Three Parables

Children of the Volcano

It is said that there is no mention of volcanoes anywhere in the Icelandic sagas; when Eyjafjallajökull erupted in 2010, stranding travelers in airports throughout Europe, the absence seemed a pregnant one.

As the Landnámabok tells it, in 1010 AD the sorcerers Hilmir and Hrafn moved in next to each other below the glacier on good flat land where they raised their sheep and chased the trolls from underneath their neighbors’ rocks. But one day there was smoke on the mountain and fire in the ice, and a flood came storming down from the glacier. Hrafn stood behind his walls of stone and threw spells to turn the waters away from his flocks towards Hilmir’s land. Hilmir stood on his roof and sang for all he was worth; but his spells were late and his runes weak, and the flood swept away his flocks, his rocks, his home. Hilmir took the whale’s road to Norway and his tale dropped from the sagas.

Not long after, Katla the witch built her hut with the help of her son Odd high on the slopes of the mountain. Odd was strong and simple and quick; when one of Hrafn’s sons tried to take a ewe from him, he swept off his hand with a scythe. Katla tried with all her spells to hide Odd, and although his sons’ wits were sundered Hrafn’s magic was strong and he saw through the witch’s rude magic. With a spell of his own—Odin’s magic, rune-magic—he set the very stones of Katla’s hut afire. But then a flame of gold flowing on the mountain sent an angry tide of cold water to quench the wereflames. Katla perished, whether of flame or flood none could tell. But Odd disappeared in the mist of ash, and his tale dropped from the sagas.

A thousand years later, Tinna Guðnasdottir, Odd’s great-grandaughter seven times over, sits in a boarding lounge in Schipol with her legs propped on her rolling suitcase and the fey glimmer of Spring’s late twilight on her face. She was due to leave for New York three days ago. But instead she’s still in Amsterdam, and she’s staring into the eyes of Neils Ullman—Neils of Minot, North Dakota, whom she had never met until yesterday. He was planning to backpack across India. But Neils isn’t so sure now—for in Tinna’s black eyes he spies glimmers of molten gold and storms of glass. Tinna taught him to say the name—Eyjafjallajökull—the syllables strangely soft and sharp like spells made not of runes but flowing fire and flood. And now he wants to see the land that his great-grandfather seven times over left so long ago when he swore off spellmaking and woolgathering and came over the whale’s road to Norway.

The darkling plain

The origin of these prairies has caused much speculation. Clouds stand in for landscape and hills are prodigies, monsters, dragons' teeth. We might as well dispute about the origin of the forests, upon the assumption that the natural covering of the earth was grass. A picket of young trees stood on the verge of a great tangled timber that festered in the crook where street met highway at the very edge of town. Probably one-half of the earth's surface, in a state of nature, was prairies or barrens. The timber was watered by a creek that passed under the highway through a great concrete tunnel—more like hallway than tunnel in its square cross-section. Much of it, like our western prairies, was covered with a luxuriant coat of grass and herbage. Down a bank of grass tresses we slipped to enter the tunnel, the timber's uncanny entryway. The steppes of Tartary, the pampas of South America,  the savannas of the southern, and the prairies of the western states, designate similar tracts of country. Mesopotamia, Syria, and Judea had their ancient prairies, on which the patriarchs fed their flocks. Through the timbered fretwork beyond its cool wall one spied a dun sheen of grass, a forgotten quilt of prairie stitched by orb spiders and the vagrant thrushes. Missionaries in Burmah, and travellers in the interior of Africa, mention the same description of the country. Within the tunnel, a dimpled vitrine of water glazed the floor, strands of algae pointing the way, festooning the cracks and machine-made jointures of masonry. Where the tough sward of the prairie is once formed, timber will not take root. Destroy this by the plough, or by any other method, and it is soon converted into forest land. We smack-smack-smacked our way through the tunnel towards the timber's green light, swishing footfalls seeming first to hurry forward in echoes that stuttered ahead through time, only to reverse course and hang back timidly as we struck the midsection. There are large tracts of country in the older settlements where, thirty or forty years since, the farmers mowed their hay, that are now covered with a forest of young timber of rapid growth. Finally there was a breathing-out, green glow mellowing to white of sky through the besom of the trees. #The suck and trickle of the paddle playing counterpoint with the hum of the mercury vapor lamp at the corner of the parking lot overhanging the bend in the river at the edge of town. He looked back; the tumble-milled cobbles of foreign granite died like stars in the evening murk while the canoe’s aft end swung out into the middle of the river trailing ragged black parentheses across the water’s dimpled top. Behind the graying shore, shadows massed: propane tank, tree of heaven, and the night’s enveloping leaves, parted here and there by the flickering prick of streetlights in town. Swiveling, sliding into place on the vinyl seat, the boy watched the bow as it bobbed plumb with the current, aiming into the angle where dark trees tumbled down to the vanishing point and made a crotch of the star-furred sky. There should be hoots, he thought, and slitherings in the brush. Instead, the lamp-hiss hung high on its pole and the plumbing of the river running through channels in the bottom of the canoe beneath his feet.#The town was an unaccountable ultima thule deep-folded amid fields of soybean and corn. But little has been done to introduce cultivated grasses. For five hundred miles in any direction the land had been planed by continental blades of ice, which carved the great lakes and left mile-wide rivers rolling stones and icebergs down their tumblings. But some obscurer forces had kneaded the hilly defile where, in the 1830s, the tall fellow had come as a surveyor, spreading out the gridded lots like a quilt draped over picnic goods. The prairie grass looks coarse and unsavory, and yet our horses and cattle thrive well on it. In a standard-issue town somewhere on the high prairie, some flattened grid of black streets bubbling in the August sun, the anomaly of the hills would never have presented itself; in some high country, the rhythm of ridge and hollow would have seemed merely de rigeur. It is already known to the reader that this grass disappears when the settlements extend round a prairie, and the cattle eat off the young growth in the spring. And anywhere the tall fellow had not trod would have been unlikely to inspire a hungry search for traces of the past. But here the impertinent hills, measured out by history, looked out on a river and trees and the dull horizon, and in the music of these I heard the questions that would enchant my childhood. Consequently in a few years, the natural grass no longer exists.#Summer Bible camp at a white church in a timber primordially green, a tangled garden sprung up in a corn-barren cleft. Its flower-jeweled particularity was wasted on most of the mouth-breathing surlies in summer exile. The kinds of timber most abundant are oaks of various species, black and white walnut, ash of several kinds, elm, sugar maple, honey locust, blackberry, linden, hickory, cotton wood, pecaun, mulberry, buckeye, sycamore, wild cherry, box elder, sassafras, and persimmon. It would have been miserable but for a girl a year older than he made of blond and china who picked a bucket of blackberries with him. They seemed to bud forth and ripen at her touch. The trees would have gone to war for her. The fire annually sweeps over the prairies, destroying the grass and herbage, and blackening the surface, and leaving a deposit to enrich the soil. And there aren't enough blackberries in the world.

#

He slung along, wrist-twisting the paddle with each stroke to keep the boat moving in a straight line—tick tock tick back and forth across its course—and watched rumors of snags drift by in the peripheral gloom. The light was lowering, the tree-shadows closing in and down. Above, their leaf-crowns stood away to reveal gobbets of starlight lost amidst obscure constellations. Strange, he noted, the way the riverbanks drowned in darkness seemed to disappear, how the treetops, falsely solid in the night, seemed to become the banks of a deeper river along the bottom of which he slid and shuffled in his carapace-canoe.There was the town, and then the town, mirrored in their habits. In the town, raiment of cottonwood down and willow, the oaks spilling golden seed on the barren roads of Spring amid the relentless sun. While in the town, angled shadow lit the homes in black, blackshine measures the stillborn road. We don’t see the town from here; it angles off obscurely, a ricochet of time’s obscure trajectory and the habit of the world. Could it be said to settle the reservoir, to haunt the waters beyond Lake Sheridan’s fuzzed floor? Although to call it haunting is to clothe it in a raiment not its own, the habit of an accidental cosmos jealous of hints and vectors.He let the paddle go slack in his hands, felt the canoe nudged into a slow turn by the current. Looking over his shoulder he watched the last lights of town wink out among the obscure trees. Oh how it once poured through here, the water, rank and shriven, how it foamed brown and took down the trees in groves. A roar five miles wide though miles were never measured then; nor was the measure of the roar taken either, at least not by human ears. This after the scouring of the ice, amidst the agelong wandering of the north magnetic pole and the steady restless shrugging of the constellations. These ponderous rhymes through the slow-metered stilling of the planet’s fires, the compass rose dialing to rest, the stilling churn and convection. All this making unmade, innocent of the appearances. Steppe rising upon steppe in a land undenominated into prairie, of wilderness, and road, steppe upon steppe upon steppe unto higher green countries of blown ash and glaciers where locusts fat with the teeming cud of unflowered plants, fall from the sky, entomb themselves in ice for undreamt of creatures to walk and puzzle over in doomed ages to come.

An apocalypse

It was the end of the world, and no one took notice. They boy who rode in the back of the truck with a weapon between his knees carried a secret in his head, lodged in places not even he could unlock except through the invisible lockwork of time and experience. The secret wasn’t even the secret, but only the means of its discovery—an access of insight into a power that would remake the world. Its possibility was hardly seminal, much less instantiate; it was a spiral angel the slumbered in the cells awaiting synthesis. It slumbered while he sat in the back of the truck bouncing on his bones with the rest of the crew. He fingered the action on his weapon; he worked it in and out, the machined levers and pins sliding together and apart with easy imperfection, like the last few teeth in an old man’s mouth. Such spirits had been formulated throughout history; while most had been snuffed out, some had flowered forth in blossoms of insight. Why do you keep working the bolt like that? a companion asked him. But every other time the blooms had run red, the world had tempered them into blades and shards of injury. But there on that day when the world ended rode its truest formulation, as yet uncoiled. It would have straightened the boy, who was soft and dream-haunted despite his lean limbs and his haughty mouth; it would have put him before his brethren and led them through him to see themselves with something close enough to truth. The sound makes a kind of color, he said without glancing up to watch the foliage stream by sickeningly as the truck sped down the forest track. Which is all that would have served to save the world, in the end: the simplest insight truly born and placed before one and all to catch in its light the reflection of the world at its every point. In their millions, people would have laughed at the simplicity of their salvation, which would prove in time to be their apotheosis as well: that the forces which they worshipped as gods were selfish and all-seeing and tormented by hunger, while the truth which shaped them was blind in its devotion to their perfection. He would have taught them; he would have taught us. Now it’s given to us only to know this much, even if we’re doomed now to remain ignorant of the means by which the deed would have been accomplished, how the insight would have turned aside the weapon-making and the disease-seeding and set our kind on its course toward the stars. It makes a kind of color, his companion said, snickering and turning to face the others who sat in the back of the truck, a fat man with a shotgun and a trembling, walleyed man with one hand. And the round was through him while its sound still rent the air, a large-calibre shell that came through the wall of the truck, deflected and blossomed into an ugly cleaver, and tore through the boy’s flesh, breaking his back and destroying his liver. It was at this point that the world ended, that its fate was sealed, that the course was set upon which its demise would be composed in heat and storms of broken glass. And no one noticed; no one could. His knees buckled and the weapon clattered and the head with its stillborn angel of transcendence and escape hit landed on the bloodsmeared bed with a sound like the crack of a bell. Of course the end itself would take time; it would patiently measure itself out in dessication and ruin and finally silence. Just now, the truck sped up. Arriving at the camp in the forest, the others made the one-handed man drag the boy’s body to a trench where he struggled to shovel it over with lime.