The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

35 Bitch’s Belly and a God Named Dust 2009

Lóa is gone. Did she leave some treat behind? Yes, there’s something. What’s that? Skyr? Porridge? I forget everything, poor me. I must have been eating that earlier. But now I can’t remember if I’m still hungry. Whether I was hungry, I mean, and am now full. I seem to have lost all contact with my stomach. It’s running its own show.

I don’t know what day this is, but it must be close to noon. There’s no way that it’s a good enough reason to draw breath. I’ll say it loud and clear: the closer I get to the furnace, the more insignificant my days become. What’s that rude knocking on my window? Wind? Allow me to respond in kind! To that liver-grey sky and the wind-bent trees with shrivelled leaves that look like overused hankies. Which shows you what a head cold the Icelandic summer is. I spit on this crap they try to pass off as everyday life to us who have lived under a more radiant light than the vile sputum of this rain could ever give. And it falls from a sky that looks like a damp and foul-smelling bitch’s belly. Yes, that’s our fate as Icelanders, to crouch under the belly of a stray bitch. Under erect teats that have nothing to offer but sterile, freezing icicles.

I, the sentenced bed-bird, say: The days become more diluted as life goes by. At first, existence seems so immense to us and we so incredibly insignificant; we gulp it all down. We spend our lives swilling it until we discover that there’s nothing left to suck from it, because we realise that we ourselves are so much more significant than days, time, and all those things they call reality, a phenomenon that men have venerated for centuries but that pales into insignificance in the face of unreality. It was my good fortune in life to have freed myself from the former and subscribed to the latter. It was such a complete liberation for me to no longer have to get out of bed, pour milk into a bowl, totter over to open envelopes, watch TV, and make phone calls. That was when I first started to enjoy life, when I no longer had to live it and therefore got to cherish it in secret. Therefore let no one pity me for vegetating in this cramped garage in a dreary neighbourhood, because I’ve finally found life itself. And God. I can make him out with my glasses, on the floor by the sink: a transparent, tiny, lightweight dust ball, who moves only when the door is opened. I call him Dust. And honour him with this verse:

Happiness is to own nothing. And believe in Dust.