…I am speaking of energies which ingest
the first perfected forms of creation

the primordium of waves
the calligraphy of torment

& so the coelacanths
the vampire fish
the orbits of volcanoes endure

- Will Alexander
“Water as a Dysphoric Medium”

Close to the Arctic Circle, and near to the polar light, your dreams are different. On two hours sleep, I ride a bus to tour the countryside and to view glaciers and geysers, hot springs and waterfalls—long-legged models, writers, and photographers all in tow. And also, a Ph.D. candidate in Math from Caltech. I know just a little about Maxwell, but I could use some more schooling on the topic of electromagnetism—especially knowing that the sun will set late tonight in prolonged purple and a simmering green.
I am in Iceland.
Later still I will meet a woman. She is a Reykjavík designer, not a model. I think she is prettier than god. I am not sure how the lights—and my dreams—have affected me…
At a stop in the mountains, a Danish journalist and I pick up solid chunks of hardened lava and hurl them across the flat-top glacier, the rust embedded in the rock staining her pretty hands a burnt orange. I go get us napkins but the rust is hard to wipe off. We giggle and return to the bus. The sun is not visible but still we must squint into the strong horizontal light. We are snow blind as we find our way back to our seats.
    En route back to the hotel, we stop for coffee and a pastry at an inn by the geysers, a mind-bending geothermal event where boiling hot water erupts from snow-covered ground. We are warned not to touch the water: it will burn. But the air temperature is so cold and the winds so strong that we are numb waiting even the seven short minutes between eruptions. As a team, we lost more than a half dozen umbrellas to the gusts.
In a few hours, I will sit front row at the Reykjavík Fashion Festival, right next to my new mathematician friend.

*   *   *

The surface of the Earth first solidified 3.7 billion years ago; life on Earth first appeared 3.5 billion years ago. Iceland is only 20 million years old. An infant. Volcanoes on the far northern Atlantic Ocean floor propelled lava from the depths, giving rise—like the most difficult childbirth—to what we now know as Iceland. The country, the island, the eruption of Neptune’s wrath, the lava’s outgrowth of craggy rock and soil remains the most active volcanic land on Earth.
Tectonic and geothermal actions give Iceland its landscape; the Arctic Circle and the Gulf Stream give it its climate—cold as hell and rough (though a bit less biting than one would expect).
Cold climates create resilience and an often-stark sense of beauty.
Resilience becomes renewal.
In Iceland, what goes around comes around. In the best of ways. Geysers spew boiling water from snow-covered plains; entrepreneurs make the world’s only carbon-neutral bottled water from the nearly inexhaustible Olfus Spring; the nation’s first Parliament convened in 930; Day-Glo borealis sunsets combat gray volcanic landscapes; there are no native trees taller than three feet; Pagan Vikings and Irish monks forged the first two waves of the island’s settlers; a professional comedian has been elected Mayor of Reykjavík; 95% of home heat is supplied geothermally; and, the banks are broke while designers evoke and parade both bikinis and the Arctic Fox.
In Washington, D.C. last year I discovered the work of Brian Jungen at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.
Reminiscent of Tlingit totems, Jungen’s found-art sculptures—consisting mainly of Nike athletic shoes—comment on contemporary life in many ways, including a roundhouse critique of consumer culture. They also evoke whales and birds of prey and creatures of the cold.
I was not cold then, but I am in Iceland, and I am cold now, and I long for embrace.
As I stand peering out at Reykjavík Harbor I think of the San Juan Islands and the stretch of the Pacific swerving north towards Juneau. The Arctic wind picks up and I tighten my scarf and turn up the collar of my overcoat, and reflect on the purple Arctic sunset, the purple that will—later tonight—make the black a darker black.
I disdain the pure, but I love the pristine here. And, we must yet return to the topic of Iceland’s women…
On the runway’s front row, a woman wears a complete coyote—replete with ears and teeth and claws and all—fashioned into a wildly wide and tall hat, the perfect counter to the cold, it seems.
After the first night of the fashion show, my party gleefully eats both cured puffin and Minke whale, accompanied by Chilean wine. The entire country contains less than a half-million people. Before I leave, perhaps I will meet them all.

*   *   *

Freydís turned to face her pursuers, baring her breast, beating her chest, waving her sword, and letting out a fearsome battle cry. The angry natives screeched to a halt, stared in amazement for a few seconds, and then turned tail and ran for the hills. It is not known whether it was the sight of a she-devil with a sword, or the naked breast which scared them the most…

- Freydís Eiríksdóttir, “Saga of Erik the Red”
 

Iceland is a nation of storytellers. While it is unlikely that Native Americans would scare easily at the site of bare breasts, it is in the Icelandic character for their tales to be tall. And for the stories to be long—I have a copy of a compendium of the Sagas that totals more than one thousand pages. The words of the language itself are long and the 1,000-year-old sentence structure is involved and complex. And, oh yes, the women are strong and beautiful.
Despite my relative ignorance of fashion, as I cross and uncross my legs in the crowded seats at the Reykjavík Art Museum, I am sleep-deprived and pleased with the presence of black and the absence of light in the collections. After all, my experience of Iceland will take place almost wholly in the dark and the night—in the rain and the clouds and the dimlit show and in the midnight hour.
Hush, hush—I lean over to talk to my mathematician friend.
I want another drink, just not another one of these NyQuil-blue vodkas that I have in my hand.
I realize I do not know what a math dissertation might look like, how many pages, what the language might be, that of mathematics, of course—a paper of numbers and symbols, of functions and equations. I write a note on my hand—quite unlike Yasunari Kawabata—to ask Steven about his topic, though I may in no way understand.
At intermission, I write on paper—not on my flesh—about the beauty and talent I perceive: the elegance of a theory or a proof; the girl that looks better than god; frightening Freydís; rusted rocks of lava and eruption; glaciers, geysers, and girls; my favorite designers—Mundi Vondi, Eyglo Margret Larusdottir, Spaksmannsspjarir, and other names I cannot pronounce.
The writer sitting beside me looks like a beautiful Modigliani model. I tell her so.
A piece of lace drops from a model’s cloak. It is sequined. It stays there through the next five shows. Glittering. At intermission, a photographer reaches over to remove it from the runway.

*   *   *

Beauty walks a razor’s edge, someday I’ll make it mine.
        

- Bob Dylan, “Shelter From the Storm”
 

It is cold inside the bar; it was cold in the last place, too. The girl who is better looking than god wants another drink. So do I. Our friends bring a bottle of champagne to our booth in the darkened tavern. It is sparkling wine from New Mexico, not far from my home in California. The cork has been popped and we pour the wine, the bubbles braving the frigid air, and we drink and we talk about Halldór Laxness, Iceland’s Nobel Prize-winning writer, and about Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and about how the last line, or something approximating it—the notion of, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”—is a sentiment for almost every occasion.
Though I think of canceling my flight, I have no intention of staying in Iceland.
Though I am in love with my wife, I am definitely in love with the woman who is prettier than god. The Arctic has done something to me, though I am not sure what.
My friend and fine writer, Eric Miles Williamson, wrote a book of non-fiction called Oakland, Jack London, and Me. Jack London knew both about the poor and about the cold.
I grew up poor in Boston. It was often cold there. When I was 19 and in love, it was Christmas and I wanted and I needed to see my girlfriend that night. I had her gift, and I wanted to see her, to give her the present. It was 14 below. I wanted the keys to the car. Dad told me I was a fool. Of course he was right. Half an hour later, he opened the car door for me with an acetylene torch. I saw my girl that night and she saw me. We exchanged our gifts. I see her face again tonight in the Reykjavík snow. From far away, I am not sure she reciprocates—it’s been a long time—but it is pretty to think so.
The night sky here is a Vija Celmins painting, a sparkle of infinity.
I say goodbye to Iceland and to the Gullfoss Waterfalls and the geysers, to the woman prettier than god and to my Reykjavík dreams, shaped by the cold and the light.
As I fly out, rising into our first cloudless sky, I think out loud about rebounds and resilience, of rising from the dead—of a place where bohemians have replaced bankers as the people in power, where the land primordially yields instant life and death, where designers and models equally seduce, where taxes are high, but life is good, where a post-capitalist future might emerge from flame and ice. It is pretty to think so.