Friday, June 20, 2014

arctic dreaming







Midsummer.  I ride my bike after supper up County Hwy S. The peonies are past their bloom, now,
and shatter petals on the top of the woodstove when I try to take them out to the compost heap.  I'm still sucked in to the picture archive of N. Sweden. The archive is from 1929, not that many years ago, but it looks like something from a completely different era.  I can't explain, even to myself, why this is so rich and affecting.

I can't read a word of it, and yet there is the stark reality, not sad, not joyous.  It just seems true,
and full of mystery. Black kettles hang over smoky fires in tents with warp weighted loom woven Sami grene weaves on the walls in the background. A reindeer pelt moults against the head of the woman milking it; a midwife sits complacently beside the bed of the new mother. On the pillow next to her is the small, dark head of the newborn. It does and doesn't seem like a miracle.

Storehouses, draped with garlands of drying animal pelts, vast forest covered hills, cut by wide, fast Arctic rivers, landscape that dwarfs the lives of humans and animals. No fences. Boats and sleds, few roads.  I don't want to be there, but I'm hovering there in my imagination.

6 comments:

Sidse said...

Hej Susan
I can not read either, it is finish words and names. But what a great archive. It was a hard time to survive..

Judith said...

I went back and looked again and found what I missed the first time that there are hundreds of photos.....enough to really see the life and yes the women in kerchiefs and the impish crowd of children on a porch and out in the fields make me feel how real and full a life it was...there is only time to work together to stay alive and very alive at that....full.......

Susan said...

Hej Sidse, yes, Finnish. Impossible to understand. This life looks like hard scrabble

Judith, it's hard to read what any of the people are thinking of their lives and circumstances. I feel so present in the pictures. Almost as if there is no photographer there. That's what make it so uncanny, and irresistible

Dawn of LaTouchables said...

Me too (hovering there in my imagination).

Susan said...

Dawn, ithe images are so elemental, pared down, minimal and rustic. I hope you glean something from it for your stony, spare minimal beautiful bead strings

BluedoorRedgate said...

Love the blue check. How wide is the loom you are using?