That’s the art of Iceland: remaining hospitable. It is a kind of mercy. Art and beauty are reduced to a line of thought here, in a language of “eye” and “body” but not so much of mind, and that line is reduced to gentle gestures, lest the bodies of visitors scare. The language of mind (below) might just scare them off.
I’d love to see Iceland market it. Such beauty lies there.
Why aren’t shipping containers, repurposed as homes, sold in souvenir shops in Reykjavik? I think it’s because Icelanders want to give people the experience they came for. They’re generous like that.
Not that there are polar bears in Iceland, but what the heck. The practice speaks to a tremendous self confidence, and the secrecy of all islanders: everyone is the island.
All who come remain within the gesture of arrival, until they choose to either leave or stay. Everyone gets to decide for themselves. No one will help you… unless you get lost. Then you will be brought back and warmed up, and will be once again within the gesture of the island itself. It’s the same if you try to leave. You might find yourself leaving and staying all at the same time.
The island is the one doing the speaking here. Humans are almost speechless in its face.
This entry was posted in Art, Christian Iceland, Enlightenment, Land and tagged Iceland, Icelandic culture, island life, islomania, nature photography, Reykjavik, souvenirs, tourism on September 3, 2017 by Harold Rhenisch.
Many parts of Icelandic culture did not leave an indigenous sense of land until the Second World War, when occupation by American and British military forces completely transformed the economy.
The wind, I promise, is unforgiving here. The house is built directly in it, on the crest of a hill above the Greenland Sea, so that the wind will take the winter snow away. The rest of the year is scarcely warmer. I would have left, too. And I love the wind!
For one thing, in Iceland you’re always under the observant eyes of ravens, who range out to the left and right of the god Oðin, acting as the harbingers and scouts of all identity: thought and memory. Here’s one keeping an eye on me.
… and ice are never far, and come from beyond the world.
You can read it all winter long, or your sheep can. My book The Art of Haying explores these mysteries.
… and creativity rising not from person but from space, in an ancient conception called the Tun.
All these technologies and many more meet in the culture of Iceland. The culture is their expression. Humans pass through this culture’s forms, in the same way they ride (or walk) across the land.
In Iceland, nothing gets thrown away.
Well, that’s the tun (our contemporary ton, or town), in many of its forms. It is in this space that Icelandic creativity takes place, because the tun (not the individual self, not God but focussed activity rising from location, here in Middle Earth, between cataclysmic forces) is where creativity takes place. In Iceland, it is Middle Earth, Miðgarðr, that is creative space. A similar set of illustrations can be worked out for the other technologies (string, etc) with which I introduced this post, but for now, I think you get the point: in Iceland there is a form of creativity and a corresponding land sense with little if any connection to American, French or German land senses. The culture, however, is more creative than those others. That’s worth sitting down in for awhile and getting to know. So, until next time when I will speak about Indigenous creativity on the Columbia Plateau, thank you for spending some quality time with me among the elves.
This entry was posted in Architecture, Art and tagged creativity, Iceland, Icelandic culture, mythology, Odin, Old Norse, Photography, tun on January 27, 2016 by Harold Rhenisch.
This entry was posted in Architecture, Christian Iceland, Land, sea, World War II and tagged architecture, Beauty, creativity, economy, Iceland, Icelandic culture, Nature, Photography, tun on January 25, 2014 by Harold Rhenisch.