will be made along the way. All of the above will be summarised in a tasteful voiceover on top of some sort of video montage of all the places I go looking mysterious and cloudy.
Travelling by sea and land, it will be an Odyssean epic, only with me, a girl, on a female quest for authenticity.
HAUNTED BY THOUGHTS OF AN ELSEWHERE
I have a cabin on a corridor with all the other cabins; each cabin has two bunks, two lamps, two lockers and a porthole. The cabin doors do not have locks and next door keeps walking into my cabin, mistaking it for his. From what I gather he works in shifts, engineering things. Most of the employees are Icelandic but speak at least partial English. I get by with a kind of pidgin formed from their rudimentary vocab and my pocket phrase book.
There are also two students: Kristján and Urla, a guy and a girl from Manchester and Leeds Universities who use the freighter to travel home to Iceland cheaply in the uni holidays. They live in different cities and only met on their first trip. They now make their trips home coincide so they can keep each other company, and they have a rapport with the regular employees. Everyone seems to be under the impression that they are, or are to be, in love.
I am trying to capture the ‘essence’ of life on board Blárfoss for the documentary. Can I do that by filling a memory card with pictures and videos of every inch of the ship, enough to make a 3D mosaicked replica? As though to get at the essence of something is to cover its every angle, like a method of scientific inquiry, exhausting its possibilities? Probably not, because the memory card is nearly a quarter full already. I have also interviewed just about every English speaker afloat. Urla especially thinks the documentary is ‘totally cool.’ Everyone was taking part as a way of alleviating boredom but it has evolved into some strange kind of fame-ritual, because in the tiny world of the ship the interviewee becomes something akin to a celebrity. At first I was worried about this tainting the documentary, but I suppose I can make it a case in point.
The ship’s interior is functional and plain, with dull and unengaging shapes and cold pastel colours that work to intensify the inside of the lounge, the colours of the board games and the humming of the heaters. Aside from the ubiquity of the ship’s engine, which can be felt more than heard, outside the lounge there is rarely any sound apart from the intermittent tannoy presence of our captain (who we have nicknamed Capt. Oz). We have all found ourselves taking an unusual interest in food and meal times, which are almost always the same. Plokkfiskur, it is called: fish stew, in all its variants. Then underpinning the whole experience is a feeling that I would tentatively call weariness or dreaminess or, combining both, dreariness. A kind of suspension, being both still and unstill, wonky, caused by the weird sensation of movement when nothing visible is moving, the force of gravity contending with the swell of the ocean. Being on an object that is floating makes you more conscious of gravity. With time to think about this, I have come to an arbitrary decision as to what zero gravity might feel like.
In outer space I figure you develop a stronger sense of proprioception, which is the sense of the body parts in relation to each other. (I read this in one of the only English magazines from the lounge, Pro Bodybuilding Weekly.) The brain can adapt the senses to compensate each other, so a blind person might feel and hear better. In outer space, with minimal stimuli of sound, sight, smell, taste and touch, perhaps proprioception becomes enhanced. Weightlessness makes any body movement effortless. Forces would radiate from the inside of your body, your pulse would throb through your limbs and you would feel ‘embodied’ in the most literal sense. This is all just boredom-speculation. I also like to think I can imagine what it would feel like to not have an arm, or to have a third arm, or a penis.
LAND OF THE ICE-QUEENS
Every star is a sun. Every sun has its own planets. Every planet has its own constellations. The 3D world is a hologram of a 2D world projected from the edge of a black hole.
OUTER
SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE
We do not make enough of outer space. The only remaining frontier and it is no longer of much interest to most of the public. I suppose that is a good thing, and practical. Things would be trickier if everyone was ultra-conscious of their infinitesimality. My mum does not believe in space. I asked her once when I was young if she believed in aliens and she said don’t be silly, Erin. I said it seems far more likely that there are aliens if space goes on forever. She said she had never really thought about it. I asked a bit more because I wanted to know what was past the blue sky in her head if she did not think about space. She told me to shut up, she had more important things to think about, like working overtime to make money now that Dad had lost his job at the Cadbury factory because it got bought by America.
Having busy parents meant spending a lot of summer holidays in kids’ clubs and eating mainly breadcrumbed/fun-shaped frozen foods. Our domestic life was founded on convenience. Remove foil before heating quickedy-quick Micro Chips I feel like Chicken Tonight like Chicken Tonight. Only modern convenience did not bring the liberation they said it would because Mum still had to work a job and vacuum as well, thank you, Mr Dyson. So really she can be excused for not stopping to think about infinity.
I have been standing out on deck and looking out to sea. The sea that goes on unbroken to the horizon. There is nothing, no things but gulls, and you think, how do the gulls fly without tiring? Do they not feel panic that there is nowhere for them to rest their wings apart from actually on the ocean, and here they might get eaten by something big that comes from what to them must seem another dimension? No place to rest their eyes and sleep? The empty space makes me think of a diagram in a physics book of a ball on a plane of Newton’s, a single arrangement of matter rolling on a grid of space, the loneliest object in the world. We are the ball and the sea is the grid. I have only been on an unbroken and empty plane like this on a P&O ferry to France once, and that was only for a matter of hours. By day three I feel like the Ancient Mariner.
Urla likes to read and we got along quickly. We have formed a kind of two-way book club where we swap and then discuss. We have been dipping into Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel. Urla says she likes Le Guin; the book’s world Winter reminds her a little of her own icy home, but she is not so keen on Bishop, maybe because some of the intricacies of language are lost on her, maybe because her BA is in Business Studies. I have read a little of her book, Lean In, by her hero Sheryl Sandberg. It is all about how women in business can help themselves to succeed in a male-dominated workplace by learning to be more like men.
Part of the trip obviously had to be about personal growth, and I have resolved to take the extended opportunity to make myself a more well-rounded human being. The five-point plan goes like this:
–Read lots of insightful books
–Know rough history of every place before visiting
–Immerse self in culture of each place
–Learn important phrases in each language
–Write. Every day
Urla’s parents are separated. Her mum is Icelandic but her dad is English. He lives near to her in Leeds and she has split her time between England and Iceland since she was ten. I was planning on staying in a cheap hostel in Reykjavík but Urla’s mum has a spare room that I can stay in for free for as long as it takes me to figure out how to get to Greenland. So instead of having to infiltrate my first foreign city with the blunt ram of a tourist I have Urla to show me around and she has an SUV, so we can even go see the best bits of the landscape of Iceland, something that would have taken some logistics considering my budget. Urla talks like everyone should listen and has a way of draping herself over everything like a languid cat.
