Iceland

Before dawn. Icelandic Air landed in Rejkavik this morning at 6:00 am. Snow was falling. Ice and freezing rain delayed the departure to Amsterdam by over an hour.  We were bleary eyed.  

I had awoken in the night before we left in order to write down some notes about narrative poetry--phrases like experimental histories, archeology of morning, noon, and night, and things about grief. There were several almost rhymes and alliterations. I couldn't stop.  

Like the water drops on the window of the plane, certain things begin to glimmer as if they had extra significance. Maybe it was the aurora borealis lights on the ceiling of the plane, a feature of Icelandic Air, or maybe it was going without sleep for twenty-four hours. The sudden appearance of snow and sleet was startling. I like these abrupt shifts in environment and watching interesting people!  The arduous trip kept me thinking about the journeys for Syrian refugees, displaced, traumatized by war, separated from loved ones, beaten, jailed, exploited.

On the plane, I was reading an article about Svetlana Alexievich, 2015 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. She is writing a history of emotion, a woman's version of history, a series of oral histories that are dramatic monologues, and they are riveting "transfers of pain," This is what the witnesses call the process of telling their stories to her. But in addition, she has demonstrated a flawless composition that the Nobel Prize recognized "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time."  Here is a link to her work:  http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2015/alexievich-prose.html