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To Giovanna, Alexander, Anton, Nina, Olav, Natalia, Metha, Snædis, Anna Margret,
Kristinn, and Ingibjörg.
6
A diary from the inside
In the beginning of each new week of the fall program of 2014 we published a short
story about the week that just passed at the LungA School.
It is written from the inside and it can be about anything. That’s all.
This is the collection of all those stories.
A diary from inside the
volcano
I dance around with a red drink in my hand. My face is covered in black and white paint and lipstick
and I can feel the sweat running down my stomach underneath the silk shirt I am wearing. I look up
and see loads of other people dancing, and I see the DJ swaying side to side a few meters above.
We are all inside an erupting volcano, surrounded by flames, lava, rocks, and glow-sticks. A volcano
created by the students of the school during the day. Build for this party, build to celebrate themselves and each other and build for the people of Seyðisfjörður to come and dance the night away.
At 03.30 the party ends. We stand outside Herðubreið and discuss whether to go on or go home.
Some begin to trickle in different directions. But the lack of warmth makes my body shiver and I decide to walk home.
I go there with one of the students. We walk in, and see two other students sitting in the kitchen. We
sit down with them and start to chat.
Others join us. Someone brings a record player to the table and jazz music start to flow around the
kitchen. Another brings a cat, a cucumber and gin and tonic. Drinks are passed around, while the
night outside the windows slowly becomes brighter and turns into day.
Still with paint all over my face I look at the unconcerned, smiling and talking faces at the table and
think back on this first week at the school.
I think about the Danish actor Christian Gade Bjerrum who facilitated a two-day workshop where he
pushed the students towards each other with yoga, acting exercises, and story telling. How he got
everyone to tell their life story several times and how each time something new found way into the
story. And I think about how he made them run around the public playground, surrounded by school
kids, and how some of them were a bit reluctant but soon ran like maniacs on the dark pebbles with
big grins on their faces.
I take a sip of my drink and the taste of pepper and spruce starts shooting in my mouth. I lean back
into the pillows and think of the two first days of the week. Before Christian’s workshop, before any
of the students knew anything about each other. How they were all so quiet and seemed so serious.
How they consumed the common meals silently. And how I wanted to say something to shatter
moments of silence and wanted them to feel good but was stopped by my own lack of social interaction skills.
I am not sure when it changed, when they started crawling slowly on the skin of one another. But I
remember the moment when I registered the first sign of a change coming. It was Tuesday evening
after dinner.
We all sat in a circle on the floor in the old theatre. Six lighted candles stood in the middle.
- Whenever you are ready to share your memory, you just talk talking, said someone and then silence spread in the dark.
Some looked down into the floor, some at each other, then at the floor again, silence. A minute
passed by.
- Who will be the first to speak, I wondered.
- Her? Or him? No. It has to be her over there.
Another minute passed. Still silence. Someone turned around and laid flat on his stomach.
- Maybe I should go first. Get it over with, I think and decide that when I have counted to ten, I will
begin to speak.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
- …No. Actually I would rather see who of them goes first.
Another minute passed by. My cheeks blushed in the heat of the room.
- What are they thinking? Are their hearts also beating faster? Do they also have sweaty palms?
Maybe they are thinking about how to start telling their memory in a proper way. Or trying to figure
out what the proper word for that feeling is in English.
While the thoughts ramble inside my head, somebody to my right suddenly coughs slightly. I look
in the directing of the sound and see a male face with a pair of red cheeks. The mouth of the face
opens and then he starts to speak.
A diary from inside the body
I walk towards the swimming pool. It is early Friday morning and I am going there to wake up. My eyes
are narrow but as I look to the top of the mountains surrounding the town they open up and from
what my eyes see I determine that winter has come to Seyðisfjörður.
Because there, on the top, it looks as though someone have sprinkled icing delicately over the former
so grey and dark mountain tops. The sight of snow gives me the shivers and I increase the pace of my
walk to get to the warm waters of the pool even faster.
A couple of hours later I walk towards the school. The mountain snow is still looking down at me, but
now it is accompanied by thick rain and wet winds. While my shoes and jacket gets darker I can’t
stop thinking that the drastic change in weather is an indication of something.
- Maybe it’s a foresight of the students’ performance tonight, I think before entering the school, still
with my neck bowed to protect myself from the cascades of rain.
Inside I go to the theatre with a camera over my shoulder.
Three female students and their teacher are sitting in a circle on the floor. In the middle of the circle
three other female students are supposed to dance authentically - like they feel inside themselves
- for ten minutes while they keep their eyes shut.
Or maybe dancing is not the proper word. Because there is no music and two of three are lying still
together spooning on the floor and only move slightly now and again, while the last of them is standing up a bit away. In my eyes she isn’t dancing either - rather moving and exploring her body.
It looks as though she is cramping up. Her body twitches, she breathes heavily and then suddenly
she is on the floor stretching her arms and her fingers and pushing the palms of her hands towards
the ground.
I feel like I am watching a two-meter tall person trying to get out of that undersized suit of skin in
which she is trapped. But I also feel like I am watching something I am not supposed to watch. That
I haven’t earned the right to look at something so personal and intense without giving something of
myself. So I get up and leave the room again while I am trying to figure out what kind of feelings she
was actually dancing out.
- Was it despair? Anger? Sadness? Or could happiness look like that? How about relief or sorrow?
Maybe privation? And is that really how you would look if somebody turned your body inside out after
two small weeks at this school, I wonder after my exit.
I decide that it has to be a medley of all of the feelings above. That each one of the feelings lives
strongly inside her, inside every one of the students, just as they live strongly inside me.
Where the first week was primarily filled with the anxiety of a new beginning and the pure joy of everything being new, this week some things have become everyday life. Patterns and routines starts
to show, so does the good and the bad sides. That is inevitable when you live and breathe 16 hours
everyday with a dozen people whom you don’t actually know while living in a place you don’t know.
And when I leave the room of dancers I imagine that the ambiguity of feelings twirling around inside
our bodies might actually look precisely like that, when transferred into a dance.
Afterwards I walk to the other workshop of the week. There is a smell of indoor sweat and from two
speakers electronic music is pouring out. Four boys and their two male teachers have slowly messed
the whole space up during the week. They have collected an arsenal of different kind of garbage that
is now mounting up in the room. A hockey stick, what used to be an office table, red pumps for air
mattresses, a long tube, light bulbs, balloons, cables, televisions, books and springs. But somehow
every single one of the six people in there have managed to find a spot for him to work. Work on the
instruments, they have being creating themselves during the week out of materials found around
town. There is a one-stringed guitar with a wheel, there is an organ made of slim pipes and seven red
pumps for air mattresses and there is a horn where the mouthpiece is a balloon taped to a cardboard
tube.
As the day turn into evening the boys throw their instruments in a car and drive them to The Green
House where their performance together with the girls form the dance workshop is going to be held.
I follow them on my legs with my computer in a clear plastic bag to protect it from the cold rain that
is still pouring down from a black sky.
I reach the green house. They are going over the details one last time before the performance and
nobody take any notice of me coming into the room.
In there I am puzzled about how different they all suddenly look from when I looked at them at the
school.
- Is it just the new space, that does it, or have they put on the mask of the performer because they
suddenly stand in the real world and, within a short while, shall perform in front of real people they do
not know. It seems like a completely different thing, even though we just moved across the street, I
ruminate.
Now the intense performance and feeling I saw in the safe, closed space of the theatre will be something for all to see. Are they nervous about that? Or are they nervous if no one will show up for the
performance? It doesn’t seem that way while they stand there in the dark of the room where the
band of boys sit like a wall behind them with panty hoses over their faces.
People start to show up, and suddenly the room is filled with stories, dancing, figures made of bodies,
movement, music, and the sound of a one-stringed guitar and an organ of seven red pumps for air
mattresses.
A bottle of whiskey is passed around the room and everybody is invited to close their eyes and dance
like a whiskey would dance, while the band plays their home-made instruments and the music builds
up and reaches a climax and ends.
The light is turned on and the sound of relief, that only a success can produce, spreads across the
room. So I put my camera down and look around the room and I smile. Because I realize that the snow,
the wind and the cold coming to Seyðisfjörður is not a sign of anything else than September will soon
turn into October.
A diary from inside the past
I am sitting in my room staring out of the window and into the dark night. In the misted window glass
the shadow from a plant dances. But besides that and the glowing streetlights, the only thing I can
see is the shining city sign at the foot of the mountain showing that this is:
SEYÐISFJÖRÐUR
As I sit there I feel strange. It is as though a feeling of uneasiness have taken resident in my stomach
and mind for the first time since I arrived in this town more than a month ago. The feeling came from
a conversation via Skype I had a bit early the same day with a person from back home whom I mostly
consider as a persona from my past.
But suddenly the person contacted me again and there we were, sitting in two different time zones
talking to each other through our computers.
The conversation itself was fine, it was nice hearing the person’s voice again, seeing the person’s
face so that was not the problem. The problem was that she reminded me of something I really had
not thought about up until that moment. And that was the world outside Seyðisfjörður, outside the
LungA School.
The conversation reminded me of my home, of my past, of my life. It reminded me of myself, and the
world I ran away from, when I ran here.
And right there, after living in this isolated cooking pot for one month, I was suddenly sucked directly
back into reality, and I was reminded that the “real life” awaits me when this fall program is through
in two months.
That was what I was sitting there thinking about this late night. And then I came to think about the
students of the school.
As well as me they were sucked back to reality, their life outside the school, their past and the life
that awaits them after the fifth of December. But they were not sucked back by a Skype call but by
telling the story of their life to one other student.
Paired in two each student had a whole day to tell their whole story to the other person in the pair
and when finished they switched. They could do as they pleased. The student not telling his story
listened, asked questions and wrote and drew the life journey on a long piece of paper as the story
allowed. Some did it in the light hours, and others sat up for a whole night in room with a lighted candle and just talked and listened. Talked and listened. To look back at their pasts and try to recognize
patterns and continuities, so they maybe would become more conscious about their actions in the
future.
I didn’t get to hear any of the stories, so I cannot tell you anything about it. It was only for the four
ears of two persons to hear. But I couldn’t help thinking about what they were telling each other and
what they wrote down. Maybe they are also here to get away from something back home. And in
those thoughts I imagined how one skeleton after another just fell heavily out of their closets.
How intimate was it? Did they cry while telling about themselves? Why were their cheeks red when
they came out of the rooms in which they sat while telling the story? What did they actually tell?
Perhaps they told about unrequited love and how their young hearts has been torn apart by big
loves? Or about their relationship with their parents? How they were bullied in school? Loneliness
maybe? That painting, soccer or filmmaking is their biggest passion? That they have doubts about
their sexuality? Doubts about themselves? Their lack of self-confidence? Their desperation about
not knowing what to do with their life? Their love for chocolate? Or how their older siblings always
tried to fool them into doing disgusting stuff like eating an earthworm?
But no matter how hard I tried to imagine it, I probably wasn’t even close to naming half of their stories, neither the good nor the bad ones.
Sitting in my room staring out into the dark night, I considered whether to look into my own closet of
skeletons. I didn’t though and instead I took a deep breath and shook my head and decided it was
time to go to bed.
Still with the strange feeling inside my body I came to think of the saying: “you can run, but you can
not hide”.
- It is probably true, I thought.
- But maybe sometimes it is all right to go for a really long run before you turn around and run back
and deal with whatever you are running from. That sometimes it is okay to hide just for a little while.
A diary from inside the process
I am sitting at the breakfast table. It is Saturday, and suddenly she walks in. Guided by another student she slowly fumbles her way into the kitchen with her arms stretched in front of her as if she is
searching for the light switch in a dark room. And in way that is precisely what she is doing.
Because over her eyes sits a black blindfold as she has decided to live like a blind person for 24
hours. Just because she would like to try it out. And I am thinking: sure, why not?
Then I start to think about how little it actually takes to change a lot. That it just takes one other
person one dark night to fall in love, one mistake behind a steering wheel to end somebody’s life and
become a killer, and just one blindfold to lose your sight.
And then a light dawns on me. Because exactly the idea of making rules and changing small things
to get to end up with something complete different from what you first expected is very much what
the entire week has been about.
In the week’s workshop the two teachers made the students focus on the process instead of the
goal. On the making for the purpose of making. Creating from one’s intuition instead of one’s intention. The final product was not the most important thing. The most important thing was the road up
until the final product - the ideas, the worries, the dreams, the doing.
Oh, so you don’t have a high-tech Mac-computer? Then just do something in the Paint-program
on your old, white Toshiba laptop. It does not matter, it is not important. Just do something and see
what comes out of it.
That is what I am thinking about as I sit there at the breakfast table and dig sleep out of my eyes.
Then the blindfolded student gets up. Once again she is helped on her way around the house. She
puts on a neon green jacket, gets her towel and swimsuit - she is going to the hot tub at the swimming pool.
- I just want to feel the bubbles, she says as she fumbles slowly out of the door.
Then I start to think about what all the old, Icelandic people at the swimming pool will think when
this girl will suddenly walk pass them blindfolded in her bathing suit. And I think about how stupid
it actually looks but at the same time makes so much sense to do. If there is something you would
like to do, do it. Do not care about what old, Icelandic people or any others would think about it. It is
a pretty mundane remark, I say to my self, but comes to think of a song by the Danish band Iceage
wherein it says:
Whatever I do/
I don’t repent/
I keep pissing against the moon
That reminds me of the behaviour of the students throughout the week. I wonder how the two teachers managed to change so much in five days, and about what have happened since the students
started at the school only four weeks earlier. Back then they sat quietly together and politely ate
their food. And now suddenly they are walking around blindfolded in town. While others are taking it
even further.
Like the 18-year old, Icelandic student who is living away from her parents for the first time in her life.
How she cut a smiley face in a watermelon and took it up into the mountains and smashed it with her
bare hands before eating a piece of the melon and making it all into the most unbelievable film I have
seen for a long time.
Or the female student who had been painting meticulously on three printed portraits of herself
throughout the whole week. Five minutes before their exhibition the three portraits are hanging side
by side on a white wall. But then she decides to take of all her clothes and throw black paint on the
portraits and the wall, so it runs down her naked arms and hands before she puts on her clothes again
while receiving an applause from the various spectators. I am not sure I understand why the hell she
did it, but apparently it was something she just had to do. It was part of her, part of her process, and
then it is important to do.
Because sometimes all you want and all you need is just to feel the bubbles.
A diary from inside the light
I wake up and lift the curtain a bit to look out the window. Outside it is just as dark as when I went to
sleep. I wonder if I woke up to early and look at my telephone to see what time it is. 06.30 - just like
every other morning.
So I drag on some clothes, put my blue swimming trunks inside my white towel, throw it over my
shoulder and walk to the swimming hall surrounded by the heavy darkness.
Inside, the bright blue colour from the bottom of the swimming pool lights everything up and when I
break the surface of the water I forget that it is still dark outside.
But the instant I leave the swimming hall an hour later, I am once again reminded of the time of the
day. It is morning, it is cold and it is still dark.
- And it will stay dark and only get darker, while I am here, I say to myself as I walk back to eat breakfast with the smell of chlorine on my skin.
In the candle-lit kitchen people slowly starts to show up as the hand of the clock passes the number 8. Suddenly the room is full of more than 20 people. That’s about one third more from the usual
number of people at the school’s breakfast tables. But we have extra company this week. Besides
three workshop holders we also have five students and one teacher from the Danish Folk High School
Krabbesholm living and working with us.
For a moment I step inside my own head. From there I look around the kitchen, where people are
sitting, eating, talking and drinking. I start to think about how much the energy and the synergy in a
group of people can change, when someone new is added to the group. Of course the level of sound
increases as more voices are added to the mix, and the amount of activities going on is naturally also
getting bigger as there are more brains to think and more hands to lift.
But people’s position and role within the group also change. Some people start to talk to new people,
and take a break from the old ones. Some people move around in the imaginary hierarchy, some talk
more at gatherings and some talk less than they usually do. Some disappear into a shadow, others
start shining with a new glow. Maybe the reason is just as simple as the fact that some like a lot of
people and some really don’t. No matter what, everything changes.
Then I come to think of how cut off from everything we are out here, how far we have moved away
from the rest of the world in just five weeks. And how that world suddenly comes thundering like a
tidal wave, when someone from the outside enters into the bubble we have created in this little town.
It is a tidal wave that will leave everything in a different condition, when it pulls back and disappears
after the week is over and the amount of people at the LungA School again is back at normal.
But these guests have brought something with them from the outside. Something that is slowly
saying farewell for a period here below the mountains, I think and look out the window, where the
morning darkness has disappeared for now.
They brought the light.
Literally.
Two of the workshop holders have brought it with them from London and is using it in a workshop
called ‘Glowing Bodies’. And the timing could not be better as the days are crumbling and vanishing
with a only more rapid pace.
They have brought materials that can mirror light, reflect light and project light and with them they
are going to design and create costumes that can play together with different sources of light in
performances at their exhibition. It is on Friday.
And we get to Friday.
I sit in the dark and suddenly a sharp light is turned on and someone is lying inside a plastic bag and
is projected up on a big white screen. Then someone inside the bag starts to move, and slowly she
escapes the plastic bag like a foetus escapes it’s mother and this whole conception is projected as
shadows on that big white, bright screen.
The foetus disappears and a recorded story of a guy who hung himself is coming out the speakers.
The story ends and then a new shadow in a self-made costume is dancing slowly inside a big, orange
circle of warm light.
After more sound and vision we all get up from our seats and walk outside, where we can ascertain
that the darkness has return. In that darkness I see a silver mushroom. When I direct the light of my
torch towards it, it starts to glow. Then it starts to move, dangling slowly from side to side.
I stand there in the darkness and look at this silver mushroom swaying by the water and I smile over
the crazy scenario and I get proud and puzzled by how much these students can create, how brave
these young humans are and how far they can go in only five days.
And while still smiling, I remind myself that no matter how dark it is, there is always a light, and it never
goes out. You just have to use your torch to find it.
A diary from inside Elton John
I am walking on the asphalt road up the mountain towards the city of Egilsstaðir. I am not going all
the way to the town, only a couple of kilometres up the mountain to look at the Gufufoss waterfall. I
have wanted to do that since I arrived here 50 days ago.
As I walk cars and trucks are whizzing past me in each direction at regular intervals. To my left the
river is raging more than usually because of the snow that fell the day before and now is melting,
running down the mountainsides. The wind is blowing into my ears, and I start to freeze my hands. I
put them to my mouth and blow air into them.
Then I begin to sing an Elton John-song:
Mars ain’t the kind of place
To raise your kids
In fact, it’s cold as hell
The song is called Rocket Man. And for no particular reason I replace Mars with Seyðisfjörður inside
my head and think the lyrics suit pretty great this day, while I put my pale hands into the pockets of
my red jacket.
It annoys me, that I can’t remember any more lines from the song, because I want to see if the rest of
the song also fits with Seyðisfjörður, and I decide to look it up, when I get home.
But it strikes me:
- This is the first time in more than 14 hours I have said anything.
The reason for that is that today is the Day of Silence.
14 hours earlier we all sat in the kitchen of our home and one after one we put our voices into a glass
jar. When the jar passed me I put two fingers into my mouth and pulled out the voice as if it was a
little hair stuck on my tongue.
Others screamed their voices into the jar so intensely that the glass was misty on the inside when
the top was fastened.
But we did not only loose our voices, we were also encouraged to be as much alone as possible, not
to use computers, telephones or do anything else to escape the silence and the time alone. And we
should use that time to think. Sit and think. Be alone.
I looked around the room at all the silent students while thinking, that they would have no problem
being on their own and keeping silent.
- It is just 24 hours, it is nothing, I thought and went to bed.
As soon as I woke up the next day I realize that the Day of Silence has been given the wrong name.
The ticks from the wall clock are louder and more irritating than all other days. Suddenly I look towards the ceiling in surprise as what seems to be a herd of reindeer runs wild on the first floor. Cutlery
tapping into a white porcelain plate. And then the pipes in the common showers starts to growl again
and again. And again.
- What’s up with all the showering today, I think before I start my hike towards the waterfall.
After an hour I reach it. The water pours out over the dark rocks and together with the cold a web
of ice is created behind the falling water. I listen to the waterfall’s rumble sounding like something
coming from the depth of a throat.
As I stand there, in what reminds me of one big Anselm Kiefer painting, I begin to think about the
difference between sounds and noise. Is there any difference? And if so, is it whether or not it is a
human creation or a creation of the nature?
So, when the sheep, an animal, is bleating, it is a sound, a naturally created element, while the “sound”
the bell around its neck makes when the sheep is moving is noise, because the bell is created and
placed around the neck by humans. Or put in an other way – the water in a waterfall is creating sound,
while the water coming out of a showerhead slamming against a naked body and a tile floor is noise.
- Was there even any noise before the humans popped up on earth, created the word and began to
arrange the world, I think before my cold hands grabs me by the collar and pulls me back into reality
and I begin my descend.
I get home and it turns night. I go to the kitchen were everyone is sitting once again. They are talking,
and it is as though they are all talking more loudly and passionately than they did before losing their
voices. They seem really happy, almost ecstatic, as if they had been blind for years and then suddenly got the sight back.
I have no idea about what they been during the whole day, I haven’t seen them.
But one tells that he couldn’t take the isolation and took out his computer during the day, another
talked like usually, one had to sell a car and talked, while someone went to the post office with a note,
that said she was not allowed to use her voice today, but she would really like some stamps. And I
also get the explanation to why I could hear the tubes of the showers so often – people simply took
several showers to feel something against their bodies since it was also prohibited to have physical
contact.
I try to understand the importance of physical versus verbal communication but all the sudden words
in the room makes me dizzy. So I walk back to my room. There I come to think of the Elton John-song
again where I open my computer and find the lyrics for it. Four lines hold my attention afterwards:
I miss the earth so much
I miss my wife
It’s lonely out in space
On such a timeless flight
As I sit there I can’t decide whether or not I think those lines fits with my idea of Seyðisfjörður. And I
am not even married. But I know that it can get lonely out in space.
A diary from inside the cult
I am standing by the river that runs into the fiord that runs into the ocean they call the Norwegian Sea
that is a part of the Atlantic Ocean.
From my spot there I see them coming. Walking towards me. Four guys. All dressed in similar white
suits acquired from the town’s fish factory where the workers usually work in them, because they are
supposed to be impossible to freeze in. Those warm, white suits are perfect for the mission the four
guys are about to begin.
- They look like someone from a cult, I think while looking at the four white-dressed guys.
Sometimes it can actually feel a little bit like a cult out here on the brink of the world.
We are not worshiping any god or anything, but we are worshiping the idea of being here, being free,
being artistic, expressing ourselves. Sometimes it is as though this right here, at this school and in
this city, is all there is.
Like other cults we also live together in a house in a small town far away from everything, where nobody is keeping an eye with us, and nobody really knows what is going on. What I am writing right now
could be one big lie. You don’t know.
We also have our own rituals. We are not sacrificing any animals or striking our backs till the blood
flows or anything. But we are eating together three times every day at the same time, every Sunday
we have our film club and every morning we have an inspirational morning gathering in the theatre.
Also we are starting to look like each other. Not just by dressing up in similar white suits, we also
adopt different things from each other, which drag us closer together and make us more similar.
Some of the guys are letting their beard grow, others are sharing clothes, the Icelanders are starting
to speak English with a Danish accent, we often use the same words, like ‘beautiful’, and same expressions and the internal references are getting even more internal.
And like all other cults we do weird things that differentiate us from the normal world, like painting
ourselves in the face, dancing an hour before lunch every Monday and swimming in the ice-cold fjord,
while the snow is falling and the wind is blowing.
Speaking of the fjord I am still standing at my spot by the river observing the four white-dressed cult
members walking towards me.
Between them they are carrying a construction made of four big, blue barrels, wood, plastic and some
rope. The construction is a square with two thin wings made of planks with a couple of Coca Cola
bottles at each end of the wings.
The construction is a raft.
And the four white-dressed cult members wants to sail on the raft to a little island a couple of hundred meters out in the fjord and have a drink, a piece of bread and plant a flag made for the occasion.
They have spent the entire day building the raft and now they are going to conquer that island, for no
other reason that they would like to and that they never have been out there before.
And that is another thing about this cult, I think. That the members of it just do things for the sake of
doing. There does not have to be some kind of grand plan. If one of the students gets an idea of doing
something he or she will just realize it. There seems to be no limitations, nothing is too difficult or too
stupid to be done. So if you want to spend a day making a raft so you can sail out to a little island, you
just do it. There is nothing or no one to stop you.
The four cult members push the raft into the water. It makes a splash and when steady in the water
the first white-suited guy walks onto it and sits down. Then the second one. And the third one. And
then it is time for the fourth and last white-suited guy to go onto the raft.
- I’m gonna push you off a bit. Ready, he says and lifts the raft of the stones where it is stuck.
It starts to float and he tries to step onto it. But it is already to far away, so it gets out of balance and
starts tipping to the right. He jumps of it again and grabs some stones at the edge of the water.
At the same time another guy on the raft starts sliding helplessly into the water.
Now one guy is clinging to the rock with half of his body and white suit under water.
The other guy is in the water. Only his hat and head is sticking up. In cold desperation and as a reflex
he holds on to the raft that is about to float away. But then he lets go and swims to the stones in the
water’s edge. There, two people help him to get up onto dry grounds.
The two remaining guys are still sitting on the raft. They throw a string onto shore and the raft gets
moored to the stones just in time to prevent them from being taken by the stream.
After a few minutes the three most dry cult members sets of again. This time no one falls into the
water. They go under a low bridge, come out on the other side and sails steadily towards the island,
steering the raft with two home-carved oars.
A white four-wheel drive with four Italian girls stops. They step out of the car and take photos while
wondering about what is going on and why they guys out there are wearing the white suits.
- It really most look like a crazy cult to them, I think and laugh to my self.
Then after a few minutes of sailing the three guys reaches the island and plants a black flag in its soil.
They cheer loudly, waves and then sit down. From my spot on dry land I can’t see what they are doing
and I get a bit envious of their sacred moment out there.
Meanwhile the unlucky cult member has taken of his wet white suit and has unveiled regular clothes
underneath it. His brown pants and black shirt reveals that he is really not a cult member, but just a
pretty normal guy. A pretty normal guy whose clothes gets wet and his body cold, when he falls into
the river that runs into the fiord that runs into the ocean.
A diary
from
inside
the
apocalypse
I am standing on a mountain by a waterfall that is below another waterfall. It is raining heavily and my
holed running shoes are just about to drown.
In front of me is a girl. She is wearing a pair of white silk pants and a small blue top. I can see the top
because the light-blue kimono jacket she is wearing over it is open.
Her hair is wet and her cheeks have slowly turned red and warm.
She is dancing. Her hand and arms are swinging everywhere - in front of her and to the sides. She
bends her knees, gets up again. She punches the air, falls to the wet grass and gets back up. She is
trying to catch her breath and pants as she is trying. She is dancing. Like a mad woman, like it was
the last dance of her life.
And actually it is the last dance of her life.
Or at least it is supposed to look like it is the last dance of her life. Because when I zoom the picture
a bit out, I also see a short guy in a brown suede coat and a tall guy in a black coat. One is controlling
a camera, the other is holding an umbrella over that camera.
They are making a movie. A short movie called ‘Fin’. And they are doing it as a part of a workshop that
circle around a post-apocalyptic theme.
Right now, though, I have a hard time imagining that in a couple of days this beautiful scene and this
soaked dancer will turn blue and work as a symbol of a world that is going under.
- Cut, yells the guy with the umbrella.
He is the director of the movie and also a student at the school. He’s glasses are covered with raindrops and while shooting he moves to the music he made for this purpose and plays from inside a
plastic bag on the ground. He looks like he can’t be inside himself, as if something or someone is
trying to break out. Every move is like a small twitch or blast.
As I watch him I smile to myself, because I know those moves. It is the moves of extreme excitement,
the moves of exaggerated passion, and the moves of doing something that gives you so much joy,
that you want to do all of it at the same time, but you can’t so you get all your build-up energy out in
a physical way instead.
It amazes me that even after eight weeks of being under a constant bombardment of inspirations,
assignments, workshops, different people, ideas, sound, images and visions, that students still have
the energy and the lust to go fully and completely into almost every project they get thrown in front
of their feet. And as if that wasn’t enough they also still take initiative to make their own stuff on the
side, like making their own chocolate, building a whale, teaching each other how to dance, participating in the city’s theatre group and loads and loads of other things.
I mostly just go home, read a book, stare into the air and then fall asleep.
- Is it the age difference? Or is it really just because I am turning into a boring, old fart, who wakes
up early in the morning and who puts his clothes on the hangers instead of on the floor, I wonder and
look down myself and notice that I am wearing waterproof clothes and don’t really look that apocalyptic.
- Well, at least I still got some holes in my shoes, I think and shrug my shoulders.
The waterfall is roaring and the rain just makes it flare even more up than usually. Is this how he
imagines the apocalypse would sound, if a big meteor would smash into earth and kill everything that
breaths.
By the way, why is it that every time I think of the end of world, I think of a big meteor smashing into
our earth? Is it because of the stories of the dinosaurs? Or is it because that is how it happens in
Lars von Trier’s movie ‘Melancholia’? No. Wait. That can’t be, I haven’t even seen that movie. It most
be something else.
But how else could the world go under? Too much Co2 in the air? An enormous ash cloud from an
Icelandic volcano that would cover the sun for so long that all vegetation would die?
And why is it, as one of the two workshop holders pointed out earlier, that it is easier for us to imagine
the end of the world than the end of capitalism for instance? What is it that draws us to the apocalypse?
How would it even look? How could it even look? Could the earth suddenly grow a pair of sharp teeth
and eat itself? Could it be a rose that caught fire and burns until it vanishes and a new one grows? Or
could it maybe just be a girl in a light-blue kimono dancing intense in front of a waterfall?
Oh, speaking of, we better get back to the girl in the silk pants and the light-blue kimono by the waterfall. She isn’t dancing anymore. Now she is now lying in the wet grass with closed eyes and with
the camera and the umbrella hanging above her face.
She is done dancing. Actually she is dead. But the mountain is still standing and the waterfall is still
roaring. So maybe the world isn’t going under after all. Just her world. If so she used her last minutes
dancing. Dancing the last dance of her life.
A diary from inside the child
I am sitting beside him on a big, blue plastic barrel. I am his assistant. Actually I was supposed to walk
around with a hunchback and wear grey and brown clothes, he demanded it, but I forgot all about it,
and he has already mentioned it to me.
In front of us eight people sit at tables with papers and pencils in front of them.
- Why is it important to draw, I ask him loud enough for everyone to hear it.
- Because then you have something to do when you are bored, he replies and looks at me as if it is
the most well known fact in the world.
- And it is also good because you can draw your own world where you can do everything you want,
he adds.
I nod my head and look down at the papers in my hand.
The guy next to me lives just across the street in a blue house. He has blond hair and wears football
shoes. He is a kid. A nine-year-old kid. Right know he is facilitating a one-day workshop about drawing monsters for the students of the school.
A minute ago he walked around to every table to give individual advices to the students on how to
improve their monsters.
- Maybe try to draw wings and horns, he told just about everyone of them.
We have been at it for about half an hour, doing different drawing exercises, and now it seems as
though he is a little bit bored.
Or maybe it is just because of the candy he has eaten until now. I bought some candy on his desire
and found four bowls, so each table with students could get a bowl. But then he decided that all four
bowls should stand on his table so the students had to walk to him to have a piece. That also means
that the liquorice and the M&M’s are within an arm’s length of him.
Earlier in the week him and I had a meeting, where we talked about what we should do during the
workshop. It was his workshop and he should decide everything about it.
He said that he wanted them to draw monsters and to make a symbol to put on their drawings instead
of initials. He also wanted to have candy and music. And that was about it. The rest of the meeting he
spent fifty-fifty between showing me some of his own drawings of monsters and shooting me in the
face with foam rubber bullets from his toy gun.
So in fear of the workshop becoming a ten minute long sugar disaster, I sit down the day before – like
a real painstaking grown-up - and prepare to make it as perfect as possible. I come up with some
different drawing exercises, write them on a piece of paper and then I try to gather a bigger arsenal
of arguments of why the students should listen to and learn from a nine-year-old fellow.
My first argument is: just because.
My second argument is: kids are happier than grown-ups.
My third argument is: kids think differently, because they are not ruined yet.
But I don’t really believe that will convince anyone, so I go to Google and search for Picasso quotes.
Somewhere, sometime someone told me that Picasso once said something about kids and drawing.
SO I go to the search engine and write:
Picasso + quotes
Dozens of quotes from the bold painter pops up and two of them catch my interest. I write them
down and feel like an artistic authority is backing up the idea.
Back in the classroom I am still looking down at those papers. I am looking for the quotes. Oh, there
they are:
- “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up”, I read out aloud
and continue with the next one:
- “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child”.
Then I look in the direction of the teacher. He is looking down at the piece of paper he is drawing on
while stretching the other arm towards the bowls of candy. He gets fingers around a green M&M and
starts to pull it toward his mouth.
- Have you ever heard that before, I ask him.
He looks up, shakes his head and chews the green M&M.
- Okay, I say and ask him if he can remember what we decided to do next.
He ponder for a minute while looking at the ceiling.
- Oh, is it that they can just draw freely for 15 minutes, he asks.
But it is not time to free drawing. Actually we have never talked about giving any time to draw freely.
At this point I don’t realize that it is probably because he himself would like to have 15 minutes to do
whatever he wants to do, so I give the students a new assignment.
The nine-year-old teacher joins the assignment and starts to draw a leprechaun with a machine gun,
but suddenly he knocks over a cup of coffee that floods the leprechaun and colours it brown. When
I come back with paper to clean it up he has left the table and is pulling fabric out from the shelves.
He wants to make a costume for the following day’s Halloween party.
At this point I realize that he is a kid, that he is just a kid, and no matter how much I prepare, no matter
how big my arsenal of arguments is, he will still just be a kid. And kids don’t really care about arguments or perfection or predetermined exercises. Especially not when they have eaten candy for one
and a half hour.
- And why should they, I asked myself while looking at him.
He has fund a pair of glasses and placed them on the tip of his nose. He walks to every table, and
while looking over the frame he shakes everybody’s hand and says thank you for today. Now he wants
to reward the students.
We move all the tables to the side and put eight chairs in a circle. I start the music and people start
to walk around the chairs. In a moment I have to stop the music and everyone else have to sit down
on a chair as fast as possible, because we are one chair short.
I look at them walking with my finger on the pause button. They are all smiling while moving attentively, just waiting for the music to stop.
I have forgotten everything about the arsenal of arguments and Picasso. Right now there is no need
for arguments. I not sure the students learned anything about drawing, and I don’t think it really matters. Because I do know that they had some candy and that they have smiled several times during
the workshop. And that is sometimes enough.
Maybe we should all just act a bit more like children more often instead of painstaking grown-ups, I
think. Just play and draw monsters with big wings and horns. So we wont get bored, but instead create a world where we can do everything.
Then I press the button, and the music stops.
A diary from inside the whale
I am standing inside the stomach of a blue whale. It is Saturday and except for a few breaks I have
been in here for the last six days.
Right now I can’t see her but I know that somewhere in here with me there is a student. Maybe she is
lying on the red tongue or sitting down in the whale’s oesophagus.
Of course this is not a real whale, of course it’s not. It is just a room transformed into a whale by bunk
beds, painted paper, wire, cast and blankets.
It is the students final project and she has been inside the whale for weeks. I have only been helping
out, so she would make it in time. And it is almost time now.
In a couple of hours she and the rest of the students of the school are opening the doors to the hostel – their home - for the people of Seyðisfjörður. Because today they are having their last and final
exhibition at this first ever full program at the LungA School.
I am about to tape the last piece of dark whale skin over the window to the world and I come to think
about why we are actually doing this. Why we have been using weeks and energy on building a blue
whale well knowing that we have to take it down again in a couple of days for it to disappear in all
eternity. Why is it important, why do we do art, why do we feel the need?
I am not an artist, so I write one of the artists who taught at the school earlier in the programme and
ask her why she is doing art.
She answers that it is the art that makes her. That she does not have a choice, cause once it starts
to spew out of her, then it is the only thing that exists.
I recognize that feeling from when I am standing in the stomach of the blue whale taping it’s skin
on the walls or twists steel wire around itself to make the teeth stick in the open mouth. Inside the
whale I feel safe, like nothing can touch me. Inside the whale nothing else exists. There are no wars,
no annoying people, no rain, no time, nothing.
Well, that is not exactly true, because now it is time for the exhibition to start. The hostel is full of
people from town eating canapés and drinking drinks.
Downstairs bells ring and the door to room number 13 opens up. In the room a bright-coloured body
painted student is dancing desperately around. She bangs into the walls, fall to the floor and every
time she hits something a little bit of paint from her skin comes off.
On the door sits a little slip of paper with someone’s red handwriting on it:
- I have been fasting for 3 days to experiment what it does to my body and mind and how it affects
my movement, the paper says.
After a while the bells are ringing in the kitchen. Everyone gathers up in there instead.
On a bench in the corner sits a student with an empty wine glass on the windowsill. Next to the glass
lies to small tubes with a red liquid inside them. That’s blood. Her own blood, eight millilitres, tapped
the day before at the town’s hospital.
- I am going to drink my own blood, she says.
She pours the blood into the wine glass, rotate it in her hand and drinks the blood in four sips.
- That was it, she says.
No further explanation is given, no reason for the blood drinking, just the act. Then people get up and
start to walk around again.
I also start to walk again. As I walk by room number 13 I see the fasting, body painted dancer as she
gets a glass of orange juice and almost explodes of joy.
I continue upstairs and while travelling this El Dorado of crazy students and their art works I come to
think of a conversation I once had in Copenhagen with a musician a late hour in the trashed music
venue he and his friends took care of that night.
- We are doing all of this because it is closer to our version of the perfect world, he said and pointed
into the room where people were partying and listening to music.
- It is an illusion of reality. The reality where I am first at the hospital to visit my demented grandfather who is dying, and afterward go home to my stepfather who needs a new heart to keep living. Of
course my illusion of the perfect world is much more beautiful than this one right here, but this one
right is much more beautiful than the real world.
Maybe that is also a reason for doing art, I think. To create a universe where you decide everything,
where you are the one on top and everyone else is under your rule. You decide what colors should go
on the painting and how the wooden sculpture should be bended and what song you want to sing in
your Buddhist temple and what story you want to tell in your film or zine. And maybe this exhibition
is how the perfect world would look if I could take all 11 students’ visions of that world and throw them
into a melting pot and stir it constantly for 11 weeks.
It is almost two hours since the exhibition started. The amount of people at the exhibition is decreasing, and I go alone into a room and sit on one of the students’ beds. A big flat screen television loops a
short movie of a student who has filmed herself in her underwear as she sits at, stands by and walks
around a sort of a makeup table with a depressed look on her face and body language.
On the floor lies all the long blond hair she trimmed down to a few centimeters days before and in the
corner of the room a computer display Facebook-messages with all the nasty things people in town
said after she took of the hair.
I look at it a couple of times with pride of these young human beings’ bravery. Then I walk to the
kitchen. Only people from the school is left in the building. Some are preparing dinner.
I walk upstairs, go into the whale to say goodbye and close the door behind me. Few minutes before
people were laughing and puffing and blowing from crawling around in it, but now the only sound left
is a Youtube-video with underwater and whale sounds.
I crawl into the mouth, down the tongue and into the oesophagus. On my knees and elbows I slalom
my way through plastic bags and Coca Cola cans until I reach the stomach. There I lay down on my
back and just before I fall asleep, I think, that maybe the stomach of a whale isn’t the most beautiful
illusion of the perfect world, but it is much more beautiful than the real world.
A diary from inside the end
I am outside. It is morning and I am walking towards the hostel that has been my home for the past
three months. During the night the rain has made the snow disappear and left a glistening floor of ice
behind for me to walk on.
I know that when I get up there the house will be quiet and dark - and completely empty. Because an
hour before walking here I hugged and said goodbye to the last student to leave the town, just before
he crawled into the small bus that would take him to the airport.
Never in my life have I seen somebody travelling with so much luggage as him. Speakers, a keyboard,
two major bags, two backpacks, a camera bag, a pillow and some of the drawings and paintings he
created while been at the school.
I teased him about it and realized that I am going to miss that and all his other oddities. I going to miss
knocking on his door to wake him up in the morning, and I am going to miss his comments about me
eating like his grandfather, when I eat of my knife instead of the fork at dinner.
Just like I am going to miss all the other students and their human oddities.
I am going to miss looking at their grumpy faces with my own grumpy face in the morning while eating
porridge, drinking coffee and struggling to wake up. And I am going to miss their little specific sounds
and grunts, their dancing to Beyoncé at all times, their stupid, internal jokes, their screaming in the
hallway at night, their bravery, their Egyptian Rat Slapping, their feet dragging across the floor, and
passing them the salt and pepper every second minute. And I am going to miss their presence in the
sauna, their slowness when picking out vegetables at lunch, their discussion about feminism and
pubic hair, their big white Toshiba, their smell of incense, their red faces after an hour of Lunch Beat,
their hugs, their eternal cursing, their watching of horrible troll and zombie movies, their lateness at
the morning gatherings, their laughter, the fighting over the best pizza slices every Tuesday, looking
into their eyes, and the sound of them walking across the floors above me.
Actually the last student was supposed to leave and fly home to Reykjavik with all of his luggage the
evening before, but the plane was cancelled due to bad weather. That is just how it is here. Nature
rules. I am also going to miss that, miss being reminded that no matter what is going on, nature can
decide to close of the road over the mountain with snow or create so much wind that the ferry can’t
arrive.
I am reminded of this as I walk the last couple of metres to the hostel with my arms sticking out to
both sides to keep balance and myself from slipping on the ice.
Once inside the hostel I turn on the lights and walk down to the end of the empty hallway to the
laundry room where a hill of linings is slowly getting smaller. I open the washing machine, take out the
clothes, hang it up and hug a new pile of dirty linings to throw it into the machine.
A smell of one persons perfume and then another person’s aroma seep up in my nostrils and I get a
little bit nostalgic. I know that when I will take the linings out of the machine again in one hour and
forty minutes the smells will have changed to the smell of wet lining washed in perfume free detergent. Then I throw the white linings into the machine and press start.
I walk to the kitchen to wait for the washing machine to finish and starts to wonder about if anything
has changed during these three months.
Yes, my hair and beard has grown longer, I might have lost a little weight from swimming three times
a week and it has gradually become colder and darker outside. But I have also felt like something
inside me has changed to the better, even though I am not sure what it is. Maybe it is because this
place seems more pure in all aspects. There is a lot less noise here, a lot less to distract you and your
mind and steal your time and energy. Instead it gives you energy and reinterpret the way you look at
different things. Like what is beauty. My understanding of beauty has changed, I tell myself, in a good
way, so I look at more and different things and more and different people as being beautiful.
In some strange way it just seems as though my bones are finally coming to sit in their right places
after having been dislocated for a while.
But as the time of my own departure from Seyðisfjörður creeps closer I start to doubt if anything
actually has changed or if it is just because I have been living and breathing inside a magical bubble
that is this school, this town, these people for those three months. What if the bones get dislocated
the second I step out at the Central Station in Copenhagen and arrive at the place I consider my
home? What if I will fall directly into the same hole I start to crawl up from when I decided to go here?
What happens when all the people, all the money, all the influences, all the lights and all the noise
comes back?
And if my look upon what is beautiful and what is not has changed, does that then mean that I will
look at the things and the people I thought of as beautiful before going here as not being beautiful
anymore? Or will they just stand out as being even more beautiful than previously?
I guess I will not be able to answer that question before it actually happens in a couple of days. Maybe
I become the exact same person. Shave off my beard and try to create a career again. I really don’t
hope so, I would rather be dirty and happy.
I don’t know.
All I know right now is that all the laundry has been washed and that I am going to miss the students.
Hey, I said, I am just going to miss you.
Yes, I am talking to you Giovanna, Alexander, Anton, Nina, Olav, Natalia, Metha, Snædis, Anna Margret,
Kristinn, and Ingibjörg.
Even though you really irritated me sometimes and probably vice versa, I really hope that right now
you are all walking around out there feeling proud of what you have done and created and gone
through the last three months. And while I have your attention I just want to say thank you. You also
helped my bones to get back to their right place again. Maybe they will get dislocated when I return
home, but at least now I know that they can actually be where they are supposed to be and that is a
nice feeling.
I would like to give you a good advice, seem really clever, you know, but I can’t, and I am sure you will
all figure it all out yourselves. But just remember to be good humans towards other humans.
Now the school starts.
See you in the spring of 2015
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