The bay at Skagaströnd is around two miles from end to end and tilted slightly south. This is a busy deep-water harbour for the Greenland fishing fleet, though largely shut down in December. Around the industrial units are tidy piles of metal – private collections of cars, pipes, gates, chains, corrugated roofs, antennas, steel mesh and trailers. The wind thrums and whistles through them, setting up odd drones and whines that alter in pitch and volume as it swings round, onshore to offshore.
The effect is of walking through an orchestra where the players sit out of earshot of each other, or very far apart, responding to each other in a delayed back and forth, following on like a Gaelic psalm. Chords are fragmented or entirely deconstructed so that each note exists on its own, held as long as each long breath of wind. Through this runs the white noise of air over water, or air over turf, an acoustic friction that binds the whole together. When the wind drops, its resonance lingers, like the pause when an orchestra stops playing, or the charged attentiveness just before it begins.
This is a landscape where silences are textured. The profound scale of weather systems coming in off the Greenland sea – the giant, hysterical storms and the days of multidirectional water flow (‘rain’ is too weak a word) – wear the landscape down to its bare matter. Surfaces are tactile, often porous, distorting the movement of air.
In Iceland, December is for reading. I took with me Halldór Laxness’ novel Under the Glacier (translated exquisitely by Magnus Magnusson). In the story, the male inhabitants of the small town of Glacier are nervously anticipating the arrival of Úrsula, a woman with whom each is in love, who is/has been married to at least one of them, and whom they imagine is somehow preserved in the glacier that hangs over the town. When she at last arrives, now 52, comely and rather tired, she is nonetheless marvellous in their eyes. “You know I am hunted for my skin,” she says.
“There is an incongruity of people from remote islands,” says Embi the narrator, “which consists of being unequal in size and shape to all objects around them.” Like all small, isolated communities, the town appears to be timeless; and in this changeless, uninterrupted world the outward projections of each character’s imagination become more real than reality itself. Yet Laxness’ characters are distantly aware of their odd existential condition and are now also mildly apprehensive of the interruption Úrsula represents. Laxness is a master surrealist; the magical powers of self-delusion and wish fulfilment are the stuff of his deadpan Icelandic humour.
Glacier exists in a perpetual subarctic Spring – sunny, cold. Cycles of day and night and seasonal migrations are mentioned but happen off-stage. There is geological time in the building and weathering of landscape, the accrual of scree, the sharp, high edges of the new, still-warm mountains behind the town. There is the narrative time of the story, where no-one ages and nothing changes unless the story requires it. “I’m simply here,” says HallÞóra the housekeeper. And there is now the problem of human aging. Can we be the same person as we were thirty years ago?
Re-reading the book in Skagaströnd, this interlayering of time becomes incredibly dramatic. Massive, fast-moving columns of rain from the Greenland Sea literally swamp the coast in seconds; the ever-present Force 5 wind; the temporary sun switching on and off, the fast-approaching darkness. You are not just walking in, but walking through. To walk is to be constantly reminded of the fact that you are walking – by the sensory shock of rivers of cold air streaming off the mountains, by sudden concentrations of colour and smell, by the huge raindrops, like spoonfuls of water, landing seconds apart. The newish town is dwarfed into nothing by the planet-sized weather systems and the continuous uplift and erosion of the mountains behind. There is a sense of our having only slight purchase on the ground, of the human flux being only inches deep, like the lime-green moss on a lava field. To the west, the Westfjords glacier Drangajökull is (I thought) just visible as a gleam.
You always bring yourself to the party. There is a theory that accent matches habitat, that the subliminal, textural sounds we have absorbed over thousands of years have become the music of our speech, the sticks and stones of our vocabulary. This is the auditory imagination of Eliot and Heaney, which Heaney describes as “the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word … the word as pure vocable”. A month with nought but books and blank paper would seem like a gift; but my writer’s voice, the narrator in my head, really struggled to word this place. All metaphors seemed inadequate; all adjectives, all points of comparison, even the cadence of sentences, seemed to belong somewhere. Why?
In her essay The Listening Gift, Faith Lawrence describes a quest to “rehabilitate general acoustic awareness”, to develop a “mutual listening” in order to un-alienate ourselves from the more-than-human world. This, I think, is a highly controversial position. Lawrence describes an outing to hear a male nightingale sing for a mate. The humans would reply to the solitary bird, “taking it in turns to listen to each other and make music”. A “heightened” and “exceptional” encounter for the humans, but how did their presence affect the bird’s chances of finding a mate? She quotes Rilke: “Yes – the springtimes needed you. Often a star / was waiting for you to notice it.” Is the other-than-human world really waiting to hear from us? Wouldn’t it be much happier if we just went away altogether?
“I am a languaged being,” said Gary Snyder. “My gesture is with language.” The primacy of speech to we humans is both a gift and a flaw, I think. Our desire to word, so complex and so insistent, is innate to us and, I would say, overrides and drowns out so much else. It is what Wittgenstein called “language as superstition”. Put very crudely, our shared language, with its familiar forms and conventions of meaning, are the lens through which we experience and reiterate our world, to the extent that our experience becomes limited at the limits of our linguistic structures, our frame of reference. In trying to talk creatively about our world, we repeat it back to ourselves inexorably.
At its creative margins, the true domain of poets, this lens can (and should) be tinkered with. More and more in ‘nature poetry’ I see language as intrusion, as self-placement and self-prioritising. Yet listening – or micro-listening; for subtle, thermic textures and shifts – is difficult, demanding work. “Sometimes I feel it is too early to use words until the world has been created,” says Glacier’s village priest. “It’s a pity we don’t whistle to each other, like birds”.
The Biopol library is on the top floor of its Skagaströnd offices, its windows looking north into the green-dark ocean. Biopol is a marine research station which monitors the populations and health of North Atlantic fish stocks. One long-term project follows the lifecycle of the lumpfish, a gnarly, blubber-lipped creature the size of a shoe. It abides in the deepest, most inaccessible parts of the Greenland Sea for most of the year, returning briefly in Spring to make love in the shallows. Biopol tag lumpfish they catch; the tag carries the mobile phone number of the Biopol director, so that the fishermen out in the Greenland Sea can send a text if they find one in their nets. (Skagaströnd is a small community.)
Late one afternoon, walking home from the library, one of the guys at the fish market waved me in.
In the middle of the hanger, in a large plastic crate, was a Greenland shark – by-catch, and fortuitous for the crew. It was a magical object, around 7 feet long, almost adult, perfectly sleek and pale, its velvet flanks as plush as velvet. They had removed its liver and then curled it round, tail under chin, to get it into the tub. It was probably around 250 years old.
Is it possible to step out of your world? Without the opportunity – or impulse – to continually word what we see, do we lose the desire to tame it, to reduce it to something familiar and relative? Faith Lawrence makes a case for “listening as part of the poetic process” – and I wholeheartedly agree with this – but I think there is also a case to be made for silence for its own sake: to at least temporarily stop explaining the world to yourself, to still your own continual narrative. Both the lumpfish and the shark live in a world increasingly saturated with human sound. Imagine the world when this stops.
Auchmithie, 31st January 2025
https://aeon.co/essays/rilke-and-the-art-of-listening-as-a-way-to-shape-the-cosmos
Cover photo credit: Lesley Harrison
Lesley Harrison
Lesley Harrison lives and works on the Angus coastline, a landscape which inspires much of her poetry and prose. Her most recent collection, Kitchen Music, was published by Carcanet (UK) and New Directions (USA). She is a member of the North Sea Poets Collective.