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Hi. The one on the left (or top, depending on your browser, I think) is a pic I took whilst walking yesterday here in Akureyri, Iceland (during which I was enjoying the first sunshine in a few days) and the other one is a picture I took last October at Rough Ridge in the Appalachian mountains.
Neither picture depicts any human beings. The questions I want to ask are:
1) Which scene is prettier?
2) Which scene is lonelier? (keeping in mind neither one depicts any humans - or any animals at all, actually).
You can disagree, but my feeling is the one on the left is slightly prettier, just from a purely aesthetic point of view (there is more sky, the clouds are more interesting, there is less clutter, the proportions are better, the lighting is more interesting and pleasing to the eye, etc), but the one on the right is the least hostile, and the most friendly or inviting.
If you don't share that evaluation, you can pretty much skip this next part, but here are two things I have been semi-thinking about:
1) A (possible) paradox: Beauty, in theory, should be an indicator of the Good (that which is conducive to Life), but sometimes we evaluate the not-Good (that which is hostile or dangerous ... such as this icy hill) as beautiful.
2) Perhaps in our evaluation of environments, we include trees/other flora as 'friendly beings,' as part of the 'us' in an 'us-vs-them' / friend-or-foe assessment. (I am trying to think of why I have a 'clear and distinct feeling,' as Descartes would say, that the picture of Rough Ridge is much more inviting and friendly, though it doesn't show any humans ... or maybe it's the tiny path at the bottom that suggests a former presence of people, and a future possibility that people will be there? ...)
Thoughts?
Love,
graham
1) A more affirming depiction of the Akureyrarkirkja than my last one. See how it soars into the heavens? By the way, that cross lights up at night. I think it's neon. Maybe the Techno Viking came by?
2) Some kind of gym down by the fjord? (saw people on treadmills, so that´s my guess).
3) Buildings occupied by the utility company Norðurorka.
I framed each of these pictures to filter out a lot of environmental "noise" -- the Akureyrarkirkja is actually surrounded by a lot of buildings and houses and cars; next to the gym (?) there is a construction site that's definitely not pretty to look at; and the Norðurorka buildings are near a main road and plenty of apartments. I wanted each of these buildings to look like some austere, ethereal outpost on the frontier between man and "unspoiled" nature. Each of these buildings is beautiful (from a certain angle) in its own way, and I wanted them to look like they were floating silently in a sea of natural beauty, out away from clutter, disrepair, humans, animals, pieces of things, activity -- in short, "noise." Why? Wish-fulfillment -- that's how I wish man-made artefacts were situated. It would be pleasing and peaceful. I could enjoy the beauty of man-made creations within the context of the beauty of God-made creations and not worry about having to manage chaos (so I think).
It took me some work to frame the pictures so that they would give the illusion of fulfilling my man-nature-harmony wish. For each of these, I probably took seven or eight other pictures that ultimately got axed because they were blurry or weren't balanced correctly or because I had inadvertently let a little noise creep in on the side. Not to mention the fact that I had to walk to wherever I thought I would get the angle right.
I encourage everyone to read the Boston Globe essay How the City Hurts Your Brain (and by everyone, I mean the two people who read this blog). Here is one of my take-away lessons from it, related to the above points (with some definite pseudo-psychological and pseudo-anthropological amateur botchery): The brain must also work very hard to filter out things undesirable to it. Anything in our environment that is a potential threat (anything that moves in our peripheral vision, and anything that looks like it might be unstable, powerful, large, sharp, loud, high-pitched, pathogenic, decaying, or in a rival tribe) must be evaluated by our brains. Potential threats cause tension (alertness): in the event of a real threat, that tension contributes to appropriate action (fight or flight); in the event of a false-alarm, tension is released.
The city is an environment overrun with false alarms - things that seemed threatening, but probably aren't (car alarms, traffic noise, fast-walking pedestrians, huge, angular buildings that look like they should fall over). The brain is overloaded, and must filter (ignore) many of these stimuli. It just can't handle them all. Here is a silly analogy: Suppose you live in a rain forest. Suppose you live in a part of the rain forest in which a thousand panthers lived. Suppose these panthers got together and decided to play a joke on you. Whenever you walk anywhere, they line up and hide in the bushes and growl and scream and flash their teeth at you. The first time this happens, you are scared out of your mind; you think your life is about to end. You keep walking - or running, probably - to your destination, and it happens again - and again - and again! The whole time, you are on the verge of a heart attack, and when you finally reach whatever part of the rain forest you're trying to get to, you're out of breath, panicked, and confused. What's with the jungle today?! But one of the nice panthers pulls you aside and says "Look, none of us is going to eat you, so you don't have to worry about that. However, I'll be honest. We think it's hilarious to see you jump back in terror, and we're kind of addicted to it. So whenever you go anywhere, we're going to keep doing this." That first night, you can't sleep. You're terrified. For a few days, you don't go anywhere, because you just hate the feeling of adrenaline surges, horror, anxiety, and near-miss heart palpitations. Then you tell yourself: They're not going to kill you. Just ignore them and get to where you're going. And you try it. And at first, of course, it's really scary. I mean, these are huge, loud panthers! But then you get used to it. You're always slightly on edge, but you've trained yourself to ignore panther-growling, teeth-flashing, and all of their nasty tricks.
This is what living in the urban environment is like. The buildings (probably) aren't going to kill you; the taxis (probably) aren't going to kill you; the fast-walking, angry-looking pedestrians usually won't kill you either. But you're always on edge. You've trained yourself to ignore all those false alarms, but there is a constant background noise of underlying tension.
The point is this: It takes a lot of mental energy to filter out (ignore) potential environmental threats, so that your brain can believe it's living in the world it wants to live in (a word that is not arrayed against you, its host). Wouldn't it be much more efficient - and conducive to mental energy - to shape the environment so that, in reality, it's not threatening, nor does it seem threatening? So that the mind doesn't have to filter anything out, and thus it can devote that energy to creative pursuits instead?
Just some thinking-out-loud on a few themes I'm trying to develop in more detail with the novel ...
Love,
graham
This is a picture of the Church of Akureyri (Akureyrarkirkja, á íslensku) – it’s the thing right in the middle of the bottom of the frame – with the two strange, boxy towers, and the clock. Usually when people take photographs of the Church of Akureyri, they frame it so these iconic towers are soaring into the sky (it’s pretty easy to get such a shot at the bottom of the very long flight of steps that go up the mountainside from downtown to the church’s front door). But I decided to depict it as humbled by the majestic mountain, and lost within a clutter of buildings, because of our experience there.
We went to the Church of Akureyri last Sunday, and, to our surprise, we’ll go there again this Sunday. We went with high hopes. This was a church famous for its architecture; it was a well-known icon in the town. It was right in the city center, at the heart of a city known for its culture, in a country known for being Christian since the year 1000. Even better, it’s an “Evangelical” church (which means Lutheran in Europe, as opposed to the rest of the church that Luther protested against) – this had to be a focal point of Akureyri’s vibrant spirituality.
We got there a little early, and to our surprise, only two or three other people had arrived by then. I jokingly said, “What if only twelve people show up today?” – of course, we expected hundreds of people to fill the sanctuary, many of them young, many of them female, many of them smart and curious and spiritually deep. Henry’s response was that there would probably be at least fifty, even if today was an “off” day for whatever reason.
When the service started, there were maybe twenty-five people in the whole place, including us. Six of these people, including us, were under the age of sixty. It became painfully clear that this was another waning European church, slowly drifting into oblivion. We expected the worse – painfully quiet and awkward music, half-hearted attempts to sing along. A short and hurried sermon from a preacher who just wanted to get through the day. All the pleasantries, all the ritual, but no passion; subsistence spirituality, at best.
So it came as quite shock when the organist belted out a huge wall of minor chords that shook the building – and then the choir began the first hymn with unfettered passion and strength. They practically shouted the hymn with crystal clear, indignant, and huge, gigantic voices. And every hymn was like that! And the pastor’s chanting voice – the name Steindór Andersen comes to mind – heavenly! And his sermon – spoken with such passion and energy and pleading insistence … while one of the elderly parishioners kept nodding of to sleep.
We felt terrible; we were probably the only ones seriously fired up by the sermon, and listening intently – but we couldn’t understand any of it. We were undeserving of the immensity of the choir and the organ and the sermon. We all were. The quality and passion of the music befit a congregation twenty times as large, and twenty times as engaged. Why did the choir sing with such energy, and why did the pastor preach with such fire, when no one was there to listen? We don’t know, but we’re going back to find out.
Henry asked his Icelandic teacher where all the young people go to church in Akureyri; we still wanted to meet them. She just laughed. They don’t go to church…
... but they do go to soccer games ... we're going to one now ... this could be a religious experience, stand by ....
Love,
graham
A solitary Chicagoan of the avian variety faces the cold blue east and takes stock of his life. I was sitting behind him on a bench on my last day in Chicago doing the same.
This is not a snowy yard. This is the interior of Iceland, as seen on our flight from Reykjavik to Akureyri. They don't call it the Land of Ice for nothing.
Go north, young man, the statue in our neighborhood seems to say, as the mountain agrees in silence. It feels very good to be here. I don't feel ecstasy, or wild excitement as if on vacation, but it feels good and right to be here. I feel like a Northern European (which I am), among Northern Europeans (which I am). Everything I've seen in our neighborhood seems to fit ... the traffic lights warn you before they turn green, and not just before they turn yellow. We can walk to a grocery store, an internet service provider, a church, a coffee shop, a used bookstore, the university, and a little path through the woods, all very easily from our apartment. Everything we need it within reach. There is a police station near by, but it seems quiet and empty, and I haven't heard a siren yet. When it looks like you are about to cross the street, cars stop for you. People are friendly, but not gregarious. People are quiet, but not withdrawn. The kids look happy and healthy; the outdoor cats look fat and fuzzy and playful. There isn't a single piece of trash on the ground anywhere. The houses are small; they are cozy, the right size. There are no beggars, no homeless. The high school kids working at the grocery store are friendly and kind. In sum, it seems like this is a place designed for humans, a place where you don't have to fight an existential fight against the urban environment ... or maybe you have to fight against the dark (the sun gets up all the way now by 10 and sets all the way by 5) and the cold (though it feels a lot better than Chicago), but these are natural elements - things that we secretly love the struggle against. I think this will be a good place to work with few needless distractions.
Love,
Graham
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