Collected Works ✏️ Vancouver

Drive Our Ships to New Lands

6:06

The first song on my playlist is “Thousands Are Sailing,” by the Pogues. The song starts off slowly, with the ghosts that haunt the waves, then the drums and fiddles start up, bringing us melodies from the backstreets of Dublin and the pubs of Galway. The song is about Irish immigration to New York, but it also rings deep, and can be felt by almost any migrant, like the poem by Li Po: The moonlight lies before my bed / Like frost on the ground. / When I lift my head I see the moon; / When I lower my head I long for home. The song appeals to those who might fall for drunken Irish revelry and red-haired girls (may they whisper in your dreams) but also to the thousands upon thousands throughout history who have migrated to new lands, from the Greeks in the Black Sea to the Phoenicians in Cartagena, from the Vikings in the North Sea to the Danes and the Saxons across the English Channel. It’s about all our kith and kin, all those who travelled Across the western ocean / To a land of opportunity.

11:01 AM

Thousands Are Sailing

The Irish have wandering in their blood. Perhaps the best example is James Joyce, who having wandered to Trieste, couldn’t stop himself from simultaneously wandering around Dublin, on that great pub-crawl of a text Ulysses, written by a drunken Dubliner who gulped down allusions all day long and made up new names for the old sea-farer and his rosy-fingered Dawn. A pub-crawling Odysseus. From Virginia to Botany Bay, the Irish joined the witless hordes who trailed their bleeding souls across the grassy knolls of Texas and the dead heart of Queensland, rolling with the diesel and dust, toiling under the midnight oil of the mines, and banging their nefarious kettledrums of “Waltzing Matilda” and “God and Country” like a great diesel train laying tracks over the songlines of Australia.

I hear the rhythm of the locomotion, the whistle telling us we’re about to enter the station, when a great blast comes from an iron warship in the sky, a zeppelin shiny and grey, glowing with iridescent red plants and burning Alexandrian pages, its zithers and electric mandolins blasting ancient melodies from the sky, high on the peaks of Kashmir and the topless towers of Ilium where Achilles makes his last stand.

After that Greek clusterfuck, the iron warship turns westward and northward toward the wolf-haunted world of alliterative waste and wonder.

Like Jerusalem, Troy is as much an idea as a place. Over and over the battle is fought, either in Greece or England, which becomes the new land of battles both earthly and supernatural, as we see in the opening of the anonymous romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:

After the siege of Troy, after the city was destroyed and burnt to ashes, the noble Aeneas and his kin sailed off to become princes of the Western Isles. Romulus built Rome, and gave to the city his own name, and Ticius sailed to Tuscany, and Brutus sailed past France to found the kingdom of Britain, where there has been war and waste and wonder ever since.

And thus the epic heads north to its third home, not far from “the land of the ice and snow, / From the midnight sun where the hot springs flow,” while into England the Viking blood seeps, tempered by the Romans with their methodical scholasticism, their hierarchical religion, and their laws. In England, as in Rome, the epic finds a rebirth, not just in its literary form, but in its aggressive, world-conquering vision. Little wonder that England’s first literary work of any note is Beowulf, with its Geatish hero and its Danish lord.

6:20 A.M.

I see the stationmaster now, and the sign Stockton-on-Tees, and and the iron wheels are grinding in my ears. The Dark Lord rises again and again, like Grendel or his mother, and I am once again sinking into my sea-bath, my Matthalaug, scribbling like Snorri amid the slipperiness of myth. I try to keep my sleepy fingers on the green notebook on my knees, which is sinking slowly into the suds, deeper into the mines of Moria and the dangerous land of Sauron and his Orcs. In the darkest depths of Mordor / I met a girl so fair / But Gollum the evil one / crept up and stole away with her. And now Led Zeppelin’s left on the platform with no girl, fair or unfair to distract me, only gollums, as I sit down on a bench beside the Mason’s Arms pub in 1825. I open my laptop, and find a test paper inside.

11:11 AM

Sylvia is going to make me pay, I can see it in the way she holds her pen like a hammer of the gods. She is totally ignoring me. She doesn’t know, however, that in my early morning madness I drank from the well of Mimir, which lies deeper than the roots of the cosmic tree Yggdrasil.

I couldn’t care less about the fact that Sylvia is ignoring me, for even after Mimir got his head chopped off, Odin carried it around because it spoke to him. So Sylvia doesn't really stand a chance, no matter what she said on the phone last night. No matter what she said she was going to do. No matter what memory I have of her alabaster skin and breasts rising in the suds, even now, nothing will tempt me from rambling on.

6:22 AM

In the background there’s an ominous rumble from the trains, which have multiplied like rabbits, and in the distance there’s a squealing of iron and grease. It’s Iraq and the war machinery of the modern Orcs. It’s Mordor and the Two Towers, and great mountains of ice collapsing into the sea (Sylvia made me watch the Al Gore movie three times). It’s all happening faraway and out of sight, near the melting caps off the coast of Greenland. And somewhere in the land of hot springs and fire Loki is making a deal with Hel to pilot a boat.

I find myself drifting out to sea, “Immigrant Song” playing ever fainter, my notebook dipping further and further into the Gulf Stream, which is slowing according to Sylvia's latest information, slowing just enough for me to grab the corner of my notebook and pull it back onto my knees. The water slaps about my wrists as I dip my codslick quill into the deep blue water, the well of memory, to copy from a website that’s flickering in front of my half-conscious mind: Odin gave one of his eyes as a pledge for a drink from Mimir's well of wisdom…His vast wisdom is used to preserve Middle Earth and all good wights against chaos and destruction for as long as possible…It is believed that the eye Odin left in the Well sees all that happens in the unseen worlds, as the eye he has sees all that transpires in the Nine Worlds from his high seat, his Hliðskjálf.

The book is already six fathoms deep, yet one of my eyes is still seeing into the book, witnessing the unseen world of Thor and Odin and Ragnarök and all that is happening there: the villages in flames, the drum shaking the castle wall, the ring-wraiths riding in black, the fall of the mighty Ash. Our happy Shire in flames.

11:13 AM

But the Hobbits are a resilient lot and they survive no matter what, like the primordial couple inside the bark of the mythic tree Yggdrasil, the same cosmic tree beneath which Odin sacrificed one of his eyes. Like Noah and his wife, the couple step out of the bark like birds from a shell into the new world of Gimli, rising from the sea.

6:33 AM

My other eye sees into the other nine worlds, which on the surface have nothing to do with Snorri or with the outcome of these exams which shake us nightly, or with Sylvia’s wrath (What did she mean on the phone when she said she was going to come over and kick my ass?). I try my best to avoid the image of a pair of smooth white legs kicking my ass instead of sliding, delicate ankle first, for I’m almost positive that the inquisitors will ask about burning villages, Danish castles, the thane of Cawdor, pillars of ice, and about all the other towers now falling and now rising from the deep.

With my eyes half-sunk in the realms of sleep I see the bright cliffs of Gimli rise from the world on fire, post-Ragnarök, the grass-covered hills of Iceland bursting from the deep, dripping with salt-water from the sun, shaking their flaxen locks, like the pixy before me. Is that a dagger I see? Knees rise from the suds, and Sylvia tells me that I should lock my doors, but I’m sure this is a hallucination, like all the other eco-feminist arguments she makes, they make no sense, I must focus on busty blondes not slim pixies, clicking madly I find some images of the lusty sluts of Buxömbúrg (just west of Blönduós), north of the undulant hills of Hálendið and Rhovanion, the craggy moors of Scotland with their terrified monks and the grass-scattered outcrops of the Hebrides, which look strangely familiar like the promontories of some New Found Land, perhaps the very spot where Leif Ericson dangled his heavy Norweigan boots over the mossy tide of the New World.

11:14 AM

Now she’s smiling at me. How am I supposed to get anything done when she smiles like that, the same way she smiled when the hippy on the beach came along with the mojitos? No one would believe the scene down there: everyone wrecked and naked out of their minds, the Cuban rum must have done something down there, because she turned to me and asked me if — … if only I could remember where Ericson set down! How that little piece of information would impress the Grand Inquisitor himself if I could tell him that, yes that’s it!—the first Vikings touched down at L’Anse aux Meadows. But what’s an anse anyway? I’m sure I looked it up already. 

6:44 AM

Consulting Wikisleepia I find out that it means a creek — ah, The Creek in the Meadows! The odd combination of English and French confirms my suspicions that we are in fact somewhere near Canada.

11:15 AM

With Socratic intent, I ask Kenneth Aristotle Rexroth,

So why did they leave Iceland anyway?  And did this have anything to do with the development of the sagas? Let us make our visit of the facts: according to the Germanic scholar Wikidemus,

The sagas (from Icelandic saga, plural sögur), are stories about ancient Scandinavian and Germanic history, about early Viking voyages, about migration to Iceland, and of feuds between Icelandic families.

So, why did they leave Scandinavia for Iceland? And why did they sail further west, setting up a base in Greenland, a home away from their home in Iceland?  Was it just out of necessity? Or —

6:31 AM

rising from the bath and pointing a Socratic finger toward the light bulb above me and exposing myself most unashamedly,

11:16 AM

was it not the very torch of Odysseus falling from the sky, into their rough hands? And did this torch not light their way westward, toward some nebulous capitalized West, a mythical realm that in time would become real?

6:32 AM

I address the flaking blue paint on the ceiling, vaguely aware that someone is splashing me with water, only momentarily distracting me from my exalted thesis—

11:17 AM

And would this same wanderlust not descend into the veins of the other northerners, once the wolfish blood of the Scandinavians had mixed itself into the Danelaw and throughout the newly-conquered Normandy? Did the first ships that set sail from Norway, with their heavy load of Scottish and Irish slaves, not lead in the end to the peopling of an entire continent, from Miami to St. John’s, from Galveston to Saskatoon, from San Diego to Vancouver?

And do we not also live in an Age where we are terrified by the writing on the wall, and where doom steers toward us, like Nazguls from the sky, like Loki and Hel and Fenrir on the seas in their devilish boat? Eight hundred years ago Snorri writes of  “an axe age, a sword age, / where shields are cleft asunder / a storm age, a wolf age, before the world plunges headlong.” Are his words more accurate now than they were then? Isn’t his vision just another version of history, which Byron calls The Devil’s Scripture?  

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