The Sound of Light – by Verity Borthwick
ISLAND | ISSUE 162
Children conceived under the northern lights are blessed with intelligence and wisdom. It turns out this is a recent urban legend masquerading as ancient knowledge. Still, it has propagated and even appears on the Greenland tourism website, which is where I read it. I did not know this when I visited Greenland, but something about the idea of phantasmal lights had the feel of fate, and it gave me hope.
It’s strange how much I let in the idea of fate during that time. An obsession with auspicious days and signs grew, as though if I could just understand how the stars were supposed to align then it would finally work. As though it had nothing to do with bloodstreams running with hormones in exactly the correct proportion – oestrogen, progesterone, luteinising hormone; yes, I knew all the names by then. I’d studied the graphs and made many of my own, like an astrologer mapping out star charts, only mine were created from temperatures taken first thing in the morning and the results of ovulation predictor kits.
As though egg quality and sperm motility mattered less than the glow of atmospheric light.
*
Through a haze of jetlag, I first see the lights. We’d just gone to bed, then the knock at the door, the lights are above us, and I’m already sunk in stupor, waking up impossible, getting dressed more so. Out the door and even a blast of frigid air to the face does not truly wake me. I look up at the mountain beside the house, a mountain that in the day is speckled snow and black rock, snow that reflects the pink of sunset; a sun that hovers low in the sky like a tired eye waiting to shut. From behind that mountain pours soft green light, an eerie light that seems more permeable than other lights, as though a hand slipped into that glow might disappear forever.
The light shifts slowly, tracing a curve above the harbour and moving like a living thing. Strangest of all, it makes a sound. Not a sound of light you’d expect, the blink of a fluorescent globe that’s failing, the crackle of a cosy fire, the incandescent explosion of a firework. It’s a rustling sound. Like static or white noise, the sound the powerlines made when it snowed in Stockholm where we used to live. When the lights hang right above our heads in soft vertical lines of purple-green, we can hear it; the world around suddenly silent, as if allowing the space necessary for such quiet mumblings.
“When the lights hang right above our heads in soft vertical lines of purple-green, we can hear it; the world around suddenly silent, as if allowing the space necessary for such quiet mumblings.”
We watch a long time until the lights are finally gone.
Conception isn’t an option. It turns out there are things more auspicious than the flicker of magnetic fields. The timing of an egg released from an ovary, for instance.
*
We plunge into Greenland the way you’d fall into a certain form of limbo. Back home in Australia everything in our lives is uprooted. We’re homeless, sleeping on a mattress in my parents’ attic. We’re between jobs or stuck in relentless, grinding ones we hate.
And we are infertile.
Greenland is the place for it too; there is something of limbo about Nuuk. The only colour comes from the little houses, painted in a rainbow and clinging to bare rock. That song: little boxes, made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same. If not little boxes then larger boxes, big apartment blocks, modernist monstrosities more barren than the landscape itself. There are no trees in Nuuk, yet it is a place perilously close to nature. A cold kind of world closes in all around. You can only reach it by plane or boat; there are no interior roads in Greenland, only ice. Unfenced gardens end in mountains with red and brown moss and scrub clinging close to the ground, visible root systems weaving amongst the rock. Or at the water’s edge where, if you look closely, there are tiny plants and strands of grass entombed in the ice. Drying fish hang from the eaves of houses, and apartment balconies are festooned with dangling vertebrae or skulls, talismans to ward off evil spirits. Hulks of blue-streaked ice lie marooned on pebble beaches.
Greenland does find itself in an uncertain space, desperate for independence from Denmark but beholden to the country until it can support itself financially. There is an uneasy tension that is almost palpable; it feels on the brink of rupture. It is also a place of comings and goings: teachers from Denmark with year-long postings; diplomats on six-month secondments; academics on sabbatical; geologists flying in for the field season. There are always farewell parties for friends newly made.
On a trip along the fjord, I pull three cod from the water, one after another after another. It’s a disturbing sort of fecundity – it almost feels an insult. No sooner do I throw in the line than I hook one and pull it dripping and fat-fleshed from the water. It is a fish that leaves a muddy flavour in your mouth. If you want to get to tastier fish, you have to weight the hook so it sinks faster. Even then, half the time, you pull up cod before you can reach the fish you truly seek. When we gut the cod, they leave a spatter of organ blood on the wharf. Back home the headless fish lie side by side in the pan for baking, slimy and mottled.
In the Greenland National Museum, in a small darkened room, I come face to face with the Qilakitsoq mummies. It is a solemn place. In contrast to the black of the room the mummies seem bathed in golden light, a light like the strange colour that heralds a coming storm, rays of sun streaming through blackening clouds. They lie in huddled heaps of sealskin, desiccated hands folded, dark sockets staring. The smallest body draws my eye; this is mummy I/1, a six-monthold boy. He is so well preserved you can see his fine, dark eyelashes, the pencil-stroke hairs of his brows. Empty eyes stare skyward. Tiny mouth slightly open, he seems cold despite his sealskin suit. He doesn’t look all that far from life.
The cause of death is unknown, but it was not uncommon at the time for infants to be smothered or buried alive with their dead mother if a nurse could not be found.
Better than a slow starving death.
I stare at his tiny, perfect face and think of his mother’s fight for life. Was she afraid her journey beneath the hide that separates the Inuit’s world from the next would not be made alone?
“I stare at his tiny, perfect face and think of his mother’s fight for life. Was she afraid her journey beneath the hide that separates the Inuit’s world from the next would not be made alone?”
*
When the snow comes in gusts and outside the window turns white, we stay home for days. Settling into a kind of exhaustion, I stir only to get another cup of coffee. I read a news article about the bodies that remain on Everest; those who climb must step over them to reach the summit. One story stays with me in particular: that of a woman whose body is now known as sleeping beauty, whose young son begged her not to climb and yet she told him, ‘I have to do this.’
In the days that follow, Nuuk descends into fog and the whole world falls away. I become obsessed. I read everything there is to read about Everest. Inside I am roiling, strangely angry; angry at this woman who left her son for a mountain, angry at the people who would climb and face death in this way.
I watch a documentary about Everest. There is a Spanish climber attempting to summit. When we first meet her, she is hanging by one hand from a rock face. I look at her dangling there and think, how do you have such faith in your body?
*
Looking back at those void days, those days spent in a cloud of nothing – where perhaps above us the lights were churning but we couldn’t know – gorging myself on tales of ego and of suffering and death, it’s easier now to understand what was happening to me. I’d stumbled into the lives of people whose bodies could achieve amazing feats, bodies that could carry them into the sky, up to the cruising altitude of an aeroplane. Bodies that could hang from one hand. Bodies that could be trusted.
And yet, my body was failing at the one thing I felt it was supposed to do.
“I’d stumbled into the lives of people whose bodies could achieve amazing feats, bodies that could carry them into the sky, up to the cruising altitude of an aeroplane. Bodies that could hang from one hand. Bodies that could be trusted.
And yet, my body was failing at the one thing I felt it was supposed to do. ”
Getting pregnant should be simple. I’d spent my whole life trying very hard not to. We had sat in sex education – they didn’t call it that at my prudish school, there it was ‘personal development’ – making a list of pros and cons on the whiteboard, rows and rows of girls in identical uniforms. Pros: it feels good. Cons: you might get pregnant, catch an STD, lose your reputation, purity, dignity, respect; it’s a sin.
The list of cons was always long. You might get pregnant always at the top.
*
As I sit and read beside the wall of white that is the window, a tupilak sneers at me. It is a small figurine, carved out of antler bone, sitting on the windowsill. Huge, grinning teeth, too many teeth, and obscenely stretched arms that end in webbed appendages. It is not a real tupilak, only a representation of one. Real tupilaks were created in secret by shamans, made up of bits of animal: skin, bones, hair, sinew, sometimes parts from the corpses of children. Once the tupilak was brought to life through magic and sexual contact with the bones, the shaman would release it into the water to find and kill an enemy. But if that enemy’s power was greater, the tupilak would turn right back on the creator. When Westerners came to Greenland, they wanted to know how these creatures looked, so the Inuit people began to carve them out of whale teeth.
When the weather clears, I go out in search of my own tupilak and finally find one carved into a long piece of antler, two faces with manic grins and hollow eyes. I want one of my own, a way to remember Greenland, but I am also afraid to bring it home with me. It is part of this superstitious slant creeping into my life – I’m wary of anything that might bring bad luck.
The lights appear again later, when we are on a ferry heading up the coast to Ilulissat, a place where 40-storey icebergs calve off the glacier and litter the sea and where the night is the howl of a thousand sled dogs. It’s rough, 30-knot winds, whitepeaked waves towering around and the ferry pitching from side to side. When it gets dark, I stand on the deck, looking into the sky as the waves thrash around. I’m holding onto the railing so I don’t fall, and though there is cloud overhead I can still see a ghostly smear of light, a grey tendril. It is nothing like the glorious greens and purples, but it is still beautiful, though it seems less a living thing and more like a haunting.
“I’m holding onto the railing so I don’t fall, and though there is cloud overhead I can still see a ghostly smear of light, a grey tendril. It is nothing like the glorious greens and purples, but it is still beautiful, though it seems less a living thing and more like a haunting.”
Conception isn’t an option. Seasickness will fell me as soon as the ferry starts to yaw as well as roll.
But for now, it is quiet in the long moments before the crash of waves against the boat, and there is the grey glow above, and I am very alone. If I fall overboard and slip into the icy waters no one would realise for a time, and what strange and terrible things dwell there beneath the waves? I think of the tupilak, its body slick as a seal, appalling long fingers grasping for me in the darkness. It is freezing; my feet slither on the icy deck and my breath comes out in clouds. I stand against the railing as the ferry tilts crazily to the side – down, down, down towards the maw of the ocean. The waves crash against the boat, almost reaching me, and a mist of saltwater turns frigid in the air and flecks tiny ice crystals against my skin.
My body that is failing me clings to the railing, rushing down towards the cavern made by the waves, then soaring up into the night sky and the lights.
And I feel very, very alive. ▼
This essay appeared in Island 162 in 2021. Order a print issue here.
If you liked this piece, please share it. And please consider donating or subscribing so that we can keep supporting writers and artists.