On Beauty, Poetry and Autumn

A purely Icelandic summer evening in the late August can be very romance-inducing - wind putting feeble, scarce trees to the ground, howling above all limits of sanity, washing out any thought of opening the door, let alone going out. Rain (or, wait, was it snow) is beating the windows with the rage unknown in the rest of the world, slapping and stamping the last leaves on the sleek wet transparent surface, forcing them down to the bricked unyielding uncaring cold wall. No one is behind the windows, no one exists in the world, we are stuck inside.
 

And this is the perfect evening to go down with some "roistering, drunken and doomed poet" with some good whiskey (if I could ever drink any).  

Today it has been two years since I arrived at this proud little island.  

        ...O may my heart's truth 

                Still be sung

On this high hill in a year's turning. 

______

Poem in October

By Dylan Thomas

It was my thirtieth year to heaven

Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood

        And the mussel pooled and the heron

                       Priested shore

                   The morning beckon

With water praying and call of seagull and rook

And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall

                    Myself to set foot

                        That second

       In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-

Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name

       Above the farms and the white horses

                         And I rose

                     In rainy autumn

And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

High tide and the heron dived when I took the road

                    Over the border

                       And the gates

         Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling

Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling

          Blackbirds and the sun of October

                      Summery

              On the hill's shoulder,

Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly

Come in the morning where I wandered and listened

                  To the rain wringing

                    Wind blow cold

          In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour

And over the sea wet church the size of a snail

          With its horns through mist and the castle

                    Brown as owls

                But all the gardens

Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales

Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.

              There could I marvel

                     My birthday

         Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country

And down the other air and the blue altered sky

          Streamed again a wonder of summer

                   With apples

              Pears and red currants

And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's

Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother

                 Through the parables

                       Of sun light

         And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy

That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.

         These were the woods the river and sea

                      Where a boy

                  In the listening

Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy

To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.

                   And the mystery

                         Sang alive

          Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday

Away but the weather turned around. And the true

           Joy of the long dead child sang burning

                        In the sun.

                It was my thirtieth

Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon

Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.

              O may my heart's truth

                        Still be sung

            On this high hill in a year's turning. 

What doesn´t kill you makes you stronger?

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" - persistently was persuading me Kelly Clarkson, as I was trying to mutilate myself on a treadmill, finding pain in the parts of the body which were dormant for most of my life and feeling aching organs that I had no idea existed in my body before.

Source of photo (and an interesting blog about running)

Being half-conscious, to divert my mind from the pain purely out of survival precaution, I started thinking if is that really so - do we really need pain to grow? Does a person, who is blessed by a peaceful and quiet life, undisturbed by any sorts of turbulence, come up as an physical, emotional, spiritual cripple? And to follow the other extreme: going to the hell and back creates, basically, a superman? (oh, sorry, I meant a superwoman).

What happens if one doesn't get enough pain through life? Lets say, there's a moderately happily married life with 10 years on the back and two kids on the front. Then, one day there comes a realisation that the chest starts sliding down and actively forming a paunch, social networking becomes the most exciting thing, beer and caffeine have replaced water, in general - things have got out of control.

And there it starts - subconsciously,  persistently,  methodically we start to generate our own suffrage to get out of the couch and back on a horse: to be emotionally fit one gets an unobtainable love object - the wife of a neighbour will do, a colleague with its regularity of meetings is even better. After all the person doesn't matter - it is just is to train emotions, as Robbie Williams was confiding into my ears: "just want to feel real love, feel the home that I live in".  Next step is to ruin the family, get a divorce, see kids once a month, live alone and start looking for the meaning of life - all of these  to be spiritually fit and growing even further.

But what if we stay motionless in your moderately happily life? We stop being interesting to people - the absence of drama makes us lose colours and mimicry with the life itself. The most interesting people, writers, artists, politicians, actors, even "that nephew of the guy who lives next door", are the people with the wretched life and an ongoing crisis.

And we still think we are going for pleasure? That's our eternal shallow delusion, a trick formed by our refined inventive artful psyche, which wraps a bitter pill into the sweetness of a minute pleasure. "Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure" - floated the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald somewhere in my already half-conscious mind.

By following our unnecessary immediate wishes, overindulging in foods, sweets, tastes, with all sorts of social infidelities, we are methodically paving the way to our own abyss, so that later we would have a chance to apply all our strengths to get out of and become stronger, fitter, smarter. Or drown and die.

So, stating the obvious for everyone but me, I came to a conclusion, which helped me to finish those last minutes on the treadmill - that we need regular injections of pain, leading to suffrage, produced by our internal striving for crises. "Everything in moderation" - refrained Ancient Greeks in my head to beautiful Kelly, and I decided that was enough for the day.  

The song ended, treadmill stopped, I took out the earphones, and with a feeling of standing on the way to perfection, went home thinking about mundane things as what to cook for dinner for my moderately handsome husband who was babysitting our inquisitive beautiful baby-daughter, secretly thanking Providence for all that boring uneventful life that I was blessed with, hoping I was done with my pains at least till my next gym.


Copyright © 2013 by Olga Johannesson