered or retrieved from the waves in such bad condition as to be unrecognizable.  Using wax to memorialize the appearance of the deceased person was not so rare as to be considered eccentric.  The young man seems to bow slightly and he is dressed in a neat maritime uniform.  At Borganes, a bronze bas relief stands next to the burial mound – the monument shows Egil on a fierce-looking little pony, the old Viking’s head thrown back to wail at the wind and the corpse of his drowned son, Bodvar, giant and unwieldy as it sprawls over the plodding animal’s shoulders.  

102.

An army of attendants and lackeys is setting up a banquet in Stockholm City Hall, the Radhuset.  The feast will take place on a hundred tables all neatly draped in white tablecloth in the brick-lined atrium of the Radhuset.  This is where the Nobel Prize banquet is held each January.  No one tells us the meaning of this present feast.  Of course, it has something to do with the hovering media, the red carpets, and the sidewalks guarded by soldiers at the Grand Hotel at the other end of the harbor, among the fragrant, green, and museum-laden islands, but that occasion remains inscrutable.  The Radhuset atrium where the banquet is being equipped is plain and, even, monastic with a cloister walk around its perimeter and austere brick archways opening into the surrounding walls.  Forty feet above the atrium, a large room resplendent with golden mosaics on its walls complements the plain brick courtyard – originally, the building was designed to be open to the elements, but this climate is cold with rain and snow and, so, a roof was installed.  The mosaics are in the chamber where the Nobel laureates and the guests of the royal party dance and converse after the celebratory dinner.  The glittering walls harken to the Rus and the Viking incursions into Novogorad, fleets then sailing down along the Volga to the Black Sea and Byzantium.  Enthroned, the Goddess of Lake Malarna looks down beneficently on the many heroes portrayed on the pilasters enclosing her.  Long boats glide by cities with Greek temples and mosques.  A saint without her head goes for a stroll in a meadow thronged with wild flowers.  Loons and brightly feathered ducks skim over golden ponds. 

103.

Even a hundred years ago, the rounded moraine where the Perlan is located was entirely barren.  Pictures show a stony mount, something like an Arctic Golgotha above the humble outpost city. Rekyavik’s water towers were built on this prominence overlooking the city and thousands of trees were planted to make a modest forest.  The groves have green hedges around them and meadows are laced together with purple lupine.  The water towers, which are the color of pearls, now house a natural history museum.  You can slip and slide around in an ice-cold glacial tunnel, watch volcanoes erupting, and attend an IMAX movie showing the Aurora Borealis – all of this is tastefully done and elaborately mounted.  Iceland’s glaciers are suffering the onslaught of climate change.  The exhibit featuring the ice-cave – it loops around for 250 blue meters – notes that in a hundred years, perhaps, the last grotto of that kind will be the one maintained in the Perlan Museum.  In 2008, two disoriented and starving polar bears were glimpsed stalking along the stony shore in Northwestern Iceland.  Although it’s rare, polar bears sometimes wash ashore in Iceland, hapless passengers on melting ice floes born by currents to the island and, as the pack ice turns rotten this has become increasingly common.  An exhibit at the Perlan tells their story: the first bear menaced a farmstead where children lived and had to be shot dead.  A plan was made to anesthetize the second bear and transport it to a zoo in Copenhagen.  But the animal spooked when the hunters approached it, diving into the water.  Undoubtedly it would come ashore somewhere else and attack livestock or people and, so, the hunters commandeered a fishing skiff and killed the beast with charges used to harvest whales.  The same thing happened, more or less, in 2016 when a female polar bear swam 200 miles, landed in Iceland, and had to be shot.  

104.

In 1976, Ingmar Bergman was in rehearsal, directing actors playing Strindberg’s Dance of Death. Two plainclothes policemen came into the Royal Dramatic Theater where Bergman was working and arrested him for tax evasion.  Bergman accused of setting up a corporation to receive profits from his film Persona and not reporting those proceeds to the Swedish IRS.  Bergman fled Sweden for the United States, didn’t like working in Hollywood, and, then, went to Munich.  After some litigation, the charges were dropped – the prosecutor, somewhat contemptuously, likened Bergman’s conduct to “stealing a car not knowing that he already owned it.”  Prime Minister Olof Palme begged Bergman to return to Sweden.  (Things didn’t end well for Palme – he was assassinated by an unknown assailant on the sidewalk after coming from the cinema with his wife.  This was the first assassination in Sweden since the death of Gustav III at the masked ball in 1792.)  Bergman ultimately came back to Sweden, mostly avoiding Stockholm and living as a recluse on Faroe Island.  Strindberg is portrayed as a knight in shining armor on the mosaic wall at the Radhuset.  His figure looks oddly elongated.  The mosaics were made before World War Two and so Bergman is not represented as one of the nation’s heroes.

105.

Despite his many murders, Egil is a national hero in Iceland.  He fought the English and came close to establishing a Norse-speaking kingdom in that country.  And he is revered as the greatest of the skalds, the old Norse poets.  Someone wrote that modern English is not that different from the language that Shakespeare spoke, possibly, because our culture is not willing to linguistically progress to the point that the Bard’s verse would be unintelligible to us.  (I am skeptical of this theory.)  The point can be made even more forcefully in Iceland – the people on that island speak Old Norse, a language that Egil and Snorri Sturlason would understand.  Perhaps, people are unwilling to change their speech to the extent that the treasures of their language become unavailable to them.  In his “Lament for (his) Sons”, Egil rages against Odin for abandoning him to a lonely “straw death.”  A man survives feuds, the frigid sea, and the interminable black Arctic nights, only because he is lucky and favored by the Gods.  Luck is foremost.  When your luck runs out, your life is over, and Egil in his old age felt supremely unlucky – Bodvar’s death was soul-murder.  Egil would try his axe against Odin’s shield if the god deigned to meet him in a fight.  But, of course, the god is aloof.  At the end of the poem, Egil lists his accomplishments – they are now ash in his mouth. But, at last, he is reconciled to Odin.  The one-eyed Allfather has given him something that few men possess – “the irreproachable gift,” the ability to make poetry, the only lasting consolation for mortal men.

Departure  

On the way from Stockholm to Iceland, a cold front clashes with warm, wet air and the plane rolls a little and, then, the white clouds are whisked away, blown apart so that the sky is clear all around and vertically also, from earth to the bluest blue of heaven.  Norway’s mountains are below, caked in an icing of snow, a wilderness of peaks and glaciers and, then, suddenly deep green fjords where ribbons of waterfall are plunging from the snow-cap straight down to the sea.  Over the North Atlantic, flotillas of clouds embrace one another and the sky is a continuous blur of white until suddenly the wrinkled face of a glacier frowns up at the sky giving way to lava fields incised by white turbulent rivers...

And a week later – Greenland: a grey peak sticking its thumb up out of the glacier, the white plains inscribed with inscrutable runes, more cloud, and, then, two hours later, over the tip of Labrador: brown cliffs scabbed with snow.  The tessellated ice-pack north of Hudson Bay, a million floes veined with blue capillaries of sea water, then, the inlets of the Bay itself and a royal road, a vast blue pathway unscrolling below the plane’s wings, a gleaming water-highway over which the plane flies as if striding along a great sky-blue carpet, the St. Lawrence seaway, Great Lakes that are also arrayed below like a blue freeway that leads, at last, to the green forests, the algal lakes, the rivers rolling in their flooded valleys, all the landmarks of home.  

June 23 - July 15, 2019