Bewilderment Is Power: S. Leonard Rubinstein (1922-2013)

"Bewilderment is power."

These are the words of S. Leonard Rubinstein, my writing teacher at Penn State University in the late 1970s, my mentor and friend until his peaceful death a few days ago at the ripe old age of 91, and one of a trio of teachers to whom I dedicated my last book, Song of the Vikings.

Bewilderment is power: These are the words that chime in my head every time, like now, I am embarking on the writing of a new book--or any major piece of writing.

Bewilderment is power: Only when you realize you do not understand will you make the effort to understand.

Paired with this powerful aphorism in my mind is another: "Writing is infinitely perfectible." To revise successfully, collaboration is essential. Without criticism from sources, editors, and readers, revision can be endless, and ultimately pointless.

All of Leonard's writing students learned this. They learned that good nonfiction writing was "the painless delivery of information" and that "anything looked at closely enough is interesting." They learned that "we earn belief," that "honesty is a skill," and that writing is "a habit of mind."

I was privileged, however, as a graduate student and employee of Penn State, to produce a half-hour radio series, "Odyssey Through Literature," with Leonard as the host. (Our logo, above, was created by artist Jeffery Mathison.)

Leonard and I recorded 260 "Odyssey Through Literature" radio shows between 1980 and 1998, interviewing writers, translators, and scholars of literature from around the world. A hallmark of the show was to read the works in their original languages (as well as in translation). I became accustomed to hearing what Leonard called "the music of the language" before I knew what the words meant.

The real impact of the show on my education as a writer came after the actual interview. As the producer, I had to listen to each tape over and over again to edit it down from the recorded 50 minutes or more to our 28-minute airtime. Doing so lodged snatches of poems and prose permanently in my brain, along with the voice of the person who read it on the air. For instance:

--The apparition of these faces in the crowd: petals on a wet black bough.
(Ezra Pound, read by Peter Schneeman)

--Who were these people? And who finished them to the last? If dust had an alphabet, I would learn.
(Agha Shahid Ali, a Kashmiri poet)

--We rode the low moon out of the sky, our hooves drummed up the door.
(Rudyard Kipling, read by Jorge Luis Borges)

--I am the exile, the wanderer, the troubadour (whatever they say)
(Dennis Brutus, an exiled South African poet)

--The bud is the emblem of all things, even of those things that don’t flower. For everything flowers, from within: of self-blessing.
(Galway Kinnell)

--My ancestor, a man of Himalayan snow, came to Kashmir from Samarkand, carrying a bag of whalebones, heirlooms of sea funerals.
(Shahid, again)

--“Haere mai, mokopuna,” she would say. And I would always go with her, for I was both her keeper and her companion. I was a small boy; she was a child too, in an old woman’s body.
“Where are we going today, Nanny?” I would ask. But I always knew.
“We go down to the sea, mokopuna, to the sea…”
(Maori writer Witi Ihimaera, read by Murray Martin)

Working with Leonard on "Odyssey Through Literature" convinced me that all literature, all good writing, is meant to be read aloud: that the sound of the words is as important as their dictionary meaning and cannot be divorced from that meaning. It made me conscious in my own writing of rhythm and rhyme, alliteration and assonance. It made me punctuate musically. It made me take care that the words I chose fit both the sound and the sense of what I wanted to say.

In 2007, many years after our radio program ended and I had moved away, I received a thank-you letter from Leonard: "Slowly, in the course of transforming 'Odyssey Through Literature' cassettes into CDs, I realize how much I owe you for bringing so many accomplished people to sit across the table from me. In short, I thank you for my education."

I hope Leonard knew, when I dedicated Song of the Vikings to him in 2012 (for which he also, gracious as ever, sent me a thank-you letter), that I thanked him for my education.

Some people say writing can't be taught. I think the many students of S. Leonard Rubinstein who are now professional writers would agree with me that it can.

Click here to read Leonard's obituary. 

Join me again next week at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.

Saga House

Where do writers get their ideas? Out of the blue. Here’s an example. From 1981 to 2002 I worked as a science writer at Penn State University. At the same time, I indulged my interest in medieval Iceland and its sagas by visiting the country every other year. Imagine my delight when a Penn State anthropology professor called one day to tell me about his research project in Iceland. It was the seed of my book The Far Traveler. Here, reprinted by permission, is my original report from January 2003 in the magazine Research/Penn State:

Around the year 1000, a woman named Gudrid sailed west from Greenland. She spent three winters in a land called Vinland, then sailed east to Iceland. Since the 1960s, archeologists have linked Gudrid’s home in the New World with the Viking ruins at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. Now [in 2002] a team working in Iceland believe they’ve found the longhouse Gudrid lived in when she returned from America. “That’s not what archeology is about,” says Paul Durrenberger, a Penn State anthropologist who was part of the team. “It’s not about finding somebody’s house. “But,” he concedes, “we probably can name the people at some of these farms some of the time.” The point of the project was to determine the power of an Icelandic chieftain. John Steinberg of UCLA [now at the University of Massachusetts-Boston] had studied bronze and iron-age chieftains in Denmark, trying to expand upon Timothy Earle’s findings with the Inca in Peru. Earle, who teaches at Northwestern, wrote the 1997 book, How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. In Iceland, Steinberg thought he might find out how chiefs lose power, how they are replaced by the centralized state, a process that Iceland’s sagas record as happening in 1262. Durrenberger was invited to join the project due to his 1992 book, The Dynamics of Medieval Iceland: Political Economy and Literature. Using archeology to study a political system requires large-scale surveys of an area, not detailed excavation of one house. Yet these surveying techniques were developed in hot, dry climates where much of a culture’s record is visible on the land’s surface. “In Iceland, you can’t see anything on the surface,” Durrenberger notes. The museum complex at Glaumbaer. The Icelandic landscape is stark: black heaps of lava, high mountains streaked with snow, rivers blue with glacial till, hayfields green as jewels. The wind is never still. With no wood or building stone, the first settlers built houses of turf, like the sod homes of prairie pioneers. Some were lived in, patched and expanded, until the present age: The site of Gudrid’s farm is now a historical park, with a turf house open to tourists. To see beneath the soil, Steinberg’s team used a remote sensing tool that measures electrical resistance. “It’s a tube 6 inches around and longer than 6 feet, quite heavy, that you carry on a strap on your shoulder,” Durrenberger explains. “The front end sends a signal down into the earth, and the back end picks it up. What you get, if you’re walking across the valley, is a series of squiggles. Brian Damiata, the geophysicist, puzzles over it, like somebody reading auguries in bird guts. If you stare at it long enough, you begin to see what he’s talking about. Turf walls do not convey electricity the way soil does.” Combining this remote sensing tool with GPS (Global Positioning System) data, the team could map all the old houses in the valley, measure their sizes, and determine when they were occupied. Iceland is good for dating such finds because of its history of volcanic eruptions. “You can date things by the tephra layers,” Durrenberger explains. “Coming down from the top, there’s a 1300 layer — black, gritty ash from an eruption in the year 1300. Then there’s soil, then the 1104 layer — very distinctive, shiny white. Then more soil, then the 1000 layer, a sort of grayish black tephra. Below that is the Landnam — the Settlement — a greenish black, gritty tephra. A house dated before the Landnam layer had not been occupied long; Iceland had no native inhabitants before the Vikings arrived in 870. “So you should be able to see the shift from chieftain to state. It starts with longhouses, chieftain’s houses — they brought that idea on the boats with them. Then it moves to a dispersed pattern: a big house with a bunch of smaller houses around it, what Steinberg calls the Manor.” The Manor plan marks when the idea of property rights took hold in Iceland. Once the walls were found and dated, the archeologists screened the dirt to find bones and plant remains, by which they could reconstruct the inhabitants’ diets and the climate. But it was the depth of the soil that told of a chieftain’s power: the mainstay of the economy was grass for raising sheep. “If you control that, you have a strong household.” They were calculating the depth of soil in a hayfield when they found what might be Gudrid’s house. The saga-age house was found in the flat hayfield in front of the museum office. They had dug holes to gauge the extent of the house when Gudmundur Olafsson, head of archeology at Iceland’s National Museum, visited and convinced the team to extend the excavation, uncovering a long wall with two smaller turf walls at right angles to it. Soon “it became quite clear,” Durrenberger says, what they had found. “Here we have a longhouse with internal turf walls. Longhouses like this one are never found in Iceland, but they are at L’Anse aux Meadows. And we know this house was built later than that one. So how does this house connect to L’Anse aux Meadows?” He laughs. “The only thing to do now is to excavate further.” Paul Durrenberger, Ph.D., is professor of anthropology in the College of the Liberal Arts, 318 Carpenter Bldg., University Park, PA 16802; 814-863-2694; epd2@psu.edu. This work was funded by the National Science Foundation. John Steinberg’s Skagafjordur Archaeological Settlement Survey is still in progress. See their blog at http://blogs.umb.edu/sass.  Steinberg (center) and crew (I'm the one in the Icelandic sweater). In 2005 I joined Steinberg and Durrenberger as a volunteer, helping to uncover the tops of the walls of Gudrid’s house; you can read about that experience in The Far Traveler and in the series of posts I did for the Research/Penn State blog, "Secrets of Ancient Iceland." I've borrowed Rita Shepherd's photo (above) from that site. Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another writing adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.

Practical Education

What is college for? I pondered the question a few years back in an essay published by Penn State University in the magazine I then worked for, Research/Penn State:

I studied the Icelandic sagas in graduate school at Penn State because they were compelling. A mix of The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien had been a saga scholar) and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” magical realism a millennium before Garcia Marquez, they were unlike anything I’d ever read.

I had been introduced to them by a professor of folklore, who, though retired, still taught one course. Sam Bayard was an impish man, small, bald, rotund, and hunched like a wise turtle walking upright. He had an impressive nose, which he periodically aroused with snuff taken from one of the half-dozen boxes secreted in his pockets. He would courteously offer me some, smile when I declined, then, snuffling up a liberal pinch, harrumph into a large handkerchief which he subsequently used to brush the dust off his breast. His snuff boxes were antiques, portable works of art carved of horn, cast in silver or brass with ancient scenes of hunts or warfare, shaped of handsome woods. Another pocket held a tin whistle, which he’d occasionally demonstrate. A fiddle hid in his filing cabinet. A narrow bookshelf along one wall was crammed with Icelandic sagas, which he loaned me, one after the next.

I indulged. I read them in English first, then in the original Old Norse. The professor who taught me the language, Ernst Ebbinghaus, was an icon of his occupation -- high forehead, aquiline nose, a halo of silky white hair. I translated bits of sagas into my notebooks, puzzling over the three genders and four cases, singular and plural, into which the grammar slotted the words, memorizing the twenty-four different forms of such essentials as “the” or “this” or “who.” Ebbinghaus stood at the lectern and explicated such words as ójafnaðrmaðr: the unjust, overbearing man, the man who upsets the balance of the world.

I gave up the sagas to be practical. Deciding whether to go on from a master’s degree in 1985, I, like any sensible graduate student, looked at the job market. Opportunities for a medievalist with a speciality in Icelandic sagas were zilch. A friend with a stellar resume -- Ivy League Ph.D., Fulbright fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities grant, papers published, book in progress, experience teaching abroad -- got no job offers. Others with theses in Old Norse were teaching Old English (a related language) or history or English composition instead.

I already had a job as a science writer, working at Research/Penn State, a magazine published by Penn State University. I decided to forget an academic career.

But before I packed my books in boxes, my husband and I took a trip to Iceland. We rode the bus to a small fishing village on the west coast. We shouldered our backpacks and hiked four miles out to Helgafell, an egg-shaped hill that marked the ancestral holdings of the saga chieftain Snorri Godi, who died in 1031. His farm at Helgafell was still a working farm: sheep, cows, horses, a barking dog. I knocked on one door of the low modern duplex. The old man who answered, dressed formally in coat and tie, could not make out my attempts at Icelandic. He called his son out of the milk house.

“Snorri Goði -- Búa hér?” I asked. “Living here?”

The son, a lanky man in his early forties, in orange coveralls and a stocking cap, beamed. “Já, já, já, já, já,” he exclaimed, in the Icelander’s long-repeated yes. Snorri Godi had indeed lived here -- a thousand years ago, he said. He took off his cap and shook our hands.

He led us around to his half of the house and, as his wife and five children and her old crippled mother all gathered around the too-small table, and the coffee and cakes and cheeses and cucumbers appeared and then disappeared, he began to tell stories from the sagas.

One night a shepherd saw the whole north face of Helgafell swing open like doors. The god Thor was holding a feast inside the hill.

He would look at me and nod, and I would nod back as if to say, “Yes, that’s how I learned it.” My Icelandic was so poor I understood only a tenth of what he was saying, yet it was enough to recognize the tale.

It was queer to be sharing tales a thousand years old, an American tourist and an Icelandic farmer, as if I and a neighbor in central Pennsylvania had discussed over coffee the mere-hall scene in Beowulf or the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book. Queer and delightful -- and why I’ve gone back to Iceland again and again since that first time in 1986.

I’ve shared sagas with many Icelanders. My Icelandic has improved to the extent that in 1997 I spent a month among Icelandic horsebreeders, and bought two horses, all the while speaking only a few words of English. The experience became my first book, A Good Horse Has No Color: Searching Iceland for the Perfect Horse. The horses themselves, Icelandic horses, have been my entree into a whole new world.

I am still a science writer. But my life has been enriched by that compelling, impractical graduate education in a medieval literature still current in one small corner of the world. As British writer W. H. Auden (another Icelandophile) once told a newspaper, “This memory is background for everything I do. Iceland is the sun which colours the mountains without being there.” For me, my graduate education is the sun, the background for everything I do.

I had thought about it once as a way to earn a living. It turned out to be a way to make a life.

Since writing this essay, I have written two more books about Iceland: The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman came out in 2007 and Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths will appear in October 2012. I took the photos shown here at Helgafell in 1986, 2009, and 2011. Many thanks to Hjörtur Hinriksson and his children and grandchildren for being my dear friends. If you visit Stykkisholmur, Iceland, be sure to buy a hotdog from the hotdog cart run by Óskar, Hjörtur's son.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.

The Greening of Iceland

This week at an American Geophysical Union conference in Iceland, my friend Anna Maria Agustsdottir gave a talk on the importance of planting trees in Iceland to repair the damage caused by volcanic eruptions. (See news coverage here.) It’s a project she and her husband, Magnus Johannsson, have been working on for a long time at Iceland’s Landgræðslan ríkisins, or Soil Conservation Service. In 2000, I went out in the field with Anna and Magnus, in the shadow of the volcano Hekla, to report on their work for the alumni magazine of Penn State University. 

Here’s an excerpt from that story: Comparing it to the AGU report, you can see that Anna and Magnus and their colleagues have accomplished a lot in ten years. 

After an hour of bouncing us down a dusty road in his high-powered SUV, Magnus swerves over the berm and inches across the lava plain, over black sand and large rocks blasted there by the volcano Hekla, that snow-capped eminence over our left shoulders that people in the Middle Ages knew as the Mouth of Hell. I’m taking the grand tour of the research plots of Iceland’s Soil Conservation Service with Magnus, his wife Anna, and their children, five-year-old Sara and infant Snorri. The same tour, Magnus says, that he gave to Deng Xiao-Ping’s granddaughter the week before. For his Ph.D. at Penn State, Magnus spent his summers growing zucchini and testing the viability of its seeds. Anna’s dissertation was on volcanoes. Back home in Iceland, they have a much harder row to hoe: growing grass—or anything—to stop the blowing sand.

There’s nothing for miles here, it seems, but black sand and snowy peaks. Volcanoes erupt frequently. An earthquake registering 6.5 on the Richter scale struck the week before I came. According to Kristin Vogfjord, another Penn State alumna and the earthquake specialist at Iceland’s National Weather Service, the epicenter of the quake was just where Magnus is trying to grow grass. His fields lie atop a major fault, where two tectonic plates beneath the continents are pulling apart. On an average day, the area is shaken by 20 to 30 tiny quakes; today there are 3,000. One of Kristin’s colleagues, monitoring the fault, registers the movements each night. Said Kristin, “It’s almost as if you can see the tectonic plates moving in her data.” The earthquakes are often precursors to eruptions. In the last 20 years, Mount Hekla has erupted three times, coating the ground each time with six inches or more of rubbly, sandy black pumice.

Yet Magnus is undeterred. “We’re fixing the land,” he exclaims, waving a hand out the car window.

Far in the distance I see specks of color against the vast expanse of gray. It’s a small cadre of workers, among them Magnus’s 16-year-old brother. As we park and walk toward them, I begin to laugh. Each of the teens has a flat of lupine seedlings, spindly plants about four inches tall. Each also has a potato planter: like a coffee can on a stick. They’re spending the summer trudging back and forth across the black sand plain, six steps, plant a lupine, six steps, plant a lupine. Today the midges are thick. The teens wear face nets, but Magnus and I are fanning our hands like crazy. The kids and Anna have stayed in the car. Six steps, plant a lupine. It’s like the summer job from hell.

Magnus sees the humor, but he’s still miffed that I’m laughing. “In a reclamation project you want your lupine,” he insists. A spire of blue or purple or rose-colored flowers, lupine is a legume; it takes nitrogen out of the air and fixes it in the soil, making its own fertilizer. “We’re creating dunes by planting melgresi—Icelandic lyme grass—perpendicular to the direction of the drifting sand,” Magnus continues, “but we need to use fertilizer year after year for three years to get it to grow. Legumes are the answer to this. We’ve tried native Icelandic species such as white clover or sea pea, but they’re not as vigorous as lupine.”

We drive a little closer to the volcano, and now, indeed, I see that the peculiar Icelandic persistence is paying off: The sands have taken on a tinge of green. They were sown and fertilized four months before Hekla erupted last February [2000], and now the grass shoots are poking up through the new lava and ash. “Ashfall is not a problem in heavily vegetated areas,” Magnus says, “but here we get pumice blowing and drifting like snow. That’s quite a different matter.” Only the native lyme grass and a new Alaskan import, Bering hair grass, can stand having sand blown over them. “They just push up through it.”

When the first Viking settlers arrived in Iceland in 874, the medieval Icelandic sagas say, the land was green “from the mountains to the sea.” Birch woodlands blanketed at least 25 percent of the country; they now cover only 1 percent. Sites of old farmsteads, once grassy and full of sheep, are now black sand deserts. Nearly 40 percent of the country is threatened by desertification. The cause of the problem, Magnus says, is a mix of volcanic action, wind, weather, and human activity.

Icelanders can’t control the first three, so they’re working on the fourth: reducing the grazing herds and planting trees. As one Soil Conservation Service brochure puts it, “The Icelanders still owe their country more than half of the original vegetation cover.”

I like the way they put that: Icelanders owe their country. It’s a lesson other nations need to learn as well. From South Africa to northern China, desertification directly affects some 250 million people, almost four percent of the world population, according to a news release from the United Nations Environment Program last June [2000]. The Icelanders’ experiment could set an example around the world.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.