Mogwai
Les Revenants
2013
Audio:
Audio:
Further down the road:
Between Landmannalaugar and Skógar, south of Reykjavik, Iceland.
(More photographs available here.)
Greenlaw, Lavinia. 'Blue Field'. Minsk. London: Faber & Faber, 2003.
I don't think I've ever been as happy in a place as I was in the Arctic, midwinter.
The landscape had been simplified by darkness and snow but was actually full of
traces of colour and light. And the most thrilling moment was towards the end of
the day when there would be a kind of twilight which is called in Finnish 'sininen
hetki' which me.ans 'the blue moment'. And what astonished me about this light
was that it didn't seem to come from the sky which was already dark, but from
within everything around me, even from within myself and because so much of
everything around me was covered in snow the blue that the evening released
was very, very pure. When I came to write about it, I didn't want to compare this
blue to anything - I wanted to retain something of its purity but of course I found
I couldn't describe it. I couldn't explain what this blue was like without resorting to
the different kinds of blue I already knew, so I decided in the end to construct
what might be called an exercise in negative analogy - so instead of saying that
the blue was lik·e this or that I would describe all the things that it wasn't like at
all.
Blue Field
A flood as the day releases
and the whole snow world
is neither wet nor deep, but primary.
Colour so inherent, it does not fall
but rises from my skin,
the snow, the trees, the road.
This blue isn't built or grown.
It has no tissue .. nothing
to touch or taste or bring to mind
a memory, no iris or artery,
no gentian, aconite or anemone,
no slate, plum, oil-spill or gun,
no titanium or turquoise,
no mercury or magnesium,
no phosphorus, sapphire or silver foil,
no duck egg or milk jug,
no chambray, denim or navy,
no indigo, octopus ink, no ink,
no element. The blue moment,
sininen hetki in a language that claims
no relation but greets in passing
picture blue, cyan. Ultraviolet
twilight, higher than the heaven
of swimming or flying - no splash.
A time without clouded objects,
in which you might become the glass
you swallowed through cold.
Light draws back
behind the rim of the eye as it closes.
I keep my distance, as things turn blue
through stillness and distance,
as everything blue is distant.
© Lavinia Greenlaw, 2003.