chips of iceland

walked on a melting glacier. what a metaphor

this place is like Lord of the Rings on acid...

Heavy mist. Low visibility. A lagoon filled with icebergs. Natural, translucent ice sculptures. Cumbersome white fragments. Floating in the mist. Birds circle madly. They dive for fish. I reach the pebbled shore. A fish comes up to the surface. On its side it turns. Flopping on the shallow. It looks at me. Its silvery back flashes in the cold gleam of the frozen landscape. It wriggles off and swims away. I walk along the shore into the fog.

Stop in a small fishing town. Actually considered quite large for these parts. Population 300. The restaurant served a buffet –10 types of freshly caught fish. All the guesthouses were full. Driving in the not so dark night. Meet a farmer whose wife is an artist. They have rooms to let. Her art is on the walls. She oscillates between abstract and expressionism. The water still smells like sulfur here.

Bog of eternal stench: sulfur craters. Yellow, ochre, pink sides. Milky light blue water, steaming. Or steel-grey liquid bubbling and frothing. An awesome sight. But the stench is overpowering. So awful, my head reels from it.

Mordor: Charcoal black with patches of light blue as far as the eye can see. Smoke rises from various parts of this burnt scenery made of broken rocks and craters thrust skywards. A shattered, smoldering, ashy landscape. The blackness. Everywhere. Steaming. It fumes across the vastness. Like the aftermath of some colossal fire. A battle between gods. The brokenness – cracks, fissures, rubble. One can smell destruction here. Frozen lava flows, petrified in movement, blacker than the rest reach down the valley, grasping at the green. The glaciers glint in the distance.

Through the mountains once more. Half an hour on a dirt road. The canyon. No railings or protection. No tourism industry framing the ferocity. No niagra-like kodak moments. To stand a foot away from the edge. Walls of water, gales rising upwards. A hundred detonations every second. hypnotizing. I think of Kundera's remarks on vertigo: not the fear of falling but the fear of the desire to fall. Dettifoss. The name of Europe's largest waterfall. (I imagine it means 'God's Madness'). I am silenced. The pain of no words.

jrkglæjskfhrtsubrr

I have reached a land where the sand is black, and the waves tell
their tale darkly amongst the craggy cliffsides. A land being
literally torn apart by its own volcanic activity but which still
holds stretches of endless green. This is an enchanted island. Near
the town i am staying in there are 5 rocky spikes reaching up out
of the water. Legend has it that two gnomes were dragging a
three-masted ship in to land but were caught off guard by the
sunset and froze into solid rock. Today I head further east to the
glacier fields. I seek to discover the secret of frozen landscapes, perhaps it will help me better navigate my own...

dream 5

I was to accomplish a task for the great grandfatherly wizard named Gandalf. I stole a special sword or something... but I did not succeed and I finally approached Gandalf with bowed head, full of shame saying 'I have failed you' and I knelt and heald the sword out to him. My failure overwhlemed me. But instead of his usual harsh voice he answered softly, 'if you had failed you would not be here offering me your failure' and he pointed to the sword 'look, it has turned to pure copper has it not...' I looked at it and realized that it was true and set about chopping the log that couldn't be chopped... ??

self portrait

The Renegade - by E.M. Cioran

He remembers being born somewhere, having believed in native errors, having proposed principles and preached inflammatory stupidities. He blushes for it... and strives to abjure his past, his real or imaginary fatherlands, the truths generated in his very marrow. He will find peace only after having annihilated in himself the last reflex of the citizen, the last inherited enthusiasm. How could the heart's habits still chain him, when he seeks liberation from genealogies and when even the ideal of the ancient sage, scorner of all cities, seems to him a compromise? The man who can no longer take sides because all men are necessarily right and wrong, because everything is at once justified and irrational - that man must renounce his own name, tread his identity underfoot, and begin a new life in impassibility or despair. Or otherwise, invent another genre of solitude, expatriate himself in the void, and pursue - by means of one exile or another - the stages of uprootedness. Released from all prejudices, he becomes the unusable man par excellence, to whom no one turns and whom no one fears because he admits and repudiates everything with the same detachment...
(he rivals the Idea itself; he has abstracted himself from his ancestors, from his friends, from every soul and himself; in his veins, once turbulent, rests a light from another world. Liberated from what he has lived, unconcerned by what he will live, he demolishes the signposts on all his roads, and wrests himself from the dials of all time...)