Читать книгу On Time and Water - Andri Snaer Magnason - Страница 12

I understood that Icelandic has a word for every thought on earth.

—Einar Benediktsson

We believe words are easily understood, that understanding them is natural to us, that the world we perceive and understand from newspapers and books is the world we perceive and understand. It’s not that simple. Not at all. For example, we are accustomed to letting words like “global warming” pass us by while we respond to far less significant words. If we could perceive in granular detail what the words “global warming” contain, they should be like the threat in a fairy tale: we should feel terror. It can take decades, even centuries, to understand new words and concepts.

Pastor Hallgrímur Pétursson is considered one of the masters of Icelandic language and poetry. His Passion Hymns were first printed in 1666. The thirtieth hymn begins, “Hear, my soul, this sinfulness! Conscience should have intervened.” The words in this verse—“soul,” “sinfulness,” “conscience”—these were the dominant words in that era’s culture. For centuries, those words were pure power in the hands of priests and of the ruling class. Men confessed their sinfulness, purified their consciences, and secured their eternal souls in heaven. But these words had not always existed. During the ninth century, the Age of Settlement, it was unlikely the Nordic people would have understood Hallgrímur’s lines. “Soul,” “sinfulness,” and “conscience” entered the language with the Christian faith around the year 1000. These words would not have registered for the enterprising Vikings. They robbed and pillaged without worrying about their conscience or about sinfulness. Men gained honor and esteem according to their raids; they were not to forgive their enemies but were instead obligated to take revenge. When they didn’t take revenge, they might have felt a sensation that in some small way resembled a pang of conscience, but the word itself did not exist.

The poetry of the Vikings, skaldic poetry, was based on strict, specialized poetic conventions. In the wake of Christianity, a tenth-century poet would have faced a troubling challenge. Poems at the time were written using kennings derived from Norse mythology: they referred to Earth as “Odin’s bride” and to heaven as a “dwarf’s helmet.” How could such a poet explain God as the creator of heaven and earth while writing in this tradition in which poetry itself was described as “mead of the Æsir” or “Odin’s gift” or “Kvasir’s blood”? Obviously, it would be problematic to refer to the pagan gods of the Æsir in a hymn praising the Christian God, the creator of heaven and earth. We use old ways of thinking to understand new ways of thinking: at first God could not be spoken about except in terms of the “dwarf’s helmet” and “Odin’s bride,” relying on the very pagan worldview that Christianity intended to clear away.

Words affect our emotions, our feelings. Words enable us to get a handhold on the state of being and describe what slumbers in our chests. Words can tether actions that were previously invisible, frame them. In Icelandic, we have a word to describe a feeling of sweet yet melancholic nostalgia, the feeling that comes over you when you’re listening to a meaningful, possibly sad song from the past. This word is angurværd, which you might directly translate as “tendersadness.” The Faeroese have this concept, too, but their word is sorgblídni, which literally means “gentlegrief.” These sister tongues, Icelandic and Faeroese, have adopted two pairs of synonyms to express the same sentiment: tender/gentle, sadness/grief.

I’m not sure if a mournful Faeroese feels exactly the same as a melancholic Icelander. But we could use such words to enrich our language and render the spectrum of emotions more precise. The tender remorse of angurværd might suffice to name the feeling that fills one’s breast when people sing a tranquil song around a campfire. The gentle grief of sorgblídni is analogous, but in it there is a still deeper sorrow, a greater mourning. And so these two different words let us express our feelings with more nuance. I felt a strange angurværd when I looked at those old pictures with Grandpa; now that he is gone, my heart is filled with sorgblídni.

Hallgrímur Pétursson was born in 1614 and could write passionately about sin and grace, but he would have had great difficulty writing poems about freedom, human rights, democracy, and equality. He was a fine poet and a formidable thinker, but those words and concepts hardly existed in his century’s language.

When, in 1809, Jørgen Jørgensen, the man Icelanders call Jörundur, King of the Dog Days, fomented a revolution in Iceland, he arrested the local Danish authorities and issued a radical proclamation. He said: Iceland is free, independent from Danish rule.

To our ears, this might sound like an obvious wish for a subjugated nation, a nation that had lost its independence in 1262. When I was in school, I learned that Icelanders had yearned for freedom for six hundred years. The reality was more complex. In all likelihood, nobody was asking for freedom back when Jørgen sailed ashore and issued his declaration. One fine day in the summer of 1809 a new and revolutionary idea set sail for the first time and came into being that very same day. But the problem was that no one had ever thought that Icelanders ought to be seeking freedom or independence. It’s possible no one had ever spoken these words aloud in Iceland; as a result, they had little or no meaning.

Jørgen Jørgensen came to Iceland as an interpreter for a British soap merchant, Samuel Phelps, who was planning to buy tallow and lamb fat from Icelanders. While the countryside was well provisioned with those items, the war between England and Denmark had hindered sailing to Iceland for some time, and the country was beginning to sorely lack grain and other necessities. Count Frederich Trampe, the Danish governor-general, the Danish king’s highest-ranking official in Iceland, tried to obstruct the transaction: Danish merchants had a monopoly on trade in Iceland, and contravening the law was punishable by death. Phelps and his crew detained Trampe and imprisoned him in a cabin on board the merchant’s ship; meanwhile, Jørgen temporarily seized control of the country. He issued a declaration that Iceland was at peace with all nations. He made a national flag for the Icelanders and hoisted it: three saltfish.

At the time, strict rules governed domestic travel; Jørgen gave Icelanders freedom of movement, allowing people to move around the country as they liked and to trade without needing official documents or other permission; he mandated that every port engage in free trade with all states. That notion of free trade was a novelty in Iceland. He also announced that taxes would be cut by 50 percent immediately, putting an end to the practice of Icelandic tax revenue being exported to Denmark without Icelanders having anything to show for it.¹⁰ In addition, he proposed that Iceland should always have a year’s supply of grain as a way to protect against famine and economic fluctuation.

Jørgen had harsh words about the situation where a few “cowardly” merchants held the nation hostage. At the start of the nineteenth century, farm laborers constituted roughly 25 percent of the population, but as landless individuals they were without freedom, people who couldn’t marry or have children, almost like drones in a beehive. Jørgen presented ideas for establishing a hospital and for ways to improve midwifery and prevent infant mortality. Over sixty summer days, from July through August, he managed to propose improvements in almost all areas of society.

He undertook to govern the country until the people elected a parliamentary assembly and established a republic. Article 12 of his Declaration of July 11, 1809, clearly states:

That we declare and promise to lay down our offices the moment that the representatives shall be assembled. The time appointed for the convocation for the assembly is the 1st of July 1810; and we will then resign, when a proper and suitable constitution shall be fixed on, and that the poor and common people shall have an equal share in the government with the rich and powerful.¹¹

The revolutionary spirit that had spread from France across Europe had barely reached Iceland; the foundational writings that defined terms like “freedom,” “equality,” and “independence” had not been translated or published in Iceland. Jørgen was ahead of his time there, and almost in the whole world. The Danes’ constitutional democracy, established via the Danish Constitutional Act, did not come about until 1849. When Jørgen stated in 1809 that the poor should have as much of an equal share in governing the country as the rich, his ideas went further than those of the French Revolution did; there, franchise was based on property. At that time, 88 percent of Icelandic farmers were tenants; the idea that they were of the same stature as the well-off was an absurd concept for most people. They felt themselves to be lowlier, that power by default belonged in wealthier hands.

Jørgen wanted to give us freedom, he wanted to abolish the monarchy in favor of democracy. He did not want power for himself—he was an anti-monarchist—but the only word the nation had to describe his role was “king,” the same way Norway’s skaldic poets could not say that God was the creator of heaven and earth without talking about “Odin’s bride.” Icelanders scoffed at Jørgen, giving him the nickname King of the Dog Days.

The apathy of the era’s Icelanders disappointed Jørgen. He offered people freedom, but no one understood what he meant and so no one wanted to accept it. The idea that a poor man could have as much to say as the wealthiest man was completely at odds with their reality. People had difficulty understanding how to run a country with a kingless representative assembly. A parliament amounted to a new concept, even though the medieval sagas spoke of Iceland as having a parliament, the Althing, with its system of administration by rural delegates—and it was not a given that people wanted to return to such a bygone system.

There were many good reasons to distrust Jørgen. He was only twenty-nine years old and an incorrigible swashbuckler, a gambler, a womanizer, and one might suspect his goal was to incorporate Iceland into the British Empire, but whatever his motives, the result was that radical ideas were being given voice in this country for the first time and people treated them like a joke. Magnús Stephensen, who was not only a leading judge but had also been instrumental in the founding of the Icelandic Society for National Enlightenment in 1794, offered the excuse in a letter that independence could not “be the wish of any good Icelander.”

Those who would later struggle to achieve these notions of freedom, equality, and independence were either still in childhood in 1809 or hadn’t even been born yet. Baldvin Einarsson, considered one of the founding fathers of the Icelandic independence struggle, was seven years old; the poet Jónas Hallgrímsson was two; Jón Sigurdsson, Iceland’s hero of the Independence movement, the man whose birthday is Iceland’s national holiday, wouldn’t be born until 1811—and his notions of freedom were still considered radical even by the time he reached middle age.

When the Icelandic parliament, the Althing, was reestablished in 1844, only property owners had the right to vote; that amounted to about 5 percent of the population. It was not until 1915 that disenfranchised men, as well as women forty years or older, gained the right to vote in Iceland. Men and women did not get equal voting rights until 1920. Complete independence—an end to home rule and the abolition of the Union with Denmark—was not achieved until 1944.

In elementary school, my generation learned that Icelanders had endured six hundred years of oppression under Danish rule, and that during that whole time the nation longed for freedom and independence. But that wasn’t at all the case. It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that romantic poets came up with the idea that the nation had always wanted independence. Most people had been impervious to the zeitgeist, quite content to live day to day. People live inside their own realities, locked in the prevailing language and power systems of their contemporary moment. Most people think only in terms of the paths and concepts offered within a given era. It took Icelanders more than a hundred years of poems, speeches, forums, declarations, translations, and conversations in Copenhagen taverns to fully understand the terms set out in Jørgen’s declaration. Only then was there a foundation for discussing these ideas and so a basis for achieving sovereignty in 1918; even then, there still had to be discussions about gender equality for the best part of a hundred years.

This book you are holding uses words that are as new to the language as the words Jørgen used back then. The term “ocean acidification” was only coined in 2003, by the atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira.¹² According to the media registry Tímarit.is, this concept first appeared in print in Icelandic, súrnun sjávar, in the newspaper Morgunbladid on September 12, 2006.¹³ After that, it appeared once in 2007, never in 2008, and twice in 2009. The word “profit,” hagnadur, came up by contrast 1,170 times in 2006 and 540 times in 2009, according to the same source. By 2011, the debate had developed only so far as to warrant five print occurrences of “ocean acidification.” “Kardashian” appeared 180 times.

Ocean acidification is an example of a concept that has passed us by, although the phenomenon is one of the most significant changes in our planet’s chemistry and constitution over the last thirty to fifty million years.

What we are talking about is a fundamental change in ocean chemistry that could disrupt the entire ecosystem, a change so great that we might taste the difference in the ocean, with its pH level expected to drop from 8.2 to 7.9 or even to 7.7. The difference between numbers on the pH scale is logarithmic; most people thus struggle to realize how vast is the difference between each integer. It is a poor fit for the frame of reference inside our heads. We similarly struggle to grasp that a 4.0 earthquake on the Richter scale is one hundred times larger than a 2.0.

Ocean acidification stems from the seas having soaked up about 30 percent of the carbon dioxide mankind has released into the atmosphere. If we look at fluctuations in ocean acidity from twenty-five million years ago to the present, we will see a number of smaller fluctuations, some of which lasted over hundreds of thousands of years. If things continue as expected, the next hundred years will see a vertical plunge in sea acidity, as though a meteorite has crashed into the Earth. For the Earth, one hundred years is like a moment. For a process that once took millions of years to take place in a hundred years instead is a speed comparable to an explosion.

“Ocean acidification.” I feel like I understand the words, but I probably don’t. An empty gun looks like a loaded one; a gun’s usefulness, its harmfulness, depends on whether it’s loaded or not. Words have different charges to them; it takes many years for concepts to reach full charge. “Ocean acidification” is as great and deep as all the oceans for all time. It is as vast as all the combined shoals of herring and sculpins, all the haddock and porpoises, the oysters, phytoplankton, and sperm whales; it is as massive as all the magnificent coral reefs with their turtles, brain corals, and clown fish. It is just as hard to swallow these words as it is a mouthful of sea butterflies.

If we examine the science behind ocean acidification and consider how many of Earth’s inhabitants are reliant on the seas’ health, we might wonder whether the full meaning of “ocean acidification” in 2019 is similarly weak as the word “holocaust” was in 1930 compared to its meaning in 1960. The term “ocean acidification” might become so significant that it will be future generations’ dearest wish to be able to travel back in time and prevent the utter loss of paradise.

We inhabitants of Earth today are like the Icelanders during the time of the King of the Dog Days. It’s as if the words “acidification,” “melting,” “warming,” and “rising” don’t elicit meaningful reactions the way “invasion,” “fire,” and “virus” do. We read the news and watch documentaries, but for some reason we keep to our daily routines.

Climate discussions are full of scientific concepts and complex statistics: 7.8 pH, 415 ppm. We must wrestle with aspects of chemistry, encountering words like aragonite, calcium saturation, and atmospheric carbon dioxide activity. We do not feel a connection with years like 2050, 2100, 2150, except when politicians make fuzzy plans to achieve a particular goal by, say, 2040. Politicians would like these issues addressed five to six terms of office beyond their own tenure. Countless “dog day kings” have come up with viable solutions that could benefit all Earth’s inhabitants, but we have greeted them blankly, like a farmer in 1809 who has freedom placed in his hands but doesn’t know what to do with it. And maybe they’ll excuse themselves by saying that the forecasted end of the world was encrypted:

2100 is considered the year that aragonitic sub-saturation in the Arctic is expected to have a significant negative impact on calcium-forming organisms as ocean pH approaches 7.8 compared to the RCP 6.0 scenario outlined in the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Report of 2018.¹⁴

The message in this passage should incite fear, but for most people it is just jargon. Clauses like these should have a direct impact on politicians’ policies, on voting in elections.

Jørgen believed that the whole public could be trusted to get involved in complex matters, to take a stand on them, and to vote for them. The world’s peoples face a challenge. Scientists have pointed out that, based on current policies, we have paved the road to destruction. That puts our system to the test: Can we get so deeply involved in the issues that we elect people to power who can steer the world in the right direction?