Table of Contents
I. Alternative travel: a journey of self-definition in the polar night
Have you ever felt that you’ve reached that point in life where you’ve already lived too much? Or perhaps you no longer know what you want, that you’ve begun to undertake all sorts of things, maybe without coherence or without aim.
Or perhaps you’ve reached the point where you feel severed from yourself or severed from the world.
Or perhaps you’re among those who have entered a serious game, a game of life itself, into which they’ve thrown their whole being — and perhaps you’ve shouldered a great deal of responsibility and subjected yourself to a prolonged stress lasting years, and now you’ve finally reached that point where, at last, after a long race, you have time to let the tension go.
Or perhaps you’re simply someone searching for a corner of this world where time flows slowly. A return to the grassroots, a return to the self, somewhere far from all the noise, the turmoil, and the pain of the world.
Perhaps you’re seeking a place where you can take stock of yourself, remember what you lost along the way, what slipped from you in the world’s whirl, thread your memories strand by strand, give yourself the time to learn what can be learned from your own life. Perhaps to realize whom you’ve hurt, and how, and whether anything can still be mended.
Perhaps to remember who you are — or, on the contrary, to gather like a bundle everything you’ve lived and to define who you will be from now on.
The night and the solitude of the north. The loneliness and the emptiness. Sometimes, in order to return to the world, you feel the need to break from it completely. The solitude and the whole hectares blanketed in snow make you see yourself as you are, without other people. And slowly, inwardly, you settle and break things apart within yourself: what you wanted, what was possible, what will be possible, and that impenetrable Quo Vadis?
Perhaps between three flights and two work-related meetings, the moment has come to weave together the fractures of the contemporary world that somehow are also a part of you.
Perhaps between what you want and what others want there seems to be no middle ground.
Perhaps you find yourself at a crossroads where your entire system of values has collapsed and you must work, within yourself, on a new one.
Perhaps life has not been as you imagined it, and you need a place and a time in which to dream new dreams.
The north is a solitary, introspective, meditative place, a place that allows you to look into your deepest darkest recesses of your mind. A place to come to terms with yourself, to understand your limits, who you are, what you can do, and what, on the contrary, you must accept. A place where time slows suitable for slow travel.
II. A phone call from a friend and a flight to Luleå
I was searching for that kind of frozen solitude in rural Romania, so I moved in with a friend who had found a house to rent at a reasonable price in Argeș County (Winter in Romania, Vâlsănești Argeș). About two months had already passed of my half-year sabbatical when I got a phone call from a friend and received a similar proposal, but a far more frozen one.
He was about to take his annual holiday at his little cabin in Sweden. For him, the one place in this world where he could truly unwind. So, I decided to join him and we flew to Stockholm and from there took a domestic flight to Luleå.
It was a small plane and I sat by the window. It was late March, and beneath us the Gulf of Bothnia was partly frozen. I put on my headphones and let a gentle, frozen intro play: Tchaikovsky’s Winter Dreams.
I was flying over frozen lands. A thin film of ice lay between me and my pain, and for the day at hand it would stay that way. A layer of ice between what I was and what I showed to the world.
We landed at the small Luleå airport around early noon. Not far from the Arctic Circle, I suddenly found myself in a bright, snow-covered tundra. The town itself wasn’t far from Tchaikovsky’s hibernal dreams.
Flight over Bothnia gulf
It lay scattered across the islands and peninsulas in the estuary of the Luleå River, and if you had a pair of skates — as almost everyone in Norrbotten County does — at that time of year you could glide over to your neighbors across immense frozen expanses…
I didn’t linger long in Luleå that day, only long enough to buy a SIM card. An occasion on which I realized I had stepped into a realm where time, too, had nearly frozen. I was used to this experience from back home as well — moving from the urban to the rural, or from south to north. I was still caught in the frenzy and restlessness of the south, and suddenly I found myself in a place where people drove at 25 km/h when the limit was 50. I stood in line at Telia (the Nordic telecom company) and watched how languidly the woman at the counter moved. The rhythm of life here was clearly another, and the reasons to hurry had vanished. The agitation and the urge to rush existed only within me. It would be an active exercise to shed the turmoil inside me.
From Luleå I took the bus to the town of Kalix. It was barely 4 in the afternoon, but the sun was already showing signs of dusk.
I feel frustrated because I can’t. What a human feeling. A can’t — absolute, immense, like the icy wasteland where I was about to live for two months. To search for yourself… what an idea… I’ve known since I was born that I would be… it always felt like an inescapable destiny. Ah, how I hate this vise I’m caught in. The only way by is through… and if I dehumanize myself, it’s all been for nothing.
I gase, I cry, I leave.
With the last sliver of light I reached the bus stop. Somewhere at the foot of a bridge over the Kalix River. There was nothing there; the bus stopped only in case some lost wanderer wanted to cross the bridge on foot. We took an old, unplowed road running parallel to the river.
The little cabin, nothing more than a hermit’s fantasy. I knew I would feel good there.
— This is me! This is me! No one knows it, but this is truly me. Now, in this state, harnessed with two backpacks and the santur, walking at a steady pace down an empty road, I am far more real than ever.
I shouted to Lars, who understood my excitement perfectly.
We reached his cabin, which sat on a higher bank of the river. What madness. To analyze yourself, to construct and deconstruct your own mind. Or is the madness something else?
Riverside cabin Månsbyn, Kalix
You wanted to break through the structures of your own mind as if they were made of butter. You wanted to shatter them and remake them as new. There is a price for everything in this world.
As soon as we arrived, I made a fire in the fireplace. The cold bit both inside the house and out. It wasn’t late, but it was already pitch dark outside. We made minimal arrangements for the evening. On the little speaker I let Smetana play. Unlike the flowing of the Vltava through the music, the ripples of our river had frozen a while ago.
Winter in Sweden: Kalix river frozen
I opened the bottle of wine bought specially to mark the first evening. The fire crackled playfully in the fireplace.
There was something fitting, in the turbulence, in the music of the Romantic era, binding the harmony of the moment, of a place that had remained in another time. Above the small wooden table, that was placed right in front of the window, hung a candelabra with wax candles.
What more could an 18th- or 19th-century writer have wished for? The candle flames danced in the windowpane, while a storm broke loose behind. Ah, these emotions of the Romantic age, tumultuous, dramatic, declaring that everything will collapse in the next instant. Emotions I keep displacing onto an abstract plane, that I experienced through various forms of art, but which I’ve lived split, fragmented, halfway and more inside my head than in reality.
Emotions I dissect in various directions, hoping I’ll make sense of them and one day be whole again. I let the unnamed emotions swirl together with the music, but I pushed every other form of thought to the back of my mind. Their time would come, in the next weeks, when I will be left alone.
In places like these, in moments like this, people feel free to philosophize.
We told stories of people, of life, and of the world. I like holding conversations with free people.
There were many things I appreciated about my friend Lars, beyond the fact that he was a successful musician (an aspect of himself he’d have preferred to forget when he was around people from other circles).
Somehow he had remained a normal person, which is no small thing in the face of life and the world. He chose to become a social worker after finding success on the classical music stage. We talked about the difficulties of a job in social services. He told me how he works with families coming from disadvantaged parts of the world. He worked every day from morning to evening. He’d wake at 6 and get home late in the evening. Somehow he managed to sustain both sides of his life: he practiced with the orchestra, two days a week he conducted a youth orchestra, and he continued to work in social services.
A man of the world and of his times. Immigrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and who knows what other Asian or African country. He was responsible for their integration into society.
He helped them take charge of their social housing and learn how to function in this world. Not an easy job at all. A man who managed to bring the sensitivity born of so many years studying classical music into people’s lives.
— I wanted to get rid of the musician’s ego, that make some of us think that if they are able to render a string of notes perfectly, it makes us geniuses or special.
We burned through an armful of wood, and then burned through another. We both knew the stories of many people, and we jumped from one to the next, sometimes catching a fragment of understanding.
III. First days in a Riverside Cabin
Just write.
The next day we stayed around the cabin. We shoveled the snow and Lars taught me everything necessary for living on the bank of the Kalix River. I learned to make ice holes with a hand-operated metal auger and to draw water from them to supply the cabin. We cleaned the house, I saw how the sauna worked, we got the outdoor toilet running.
Then we gathered everything we needed and, with a certain tightening of the heart, we set out over the frozen surface of the river and went to the island downstream. The little river island seemed torn from a dream. A small clearing with a stand of white birches at one end, three large boulders polished by repeated cycles of freeze and thaw, and a cabin that held nothing but a dining hall. It was the gathering place for the community of the hamlet of Månsbyn. It belonged to no one and to everyone, one of the many ways in which socialist, community-oriented thinking manifested in Sweden.
Do you have a dream? Fulfill it.
Do you have a dream? Shout it. Bring it into reality.
Have you forgotten how to dream? Learn. Allow yourself.
Walking on ice: Kalix river frozen
On the third day we set out on foot along the frozen river. Nordic nature was a continuous spectacle. And its beauty offered a fulfilling joy. I simply love walking whole kilometers through winter. Here and there, the forest was broken by a few timber houses with a view of the great river. We also passed other river islands, many of them covered with bare birches with white bark. I remembered the pleasant impression they had made the evening before in the fireplace. A warm fire with sparks from the peeled flakes of white bark.
There was a thought repeating within my mind: I am human, I have human limits. I work with my humanity.
I remember how they taught us in school about the central themes of authors. Perhaps no such thing even exists. But if it does, one of my central themes is the road. I look at the river winding, frozen, ahead of us. I feel good again. As long as my gaze can fix on the line of the horizon, I feel good. I stand again before all possibilities.
In a way, I’ve succeeded. It’s no longer about me, it’s also about others. It’s no longer about the fact that I am here, but about the fact that I share the road with Lars.
In Kalix we tried again the Swedish cuisine and I discovered the wonderful sandwich with river shrimp. Then I got a membership to the community pool. Kalix is a small town: a few apartment blocks, a few houses, a couple of restaurants and 3 cafés, a hospital, and an extremely long skating track maintained along the frozen river.
We made the fire in the fireplace again. We were talking about the past, and somehow Lars ended up conducting an imaginary orchestra toward Dvořák’s New World. In his mind everyone was placed in their seats, the music flowed through him and out of him, an imaginary baton waved vigorously through the air. I watched him and had that feeling again that people can do absolutely incredible things — something I remind myself of periodically.
With him in the room, there was a real orchestra, and he was signaling to the violins at a precise but fluid point in time. Something in his expression told me he no longer saw the room; with his gaze fixed on a space that existed only in his mind, he revealed his greatness as a conductor. There was something so alive and so human in the way the emotions succeeded one another across his face. As he displayed his mastery, a whole spectacle was simply playing out on his conductor’s face. He is a man somehow oversaturated by the wonder and enthusiasm others throw toward his musical abilities, and it seems he isn’t looking for praise from his friends.
On the fourth day we woke at dawn and took the bus to Luleå. We met Sven, who lent me his wife’s skates, a pair of white leather ones, elegant, classic, a perfect pair of nordic skates. He and Lars each took one of the ice sleds the municipality leaves available to anyone.
Prepared for reading by the fireplace
Imagine this: to have before you an immense wasteland of crystal ice on which to glide without obstacle, to be one with nature, to have the view open toward nothing man-made — the covered shores of the estuary and the river islands covered with clusters of pine forest. Imagine the feeling of freedom given by the immense frozen lake on which you can glide freely.
Then we settled at a terrace with a view over the expanse of ice and had lunch, an occasion on which I learned the incredible and improbable life story of Sven.
— I’ve lived almost my whole life with the belief that I was going to die within a few months.
There was something childlike about him, an elfin air wrapped in a thick blanket of life experience. Tomte, as it was called in the frozen north. He suffered from cystic fibrosis and was the improbable survivor of two lung transplants. Fishing and a love of nature had brought him close to Lars. He lived in the city and had always wanted a cabin on the riverbank. Lars left his in Sven’s care, so whenever he felt the need to tinker and be in nature, he’d spend a weekend there.
The fifth day Lars spent sleeping and gathering energy to sustain the intense post-vacation lifestyle. And I took the car and drove along the Swedish coast.
It was the first time I had ever seen a completely frozen sea.
IV. Was für ein Albtraum
I had nightmares that night.
It smelled of earth and macerated leaves. Downhill, the forest floor grew wetter and wetter, until you sank into it as into a swamp. I was there to help someone. Perhaps a former lover, toward whom I felt indebted. From another world someone was screaming at me. You always do this, you don’t care about me, you always put yourself in danger. That voice grated in my ears. My mother’s voice. She was calling me into another world, and without realizing how, I arrived in that world. The wind with its ice crystals lashed my face. You don’t care. No one cares about me. No, no, you don’t care.
My mother howled as she slid down the frozen slope. I wanted to save her. I began running downhill after her. As she slid, more and more ice crystals were sticking to her.
Helpless.
At the bottom of the valley I managed to catch up with her nearly frozen body. She was still howling, this time unintelligible sounds.
Was für ein Albtraum.
What a nightmear, straight from the cold and misty Hel.
I can’t grow up. I don’t understand why. I’m almost 30 and still running on the scripts inherited from my parents or from childhood. I’ve felt frozen for years. I feel like a child and I’m forced to solve adult problems. I am frozen in time.
Slow travel: frozen sea
My mother’s body had crystallized into a statue of ice. I try to unfasten my many layers of clothing and wrap her in them. I try to save her from freezing. But it’s too late. The translucent ice only melts. I wake up.
That day, Lars decided to rest at the cabin and I took the car for a drive in the Haparanda Archipelago.
V. I want.
I WANT. To drive fast and listen to Mozart’s Requiem. To press the accelerator and feel, in my mind, how I collide with my own survival instincts. Beautiful, heartrending sorrow. The ability to press the accelerator and let the world run down the windshield. And I’d do it too, if I were as free as you. Said the beautiful wife, with her beautiful blond children, in their perfect house.
I am perfectly free to flirt with death, with life, with the world.
There’s a lot of freedom in this state where you wish for death. Perhaps I simply wish to live intensely, vibrantly, utterly unmediated. Perhaps it’s just a powerful reaffirmation of my own life.
This time, the time of love has passed. I’m not even interested in reinventing this feeling, for the umpteenth time, into some form potentially livable for me. ENOUGH.
I have forgotten how to want. I was trying to dig out form under of layers and layers of time and years of socially accepted behaviours and goals. Who I am, what I want, two simple questions, falling into the nothingness.
It is possible that I am wrong and I have not yet understood myself.
But guess what, every person, in any situation whatsoever, is free in the embrace of death. There is absolutely nothing in this world that can deprive me of this freedom.
I undo with one hand what I do with the other.
Dies irae, dies illa Solvet saeclum in favilla
… And I tried with all my might not to subscribe to feminism. I wanted to believe it was an outdated current, at least in the social stratum I grew up in.
Even now I can’t be a feminist, because it’s a current based on revolt, opositionism, the generalized distortion of the other — but some things remain boringly true, even in my times. I wanted to see it as something necessary in the past and in other societies. And because I’ve met many educated men I had nothing to reproach them for.
Realism: the ability to look at the truth and the state of the world unmediated, direct, unromanticized, unaltered, and in no case through a soothing positivism.
My pains are small and irrelevant, if compared to the pains of the world. I always have to be careful not to take more than I receive.
Frozen sea in Haparanda archipelago
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
I want to speed, because I can.
Why is it that I need the ilusion of danger in order to get close to my own will? I told him how it affected me. And I also told him, in the same conversation, that I forgive him. To my father.
I did everything I had to, with effort and great sacrifices, and even so, look where I ended up. I have nothing in life I truly care about. I am a set of humanitarian principles meant to serve others.
That he made the best decisions with the data he had.
Like all of us.
Nil inultum remanebit.
And yet revenge was never part of me. It leaves me cold, like everything else. I simply WANT to leave everything behind – untangled feelings, the stale taste in my mouth and the bitterness of life. I WANT to redefine myself.
I have obsessive traits. I listen to the same songs over and over again. Today it’s Mozart’s Requiem. I bury my past. I CAN do this. As, I can immerse myself in a polyphonic Latin snobbery.
Sadness can be a feeling that breaks under its own beauty. You don’t understand, you were the one who wanted to make me give up my young-girl romanticism. Why? It was a beautiful outlook… Just like the ice cracks on the surface of the river as it stretches over the boulders.
Sacrifices are necessary, we all make them, how do you think you arrive at those truly important ideas? No, I don’t believe in this idea. It’s a cheap consolation I no longer believe in. My life was full of empty, unnecessary sacrifices. I sacrificed myself, and for what?
I don’t have the answer yet.
But you learned, didn’t you?
Slowly and poorly.
I think it’s time we sacrificed the theme of sacrifice.
What should I do with my life?
The right answer to that question was to teach me to make a good choice for myself. Yet, I have learned on my own.
How much fury smolders under this ice cap that generally separates me from the world.
«— And yet I envy you.
— The second time, this line sounds like a cheap chess opening.»
Envy comes either from misunderstanding, or it’s a feeling meant to tell us what we lack. It’s a corrosive feeling… Sometimes if educated, if taken apart and understood, it can be quite insightful for oneself. But it can also be blind, when blindly directed to others.
You still envy me? It’s about you, not about me.
If you act based on your envy, I can presuppose your lack of understanding. If you would be in my shoes you would not envy me.
I felt nothing. Nothing, just like in this frozen landscape. As if nothing mattered anymore, or had ever mattered.
You have no power of any kind over me. No one does. Power is conferred. You have as much power as I give you.
Redemisti crucem passus, Tantus labor non sit cassus.
Such a Christian game, of guilt and redemption. The concepts of the past bore me. What’s fascinating about the structures of the mind is that they are, but they might just as well no longer be. Guilt… redemption… they seem words empty of meaning.
What is truly real in the realm of the mind?
In this particular corner of my own mind, I no longer care if I wound others’ sensibilities and I have to tell what happened to me. In another, I cry and don’t know from where so much sadness arises in me. And I’d want to spare others of the sadness inside me.
I want. My friend back. My friend who listens to me anytime and about anything, who was always by my side, in all these turbulent years. Who understood those things in me that were irrelevant to everyone else. And yet this friendship leads to love, and love leads to rejection. And we’ve been going around in this circle for years. I don’t think either of us can go on anymore. I think they’re very normal feelings, the ones you have for me. But I can’t give you what you need. He told me. I could not heal his ability to love. I could not heal mine either.
The ice on the immense surface stretching for the horizont is cracking.
Contempt was written on his face.
Strange, that from the other side contempt should come back, from the face of a person you love. This break in script blocked me, violating ordinary expectations.
«It’s clear to me that as long as I’m around you’ll never get past this pain. And so we’d better each go our own way, because this isn’t life.» Your mother’s pain — here you were talking about your mother’s pain, not about mine.
I can bury love — after all, I never lived it, it stayed at the level of a phantasm of my mind.
It’s a bit harder with friendship. But it must be done. Es muss sein. Und wenn es muss sein, es muss sein.
All of this are only thoughts.
… and the mind can filter its own experiences and thoughts.
At least I’d be free. Free to leave. For the first time I’d be leaving, not running away.
After all, what is the problem with the romanticism in me?
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
The road ran through the birch forest to a steep bank. The dirty white of the rained-on snow covered the little beach. It was the first time in my life I was loosing my sight over the frozen sea. Within the frame of the windshield, a solitary bench interrupted the palette of whites, humanizing the scene through absence. But what if I belong anywhere? Then I don’t have to leave from anywhere.
I choose from inside me what I carry on. I choose. What I bring into my future. I choose what is worth to be lived from what is possible.
I drove several times along the slender, splendid road that crossed from one island to another of the Haparanda archipelago. Once more I closed the surging waves of my own mind.
Before sunset the fog scattered too. I felt tempted to set out across the sea’s expanse of ice. Instead I parked and went off on foot along a beach sheathed in ice. That day, and in the ones that followed, through this fury within me that I had feared, among its searing wisps I began once again to discover my own will.
Now I know how to WANT.
VI. Walpurgis Night
A genuine, unbridled warmth wrapped around the home of Fill and Sara. Their family lived and breathed positivity. Their happiness had a rhythm, an undulating cyclicity. She would come up with an idea, he would take it up, develop it, and begin planning how to make it happen. He cleaned the grill, she seasoned the meat. She dressed the little one, he got the car ready. There was a constant exchange of glances between them; they danced through life together.
They welcomed me into their lives because they knew how hard it can be to be accepted as an outsider by a small community. And because I had stirred their curiosity, and because it is interesting to meet someone new from time to time.
“I love your happiness—it’s genuine, well grounded, ingenuous. You live in a little corner of paradise. You know that, don’t you?”
They knew. They answered me with a smile. Past the glass wall of their living room flowed the blue of the Kalix River. It was the season of the thaw, so slowly—at the very rhythm in which all of life here was steeped—a floe would drift downstream now and then, with some stray dream clinging to it.
“Sometimes I think about what it would be like to climb onto one of these floes and drift with it all the way to the Baltic Sea.”
“We have the same thoughts, Alexandra. We have the same thoughts.” Said Fill, his voice being loaded with understanding.
People capable of taking part in human connection…
She told me how they had met, how they spent that first summer in a caravan, and how they later moved into a little cabin on the riverbank, how they built their house together. Their story soothed me. I am soothed by the thought that people can be like this, can live like this. I burned these thoughts and others in the fire Fill made for Walpurgis Night.
People here haven’t learned that you can break away from nature, and nature is sometimes frozen, sometimes flowing gently. When the river is frozen, people sit patiently with their little stools beside a hole in the ice and wait for the Arctic char; after the floes have run, pike season comes and everyone goes out in their boats.
This year Luleå won the national ice hockey championship for the first time in 30 years, and every citizen of the region feels a personal pride in this achievement. A little Viking boat is set in the water upstream of the bridge over the Kalix. If, through the melting of the ice, it manages to pass beneath the bridge before midnight on the 30th of April, everyone wins and the money goes to a local charitable cause. If not, any one of them can win the whole sum collected, should the little boat happen to pass exactly within their allotted time slot.
Perhaps that is what I did with my life. I sacrificed my happiness for knowledge.
Now I know. Now I understand. There seems little to be done, but I understand.
Perhaps it is just a silly thought that burns along others in the night. Perhaps not.
I was watching their little girl, the way she gazed, fascinated, at the bonfire. A pagan tradition: on the night of the 30th of April, on Walpurgis Night, they burned the brushwood and the deadwood to drive away the evil spirits and to enter the new year clean.
–I remember a legend, the one about Odin. Do you know it?
They didn’t know, because it wasn’t their purpose to know. They lived, naturally, within a mingled amalgam of beliefs, pagan and Christian at once. They burned the brushwood and listened to Längtan till landet because that was what they had done for as long as they could remember, and because that was what everyone did.
–It is a story about sacrifice. It tells how Odin plucked out one of his eyes and cast it into Mímir’s well, the one which lies beneath the tree Yggdrasil, in exchange for a single draught from the water of wisdom.
Strange, how out of all the Norse tales it was precisely this one I kept. It must have seemed personal to me.
Flows fascinates my mind, they have a power within themselves to hypnotise me. The flow of ice floes on a river barely thawed. The flight of the sparks through the air, little highways of luminous sparks taking the shape of the air currents. Flowing and flight, the dance of nature in fluid mediums. The movement of the glowing particles hypnotized me; I watched my memories drift away along with the luminous music of the kindled ash-flakes.
And yet the pain throbbed in my chest. I know how to master it, to let it rise to the surface a little at a time. I take a little of my pain and mingle it with the warmth of Fill and Sara’s home, and I let them depart together in the dance of sparks.
At that moment I didn’t realise that I was attending a purification of my own. I let go of my pain with the hope that it would actually burn away, flow away. I didn’t want to carry it with me, or even worse, to unknowingly, unconsciously bring it into other people’s lives. My pain stops within me; I have no right to propagate it to others. And it is within my power to do so.
I looked around at this little, warm, fluvial family, who for a while made me one of their own, and I felt endearment. Perhaps it is not my own happiness, but for a moment I can rest within it.
VII. With the Santur, by the River
The days passed, one after another. In a way, I too fell into the rhythm of the forest. I swung between my inner states and the many kinesthetic sensations the forest offered. Right from the front of the little cabin, a web of paths set out, scattering in every direction. In a way, I too became one with nature, one with the forest. I would go to the river, and every few days or so I had to reopen the ice-hole from which I drew water. The water was rich in minerals and had a brick-red, reddish hue. I made a fire every evening. And then I read. A book about Nigeria in the ’60s and the Biafran War, a book about expression, freedom, and irreversible loss, a book about physics.
I spent much of my time watching the frozen sunsets. I didn’t care whether it was clear or stormy; I spent my time writing and wandering through the forest. I loved treading on the soft, downy moss of the taiga. I didn’t necessarily need paths — I trusted the forest, the damp, green scent of it, the patches of light and shadow cast by the fir branches. I loved those old stones, worn by ice and time, covered in dry lichen. I loved the solitude, and walking alone with my thoughts.
There was a scream bottled up inside me. In a way, I wanted to dig for the roots of that scream, to unshackle it, because it sat in my throat like a stopper. I couldn’t, I didn’t manage to. Pain, emotions — they yield to the will only in part. And it seems this scream only came to be a scream at the very moment when something more tore inside me. In the end, it was for the best.
Fill and Sarah told me that the river usually thawed about a month later, and that after truly bitter winters, when the ice built up in genuinely thick layers, the river became a real spectacle during the thaw. The pressure of the ice floes from upstream and the strong current of the water beneath created an extraordinary tension in the still-undislodged ice sheet. The thick ice would break with a crash, and sometimes, when the impact was greater, it would burst upward, and great floes would end up riding one over another. And the river had its own screams to scream. Small, grating voices that, shattered to pieces, turned into the icy chiming of the fragments. Now and then, over the waterline and the chiming, a new, resounding, thunderous suite would layer itself.
In the last weeks I spent there, almost no floes drifted down the river anymore; the snow had melted entirely, giving way to an early spring.
That was when I began to take the santur outside. There were only a few hours in which the sun was strong enough that sitting still was pleasant. I would settle facing the river, with the santur perched on a corner of the wooden railing, serving as a stand.
I had set my mind on holding a musical-cultural dialogue with Mr. Ardavan Kamkar, of the famous Kamkar family. A Dostoevskian novel condensed into ten minutes of music.
Obsessiveness, thinking and rethinking, inner turmoil, sharpenings of pain concentrated into a needle’s point, and here and there — faint and easy to overlook — brief moments of self-consolation. How can you hear self-consolation in music? And yet you can. How can we, as human beings, understand that someone else, from another culture, raised in a world so different, felt and managed to put self-consolation into their own music? Ardavan crossed the bridge from Persian music toward European music. And he gave voice, in terms our ears could grasp, to the pain and the turmoil of that corner of the world.
I too tried to render on my own santur the modulations of his music, the tumultuous undulations of the sea as rendered in sound. What a mad dream — one that most likely would never come true — to play Daria on the santur. I settled for the first few musical phrases, the rocking of great waves, yet somehow caught in a cyclicity of a certain measure.
What a dream… to become one with the wind… one with the river… one with the music of the santur that flows out of your own hands.
TLDR
TL;DR: A deeply personal account of slow travel through Sweden’s frozen north during a half-year sabbatical. What begins as a friend’s invitation to a riverside cabin in Månsbyn, Kalix (Norrbotten) becomes a two-month journey of self-definition and introspection in the polar landscape. Between skating across a frozen sea, walking on the frozen Kalix River, drawing water through ice-holes, and evenings of reading by the fireplace, the narrator confronts old pain, inherited scripts, and the question of what she truly wants. Woven through are a Walpurgis Night bonfire, the myth of Odin’s sacrifice, and an attempt to play the Persian santur by the thawing river. Part travelogue, part meditation on mental health and healing through alternative travel, it’s a reflective portrait of winter in Sweden and the quiet, restorative rhythm of the north.
