Waking Up in Djupavik
By jonelle vette
10 Feb 2008
Today is my first day in Djupavick. My eyes open lazily to my little room and a soft warm bed coaxing me through the torment of waking. Frosty condensation fills up the corners of the little windows patched into the fjord side of the Hotel Djupavick, and the snow we've been expecting gently settles across our rocky little shore. How could the day be so quiet after last nights rabid and howling wind?
I have been sleeping for the past 2 days as late as 3PM leaving only 2 hours of light to take pictures and let my eyes sweep over the vastness of a barren and breathtaking landscape. Staying up all night to read, talk and photograph the night sky have all kept me out of step with time or any sort of schedule beyond the demands placed on me by the urge to photograph everything in Djupavik.
So today, again instead of getting up early enough to capture some more daylight and pursue my plan to shoot the Herring Factory, I find myself wanting to stay in bed. So I imagine myself stepping into my boots, my hat and my down coat. Opening the door, I let Tina the dog slip out in front of me for a romp in the snow and we slip across the ice-slicked driveway to the crumbling cement factory a few yards away. The former Herring cannery and its maze of lost rooms rise up into the icy white sky much like living bones or a monument to man's constant pressing onward, for better or worse, toward progress and the manifestation of personal vision. And I watch myself in my daydream, exploring the light and angles and cracked bones in this cemetery of human cultural remains, but still, I don't actually get up.
Lying there, suckling on the milk of rest, I begin walking through my own version of 'to be or not to be' i suppose because on some level, i know that it really is the only real question. And I give myself a choice between doing something and doing nothing today - defining what 'something' is. As I lie breathing and quietly passing away with the river of moments ticking along the banks of my finite existence, I know I could choose to do nothing but sit, watch, eat and sleep, and that would be ok. I could choose to fill up my imagination with stories and other peoples' lives, movies, books, heroes and devils, and that would be ok. But today my soul finally kicks me out of bed and into my boots in order to follow the mysterious call to create - and THAT is great.
It always amazes me that I am able to say these things and have these experiences - like Iceland - and feel my differentness as compared to a lot of people i meet mostly due to my preference for a life spent creating, and yet I still participate in conversations about The Sopranos. In fact it might be safe to say that i really like Tony Soprano, even though i know he doesn't inspire me to do anything besides curl up in bed into a cozy ball in a dark room (not a darkroom) with my cup of hot chocolate. He doesn't wake me up and kick me into sewing together the heaps of creative impulses that litter my head like orphan seeds of potential wandering the streets of my subconscious. He doesn't lean over to me and say, 'Hey take it from me. All the seeds in the universe don't weigh as much as one finished project. And even though they're light, blowin around in the wind, they just get kind of heavy after awhile."
I ponder the phenomenon of the fragile, fearful and overly sensitive creative personality in order to reflect on how amazing it is that anyone ever actually creates any great work of art on their own. Just one doubt or negative thought, loneliness, fear of the future, kids or no kids??!!, a bout with a cozy bed, pleading from a lover (or mother), can have most of us abandoning all our infant plans and visions before they've had any chance to breathe their first breaths, rendering us back into doubting ourselves and an all 'round lack of magic. I guess some people might refer to that statement as an overly dramatic description of "being realistic" but when one stops to think about how our personal histories are written, eventually one must consider the fact that all our thoughts and fears and concepts of reality are on most levels, fictions of our own making. So why not make a fiction that leads one to the act of making and fulfilling a personal vision more often than on just the rare occasion?
I think the answer to that lies in the fact that Tony Soprano is a damned charming guy - I can't wait to see if he and that psychologist get together (I'm only in season 1) and boy is my bed comfy. And if it's not Tony Soprano then its any number of distractions or addictions calling you like a siren from your goals into the deep endless sea of empty pleasure. Not to mention most people don't have enough inspiration on a daily basis to make Tony Soprano take a back seat for the kind of pleasure that actually fertilizes some of those great ideas. Or if you're like me, there's a continuous swinging back and forth between 2 opposite personalities that don't seem to remember one another.
I was suffering in the weeks prior to my trip to Iceland, battling sleep and those dreams that want to pull you so far into your bed that you can't get out, but 1 fjord into the countryside of Iceland, eyes peeled for the Borealis, wondering if mother nature would decide to eat me alive, and one glimpse of the herring factory sent my imagination spinning with adrenaline to the point where yes! I remembered that there already isn't enough time in life to do all the things I want to do, that there is no time to waste and so much has already been wasted! And there's so much more I must do than what I'm managing at the moment.
I think it must always take something special like an Iceland or a Herring Factory (or a great conversation or an impulse to run, screaming, off some fatal ledge) to remind me what I'd really like to do while I'm on this planet. And with the tempting and pleasureful distractions that abound in our culture, remembering how you really want to spend time, is no small effort. Sometimes we just plain need inspiration to give us that magic energy. The question is where to find it when you need it.
Building a herring factory in Djupavick in the early part of the 20th century must have been a little bit like pounding a flag into the moon. 4 hours in today's automobiles, from any sort of civilization by an icy 2-lane road through mountainous terrain, the factory's very existence is a testament to what one can build when a vision is adhered to. Every brick, stick and bucket of wet cement used in the construction of this building had to be shipped hundreds of kilometers into the Djupavik fjord, and then floated on to shore by an army of men. There were no forests, wild animals, wood to burn or obvious energy sources in this remote place. There was little more than volcanic rock, a black sky full of diamonds, canned fish and some putrid whale blubber to sustain them. I wondered how much sleeping the builder of the Djupavik herring factory did in his lifetime. Did he open his eyes slowly? Hit the snooze button 3 times, groan and hate the mounting day's demands?
I suppose I could stay in bed and sleep and dream and doze off into the milky softness of these quiet hours where no one is there to judge or witness my accomplishments, but the factory keeps whispering to me "Hurry up! Not much time! You're late!" and the truth becomes that I want to feel alive more than I want to feel rested. So, falling into my jeans, socks, my boots and into the arms of this unbelieveable site before me, I can't remember anymore what the trouble was with waking up. Then I thank the cold, Tina, the rocky shore, my cold hands, and off I go to coo my gargantuan corpse of a factory for a few hours and to pound out my footprints in the snow.
