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Getting rid of the luggage at the nature.
Roads are light-struck places. This comes as a surprise. Countless travel-guides and documentaries would have me believe otherwise. The world beneath my feet is neither dim, nor gloomy, nor monochrome. It glows with the light of some alien order – a light so improbable it has a dreamed quality, the way colours in dreams can prossess actual weight, or create a sound, or stop time. I have looked up, startled, from my window to see the landscape – the scent of elusive sun; the cool fragrance of snow; the nagging absence of trees, the unbearable arctic wind a cappuccino-coloured Bulgarian can ever encounter in the snow-white Iceland. Suffused with the calm, almost glacial cleanliness of our fluorescent-lit highway, my driver is a man of few words. Only Múm rips off the solidly fixed silence. A few moments later, or merely a few kilometers it became calmer and even brighter. Sunrise burned though the pin-holed canopy, and its deep, red laminar shafts spattered the sodden grass like flecks of lava. Right now, at this precise instant, the snow is blue – rinsed the colour of indigo ink diluted in water, its shadows deep as the bluing on a gun. Right here the couch stops. I am the first of the three passengers who jumps out. I stare at the nothingness before my eyes in bewilderment. There is forming an inward feeling to leave the bags I brought from home overboard, to forget the angst from the old world and establish a new compass for this one; to get lost among the empty piles of snow and redefine freedom. I am wordless. I do not mean speechless. I mean wordless.
Imaginary landscape free of criticism and cultural mediation with Icelanders.
Iceland has all the characteristics of a galaxy just after the Big Bang when more harmonious and organized events have happened ever since. And for that matter, Iceland’s inhabitants are calm, down-to-earth and artistic tribe. When I talk with Icelanders they use plain language. I think it is in the service of a spiritual insight. They observe moments in nature daily. Each word is a polished stone that when dropped in water, creates infinity of rippling thoughts. Icelanders appear motionless, almost frozen so that it seems at first as if one is looking at the series of stills. But then, an occasional tracking of a passing jeep or smoke blowing in the wind, a bird crossing the wintry sky, or most shockingly, eyes blinking in an otherwise impassive face indicates that these are moving human beings with colourful souls and emotions. And there is the rub, the Icelander is like a quirky philosopher tour-guide who pretty much leaves foreigners alone to experience travelling in those remote places for themselves. Rather than trying to account for things, s/he feels the obligation to take a note of them, a vast striving for connection. Most of the visitors perplex this attitude with the famous stereotypical Scandinavian misanthropy. It is not. It is not. Iceland – to celebrate the sound of a sound.
Passing the Reykjavik club house constructions, entrants hear a burst of electronic noise – a jolt announcing entrance into a space where ears, rather than eyes, would better guide my path. The haunting presence of ice and darkness in two-thirds of the year is an endless supplier for an artistic expression of these 310 000 individuals. Icelandic art, music, literature, theatre and films differ from any other forms of approaching the sun, the sky, the land and the air. Some signals require touch and as well as hearing, their vibrations perceptible only when in contact with our skin and bones. I mixed my own inside understanding with the one I found here, and it shaped a whole brand new DNA independent from the other human beings.
Instead of a final: Final.
Roads are light-struck places. I have seen them twenty, maybe thirty times now. I have been travelling for days. People here do things most of the humans forgot a long time ago. Like riding a cat-size horse into the nothingness. Or live in adult accord with pain and sudden storms. Or mold a children’s toy out of a sheep jaw. All of this, of course, is interesting. But what distracts me more than ever, what has got me disorientated, even a little scared – my eyes, these days my eyes seem like borrowed things. I have been trying to see this miraculous and enigmatic empire of colour that only Icelanders know.
It shifts again.
The Akureyri’s fjords shines aquamarine. I approach through a white-hop slab of brilliance that could burn diamonds. I top my hands into the icy sea. Dazzled, I look down at what, apparently, are my hands. In the bottom sheen of the sea, the skin looks insubstantial. Almost translucent. The hands of a ghost.
I hold my breath.
Maybe Iceland is this.
Thought: Iceland leaps around time. She evades certain definitions and curiously reveals a few ambiguous images. See them. Create them. Listen to them.
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