One long walk across

 

Fuel to the fire

 
"You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper. The fire isn't thinking 'Oh, this is Kant,' or 'Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,' or 'Nice tits,' while it burns. To the fire, they're nothing but scraps of paper. It's the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there's no distinction--they're all just fuel."

Haruki Murakami, After Dark (2004)

 

La agudeza para recordarse

 
“When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see.”

Baltasar Gracián, Spanish Jesuit and Baroque prose writer and philosopher, (1601-1658), Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia (The Art of Worldly Wisdom) (1647)

 

De la dignité dans l'indignation

 
"La vie garde un prix tant qu'on en accorde à celle des autres, à travers l'amour, l'amitié, l'indignation, la compassion."

"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, and compassion."

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), La vieillesse (1970)

 

Norrsken i fjällen

 
The moon glazes
snowdunes silver
streaks the fjäll
with argent strands
only as we think
auroras commence
burning the sky
the hoary threads
bind us to the glacier
slowly combust us
until only remains
tar-like scorched marks
and haphazard footsteps
in the refreezing snow

 

Calendars

 
Calendars measure time
differently from clocks:
they are a record of
our perception of events,
like town square statues
suffering rainshowers,
winterstorms and heatwaves
and the annual
deposition of wreaths.

Yet they can be
like clocks
when they tick
year in, year out
acknowledged
unfailingly —
until we’re no longer
conscious of the time
passing at the
back of our mind.

 

Strynefjellet

 
In Strynefjellet, one feels the vulnerability our ancestors must have resented then, when skin on skin did little to shelter them from the fierceness of their gods.

One cannot hide from the frost among the congealed peaks.

There seemed fitting to depose a memory, nestled in a crag where it froze upon touch. Soon it was sealed in ice and snow, never to be found again.

The sense of abandonment is strong.
There is a feeling of loss and uncertainty.
It is a place beyond danger, beyond peace.

Words have no weight here, and names no longer bear any meaning, even its own disperses, windswept.

There are two forms of life: trees, and snow, and they cannot be told apart, are one and the same, having no bearing within our sphere, the experience of them only affecting our senses.

It is a desolate rift in every direction, where no one should have to go unless a memory needs be cradled in its lap.

When I drove away Strynefjellet closed behind me, deepest night curtaining all light, the snow a mirror to that night, the blizzard raging indiscriminately.
 

Stone to stone

Graves half buried in snow

— their greyness like exposed rocks

on streaked mountainside —

resolute mourners shovelling

the white compact down

to the hard ground

to place photophoroi

— however diaphanous 

and dim the lanterns be —

to show the living

the place where

they chose to

remember

and pray

 

The sleeping giants of Nærøyfjord

 

On thin ice

 

The Sámi told me
to pay attention
to the bear and the elk
— also to the wolf
he had tracked an old one
prowling for a last kill —
but above all to
pay attention to
snow-covered ponds
their surface ice too thin
yield under the weight
— the Sámi said to be quick
with the puukko, wedge it
deep into the ground
before the pond swallows
and snowfall covers it all
— he said to be weary
of clearings and circles of trees
follow the tracks, if any
— even that of the bear
for they knew where to tread

but the moon had bewitched me
draped in faint clouds and auroras
pearl white pupil pulsing
in the benthic blue dome
clouds an extension
of the mountains
snow lining the rifts
pine trees like raised down
on bare, pure white skin
the blanket of rime
groaning underfoot
much like
cracking ice —