069: diving into the astronomical twilight of our fears

December in Iceland, a waxing moon, Beowulf, and of course, monsters and fairies

In Iceland, the sun started setting before we could get to the rental car desk. By the time I was driving back toward Reykjavik city limits, the astronomical twilight had already dropped down around us, blanketing the landscape in deep cobalt blue. My friend called out directions as she looked for podcasts on Nordic folklore, leaving me free to look at what little I could see in the near distance.

Near the city limits, there was long, low building, so long that it continued as the only structure I could see to the east of the road for a couple of kilometers. In the deepening darkness, it looked like a factory or granary, very plain and economically built, with a height of maybe two stories and a long, uninterrupted, pitched roof. Running parallel to the roofline there was something approximating a narrow window or other opening, glowing with what could almost have been firelight. The simplicity and size of the building and the quality of the light made it seem like an encampment or an outpost, something rudimentary but safe—for now. Like everything I saw in Iceland, it acknowledged the wild power of the land.

We turned west on to a two lane highway. Soon, even the light thrown off by the city was behind us and the countryside had disappeared entirely into darkness. As I switched the high beams on and off in response to oncoming traffic, I was reminded of nights spent driving two lane highways and narrow dirt roads in Wyoming, of the infinite midnight of rural areas, of the twinned sense of adventure and caution that comes with being on open land after dark.

Click, and the beam goes up. Click, and the beam goes down. Click, and it goes back up. Look down when the oncoming car’s beams are blindingly high. Look up to stay off the gravel.

The focus required to stay centered on the road was meditative. It felt good to know how to handle a car on a narrow road in the dark.

Click, up. Click, down.

After an hour or so, my friend called out, look at the moon! And there it was, waning gibbous and floating hugely on the horizon, a massive, illuminated goblin, leering roundly from behind my left shoulder, animating the darkness with exaggerated shadows, as if rallying a weird anthropomorphic army to come out for the solstice revels.

Back in the days before we hid ourselves from our suffering, our northern myths were strong and bloodthirsty, filled with monster moons and black magic.

∞

This past year is the only year of my adult life to which I can’t ascribe some kind of catastrophe. I’m not exaggerating. There is no year, prior to 2020 going all the way back to when I was nineteen, where there wasn’t something going on that could not rightly be considered a major life transition, if not a trauma.

In 2022, assuming all goes well in the next week, (knock wood) I will have had a more or less stable and normie year. At least for me.

It’s an enormous blessing, except I can’t really enjoy it. I look back on the political, cultural and biomedical angst of 2020—remember how gleeful we all felt about the approach of 2021?—and it all seems petty by comparison. What if, in 2020, we had known that 2022 would be defined by a protracted, bloody, and economically disastrous war in Ukraine? Or that the polarizing effects of the elections of 2016 and 2020 would get worse? Or that we would be hit with a perfect storm of bewildering economic effects just as our faith in our leaders had gone missing?

It’s a strange place to be in, existentially speaking. It makes it hard to live into the good things. I’m already hyper vigilant, and about the best thing I can manage is to see my current relative safety as being in the eye of a storm. I can’t stop scanning the horizon for the next big wind. Sometimes I think I just like to feel a sense of urgency. Maybe, I like adrenaline. Maybe some internal capacity for contentment and peace is permanently broken. I don’t know.

I have to remind myself that it’s ok to be happy, or to make plans to see someone, or to leave aside planful productivity to squander a whole day watching “Emily in Paris.” To stop scanning the internet for incoming fire seems reckless.

In Iceland, I didn’t feel any of this because all of the terror and cold and wildness is out in the open. The whole time we were there, the sun—all four hours of it—was unobstructed by clouds. I could see how weak its arc was, how it barely skirted the horizon, how its light shifted from the rose-glow of sunrise to the fiery orange of sunset without so much as a midday fight. The enormous goblin moon was an indifferent, familiar constant, as was the bitter cold.

During the single hour of almost-full daylight, the steam from the thermal springs hung in the air like pollution, a bell-clear signal of the turbulence underneath.

∞

I remember the first time I jumped out of a hot tub and into a snow bank in ski lodge in Red Lodge, Montana.

I remember the first time I waded into the shock and cold of the snow-fed Tongue river and realized that my body was capable of getting used it.

I remember jumping from a cliff into a pool at the base of waterfall in the Blue Mountains in Australia, the terror of leaping, the shock of cool water.

I remember falling through the ice in New England in March, the surge of adrenaline, the sense of achievement when I dragged myself onto the shore

I remember the exhilaration after all of these these —how alive and powerful I felt, strong enough for anything.

In Iceland the land is young and unruly—you could be boiled alive in a volcano or freeze to death on a glacier on any winter afternoon. I guess that’s why taking a plunge into the cold and the dark—metaphorically and literally—is built into the culture. You can go out into noon dawn and look into an active volcano if you want to. You can walk right up to a frozen waterfall, or out onto a glacier. You can sink deep into the heat of a thermal spring so that only the tip of your nose feels the cold and look out over the frozen ocean.

If you’re lucky, snow will fall softly, melting into the steaming water while you rub your skin into buttery smoothness with lava rock and salt.

No matter what you do, there will be long sequences of darkness and bitter cold, with nothing but a dim glow of warmth in the distance. You will take it in stride because you are prepared. You will survive because you have not been told that the risks no longer exist. You might even exult in it.

∞

When I wrote about the celebration of epiphany a year ago, I was singing out a story for myself, trying to wish some kind of magical Twelfth Night ritual back into being, not just for the holiday, but for a bolder, brighter approach to the incoming year.

Of course I failed. 2022 was culturally something like the opposite of letting go and laughing against the dark. There were days when it felt like an enormous, collective social backslide to me, just a lot of us running for the hills, exhausted and bruised mentally and physically, clinging to small habits and rote prayers. I kept trying to break through, but it was hard. It felt a bit like the conclusion to Gatsby, a bunch of little boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past.

It takes so much courage to do more than just lock things down and endure. It takes so much fire to dive into the chaos and hold fast against the impulse to fight the shock of it, until it yields up that certain, but hard-earned exhilaration.

To me, the dark time of the year is opportunity to go right down into the gloaming and dive into astronomical twilight of our hidden fears. In the blanketing quiet of mid-winter, we can acknowledge that nothing is ok, that we aren’t safe, and we will all eventually die. Then we can go on singing, anyway, because fuck the cold and fuck the dark, we can still tell a joke and fling our arms around each other.

How do we breathe miracles into being if we don’t admit our desolation?

∞

In the winter, in the northlands, the light is crazy and slant, casting spells across every nook and cranny. Every tussock has a the face of a fairy, every twisted branch looks like a monster’s arm, every gap in a rock formation could be a hobbit house. Time slips away from you, vertiginous, it can seem as if both the future and the past are beckoning. Blink once and you’re looking out over starving subsistence farmers eating lichen in the 19th century. Blink twice and you can see a hydro-powered techno-utopian future that might almost be livable.

Blink yet again and you can see the great warrior-hero, Beowulf, at the twilight of his life, fighting his last dragon, with only one warrior brave enough to join him. They have survived a first blast of dragon-fire and Beowulf has dealt a mighty blow, pouring all of his strength into his sword. But it has snapped—Beowulf has never been one to benefit from his weapons—he’s too much of a brawler.

What a metaphor, right? All of our prepping and safety planning, embodied in an “ancient irongray” sword that breaks from the force of the blow. In the next scene the dragon first burns Beowulf and then sinks his fangs into his neck, and Beowulf’s body is running “wet with his lifeblood.” This is a real fight, kids, not a choreographed green-screen sequence.

But hold on, it’s not over yet.

Next thing, they say, the noble son of Weohstan
Saw the king in danger at his side
And displayed his inborn bravery and strength. He left the head alone, but his fighting hand Was burned when he came to his kinsman’s aid. He lunged at the enemy lower down
So that his decorated sword sank into its belly
And the flames grew weaker.

Once again the king
Gathered his strength and drew a stabbing knife He carried on his belt, sharpened for battle. He stuck it deep into the dragon’s flank.
Beowulf dealt it a deadly wound. They had killed the enemy, their courage quelled his life; That pair of kinsmen, partners in nobility,
Had destroyed the foe.  

This is my kind of fairytale—the one where the monster is as big as the ones in real life and in which the hero hangs on to the bitter bloody the end, even after being dealt a death blow.

Look. Don’t be afraid of the dark. There’s firelight and magic there—and the conditions of courage are everywhere if you can hang in long enough to look.

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