Reykjavík Grapevine - 25.09.2015, Page 14

14 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 15 — 2015
Politics | Bright?
hard time adapting to
the school system. He
was different from his
siblings and the other chil-
dren, he says, and had a hard
time growing up. He said he sur-
vived by taking on the role he was given:
the outcast and village idiot. “I was at-
tacked from all sides,” he says. “In my
home by my parents. By the other chil-
dren in the village—and the grown-ups.
By the teachers at school. I had to react
somehow. Society told me, ‘We want you
to be our village idiot!’ And I said, ‘ok,’
and assumed that role. Through doing
that, people didn’t really get to me. It
was pure self-preservation. I was just a
baby, and I couldn’t fight back.”
During his youth and adolescence,
Bjarni lived with his parents, but also
in a variety of foster homes. After he left
home at seventeen to work as a fisher-
man, he hardly had any contact with his
parents or siblings. “My siblings don’t
have any interest in me,” he says. “They
are on a very different path in life. There
was an emotional coldness and shortage
of love in the household. There were too
many children for anybody to love. To
them, I am still the village idiot.”
Harnessing acid
Bjarni lived in Reykjavík, moving
around the country to work on fishing
boats. He got acquainted with the new-
fangled hippie lifestyle, and eventually
decided to move to Copenhagen along
with some acquaintances. He visited,
and then moved into, the free state of
Christiania, a former military base in-
side Copenhagen that has been “occu-
pied” as a hippie commune since 1971,
and where the cannabis trade is largely
tolerated by the authorities.
It was there that he began experi-
menting with LSD. Bjarni’s claim is that
the psychedelic drug both saved his life,
and was a factor in triggering his mental
illness. “When I tried it I found some-
thing sublime,” he says. “After my first
experience, I began to use it differently.
I tried to harness its power. Because,
you can use acid in a lot of different
ways. You can use it to have fun, going
to discotheques and seeing bright colors
and the city life splay out. But there’s a
different side to it, if you aim its powers
inward.”
From that point on, Bjarni was al-
ways alone on his acid trips. “I closed
the doors to the outside world when I
saw that this was a substance that could
help me break off the chains,” he says,
“to get me out of the darkness of child-
hood. It was the beginning of a long
chapter in my life—the long journey to
regaining myself. I’m a terrific artist,
but no one knew. I never had the oppor-
tunity to develop my artistic abilities.
But the acid screamed at me,
and also set off a fury in me. And gave
me a power to regain myself from the
darkness.”
“Man is a
spiritual cripple”
Bjarni’s foray into acid wasn’t with-
out consequence. “The way home
for me was a long one,” says
Bjarni. “The schizophrenia ep-
isodes, nine of them in all, were
the only way for me to get back
after the acid trips. I was alone
in my apartment in the bleakest
paranoia. But in them, there was an art-
ist being born. I became a better painter,
and a better poet. I didn’t paint during
the episodes, but afterwards I felt like
I’d gained something new. It was
a painful birth, but today the acid
remains the undertone of my
whole creative process. It’s al-
ways here, but now it’s serene
and quiet, with endless dimen-
sions.”
So would he recommend
dropping acid to other people?
“Not at all!” he exclaims. “Most people
have nothing to gain from it. But I had no
other choice than to try it. Acid is hugely
misunderstood. Mankind has to face
a lot of obstacles. In the future I think
LSD will help humankind overcome
these difficulties. Man is technologi-
cally advanced, but a spiritual cripple.”
Radical politics of the
mind
At the end of the acid trips, the schizo-
phrenia took over. “Those two are glued
together,” he explains. “I had a lot of po-
litical delusions in those episodes, and
started believing I wielded great power
in the field of international politics. Al-
though it was only in my mind, I was
happy with that at the time. That was
my reality.”
During his episodes, Bjarni believed
himself to be deeply immersed in the
radical politics of the 70s. He was ob-
sessed with the Red Army brigades, fas-
cists, counter-revolutionaries and impe-
rialist spies. He moved back and forth
between Iceland and Denmark in that
period, and self-published seven books
of poetry, which he describes in his au-
tobiography as “acid ramblings.” He also
fathered his first two children, and lived
with their mother for a while in an un-
stable relationship marked by drug use
and domestic violence.
Shockingly wonderful
world
In the mid-80s Bjarni rented an apart-
ment in west Reykjavík. During one of
his paranoid-schizophrenic episodes, he
became convinced
that his landlord was a
spy for the world’s greater fascist forces,
transmitting his every move to the en-
emy through radio technology. This fan-
tasy would later lead to the most drastic
event of his life, when—in the grip of a
schizophrenic episode—he knocked on
his former landlord’s door, and invited
himself in for a talk.
In ‘Those Slippery Steps’,
Bjarni describes the moment of
madness that struck him. As
the sound of Louis Armstrong’s
“What a Wonderful World”
began to fill the apartment,
he stabbed his landlord to death.
“There are stories about how I mutilated
the body,” he says, “and most of them are
true. But you know what? There was no
other way out for me. I had to shock my-
self by this horrible act, when I shred-
ded the man apart like a wild animal.
I shocked myself so hard…”
His voice trembles at this,
and he pauses for a few seconds.
“So hard, that I got myself out of
the darkness. There was now an-
other way. It was a subconscious
reaction to how I had become.“
Bjarni describes how he afterwards
proceeded to write with the blood of his
victim on the wall: “Baader Meinhof”
and “PLO.”
He was picked up by the police three
days later. “The police that attended the
crime scene had to get psychiatric help,”
he recalls. “It was horrible. I remember
all the details from the night, it’s stored
right here.” He points to his head. “My
memory works like a hard drive, filing
everything into storage.”
However, as soon as the door to his
cell was shut, Bjarni decided he wasn’t
going to give up on life. He spent the
next eight and a half years in a criminal
psychiatric ward, first in Sweden and
then in Iceland. While locked up, he says
he hardly wrote or painted, rather using
his time for self-examination, preparing
for his rebirth.
Standing his ground
Since 2004 Bjarni Bernharður has put
out a dozen books of poetry and three
books of prose, painted countless paint-
ings—and now, he’s released his marvel-
ous memoir.
Bjarni has self-published all of his
books, noting that no publisher has
the nerve to touch him because of his
past. “I heard from an inside source at
Forlagið [Iceland’s biggest publisher]
that the superiors said: “'Bjarni Bern-
harður? Nobody would give his grand-
mother a book by Bjarni Bernharður
for Christmas…'”
For the past twelve years Bjarni has
quite literally stood by his works, on
most days assuming a post on the corner
of Austurstræti and Pósthússtræti, often
for hours at a time, shouting, “Poems”
and selling his books to
passersby. For the Eng-
lish-speaking bunch, he is
also selling a translated collec-
tion of his poems, called “Poems
and Paintings.” “I’ve asked young
writers to come and stand with me on
the corner to sell their books, but they’re
too ashamed to do it,” he chuckles. “I’ve
been to so many dark places that stand-
ing on a street corner for a few hours is
easy to me.”
Past and future battles
Bjarni lives by a few rules, to keep his
existence stable and creative, saying: “I
don’t use drugs or alcohol, I think about
my diet, I sleep well, and I choose wisely
the people I keep company with.”
He also feels at peace with himself.
“Freedom is a state of mind,” he says.
“When I learned to accept the past, I
earned my freedom from it. To me, the
past is like a book of fiction on a shelf
that I can occasionally pick up and flip
through. I am maybe the only man in
Iceland that has freed myself from the
manslaughter I committed. Everybody
else can’t stop thinking about it, and is
unable to see me except through that
lens. However. I’m not a prisoner to that
horrible event. I can talk about it with-
out sentimentality. That may sound cold
and nonhuman, and who knows, maybe
it makes me some kind of a monster.”
He belives that all of his painful ex-
periences were necessary to form the
artist he is today. “There was no other
way for me to go,” he says. “I had to
suffer as a child, and perform the hor-
rible deeds of the acid trips and psy-
chotic episodes. When you combine
everything together it’s like pieces of a
puzzle that form a picture...” He pauses.
“... of Dorian Gray maybe,” he finishes,
through bellowing laughter.
Bjarni believes the new book will
pack more punch than anything else in
his artistic career, and refuses to back
down or be silenced. “I am a warrior,”
he says. “When you’re a warrior, you
always have to prepare for the next bat-
tle.”
And what is his next battle? He
laughs at the question. “Well, I’ve just
finished the battle with this book,” he
smiles. “It was sent to the printing press
this morning. So I might give myself
a day’s rest and then begin to plan the
next battle tomorrow morning.”
By the time this interview is out,
'Those Slippery Steps' will be, too. Bjar-
ni will be battling it out on his chosen
front line, down on the corner of Aus-
turstræti and Pósthússtræti. And that’s
where you can buy your copy and read
his whole story yourself.
“He who lands outside
the box doesn’t need to
wind up in the wasteland.
He is not without his
territory. There can be
a box outside the box—
you just have to build it
yourself.”
BBB
I am a warrior of the light
my archenemy is the darkness.
My birth
displeased the serpent
that had dug itself
into people’s consciousnesses
the people
who had been taught to despise
me
been taught to mock me.
*
The Almighty
who sent me
into this world
knew what awaited me
and gave me strong bones
— I do not fear at all.
In my heart
I know my role
I was summoned here
to slay the serpent of darkness
my strength grows
each day
it will not be long before
the snake writhes in my grasp.
Pegasus
I feel the wingbeats of my poems
in my soul.
It is whispered
to me – from out in the void
fly higher, fly higher…
Kiss of the Bat
I dwell
in a dark cave
of my youth
when the bat
kissed me
that warm kiss
determined my destiny
to tread the path
of cold nights
to the border
between light and darkness
“There was no other way
out for me. I had to shock
myself by this horrible act,
when I shredded the man
apart like a wild animal. I
shocked myself so hard
that I got myself out of the
darkness.”
3
Poems by
Bjarni
Poetry | Continued