October 11 (Day Twenty-nine)
The weather, which has been rainy and windy and only briefly intermittently clear since we arrived in Iceland, has taken a turn for the worse. I know this in my first waking moment from the sound of heavy rain in the courtyard outside and the gusts against our window. We don’t have to say it—the trip to Akureryi for which we readied overnight packs the day before is in doubt. It was going to be a lot of driving on back-country highways under the best of conditions; it will be totally harrowing for five and a half hours in wind and rain. Yet we don’t have any other options. We have been focusing on this journey with Birgir and Erla to return Victoria as our single opportunity to see a large stretch of Iceland. The curiosity is balanced by fear of the unknown, including worry about driving—high speed, narrow roads, blind curves, total wilderness outside.
The clerk at the front desk is used to citing a homily that I have heard often in Maine: “If you don’t like the weather in Iceland, just wait a few minutes.” So no one really knows what this day will be like yet, she tells me, using her own words.
True enough. By the end of breakfast the rain has all but stopped and the sun is even visible for moment, as I walk down Laugavegur to the tourist office to get their daily weather report. The moment I enter, I know that we will not make the trip. In big letters on the board are words like “snow” and “gale-force winds”; closer inspection confirms that they apply to Akureyi as well as just about all the regions we must pass through to get there. I wait on line anyway and ask the woman’s opinion. “Today is not a good day to travel north. Tomorrow should be much, much better. The sun is going to come out.”
“How about those tours?” I ask, pointing to the brochures stacked along the desk. We were going to spend two whole days with Birgir and Erla so, if we aren’t going to Akureryi today, we must makes plans for tomorrow too. Our time in Iceland is growing short. This will be the fourth of six days, and we still hadn’t gotten out of Reykjavik except for the lava fields en route to Keflavik and the Blue Lagoon.
“I have been on Reykjavik Excursions,” she tells me, “and they are very good, very informative. I can’t speak for the others.”
“Do you think they will go on their tours today?”
“Yes, they go everyday, but it is too late for today already. They leave first thing in the morning.”
“If my wife and I want to go tomorrow, how would we get reservations?”
“You buy them right here from the tourist office.”
“Okay, I’ll be back if we don’t go to Akureryi.”
It is not raining at all now, and a brief shot of sun comes through the clouds, so my mind is moving in two directions at once. But almost as soon as I return to the room, ambivalence ends. The phone is ringing, and Birgir in on the other end, “There is snow up north and it is very windy. I think maybe it is better if you don’t go. It will not be comfortable.”
“Are you going?”
“Of course. And you are welcome, but I am thinking you will not like it so much. The roads will be slick.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“We’ll be back tomorrow. Maybe we can do something on Saturday. I could take you on a tour out of town.”
“Okay. Let’s plan on getting together then.”
“Yes, that is good.”
“Have a safe trip. Give our best to Victoria.”
“I was just thinking,” Birgir says, “Erla and I will get back on time tomorrow to take you to dinner. Will that be good.”
“For sure. Let’s do it. Good luck with the wind and ice. Don’t rush on our account tomorrow. Get back whenever you can.”
“I’ve driven it many times in worse weather. We’ll be fine. We’ll be back by the middle of the afternoon.”
Relieved that the issue is no longer in doubt, we can now give the next two days a fresh look and consider our options. We definitely should sign up for a tour. Yes, it would have been better to travel the countryside with Birgir and not a busload of tourists, but we have two days left after today and, if we are not going to miss Iceland altogether, we need to get out of Reykjavik one way or the other.
First there is today, and we go downstairs to discuss possibilities with the concierge. There is an older tour guide hanging the lobby, bitching about the snow and wind outside of town and having to work today, so Lindy inquires as to whether he is leading a group somewhere. He is—the ladies from Philadelphia have signed him up for a private tour. I want no part of that, but Lindy brazenly asks if we can come along.
“I would need to ask their permission.” “
“That’s okay,” I say. “I think we have things to do.”
But Lindy wants him to ask anyway until she hears where he is going: the tour he leading them on is to suburban town of Hafnarfjordur, about the best that he can muster on this inclement day—nothing we need to see, especially amid their small talk and at the mercy of their generosity.
Upstairs I ask Lindy her thoughts about calling Helga, the anthropologist I met the other morning on the campus. She thinks that is a great idea. I dial Helga’s cell and get her on the first ring. She is immediately receptive, graciously so. For the morning she is working on her thesis but she can spend the afternoon with us. She offers to take us around the city. “Maybe you would like to meet some anthropologists afterward?” she asks.
“Sure. That would be nice.”
“We can plan our walk so that we end up at the anthropology department. I know that my advisor Dr. Palsson will be there. He is chairman. I have told him about you, and he is very interested in meeting you.”
We agree to meet for lunch at 12:30 at Anaestu Grosum, her favorite restaurant.
After the phone call, I propose to Lindy that we sign up now for a tour tomorrow. She agrees, so I offer to go back to the tourist office myself. It is pouring again, and she would like to check out nearby second-hand clothing stores.
This time I remember my bag of old crackers and stale bread from Italy. Borrowing a second umbrella at the desk, I set off down Laugavegur. By the time I get to the tourist office, the rain has stopped.
A brief discussion with the same attendant convinces me to select the Golden Circle tour over the Saga one. These are the two that make the most sense, as we would not seek a tour of Reykjavik and we do not plan to sit on a bus for a whole day just to see one glacier, volcano, or ruins. The Golden Circle hits the major sites near Reykjavik, going essentially south, southwest, and west, including waterfalls, geysers, volcanic ponds, and the National Park. The competing Saga excursion goes north and northwest of town and is more historic, focusing on early settlements and Viking sites, with a museum or two thrown in. We want to see the varied outdoor landscapes of wild Iceland and, while any itinerary means missing certain things, the Golden Circle provides the most big-ticket items.
The cost is almost $100 per person, which seems reasonable for nine hours of docented touring of the countryside. I provide my credit card and get two tickets and a receipt. Then I head out toward the Tjorn.
The sky is now cloudy bright, so I stick the umbrella in my pocket and cross Laekjargata. The street is a complete wind tunnel again. I find that I can barely move against a stiff gale. Signs are rattling noisily, and at least one metal board on a pole outside a shop is being bent to the ground and then snapping back up, so that it drums erratically within the white noise of the air. People, if slowed, seem undeterred, as men and women proceed to work, hunched against the elements, clutching articles. At moments I feel as though I will be lifted off the ground, but there is a theme of normality. Everything is okay in Reykjavik; it is just windy.
The weather is calmer at the Tjorn where the birds are in full attendance—maybe a hundred ducks and a dozen or more swans plus the a requisite band of gulls and a few geese. As I begin tossing crackers, everyone is drawn to the spot. Even the pigeons and other land birds gather around me and try to get catch the crumbs in midair. I aim to different spots for a variety of clienteles, but it is a melée. Wings flap, and birds peck at each other, tossing the bigger scraps into the air, occasionally many times. When I am out of rations, I stand by the bench and watch the arras settle, the fowl finally drifting away so that, for a moment, it is a scenic landscape—serene swans, gulls taking off, ducks in flotillas, sky and water both vibrant and shifting shades of violet, an old-fashioned church with a high thin pointed steeple on the near shore, a small bird-covered island in the center, and prop planes ignoring the gale and taking off and landing in the distance, probably to and from Akureryi and other such places.
Shades of amethyst and violet in the water mixed in its chop with the brightness of the sky make a carpet so lush and textured it is almost museum-quality, with an imaginary grape taste to it; the church completes the cameo as the frontispiece of a novel about Scandinavia.
Anaestu Grosum prepared enough shredded parsnips and carrot soup yesterday that they are still offering it a day after and, delighted to see it, Helga orders exactly what we had. We get different soup and vegetable dishes. She is a studious-looking woman, wire-rim glasses, light brown hair parted down the middle, a broad gnomic face. During the meal she talks about her work—a thesis on male gender issues in the Icelandic equivalent of the Peace Corps; then her previous career, time living in Denmark studying pottery, her grown children, and the walk we can take through Reykjavik during the afternoon.
We start out by meandering around the streets of the district she refers to as “101 Reykjavik,” the center of town. As we walk a few blocks from the Fron, she points out styles of architecture and spots where this or that event happened in her life such as an exhibition or the home of a friend. We head down Klapparstigur to Grettisgata, then over to Skolavorthustigur.
I am noticing now how so many of the graffiti, ads, and posters reflect qualities of Erro: a kind of cartoon sensibility of things, blimplike figures, a blobbish floating quality to shapes, creatures with distorted body-parts, collages blending photography with painted icons, posters merging into graffiti. As I point this out, Helga has a sudden inspiration. A gallery just down the next block is owned by a friend of hers.
Most street galleries are mediocre or mildly captivating affairs; every so often one invites a second look. Listagalleri is one of those for me. We have been in Iceland only three-plus days and seen but a few kinds of landscapes; yet they possess a unique light and energy, and their surface features and topography arouse another landscape in the unconscious, a kind of subliminal after-image. These have been imprinting on my imagination without my realizing it: the subdued brilliance and phosphorescent blue-gray on a black, jagged, featureless topography that in a smaller, fractal dimension is so intricately and tortuously carved that it is beyond inventory. Multiple contrasts of bright skies, active clouds, black lava fields, twisted rocks, and sparse but glowing foliage comprise a secret phenomenology that is mostly invisible like ultraviolet light. And that is precisely what I see in the work at Listagalleri.
We are surrounded by subliminal renditions of the native landscape, canvasses portraying complementary colors, hues seen in a different radiation; these have replaced those that our eyes discern. Big oils show rocks and mountains as blue-black blobs and mounds set in fiery orange and yellow to yellow-red landscapes, everything that surface Iceland is not. The black with green and white fuzz has been transformed into something implying the intensity of its formation, i.e., when the lava was hot, swirling rivers and ingots. It could be that the painter is working subliminally, creating an appearance of luminosity that is absorbed and withheld when only black rays are reflected for sight.
Topographies in yellow and orange are minimalist and spectral rather than realistic portrayals of even volcanic eruptions; they are an imaginal tundra from a children’s book, bright and primal; they suggest bands of light on the surface of the Sun. Other canvases show brownish-black islets and lagoons. The edges of the islets are streaked with dirty orange. A cobalt blue mountain shading to absolute black along its top overlooks a bright landscape. The water filling its pools and lagoons is a sharply clashing Van Gogh white with currents of blue and purple, some like threads, others puffy. These works all evoke hidden Iceland, the astral core of an otherwise bleak northern land.
The owner of the gallery is a man of our age, Guthmundur Kjartansson (a bent “d” rendering “th” on his card), someone Helga knows from her pottery days. I ask his permission to photograph some of the paintings, as I imagine that they might make great covers if we end up publishing one of Salka’s Icelandic novelists or find some other Icelandic writing—and he is pleased by the request. He identifies the main artist here as Hafdis Huld Hakansson and shows us some new works he has just received and not yet hung. Then he points out other painters who he thinks we might find engaging. Almost all of these are landscapes and most of them are minimalist in some way—blocks of “false” color and simplified, Euclidean and non-Euclidean renderings of complex spaces. A number are little cameos in golden frames and show childlike or doll-like interiors and faces turned slightly oddly, wrong in some way that also makes them “right.”
“These ones are pure jazz,” Guthmundur says, pointing to a group of miniatures in fields of color. “On the other hand, this one is more like a chess game.” He points to an abstract scrabbled design.
“I just remembered,” I say, “doesn’t Bobby Fischer live in Iceland? Isn’t it that no other country would take him?”
“Yes, he does. You see, we are a bit mad. You spot him occasionally, walking the streets, looking distracted. He has a Japanese girlfriend in Japan. Sometimes she’s with him.”
“I think the United States is after him,” I continue to recall, “because he played a chess match in Serbia during the Balkan War when there was an embargo against Americans going there or doing business.”
“That’s right. Iceland offered him asylum and they won’t extradite him. Why? Because we are crazy about chess, that’s the only reason. We make him a national hero. But, if the truth be told—and everyone knows this—he’s a little ‘not right,’” he concludes, pointing to his head.
“Any game at which a machine can beat a human is dangerous to try to master because its algorithm is deep enough to get lost in but not deep enough to get you out.” say that, but I don’t know where it comes from, and I am not sure that I haven’t committed the very fallacy I am trying to describe. I guess I have considered for a while that chess may not be quite as deep as it seemed once seemed to me before computers were able to find it had a limited number of algorithms and moves.
Next we talk about Erro and his influence on Icelandic painting. “I have known him and I like him, “Guthmundur says. “He is appreciated in Iceland, but we don’t revere him the way they do in Paris. I guess we save that for a stranger like Bobby Fischer. You know, Erro is Guthmundur too. His real name is Guthmundur Guthmundsson.”
The visit gradually over, we say goodbye and head back out into the wind.
We continue up Skolavorthustigur to the Hallgrimskirjka church at its summit. I passed it at close range two mornings ago but didn’t get a good look at it because I was running back to the Fron. It is a massive structure, more tall than broad and more odd than majestic. The white concrete with its modern stepped design gives the appearance of a giant organ, rising by degrees to a summit and steeple with simple Cross. It also looks like a giant stone bar graph. One tall, extremely narrow arch-shaped window in the Icelandic style is set over the entrance, no stain on the glass, no color at all, in fact black. Six extremely tiny, vertically oriented windows follow it like little peepholes to the top, also in the spare national style.
The Lonely Planet guide describes what I call metaphorically organ pipes as “concrete representations of volcanic basalt columns…flank[ing] the 75m-high steeple.”
“What denomination?” Lindy asks.
“Lutheran,” says Helga. “This is Iceland. Everything is Lutheran. Look at this church. Construction was begun in 1940 and it took thirty-four years to build. Lutherans build churches because they believe in nothing.”
She points out the statue of Leif Eiriksson on a giant ascending slab in front.
“Hardly a religious figure,” I say. The slab is actually an abstract rendering of a Viking longboat, with its marine shape gently hinted as the stone block rises to where Leif is planted grandly at its prow, looking outward, no doubt to the West.
“The statue is older than the church,” Helga explains. “On the one thousandth anniversary of Iceland’s first parliament in 1930 the United States presented it to Iceland. I imagine they chose Leif Eiriksson because he discovered Vinland and was the first American.”
“Vinland is America,” I add, “at the end of that sequence from Norway to Iceland to Greenland to Baffinland.”
“And of course Irish monks were there ahead of Leif Eiriksson,” Helga adds.
She wants us to be able to go into the church and take its fabled elevator to the top for the view of the city, but there is a funeral going on, somber music flowing out, quite loud and melancholy when we poke our heads in. A guard informs her that the public cannot be admitted for viewing now. “Too bad,” Helga says. “It is worth the ride just to hear the choral music in the elevator. They think of it as an ascension to heaven.”
When we leave the area of the church and cross the crest of the hill, the wind is so strong that for a moment we are walking without moving. Deep purple cloud masses parade across the sky. Lindy pulls the blue woolen cap she bought at the used-clothing store tight over her head, and Helga snaps the knot in her thick layers of scarfing tighter. “This is typical weather for us,” she says.
The route she chooses takes us from Hallgrimskirjka down Skolavorthustigur along Laufasvegur, Skothusvegur, and around Njardarsgata and Freyjugata, with a peek at the sculpture garden of Einar Jonsson, an early twentieth-century Icelandic artist who left behind a menagerie of icons and ghosts (“and far too many Leif Eirikssons,” Helga sighs, “all over town”). We pass residential homes with ambitious gardens, stone walls, towering trees with swings as if this were the American Midwest. A row of nearly identical two-story, three skylight houses runs down to the Tjorn, each of them a different bright color with a different-colored two-tone roof so that the appearance is like a gameboard: coffee, blue-gray, light lemon, white, the roofs red, silver, orange, etc. A so-named Nordic House on the corner is bright purple blue on top and yellow underneath.
As we come down to the Tjorn, Helga tells us that there are not yet quite 300,000 people living in Iceland, eighty percent of those right around Reykjavik. By American population standards it is a county, but by the standards of a culture, it is as much a nation as Russia or Denmark or Navaholand.
We circle the pond to its far side, creationary clouds opening and closing like curtains in an insistent wind. A rainbow forms in the distant sky. Small, low-flying planes come down right over us to their landings.
We repeat my experience of entering the grounds of the University of Iceland and head straight to the library. Helga shows us around the stacks and then leads us into a room with old Icelandic books. A large Eskimo-type boat occupies an alcove. A furry, leathery object (at least for an intrepid water-going vehicle), it is set there for close examination and touching, complete with a suit of fur clothing and thick water-bearing sacks which, I imagine, are versions of the seal bladders that the natives used as weapons against the Vikings, hurling them full of liquid against advancing invaders so they exploded in their midst.
“A Skraeling craft,” I declare with playful superciliousness, showing that I know the Sagas to some degree.
“Yes,” smiles Helga, “this is Skraeling indeed.”
She leads us downstairs to the anthropology offices where her advisor is waiting in his faculty office, a large desk, a floor-to-ceiling library encircling the room. Gisli Palsson is a tall, handsome distinguished-looking professor in the “Charlton Heston” tradition (remember The Vikings with Tony Curtis), a little bit younger than Lindy and me. He stands and shakes my hand and then signals us to chairs. In the ensuing twenty minutes, we discover a number of different points of connection:
•He has done a study of Icelandic fishing villages, whereas I wrote my thesis on fishing villages in Eastern Maine, and Jim Acheson, a professor at the University of Maine who got interested in my work and did a real study several years later (by comparison to my half-assed job), is a colleague of his in the area of fishing ethnographies. Gisli asks right away if I know him, and I tell him the story.
•We have each written, albeit it very different, anthropological books on the meanings and metaphors of DNA when viewed as a cultural rather than a scientific object, e.g. the social and symbolic implications of biotechnology, its attempt at redefinition of our bodies and humanity through genetic science. He has focused on the social and sociopolitical aspects, with some emphasis on the famous Icelandic genome study, and I have focused on the epistemological and psychospiritual aspects.
•He is presently writing a book about wetlands in Iceland and the general meaning of “water,” and our son Robin is a wetlands biologist working for San Francisco Estuary Institute and developing ideas about the morphology of landscape and particularly relations between bodies of water and land.
•We were each good friends with Roy “Skip” Rappaport, ecological anthropologist, one-time president of the American Anthropological Association, one-time chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Michigan. Skip was my adviser at Michigan, head of my thesis committee, and a founding board member of our nonprofit and publishing company and a member till his death in 1999. We also published his book Ecology, Meaning, and Religion because, as I tell Gisli, “Skip thought it was easier to give me rather than Yale the next book of his to help me earn a living than to keep writing recommendations to get me a job.” Gisli knew him mostly in his later years and had invited him at one point to Reykjavik to give a talk.
•We each have a connection to Donna Haraway, the feminist historian of science and academician living in Santa Cruz. I know her as an author I discovered while writing my first embryology book in the early ’80s and then as a faculty member that both our kids had at UC/Santa Cruz in the ’90s. We also have a more recent connection, as we republished her out-of-print history of twentieth-century embryology, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields, the very book by which I discovered her. We recently had dinner with her and her husband. Gisli has that book on his shelf, and he points to it.
•We each have an adult child living in Los Angeles.
•As the annual Anthropology Association meetings are in San José this year, Gisli will be in Berkeley, the town where we live, to visit in about a month, and he knows our turf well because recently he and his family spent the better part of a year there.
Everyone is amazed at so many less than “six degrees of separation” events across remote cultures, and Helga offers to leave us for a while to chat, as she can take Lindy around for an additional academic tour.
Gisli and I try to get a better understanding of each other’s work. He hands me the manuscript of his “at press” DNA/genomics book, and I sort through its pages, reading here and there, looking for the central themes. I then explain my own work as an outsider, concluding “It’s too academic to be popular, and too metaphysical to be academic.”
He asks if I know Paul Rabinow, a renowned, somewhat cutting-edge anthropologist at Berkeley, dealing in structural and Foucaultian matters. I did know him more like twenty-five years ago when he lived a block away from us on Parker Street and we occasionally got together then and talked ideas though with meager concordance. I haven’t seen him since then, so Gisli brings me up to date: He has gotten married, had a child, the child has grown up and gone to college; Paul has had some health issues, but he’s recovered.
I mention the only thing I know about—Rabinow’s attack on Peter Duesberg, the so-called AIDS contrarian and radical by and about whom we published books, and my distaste for the smugness and know-nothing tone of his attitude. “In this case,” I say, “he is in over his head because he doesn’t know the biology and, even if Duesberg turns out to be wrong, Rabinow is criticizing him solely for political reasons and without understanding the real epidemiological issues.”
Gisli tries to cast Paul in a more sympathetic light, so I back off a bit. “What it finally comes down to,” I say, “is that he is ambitious and academic, while I am anti-ambitious and anti-academic.”
Perhaps by now I am getting a little pompous and full of myself in my excitement at all the connections, switching gears within this high-end show-and-tell. When Helga and Lindy return, we say our goodbyes and exchange information for reconnecting in Berkeley. Then Helga and we continue the informal tour or, more to the point, bring it to a conclusion, as she is going to the Iceland-Sweden football match at 16:00. This surprises me, not only for her strong interest in the game but the bad weather. “That hardly would stop a match,” she says. “It would only make it more interesting.”
We come back by a different route, as Helga leads us past the oldest house in Reykjavik, which is just a small apartment building presently under renovation; the Salvation Army hotel; a well-known innovative-music pub of the sort that modern Iceland is famous for; and then around the harbor back to the Reykjavik Art Museum where she leaves us off and we wave farewells.
Our location gives us a chance to revisit Fee Quay to discuss the prospects for an Erro project in more detail. Fortunately, she is in her office and able to come downstairs to meet us. We bat around concepts for about twenty minutes.
From there we head back toward the Fron but stop spontaneously ub one of the tax-free shops downtown. The entire inside of the place is like a big fluffy sheep with blue, yellow, pink, and brown wool in a variety of shapes and forms. We spend an hour there, picking out presents, as we sort through myriad items on shelves, weighing aesthetics, practicality, and cost in the matter of hats, shirts, towels, and the like. Scarves are woven in a variety of odd forms and shapes, other headgear likewise. We acquire a fair amount of stuff. I am particularly charmed by the ubiquitous woolen head bands which cover the ears but not the head, and Lindy and I both get those for ourselves; in fact, I select two. I wear one of mine out of the store.
The way the tax refund works is that the clerk gives you a form, and you take it over to the closest tourist office, a block or two away; then they give you cash in your own currency as well as a form that you have to fill out and put in a mailbox at the Reykjavik Airport after you have passed customs and are officially “out of the country,” this obviously to keep locals from getting tax refunds. At the tourist office a woman takes our credit-card numbers, and the amount of the refund will be debited if we don’t mail the forms properly.
A side benefit of this process is that the lady handling the refund is willing to take all my small euro coins and turn them into nickels and dimes as well as two whole quarters because she needs all the change she can get for refunds.
That night we hike up and down Laugavegur looking for a new place for dinner. We actually take a table at an Italian place a block above the Fron, but everything on the menu is so expensive and synthetic, kind of like a fancy KFC, that we spur-of-the-moment bail for the second time on this trip (or third if you count the villa).
“After all can’t we just change our minds?” we rationalize as we manage to get to our feet and stride out…though Lindy worries she left her scarf on the chair and has to go back while I wait outside—she didn’t. It was probably compulsive guilt. We return to the Italian restaurant of our first evening, the Caruso, which at least has a good feel to it, kind of dark and crowded in a bustling romantic way, with an interesting fish of the day.
Afterward we return to our hotel, dodging cars pulled onto the sidewalk. The Habrystipvotur is out again with its serving crew, steam-cleaning the cement and cobblestone.
Excited at the prospect of the upcoming tour into the countryside, I fall asleep picturing geysers and glaciers and have a dream somewhere between the archetypal and the lucid. I am walking to the area where we are going to meet a bus for our tour but, in an indiscernible switch, instead of being about to travel by land, we are being directed toward the dock. Once we are walking down long blocks, we realize that it is much too far to go for the limited time we have and we are going to miss the tour. I am frustrated and complaining about the changed logistics to Lindy when a car suddenly pulls up alongside us. A friendly man, apparently associated with the Reykjavik Excursions company, offers to drive us there. I get in the front seat, and Lindy gets in the back. He cuts through a giant park reminiscent of those in Berlin and then along a much enhanced version of the Trieste wharves. As he leaves us at the dock beside a giant liner, he calls out us his cell number to us so that we can phone him for a return to our hotel after we get back.
The ship is full of kids running around; it reminds me of ballrooms of my childhood. The liner pulls out slowly into the ocean with us aboard. Where we are going is a much longer trip than we realized. We are supposed to go to sleep in a berth. However, there are no beds, so we wander around, waiting for daylight.
I wake up but find myself still in the dream. I am lying on a cot next to a porthole. We are drifting by lava fields visible in moonlight. Since I am awake, this cannot be a dream, but it is. The landscape is like ones we have seen outside Keflavik but much steeper: a cindery mountainous shoreline filled with perfect crystals the size of basketballs, all different sorts of these, most of them balls of perfect white luminous quartz, shining as though from within. The kids are reaching out somehow through the glass portholes to touch them, and they even snag a few diamond shards off them. It seems too dangerous, however, for me to stick a hand out—the passage is narrow, and the ship is moving very fast.
Down a flight of stairs is a large room where a class is transpiring, and I head there. Someone is teaching a method of massage that I immediately judge fraudulent and inflated. I think it is a form I rejected years ago. He is wanting everyone to touch each other, in fact encouraging people to touch their partners’ genitals (this replicates a scene from an American sitcom with Icelandic subtitles on the TV the previous day). The request seems indulgent and wrong to me, yet still titillating, and some people are doing it. Most are just standing there. The teacher then says, “Everyone is being too polite. If you follow my instructions, you will understand the method.”
I interrupt him to boast, “I have written hundreds of pages on somatics, so I know what I am talking about, and this is not a legitimate system.”
Even as I finish saying this, a powerful-looking Indian man appears out of nowhere, sort of like a swami, and he addresses his words pointedly at me, “It is all in the tron. You don’t understand the tron. It has a quantum, holographic nature. It transcends all your childish arguments.”
He is larger than life, exploding with charisma, threatening the very dimensionality and fabric of the dream. I am afraid of him. I awake trembling.