Category: Observations Page 1 of 2

Some time’s been spent since my last post—an apology for that lapse is probably appropriate. But I’m not terribly sorry, in the end; I’ve been uptaken by an unexpected surfeit of things to do with other humans in, y’know, Norway.

In the middletime, though, some things happened: jul happened, the Paris Climate Agreement happened, the deflating, heart-grinding (and sadly unsurprising) Tamir Rice decision happened, the turn of the year happened, and vinterbading, winter-swimming, with it, the state of the union (or the address of the same name) happened, the Iran Deal happened, the national embarrassment on display in the American GOP primary race continued to happen, and the ceaseless becoming of seven billion odd lives the world over continued to happen forth. Among other happenings too numerous to list. (I’m no Whitman, after all.)

And snow, at last, in Oslo (and elsewhere hereabouts) happened, which gave rise to my first skiing here in the heart of this ski-going land, amongst this ski-going people.

I decided, when I left the US to live here this year, that I would not, barring emergency, return for the whole calendar. I’m gonna be there, I said; no pond-hopping for the holidays & such (unless we’re talking about real ponds on sidewalks or mountainsides in Norway). And so I stayed over the holidays, that most family-y time of year. But I’m fortunate to have friend & folk here, and so I had an ordentlig norsk jul, first and foremost—a “proper Norwegian yule.” In some ways this wasn’t so different from a proper American Christmas in my family, but with some substitutions: my (little more distant) Norwegian family for my American family; ribbe and pinnekøtt for the lutefisk and empanadas I’m accustomed to in the Midwest; Norwegian for English; among a few other things. But because I offered a lot of words to julestemning in advance of jul itself, I won’t dwell long on the topic (and indeed, in Norway, it seems the anticipation of juletida is as exciting as the day—or run of days—itself. It’s a very fine time, at any rate. Or, rather, not at just any rate, but at just that rate, just that unhurried, rounded, pine-scented rate at which it transpires, bathed all in that particular amber light only such an angle to the sun offers. The 60° solstice of the north. As my fellow Rover John Hanson likewise observed, the winterdark wasn’t so challenging as I had expected. That rare quality of light was more than enough compensation (and notably, the sun doesn’t entirely forsake Oslo as it does the Arctic parts).

Despite the latitude, though, and the expectations that it encourages, no snow fell on this Norwegian jul. A “brown” Christmas, with Charlie or without. This, it turns out, isn’t entirely unusual in these parts. Iowa’s like that too. But winter is coming, they kept telling me; just wait for January and February. All but guaranteed. Yet, I was skeptical, as a witness to last year’s absurdities in Washington state—snowless Cascades and bare Olympics the winter long (a gravelly run in February was all Mt. Baker, with its world-record-for-snowfall, had to show for it). But winter has come, generally speaking, to the north, and in some places (as in Bergen where I write this), moreso than usual. Bergen, as I think I’ve said before, is a sister-city to Seattle, and for good reason: same famous fish market, same-ish landscape, same sort of just-off-kilter counter-cultural attitude (combined with a secret hyper-participation in mainstream consumerism, let’s be clear), and same climate. Not a lot of winter snow in either town; rather, a lot of winter rain. But Bergen has been below freezing for a couple weeks now, and I arrived here to a winter wonderland, which Bergen isn’t wont to witness. A whiteout hike up to the highest of Bergen’s seven peaks, Ulriken, proved a rare treat (see below). Only one slip, though, despite the preponderance of ice (and a little knee-blood for proof).

And Bergen isn’t the only coastal city offering a season’s special: I paid a visit to Kristiansand, where snow tends to fall, but not in the quantities this year’s provided. I took my skis along and had my first go of the year, which was also my first ever ski with that special feeling, half-invented, that comes with skiing in Norway, heightened, surely, by the sense of being among people whose ancestors, some of which are mine, too, are partly credited with the invention of the modern ski. Even in Kristiansand, a place hardly known for skiing, the park was chock full of folk & families out on the trails. Toddlers, too, trying their feet with startling skill (I gladly confess I was passed more than once by a little guy skating gracefully along while I labored, unpracticed, in the classic traces). But in Østlandet—the eastern, snow-covered part of Norway—the prevalence of skiing is almost joke-high. I’ve been gently tormenting a ski-going friend in Seattle with images of all the people I see carrying skis on the Oslo subway on my way home from a this or that, all hours of the day (and on Saturdays and Sundays, on the 1-line out to Frognerseteren or the 6-line out to Sognsvann, you’d think you’d the “skiers-only” sign). To boot (pun intended?), Oslo kommune maintains a network of lysløype, lighted trails, that skiers can enjoy well beyond the few hours of winterdaylight. I put in my first go in Oslo the other night, before this two-week stint away—14 km, entirely after dark. And though I wasn’t alone by any means, I evaded the thick crowds that jam the trails on weekend middays. Instead, I skied at my own pace, from Holmenkollen to Ullevålseteren and down to Sognsvann, amid pine and spruce, laden with snow, with only the occasional hei hei to skiers-by and the squeak of the well-below-zero snow (°C, that is), along with the sweep of easy wind, av og til, and (I’m can’t resist) downy flake. You might say I stopped by woods on a snowy evening, with frost (literally) in on my mind—and in my beard. But whose woods are these? I didn’t have to think; I knew. No villager in some distant house owns these trees. These are the people’s woods, farmhouse near or no. All this but a ten-minute train away from the heart of the Viking capital. A lovely way, I think, to winterize.

Meanwhile, “outside,” the world rages on. The Paris Climate Conference culminated in a (supposedly) landmark international agreement, necessitating a welcome update to my environmentalism presentation. President Obama gave his final State of the Union address (surprise!, it’s “strong”), as well as a pretty interesting interview, in some ways, with NPR’s Steve Inskeep, despite the latter’s indecipherable cause (by which I mean his series of very strange facial expressions), and the expected-but-nevertheless-dispiriting decision not to indict the officers responsible for the shooting death of Tamir Rice. I have comments on all of these, but I’ll spare most of them for other times; I will say something about the Tamir Rice case, though. And it’s this: I can’t understand it. The Grand Jury, at the (unfathomable) recommendation of the county prosecutor, decided not to indict. I guess I’m not entirely certain, really, what the fundamental task of a Grand Jury is, but it seems to me that theirs is not the same as that of a trial jury; theirs is not to determine guilt or innocence, but to determine if the shadow of doubt is long enough to warrant a formal trial, in which guilt or innocence can then be named. I am absolutely baffled by the conclusion that there is insufficient tension between the statements of the Cleveland officers and what’s visible on the security videos. Not even a handful of seconds transpire between the aggressive arrival the police car and the end of a twelve-year old life. Nobody else nearby. Nobody under direct threat. What is it that motivated the police response that drove a cruiser up over the curb, onto the grass, but feet from the “potential” threat, rather than a slower, more spacious approach, even a half-hearted attempt at discerning the reality of the situation from some distance safer for everybody? It appears to my untrained eye that the conditions of a perceptible threat (mistaken or genuine, but let’s grant that the officer really did feel threatened) was precisely generated by the arrival and push of the officers themselves. I recognize we have an incomplete, choppy, uncertain video as evidence; I realize that in the moment of duty, with deadly weapons potentially at play, the decisions that police make are pressurized and difficult. But I’m running the scenarios through my head in which the officers may have attempted a humane approach to the situation, grasping for some imagined version of the timeline in which what the officers say somehow holds together. But I come up empty. I can’t understand it. I can’t get my head around it. And in reading about the case again, I was reminded of John Crawford III, whose name gets lost amid the Garners, Rices, Browns, and Grays. Similarly “armed” with a toy gun, similarly escalated by a highly aggressive, unquestioning arrival of deadly police force. It seems like we’re long beyond the time when we ought to have reassessed what we mean by “police,” reevaluated the power we give such people with so much less consequence or comeuppance than we give civilians, reconsidered the supply of get-out-of-jail-free cards that seem to fall out of their blue sleeves in droves (not to mention the embarrassment of put-others-in-jail cards that are more numerous still). I’m not in any way anti-police. A just and well-trained police is absolutely important for a modern democratic and, if we’re gonna have it, capitalist state. But I’m certainly not convinced that what we have, on average (there are, of course, serious and meaningful exceptions) is the police culture befitting a democratic republic such as ours. Even so, I tell Norwegian students that I have hope, that the conversation about police reform, about racial profiling, about becoming aware of our implicit biases, about retraining our forces toward de-escalation rather than reaffirming the knee-jerk lapse into aggression and intimidation (i.e., escalation) that we’re used to, and that we not-accidentally celebrate in film and fiction (I write this as a big fan of The Wire)—these conversations are happening in ways and at levels we’ve not seen in some time, thanks in part to #BlackLivesMatter. Still, I wonder what, say, fifty years will show. What sort of police culture (and, by extension, community culture) will we have built? What will we have affirmed?

All this in the context of a political primary season that defies the understanding. My routine message to Norwegian students (and teachers, moreover) who wonder has changed over these three, four months. In September, even into mid-October, I kept chuckling as I confidently asserted the imminent disappearance of that monster who leads the GOP pack. A clown, said I; a side-show. Not long now and he’s gone. Then November. Still (though a finger in my collar now), I held the same tack. So December. Then that embarrassing, despicable call to ban all Muslims from entering the country (nevermind those millions who live here already?). That’s the line, thought I. No one will stand for this who has a mind to think, or, at the very least, a heart to care—or half a heart, even a sputter of empathy in one’s bloodstream. And yet, if you’ll pardon the glib Princess Bride reference, he gains. Nothing for it now but to remind ourselves that this is still the primaries. That man is not running for president. He’s running to run, I tell them. The people responsible for this moment are a sliver of the manifold population, the mangfoldig befolkning in Norwegian (a rather poetic term). The whole, ungainly, irreducible population will never elect such a monster.

But my skin still crawls a little, and some days more than others. I had written a longer, drawn out reaction to this deepening embarrassment, but I’ll hold it back for other times and places. I was getting too worked up, a little too acidic for my purposes in these writings to comfortably ask you, dear readers, to keep reading. It defies description, in any case, and I tire somewhat quickly of the smell of a fire that rages on that sort of fuel. Better to build a birch fire, or toss in a pine-knot to scent the air. Evasion? Subterfuge? Perhaps. I’ll live with that for now. So, like Inigo Montoya, I won’t explain; there is too much. Let me sum up: I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know how the American populace has become so permeated with anti-intellectualism, with an excruciatingly high tolerance for ignorance (almost a celebration of it in some quarters). One theory I have is that Americans, in startling numbers, walk the country with an insufficient understanding of their own government, of its (necessary) complexity, much less the complexity of the world beyond our borders. We could say it’s the result of inadequate education. And it likely is, though I’d like to believe that even the most basic high school education ought to be sufficient to loosen the calcified deposits of fear in the veins. I had a decent enough education in my rural Iowa town, all things considered. Yet, at the same time, I graduated with zero sense of the politics of our time. I didn’t develop any thoroughgoing understanding of government or the political parties and apparatuses that help shape the lives of people until well into my college life. So certainly more can be done in many isolated places (like the one where I grew up) to encourage engagement. But then, my teaching philosophy has long been based on a belief that effective education requires willingness, and willingness (to learn, to ask, to apply, to wonder, etc.) may flow from another source, something more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and so forth. (Pardon that Romantic intrusion.) But I do mean that it’s as hard to locate, much less name, the source of the rampant anti-intellectualism that has gripped such broad swaths of the nation as it was for Wordsworth to name that feeling, or that form of knowledge, that he felt in memory and landscape. And in the case of the US, the grip of this almost (or fully?) willful form of ignorance is showing itself to have profoundly dangerous strength. I really don’t know. I had scratched out a lot of thoughts about the utter failure (in my opinion), in many parts of the nation, of churches and religious leaders to root out the almost open-faced bigotry that has gripped that mysterious and large group of voters who take the name “evangelicals,” but my strong feelings on that matter didn’t feel appropriate in this container. There are deeper, uglier reasons, I think, for what’s happening. They are tentacles of fear, especially fear of difference. Fear, frankly, of facing the reality of life outside of the halls of white-supremacy, whose walls are crumbling, however slowly. In my presentations I use a couple of quotations from writers who’ve helped me think through the depth of our struggle in the US. In one of them, Claudia Rankine reminds us that the “American imagination,” which is to say the American society, began in white-supremacy. “We” Americans don’t like to think that way about our own glorious history of equality and liberty and bravery and pluckiness. But it’s absolutely true: white-supremacy was in the original fabric, the raw materials, as it were, and it needs, I think, to be remembered so that we can recognize its legacies today and dismantle them. The other is by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who commented in The New York Times a couple years ago that “We,” by which he means African-Americans, “were never meant to be part of the American story.” It was a story written by white people for white people. Though from the beginning, Africans were there. So we need a new story. We know we need to re-write the American story (and we need to, and do, do it daily). The old story, false as it ever was, is slipping away, and with that slippage come the desperate gasps of the class that has inordinately benefited from the exclusivity of that story—an exclusivity bestowed only by birth, and the maintenance of a profoundly unjust system that favored that class of births, for no self-evident reason. Birth, that obvious mystery, unintelligible.

There are, to be sure, real threats at large, no matter what cross-section your slice of America reveals. There are. But without willingness to encounter difference (turns out, it takes a ton of work), we’re lost, we’re distracted, we strip ourselves of the ability to witness, and so to adjust. No one to drive the car. The pure products of America do indeed go crazy. It’s dangerous to live in a padded room.

And here I am, in Svolvær now, midway along the Lofoten archipelago, well north of the Arctic Circle, in January. (I’ve roved in the run of this writing.) I was up “early” to see the sun crawl up over the distant island peaks to the south . . . at about 10:30. It set around 2:00pm, and climbed, in its transit, only far enough over the horizon to lose its orange and gain a golden glow; no offer of that full spectrum of naked light in the noons we know to the south. I walked out to the end of the road (I’m drawn to the ends of roads), where a sculpture stands on an islanded pedestal some meters out into the water from where I stood. Fiskarkone, she’s called: the fisherman’s wife. She looks away from where you stand, raising her hand in a gesture of either farewell or longing. Or, if we were to glimpse the reality in the minds and hearts of the women of Lofoten over the ages, long and long, I suspect we’d see gestures far more complex than either farewell or longing can communicate. And far more powerful. And how marvelous that the statue looks away from the viewer—from the fast-land, one cannot see her face. Something to that, there is. Meanwhile, as I look over her shoulder to the ice cold Norwegian Sea, codfish dries behind me in droves, even in the sharpness of January, on long A-frame racks called fiskehesje, scattered throughout Svolvær. And into my mind wanders Elizabeth Bishop, who also once plied her trail toward the fisherfolk and knew something, almost, by dipping her hand in the ice cold seawater, something elusive that I think is helpful to consider:

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

And so, some images of these winterdays as they pass:

After a whiteout on the way up Bergen’s Ulriken, the sky opened up on the way down.

Bergen wears winter well.

Svolvær i januar. Ubeskrivelig.

Fiskarkona, seaward.

The season’s word in Norway is stemning—or, more specifically, julestemning. It’s all over (both the word and its meaning): the streets, the advertisements, the hashtags. It means “atmosphere”—stemning does, and julestemning means “Christmas atmosphere,” or, maybe closer to our American usage, “Christmas spirit.”¹ The latter doesn’t quite capture it, though: julestemning is somewhere in the quality of real space, the physical atmosphere at this special time of year in Norway, when the daylight hours are few (and fewer) and the quality of light is, in general, permeated by a soft (and softening) blue. It’s also permeated by a whole host of candles—Norwegians seem to be quite taken with candle-lighting as December rolls in like a fog. If ever you leave the house this time of year, you’ve got to check every corner in case you (or some nisse) lit a candle there. Or there. Or over there. Julestemning is, indeed, intentional: it’s a mixture of our collective will with the characteristics of the earth—a collaboration, of a sort, with the natural forces of the deepening season, the seeping (or gale-force blowing) in of winter. Julestemning is, in other words, the resulting atmosphere of our effort to bend the spaces we inhabit towards the koselig. And the way it feels, in my experience so far, is not so much like a battle against the dark and cold (though the latter has, sadly, been awfully mild so far this year). Rather, it feels like a sort of dance with the physical realities of winter. (Thought there’s bound to be a spat & a quarrel here and there.)

And Norwegians seem to turn, in a way, with the arrival of December. I’ve been roving now more or less non-stop for three months. I’ve spent a lot of nights alone in hotels all over the norðrvegr—the northern ways². This isn’t a bad thing at all. In fact, despite myself, I’ve really enjoyed this sort of extended solo meditation (and have, along the way, had plenty of fabulous conversations and time with the teachers and people I’ve encountered). And yet, since December has begun, I’ve enjoyed a much more social side of the Norwegians I’ve met, from my first (and second) julebord to home-baking pepperkaker with Christmas music late into the night (and note, it had already been dark since 3pm). In Rørvik, a small coastal fishing town in Nord-Trøndelag this week, more than one Norwegian approached me unbidden as I sat at the hotel bar reading Sigrid Unsedt. One man, walking past on his way back to the restaurant, even cozied up right behind me and asked over my shoulder what I was reading. This doesn’t happen in Norway. And Julebord, by the way, simply means “Christmas table” but it is a huge tradition in Norway, it turns out; really, a julebord is a very big party party—with very decked halls—with all the very traditional Norwegian holiday foods that I didn’t grow up with (pinnekjøtt, ribbe, etc. No lutefisk³). So good. Like, real good. To play on a line from Beowulf: þæt wæs god julestemning.

So it is. The air, the light, the natural abundance of pine, fir, and spruce, snow (if we believe hard enough [cue sad Charlie Brown music]), and a couple thousand years of enduring the relentless elements that beat and batter this upheaved coastal land leaning long into the deep north. They seem to come together, all these things, around the turn of the solstice. And that makes all the sense in the world. Animals that we are, in our best moments, we respond to this northern dome of the earth as it rolls away for a spell from the sun, and imbue our experience with something that expresses our physical relationship with the changes that this rolling effects. That expression is julestemning. Hopefully we’ll do it with skis on soon enough.

But the julestemning this year is being carved out of the northern winter in the midst of a larger stemning: an atmosphere permeated by fear, ignorance, and insecurity. I’m utterly exhausted by the ugliness, the bigotry, the racism, and the willful historical ignorance that is bubbling out of what seems to be a surprisingly significant sector of the United States (and Europe is not immune, of course). I’ve been convincing myself that what I’ve been able to see from afar is the result of an obsessive (and often dangerous) media machine, as well as a few monstrous plutocrats, and the small but loud group of far-right Tea Partiers and their ilk. But alongside the horrendous and cripplingly repetitive acts of violence—and let us be clear: acts perpetrated by all kinds of people (as I type this, a headline lit up my phone about the motives of the Planned Parenthood shooter)—that we have witnessed these past several years, I’m becoming more and more dispirited and dumbstruck with the breadth of these voices of hate, voices that openly suspect all Muslims, much less call for large scale acts of fascism (or cheer for those calls or post wantonly anti-intellectual and hateful memes in social media outlets). Or, as may have happened here in Norway, burn hotels and living places for incoming asylum-seekers and refugees.

These acts, too, generate stemning. This atmosphere, on the other hand, is a sickening air. It sickens and abuses human beings who have chosen to follow the Muslim faith (along with one and a half billion other people) or who have brown skin or Arab heritage. It is a toxic cloud made of the breath of some people who would claim love as their god. Like julestemning, this other, larger stemning, this atmosphere, is the result of our choices. It is a mixture of our collective will with the physical, social, and political realities that surround us. For my part, I’m deeply concerned. Scared, even. Our culture has, of late, shown itself to be capable of unconscionable things, unconscionable thoughts. And out in the open air. Things that many would ascribe to the culture of “the enemy.” Shameless, violent, and inhumane things. Even as some monsters (and this force of ISIS is clearly, purely monstrous) claim to act in the name of a religion, if we have minds to think and eyes to see, we must recognize how far these monsters are from the reality of Islam for the vast, uncountable majority of Muslims. And thus we must not only do what we can to offer help and safety to those who seek refuge, but we must also make as many choices as we can that create an atmosphere, a stemning, that acknowledges the humanity and the dignity those in need in these unfathomable times. We must, I say, dance with the reality of people in need of help; we mustn’t stomp on it.

Julestemning is contagious. You want to come into it. In fact, there’s another beautiful Norwegian phrase I’ve learned that’s appropriate here: å bli tatt inn i varmen—”to be brought into the warmth.” That’s the origin of julestemning. I think we ought to try to make it the origin of everything.
 
 
 
 
 

¹ADDENDUM: I also want to note how wonderful the word jul is. It’s translated most commonly as “Christmas,” and that’s been its primary usage for a couple of centuries. But it’s important, I think, to remember that jul, the cognate, of course, of the English “yule,” is of heathen origin and so predates the Christianization of the pagan celebrations of the winter solstice in December. The OED etymology reads thusly: “The modern form descends from Old English geól, . . . Christmas day or Christmastide, and in phrase se ǽrra geóla December, se æftera geóla January; corresponding to Old Norse jól plural a heathen feast lasting twelve days, (later) Christmas. An Old Anglian giuli, recorded by Bede as the name of December and January, corresponds to Old Norse ýlir month beginning on the second day of the week falling within Nov. 10–17, and Gothic jiuleis in fruma jiuleis November” (bold type mine). In other words, jul derives from a tradition other and older than the three warring global religions that currently define our struggle, and contribute so frustratingly to the unwelcoming, unhospitable atmosphere in almost every place where one of those religions is dominantly practiced. Thus, julestemning, to my mind, is etymologically welcoming.

²Hence the name Norway; though I just heard a special on NRK the other day suggesting that the name could also have emerged from a reference to the narrow ways—the endless series of narrow inlets and fjords all along the coast.

³Norwegians today do eat lutefisk, though not as universally as we Midwesterners tend to assume. Moreover, those that do eat it (the ones I’ve spoken to) mix it with bacon and a sort of mash of peas. So there y’go.

I’m sending love and care to the terrorized people of France, also thoughts of rest—as well as anger on their behalf—and a sort of deep, deep, generalized frustration, unsure where it ought to land, about the persistent why of such suffering, the origin and taproot of its ideologies that seem always to lie a little deeper than we’ve been able to dig.

And I’m sending the same love and care to people terrorized all over the world, no matter their nation.

I can’t understand it, and I do not envy the politicians, the heads of state, the commanders of vast instruments of destruction, the cultural leaders, their position right now. But I do join many others who’ve spoken already in their call to respond with care and the deepest compassion we can muster. Many are afraid of how Western leaders will respond, assuming more violence, more insult, more sabre-rattling, more fire-stoking, etc. It will again be easy to conflate the completely fucked up hate-work of ISIS with the vast majority of Muslims, who are humane, loving people, like (I believe on my best days) the vast majority of Americans, many of whom ARE Muslim or the vast majority of the French, many of whom ARE Muslim. It will again be easy to forget the depth of violence carried out in the name of Christianity (and I don’t mean way back in the Crusades, but today), and in the name of Democracy. It will, in other words, again be easy to justify violent response, both on the part of nations and on the part of their private citizens, to versions of “difference” that fit conveniently into simplistic narratives of “us” vs. “them,” and drum up the easy but dangerous pleasure of bias confirmation. I hope we move further into this inevitable mire more thoughtfully than that.

The bulk of my role as a Fulbright Scholar this year is to be something of a representative, a sort of cultural ambassador, for the ungainly, cumbersome, not-altogether-easy-to-love nation of the United States, its ogre of a government, its irreducible multitudes of people. But I’m in no way responsible or expected to know something special about international governmental relations, or to have any sort of official opinion about anything at all. Indeed, the disclaimer on this blog demands that I’m but a private citizen (as tangly as the term “citizen” is). Still, in the wake of last night’s terror in Paris, I’m trying to think through things. And as I do so, my thoughts are full of care and love for the people terrorized, the families of the dead and injured, the people of France, and my own friends and companions who are in some cases directly affected by this horror.

And there are of course other thoughts—thoughts of a more political nature—that this kind of event stirs up. They aren’t new ones. They’re all knotted up (a metaphor I feel like I’ve turned to so often lately) in the seemingly intractable tension between the “West” writ large and what- or whomever is not the West. I wrestle with my own thoughts. I think of J. William Fulbright’s notion that I recalled only recently in this blog, that the purpose of international exchange is to “convert nations into peoples and to translate ideologies into human aspirations.” I really do value this way of thinking because it is an attempt to demonstrate by interpersonal relationship, communication, empathy, and care, that the acts of nations are not reducible to the acts of the manifold people who bear those particular political labels (and neither are the acts of people reducible to those of the nations that claim them). This is vital when you’re an American abroad, given the less-than-positive view much of the world has of the activities of the US worldwide since WWII. I do believe that much good has been done, but much damage also. And I don’t know if the balance tips either way. So it seems to me that, somewhat simply, the failure of vision that gives way to acts of terror is the failure to see people as something more than nations, something more than pure products of ideologies. This has always been my frustration with the logic of war: that human beings become absolutely expendable as mere appendages of a political or religious ideology. That in the context of political or religious conflict, humans temporarily suspend their own humanity, despite the lingering truth that politics and religion are supposedly enterprises rooted in the very idea of what it is to be a human. At the risk of seeming glib, I think of the illicit address to the camera by manager at Stan Mikita’s Donuts in Wayne’s World in which he asks, “Why is it that when you kill a man in the heat of battle it’s called heroic, but when you kill a man in the heat of passion, it’s called murder?” This is the facelessness, the inhumanity of war and terror alike.

And to be sure, international educational exchange has its risks, not least of which is the fact that human personality, which I’ve been preoccupied with the last couple years, is knitted right in there: the “person” whom the “other” encounters, no matter the direction in which the encounter occurs, may well be an ass or a fool. In other words, people are people, in the last analysis, and the image of the people that someone gets via any particular person may well not be a positive one that generates more empathy. But it will be an avenue to hope. Fulbright wrote in The New Yorker in 1958 that “The exchange program is the thing that reconciles me to all the difficulties of political life. It’s the only activity that gives me some hope that the human race won’t commit suicide, though I still wouldn’t count on it.” A glimpse of his realism, there, in the heat of the Cold War. Power, I guess, is also part of humanity. How do we hold that problem in our hands?

But all this raises the question of how successfully people can really escape, even for a moment, the conditions of their political identity. How able are we, really, to suspend the baseline of the lifeways and the habits of thought against which we are wont to measure our socio-cultural expectations, the assumptions against which we measure difference and compare ourselves to “others.” No matter how deeply we cultivate our empathy, our willingness to imagine how others see the world, it’s nearly impossible to unhitch our self-centeredness. Western media is right now obsessing over the terror in Paris last night. I watched and read and listened as it unfolded last night, until I was too tired to continue; I was reading multiple news outlets this morning and listening to the non-stop coverage and discussion on Norwegian public radio (NRK) all the while (even while I did the crossword—people continue to live their lives in the midst of horrors), and the front pages of every Western media outlet are entirely consumed with Paris. I came home after being out for several hours and NRK was still in the midst of nonstop coverage on its main channel. Yet, as many writers (and social media friends) have already pointed out, a similar terrorist attack was carried out in Beirut only two days ago, killing 43 and wounding upwards of 200. Every morning I read the New York Times and listen to NRK. I glance at newspapers in cafes and on the streets or in the (idyllic) breakfast halls of the hotels I stay in. Yet I hardly heard about the acts in Lebanon. It was a level two or three headline. One story among several others. It was certainly not the whole front page of any Western paper. “We,” in the West, feel that attacks on the soil of Western nations are attacks on our own. We almost expect such violence on, say, Middle Eastern soil, because most of us secretly believe that violence is more “natural,” or at least more usual, there, that “those people” are somehow more liable to violence, given what we (think we) see of their societies. We too often see the people in those nations in the same way we imagine people under the logic of war: as appendages of a foreign political or religious ideology. Because of the acts of a few, and too often a highly powerful and highly corrupt few, we temporarily suspend our belief in the complex humanity of the people who really live there. We imagine a little too quickly that the norm of political life in the West is peace and the norm of political life elsewhere is violence. Erna Solberg, the Norwegian Prime Minister, said in her response that “we do with words what ‘they’ do with weapons” (a rough translation from memory). And indeed, she is specifically talking about ISIS, but I fear how quickly the fringe gets conflated with the whole when it comes to these things. President Obama insisted that this was an attack on our “shared universal values” (and again, no such response to the attack in Beirut, as though we don’t share universal values with ‘them’). It’s as though ‘they’re’ used to violence in those other places. As though it’s not quite news. I don’t like that assumption. I don’t like how it feels, even as I catch myself making it. I want to practice thinking differently, cultivating a different kind of empathy.

And indeed, millions wouldn’t be fleeing their homelands to places like Sweden, Norway, or Germany, or wherever, if they were “used to it,” if the violence currently wracking the Middle East was somehow to be expected. And I get it: I certainly will admit that, two years ago, when I was stranded for 48 hours in Khartoum, Sudan, on my way to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to teach in a summer program, I was a little taken aback by the highly visible, almost unremarkable presence of assault weapons on the street or carried by everyday security guards. The same is true when we take students from The Northwest School to El Salvador. Even in Addis, the security guard who was stationed at the entrance to the school was a super-friendly fellow with whom we made jokes and gave hi-fives and big smiles each time we came and left. He carried a very large assault weapon. So it’s easy, thoughtless, even, to make assumptions about what a “normal” level of violence is given what seems so plain to see. But then, how many school shootings do we need in the United States before we acknowledge the limitedness, the selectivity of our vision? How many shootings of young black men, however “violent” they may be towards the police (who harass them unevenly, compared to their white neighbors)? How many abuses and sometimes murders of people of alternate sexual and gender identities and expressions? I don’t write these things to denigrate the US. In fact, I love being American, in my way. I value the sort of freedom and opportunity my nation affords me more highly than most things. But I’ve learned to recognize that I am afforded these privileges in part due to my skin color and heritage. That they are not shared by all, even in my own nation. The theory is so beautiful. The practice has not been so. Our struggle is, as ever, to close the (arguably huge) gap between the idea we celebrate and the lived experience that bears it out, which has so far excluded so many more human beings than “we” like to admit.

One of the exercises in my US Constitution workshop for Norwegian high school students is to have them translate the preamble into Norwegian. My own grasp of the language allows me to help them understand or ask interesting questions about the translation choices they make. I’m always particularly struck by their translations of these two parts: “to ensure domestic tranquility” and “provide for the common defense.” In Norwegian, there are at least two words for “tranquility” that work here: ro and fred. The former means “rest” or “calm” (e.g., the phrase ta det med ro means “take it easy”; the adjective rolig means “peaceful,” as when the barista at a cafe called Oslo K yesterday said this spot is more rolig than the busier cafes over in Majorstuen, with the glut of high-end boutiques and foot-traffic there). The latter, fred, means, more aptly, “peace.” Fred is the word you’ll see in Christmas carols that sing of peace on earth, and it’s the word that is more commonly used as the opposite of war. Thus, it has a little more political valence than ro. Yet, Norwegian students offer one about as commonly as the other in their translations. “Domestic tranquility” becomes either hjemmelig ro (“homely rest” or “rest at home”), ro i landet (“rest in the country”), or innenriks fred (“domestic peace”). Likewise “common defense” becomes felles forsvar (“common defense”) or felles beskyttelse (“common protection”). Constitutions are, naturally, self-centered: they don’t provide for ro i verden—”peace in the world”—but ro i landet, peace limited to the artificial political boundaries we draw around ourselves. This is to be expected. I’m not trying to say this is wrong-headed somehow (i.e., I’m eliding the question of whether the very idea of a nation-state is or isn’t wrong-headed), only that self-centeredness a natural part of nation-building (in my Civil Rights workshop, I ask students to define the terms “ethnicity,” “nationality,” and “race,” which always raises really good questions around the issue of civic self-centeredness). At any rate, certainly a constitution that aimed to ensure ro i verden or utenriks fred—that is, “foreign peace”—would provide for quite the global disaster. And yet, laying implicit claim to a political ideology that assumes peace as the norm, the West, as the self-styled pure products of the European Enlightenment, too often sees itself as the sole agent, or sole proprietor, of ro i verden.

Moreover, at the same time, I’ve been giving a presentation on the history of American Civil Rights. If there is a way to give the lie to American domestic tranquility, our record of civil rights and equal protection of the law is perhaps the best way. I include in my Civil Rights presentation the litany of racially motivated cases of violence against (especially) young black men by (mostly) white perpetrators (whether police officers or white-supremacist kids) and some of the startling statistics of incarceration that reveal something about the motives of our justice system during the past, well, hmm, during the past 394 years, since the first slaves were brought to Virginia in 1619. These facts offer somewhat of a challenge to the success of “ensuring domestic tranquility” in the US for all those who dwell “domestically.” Despite the United States’ myriad successes in building a concept of a peaceful, humane society, our nation and the people who bear its label, have struggled mightily to figure out who belongs in the category of “domestic” and who is included in “common.” Who, really (and this is a cliche, I know) constitutes the “We” of “We the People”?

Many of us have it really good. Many of us have never had to ask whether or not “we” are part of that “We” that so meaningfully opens the Constitution. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an essay in the New York Times op-ed section a few years ago in which he made a comment that really got to me. You may disagree with his larger point in the op-ed, but his comment, I think, is profound: “We,” he says, meaning African-Americans, “were never meant to be part of the American story.” I think he’s right. We wouldn’t have been so thrilled, or so surprised (even those of us who voted for him), when Barack Obama was elected President of the United States of America, if it weren’t so. To be sure, black Americans are, and always have been, a part of the American story, just not the one that is told and retold under the rubric of “Freedom, Opportunity, Democracy, Equality,” etc., etc., and all the beautiful things we celebrate about ourselves. If we’re going to mean it when we celebrate American democracy in the twenty-first century, the the first truly global century, in which human beings will doubtless need to begin to tell a new story as a changing climate forces us all together, we will need to be able to look at ourselves and our secret assumptions, even in the midst of what appears to be outright, unadulterated evil perpetrated by a fringe group proudly claiming a label and so dragging so many millions of unsuspecting, innocent human beings into the mud with them.

The great challenge is knowing our own limits of tolerance, and knowing how and when to change those limits. I admit I have my own struggles, even with moderate Islam. I believe, and I dare say universally, in women’s rights, and I haven’t yet been able to see parts of Islamic practice, as it’s carried out today, as anything other than denigrating to women. I am appalled by the hatred spewed towards LGBTQ people worldwide. But then, that’s not unique to Islam. So my point is simply that we be careful. I cannot stand the things that are carried out by the force of ideology, of belief. I hate what has happened in France. I fear that similar things may happen in places even closer to my homes. It’s so very difficult to get out of it. But I only mean to say that it’s important that we remind ourselves that we all have one or another ideology. That none is immune to it. That our greatest challenge (and I mean this for all “sides”) is to imagine the experience of others, even others whose radically different appearance, worldview, ideology, is unrecognizable to us, is wholly foreign to our own. President Hollande called the terror attack on Paris “unprecedented.” Maybe that’s true, if he means attacks by foreign ideologies. But we must remember, however long ago, that other “Terror” that came absolutely from the inside, at the dawn of the French Revolution. Enlightenment thought has long been highly prone to violence. “Terror” is not unique to foreign ideology. It is almost always the product of a few shockingly committed humans seeking power at all costs, based on the depth of their commitment to, their inculcation in, an ideology. So we must always examine our own ideologies when we are in the moment of casting harsh judgment on others whose lives we don’t quickly recognize as “familiar.”

I don’t know what the right solution is to ISIS. They seem like a truly evil force in the world. I fear sweeping military action because of the inevitable collateral damage. The unwitting numbers who sacrifice their lives in a flash. I fear the tendency toward suspension of habeas corpus, the suspension of human rights, the suspension of the very values we implicitly defend when we heave our righteous anger towards threatening ideologies like ISIS. So I hope we step carefully, all of us, into the swamp to come.

Strangely, and maybe a bit ironically, I’m drawn to Thomas Hobbes, speaking of Enlightenment. I think his articulation, in 1651 in Leviathan, of the reasons human beings band together to form societies, is beautifully put. He says, early in the text, that the “Passions that encline men to Peace, are Feare of Death; Desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a Hope by their Industry to obtain them.” Commodious living! How lovely a concept. But it’s that last one that I like. We live together because we have hope that our creativity and our care are enough to make the world not just inhabitable, but inhabitable well. We are going to need to figure out how to do that together more and more urgently.

The Fulbright quotes, as before, came from here: J. William Fulbright Quotes.

The calendar said so, but you can’t really know it until you’re in it (the ol’ “you can get your head around the mountain from afar, but once you’re on its face?”). The roving has begun in earnest!

But first and foremost, Happy Back to the Future Day! It’s finally here, despite the host of hoaxes over the years. This is the day to which Marty McFly and Doc traveled from 1985. And in a wonderful twist, the Cubs (as improbable then as now) won the World Series . . . and lo! Look at the NLCS! Go Cubbies!

But back to the present . . .

From the vantage point of late September, the series of red bars, each as long as Monday is far from Friday, looked constant. And indeed, it is. From here to mid-December, I rove. The destinations, fleeting as they are, are manifold and full of wonder. Norwegians have all these designations for places: a city is a by (so towns celebrate, in a way, when it achieves “bystatus“), while a small town in the country is called a tettsted, literally “tight” or “close place.” The thing I love about this sort of travel (the same can be said of bicycle touring) is that every little tettsted becomes a little magical. Places barely on the map or conveniently omitted by all the tourist guides glow a little more, take on a sort of aura that the quotidian would otherwise overshadow. Not many tourists visit Elverum in fall, for example. But I found yellowing birches there, along Glomma, and stands of stark, straight pines to wander through. Likewise Hønefoss: one teacher there said Ringerike (Hønefoss’s kommune) is “Norway’s best kept secret.” The view from Kongens utsikt (The King’s Overlook) out over Tyrifjorden was spectacular.

Up in Trøndelag, in the little industrial town of Orkanger in Orkdal kommune, southwest of Trondheim (nobody goes there for vacation!), I asked after the local hikes. One teacher told me of a road just past the school that leads up the (small) mountain to a farm on the hill where you can look down over the town. I discovered a trail into the thicket a bit beyond the farm, though, and ended up on a several hour hike through an absolutely gorgeous network of trails permeating the mountainside, running through various ecosystems in miniature: a dense stand of pine here, a spindly aspen grove just beyond, a thick mat of clover in here, a broad grassy knoll (and, doubtless, a troll or two), and autumnal paper birches scattered throughout. I found my way to Raudhåmmår’n, an outlook over Orkdal valley and Orkla, its river, all the way south to the mountains of Trollheimen.

Earlier this week I was in Sandnes, a town passed by in favor of its northerly neighbor, Houston—oops, I mean Stavanger, Norway’s oil capital, and the gateway to the highly sought out natural destinations like Preikestolen. Sandnes is a lovely town, with a healthy population of resident swans (plus a fine little bookstore). A teacher there recommended a hike to Dalsnuten, from where one can gets a hell of a view over Rogaland and the greater Stavanger area. I hiked up one side, around a smaller peak called Øvre Eikenuten, and down the other side to the semi-abandoned town of Dale. I had to wait an hour for a bus back to Sandnes, as it got dark (we are losing light—or gaining darkness—fast up here), and next to what appeared to be a grand hotel, totally empty and standing stark beneath the shadow of Dalsnuten. I found out later that the place was once an asylum. It was creepy enough in the moment, standing there in the darkening scene, silent and brooding. But it was creepier yet to hear of its history (though I admit the asylum bit I got only through hearsay, and who doesn’t love a story?). Shiver-making. Jaiks! (That’s the Norwegian spelling, by the way.)

Teachers often ask whether this job is exhausting, travelling constantly, meeting hundreds of new people, teaching all day, giving the same presentations repeatedly. As for that last part, well, I chose topics I care about, and looking at the state of American things, I’m more than happy to offer the same presentation about Civil Rights again and again, since that’s what it seems to take. As for the rest, indeed, there is a lot of a particular kind of energy to meeting so many people so quickly, but I am my mother’s son, for those that know her, so I’m lucky to have a genetic predisposition appropriate for the job. Moreover, I tell teachers that one of the best parts of the job is that it’s all teaching and no grading. Even if, time to time, I have to swim against the current of janteloven or, as a teacher in Trondheim put it, “swim through syrup,” to get some (not all!) groups of students to talk. My job is thus concentrated in the part of teaching that generates energy (being with students), and it minimizes the draining parts (being with papers). So, after a full day of visiting classes, talking, giving workshops and lectures, wherever I am I ask (or hunt) around for a good walk, and do it. Ut på tur. And, as poet Mark Strand put it so well, wherever I am I am what is missing, and that’s an awfully nice privilege, whether a backwater tettsted, a thickety spredtsted (I made that one up), or an urbane and fashionable by.

Maybe, before the photo-dump, it’s worth quoting Strand’s little verse, which fits the roving life well, I think. The poem is called “Keeping Things Whole”:

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

We all have reasons for roving, I might say, where I am. But I think the answer is about the same.

And lastly, to document two minor changes I see in myself:

• My Norwegian gets constantly more practiced. I had the privilege to spend a couple evenings with Anne Sine, a relative in Trondheim. She and another relative, Ingvild, who lives closer to Oslo, have been wonderful, gentle teachers, willing to correct my little mistakes! I can get by, at this point, pretty well, and make myself understood without much comment. But truly, y’won’t get better after a certain plateau without someone willing to correct you with care. Little mistakes in noun gender and word order will pass un-marked. But with such thoughtful teachers, I’m lucky. Another friend in Oslo, Einar, has been likewise willing to help me hone my language skills. Goodness, I’ve had an awful lot of great teachers in my life. Plus, I’ve been practicing the hard, Norwegian ‘L’ characteristic of the eastern, Gudbrandsdal dialect of my ancestors, just for fun. And it’s a whole other challenge to better understand the southwestern coastal dialects, Stavangersk? Bergensk? Jaiks!
• I miss the newspaper—the physical paper one, so I can do the crossword on paper in pen. A deep, daily pleasure in that, for me. In lieu of that option, I broke down and subscribed to the digital NYT Crossword. This means that A) there’s a timer, and B) I know whether I’m correct. While the pleasure isn’t quite the same as the paper version, I confess that the digital version has, I think, made me a little better. Begrudgingly. It’s also made me far more critical of crosswords, which I’m not sure I like. Thanks a lot, Rex Parker. But I have begun to wonder if I could craft a puzzle or two . . . I’ll keep ye updated.

Ok, to the images. This is the first time I’ve had a phone camera that can take panoramic images, so I’ve been having too much fun with that. So this is Tettsteder/Spredtsteder, Pano Edition:

Elverum in Autumn

Skogen over Orkdal

Orkanger and Orkdal from Raudhåmmår’n

Trondheim, Nidelva (med solskinn)

 Trondheim, Nidelva (uten solskinn)

Nidelva, Nidaros, og Lerketre (Larch!)

Utsikt over Stavanger området fra Dalsnuten