Collected Works ✏️ Vancouver

The Völva

9:10 AM

Forty minutes into the exam, I’m getting closer to my real argument:

The epic harrowing vision of Norse myth and Norwegian Black Metal seems to be a bar bar barbaric anomaly, a Norther burtish escapade into bleak maninglessness that the Southern Epic, with its fusion of Greek democracy, philosophy and Classical-cum-Christian religion will tame. Yet the differences between the Greeks and the Norse aren't that great: despite their democratic councils, their agoras and their Allthings, neither could stop catastrophe. Perhaps it’s because we’re only human, only apes that have learned to philosophize. We still hoard and fight, like monkeys on the loose. We’re still bound by our limited, self-centred nervous systems. After two World Wars and countless scientific facts about the degradation of our environment, we’re still stocking arms and slipping inch by inch back into the jungle. 

The epic is full of dire warnings about who we are and what we do. From The Iliad to the Voluspá we’ve got the same prophetic vision.

I look at what I’ve written and wonder how Old Rex will read it. Will he understand about guns and roses, and about how it gets worse here every day? What if he doesn’t see the dire omens — from arms trafficking and ebola to global warming? What if he thinks that global warming’s a matter of belief? Or, worse, what if he can’t stand heavy metal? Still, why antagonize the old goat when he’s the one who grades my exam? 

So I soften my tone. I remember Sylvia saying, “You shouldn’t dump vinegar into people’s coffee. You have to make them feel comfortable about their lives. You have to reassure them that they can keep on living in the lap of luxury, even though you have every intention of taking it all away. Try Bailey’s instead.” She then whistled an old Bob Dylan tune, and sang softly, 

The carpet, too, is moving under you / And it's all over now, baby blue.

I need to give Old Rex that warm feeling, the one you get when it’s cold outside yet you decide to forget about the end of the world, make yourself an Irish coffee, and let yourself sink into a warm bath. So I title my next section, 

Snorri’s Bath

What better place to start our journey into the Epic than with the outdoor bath of Snorri Sturluson, who compiled the early Norse legends, perhaps while sitting and musing in his “Snorralaug,” his “Snorri’s bath.” According to Wikipedia, “In 1206 Snorri Sturluson settled in Reykholt. The remains of his farm, including his hot outdoor bath, have been preserved to some extent.”

Snorralaug, by TommyBee (Wikimedia commons, photo cropped by RYC)

Snorralaug, by TommyBee (Wikimedia commons, photo cropped by RYC)

4:30 AM

Sylvia insists that ecologically we’re slipping dangerously toward a watery abyss, just as surely as I’m slipping into the warm sudsy water of my Matthalaug. I’m sliding deeper and deeper into the water, leaving the things of this world behind. Despite the fact that I’m drifting into the currents below, I’m nevertheless conscious of the fact that my notebook’s dipping into the water, a door is closing, and Sylvia’s standing above me.

I look over at the shut door (which is turning the room into a steam bath) and see her grey hoodie drop to the floor. Her tight jeans float downward over pink panties, and her white t-shirt brushes her nipples. The cotton layer of strata levitates northward, softly upward, then falls to the south, away from the Wall and the White Walkers and those homicidal orcs. She brings with her the frozen ether as she stands there in all her teutonic glory, turning the air a soft blue, like the image of Scarlett Johansson on my long lost igoogle page.

Sylvia warms her fingers in the water that fills the Matthalaug to its brim. She lifts one leg up and over the lip into the slipstream. White foam courses over the brim and onto the floorboards.

But I don’t have time for this poetic nonsense. I turn on the cold tap and splash water onto my face. I have five hours to come up with a thesis! I must look inward, downward, past slim fingers resting on white enamel into the deep blue. Past the aquamarine and into the teal. I must drift downward whether she’s with me or not, riding my coat-tails like a Valkyrie.

I must ride the blue eddies of the sky like a Valkyrie funnelling downward 

precipitous like a tornado bearing downward into the cold water 

through Jötunheimr, the land of the giants, to Mimir's well

with its nine circular worlds and its strange visions

I must follow Odin into the mystic currents

into the 81 hidden worlds lying beneath

into the darkest depths of Mordor

ring under ring, all unified in

one ring of elven power

for the Dark Lord —

all bounded by

white enamel

here in my

Mattha

laug

.

In brief, I must commune with the spirit of Jimmie Page.

✏️

I must concentrate. If only I could ignore the figment of my dreamworld — that long white leg with no hair on it that's curling its slim ankle around my neck. Did she have to shave her legs just before coming over? Is she here to distract me, or torture me, or both: a Banquo of the bathtub, eating away at my time and accusing me of ignoring our star-crossed gender (she was meant to be a lesbian, she’s sure) but somehow everything mixes so smoothly in the currents beneath our friendship, our shins and ankles slipping and sliding like the geologic zones beneath that deep Romantic chasm where we hear ancestral voices prophesying war, and Sylvia’s voice warning me about ecological zones, magna and warm waters rising from the earth’s core, Vulcan and Hades, and the carbon footprint that she didn’t make as she stepped into the bath. Can there be a footprint in water, Albert Camus? The polar icecaps are blowing their tops like angry polar bears, and Hel is riding across the sea with Loki toward the great heated mineral springs of Iceland.

Dripping suds from her smooth chin like a hoary beard, Sylvia asks me point-blank: Did you know that Iceland is heated by more than 10,000 metric tonnes of thermal water every day? She grabs the computer from the toilet seat and shows me the hot water coming up ↑ and the cold water going down ↓. It’s all very confusing, as you can see at http://tigger.uic.edu/~cstein/resice.html:

It’s especially confusing because they use terms like bathymetry and heat flow and global average values for that lithospheric age. The bathy part I get (her ankle has wrapped itself around my ear), but not the average values. And when it comes to lithoshperic age I’m thinking dinosaurs, possibly Old Rex. And what about that referent that? It gets even more confusing when you take into account that as the room steams up I can barely read the screen and as the water cools down the currents mix and dissipate, mixing beneath the polar ice-capped mountains of my knees and around the other submerged body parts. Alot seems to be happening down there, which makes it really hard to concentrate.

I slide my right foot around her left shoulder to reach the gleaming silver taps. I release hot blasts into the tepid deep. I’m doing my part to keep the Gulf Stream flowing, from its southern engine in the Caribbean, to its northern engine in the land of the ice and snow:

Retracting her ankles, once snugly wedged between smooth enamel and codslick bells to keep her feet warm, Sylvia pounds me with another question, more inconvenient than the first: What if the arrows stop once the towers of ice have crashed into the sea and the northern generator sputters? 

We’ve clearly strayed into ecological territory, a secular Ragnarök. But I must leave Sylvia’s question unanswered, and get back to studying for the English exam. I must slowly, carefully back away from her world of depressing facts, and try to imagine what the world was like before the Industrial Revolution and all those dark satanic mills. I must get back to the French Provençal Poets and capital letters, because there’s always the possibility that traditions courtly and otherwise will be on the exam. Oscar Wilde and his dandy henchman are waiting in the wings four and a half hours from now. As Hamlet said to his buddy Horatio, The readiness is all. I’m sure that Macbeth would have something to add.

I must get back to Norse, Celtic, Greek, and Christian myth, back to the dark Western mines of lore, the gates of Moria, and Led Zeppelin. I must stop thinking about Sylvia’s smooth alabaster and stop trying to measure the depth of Odin’s well with multibeam echosounders and isobaths. I must strip myself of my existential self so that I can focus on Jimmie Page’s inner eye and focus on what was, transcending time itself. I must stop seeing breasts rising from the foam, just out of reach, right in front of my nose.