Reykjavík Grapevine - 02.07.2008, Blaðsíða 10

10 | REYKJAVÍK GRAPEVINE | ISSUE 08—2008
BOOk ExCERPT By andri Snær magnaSon
ThE SEARCh fOR REALITY
I was in a taxi the other day and the driver wanted
to talk. ‘Wasn’t it you that wrote that piece in the
paper yesterday?’ he asked. ‘Could be,’ I said.
‘Yeah, well,’ he said. ‘You were going on about
some places up in the highlands that are supposed
to be under threat and you were encouraging us to
go there before it’s too late.’ ‘That fits,’ I answered.
‘OK, you writers can write, maybe, but you’re just
not in touch with reality. Where are we supposed
to get the money to go travelling? Do you want us
back living in turf cottages again?’ ‘There weren’t
any turf cottages in the article,’ I said. ‘What are
we actually supposed to live on? Where do we end
up if people completely turn their back on prog-
ress?’ he asked. ‘We can’t all be writers, can we?’
‘No,’ I answered, ‘I suppose not.’ ‘We can’t all go
to university, can we? We can’t all live off selling
each another stocks and shares or psychoanalyz-
ing one other!’ ‘Maybe not,’ I said, but I couldn’t
seem to come up with any particularly compelling
reply. ‘We have to have something to live off! We
need real jobs! How are we expected to live here
when there’s no one left except psychologsup-
posed to live on? Where do we end up if people
completely turn their back on progress?’ he asked.
‘We can’t all be writers, can we?’ ‘No,’ I answered,
‘I suppose not.’ ‘We can’t all go to university, can
we? We can’t all live off selling each another
stocks and shares or psychoanalyzing one other!’
‘Maybe not,’ I said, but I couldn’t seem to come up
with any particularly compelling reply. ‘We have
to have something to live off! We need real jobs!
How are we expected to live here when there’s
no one left except psychologists and stockbro-
kers? What are all these people supposed to do?
What are we supposed to live on when no one
wants to work in the fish?’ ‘People are bound to
create opportunities for themselves if they study
what they’re interested in,’ I muttered and tried to
sound convincing. The taxi driver shook his head.
‘Yes, and be like my cousin who went to Denmark
to learn design!’ ‘For instance,’ I said. ‘Can you live
off design? How are people supposed to get the
money to buy all this design? What’s everybody
supposed to live off? You people are out of all
touch with reality. You need to get real!’
So when I got out of the taxi I had a look around
me to see if I could see reality and came to the
conclusion that no one I know does anything that
is real. No one in my household comes anywhere
near reality, no one next door, no one in the family,
none of my friends. There are people in comput-
ers, marketing, advertising, languages. There are
stockbrokers, artists, photographers, students, kids
and old age pensioners, journalists, economists,
pilots, psychologists, air hostesses, ministers of
the church, architects, teachers and accountants.
I have one childhood friend who sells fizzy drinks,
another who gets people to watch more television.
That hardly counts as ‘real’. An engineer with the
telephone company. Is that reality? Icelandic teen-
agers send text messages for fifty million dollars a
year. A real need? For that you could buy a year’s
supply of flour for the whole of Iceland. Give us this
year our yearly bread, literally.
My family is made up almost entirely of doc-
tors and nurses. Yes, fair enough, they are dealing
with real problems and there’s a bright future for
people like them. In Living Science my eyes hit on
the words, ‘In the future it will be the healthy peo-
ple that take the drugs.’ It was an interesting piece
about the so-called Barbie pill that makes people
slim, makes their skin go brown and increases the
libido. What could be better? Slim, tanned, and up
for it.
My grandfather came presumably from the last
generation that was born into absolute reality. His
family had a clear overview of all aspects of its life
and every single minute was spent in direct con-
tact with reality. The family caught fish, collected
down, burned driftwood, milked cows and herded
sheep. Food was life and in a house of 1400 square
feet there were twenty to thirty people, because the
land yielded enough food for precisely this num-
ber. Everything was cut and dried. One sheep was
a month and a bit of human survival next winter.
His brother took over the farm. He bought himself
a tractor and produced ten times as much food as
had ever been produced there since the dawn of
time. His machines cut the grass, brought in the hay
and dug the ditches. ‘Ha ha!’ he cried. ‘Plenty of
food for everybody! A hundred litres of milk a day!’
But his voice echoed hollowly around the house.
Everyone had moved away. What did it mean? Ten
times more reality, ten times fewer people.
At one time people feared that machines would
steal their jobs and put us all out of work. For some,
the machines seemed to promise a life of endless
leisure: they would see to the fishing and haymak-
ing, feeding the animals, milking, filleting the fish
and heating the houses, carrying the water and
wringing out the washing. But strange to relate,
rather than technological progress creating con-
tented unemployment, allowing us to lie in bed
and take it easy while the waterworks pumps and
the heating utility heats and the trawling machine
scoops up the catch and brings it back to land, no
sooner has unemployment reached 3 per cent than
the papers are full of shock!horror! headlines:
“RECESSION! CRISIS!”
‘Downturn’, ‘recession’, ‘crisis’ – these are charged
words. They mean different things to different
people. Are we talking about a crisis like the one
when granny, at the tender age of eight, was forced
to leave the family home in their little fishing port
out on the east coast? Or does it count as a crisis
when someone has to cancel his subscription for
cable TV? Or when there’s an overtime shortage
and people have the time to meet their friends
and the energy to read their children a bedtime
story? Or can you call it a crisis when people don’t
actually notice any change in their own circum-
stances, for all that the papers tell them that some
Central Bank indicator is showing down instead
of up.
Last year my domestic electricity bills came
to 400 dollars. For lighting, cooking, the washing
machine, vacuum cleaner, computer and tele-
vision, to name but a few. The phone bills were
something over 2500 dollars, and that was before
I got broadband. The crisis will have to cut pretty
deep before it has any effect on anything that re-
ally matters.
‘You writers are out of touch with reality,’ said the
taxi driver. Maybe to some extent he was right.
But the truth is that the reality has been stolen
from us. The machines stole it. Every day a new
machine turns up to take away yet another slice of
reality. And every day another machine appears
that has no
connection with reality whatsoever.
We can try to turn back. This summer I made
an honest attempt to feed myself from what I
could catch. I stood on the banks of Iceland’s
most renowned salmon river, Laxá in Aðaldalur,
for four days and came back with one lousy sea
trout. Aðaldalur in fact operates a ‘catch and re-
turn’ policy when it comes to salmon. I had to sell
a hundred and fifty books of poetry to cover the
fishing permit, or the same price as 200 kilos of
filleted haddock.
‘You can’t live off design,’ said the driver. So I
decided to discard everything ‘you can’t live off’. I
had a look around me and cut out all the fashion
clothing, all films, all music, all theatre and the
internet. I jettisoned football, travel and religion. I
emptied out Benidorm, Disneyland and Las Vegas:
people don’t live off tinsel like that. Coffee is a lux-
ury, completely surplus to requirements, despite
its being by far the biggest trading commodity in
the world today after oil. Whole continents, whole
millions of people, live off other people’s desire
to drink the stuff! What kind of a reality is that?
Alcohol, entirely expendable, let alone poetry or
taxis. Having pared away everything unneeded
from society, I was left with the following:
One 20 foot container/tent
running water
100 kilos of fishmeal
100 kilos of flour
two sheep
one sleeping bag
one thermally insulated skisuit
silence
Reality – that’s about the size of it
Dreamland
a Self-help manual to a frightened nation
ExCERPT FROM THE BOOK
In 2006, Andri Snær Magnason’s
Dreamland – A Self-help Manual to a
Frightened Nation became a number
one bestseller in Iceland. The book
was described as a wake-up call for a
nation that was on the verge of forgo-
ing its self-reliance in exchange for
short-term interests in heavy industry.
(See interview on page 16).
The book, directly or indirectly
spawned the organization Framtíðar-
landið – The Land of the Future –
which has become a powerful bipar-
tisan pressure group fighting for a
preservation of Icelandic nature and
independence from heavy industry.
The Dreamland is now available
in English translation, and a movie
adaptation is now in the final stages
of editing. Here is an excerpt from the
book, published for you enjoyment.