A difficult, yearning, missing, moaning, spinning sort of day. For the first time this end of the world felt harsh and indifferent. And then I turned the radio on and someone was doing a cover version of Lip Up Fatty in heavily-accented English. Everything softened again.
Qaqortoq
According to Gretel Ehrlich, the Greenlandic word 'sila' means weather. It also means consciousness. I sat here this evening listening to Nive Nielsen and watching the mist creep arthritically up the hill, edging from the harbour and from the mountains and the waterfalls until slowly, slowly, I could see nothing outside at all. All was white, hiding, hidden. Moments before this just-living ghost shut us all, finally, inside, I watched a bunch of kids clamber up and over boulders and slippery, snow-covered grass, throwing a pink frisbee to each other, play-fighting, all the while wordless, thoughtless, effervescent.
I had a foggy, pixelated chat on FaceTime then and we talked about distance and separation, about mortality, about the absurdity of writing and writer's block and about the point of it all. Is there any real difference, we wondered, between life and death, between weather and consciousness, between the material and the spiritual, between you and me? And surely the mist and the mountains and music and love and lust and laughter and art are - have to be - the point of it all? Consciousness, it seemed, is inseparable from nature, just as each simultaneously dissolves and sprinkles glitter and meaning on the other.
At the end of the call I felt bright, clear, conscious. I looked outside and darkness had fallen.
Qaqortoq
I was reading this book yesterday - an oddly-textured, brave, involving and melancholic glimpse at Greenland and the strange, bloody, joyous myths of Inuit culture. I left it on the table outside, went out for a walk, came back an hour later and the book was gone. I searched and searched, decided the only possible explanations were it had been taken by vultures (are there vultures in Greenland?) or that someone had stolen it. About an hour later I noticed it was twenty yards down the hill, open. At the exact same page I'd left it. There was no wind yesterday, not even a breeze.
(Thanks to Mitch for this: https://youtu.be/pNwvzlo1ePA)
Qaqortoq
Greenlandic, of course, is a polysynthetic language that allows the creation of long words by stringing together roots and suffixes. And, as we all know, its morphosyntactic alignment is ergative.
Today I have mostly been listening to people speak. I listened to a local man giving an interview about ballet on the radio in English, the interviewer using Danish. Down at the harbour, I listened to a mum shout in Greenlandic at a little boy who was going too near the water. Neither of them seemed to be fully aware of the ergativeness of her morphosyntactic alignment. I listened then as three posh English girls came out of a bar arguing about the advisability of eating onions before a date. And as I dozed just now in the calm sun of the town square, the flurry of words became a forest of sounds and I could've been at the mart in Skibbereen or St Mark's Square in Venice: for a few minutes, it was hard to distinguish Danish from Greenlandic from Irish from Italian.
Sometimes I find myself fiercely resisting the inexorable disappearance of my native London English. But here, now, I know it doesn't matter at all - we limit ourselves by our clinging to what was in language rather than what we might become in language.
On the way back from the square, I took this photo of a street sign. It made me happy.
#Greenland #Greenlandpioneer #Qaqortoq
The only vehicles here are taxis, police cars and vans/trucks. Very few privately-owned cars: there are no roads out of town.
#Greenland #Greenlandpioneer #Qaqortoq
#Greenland #Greenlandpioneer #Qaqortoq
#Greenland #Greenlandpioneer #Qaqortoq
Wander with me. Wonder with me. It's not cold at all; the sun's shining and sparkling the ocean with light. The snow on the ground still isn't sure whether to come or go. It's quiet - quiet like those old Surrey days when the weather stopped us all driving and we leapt back into a Victorian peace. An old man shuffles past, mumbling, chewing. There are Lego houses, shambolic houses, neat and colourful houses. The mountains watch. A woman up there is doing yoga on her terrace. Breathe. A bunch of teenage boys are jumping up and down on the roof of a dilapidated shack: I want to warn them. The fishing boats are moored, waiting. Kids in hi-vis jackets are being shepherded across a road that hasn't seen a car for an hour. Breathe. The supermarket is called Pisiffik. There are no planes. In the old square, the old men smoke and stare. Let's sit down here and have a cup of coffee. All the time in the world. Just breathe.
OK. Let's head back now. And wonder: is that pram just a pram?
#Greenland #Greenlandpioneer #Qaqortoq
The view of sea and mountain from the helicopter yesterday was awe-inspiring, breathtaking, other-worldly, astonishingly beautiful. Everything becomes cliched, inadequate and soulless in response. Slivers of ice floated like sharp-white boats in the bluer-than-blue water. The harsh, jagged mountains spread out towards heaven, engulfing, disinterested, eternal, hypnotic, ferocious, bigger than imagination, harder than God, animalistic, not even bothering to mock our human insignificance or shy away from our warming, destructive power.
I've never seen anything remotely like it. It didn't make me want to cry like the Taj Mahal did, or the Cliffs of Moher, or Edward Thomas' summer hill in Steep, or morning mist over the Thames, or the view from the Montparnasse Tower, or the time Arsenal beat us 5-0 at White Hart Lane... it just made me stop. Stop thinking, stop feeling, stop it all. I broke the spell and took this picture on my phone through the helicopter window. And then stopped again.
Until we landed in Qaqortoq.
#Greenland #Greenlandpioneer #Qaqortoq