Iceland, 'Of Monsters and Men' and Skalds

Note:
In my mythology, stories are happening in all directions and as the observer I sometimes try to articulate them. It’s happening by this design that Norse mythology has always made an impression on me and I’m listening on constant repeat to a band from Iceland that sways to the rhythms of these same storytelling traditions. For Christmas, I made my mom an edda filled with Icelandic folk tales and my poetry inspired from lyrics by said Icelandic band. My writing here is  an excavation to get deeper and closer to my fascinations. This is the first entry in a series to explore different angles of these ideas.

Iceland and wanderers

"In my childhood dreams Iceland was holy ground; when, at the age of twenty-nine, I saw it for the first time, the reality verified my dream; at fifty-seven it was holy ground still, with the most magical light of anywhere on earth." --W. H. Auden.

Iceland's unfolding in my mind. It came to me as fascinations come: first through mythology, geography and then song. I can understand the Auden quote as creating your own mythology: you have this idea of a foreign place in your mind and you listen to its stories and let it settle over your map making. It becomes your superstition. Your holy ground. There you hide your ideals, you swear on it (that you'll one day see it, you will, you will). It's a promise and a poem that you hold like an ocean that will twist outside of you into a river and direct your fate.

It's the need hungering Baudelaire's  poem, 'Le Voyage':

Pour l'enfant, amoureux de cartes et d'estampes,
L'univers est égal à son vaste appétit.
Ah! que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes!
Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit!
Un matin nous partons, le cerveau plein de flamme,
Le coeur gros de rancune et de désirs amers,
Et nous allons, suivant le rythme de la lame,
Berçant notre infini sur le fini des mers

I like the translation by Geoffrey Wagner:

"For the child, adoring cards and prints,
The universe fulfils its vast appetite.
Ah, how large is the world in the brightness of lamps,
How small in the eyes of memory!
We leave one morning, brains full of flame,
Hearts full of malice and bitter desires,
And we go and follow the rhythm of the waves,
Rocking our infinite on the finite of the seas"


Auden's relationship to Iceland shifts once he meets his holy ground and conceives it as a whole, outside of his desires. It becomes a place that he understands on a different level but it still swells. Iceland is to Auden as Hong Kong is to Mademoiselle. I feel like I'm stealing her story from her in the pieces that I can snatch it, because I want it to be mine.

In our classes, Mademoiselle will dabble through her memories, picking a rattling, ringing one to share with me. Her words ring around the room, fleshing out cities and faces as she retells them, her voice moving steadily out of French and English like disappearing down a tunnel before reemerging. Her voice varies in tone and shade, but after listening to her stories for awhile I stop noticing the switching language gears.

She’ll mark a memory, a story, with one of her books. She’ll pull a book from the shelves and tell me that it accompanied her to England on her trek to visit the house of the Bronte Sisters. I feel, on these mornings that bleed into our afternoons, that I am here to listen, to grasp slowly at everything.This is my education. My mind flits in and out of her memories and fills with words, language and books. Mademoiselle’s stories billow up around us and we are the ones on wings.

Someday is when I promise myself I’ll go, but for now it is enough to be here to listen and collect and remember.

She's told me of when she was working in England and left for a job offer in Hong Kong riding on bravery. She said that she wanted to submerge in faces she'd never seen, in culture spicy and unknown. 'Le Voyage' is somewhat responsible for her back bone, too. Mademoiselle told me, whimsically and wistfully, that as a teenager she’d loved Baudelaire and left the poem as a goodbye to her London boyfriend. And that’s a romance.

Iceland and The Skalds
Iceland has a long history of storytelling and spreading. The songs and stories, histories and poems were embodied and passed through centuries by the poets, who were called skalds. Since Iceland herself was survived through her poems, the skalds served as historians, performers and her keepers. The poems were the heritage of Icelanders and familiar words to the people. The skalds were not originators in that sense: they took stories and embellished, enlivened and transformed. As Iceland progressed towards the Middle Ages, their mythology and poems were written in the eddas.

‘Of Monsters and Men’
I place a big emphasis on my soundtrack. My songs are my storylines--they run underneath and deep. They create a tone and backdrop. Sometime last year, my dad and I started downloading indie rock compilations (This is a somewhat rocky trade. You have to MANUALLY sort through some 50+ songs and listen to each of them and then debate whether they deserve a second listen. Often times, songs need time to take hold and need to be heard over and over. For example, I originally sunk the Gotye (Somebody That I Used to Know) ship before it could sail. My brother made me pay closer attention. Shh. Don’t tell.)

That’s how I found the Icelandic band Of Monsters and Men. At first it’s the sounds, the music that shoots through me; but eventually the lyrics type into my head and I listen closely. Their songs create a canvas, a blue and white sea, a forest. Their lyrics weave a story sound of ghosts and memories, houses that hide spirits, ice mountains that melt into seas, monsters that wait and transform, endings that wait inside of beginnings. The songs are like sagas, and you can trace influences and references weaving back to Norse mythology. I see Of Monsters and Men as modern day skalds. 

Here’s my free write on ‘Little Talks’:
‘Little Talks’ is stormy and triumphant. Ships battle seas, storms and voices clatter inside of her (the female singer/storyteller) mind like an attic with furniture scuttling. But in the song there are also constants--like a world fading that’s fighting to keep her and a stronger voice like fire under ice that calms and coaxes. The lyrics (Don’t listen to a word I say, the screams all sound the same. Cause though the truth may vary, this ship will carry our bodies safe to shore.) gamble everything--truth, death, insanity--in a wager with the cosmos. In the end of the story we come down to the house. The storytellers have crossed seascapes in their own geography and they’ve created their own mythology, but the house won’t let them leave. It owns their stories, and after they’re gone it will hold them silent still. These are the ghosts, memories and mistakes that creak under the stairs and move through the house like a draft.

Singer/guitarist/songwriter Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir says of the song: “We had in mind the people that lived in my house, because I moved into a very, very old house. They had lived their lives there, and the woman had just passed away. It’s a conversation, and maybe one person isn’t really hearing the other one.” It’s a romance and a ghost story.


The Riddles, Charms and Poems
The Icelandic eddas are spellbound by mystery: lost ageless knowledge and secrets that echo in the throats of the dead. The eddas favor and reward searching, questioning minds.

The charm the wanderer holds in the face of the wise is language: stories are written to be read, lost things found. This give/take balance of the universe reveals. The eddas tell of the creation story in which the cosmos birthed frost giants before yielding the existence of the gods. The gods hunt and horde knowledge. Giants know more of mysteries than the gods do, since they existed before the gods. Odin seeks out the fate of the gods, he tricks and disguises his questions and desires as riddles. Paul B. Taylor writes: Riddles also suggest the Nordic fascination with the apparent relationship between the structure of language and the structure of the cosmos. For the Scandinavians the wisest man--he who knows the most of the structure of the cosmos--is also the most skilfull poet. It is, hence, appropriate that the god who is compelled to search out the facts of the cosmogonic scheme is the god of poetry.”

New Years as Descartes would see it

My Mom just read this article aloud to me from NPR and I got excited because it reminded me so much of Descartes' meditations. I'm reposting it here to ring in my Descartes-inspired (totally dorky, I know. I love it.) New Year.

Another Year And I'm Still Here: A New Year's Meditation
by ROBERT KRULWICH
Look at yourself. Right now.
You are muscle, skin, bone, brain, blood, warmed by energy, and all of you, every cell, even the subsets of those cells, all trillions and trillions of them, are going to tire, waste and depart. In 10 years almost every bit of you will have been replaced by new bits.
And yet, you will still be you. You will look like you do (sort of), you will behave like you do (sort of), others will know it's you (most of the time), and though a census of your innards will say, this is a new body, a different collection of atoms, you will know it's the same old you. How come?

If you are all new on the inside, how do you persist?

What Keeps Us Whole?
Well, there's your soul. If this weren't a sciencey blog, we could stop here. Your soul, breathed into you at your conception, will hang around till it's time to go and then be off to wherever it is souls go to. But suppose you are a "materialist"? Suppose you choose to imagine this journey naked, you as just a bunch of atoms, nothing added? What holds a soulless soul together?
The answer, these days, is your brain. Your memory. It's the story you tell yourself as you grow up, the unfurling narrative that begins with faces and smells and meals and sounds, then stretches into tales about your mom, dad, siblings, your pets, your family, your friends. It deepens with loves, joys, disappointments. It is always told by you, filtered through you. You are the one who tells it, you are the one who hears it, you are the only one who knows every bit of it.

Memories Are Our Duct Tape
To a significant degree, you are the sum of the stories you tell yourself about yourself.
Take away your memories, the connective tissue of your life, and what's left? You may be breathing, but in the late stages of memory loss, you aren't really there any more. You have unraveled.

We live this life together, but we experience it alone.
And when you actually die, what is annihilated? Well, there are tens of thousands of private images in your head right now: the pigeon you once almost caught when you were 4. The sight of a particularly beautiful girl disappearing through a doorway. The brief whoosh made by a snowy owl flying low that time you were walking alone in the woods. These are things no one knows, no one ever knew, no one but you.

When you go, they go. Forever. But as long as you're here, they stay. So, to all those pigeons, those girls, those owls that live in our heads, as long as we're here — to all of you, and to us, Happy New Year!

Descartes and Dreams

First, some backstory: How I Found Descartes
When I work together with Mademoiselle our classes are made up of conversations and sometimes driven by the questions I ask. One morning she read aloud to me from Will and Ariel Durant's book 'The Age of Louis XIV' (which is in English). Mademoiselle translated the book into French as she read aloud and I typed up what she told me to practice my spelling and grammar. We translated/dictated/typed the chapter on the philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal. Pascal was actually an unschooler. During his lifetime, wealthy children were educated by priests or tutors, but Pascal's father chose to educate his son himself. As a child, Pascal was thoroughly influenced, swayed and wooed by philosophy and the mathematical arts. The philosopher Descartes was a visiter of the Pascal household and a friend of Pascal's father.

During the reading, as I typed and  listened to the story of Pascal I felt the detail of Descartes pulling at me. Descartes was mentioned in passing, he only made an appearance in Pascal's life, but I still wanted his story.  It reminds me of a quote from the novel The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson:

"I was always distracted by the esoterica that might appear in a textbook's footnote or a teacher's offhand remark. For example: if my geometry teacher mentioned something about Galileo giving lectures on the physical structure of Hell, it became impossible for me to refocus my interest when he returned to talking about the sides of a parallelogram. I would skip the next three classes to visit the library, reading everything I could on Galileo, and when I returned to the school I would fail the next math test because it did not include any questions about the Inquisition."

My classes with Mademoiselle sometimes benefit me as invitations to make new discoveries. I told Mademoiselle I was interested in Descartes and she suggested I prepare a presentation on him to present in our next class. I made the French presentation, researched and read, and did free writes on my thoughts about Descartes' philosophy.

Descartes' Story
Descartes (1596-1650) had a particular stance coming into the world as a philosopher while discovery and the new observations of science unraveled and aligned. He is considered the father of modern philosophy because he applied his worldview and meditations to what was being uncovered in science. Philosopher extraordinaire Bertrand Russell observes: "Descartes writes, not as a teacher, but as a discoverer and explorer, anxious to communicate what he has found."

Education
Descartes was educated at a Jesuit college, where he received his foundation in studying modern mathematics. He was fragile and sickly as a child so he was allowed to remain in bed until 11:00 am while the other students began their studies in the early morning. Descartes spent these mornings in meditation, a habit he would remain faithful to for most of his life. Descartes' life would be directed and haunted by his dreams, so these mornings gave him time unlock them.

After finishing school, Descartes spent some time traveling and hunting for the solitude that would lead to meditation. In 1619, while in Germany, Descartes had a series of three dreams which had the same power over him as visions influence saints. The dreams colored through his mind and then seized him. From the dreams, Descartes determined that his life's work would be in pursuit of science and in search of truths.

Philosophy
"Je pense, donc je suis." I think, therefore I am.
This is the core idea of Descartes' philosophy. Descartes went about his search through what is the called the Method of Doubt. I think that the Method of Doubt was Descartes' way of teaching himself to think critically. He realized that he couldn't accept the ideas he was surrounded by at face value--so he began to question, evaluate and rebuild his realities. Descartes states the need  “to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations”. He saw the Method of Doubt as a means “to reach certainty — to cast aside the loose earth and sand so as to come upon rock or clay”. Descartes writes, "If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things."

It makes sense that since dreams set Descartes' on his path, they would also shake him out of his former way of thinking. Descartes writes in Meditation I:

"Let us suppose, then, that we are dreaming, and that all these particulars--namely, the opening of the eyes, the motion of the head, the forth- putting of the hands--are merely illusions; and even that we really possess neither an entire body nor hands such as we see. Nevertheless it must be admitted at least that the objects which appear to us in sleep are, as it were, painted representations which could not have been formed unless in the likeness of realities; and, therefore, that those general objects, at all events, namely, eyes, a head, hands, and an entire body, are not simply imaginary, but really existent. For, in truth, painters themselves, even when they study to represent sirens and satyrs by forms the most fantastic and extraordinary, cannot bestow upon them natures absolutely new, but can only make a certain medley of the members of different animals; or if they chance to imagine something so novel that nothing at all similar has ever been seen before, and such as is, therefore, purely fictitious and absolutely false, it is at least certain that the colors of which this is composed are real.''

Descartes concluded that because he questioned, he was a thing that existed. He writes, working out his beliefs, "I understand by the sole power of judgement, which resides in my mind, what  I thought I saw with my eyes."

His philosophy sounds familiar, as it's an idea that we've seen played out in pop culture and movies. Descartes' wondering at reality heavily influenced The Matrix.

My Thoughts on Descartes
Descartes' search was personal. It involved him and trusted only himself (Je pense, donc je suis. Meaning the world comes to me through my thoughts/perception.) What's interesting to me is the way Descartes allowed his dreams, realities and truths to mingle. He saw his mind as one battleground, a place of history, a singular ruin. If dreams are mangled realities that come to us as memories when we're awake, what filters our truth? Our mind defines us. It's memories, wonders, self direction and our world as we choose to remember and perceive.

Baudelaire: The Musician

 This French poet I've been reading, his name is Baudelaire and he's like a musician of the French language. His poems feel like they've been written to be read aloud and Baudelaire's words feel like waves coming off of your tongue. Memorizing his poetry is chanting it over and over, working into a kind of harmony. Can the 'waves of a poem' be translated into another language?

 Words hold the culture of a language and the memories of a people behind them. Word for word translation, passing meaning from one language to another, is impossible. For instance, in French, they have like eight different words describing different layers of darkness. And using the French words vous or tu (both meaning you. Vous is the formal 'you' and tu is the kind of 'you' used to address a lover or a child) reveal the relationship between two people. How do you capture these kinds of nuances in English? 

So really, translation is finding a substitute for a word. My French teacher was saying how poems are musical, but more people are drawn to music, because music is more easily understood. In a song, the music of the song is a reference point, the music tips you off on whether the song is sad or happy. Poetry doesn't have this reference points, which makes poetic translation even more dangerous. The poem is translated through what the translator sees. The 'reference points' of the translator are the translator's knowledge of the history and culture of the language, and the translator's knowledge of the poet he's translating. 

Translation and The Riddle

I've been working (in the very literal sense of deep thinking, researching, connecting, writing, conversing, editing and rewriting) on a series of essays describing my experiences learning the French language through its poetry and also on my own particular learning style. I wanted to write a new (to me) kind of 'essay' than the basic research and biography papers I've tried writing in the past.

I want my essays in progress to include my conversations with Mademoiselle  and lessons at the Upper Room and to capture my wonder at language and what I'm learning. I want these essays to be done in a sort of memoir style. Meaning I want them to grow out of my life, like Lydia Davis's essays for The Paris Review. Her essays are vivid and personal and colored with her experiences and opinions. Davis as the writer and narrator moves the essays from Point A to B. I want to be able to capture myself and for the essays to be the format. I'm not sure if I can really call my writing (and how I'm trying to connect the different pieces to tell one story) as essays, but it seems fitting, given the French origins of the word. From Wikipedia:

The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, "to try" or "to attempt". In English essay first meant "a trial" or "an attempt", and this is still an alternative meaning. The Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was the first author to describe his work as essays; he used the term to characterize these as "attempts" to put his thoughts into writing, and his essays grew out of his commonplacing.

So this is my attempt. Here's a piece of what I've written about my thoughts on translating so far. More to come.

Translation:

A translation is an expression, it’s a way of working outside of a language. You become aware of the inaccuracies, the holes, the spaces where words fall loose. As a writer, it’s humbling. It’s like soaring, to become aware of how singular each thought is and how many pathways are opened and gutted from it. How possibilities simmer and shriek. This is your workshop. The translator labors and crawls through mechanisms, technicalities, grammar, culture, history. The translator conducts an orchestra, sets a sound and a time, pieces together a reality. The translator works with the crudest forms of language, language which lies naked and new.

Translation is constructing the pattern and depth between sound and meaning. It’s the perfect riddle.

Translating another writer’s work is the closest way to get to the writing itself. A translation is a rendering of writing across a language. It’s transferring the writer’s design with respect for the writer or a deep love and understanding for the writing and a desire to recreate it. It’s playing with the way words sound and the right momentum of words strung together to relent the intricacies and curiosities of meaning. Translating is choosing the pauses and casualties and stresses and memories that inflict this meaning. Translators redefine creation.

To Find One's Poet

Paul Valéry (a very fantastic French poet, essayist, philosopher and polymath) has this theory that every poem written has a person to match. He says:

A person has to be ''tuned'' you might say, like an instrument, to poetry. Each person has his own poetry, his own poet. And conversely, every poet seeks his own resonator. To find one's poet is to find--through another person--one's own resonance. 

It's an idea that makes us seem singular and it's something like soul mates, to think that there's a poem out there waiting for us that will hit just the right notes. I'm developing an affinity (which is one of my new favorite words, introduced to me a friend who I keep around specifically to make these kinds of introductions) for poetry. I go through different stages in writing, where I like to explore and experiment by only working in certain mediums for awhile. And so my current affinity is for reading/writing only poetry, and for researching mostly poets. My big (as in consisting of different essays from different trains of thought that I'm taking my time to write) writing project is on learning the French language through its poetry. I'll post all of the essays here when I'm finished with them.