Milli mála - 01.01.2010, Blaðsíða 208

thing we say about texts is couched in metaphors from pre-textual,
non-textual life. Lines, margins, pages, chapters, volumes, series,
corpora; nouns, verbs, adjectives, sentences, clauses, letters,
spaces: all these concepts are rooted in pre-literate society, and all
have earlier, more concrete meanings. The index, as we have seen,
is the pointing finger,10 which can point to things we can see,
words in the same sentence, or to the page before, or to the
Shakespeare on our shelves. But what of things further afield, out
of sight, beyond the horizon? In order to talk about this I shall have
to bend the metaphor ever so slightly.
The Icelandic verb ‘to point’ is benda. The etymon seems to
refer to an encompassing, bounding motion, just as the English
“bend” means to tension the bow to bind the string.11 When we
point to things out of sight, beyond our horizon, we point with bent
finger: round the corner, over the mountains. You do not point
through the mountain to a farmstead in the next valley: you point up
to the pass, even when it is shrouded in mist. Icelanders in
Copenhagen, when they point home to Iceland, will point up into
the north-western sky, following the jet trails. Before the age of
flight, they would have pointed out to the horizon, the far point of
perspective where the ships slipped out of sight. We do not point to
the final destination, but to the beginning of the journey. any
attempt to point straight, to demystify our index, is obscure, without
interpretation. useless to point down at an angle into the ground, to
ignore the close horizon: that will not be pointing to reykjavík, but
THuMBIng THrOugH THE InDEX
208
10 Messíana Tómasdóttir drew the hands in this essay.
11 The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, Vol. I, “Bend v.”.
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