Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Notes from Far Muscovy

I dreamt last night that I was sharing a taxi with Putin from Moscow to Sheremetyevo airport. He was being very friendly and I could tell he liked me. I felt like a coward and a moral cretin for not saying anything critical that would cause him to not like me, and at the same time I kept trying to convince myself that there were strong pragmatic reasons for maintaining good relations, at least for now, as this would enable me to eventually write more revealingly about him. I knew this was bullshit, however, and that I was really just a grovelling sycophantic underling who craved the approval of people in power. Then we got into a massive traffic jam, and I was so filled with self-hatred and dread that I woke up. 

In real life I had shared a taxi from Moscow to Sheremetyevo, earlier that same day, with a kind, gentle, architect from Berlin. By 'architect' I mean one of those people from Berlin who talks about 'space' a lot and who participates in panels with philosophers. He has probably never built any buildings, but nor has he blown any up, which is why I am wondering why he got replaced by Putin in my dream.

We had been, earlier in the day, on a panel in front of a few hundred people and a number of angry journalists. We were a motley crew of philosophers and political activists, and to be perfectly honest my reason for accepting the invitation was somewhat disingenuous: it meant an opportunity to go back to Russia after what seems like a lifetime away.

Anyhow there were seething antagonistic dynamics between different parties in the room that I could not even begin to decipher. There was a guy on the panel who looked like a skateboarder but announced himself as a psychoanalyst. There were plenty of the sort of bearded, long-haired Russian men who could be either dissident leftists or ultranationalist Orthodox spiritualists. Many of the people in the room clearly had cults of personality attached to them, but I did not know who they were or in virtue of what the cults had congealed.

There was much talk, more than any westerner could possibly anticipate, of Ukraine, and of popular will, and revolution.

When it came time for questions a man in the audience stood up and said, "I am a doctor of philosophy. First of all, I would like to begin by asking you all to express solidarity with the protesters in Kiev. Long live the Ukrainian Revolution! Long live Maidan!" He held up his fist and yelled "Long live Maidan!" again, and then I and maybe a dozen other people did the same. (Why not? I thought. I too support Maidan.) Then there was an awkward silence, and the journalists were all glancing around to see who expressed solidarity and who kept silent. Would there be repercussions? I wondered.

And then the 'doctor of philosophy' said (to paraphrase): "All you so-called philosophers ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You haven't even mentioned morality once. And that's what philosophers need to be talking about: morality. Here we are in a world where all sorts of unnatural things are happening: capitalism, genetic engineering, same-sex marriage, drugs, and so on. How are we going to put a stop to these things if we don't start taking morality seriously?" 

For some reason they decided to pass the microphone to me. My Russian skills, often inaccessible during this short visit, snapped to attention, and I said: "As far as I am concerned it is the sole duty of a philosopher to compare different systems of morality, to attempt to find their weaknesses and inconsistencies, but by no means to defend the one or the other." There was much muttering and nonplussedness. 

What are the lessons I am drawing? For one thing, I return convinced more than ever that Russia is far more foreign than westerners are willing to recognize. On this visit I heard, on multiple occasions and from people of all political orientations, the expression of a contrast between 'us' and 'Europe'. In the Soviet period and much earlier, the eternal question was whether 'we' are European or Asian, whereas now there seems to be a resolute and unconflicted commitment to the role of a tertium quid. At the same time, Moscow is indeed clearly more 'Asiatic' than it was 20 years ago, as a result of migration patterns from Central Asia. Restaurant wait-staff, construction workers, and others closer to the bottom of the social ladder are, it seems, far more likely to be named Chingiz than Sergei. One is reminded of how much of the current territory of Russia --not the former USSR, but Russia-- was once covered by khanates.

But the lessons, the lessons. There is a place in the world where same-sex marriage can be plausibly lumped together with GMO's as a sign of a world gone wrong, and indeed as a sign of excessive American power. One disagrees, but still wishes to rub one's western liberal academic friends' faces in it a bit: try to fit this into your pat schemes, into your Facebook echo chambers of mutually assured agreement. 

One of the most intense preoccupations of western social media over the past few months is the question how, in spite of the fact that Russia is so terribly homophobic, nonetheless Russian men, and particularly Putin, look so hopelessly gay. The country's leader goes horseback riding with his shirt off, and does so in defense of a purportedly rigorously heteronormative conception of masculinity. What on earth is going on here? It seems to me that there is something even far deeper than homophobia that marks the distance between Russia and the west in these matters, and that is a different relationship to irony, of which, I take it, the 'camp' so lucidly analyzed by Susan Sontag is but a subspecies. In the west it is impossible to simply be a man in the way Russians such as Putin take for granted, since the gestures or styles in which this would consist are continually being taken up by people who would like to subvert, invert, or at least question the process by which something so minor as gestures or styles could ever constitute something so fundamental as identity. 

Putin is purportedly a hardbody (if by now tending toward gynecomastia, and really more thick than hard), but his authoritarianism is soft. For comparison, a fascinating list has been circulating of western bands prohibited by Soviet authorities in 1984. Number 1 is 'German-Polish Aggression', which is almost certainly made up. Number 2 is 'German-American Friendship', by which I assume they mean Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft or DAF, which really existed but had nothing to do with the Marshall Plan or geopolitics. Numbers 3-14 are Soviet 'Red Wave' bands (except for one Czech group), and it's not at all surprising to see them on a government blacklist. Then, suddenly, at 15 we get Blue Öyster Cult followed by a number of well-known western groups. The list is fairly clearly composed by clueless government agents, filled with misspellings and misgroupings, e.g., number 44: 'Blondi and Debbia Kharri'. 'Dzhutas Prist', 'Depesh Med', 'Kalche Klub', 'Tokan Khedz' (i.e., Talking Heads), follow no known transliteration scheme. Julio Iglesias comes in at 45, two spots ahead of Black Sabbath, which strongly suggests the numbers are not ordinal. This list is really a nice measure of how much has changed: 'soft' authoritarianism of the sort Putin has perfected doesn't waste time with stuff like this.

And then comes glasnost: I remember, in 1991, seeing a USSR state-run Melodiya vinyl recording of Pearl Jam, released not under the name Пэрл Джем, but rather Жемчужное Варенье, literally, "Pearl Jam," i.e., fruit spread that is made out of pearls. So even with the official policy of openness the state proved as clueless as ever.

Lenin's name is now fading in the marble atop his mausoleum on Red Square. The opening hours have been reduced to 10h-13h weekdays, and apparently for Russian citizens only [Вход для граждан]. Of all former leaders, Lenin seems the hardest to fit into current narratives of national identity. Stalin fits very well, without having to be mentioned by name. The precise species of dictatorship Putin is crafting is definitely not a revolutionary one, of the proletariat, and it's not an omnipresent heavy-handed one either. The propaganda is unrelenting, but as long as you are a powerless nobody you're free to express dissenting opinions as much as you like. I held my fist up in support of the Maidan protestors, one of whose leaders, evidently, Putin recently caused to be tortured. This happened in front of TV cameras. Why didn't more people hold their fists up? Again, I don't know.

I did get 'controlled' for eating an apple while waiting on the metro platform at Revolution Square (a transgression of which I'm guilty in multiple jurisdictions), but when the police saw my American passport they congratulated me for the glorious victory of the US hockey team earlier that day (which was the first I'd heard of it). Instinctively, though, here more than anywhere else I've been, one perceives the police and other officials warily, sensing that protection and service are the furthest thing from their minds. Life as a visible ethnic or sexual minority here would be a life of constant fear.

Nadia and Masha, formerly of Pussy Riot, are out of their Siberian labor camps now, making the rounds of the Colbert Report, Brooklyn, destinations they are surely being drilled to understand. The Guardian recently published an anonymous missive from remaining members of the Pussy Riot collective, disavowing these two for their association with the establishment, and in particular for speaking out in favor of mainstream prisoners' rights groups. One somewhat hopes to see next a super-hardcore faction denouncing these anonymous posers for publishing in the Guardian. I don't care what anyone says. Nadia Tolokonnikova is our era's Aleksandr Radishchev. 

I have no patience for westerners who say it is not our place to criticize the Russian regime. I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'we'. I certainly don't see myself in that deployment of the first-person plural pronoun.

I had a friend who spent much of the 1980s in Soviet jails for the crime of circulating bootleg Beatles tapes. He fell off a building and died, drunk, during the 1991 Generals' Putch. His name was Vitaliy Dergachev. I'm on his side.

Western pseudo-left collusionism reached a fever pitch during the Olympics, which just happened to coincide with my recent return to Russia. The respected Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen, whom I heard speak in the 1990s and I admired very much, wrote recently in The Nation that we are all, essentially, being duped by a lazy western media that is prepared to say more or less anything to make Putin look bad. But if it is true, as Cohen insists, that coverage of Russia is even less subtle than in the Soviet days, this surely follows from the far more general fact of the media's overall decline in the past quarter century, and not from any deepening of the western media's Cold War parti pris. 

Cohen maintains that we are naive for going along with the official western line that the Ukrainians 'yearn to be free' and that this automatically means geopolitical alliance with the EU rather than with Russia. He evokes ancestrality: the bloody argument that Rus' was once Kievan, and --therefore?-- that Kiev must remain, if not Russian, then at least Russia-oriented. But this entirely overlooks the fact that the Maidan protesters do not think of themselves as dupes of the CIA or of western propaganda. They are disgusted by corruption and behind-the-scenes manipulation, mostly guided by Russia, and they want to be free of it. What is even more important, this overlooks the fact that almost all dissident Russian progressives (and not just the category-defying fish-fowl who simultaneously oppose gay marriage and GMO's) are in strong solidarity with the Ukrainian protesters: not because they are западник suckers, not because they are pro-western, but because they want Ukraine to realize its right to autonomy and self-determination. As my friend Kirill Medvedev, a prominent figure in the Russian New Left, writes:

Извините, если что, но я совершенно серьезно думаю, что все прогрессивное человечество должно требовать сейчас двух вещей а)официально двуязычная, двуэтничная, мультикультурная Украина б)полное прекращение вмешательства России в дела этой страны. 

Sorry, but I completely seriously think that all progressive humanity should now demand two things: (a) an officially bilingual, bi-ethnic, multicultural Ukraine; (b) the total cessation of interference on the part of Russia in the affairs of that country. 

I'm on Kirill's side.

What now about the Olympics? I agree that much of the western snickering and bickering about Sochi has been petty and embarrassing. I have been many places in Eastern Europe where a sign requested that I throw my toilet paper into the waste-paper receptacle, and not, as one might expect, into the toilet. When you travel, you see new things, and you marvel at the variety of the world. When you see them circulating on Tumblr, they're easier to ridicule.

But let us make no mistake: Sochi was an ugly travesty, and it was made possible only by tremendous suffering. Forget about the repression of gays and lesbians, for a moment. In Moscow in the Winter of 2014, two sights are ubiquitous: the Olympic games on giant screens lining public thoroughfares; and migrant laborers from the Caucasus being treated like dirt. A racial hierarchy has emerged over the past two decades in the capital city, where Central Asians are now the tolerated, unthreatening, hard-working minority, while Caucasians occupy the very bottom rung of the social ladder, and are by definition targets of suspicion and exclusion.

Who are the Caucasians, and what is the historical cause of their place in the ethnic hierarchy of Russia? One thing you might notice is that Sochi is located in a region called 'Krasnodar'. It is surrounded by many other administrative divisions that end in -stan, suggesting a Tataro-Turkic influence, and many other divisions that bear some sort of local ethnonym: Ingushetia, Ossetia, etc. Why is Krasnodar not a -stan? Why is Krasnodar not called Adyghia? The answer has in part to do with the fact that it was Russified in the mid-19th century through a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Circassians were exterminated, or relocated to Turkey. There is still today an active political lobby, based in Turkey, pushing for greater recognition of the Circassian genocide, but its voice is of course muffled by the Olympic juggernaut. In the lead-up to the games, Russian security forces were blowing up family homes around the Krasnodar region, hoping to weed out terrorists who had threatened to make the olympic spectacle their own.

The Americans were worried they'd need to be evacuated in the event of a terrorist attack, but the event of a non-event is, on reflection, no less troubling: a flawless Olympics means, for Putin, the consolidation of symbolic power in a contested part of the Caucasus, power that has seemed perpetually out of reach since at least the early 19th century. The westerners go and have a good time, tell themselves Putin's not so bad after all even if they were made to shit in adjoining toilets at the Black Sea base camp. And brute power wins with the complicity of tacky pageant, and of a grovelling and sycophantic western left, whose best arguments for Putin never amount to anything more than a simple change of subject: Well, they say, it's no worse than what we do. 

"Prose isn't here to stay": The Poetry of Les Murray

Around the same time English-language philosophers were debating whether or not you can know what it is like to be a bat (generally deciding that you can not), the Australian poet Les Murray was busy directly transcribing the thought-world of an imagined representative of this order. Here are the final six lines from his 1986 poem, "Bat's Ultrasound":

ah, eyrie-ire; aero hour, eh?
O'er our ur-area (our era aye
ere your raw row) we air our array
err, yaw, row wry—aura our orrery,
our eerie ü our ray, our arrow.
 
A rare ear, our aery Yahweh.

Murray channels the inner language of other species as well. For instance, pigs, in his 1992 poem, "Pigs":

Us shoved down the soft cement of rivers.
Us snored the earth hollow, filled farrow, grunted.
Never stopped growing. We sloughed, we soughed
and balked no weird till the high ridgebacks was us
with weight-buried hooves.  Or bristly, with milk.

While the individual pig refers to the collectivity as 'us', Murray imagines that cattle conceptualize that same first-person plural as 'me'. This from "The Cows on Killing Day" of 1998:

The heifer human smells of needing the bull human   

and is angry. All me look nervously at her

as she chases the dog me dream of horning dead: our enemy   

of the light loose tongue. Me’d jam him in his squeals.

 

Me, facing every way, spreading out over feed.

The individual 'me' (to the extent that these can be individuated), the cow that narrates the poem, ends up slaughtered by a blade, and now sees the blood, or perhaps the guts, running out of her as 'me' too:

Looking back, the glistening leaf is still moving.

All of dry old me is crumpled, like the hills of feed,   

and a slick me like a huge calf is coming out of me.

So, it turns out you can know what it is like to be a bat, or a pig, or a cow. As far as I am concerned, Murray proves as much: he offers a verisimilar report on the inner world of these animals. He does so 'shamanistically', to deploy one of his own key concepts. He moves himself poetically into a position of certainty, a position that overcomes the skeptical limitations of philosophers, which are, one now sees, the same limitations that constrain the philosophers to write in prose.

 

Murray is often criticized, particularly by fellow Australians, for his presumption of authority, for his self-assured declamations about how the world really is. But this is to fail to engage with the poet on his own terms. Murray's certainty is not like the 'intuition' of armchair philosophy, which purports to be getting the world right in view of a unique capacity possessed by human beings, called 'reason', a capacity that all too often with distance or retrospection can easily turn out to be a mere cataloguing of prejudices. Murray's reports are rather, by his own description, a result of the proper combination of three varieties of mental activity: daytime consciousness, dreamtime consciousness, and 'the body'. Any writing that does not pay proper respect to all three of these is mendacious. It is the last of them, in particular, that gives the poet access to certainty about how the world, or nature, is, since this certainty is really only something that he shares with everything else in nature, but from which language has the power to cut us off. In an astoundingly simple, direct, self-assured, and utterly true poem of 2002 called "The Meaning of Existence," Murray sums up his metaphysics (if that word may be used):

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence. 
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it 
moment by moment as the universe.

Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would 
have full dignity within it 
but for the ignorant freedom 
of my talking mind.

One of my regular preoccupations in this space is to provide some sort of account for why, in spite of my official job title, I do not feel naturally inclined to philosophy. The most straightforward account might just be to say that I share Murray's metaphysics entirely. I know nature knows what's going on. I believe philosophy, or prosaic argument, or 'daytime consciousness', is the cause of the loss of this certainty, and not at all the best hope for preventing this loss. I believe Descartes's argument that he is not dreaming, quite apart from the question of its soundness or validity, represents the limitations of the tradition in which I am implicated; it takes for granted that dreams are spurious trickery, rather than vehicles of truth. I believe Descartes is mistaken about dreams. (I know I'm sounding like a vapid new-ager, but the fact that I can only sound this way, in saying something that ought to be obvious, is itself a measure of the depth of the prejudice I am trying to expose.) 

Murray has said that poetry beckoned him from an early age "by its not putting humans above other subject matter." He credits his early life on a farm as the initial source of his animistic sensibility. In politics, he claims to be above the left-right divide, but is defiantly anti-Marxist and scornful of the formulae of academic leftism. He believes that the rural point of view is one that is systematically left out of academic attention to the various species of otherness, complaining of his early experience "of being relegated and scorned, as a country bumpkin, an uncultured yahoo, all that sanctified anti-rural prejudice that goes right back to classical times and which no antidiscrimination law or postcolonial rhetoric ever protects you from—so to hell with those." Of course, at the same time, he presumes to know all possible forms of otherness-- if you can know what it is like to be a bat, then it is not so difficult to work your way into the thought-world of an Australian Aborigene, or to imagine that you have worked your way in. Murray's complaint is not that the urban academics do not value otherness enough, but that in their limited daytime consciousness they are unable to appreciate what is really at stake in being other.

I probably value New Left prose and arguments a good deal more than Murray does, but I also appreciate his defiance of the prevailing left ideas about the forms otherness can take. When I hear academics carrying on about 'intersectionality', and composing recipes for social difference from a very short list centered upon race, gender, and sexual identity, I want to ask: but what do we get from the intersection of a Hmong peasant, say, or an Amazonian forager, with the institutions of modern society, institutions to which all intersectionality fans --being essentially urban, western, and bourgeois-- submit as if these were timeless and self-evident (particular inheritance structures, the use of first and last names, monogamous pair-bonding as the basis of child-rearing, the relative importance of fathers and unimportance of maternal uncles, a more or less utilitarian conception of human well-being...)? What about the animals? What about the ancestors? Anthropology has typically done better than philosophy at accounting for the true depth and range of human difference, but it too is constrained to do so in the language of daytime consciousness, even as it comes up against subjects and structures that are understood equally by means of dreaming and the body by the people who live them, the people for whom they have meaning.

Poetry is infinitely better equipped; it is not another domain of inquiry, but rather another modality of thought. It alone enables a person to move away from the circumstances of identity and to claim to speak for others, or for everything at once, with the universal 'me' of a cow. 

Why Is Iceland a Portal to the Moon?

There is a trite and obvious thing to say about Iceland, and that is that it looks like the moon. Descending into the Keflavik lava fields the other day, on an Icelandair flight from Paris, I was permitted to feel annoyed and a bit superior when I overheard the virgin French tourists behind me exclaiming as they gawked at the land below: Mais il n'y a rien là! By 'nothing' I thought perhaps they had meant 'no Michelin stars', but then one of them added, as if on cue: C'est comme la lune! Yet if there is an association between the earth's only satellite and this basalt outcropping of the mid-Atlantic range that is too obvious to mention, there is another that remains to this day far too occult, and that is as deserving of notice as the other is of suppression. 

The great German astronomer and natural philosopher Johannes Kepler, most famous for defending the Copernican system and for establishing the elliptical orbit of planets, began his 1634 Somnium (sometimes subtitled A Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy) as follows:

My name is Duracotus. My country is Iceland, which the ancients called Thule. My mother was Fiolxhilde. Her recent death freed me to write, as I had long wished to do. While she lived, she carefully kept me from writing. For, she said, the arts are loathed by many vicious people who malign what their dull minds fail to understand, and make laws harmful to mankind. Condemned by these laws, not a few persons have perished in the chasms of Hekla. 

 The narrator goes on to describe his mother's commercial undertakings in what might be euphemistically called 'folk medicine', or, slightly more bluntly, 'natural magic':

In the earliest years of my boyhood my mother, leading me by the hand and sometimes hoisting me up on her shoulders, often used to take me up to the lower slopes of Mt. Hekla. These excursions were made especially around St. John's Day, when the sun is visible all twenty-four hours, and there is no night. Gathering some herbs with many rites, she cooked them at home. She made little bags out of goatskin, which she filled and carried to a nearby port to sell to the ship captains. This is how she earned her living.

That Kepler decides to preface what turns out to be a fairly serious work of lunar astronomy --to wit, a theoretical reflection upon the conditions on the still-mythical dark side of the moon-- with this narrative set-up is peculiar, not least because we know, and his contemporaries knew, that it reflects Kepler's own life in significant ways. Kepler's own mother, Katharina Kepler, née Guldenmann (1546-1622), was in the years leading up to the Somnium's composition being held in prison in Stuttgart on suspicion of witchcraft, under threat of imminent torture and execution. The son fought for years for his mother's release, and eventually won it, but much of their life was spent in the frenetic uncertainty of the Hexenjagd. Kepler was concerned with witchcraft not only as a source of fanciful characters for his thin fictions.

And yet, this bit of biography in no way helps us to answer the question: Why Iceland?

Duracotus cuts open one of his mother's little bags, and the herbs and runes come falling out. In a rage, she sells the little boy to a ship captain, and he sails off to the Danish island of Hven, where he eventually falls into an apprenticeship under the great Tycho Brahe, who instructs Duracotus first in Danish, then in astronomy. From the beginning, the displaced Icelander notices the similarity between his new learning and the traditions embodied by his own mother:

I was delighted beyond measure by the astronomical activities, for Brahe and his students watched the moon and the stars all night with marvelous instruments. This practice reminded me of my mother, because she, too, used to commune with the moon constantly. 

Duracotus eventually returns to Iceland and is reunited with Fiolxhilde. Upon reuniting, they engage in an exhaustive exchange of information about their respective traditions. The Icelandic witch is happy to learn the latest science from the continent, and her son, in turn, is just as pleased to finally be indoctrinated into native secrets, "those arts among a people so remote from all the others." Fiolxhilde relates her wisdom as follows:

Advantages have been conferred, Duracotus my son, not only on all those other regions to which you went but also on our country, too. To be sure, we are burdened with cold and darkness and other discomforts, which I feel only now, after I have learned from you about the salubriousness of other lands. But we have plenty of clever persons. At our service are very wise spirits, who detest the bright light of the other lands and their noisy people. They long for our shadows, and they talk to us intimately. Among them there are nine chief spirits. Of these, one is especially known to me. The very gentlest and most innocuous of all, he is evoked by one and twenty characters. By his help I am not infrequently whisked in an instant to other shores, whichever I mention to him... Most of the things which you saw with your own eyes or learned by hearsay or absorbed from books, he related to me just as you did. 

This spirit, it turns out, specializes in organizing trips to 'the island of Levania', which lies 'fifty thousand German miles up in the ether', and which is, evidently, nothing other than the moon. Fiolxhilde goes on, channeling the spirit, to explain how the lunar voyage unfolds:

The road to it from here or from it to this earth is seldom open. When it is open, it is easy for our kind, but for transporting men it is assuredly most difficult and fraught with the greatest danger to life... Great as the distance is, the entire trip is consummated in four hours at the most... Because the opportunity is so fleeting, we take few human beings along, and only those who are most devoted to us. Some man of this kind, then, we seize as a group and all of us, pushing from underneath, lift him up into the heavens. In every instance the take-off hits him as a severe shock, for he is hurled just as though he had been shot aloft by gunpowder to sail over mountains and seas. For this reason at the outset he must be lulled to sleep immediately with narcotics and opiates. His limbs must be arranged in such a way that his torso will not be torn away from his buttocks nor his head from his body, but the shock will be distributed among his individual limbs. Then a new difficulty follows: extreme cold and impeded breathing. The cold is relieved by a power which we are born with; the breathing, by applying damp sponges to the nostrils. After the first stage of the trip is finished, the passage becomes easier. At that time we expose their bodies to the open air and remove our hands. Their bodies roll themselves up, like spiders, into balls which we carry along most entirely by our will alone, so that finally the bodily mass proceeds toward its destination of its own accord. But this onward drive is of very little use to us, because it is too late. Hence it is by our will, as I said, that we move the body swiftly along, and we forge ahead of it from now on lest it suffer any harm by colliding very hard with the moon When the humans wake up, they usually complain about an indescribable weariness of all their limbs, from which they later recover well enough to walk. 

Fortunately, like some Laurence Sterne or DFW who can never be happy or finished with his work, Kepler provides us with his own explanatory notes on the Somnium, which are significantly more lengthy than the work itself. And he does not shy away from the question we've been circling around, Why Iceland? He begins by noting that "in our German language," 'Island' means 'Ice Land'." But, he continues, the real reason for choosing it is the power it seems to hold of inducing a state of rêverie:

In this remote island I perceived a place where I might fall asleep and dream, in imitation of the philosophers in this branch of literature. For Cicero crossed over into Africa when he was getting ready to dream. Moreover, in the same western ocean Plato fashioned Atlantis, whence he summoned imaginary aids to military valor. 

But still, why Iceland in particular, rather than the distant lands selected by his classical predecessors? Kepler supposes Plutarch had already discussed Iceland in his On the Face of the Moon from the 1st century CE, though he insists that this had nothing to do with his own choice. This choice, if we are to take Kepler at his word, turns out to be fairly uninteresting, a contingent result of a contingent choice of an obscure publisher to collate the plots of unrelated stories into a single volume. He writes of his sojourn in Bohemia:

At that time there was for sale in Prague Lucian's book about the trip to the moon, as translated into the German language by Rollenhagen's son; bound with it were the stories of St. Brendan and St. Patrick's Purgatory in the earth beneath Mt. Hekla, the Icelandic volcano. Moreover, since Plutarch, in accordance with the belief of pagan theology, located the purgatory of souls on the moon, I decided that when I set out for the moon I would most prefer to take off from Iceland.

My thesis here, if I must have one, is that there is more to the story than this. The association between Iceland and lunar voyages runs deeper than some editorial caprice of Georg Rollenhagen fils. For one thing, we know that Kepler was reading other books, which can be shown to have had a significant influence on the content of the Somnium. In particular, the 16th-century Swedish minister and polymath Olaus Magnus's Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (Rome, 1555) seems to have been particularly important. Magnus refers to the "artem magicam apud septentrionales populos" (Bk. 3, Ch. 15, 117), a phrase which Kepler subsequently picks up virtually unaltered. According to Edward Rosen, "Kepler's use of the words montis... ignivomi to describe Mt. Hekla as the site of Purgatory strikingly echo" the terminology of the 1599 abridgement of Magnus's Historia. 

In fact, when we look at the entire passage on Iceland to which Rosen refers, we can plainly see that Kepler is relying on Magnus not just for his picture of Mt. Hekla, but also for much of Fiolxhilde's later account of the Icelandic spirits that, as she puts it, 'love the shadows'. Allow me to cite the passage at some length: 

Islandia terra est subiecta polo Arctico, vento praesertim Circio opposita, ac mari Glaciali propinqua: atque ob id dici meretur terra glacialis, seu ultimum Tyle, nulli veterum non celebrata... Pro maiori parte montosa, & inculta, praesertim versus plagam Septentrionalem, ob austera spiracula praedicti venti Circii, qui nec frutices elevare permittit. Insula est insolitis miraculis praedicanda. Rupes etenim, sive promontorium in ea est... quod instar Aetnae perpetuis ignibus aestuat. Ibique locus esse creditur poenae, expiationisque sordidarum animarum. Illic nempe spiritus, seu umbrae, comperiuntur se exhibentes manifestos humanis ministeriis submersorum, sive alio violento casu enectorum. Spectra sese offerunt congressibus notorum hominum tam manifesta, ut tanquam viventes accipiantur ab ignaris mortis illorum, data dextra. Nec deprehenditur error prisquam disparuerint umbrae. Incolae plurimum praesagiunt fata principum, quiduc remotius in orbe peragitur, revelationibus apparentium spectrorum non ignorant, prout inserius cap. de magicis praestigiis lucidius aperietur. 

The land of Iceland is situated beneath the Arctic pole, oriented principally toward the northwest, and close to the glacial sea: and this is why it merits the name of 'Ice Land', or 'Ultima Thule', celebrated among the ancients... For the greater part it is mountainous and wild, above all towards the northern coast, for nor does the austere vent of the aforementioned northwesterly wind permit anythng to grow. The island is known for its unheard-of wonders. And indeed the rocks, or the promontory in them, ... are seething with a perpetual fire like Mt. Etna. And it is in that place that the punishment and expiation of besmirched souls is believed to occur. One finds there spirits, or shadows, that are manifested through the conjurations of men. The specters of drowned men or of men who died a violent death appear so real that, like living men, they shake hands with men who don't know they are dead, and the error does not reveal itself until the moment when the specters have disappeared ('De apparentibus umbris submersorum', Bk. II, ch. 3, 62).

It is, in short, even more clear than it had been for Rosen, when we look at this entire passage, that Kepler is greatly indebted to Magnus, and not just for his appreciation of Hekla as a point of entry to a nether-realm, but also as an inspiration for the idea that Iceland is a place of commerce with spirits. 

But we are still missing something very important: the sort of transit Kepler describes as happening from Iceland is not a descent into a dark nether world. Iceland as a point of entry to the center of the world is of course a familiar trope, as for instance in Jules Verne, whose 1864 Voyage au centre de la Terre begins with the deciphering of a supposed runic manuscript that describes where the volcanic points of entry lie. The idea that Iceland possesses such points of entry appears to be rooted both in the geology of the mid-Atlantic range, as well as in Norse mythology itself. Thus in the Gylfaginning, which makes up the first part of Snorri Sturluson's 13th-century Prose Edda, there is mention of the Gjallarbrú, a bridge across the River Gjöll into Hel (a place that is what it sounds like). But the Gjallarbrú has its symbolic inversion in the Asbrú, or Æsir Bridge, which does not descend into the bowels of the earth, but rather extends from this world into Asgard, the realm of the gods. An alternative term for 'Asbrú' is 'Bifröst' (as found in the Prose Edda) or 'Bilröst' (as found in the Poetic Edda). These terms can all serve, even in contemporary Icelandic, as poetic or elevated ways of saying 'rainbow': a bridge that leads to the æsir, the gods. Thus in the Grímnismál, a component of the Poetic Edda, we find a concealed Odin revealing cosmological knowledge to Agnarr, who learns that the Asbrú is the best of all bridges, even if it is constantly burning up those who cross it:

Ka/rmt oc Avrmt 
oc Kerla/gar tver, 
þer scal Þorr vaða 
dag hvern, 
er hann doma ferr 
at asci Yggdrasils; 
þviat asbrv 
brenn a/ll loga, 
heilog votn hlóa.

Or, in Benjamin Thorpe's 19th-century translation: "Körmt and Ormt, and the Kerlaugs twain: / these Thor must wade each day, / when he to council goes / at Yggdrasil's ash / for as the As-bridge is all on fire, / the holy waters boil."  

There is no sign in Magnus, or any of Kepler's known sources, of an understanding of the commerce wth spirits in Iceland as initiating a flight rather than a descent. There is little indication of any interest in the Historia in the arcana of Norse mythology, and if it is to this latter that we ultimately wish to trace Kepler's Somnium, from the lunar voyage back to the burning bridge of the Æsir, scholarly prudence requires us to concede that we have yet to discover the path by which this trope was transmitted from medieval Iceland to early modern Germany. 

What can be established is that in Iceland, as a result of the coincidence of its geological features with its geographical situation, we find the confluence of two widespread and ancient mythological tropes. Its vulcanism marks it out as a site of access to Hades or Hel, while its Arctic location causes it to be associated with another world not beneath but above or beyond this one-- we see the Arctic being used for exactly this purpose in, e.g., Margaret Cavendish's conception of a 'blazing world' that attaches to this one at the North Pole, and in the many subsequent iterations of the idea that 'Nova Zembla', as it was long called in quaint misunderstanding (and where, good maps show, there is a river called 'Nabokov'), is a site where the ordinary laws of nature break down. Remarkably, both of these tropes are found already in the medieval Eddas, narratively represented by the two bridges, Asbrú and Gjallarbrú, burning and scintillating, dissuading the common lot of men from crossing them. 

Spatial Perception in Second Life

I recently opened an account in the massively multiplayer virtual-reality game Second Life, in order to test out some thoughts about what digital avatars might reveal concerning the metaphysics of personal identity.

I am roundly mocked by everyone I meet there as a 'newbie', and am criticized for my laziness in procuring new clothes, hair, skin, sexual organs. But I don't want to procure these things; I think my standard-model avatar looks just fine. My experience is not at all what I had expected it to be, and I'm finding the philosophical reflections it is stimulating lie rather far from questions of personal identity, in the realm of perception.

One thing that struck me right away was the intense familiarity of the sensation of flying in Second Life. I knew it from dreams, and as in dreams it feels in 2l both perfectly natural and somehow sinful. At first I tried to keep my flying time to a minimum, since one is fairly lonely up in the air and the original idea had been to meet people through my avatar in order to learn whether he (alright, to be honest, she) could in fact be said to be me. (The picture shows me flying outside the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.)

So I walked around a lot, down corridors, up and down staircases, through alleys and fields. And just as dream-flying had supported my 2l-flying with an immediate background of familiarity, a sort of a priori, so too within just a few hours of exploring in the virtual world I started to experience my navigations through similar environments of the real world against the background of familiarity that 2l had begun to provide. That is, walking down a corridor in 'rl', I would sometimes find myself in a momentary state of confusion as to what level of reality I was currently dealing with.

This didn't happen everywhere. Mostly it happened when I was doing in rl what might be called 'exploring': looking for the right number on a hotel-room door in a new city, trying to take a shortcut through an unfamiliar alley, etc. I had a very uncanny sense on some of these occasions that it was only the sort of perceptual experience I'd had in 2l that was enabling me to make sense of the experience I was having in rl at all. As if 2l were itself the a priori framework of spatial perception!

That's absurd of course; I had got by just fine for decades in the absence of virtual reality. I didn't need a simulation of space to teach me what space is and how to move through it. And yet that feeling was there, and, I confess, it was confirming the suspicion I've long had that some version of idealism in fact provides the correct account of reality. 2l didn't teach me about spatial perception, but it did harmonize with a capacity that was already there. This is a harmony that, when one is experiencing it, one senses could have been exercised just fine without an actual spatial world out there for it to operate in.

And at moments I thought: holy shit, we've conjured into existence this whole new reality that does just fine without real reality. What amazing creatures we are. But then I thought, in turn: what would happen if I were to show this new reality to my cat? She, were she to exist, would be entirely unimpressed. She would not even recognize it as a reality, but at most as a luminous object, a computer screen, within her singular reality.

Now we can write this off to her lack of intelligence, but then we might instead imagine another sort of being, one we all recognize to be intelligent but with a vastly different sensory apparatus at its disposal, a being that is unable to recognize, for example, pixel-based two dimensional representations of objects in space as representations. We might try to show this being what a philosophical thrill-ride 2l is, and it might say to us: "I can see that you are having a thrilling time, yet I can't help but notice that your actual experience here does not differ in kind from the experience you have when daydreaming, or listening to a story. These are varieties of what was once called ambulatio animae that need no technological support, but that, like 2l, permit a person to go wandering about in a strictly speaking non-existent space. Sitting at a campfire in the middle of the Paleolithic listening to a story about a descent into the nether-world would have done substantially the same thing, and while 2l provides a sort of hard-hitting illustration of the insufficiency of rl for accounting for experience, storytelling and daydreaming were already, all along, fairly compelling illustrations of the plausibility of idealism (or at least of a sort of phenomenalism that takes the ulitmate elements of reality to be perceivers; call it what you will)." 

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Notes from Iceland

I am in Iceland for the first time in many years, for no better reason than that Icelandair offers extended stopovers on transatlantic flights at no additional cost. I cross the Atlantic as casually as one might take the subway from borough to borough, but now that I am here, again, in Reykjavik, it seems to me that, if we have to fly at all, stopovers in Iceland should not just be possible, but mandatory. They make it all make sense.

This basalt island, really only a side-effect of the volcanic eruptions of just one segment of the vast Mid-Atlantic Range (which also includes something called the 'Charlie Gibbs Fracture Zone', where by contrast I hope never to find myself): this island, I say, is not all that far from the Faroes, which are in turn a short hop to the Hebrides, and from there another shorter one to mainland Scotland. In the other direction, there is really only a channel, and not open ocean, separating Iceland from Greenland, and again a smaller one separating Greenland from Baffin, and Baffin from Labrador.

A series of small hops then, brings one from Europe to North America, and even in the absence of archaeological evidence it is not hard to understand why, when Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence in the 1530s, local Iroquois ran out to greet the ship with furs in hand, ready, to all appearances, to resume a well established trade. The Basques and the Norse are the likely first-comers in those parts. Of the latter, an early-medieval settlement in Newfoundland is now considered a certainty, while their colony in southwestern Greenland, well documented both archaeologically and textually, is know to have endured for several generations.

The Norse were preceded in Greenland by Skrælingjar, which is to say Inuit, but only if we consider that massive island as a whole. When the Norse established their settlement in the 10th century, the Inuit were confined to the northern part of the island. Norse and Inuit coexisted in the same region from the 13th century, and by the 15th century the Norse had been entirely driven out. As far as we can tell, Scandinavians were also preceded in Iceland by an indigenous people, of sorts, even if they do not meet our ordinary criteria for counting as such: the so-called Papar are thought to have been Irish hermits, probably monks, who drifted up on rafts by mistake, and hunted and gathered for bare subsistence. (Their presence as well remains unconfirmed by archaeology, and is based entirely on textual sources, as well as on toponymy: in particular, the Vestmannaeyjar are islands off the south coast of Iceland, thought to have been settled by the 'Westmen', a Norse designation for the Irish.)

The Skrælings and the Papar together should cause us to reconsider our ordinary understanding of indigenousness: the Inuit came after the Vikings to southern Greenland, and drove the Vikings out thanks to their superior adaptation to the environmental demands of the region; the Irish came first to Iceland, were vastly more primitive than the Vikings who arrived after them, and were exterminated or assimilated. (I would argue, in fact, that there are many good reasons for seeing the Celtic nations of Europe as aboriginal within Europe proper, and not only on a distant satellite of Europe, but that's another topic.) The matter gets even more counterintuitive when we consider that at the moment of first contact the indigenous hunter-gatherers were Christians, while the invading Europeans were pagans.

As is well known, this point of difference would not remain an issue for long, not only because the Celtic element would soon be entirely erased, but also because Iceland would be converted to Christianity, en masse, just before the dawn of the 2nd millennium. 999 CE is extremely early for such a distant extremity of the West. Lithuania and neighboring Baltic regions, by contrast, squarely on the mainland and practically absorbed into the Prussian sphere of influence by the high middle ages, would nonetheless hold out against conversion until the 15th and 16th centuries. Nonetheless, as might be expected in such a case of mass conversion, the majority of the converted likely had little idea --and some, out on their homesteads, under the glacier, at first surely had no idea-- of what was going on. Even those who did know that they were now to call themselves 'Christian', we may assume, probably brought with this new name a universe of connotations that would have been quite foreign to the Romans who believed they had won a whole island, all at once, to the true faith.

To return to the ethnographic data from a neighboring island, we know from the early-20th-century explorer and anthropologist Knud Rasmussen that Inuit conversion was in fact a movement within one and the same universe of signification. Rasmussen reports that Greenlandic Inuit shamans would take their 'first communion' by ceremonially devouring those organs of the walrus that had hitherto been prohibited to men of their status. The body of Christ as tabooed walrus meat: that is the essence of conversion. Should we suppose that the case of the pagan Icelanders was much different? They were 'white' and originally European, but so what? These categories didn't mean anything at all at the time.

And so we find the well-known survival of pagan preoccupations well after 999. Unlike the case of Britain, where charlatan neopagans began in the 19th century to construct a wholly imaginary romantic past of high priests and priestesses, in Iceland the enduring power of animistic explanations for natural phenomena, complete with personified forces inhabiting every ditch and spring, is well attested by both indigenous and outside sources. The 16th-century Swedish author Olaus Magnus gives us a lengthy account in his Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus [History of the Northern Peoples] of the enduring folk-beliefs, including all the spells and incantations, of the Icelanders, and some decades later the German scientist and astrologer Johannes Kepler claims in his Somnium (at least if we take the protagonist as a stand-in for the author) that his own mother was Icelandic, that her name was Fiolxhilda, and that she was (therefore) a witch. (Kepler took Iceland to be the ideal spot from which to teletransport to the moon.)

So paganism lived on, and the conversion was an ambiguous affair. One of the pièces de résistance of the stunning, and stunningly empty, National Museum of Iceland is a small figurine, in bronze, dated to around the beginning of the 11th century, depicting either Thor or Jesus Christ. He is holding an object that is either a Valhallan war hammer, or a crucifix. Who knows? The people who have spent their lives studying the matter don't. It's possible no one ever did.

And yet, there is another sense in which Iceland has been at the vanguard of developments in the Christian West, and not at all on the periphery (in contrast with, e.g., the eastern front of the Christianization of the North, particularly the Finnic lands): and that is in its early embrace of literacy, and its consequent, immense contribution to world literature. In a sense its contribution can be seen as an early anticipation of the Renaissance explosion, on the mainland, of interest in secular themes, and in the importance of the individual. In this sense, it is literature that comes from a world still holding on to pre-Christian preoccupations with faeries and mountain spirits, and it is simultaneously a foreshadowing of the emergence, centuries later, of a post-Christian secular sphere.

But its individualism, immanentism, and dedication to the everyman does not at all come, as far as I can tell, from the cultural heritage of Norse paganism. It comes instead from an original, sub-literary function of writing, one that has parallels in the ancient Sumerian and Egyptian cases as well. Writing begins as tedious cataloguing, as a listing of who is where, who traded what with whom, and so on. In the Icelandic case, the most important thing to register was the correspondence between a given family name and a given plot of land. This project eventually issued in the famous Landnámabók or Book of Settlements, an early-11th-century text outlining the claims of the original settler families to their parcels of land.

But lists of names, at least potentially, are the tables-of-contents of stories about the people behind the names, and in the case of Iceland there seems to have been a sort of gradual evolution of these stories out of the original list: an inheritance feud among the descendants of Egill Skalagrímmson; Gunar Hámundarson attends the Alþing; etc. In a sense, Icelandic history continues to be perceived by Icelanders, or at least packaged by them for outsiders, as a sort of continual unfolding from these registries of settlements. The in-seat screens on Icelandair will tell you that every Icelander can trace his or her roots back to the original settlers. This claim is of course complicated by the fact that there is a single-digit but non-negligible population of immigrant minorities in Iceland, who are expected to become culturally Icelandic, even as they are, by definition, cut off from the possibility of being truly, essentially Icelandic in virtue of their recent arrival. Until the 1990s immigrants were required to take Icelandic names. The Catalonian painter Baltasar Samper responded to this demand with the ultimate act of subversion-through-overidentification: he asked to be called 'Egill Skalagrímmson', just like the hero of the Sagas. The authorities responded that they wanted him to be Icelandic, but that that was just a bit too Icelandic.

There are in effect three genres of writing in Iceland's early history: the official sacred, which is to say translations of the Christian Bible and associated texts; the mundane-registerial-cum-literary, of which we've just spoken; and, finally, the practical-magical. It should not be surprising to find that these can only be disentangled from one another with difficulty. We know today that the runic alphabet is only a transformation of the Latin: we don't know when or how exactly the Latin diffused to the pagan Norse, but we know that they started writing because of some sort of contact, direct or indirect, with the Latin world. This finding is a tremendous disappointment to romantic neopaganists, but the diffusionist explanation of runes does not deprive them of all possible magical utility.

In fact, when one considers the ordinary uses of runic inscription, one easily starts to wonder what exactly ought to count as magical, and what as merely 'ordinary' writing. A wooden spade from the 10th century, on display at the National Museum, is decorated with the following runic text: boalliatmik inkialtr kaerþi [Páll had me (made); Ingjaldur made (me)]. This is a plain statement of fact, but it also charges the tool with immaterial qualities it might otherwise not be noticed to have. Many runes were straightforward boasts, boiling down to something like: Know that I was here, and I was mighty. Many were also charms, inscriptions on artifacts that were intended to preserve good luck.

Both boasts and charms, I should not have to point out, have their echoes in the Christian and the post-Christian periods. A blog, in the end, is really not so different from an inscription on a bone: I was here, it declares to no one in particular. Don't forget that.

I recall seeing Etruscan mummies with inscriptions on the gauze in which they were wrapped. But they had to be unwrapped in order for the text to be seen, as it had been written on the inside. Text intended for no particular audience, for some unknown, hypothesized audience on the other side, or out in the internets, might easily be seen by an outside observer as fulfilling a magical function. Someone pointed out to me recently that the British in 18th-century Polynesia were wrong to make fun of the natives who believed that, in their letters, the British had mastered a form of magic: when the Polynesians became literate, and themselves wrote letters back to London requesting things like sailing vessels, often, with some delay, the things appeared. Magic! 

 Iceland is interesting from the point of view of the history of literature, I think, to the extent that it combines three registers of writing --sacred, bureaucratic, and 'magical' (hell, the scare quotes should really be around all three of these)-- and turns them into something we recognize, unambiguously, as literature. I also think, by the way, that Halldór Laxness well understood this, and that this is what makes his own modern literature so compelling, and so much a synthesis and culmination of the Icelandic literary tradition. And also, finally, this is what makes me happy to be his unworthy, but totemically ever so well positioned, namesake.

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