In What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium, Faroese poet Kim Simonsen suggests we have the opportunity to encounter the universe in every person: “The electric consciousness of the human mind / within your eyes / already existed in the farthest reaches of the universe.” In other words, we were not here first. We are products of what came before. He reminds us that we are one with this strange universe—past, present and imagined—and one with each other: “The things about me that feel alien / don’t seem as strange when I encounter them in you.”
In the history of Faroese literature, which dates to 1890—when the language was written in a standardized format—ecocriticism has received a lot of literary attention, and so has Simonsen, a Nordic Council Literature Prize nominee whose poetry operates from the intersection between literature and ecology within a very specific place: the Faroe Islands. The dark ecocritical poems of his 2015 collection Desembermorgun (December Morning) pave the way for his latest exploration—masterfully translated by Randi Ward—of humankind’s relationship with itself as an element of the natural world.
Sculpted by Ice Age glaciers, the Faroe Islands are home to a society where 50,000 people share Viking roots and a language unlike any other in Scandinavia. Halfway between Scotland and Iceland, these eighteen remote, mysterious islands are isolated both geographically and linguistically. In What good does it do, Simonsen takes this geographical and linguistic reality—isolation—and dives into the metaphorical resonance of what that means for the human and natural life inhabiting our universe.
But first, Simonsen provides the antipode in a variety of poetic reflections. In water, for instance, the natural world and human world converge: “The clear water smells / of tidal pools and tears.” We cannot distinguish one from the other; we are made of the same matter—us and the sea. Likewise, we are direct products of geological time and space: “A hide of snow / will cloak everything / in a heavy white / reminiscent of the ice age / glaciers that once sculpted / the earth.” Each moment is close to the next.
Buffeted by the weather and the demands of a volatile natural environment, the Faroese recognize that nature can be indifferent to one’s pursuits, trials, and suffering. Simonsen writes that someday the sun will “expand to a red giant and consume the earth / After that, she will shrink and linger as a white dwarf / Yet we still make our bed . . . It’s just us, this morning / Here for a moment / Our hands still managing to find one another in the darkness.” Simonsen insists on making meaning, on finding meaning. And where is meaning made? Where is it found? In connection.
Simonsen starts on a personal, local level, with finding kinship among all islanders—he gives the islands voice and becomes an island voice himself—before extending an invitation for connection to the wider planet:
For all the island dwellers
who hear the waves tonight
and know
how it is
to be human
for a moment between mountain and sea . . .
For those whose emotions have sense and sensibility
and a heart that reflects
For all of you who know all too well
that there aren’t any real boundaries
on our planet
Even the international republic of world literature
doesn’t correspond to the lines on the map
that govern the rest of the world.
Our heart and emotions are bound up in the literature—the meaning-making—that transcends borders and time. Connection, in small, discrete moments, has the power to erase boundaries. It is the same thing that makes literature and translation worthwhile.
Simonsen paints an expansive, profound portrait of life, all forms of life in the universe—bacteria, birds, mosquitos, birch trees, seaweed—which he protracts and contracts in the palm of his hand like a kaleidoscope; protracting through the endless shifting patterns of connection, light reflected off mirrored surfaces, and contracting through their loss. Simonsen shows us how tenuous these connections are, how easily severed. The universe is not made of unbreakable bonds, he suggests. And loss begins with us.
Simonsen is interested, primarily, in what happens when humans become estranged from one another—each living in their own impermeable orbs—then considers humankind’s separation from Earth’s ecosystems. It is a devastating distance that makes the heart grow colder. Just as the Faroe Islands lay out their harsh elements raw and bare, Simonsen’s narrator is stripped of any pretense, honest to the point of breaking. He says, “I feel at home on an island / Only on an island / But now we are on separate islands / I miss you.” Distance implies isolation and Simonsen finds the perfect metaphor in the geographical feature he has known since birth: islands.
On islands and beyond, Simonsen investigates the way humans love to attach meaning, order and belonging by way of classification. Classifying living things is our way of guaranteeing each thing has its place in the universe. But this system has its limits. It works up to a certain point:
I love classifications,
but who has organized the world
into the animal kingdom,
the mineral kingdom,
the plant kingdom?
Who can help me
find a place
in this world
now that you are
no longer here?
Simonsen seems to say that if one part of the whole goes missing, an irreparable system error occurs. This relation we have to one another and to the natural world is weakened when we have lost an element of the whole, for that element is inextricably tied to all the others in this vast universe. Simonsen’s message is this: The great thing about distance is that it can be bridged. Loss need not be irreversible.
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