Like a modern-day literary Darwin, Bill Holm travels to Isla Mujeres, an exceptional island east of the Yucatán Peninsula; Moloka‘i, whose history is graced by the example of Father Damien; Iceland, with a human genetic code nearly unmatched in its purity; Madagascar, an island of musical and botanical eccentricities; and Mallard Island, tucked in Rainy Lake, near the Canadian border. He also visits islands of ideas, including the Necessary Island of the Imagination, the Piano Island—located in the man-made lake under the atrium sky of an upscale hotel in the far interior of China—and the acute isolation of the Island of Pain.
Writing with the mindset of a 19th-century traveler for whom the journey is as important as the destination, Holm appeals to the traveler and the philosopher in everyone.
Like a modern-day literary Darwin, Bill Holm travels to Isla Mujeres, an exceptional island east of the Yucatán Peninsula; Moloka‘i, whose history is graced by the example of Father Damien; Iceland, with a human genetic code nearly unmatched in its purity; Madagascar, an island of musical and botanical eccentricities; and Mallard Island, tucked in Rainy Lake, near the Canadian border. He also visits islands of ideas, including the Necessary Island of the Imagination, the Piano Island—located in the man-made lake under the atrium sky of an upscale hotel in the far interior of China—and the acute isolation of the Island of Pain.
Writing with the mindset of a 19th-century traveler for whom the journey is as important as the destination, Holm appeals to the traveler and the philosopher in everyone.
Eccentric Islands: Travels Real and Imaginary
368
Eccentric Islands: Travels Real and Imaginary
368Paperback(First Trade Paper Edition)
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Overview
Like a modern-day literary Darwin, Bill Holm travels to Isla Mujeres, an exceptional island east of the Yucatán Peninsula; Moloka‘i, whose history is graced by the example of Father Damien; Iceland, with a human genetic code nearly unmatched in its purity; Madagascar, an island of musical and botanical eccentricities; and Mallard Island, tucked in Rainy Lake, near the Canadian border. He also visits islands of ideas, including the Necessary Island of the Imagination, the Piano Island—located in the man-made lake under the atrium sky of an upscale hotel in the far interior of China—and the acute isolation of the Island of Pain.
Writing with the mindset of a 19th-century traveler for whom the journey is as important as the destination, Holm appeals to the traveler and the philosopher in everyone.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781571312594 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Milkweed Editions |
| Publication date: | 08/28/2001 |
| Edition description: | First Trade Paper Edition |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Sales rank: | 749,654 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Call Me Island
CALL ME ISLAND. Or call me Holm. Same thing. It's one way to start, though like so many other human starts—or human books—it's not original. We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors no matter how many machines we invent. Only our memory and our metaphors carry us forward, not our money, not our gadgets, not our opinions.
"No man is an island," said John Donne in a sermon, but I am. Holm—an Old Norse masculine noun, whose forms are Hólmi or Hólmur—means small island or inshore island, in some dictionaries islet, the diminutive form of island. Island itself comes from Old Norse too: ey, traced back from the old hypothetical proto-Indo-European Ea, "river" (thus all water), grappled to "land." You know what land means; its form has not changed. Thus an island is a tract of land surrounded by water, but smaller than a continent.
Then what is the size of a continent you ask? How many galaxies between here and infinity? How many thimbles full of water in the Pacific? How many boxelder bugs in your own tree? An island is whatever we call an island. Or whatever I call an island. I am one and thus have rights and prerogatives in this matter.
I call Iceland island, as well as Mujeres, Madagascar, Moloka'i, and Mallard. In Arizona, locals call the Chiricahua Mountains "sky islands." An astronomer might call earth an island in space. Or the Milky Way an archipelago.
Island is both thing and metaphor. Without the weightof things, metaphors turn vapid, sour, empty, fly off into space and connect with nothing. Eugene McCarthy, both poet and public man, thought the Vietnam War one consequence of Washington's weakened metaphors. How else to explain that triumph of folly in American history? Islands are good to think on if a man would express himself neatly. They are generally made of rock and whatever garnishes nature or human ingenuity provide to decorate them. In going for the bottom of things, keep plunging until you strike the hard and intractable.
Some islands start as things in search of metaphor, but others begin in metaphors that grapple things into their space. Call them "sign" islands, spiritual facts gone backward to natural facts, as our island philosopher Emerson would have it. Islands of age, death, pain, prison, experiment, magic, isolation, even the island of music, thus the invisible. Don't sink under the weight of your prejudice against the invisible.
Many years ago a rich merchant built a grand house on the shore of Lake Phalen on the northeast side of Saint Paul, Minnesota. A small island in the lake that blocked his view of sunset irritated him, so he decided to rearrange nature. He bought the island, then hired a crew to remove it. They did—tree, rock, weed, grass, dirt, everything, boat to truck to dump. The island ceased to exist except as ghost, rumor, or example. It was—it is—invisible. Was the man pleased? No one can remember his name, only the story. Is he dead? Probably.
Since he is now invisible, has he, like his pesky island, ceased to exist too? Not so long as somebody remembers the story, whether it is true or not. Call it "The Disappeared Island." Let the name stick.
Farms in Iceland mostly huddle along the coast. The tail end of the gulf stream means warmth (the fjords seldom freeze in winter) and food: seabirds, eggs gathered on cliffs, seals, sharks, fish, washed-up whale carcasses, and that most precious of all commodities in a treeless place: driftwood. The sea is an easier highway to the outside world than the roads over harsh interior lava deserts. An Icelander grows up with salt in his nose and the boom of surf in his ear. The whole economic life of modern Iceland depends on the sea, the fish harvest. Farms, offices, shops, crafts are only hobbies subsidized by the Atlantic Ocean that keeps (as it has always kept) the whole country afloat in the world of commerce. Move Iceland to the interior of a continent and it would be uninhabited in ten years, or less. To be an island is to be alive. Civilization—here at least—floats on saltwater.
The vast majority of nineteenth-century Icelandic immigrants to the New World settled not just away from the sea, but as far equidistant from saltwater as it is possible (aside from central Siberia) to be on this planet. Nor have we started inquiring of our new poverty-stricken immigrants their preferences in climate, landscape, and (perish the word) lifestyle. They go now, as they went then, where there is empty space, and where it is possible to eat and stay alive. My great-grandfather came to western Minnesota near the South Dakota border, an area undisturbed by tidal irregularities, and took a farm. There, in Swede Prairie Township in Yellow Medicine County, he found himself at least eighteen hundred miles (or three thousand kilometers) from salt water in any direction. He might better have chosen Rugby, North Dakota, the geographical belly button of the North American continent, but he at least came within a few hundred miles of it. No sharks would swim close to his property (his home district in northeast Iceland was famous for the quality of its rotten shark meat—a great Icelandic delicacy), nor would kelp clutter his ditches. His farm, bought in 1885 from the railroad, sat atop a slight swelling on the prairie. In a place with low geographical standards, and not a real mountain for a thousand miles in any direction, he called it a hill. The nearest creek was three miles away, but it froze in November, dried up in August, and even in good years contained only bullheads and mud carp. So Jóhannes Sveinssonh and his son Sveinn Jóhannesson (my grandfather) changed their names to "island" so that they could become citizens of a country that insisted, tediously, on the same last name for an entire family. Icelanders, who still use patronymics, don't pay much attention to last names except as a means of tracking down who was in whose bed on any given winter night.
Sometime in the 1890s Sveinn Jóhannesson became Swan J. Island, and a century later, I am William Jon Island. It's a satisfactory name, and I'll keep it. Evidently LeRoi Jones thought Imamu Amiri Baraka a blacker name than Jones. He was wrong. Jones is a fine black name, and he contributed to the honor of its history with his books. That's what it means to be an American, to take an inconsequential—even comic—name and domesticate it. We all bear the wrong names. Holm is the Old Norse equivalent of Jones or Smith or John Doe, a trifle, a commonplace, an anachronism, a puff of air. Why shouldn't a man, three thousand miles from his real home, thinking in the wrong language, looking out at a horizon of grass thousands of miles from large water, call himself "Island" and be done with it? I hope old Swan laughed when he signed his new name for the first time, maybe at a bank that loaned him a little island money to buy slabs of air-dried board-hard ocean fish at the Icelandic grocery store in Minneota.
Islands seduce us because sometimes the universe seems too big. We want to shrink it a little so that we can examine it, see what it is made from, and what is our just place in it. An island is a microcosm. We cannot count the trees, the animals, the humans, much less the insects or the orchids or even so modest a planet as the one we inhabit, but we imagine that the creatures on islands are countable, and sometimes they are.
Think of the thousand cartoons you have seen—in the New Yorker or a multitude of other places—of the marooned human or pair of humans (in whatever combination of sexes) on some microscopic tropical atoll, a little sand, one palm tree, one rock, the vastness of the sea. Humor and pathos live together in these scenes, Here at last, we think, life is cut down to the bone so that we can see what stuff it is made of. If two men, they are The Odd Couple; if man and woman, they will find the roots of the old sex wars and quarrel, as they might on a street in New York; if only one, there is a message in a bottle, generally with cheerless news. Do we love this cartoon scene because we imagine we can discover the bedrock of human nature inside it?
Our great American conscience nagger, Henry Thoreau, was not, in the geographical sense, an island man, but in the spiritual sense, he was never anything else. Walden Pond was his desert island, his plunge to spiritual bedrock, his downsizing of the universe in order to get a better look at it. "I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion." Concord was too big, so he rowed to his island in the woods, where the world was more countable and visible, but where the invisible might peek out now and then from behind the vastness of its mask to surrender a nugget or two of wisdom.
* * *
I'm not sure I was looking for wisdom when I invented islands on the prairie as a boy. Like most children, I longed for a private world with boundaries unassailable by adults, or even by other children. Maybe only children like me discover the essential isolate quality inside human beings before others, but I'd guess that all humans discover it in the course of an average life; pain, disease, failure, betrayal, death, all have proved themselves adequate instructors.
My father's island was his hilltop farm from which he could survey the roof peaks of his neighbors' barns and the twenty-mile-distant line of glacial hills that rose southwest of his house. My island was not his island, despite the fact that we shared a name. The farm seemed to me a bottomless pit with its practical labor, animal smells, grain dust, whirling eternal winds, barbed-wire boundaries. I discovered the imagination early, then fed it with books, music, and daydreaming till it grew to the usual monstrous human size. I lived in a private mental world, sure that no other human being on the face of the earth had any remote notion of the strange goings-on inside my head, or what singular oddities gave me pleasure. I found my comrades among the dead: Poe, Hawthorne, Shakespeare, Icelandic sagas in literature; the fiercer and stranger books of the Bible: Job, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon; the romance of the Arctic: Fridtjof Nansen, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Robert Peary, and Frederick Cook, the search for the lost Franklin expedition. I savored the gothic and the horrible: Frankenstein, Dracula, stories of zombies, of corpses risen from their coffins for revenge, mischief, self-assertion.
Though I think I was a friendly enough boy in my functions on the surface of life, I was always convinced at bottom of my utter disconnection from humanity. Who else longed for violin music, dogsleds mushing over frozen ice floes, old heavy leather-bound books, eerie scratchings on night windows from inhabitants of the next world? I would look in the mirror at my pink, soft, fleshy head, crowned with a mop of bright red hair, adorned with thick black plastic glasses and think: there is someone else trapped inside this body—another life, another possibility. The universe has made some mistake here.
So in the brief subarctic Minnesota summer after the box-elders and cottonwoods leafed out and the legions of insects hatched, I would journey out with my equipage to furnish and fortify my private island. It was not a long trip. Trees were scarce on the prairie and aside from farm groves and river courses grew one or two at a time in odd places, along fence lines or in the middle of fields, where the birds had shat out or the wind had scattered as if by random chance, a seed that actually amounted to something and grew up to be a real tree. A fine old cottonwood sat on a little island of grass in the middle of the field just west of the house. You passed through a grove of Chinese elms and box-elders to arrive at the field's edge and there it stood, as if out to sea—either corn, wheat, alfalfa, oats, or flax. An ambitious farmer might have cut down the tree to reap another bushel or two and to avoid plowing around this impediment to agricultural progress, but my father was willing to circle it and leave nature well enough alone. His character did not resemble that of the rich merchant island owner on Lake Phalen. I furnished my island always with food, (I was and remain a happy eater), bottles of water, books, paper, and pens. I used fallen branches and pulled up weeds and farm scrap to make the island invisible to prying eyes, though my father could always follow my progress from his tractor seat. Such are the illusions of youth in its pursuit of a private world.
The illusion of island life always looked best in years when my father planted the hilltop with flax. Flax is the loveliest of all crops on the northern prairie. When it flowers, the field turns into a sea of bright blue blossoms, pitching and rolling in that omnipresent prairie wind. Now my island of green grass with its single tree had the look of a real tropical island. I don't think I ever pretended to canoe through the flax to arrive there, but I might have with some justice. My imagination wasn't as big as I thought. Corn provided the best cover. When it arrived at its stately mature height, the island turned invisible even to my father. Had I been able to invent secret and terrible rites, I could have practiced them undisturbed, at least until my mother summoned me for a meal, Even the imagination doesn't like missing dinner. It must be fed too—sometimes with pork chops and rhubarb pie.
What did I do on my namesake island? I practiced geography, naming and mapping it, charting its chief natural features, its cities, industries, resources. I did what young liars do: I made it up. I imagined invaders and the means I might use to repel them. I populated the island with large, plump nerdy boys who, astonishingly, shared my odd tastes. I had scintillating and witty conversations with them. Puberty hadn't arrived in my island days, so I probably didn't imagine colonies of beautiful black-haired women, but I confess to having done so since. Thoreau had his flute at Walden, but I had my black plastic tonette on Holm's Holm, so I composed and wrote down whole symphonies—one tune—and labeled them, like my hero Beethoven, with opus numbers: Grand Symphony for Tonette in D Minor by William J. Holm, Opus 12, 1953. I began to assemble my collected poems, though I think I was a little premature in that. I folded, then bound them either with Scotch tape or string. I don't remember assembling Festschriffs in honor of my upcoming Nobel Prize, but I might have. Isolation breeds grandiosity in human character. If no one can see what you're at, you may as well be extraordinary. It doesn't cost any more than Lutheran modesty.
I drove by Holm's Holm last summer, but found it gone. The tree must by now have died, or the new farmer cut it down when he sensibly reshaped the hilltop field in terraces to prevent the downward slide of topsoil, a conservation practice my father never discovered. But, of course, the island goes on existing where it always existed: in my mind's eye, the same ocean that holds Crusoe's island, Dr. Moreau's, Lilliput, Laputa, Brobdingnag, and Treasure. Like Thoreau, I wanted to drive life into a corner, to see what it was made of. The big world seemed too strange, too hostile, too unsuited to my nature, but we all discover, as we age, that in at least one sense, our interior islands grow even larger. We find that we are, in fact, connected, that John Donne may have been no fool when he said we are not islands—entirely. Those connections may not always please us, and we may sometimes long to return to the private and fortified island surrounded by flax. We may even conspire to remove the other islands that we imagine get in the way of our vision. The idea of this book will be that islands are necessary for us to be able to think about what is true at the bottom of our own character; we need to reduce the world for a while to count it and understand it. But finally no island is without fine threads traveling mostly invisibly under the ocean floor to every other island, that we are, like it or not, part of the gang, and the gang, like it or not, had better get used to that fact. You can safely take all this sound advice from me: call me island and I will answer, though probably to other names as well. Walt Whitman thought we were all continents, even planets, each and every one of us, and that might be true too.
Table of Contents
| Call Me Island | 3 | |
| Isla Mujeres: Island of Women | 15 | |
| Moloka'i: Island of Lepers | 23 | |
| The Piano Island | 59 | |
| Iceland 1979 | 83 | |
| The Island of Pain | 157 | |
| Iceland 1999 | 185 | |
| Madagascar: The Red Island of Music | 249 | |
| Mallard: Island of Civilized Wilderness | 311 | |
| The Necessary Island: The Imagination | 329 |