Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller

by Guðberger Bergsson

  Tómas.

  He draws me into a monologue inside the craft studio, saying: Tómas, as you know, we have gained a foreign import license from the necessary parties regarding a new shipment of dogs arriving after the New Year. So we have an opportunity to choose appropriately symbolic names for them. And it popped into mind, because the union of shop stewards has heard you’re outstandingly accomplished in many fields—didn’t you teach final exams outside school?—whether such a learned man as you might advise us. We were thinking of choosing dog names from famous dogs from history, or names that refer to the dimming of the sight. We already have, as you know, dogs with names like Trygg, Höðr, Oðin, Heimdallr. These are extremely popular. Höður was blind. Oðin oneeyed. Heimdallr had ears instead of eyes. I had to hold myself back from christening dogs after famous dogs in the movies: Rin Tin Tin and Lassie, although I know that this would prove amiable to most sponsors. Do you have any ideas for names? Argos is already taken. Cerberus and Húi are famous dogs from mythology. Cerberus occurs in Dante; Húi is a Chinese dog who saw tornados; Jama’s messengers were two dogs; Garmr fought with the Æsir—but all these were dogs marked by death. You change the whole picture in certain ways, my dear Tómas. Let’s just forget all this and christen the dogs with some lovely icelandic nicknames. He brought me back into the room, where we began playing hide-and-blind-seek, and play-dancing to “Everyone’s a Standing Statue” and other games for the blind. But Anna never brings me to the dormitory. I also flat out refuse to bristle brushes. Blind crafts are, and always have been, abhorrent to me, and here’s why: I developed an aversion to the blind because of the peculiar gluey smell emanating from their garments.

  In the middle of the ring people play statues; one is the “hunter.” Forest imps and water nymphs walk around them and sing.

  Chorus:

  These are statues standing here

  Standing in you there’s an answer

  you are blind and this the cover

  which only has to touch her

  Imps and nymphs: Hi-hi-hi. Are you going to carry me?

  Considering the diverse scientific discoveries of this nuclear century of which we Icelanders have become conscious, I have most been impressed by the construction of the ballpoint pen. A fire like no other lit within me when I bought my first biro, as ballpoint pens were commonly called. I always gave ink the evil eye. I could discover no ready advice as to how one might dip the pen-nib down in the neck of the inkwell without soiling oneself with the ink. Immediately from nine o’clock in the morning the average office worker has ink-blotches on his fingers. A great waste of time went into cleaning the nib with blotting paper, and no matter how carefully it was done, you inevitably got ink stains on your index and middle fingers. Ink stuck oddly to my delicate fingers. I was the most thoroughly ink-soaked employee in my department. And you know the ink-soaked people in each department by their hand gestures. My ink-soaked state was not due to carelessness, the usual cause, but by my hands’ strange clamminess, which had plagued me since I was young, so much so that I avoided greeting people with a handshake, and still do to this day; I usually let a quick nod suffice. I believe this is directly related to the fact that I have cold saliva, and therefore have never dared kiss anyone. My mother would say: What’s this, Tómas, your saliva is as cold as a dog’s nose! I tested it out on Mom, Dad, Bjöggi, and everyone said: Stone me, his saliva is freezing. Of course, what caused the most excitement was the functionality and ergonomic qualities of the pen (although initially after the introduction of the pen, checks signed using a biro weren’t accepted, based on the graphologists’ opinion that written marks would fade with time. People at the bank asked in earnest: can I write in biro? And people replied: No, unfortunately, only ink signatures are valid). This invention directly affected my job, freed me from expense and worry. I set aside the use of a finger cap (which I will describe for you in my next article). I also set aside buying brushes. Because of the stupid ink I had been forced to shell out money for a nailbrush. Even so, the ink would never entirely disappear from my fingers, somehow instead sidling into the hard skin on my middle finger, resembling corns on protruding toe bones after a long work stint due to that damn pen nib.

  I have experienced some sort of epiphany that persists through this whole article that has become my best essay the ideas sweep and stack into steam columns and I feel myself regularly being lifted I suspect very strongly that I still have a callus no it has vanished I could never be a famous writer because you need a pen-callus on your index finger there will be interviews with me . . . how did you get the callus . . . I’m always writing . . .

  I made myself a finger capof course considered an expenditure, although on a small scale, the “general thrift” envelope never significantly raidedfor hygiene reasons. For the same reasons as I had to procure a nailbrush. The bristles lasted poorlyI have a deep-seated aversion to blind craftsinferior wire binding, the straw unevenly long and wanting to tear the fingernails by the cuticles, too easy to lose. One time my index fingers developed a chronic inflammation at the cuticles, which I blamed on the poor production quality of the brushes: the swelling did not subside until I boiled my fingers and out came a tiny fraction of hard straw.for sure, brushes made by the blind are cheaper than other brushes but the cost must be tallied against the hundred drawbacksWith the new ballpoint pen, made of hardened rubber cased in the likeness of marble, I felt a joy comparable to Roland with his sword, Durandal. I struck the unbreakable pen on the table edge and fragments of his famous epic came to mind . . . L’epée cruist, ne fruisset ne ne brise. O biro, cum est bele e seintisme. I placed my money proudly on the glass table, hip height in front of the girl, where pens lay in three beautifully arranged ranks under the glass case, paid shillings, as it was called then, when she asked: Don’t you want your name engraved on it; it’s free; unfortunately, there’s a waiting period. A week later, I was able to go around with the biro in my pocket, clearly marked on its side: Tómas Jónsson. And a rumor spread among the people: that a biro could write continually for ten thousand miles without running out of ink. Correspondingly, it could draw four ink circles around the earth’s circumference, though it would run out during the fifth. With this advertising pitch the manufacturers successfully created excitement among the masses. You’d often see young men on the street with differently colored rows of pens in their jacket pockets. But I found the equation strange. It hadn’t gone down well in the bank or in the office while Tryggvi was in charge. In geography, I’d learned that the Earth’s circumference at the equator is 40 thousand kilometers, nearly matching the coast of Greenland. But the ingenious gimmick was pure advertising. Ads may be impertinent, whether for poetry, fish, or detergent: either they are pretty exaggerations or rhyming exaggerations. Anything that rhymes works better on the consumer. Typically today there’s no rhyming but in advertising. Advertisers occupy the seat of the old icelandic poet-skalds; there are all kinds of asinine rhymes for products that fool the public without any difficulty, just as the singsong “andrarímur” did in past times. I would love to know who thought this all up, advertising a ballpoint pen with such imperial exaggeration and shamelessness.In school I only ever wrote with a pen nib, then with a cartridge or fountain pen. I can manage a fountain pen better. The word itself evokes the sense of an eternal flow of water from its source, or in this case the ink that streams into the pen from the cartridge, hidden in the depths of the case. You find yourself in a sound mood for discovering poetic metaphors: because each element is made by the hand of a living man there is some degree of connection with Mother Earth.

  I remember clearly when the slopes were still uninhabited land where houses now stand and grass on Hvolsvöllur is tall, succulent, and green where Guðrún is heading back down or Jónas, were he still alive, that great farmer who stood for innovation and thought about changing the wetness without landscaping and tussocks, an experimental dream of the land—who realized that the earth swelled in winter frost t
he way your legs swell from cold feet as you stand with the hens who look at you suspiciously in icelandic poetry they stop roosting lice from themselves down in their earth ridge in the sky a red cloud drags past and you think war is coming the world’s end and the thought flies down and up Skeiðin past Hestfjall and over Vörðufell where the swans at sunset by the mountain lake maimed and knocked unconscious lambs with their wings and it continues into Hrepp where it meets Fall and you say September 14th I do not want to wait for the round-up at Hvolsvöllur but at Hvolsvöllur the grass hasn’t died Hekla stands like a blue-white island rising from the sandy desert grass grows in luscious clusters you open the trunk and the house smell assaults your nose and you feel around the bottom and find loose-knit socks and spotted socks darned and then it reaches your senses and the smell of the house assaults you at Hvolsvöllur your senses you yell from behind the clothes hanging in the potato cellar over the milk cans at the outhouse over the wide-mouthed pissbog and in the Now a ballpoint pen rulesthe chickens flock together for you to splash the fish bones from your clothes over their feathers they cut the fish spine apart with their beaks and suck out the gelatinous spinal cord, then hold the spine up for you a riddle about spines in the tail you say twelve and two or is there in the spine what I call marrow nonono he laughs with dirty fingers over his mouth full of rotted teeth lost you finally write when a letter comes from home god my god Tómas my Tómmas when will you stop being an inexhaustible burden for us you are now ten my good god will you endlessly lag behind other boys, you have no delight in sheep you have no satisfaction from fish, I get no profit from taking in laundry and your father earns nothing on the ocean I’m pregnant again will soon deliver hold out until christmas try you are one of ten and I have been pregnant twelve times remember that and no profit from laundry but I persist no harbor do you want to see me later as kin as in a bog the yellow brush escapes from mom’s hands and flies back into the cloudy water she lies in the mud on her back intertwining with the foreman (I can see him before me) wading in between the tubs she screams don’t let the damn old woman’s bloody spittle mingle with the fresh-washed fish haul her to the tub’s side1 they struggle with their burden they sling mom to the planks and flatten her oil-washed skirt yelling with turned-up sleeves do not open your thighs woman squeeze them together one person struggles with her deathly pale carries her in her flattened skirt hanging down to the ground and slings then she lies there

  1. The washing-up tubs must have been in a row along from the fish supplies. The women would have been situated along the long side of a narrow plank over the puddle which formed under their feet, so they gradually got wet, wrapped with aprons and covered by arm-protectors made of oiled canvas. The aprons would have been made of the same material. This protective clothing was “treated” once a year, ideally in the spring, and spread on the ground to dry. Ointment would fall from the folds, and hence it was necessary to look after it well, otherwise it offered no protection. He must have been standing between the chest and the saltfish station cutting the neck-blood from the fish with a splitting knife, i.e. a knife with as long a blade as shaft, wrapped in string, with lead bolts where blade and shaft met. Three planks would have formed the washing board, which rested on the edge of the tub on one side and, on the other side, was nailed to a wood block underwater in the tub. After he had let the blood from the napes, he dipped the fish in the water and laid them crosswise across the board. That is called the soak, and it precedes the wash. She would have reached across the tub for the wet fish and arranged them in front of her on the board, four or five fish upside down at once, their napes toward her. First the brush is brushed across the skin and then carefully under the fins with bristles that are longer at the ends than in the middle of the brush. The bristles were yellow, hard but flexible so they didn’t damage the fish; they were slightly crooked. With one swipe, the fish is flipped and brushed with another swift gesture, the bristles applied diagonally down the spine recess, and stroked crosswise if there is any jaundice; if not, that was considered unnecessary. The washer wore woolen mittens; he stroked them over the belly to get to the membrane, what’s known as plucking. In a single swipe the fish was folded and the brush went under the tail-and back-fins; the fish was then cast back into the sink to float there, and one needed considerable technique so as not to break it apart in the fall. Mom must have slipped over herself at that moment in a slippery heap of newly-washed fish. The brush would have fallen from her hands into the grayish water full of liquid membranes which settled on the tub’s bottom in the night and over time formed a thick putrefied layer. If the brush was new it would float upright thanks to the straw, otherwise it sank to the bottom or was half-submerged. If it sank, it was drilled up with sticks or staves. Washing fish was cold and hard work in the sheds, which were not warmed by anything but obscenities. The obscenities tended to rhyme roughly—what you might call dirty ditties. These verses would describe the terrible abandon of men and women, without parallel in the history of art, except perhaps in some of Rubens’ paintings. And it is notable that both the primitive and the highly-educated court culture should have more in common than other kinds of mentality; both are un-bourgeois, basic, free. These dirty verses are extremely remarkable sources of human powerlessness. In them you find pain, the castration of the body that is bound its whole life to physical effort and sees no way out of the puzzle or toward liberty except in the abstract, in raging sexual intercourse, of which the body is incapable. Oil heating devices are part of this list of death, if they’re not swiftly dealt with the support of public funding from Parliament throughout their life, this lone innovative and unique icelandic literary-sex literary tradition without compare.

  second book

  to put herself to bed as night comes she says there are embers alive in the oven take these bloody pieces from the chamber pot and tear chips from the tar paper where it flakes at the corner of the house and set them on him and burn everything in a large firebox put pieces of wood under it so it might combust all the more quickly then come back after you burn it yes then she gropes for her glass of iodine milk and says in the chamber pot was your brother or sister and drinks her iodine milk my good god my Tómas try not to be a perpetual burden on us hold out to christmasit would be fun to know about all the people what’s become of them all of them I have known in my lifetime

  how many people have died this very momenthow many are being born while I say hey!in x state in South America one-and-a-half children are born every minute that passesI have made myself imagine the corn fields must resemble goldI have never seen corn except in pictures where it was, of course, stillother people need to do a whole lot to prove as strange in old age as to have lived the varied life of Oddný SenI remember her books about the Chinese Empire

  the bridal couple in Amoy in the picture this bridal couple intended to journey west they now live in Red China perhaps they have fled across the Formosa channel

  Snorri Sturluson’s name is the lone icelandic name found in foreign encyclopedias there it stood written out in Chinese charactersit must be that Oddný knew the Chinese language must be she speaks Mandarin or the Amoy dialect

  as the Yellow Sea yellows from deposits of yellow sand out of the Yellow Rivercorn fields and rivers where an old man sleeps in a small canoe and dreams tiny Chinese poemsbeside the anchored boat stand five stamps five dynasty pictures for the old man has been owned by five emperors five periods

  in the Ming period the mountains’ pale blue peaks are darker and rise up from the fog to where the clouds breakwhere is this written in an icelandic poem

  she has seen the Chinese Wall with her own eyes the one edifice on earth distinguishable from the moona building raised by emperors so no one steps foot in their region so they could live virtually undisturbed by barbarians the way I want tountil people recently arrived from the borderlands said that barbarians no longer exist anywhere in the world

  but no one can build the wall higher than his thought reachest
he emperors Tai Tsung and Tai Tsu lacked compassionsee here and around the Great Wallnothing is left but chaosnot since the great conquest of Gibraltar has the world been safeafter On the Origin of Species I am not explicitly created in the image of godafter the publication of Das Kapital the proprietary rights to my apartment are cast in doubtundoubtedly I do not sleep the innocent sleep of a child following the publication of The Interpretation of Dreamseven dreams are not innocent anymore nothing is innocentthe damned nineteenth century woke us up from innocence I do not know how much travel improved Oddný but she recently gave a fascinating talk on the radio about China’s past and present as the girls out in the corridor cursed the country perhaps at night she dreams of Amoyshe must have traveled to China from Southampton sailing from there in one of the greatest and largest ships to other countries and continents sites in the geography book I learned from in elementary schoolignorant people have taken to dwelling in my apartment I still have the first ballpoint pen I ever had, even though it is rather beaten up. To me it is the symbol of a certain time, a better delegate for that era than many other larger and more instrumental objects.

  Tómas Jónsson.

  On Stationery up to the Present Time

  I’ve been asked to say a few words here about the development of writing materials in the city’s offices. I’m going to start this essay by briefly tracing the history of man’s need for stationery.

  a) connecting people

  a) as tools for understanding

  b) intermediaries

  third composition book

  It’s great fun roving about and observing people, boats, and houses. Beyond seeing things in their own light, I see myself, my reactions in light of such things.