Milli mála - 01.01.2010, Qupperneq 201

PÉTur KnúTSSOn
unIVErSITY OF ICELanD
Thumbing through the index1
Iwant to suggest that we are two-dimensional beings. We can turnleft and right, and in fact travel freely to the 360 points of the
compass, but we have little control over height and depth; our
movements in this third dimension are sorely constrained. If we
stray too far below, we drown; too far above, we fall and break.
gunnar of Hlíðarendi, whom many consider the greatest of the
Icelandic saga heroes, could jump more than his own height in full
battle-gear – but probably not very much more.2 The saga does not
even record that he climbed mountains. Strapped down helplessly in
our seats for fear of turbulence, our bodies become confused at
changes of vertical direction. In our dreams of space travel, the fan-
tastic digital war-games of our dismal recreation, the spaceships all
have a topside and an underside, and bank and dive away from each
other in a giddy verticality which is unknown to the real inhabitants
of interstellar space. and in the far distance we may see the tiny fig-
ure of Milton’s Satan – or is it Superman? – coursing between the
planets, his shapely legs trailing not only behind but always a tiny
bit below his piercing eyes. So pickled as we are in gravity, our third
dimension is forever staked to the Declination of the Pole.3
Thus when we address this third dimension we tend to do so
second-hand, or at least second-eye. Just two and a half inches
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1 This essay is a rewritten version of a paper given at the inaugural conference of the The
Danish Book History Forum, Ink on Paper, Light on Screen: Text Matters, in Copenhagen
20–21 april 2006.
2 njáls saga, chapter 19.
3 Charles Lock has proposed that we first became aware of gravity in the seventeenth cen tury,
when causality appeared in the world, and made of metonymy an empty prepositional
phrase. – See his “Fredy neptune: Metonymy and the Incarnate Preposition”, in The Poetry
of Les Murray. Critical Essay, ed. Laurie Hergenhan and Bruce Clunies-ross, university of
Queensland Press, 2001, pp.121–141, here pp. 132–3.
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