Omreisende

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

Now has become that time of year when I listen obsessively to Rachmaninov’s Vespers (op. 37; more accurately, they say, called “All-Night Vigil”), and wade around in autumn, knee-deep in nostalgia. There’s something about the autumn—whether it’s the quality of the air or the quality of the colors (mostly yellowing birches here in the 60°s N)—that gets me nostalgic. The changes, the leaving (my favorite aural metaphor), or, as Hopkins put it, the unleaving, the sensation of floating in a yellow wood, what with all those choices made to wade through, and none to change. Only this.

The first time I ever visited Norway was twelve years ago, in 2003, on a tour of Scandinavia with the Luther College Nordic Choir. I sang a solo, during that tour, in the Oslo Cathedral (the song was the classic Norwegian tune “Aftensolen smiler,” or “The Evening Sun Smiles”). What an honor it was, and memorable . . . for more than the setting and occasion: I remember vividly (as do the sopranos, surely) that I had missed my cue to sneak out the side and make my way to the balcony from which perch I would sing the solo, sending the tune over the crowd in just the way, as the song says, the evening sun smiles over the earth below. (Sorry.) So, to avoid prolonging the uncomfortable silence of the audience waiting for the song to begin, I had to run, quietly but quickly, from the altar, where the choir was, down the side aisle, up a spiral staircase, and down to the front of the balcony. I heard the opening pitch from afar, and being somewhat winded and a little discombobulated from the awkward, rushed journey to the loft, I began the solo a minor third higher than I should have. The sopranos thus had to match my key, rather than the written one, and a minor third is no little leap when you’re already in the stratosphere. Oops.
Moreover, Knut Nystedt, famous Norwegian composer, was in the audience. Ouch. But then, here we are, and we’re all ok.

In college, a few of us choir folk, still some of my dearest friends, lived in a house we affectionately named The Outhouse (it was just outside of Decorah). We’d spend nights listening to the Robert Shaw Chorale recording of Rachmaninov’s Vespers and get high on the tones Shaw could draw out of his chorale. We would fawn over the last few bars of the second movement, “Bless the Lord, O My Soul,” where the basses descend stepwise to finish on a low, low C, far beneath the earth (though we were tenors mostly). I do the same now, years later, and marvel at the impeccable voice-leading, especially in the alto line, throughout that second movement—those Russian chords a thicket of roots and stone. I did so just now, in fact, while I walked from a Bruktbutikk—a thrift store—here in Hønefoss, having bought a pair of salt and pepper shakers for my apartment, a tiny convenience that has been sorely lacking (hardly a sore worth writing about, I know!). But I guess this is part of my point: the juxtaposition of Rachmaninov’s Vespers with the unremarkable: a sort of bridge to span the gap between reason and what else there is. Between the historical context in which Rachmaninov wrote such music—those unworldly tones, that seep so certainly from the earth—and the unremarkable: the salt and pepper shaker in a thrift store run by a talkative Swede, who I could understand surprisingly well, as he waxed (quite thoroughly) nostalgic about the old days of MS-DOS—”det var enkelt, men det fungerte” he said, “it was simple, but it worked”—as opposed to all the fancy graphics, the complicated programming, the mouse with so many buttons, the mash of possibilities that we endure today (he had noticed my iPad in my shoulder bag), and even offered a critique of Steve Jobs, who, he suggested, simply took the best parts of everyone else’s stuff and put them together; I can’t really disagree. Nostalgia whips us all.

All of these roads, two each, at every moment, diverging. So much to wonder at while the birches unleave and the Norway pines keep their all-winter vigil.

Meanwhile, the presentations are going well, and although some groups of students are strict adherents of janteloven, others surpise me. I visited a class of music students yesterday afternoon; they were the liveliest bunch of Norwegian students I’ve encountered so far, I’d even say far and away so.

Ah, performers. Ah, humanity.

I busted myself out of bed just before 4 in the morning on Monday, September 28, to catch the rare super blood moon. With clear skies on the tail of a gorgeous weekend (cf. Høst i Nordmarka), and my fortunately west-south-west-facing balcony, the blood moon carved an arc right across my bow, as it were.

Although I don’t have quite the high quality tripod I might like, and my 200mm lens isn’t the stuff of space photography, I managed to make some fair images & spin them into a cycle. The first image (at about eight o’clock in the image below) was made just after 4:00am, and the last (at six o’clock) was made just after 5:00am. The eclipse was at its fullest in the penultimate image (at about four o’clock), made around 4:47am.

I stared a long while at the darkened orb. The last occurred when I was one year old. The next will come when I’m fifty-two. And here, in a thousand-year-old city, over thousand-year-old Viking bones, one can’t help but wonder what the old ones thought of these things in the heavens—and not only here in Oslo, but the world over. And too, what will they think we saw, when we become the old ones?

Elskede, det er jeg

som har tatt
plommene
som stod i
kjøleskapet . . .

That’s how the translation of William Carlos Williams’s “This is just to say” begins in the collection I found at a flea market in Grünerløkka today. I should be clear, though: it’s not a translation of Williams, but rather a gjendiktning, which literally translates to “re-poeming,” or reinvention (surely drawing on my old favorite, poiesis as invention). So, I sat down in the sunlight outside of my favorite Oslo microbrewery (so far), Grünerløkka Bryggehus, and read a few of Williams’s more well-known poems to see what the translator did with them. (While I read, I enjoyed a very, very tasty pale ale brewed with pors leaves—I’d never heard of pors, and discovered it’s an herbal shrub that grows in Norway and other northern climes. Its Linnaean name is Myrcia gale and its common name is bog-myrtle or sweetgale. Neither have I seen before. But I’ll be, it makes for a lovely beer.) I found my way next to Hendrix Ibsen, a cleverly named beer/coffee/vinyl cafe I’ve taken to, and am a’gonna whip up a tiny spell of poetry chatter.

So. The translator, poet Jan Erik Vold, seems to be after the sense of Williams’s poems, done up in Norwegian rags, rather than WCW’s madly plainspoken specific (American) words—or, maybe, things (no ideas but in them, after all). This reinvention is evident in Vold’s rendition of “This is just to say,” among Williams’s most well-recognized and most anthologized poems. “Elskede, det er jeg” means “My love, it is I,” so that the poem’s title, like the original, is also its first line, but now without the self-referentiality (“this” is just to say). So, it reads thusly:

My love, it is I

who has taken
the plums
that were in
the refrigerator . . .

And so on. It doesn’t have the same spirit, I think. Williams’s confession in the original sneaks up on you; you don’t know he stole those sweet, cold plums from his beloved until a few lines in, when he reveals his assumption that she was probably saving them. Vold, on the other hand, comes right out with it from the start. It was me, baby! From glancing through his afterword, though, I think Vold is nevertheless a good reader of Williams; he knows what he’s doing, and he’s thinking about it (and he’s quite a well-respected figure in Norwegian poetry, apparently). Moreover, he certainly he has the native, nuanced, stylistic sense of quotidian Norwegian usage that I lack. For example, in the afterword, Vold says “Noen teoretiker var ikke Williams, ingen systembygger—no ideas but in things er hans favoritt-maksime: det fins ingen idéer annet enn i tingene—(ikke idéer men ting! skal det på norsk få lyde i imperativ).” Which says, in my rough translation, “Williams was no theorist, no system builder [systematist?]—no ideas but in things is his favorite maxim: there are no ideas other than in things themselves—(not ideas but things! gives it, in Norwegian, the expression [or sound] of the imperative).” I might quibble with the suggestion that Williams wasn’t a theorist (Spring and All is among the best theories of imagination there is), but one can make one’s arguments. My point is that Vold has thought about Williams. His “ikke idéer men ting!” struck me as a poor translation, missing the crucial preposition “in” (“not ideas but things! is quite another, uh, thing)—but clearly Vold has considered the difference, even if I disagree with his choice in the end. Still he swings right past some fastballs over the heart of the plate. The opening of “Til Elsie” (“To Elsie,” of course), for one, reads like this:

De fineste folk i dette land
går dukken—
fjellbønder fra Kentucky

eller slike fra Jerseys ødslige
trakter i nord . . .

The translation:

The finest people in this land
go under—
mountain farmers from Kentucky

or likewise from Jersey’s desolate
tracts in the north . . .

“The finest people in this land”?! It may have a folksy sense about it that’s in some way appropriate to what Williams is after (or he’s trying to be ironic), but “the pure products of America” constitute such a remarkably specific idea, especially with the Kentucky mountain folk and Jersey scrappers biting at its heels. The real irony is that it’s an idea very much knotted up in America’s sharp severance with the far older, deep-rooted European culture from which America sprung. So maybe it makes sense that a European translator wouldn’t immediately or naturally inhabit that meaning. It’s possible that Vold had simply misread the poem, that he somehow missed what “the pure products” connote, that it’s a historical quality Williams is talking about, not a judgment of the “fineness” of the products, as in “pure” honey or a “pure” tone. Swiiiiing and a miss. But the phrase “går dukken” means “go under,” literally—to be submerged. Or, as the bartender at Hendrix Ibsen helped me understand, it can also mean, informally, “go to hell,” as in “that plan went to hell.” Which is a striking choice, since there are alternatives, like blir gale, that would more directly signify “go crazy.” Here, however, I like Vold’s reinvention quite a bit.

But this is fun. What a sweet little surprise at the flea market (which I likewise had only stumbled upon). The collection also includes a resetting of “Asphodel, that greeny flower,” which of course insists that

     Vel kan det være
ugreitt å gripe hva nytt diktene bringer
men folk dør hver dag, ulykkelig
av mangel på hva
som der står.

Or,

     It may well be
confusing to grasp what news poems bring
but people die every day, unhappily
for lack of what
stands there.

Did Williams mean to imply that poems bring the news, whether readers grasp it or not, as Vold’s resetting suggests? Or does Williams’s original phrase, “It is difficult to get the news from poems,” mean just what it says: that it’s difficult, whether the news is there or not? Williams’s locution is a sort of response to Pound’s notion of poetry as “news that stays news”—a handy turn of phrase, but a less exact idea, perhaps, than Williams’s. Indeed, there’s a lot of shitty poetry that certainly isn’t news anymore, though still I’d call it poetry. Not all water is a glacial spring, after all. But even sewage is still water.

Maybe there’s a new Roving Scholar workshop in here somewhere, for the right group of students.

Lots to say, today, so this could get . . . verbose (I’ll do my best. Or not). I won’t be offended by any tl;dr’s.

I’ve had my first full week of visits now, including a good stay in Bergen visiting Katedralskole for four days. I had the occasion there to try out most of my presentations & workshops for the first time—to see what’s gonna work & what needs a tweak or two (or three or nine). I tend to err on the side of chatter, so I have a slower week now to try to work up some more “interactivities” (to employ an inelegant portmanteau). But Bergen was wonderful—such fun to talk to Bergensers about their vennskapsby, or Sister City, of Seattle. I made a point to see the totem pole that Seattle gave Bergen in 1970 to commemorate Bergen’s 900-year jubilee. (Seattle has a few years to go . . .). It isn’t hard to see the “family resemblance.” Moreover, Katedralskole was fantastic. I met fine, fine teachers and a slew of fabulous students at all three (more on this later) levels of videregåendeskole, or high school. This was followed by a second full-day visit to Nannestad VGS, where I spent all of the previous Friday. A marvelous beginning to this year-long dream-job. A few images from my telephone, then, before a lot of words:

 

 

 

And so, I have a few things on my mind:

A) Schools (duh);
B) Politics—Norway just held local and regional elections. They occurred at the midterm of the first “right”-wing government in a long time (spoiler: Arbiderpartiet, Norway’s populist Labor Party, mopped the floor), while across the pond the ass-who-shall-not-be-named dominates American soap-operatic media as well as the cavernous spaces created by Norwegian students’ dropped jaws;
C) Population, density, suburban sprawl, and the like;
D) Things I miss—I’ve been struggling because I certainly miss little things, but there’s not much (so far) that I really miss.

Ok. A) Schools. Now, the Norwegian school system is certainly no utopia, and funding, compensation, and length of workday are, from time to time, issues (teachers went on strike at the start of last school year, for example), but the differences between Norwegian public schools and US public schools have been thrown in to stark relief by the just-now-settled teacher strike in Seattle. I began visiting Norwegian public schools about when Seattle district teachers began to strike, so it’s been the first thing on my mind when students and teachers here have asked about schools in the US. What does one say about the struggle to fund public schools in America when your otherwise progressive home state refuses—actively, not by some unfortunate accident or economic hardship, but actively refuses—to carry out its “paramount” constitutional duty to “amply fund” public education in the state because there’s enough dunderheaded, ignorant, self-deceiving resistance to even the word “tax” (much less the entirely humane concept of social welfare) to prevent the implementation of a truly simple solution like a state income tax. Washington has, according to numerous reports, the most regressive tax structure in the country. Even the godawful, anti-public-works Seattle Times reported on it, as has that free-market party palace, Forbes. Meanwhile, schools, especially urban schools with large minority populations in economically disadvantaged areas, wallow in a vicious cycle of “underperformance” which is reinforced by performance-based reward systems (it’s like Louis C.K.’s old bit about how ludicrous it is that if you have no money and you overdraft from your bank account, you’re charged more money that you don’t have while if you’re filthy rich, the bank gives you even more money just for having a lot of money). The ol’ “born on third base but think you hit a triple” attitude. Add to this the inequities endured by schools in underprivileged areas because of the outsized influence of wealthy families who can afford to fund (and volunteer their free time to) PTAs, after-school programs, etc., in particular districts. And, predictably, those inequities hit communities of color hardest. (Somewhat relatedly, a recent This American Life episode has a lot to say about this. Note the strikingly racist statements at a community meeting at about 24:00.) I’m no expert on any of this stuff, but it’s just hard to watch American public schools from outside of the US when a big part of my job is to see what Norwegian schools are like, structurally (so far, they look pretty fascinating; more on that in another post). I LOVE teaching at Northwest, and my job is very deeply rewarding for very specific reasons. It’s truly a rare community. But these issues have me all riled up and make me want to teach public school. Of course, statistics suggest I’d be overworked, exhausted, and burnt out in a few years—precisely because of the systemic and volitional failures at work in American politics. (Plus, I’m not exactly eager to pay in time and money to get certified. So there’s that.)

I’ll be interested to learn, over time, how my perceptions of schools evolve with more experience. Meanwhile, I’m exceedingly proud of my friends in Seattle’s public schools and the union these last couple weeks. I was—and am still—standing in solidarity from afar!

On to B) Politics. It’s of course not a surprise that a lot of Norwegians are watching the presidential election process so far with utter confusion. It’s appalling to their conscience (and to mine, and to that of many Americans, to be sure) that a man like Donald Trump can “make it this far.” I have to remind students that this is the nomination phase of the election process, so it’s not like his success in the polls and the amount of media coverage he absorbs is a reflection of the feelings of the whole electorate of the United States. It is, I try to convince them (and try to convince myself), only a fraction of the voters for one party that are keeping him afloat. I have to confess, though, that I’m also weirdly scared. We’ve seen numerous truly unbelievable candidates surge through the Republican nomination process the last few election cycles. Candidates that, by almost any measure of political humanity—e.g., compassion, intellectual honesty, or demonstrably nuanced understanding of an irreducibly complex world—do not belong on the world political stage in this century. The great American democratic “experiment” was supposed to be this colossus, this great legendary thing, and yet, as Vizzini might squeal, he gains. The only response I have for Norwegian high-schoolers is that the media—and, indeed, the media-lovin’ public—eats soap operas for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It’s just that this particular daytime programming could have real, horrific consequences on real people’s lives.

Meanwhile, Norway just held its midterm elections. These were fylke (county) and kommune (municipality) elections, so none of the national leaders in Stortinget, Norway’s legislature and seat of government, were up for election. Still, although Norway is a unitary and not federal government (one of my favorite concepts to describe to Norwegian students so far), and thus the elected leaders of the fylker and kommuner aren’t quite in the same category as, say, state governors or federal and state legislators, etc., these results do serve as a referendum on the prevailing parties in power in the government in Oslo. Right now, that ruling party is Høyrepartiet (høyre means “right” in Norwegian). So for the first time in a long time, Norway’s governing party is right-wing. The right wing, here, of course, is much closer to the center (if not even a little to the left-of-center) of the US political spectrum, but there is a move, as I understand it, to privatize a lot of long-time public programas and services. Høyre is one of the free-market parties in Norway, in other words. (There are nine active parties in Norway. Nine.) But in this election, whose results I watched on the news in my hotel room in Bergen last Monday and Tuesday, Arbeiderpartiet, the left-wing Labor Party, Norway’s largest and the dominant force the last twenty years or so, made a sweeping resurgence, along with numerically small but statistically significant gains by a couple of the smaller parties, notably MDG, or Miljøpartiet-de-Grønne, or Environment Party, the Greens. Way up in Tromsø, significant gains were made by Rødepartiet, the Red party, whose alignment I’m sure you can guess. The commentators have been suggesting pretty strongly that these regional elections made for an awfully clear referendum on the right-wing government currently in power. I also wonder how much of it is half-consciously a referendum on what’s happening in the United States. The subtext of a lot of Norwegian students’ questions about Trump come from a genuine suspecion that there is a legitimate, if minute, chance that this, uh, well, monstrosity could become president of the most influential nation in the world. (I’d like to take a moment to remind myself that the president is not all-powerful in the US, and, in fact, I think we tend to overstate presidential power, especially over the daily lives of Americans, which are far more directly affected by local and state governments; but when you get to certain federal welfare programs, funding for organizations central to the defense of human dignity like, oh, Planned Parenthood, and, not insignificantly, foreign policy and relations, it’s of course a serious thing. I mean, this buffoon not only failed to challenge the completely transparent premise of the overtly racist and Islamophobic question at that rally in New Hampshire recently, he doubled down! Unreal. I was happy to see Bernie Sanders name Trump’s racism on Colbert’s new Late Show.)

At the same time, students here are, predictably, following Sanders, whose campaign is so far nicely spiced with messages that point to the relative success of the Scandinavian nations’ democratic socialist programs. And good lord, when you’ve got blowhards in the US robotically claiming that the United States is “the greatest country in the world,” that we enjoy the most freedom, that we are the leaders of the democratic universe, spreading truth and liberty to the dark places of the earth—well, you’ll forgive me if I laugh along with Norwegian teachers and students alike, while they enjoy the world’s highest Human Development Index several years running, enjoy perfectly free speech, free practice of (or abstention from) religion, access to jobs, mandatory maternity and paternity leave, a strong social safety net, excellent public transportation, and some of the most well-kept and well-enjoyed natural, protected landscapes this—and that—side of the Atlantic. On the Late Show, in the same conversation with Sanders, Stephen Colbert, of all people, repeated the strange assumption that Scandinavians have high suicide rates, as though that’s the trade-off for a socialist utopia (or just a comment on the dark, dark winter). But, according to the WHO, only Finland and Iceland have higher rates than the US. The US’s rate is 12.1 per 100,000 people. Norway’s, Sweden’s, and Denmark’s are 9.1, 11.1, and 8.8, respectively. But indeed, this is not utopia (of course, no place is, ba dum, tsss). One most certainly encounters racist practices, habits of mind, and assumptions here. There is, I think, a little pressure to assimilate, to “contribute to the society” in a way that looks familiar to “ethnic Norwegians,” and so forth. There are failures in the system. It’s a system, after all. Indeed, among the loads of success stories, there are immigrants and refugees that struggle. But American exceptionalism suffers from a Platonic sort of ignorance. It’s like they’ve never seen the outside of the suburban teenager bedrooms of their youth. Yes, it’s comparatively homogenous here in Norway, to be sure (although Oslo is surprisingly diverse), but (cue federalism), it isn’t impossible to do much, much, much better than we do.

Which brings me to C) population, density, multiculturalism, etc.

When Bernie Sanders invokes Scandinavia as an image of possibility for a functioning, humane welfare state, his critics (and I’ve been one on this account) point to the homogeneity and small size of these nations. You can’t scale it to a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural population of 320,000,000 across 4800 km, plus Alaska and Hawai’i, they say. And generally, I think they’re right. It is easier to provide for everybody here, especially when you’ve got as much oil money beneath the mattress as Norway does (let’s note that Sweden and Denmark do not, however, have that money). Still, I’ve been thinking a lot about population and federalism. Three hundred and twenty million people, I say to Norwegian students. Norway has about five million. Can you imagine the difference that makes?! It’s massive. But then, I describe the federalist system. The closest approximation Norway has to states are the aforementioned fylker. But, I describe to the students, the fylker (‘r’ is plural in Norwegian, by the way) are not governments; they cannot make fylke-specific laws or collect taxes for that fylke (this is where I get to bring up Washington and weed as a timely example). And that gets me thinking about the argument against the scalability of a welfare state. We have a federalist system designed precisely to allow the nation to expand the way it has and to scale government programs across a population and a space otherwise ungovernable by a single government. Madison, to boot, argued in Federalist #10 that a big, expansive state is a good thing (not that I agree fundamentally, but stick with me here), in order to prevent factions and to ensure that regional populations had both regional identity and national protection (what do we have in the US today, however? Two huge factions that, given their mutually unshakable commitment to neoliberalism, are really one faction: the plutocrats). But, when you consider the state governments in the US, there’s no reason they can’t operate like a Norway. In fact, Norway’s population is just over 5 million, while Washington’s is just over seven. Now that is not an unscalable difference (Sweden, for comparison, has a population of 9.7 million, while both Denmark and Finland hover around 5.5 million). And then there’s Minnesota, which has, in the past few years under Mark Dayton’s administration, made its population of 5.4 million look a whole lot more like that of a Scandinavian country, in more ways than its famously Scandinavian immigrant heritage. I mean in terms of “promoting the general welfare,” rather than, say, the welfare of the plutocrats. Tempered for the political grandstanding apparent in the recent meme about Dayton’s ostensibly record-breaking success, PolitiFact still points to some serious gains, specifically in the budget surplus. As my dad’s childhood English teacher, Mrs. Lane, used to say, “It’s really simple when you think about it.” As PolitiFact points out, yes, the meme calling Minnesota’s stats record-breaking, etc., is disingenuous, but after Pawlenty’s disasters, the overall tenor seems to me pretty hard to argue with.

On a run the other day I was thinking about urban density, which is always rising to the top of the chatter-boil in Seattle. It struck me, running through Oslo’s streets, how quiet, unhurried, in many ways open-spaced, and watery Oslo is for a city of its size. These aren’t adjectives one usually calls upon to describe dense urban spaces. And yet, it turns out that Oslo is significantly denser than Seattle, which is watery, to be sure, but is not (for the most part) very quiet, or open-spaced. It’s more and more hurried by the year, it seems, though I know that’s not quite a defensible statement (it’s certainly a far cry from the East Coast megalopolis), and I’d argue there are plenty of places in town that aren’t rushed, and that are quite open (Discovery Park, for one). Still, Seattle feels a lot more urban than Oslo, save that pesky paucity of public transit. But then, maybe that’s just it: nobody’s on the subway or the bus, they’re all aboveground in their cars, giving the illusion of urban density, even if they do stop for pedestrians (with or without a crosswalk) more commonly than elsewhere. Certainly, a huge factor is the conspicuous absence of a giant freeway slicing the town in two and bathing it in a cacophony of brain-numbing automotive noise and a sticky rain of road grit.

So really, the spirit of this post is to wonder why certain elements of Scandinavian social structures seem so much sounder than ours (pun intended). More, maybe, I’m curious about my own relationship to public and private space. There are plenty of heady and contemplative texts to cite in that meditate on the experience and arrangement of public and private space, but I’m not going to dig them up. Rather, I had to confess to myself that I secretly love the image of a house with a yard—is it the Iowan in me, refusing to sleep?—while urban Norwegians are more liable to be satisfied with apartment-life, very small yards, and close proximity with their neighbors? (This last wondering is ironic, given their famous reticence to get in anybody else’s grill.)

Curious. At any rate, here are some interesting numbers to look at, that I’ve been sharing with some Norwegian students:

Oslo Metropolitan Area
Population: 942,084
Area: 266.16 km²
Density: 3,540/km²

Oslo City
Population: 628,719
Area: 130.5 km²
Density: 4,817/km²

Seattle Metropolitan Area
Population: 3,610,105
Area: 15,209.3 km²
Density: 237 people/km²

Seattle City
Population: 668,342
Area: 214.9 km²
Density: 3,110/km²

(Sources: norges stastistisk sentralbyrå; US Census Bureau; Seattle.gov; US Census Bureau)

The low density of Seattle’s metro area is misleading, however, due to the vast area between population centers that comprise the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue Metropolitan Statistical Area, per the Census Bureau. But of course both the population and the area demonstrate the radical sprawl characteristic of even progressive American cities. Notice the utter absence of sprawl around Oslo: the city proper is nearly the size of Seattle, but the metro area only adds some 300,000 people, to Seattle’s 3,000,000. And I can vouch, having experienced Oslo’s easily transgressible boundaries.

In the end, looking at these numbers, and thinking about Washington State, with its geographic attributes, its one major urban center and numerous, lovely small towns, I find myself wondering why it’s so hard for us to get some things right (like public transportation). The obvious reason is cultural: for whatever reason, Norwegian society is, on the whole, collectivist while American society is, it goes without saying, hyper-individualist. The “law of Jante” (or janteloven) articulates it well (even if the “commandments” smack a tiny bit creepy to American ears). I’m not sure how that divergence came about. But there it is. So there y’go.

Aaaaand lastly, D) Things I miss, a little.

I’ll take a cue from Erlend Loe’s absolutely wonderful narrator in naiv.super, which I just finished reading last week, and make a list:

-abundant, affordable, locally produced beer of many styles, procurable any day of the week in numerous, accessible locations city-wide
-Theo chocolate
-my Central District/Mt. Baker running routes
-baseball games
-my bicycle
-KEXP over the real-live radio waves
-LPs
-unpopped popcorn in bulk
-bulk foods in general

At the moment, I can’t really think of much else I’ve struggled to do without. It’s a hard life in this socialist hell. Especially when the train’s late . . . by, like, two or three minutes.

 

If you made it this far, here’s a view from my apartment that has been startlingly common:

Last night the Aurora Borealis were visible from Oslo. Faint, and not photographable with the tool I had at hand (my phone), but they were certainly there. I’d seen the Northern Lights (nordlys på norsk) twice in my life prior to last night: once on Lake Wapogasset in Wisconsin some 12, 13 years ago, and once from a plane to London even more years ago. Neither vision was of the ethereal, silent, waving veils you see in images, but were rather faint bars of vague light (this is an adjective party) in a diffuse green glow along the horizon.

Last night’s lights over Oslo were not of the vivid order either, to be sure (I saw the glow from my balcony, opened up the Aurora forecast, saw a whopping 7.33 Kp on the dial, flip-flopped downstairs and out to the soccer fields north of my building). They were hazy against the light pollution, despite this capital city’s relatively low levels of it. But the draping shapes were discernible—moreso than I’d ever seen—and offered an intimation of (I hope) lovelier lights to come.

And isn’t that just a nice analogy for the view from here, with but few days before my first school visit, after which the roving begins in earnest.

(And speaking of northern lights, I’ve got a date set for Svalbard, now, in late February! There it is on my map at the right [unless you’re on a mobile device]. You may have to zoom out to see it, hanging out up at 78° N. It’ll be long twilight there, then; the sun won’t rise full for another week or so, bringing the first rays of sunlight since the sun will have set in what, then, will have been last October. No, I won’t apologize for that sentence.)