…[T]he universe had no beginning. It existed forever as a kind of quantum potential before ‘collapsing’ into the hot dense state we call the Big Bang. Unfortunately many articles confuse ‘no singularity’ with ‘no big bang.’
—astrophysicist Brian Koberlei on Singularity
In early April, to see the Northern Lights in a semi-cloudy, wind-ripping, snowless night, you have to chase them—or rather the clear patches of darkness where they might appear. You must also venture away from the capital of Reykjavik into complete darkness, sometimes pulling off right onto the narrow shoulder of a two-lane road, the early spring ground frosted in ice, radiating its own strange light which you can barely make out along these unlit, sparsely inhabited parts of Western Iceland. Not that you have any idea where you are. Not that 10 p.m. is quite dark enough, your guide Katrín says, that you might have to wait until well after midnight to find the most promising of skyscape.
Darkness is so important that sometimes Katrín turns off her headlights, her eyes peeled to the sky above rather than the winding roads she knows by heart.
And it is by heart, not by headlight, you learn of the hunt.
The Northern Lights have no set pattern, she says, they come and go, they do as they like, and that she was raised on a farm and has lived here all her life makes no difference. There is no creature alive more elusive than the aurora borealis. The chase, the hunt, is always different.
The countryside is very quiet. You sit next to Katrín in her two-door truck, in between her and your husband, and you can’t see anything outside. Your husband has fallen asleep on your shoulder; the days of long-distance horseback riding have left him tired. Katrín speaks in a low voice, and tells you that it is widely believed the Vikings saw the lights as a bridge for warriors to enter the Other World, but that scholars of the Icelandic sagas have argued for years about proof of its existence in Early Norse Literature, which was not even written by the Vikings themselves but their descendants.
Today, she says, almost no youth today in Iceland believe that God created the earth—you find out later this fact has been well-documented—and yet a good number of Icelanders still believe in trolls, elves, fairies and the supernatural—again, you find out later this is true, and that Iceland is in fact home to a historian-run Elf School. And she fully believes that there are Huldufólk, the hidden people, she says, that you must watch out for, that you must not build upon their homesteads or bad things will fall on you. That a little over a decade ago near the capital city someone tried to build a golf course by removing a large rock that was supposedly the home to Huldufólk. Numerous mysterious accidents soon befell the workers so that construction was halted, and the prinicipal engineer, no doubt a highly educated man, publically apologized to the elves, promising he would never again build on their land.
She then falls silent, peering into the sky as she points to the patch of clear sky that she’s driving you toward. Barely perceptible is its greater darkness from the rest of the darkness in the sky. You can’t imagine a night with less light. You can’t imagine all that remains hidden in the night.
Night as its own mythology, its other worlds and bridges for the dead, and on this night in Iceland, it is very real.
Before you left for your trip, a young poet wrote to you that she believed poetry was dying. That the world had become too cynical, that perhaps we’d discovered all that we were meant to, that our time was passing.
The road you are now on has no stoplights, no stop signs. Its long stretches and turns seem endless. Perhaps no story is new, and all that’s left is wistful digressions to points of departure hidden from our reach. Perhaps we confuse each other with language, even if we think we speak the same language. Perhaps there is always a bone to pick. Perhaps we are too busy guarding the gates to our own houses of languages, and we have made those houses our prisons.
For a moment, as the silence settles in the old truck, which never seems to slow down or accelerate, you wonder if you have died, and you do not know if you are dead. The silence settles further into you, and you strain to see outside as Katrín once again turns off her headlights. There are no headlights in the distance, no other cars or life approaching you as you stroke your husband’s head. He does not stir.
In the darkness which is approaching a newer darkness of the hidden, you say silently to the young poet: The death of poetry, a myth.
The origin of poetry, a myth.
What encompasses all that is poetry must be larger than us, larger than all our ideas of larger. And that is a love letter to us.
Eliminate singularity.
Burn down the prison in the night, with the night, with what is hidden in the night.
*
Twice you’ve pulled off the shoulder of the road to see if the faint lighting would give away to the Northern Lights. Twice it has not happened. It is now approaching midnight. You pile back into her truck, and again your husband falls asleep. You are thinking of the reason you came to Iceland—to ride horses—when suddenly you hear yourself asking Katrín if she’s seen a film called Of Horses and Men.
She tells you she hasn’t, but has heard it is a very Icelandic film.
Because of the horses? you ask.
Not only for the horses, she says, but because less than twenty minutes in, there is the first of many deaths.
You tell her that it was the very film that brought you to Iceland, that you’d never fallen in love with anything so quickly and so completely on film than with the Icelandic horse.
I won’t see it, she says, tell me about it.
Are you sure? You ask.
I don’t want a lot of movies like that, she says, at my age, I prefer comedies. Lighter fare.
You tell her it is a film of many stories that, in the end, overlap and come together. The film opens with Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson—
Ah, yes, Katrín says. He’s in every movie made in Iceland. But yes, go on.
His character Kolbeinn is trying to woo his horse, a beautiful white mare. Over and over he repeats: “Still. Be still, my darling. Be still, my girl.” This is his horse, but he still has to woo her, capture her in a singsong, seductive way, chanting almost, in the middle of nowhere where they and a few other dwellers live in a village. The mare does not make it easy for him because she’s in love with a stallion, who happens to belong to a woman named Solveig who’s in love with the man. When the man and his mare go to visit the woman, we learn the stallion is also in love with the mare. After their visit, just as the man and his mare are leaving, she just stops. She refuses to move. Then we see the stallion approach them and even though Kolbeinn attempts to shoo him away, the stallion mates with the mare—while the man is still on horseback.
Ah, yes, Katrín says, like I said, I heard it’s a very Icelandic film.
Are you sure you want me to tell you what happens? you ask.
You can see her craning her long neck as she looks up at the sky. You are amazed she is listening intently to you while driving looking at the sky and not the road. When she first picked you and your husband up, she looked to be in early sixties, with a heavy ponytail of stark white hair, bright light eyes, heavily-lined face and compact in size, wearing a mustard yellow coat and dark pants with boots. Now you can only see the outlines of her, and sometimes they fade and bleed into the darkness, and you know she can imagine full well what happened to the mare.
Tell me, she says.
When they return home, you go on, the man is disgraced by his mare, there is this tender moment when he dismounts—and it’s only a matter of seconds—but she turns to him, as if knowing what’s to come. Kolbeinn comes out with a shotgun. She runs out of the frame, and he shoots. We hear a thump. He heaves over, regretful of what’s he done—no, not regretful, but immensely saddened. Maybe he wanted to be a horse and couldn’t be.
Or maybe Kolbeinn wanted her all to himself while remaining a man. Not all the stories are so tragic. But they are too.
Tell me more, she says. Don’t worry; I’ll let you know when we will see the lights.
There’s another man, you go on, who makes his horse swim in the cold ocean so he can board a Russian trawler to get vodka, which is not vodka, but something much stronger and proves fatal. While the Russians onboard had told him to mix it, he drinks it straight from the jug. It kills him. The horse leans down to his master, not knowing what to do, startled when he hears the trawler sounding its horn in the distance. And there’s so much more. There’s Kolbeinn burying his horse. There are multiple funerals throughout the film and we learn there is a widow named Johanna vying for Kolbeinn’s heart, which Solveig with the stallion must contend with, must make the ultimate choice to repair the man’s wounded pride: the stallion’s manhood or his. Solveig ends up gelding the stallion. But there is so much more that happens in this little village. There is another man on a horse who dislikes the fences that his neighbor puts up. There is another woman who loves her mare, but her mare loves her freedom more. The woman must win and she does, returning to the men on the farm, triumphant. They offer her a drink and snuff. It’s a coming of age story for this woman. And in the next story there’s—
Suddenly you take a breath.
Yes? Yes? Katrín says, as your husband stirs slightly and repositions his head. You feel the entire weight of him as you take another deep breath.
There’s a Spanish-speaking tourist named Juan who has come to ride horses in Iceland. He is given an old horse who seems to have no fire in him left, but Juan doesn’t seem to notice. He laughs, excited, as they ride out with a large group. The horse proves difficult, and Juan is left behind. The horse will not speed up. They end up in the middle of nowhere as the wind begins to blow hard. The horse refuses to move, and Juan dismounts and examines the horse’s foot; there is a rock stuck in his foot. He takes it out and asks is that it? No, the horse is just old and tired. A snowstorm sets in. They are in a wasteland of nothing. He screams for help in Spanish. As night falls, covered in snow, we see Juan praying, holding the reins of this horse that will not move. It is then—if you look carefully—you can see the horse is already elsewhere. The horse has lived its life. You aren’t sure if Juan, scared and cold and near death, knows this when he takes out his knife. The horse is eerily still. Juan kills his horse with one blow between the shoulders blades, and his large, solid body falls over. Sobbing, Juan cuts open the horse, takes out of the entrails and climbs in, headfirst, whimpering.
Could you do that? Katrín asks you.
You have thought about this, you tell her, and you know you would not be able to kill a horse, even if you saw the horse had had enough of his own life. As morning falls, we see Juan’s almost completely inside the animal. A guide from the group and a rescue team find him after the storm. He remains inside the horse, screaming. The guide has to pull him out. Juan sobs, inconsolable as the guide cradles him in his lap.
The film ends, you go on, with the annual autumn horse round up in which Solveig meets some of the villagers including Kolbeinn. She rides up to him to offer him a drink that they are passing around, but after a struggle, she doesn’t manage to hand him the drink. He smiles, and she looks assured. However, the widow Johanna who has been vying for Kolbeinn’s attention gets hold of it and brings it back to him. They ride together, as Solveig falls behind. She eventually catches up to him again; she’s determined.
That sounds right, Katrín offers. But now, go on.
Solveig arranges it so that she and Kolbeinn end up alone. She tells him to hold onto her newly gelded horse while they make love before rounding up the horses.
The man holds the horse while they make love, Katrín repeats slowly.
Yes, you say, so the former stallion knows who is the boss, so to say, and—as the widow watches through binoculars.
That also sounds right, she says.
Afterwards, they round up the horses in the rain and begin to organize them in a pen. Everyone comes together. The villagers share more drink. The end is a mesmerizing tightly packed shot of horses going in every direction, some of whom fight people off, wanting their freedom, and some of whom of patently wait for the humans to point them in the right direction. You recall the last frame of the film, which promised that no horses were hurt.
A most Icelandic film, Katrín says. Now, wait a second here. I think we’ve got something.
*
Approaching 1 a.m., you see them.
Nothing can quite prepare one for what happens during the occurrence of the aurora borealis. The bus again stops in the darkness on the shoulder of the road. You, your husband, and Katrín trek into the darkness as they begin to dance in the light. Katrín shows you and your husband as the lights spread across the sky and “curtain.” The wind is blowing very hard and your ears are ringing. You laugh together, the three of you, as your husband adjusts the lighting on his camera and climbs up a small incline to take some photos.
Careful, you call after him.
The three of you fall silent on the deserted road in this darkness of the hidden, where you imagine all those lost worlds opening themselves up, doing what must be done.
In this very hard country, on this cold night, you imagine Iceland is full of some lost world and what’s likely the next. It is what that the young poet—and you, on certain hard-hitting days—think this world has lost. Our wild side. Our horse side.
Our dancing in the sky when the white noise gets too loud.
The green lights of the aurora borealis flare and streak, shakes the ground back to the sky, smells of that prehistoric young earth shifting and breaking, new life forged from ash and ice.
As the lights begin to fade, as they begin to depart, you notice there is a dark figure approaching the three of you. At first you think you are imagining it, but Katrín sees it too. You look up at the incline, and see your husband is still there, taking as many photos as he can before the lights fade. Is someone with another group, from some other car or bus you cannot see? Suddenly a car appears in the distance, drives up the road behind you, passes you, and as its lights flashing onto the figure. It’s gone.
Did you see it? Katrín asks before you can form a sentence in your head. She goes on: I saw it too. It could be many things. It could be one thing for you, and another for me, and yet something else for another.
Your husband rejoins you, and you go back in her car.
*
Sitting here at your desk now back in New York, you know what causes the Northern Lights, the science behind their dances, the science that will tell us it is not the gods of some lost ancient world speaking to us, that it was never a reprieve or offering to our ancestors on earth for those very long, dark winter nights. And you know damn well that science might explain the dark figure we saw approaching us, rob it of its own night, mythology and being. That, in the clear light of day, it was not a troll or elf, or any one of the supernatural creatures that many Icelanders believe in. Someone will tell you that it was not your dearly departed uncle trying to find you, or some other ancestor, or perhaps a lost spirit, no relation, wandering the roads because he or she does not know they are dead.
But you also know that kind of thinking requires a kind of cynical arrogance. And you know that kind of thinking is the enemy of poetry, just as it is the enemy of all potential, human or not.
No, perhaps the reason for the Northern Lights is the same reason for the dark figure approaching and never arriving: that being in nearly complete darkness on a volcanic, glacier-covered island where the horses still run wild, we are all closer to whatever is out there, in the sky. And whatever is out there is friendly as it is elusive, and has a sense of playfulness perhaps because it has no sense of beginning or end, but a different sort of passing, of crossing.
That the bridges are there, in plain sight as they are hidden.
That perhaps nothing ever dies, that everything, from horse to poet to what hides deepest in the night, is always unfolding.