Week 6: Hot
Pasta Put it in a pot.
Paragraph 6 Duration: Performance key: Situation key:
168 hours Hyperawareness of all performed actions Reflection of being
silence
Alma
Gabrielle
There’s still light from a sewing machine. Still noise from the streets. Light from the streetlamps. Constant in their movement the cars over the asphalt. There’s still song from a closed rom, song from a church, from a movie, lingering. In the room, in the vocal cords. There’s cyan in the curtains, if they existed. There’s a smell of pear in the smallest actions. Notes in the expensive but tasteless wine. In the tea. In the trees, if they existed. Still wind, sweeping over the streets, around the halogen bulbs in the standardized lamppost, through a skeleton of a tree, through a window. An overtone of a wind, almost non-existing, placing minimal vibrations In the smallest bodies of water. Vibrating in fingers cramplike in their grasp. The fabric on the sewing machine. Cramps likewise in the foot, maneuvering the machine by the pedal. Maneuvering the car out of town. Victoria
Liv + Marie
Jocko
Johan
Villi
Aoife
stuck about inside wrong winding her up for days she snaps untapped dancing laugh it off little girl whirl to serve concave very nice house and car rips my liver round to arse hole left open pendulum lumpy fridge jam maggoty kids dads spoiled meat inside tide can’t cope tape it shut untouched cube dying fruit
Insig
Garden diary
1st of November Today i spent a whole day with the flowers. It’s so interesting how they really come alive, once they are painted. It’s a very intimate moment, where i almost sense how they are communicating to me. For instance, which colour they want to be painted in, but also how they want to be built together. But the connection goes both ways. I feel my mental health getting better, and my thoughts becoming less scattered. In this project, I’m focusing on myself. I don’t even see it as me and them. We are not two separate objects. They are an extension of me, and slowly, I become an extension of them. They want the best for me, always. Which is a really difficult relationship to have with people. Because there are always past memories and lived life that is being projected on to the other person. I don’t want to give something back to the plants. Maybe that includes changing my initial idea with the project. Or at least just modifying it. This is definitely the beginning of something great. Maybe even greater than me. Also this light seems to fits the flowers. I think that I will have to write in this light when I write about them.
Fanny
Bianca
Steinar
Isaiah
Hildur + Luna
Week 7:
Cool
Paragraph 7 Duration: Performance key: Situation key:
168 hours No dancing with the dogs, please. Skรกlanes
What happened was beyond her. Indee in the white-out. Running, silent. Wor rain arrived in curtains. Light clung to t itself with its weightlessness it lifted, a holler washed the lights out of the sky. hot tiles eased out the shape — of Ja tone of the rain and the colour of the g a desktop background, FogMelt.jpg. Ex was Ireland. Now that the shiver of the wouldn’t it have been nice to hear what o dog walked himself to his own rock, whi the beginning of a waterfall. Meeting wi spirits that conjured the landscape, re Or a dog. What did it matter to step in a she came. She’d ride six white horses the mountain when she came. The ra for a soggy walk home. Who was she? process of melting. Like the waterfall, sacred unraveling in peace. The light fa
ed, it was far ahead — a dark sillhouette rds came later. After the big snow the the mountain, and then as if surprising alien, in a shimmering arc. A shriek and Cycling backward and forward in time, anuary, July, and next March. The flat grass recalled a picture that once was xcept there were no pigs here, and that e last conversation was finally fading, one more day sounded like? The magic ich was the shape of his head, and also ith the ocean, old songs reappeared as emembering how to walk it like a child. a river? She’d wear pink pyjamas when s when she came. She’d come ‘round ain rinsed snow from peaks and made ? She was Ísland, undergoing her own she said fuck off and leave me to my antastic! A hole in the sky! Her wet hair!
Goddur As interviewed on Seydisfjรถrรฐur Community Radio 107.1fm Friday 9th November 2018
Shan: And we are live, thank you for joining us. We have just returned from an 18km walk from Skálanes to Seyðisfjörður. You’re with Claire and Shan again, and we have our special, special, special guest, Goddur. Welcome. Goddur: Thankyou. S: Thankyou for agreeing to have a chat with us. Goddur spent a week and a half I think with us. What number trip would this be, Goddur, your sixth time with LungA? G: Probably, from the beginning of LungA I have been part of the Skálanes week, I think it is probably six years. Five or six years. Two times a year, both in the Fall semester and also the Spring. S: That’s right, yeah, yeah. Have you seen a shift since the beginning to now? G: Yes, no question. The shift is basically that — probably because of word of mouth — the people who apply are probably more matured and more talented than in the beginning. Not to say that (no offence, you know!) But it is to say that we get a much better quality of applicants, and at least half of them are highly skilled and highly intellectual. You know, you really only need one or two on a certain kind of a level that will influence the rest of the group. Also there are different kinds of inputs, because it is all about a kind of chemistry. When the group is led by good people instead of the bad apple, then the chemistry will be so nice. And we’ve been very lucky in the LungA school to have the right chemistry — it is always developing. Always nicer, nicer, nicer. Meeting the leaders Lasse and Jonatan before I come they say, “this group is much better than last year!” And this is beginning to sound like a cliché, but believe it or not it’s true! It’s always better and better! We are always amazed at the quality of people we are getting in. This is not only fun for the group, because the fact is — and also has been my own personal experience — I learned much more from people in my class, my classmates, people in my group, than teachers, instructors or professors. They streamlined into my nervous system and my mind came through my mates. And that is what makes a groove, that is what makes the chemistry. Yes, the group dynamics. Claire: Can you tell us some memories of Seyðisfjörður and how you connected to the place? G: Well the thing is — I don’t come from here. I was born in the North, in a place called Akureyri. All my family comes from the West Coast. Both my
parents were born in the West Coast, and I lived in the North until I was twenty. And then almost the rest in Reykjavik, except for six years in Vancouver, British Columbia. I came here for the first time in 1996 when Seyðisfjörður was celebrating 100 years since settlement for getting the rights to have merchandise. Like a commerce-rights. Then around 2000, I was then starting to be a teacher, first in Icelandic College of Art and Crafts, which later became Iceland Academy of Arts, and has now become Iceland University of Art and Design. But always the same school in my mind. We got a request from Eastern Iceland to take part in a conference in Reyðarfjörður, about cultural activity in the area. And that’s when I met everyone, I met Alla (Aðalheiður Lóa Borgþórsdóttir) who is sort of the grandmother of LungA. And I met all the key people in the region. Alla, she got me to come to the LungA festival and do a workshop in 2001, and I have been every year since 2001, every summer I have been in Seyðisfjörður. I started to notice, during this time in the beginning of the century, there were so many empty houses here. I think there were fourteen or fifteen houses that were empty. They all belonged to the government, or sort of the government fund. They were trying to sell these houses, and they had really low price tags. It cost you know maybe 1.5 million, which is just a years’ salary. A salary for one year and you could buy a house for it! Lots of young people found this out and used the opportunity to buy houses here. I think they maybe bought 3, 4, 5… Then a guy who comes from the East but he was quite wealthy, living in LA, running a company called Propaganda Films — it produced Twin Peaks and Wild At Heart, and many of David Lynch’s films — he bought up the rest of the houses, and they formed the hotel, Hotel Aldan, and things like that. Hotel Aldan [the restaurant] is just the front, and then there’s three or four houses which they rent out for rooms. That’s how it came about. I also started to detect so many things. For example, there was a different kind of energy. You know some places they drain your energy, they sort of suck our energy. And then others charge your batteries and you feel double or triple, after just staying here for a short period of time. You come from here high, you know, really high. Not on something but just on the spirit of things. And I’ve always been wondering what is this, you know? There’s a famous pattern: unbelievably many people come here with the intention of staying for a week or two, and they wake up two years later! But also there is some kind of strange spirit with this town, with this closeness to the mountains — you have tendencies to start to look at Bjólfur or Strandartindur [the two mountains in the fjord] and you are all of sudden lost. You forget yourself for fifteen, twenty minutes, and you are sort of taken
away — you zone out. And also this strange thing about, it has a border town mentality. You know once a week we get the ferry with the customs and police dogs sniffing and… C: Oh you think there’s a paranoia? G: Yeah, well not necessarily paranoia, but the thing is that border towns have always got a certain kind of mentality. Also you have to have it in mind that Seyðisfjörður used to be in the nineteenth century not raised by Icelanders, but Norwegians. They were the first ones to do both electricity and water pipes. They made a telephone line to Reykjavik and also to Norway. They were sort of the pioneers of twentieth century science techniques and devised solutions for how our community developed. They did this really early. Also it was multicultural from the beginning, there were three or four languages spoken here. And so nobody claimed Seyðisfjörður as something we had to defend from foreigners — no, it was based on foreigners all the time. Another thing is that when the Second World War came this was a hideout for the convoys from Europe to America. And this was the only attack of the Germans in Iceland: they shot down a ship in Seyðisfjörður called El Grillo — and it’s the name of the beer, the local beer. C: You did the label for it, right? G: Yeah, I did the label. We had this guy whose name is Eyþór, who is running the pub. He was quite a character. The thing with Seyðisfjörður is that out of all other small places that I know in Iceland, it has the highest tolerance for freaks and foreigners. C: Thankyou Seyðisfjörður! G: Yeah. Anyway this Eyþór guy was quite a character. He was running the pub, but he was also selling some kinds of skins, for tourists, like reindeer skins. It was not from the East, he imported them from somewhere else, from Norway I think. And he was a character. He was constantly bragging about making his own beer, his own label, something like that — and there was a meeting in the Skaftfell, just you know a casual gathering, and a group of people who more or less decided “why don’t we just help him make this a reality?” El Grillo was not at all brewed here, it was just a viking beer or something. You can buy it from the producers and get your own labels, you know, not a big deal. So it was just more or less a fake brand. C: Ok!
G: But we put some energy into this, and really loved doing it. We didn’t get paid, but that was not an issue. He was sometimes kind to you, like when I had lost my father when I was ten years old, he came to me and said, like “Do you need a car?” “Are you hungry?” “Do you need some pocket money?” He became like my father figure. He is still alive but sort of very, very senile and I think he’s in an institution for elderly people somewhere in Reykjavik now. But his family is running the joint. Also in the sixties Seyðisfjörður became quite active because of herring. There was the pickled herring and salted herring for export. But they needed some kind of work force. Young people came from Reykjavik to work here in hundreds. This goes up to the late sixties, the hippy years. And there were very strange rumours, even, that Charles Manson came here to work in the herring factory. C: Is that right? Do you think it’s true? G: At least, well, the sceptical voice said he looked at least like Charles Manson. He was living with three or four women, in a cottage in the mountain. And they were sooooo late that people say “this was him,” you know. They were absolutely sure that this was him. C: In the same way that you’re Clint Eastwood? G: Yeah, exactly! East Clintwood, for you. Yeah, yeah. [laughs] Anyway, and what is also interesting about the spirit of the town is that it never obeyed authorities from Reykjavik. You have to also have in mind now that the container ferry is usually here now, but that there are no police in town. There are in Egilsstaðir, but they don’t really respect the police from Egilsstaðir. Not really. Yeah, Because the thing is that they always looked for authorities to the continent, or to Norway. They looked to the East, but not to the South or up to Egilsstaðir or Reykjavik. That was the sort of tradition here. The other thing is that when I came here into town in 2001 I had maybe four years then of sobriety. I went to detox and rehab, and so I didn’t drink. LungA Festival was run like a grass-roots movement by mothers of the town. Because the teenagers were complaining that there was nothing to do during summertime. They wanted to go away from Seyðisfjörður, and the mothers were trying to keep them here. And they got some kind of workshop leaders from Reykjavik, artists. But these artists did not have a good reputation, all of them, because they were sometimes drunk. And I was the first artist from Reykjavik they met who was not drunk! And so I started to have early morning coffee with them, to gossip with them about what happened last night
and things like that. Slowly all the doors of the kitchens in Seyðisfjörður town were opened for me. C: Wow, you’re a mother’s dream! G: Yeah, a mother’s dream! I could have a gossip in every kitchen in Seyðisfjörður! And then slowly I sort of got respect from the men as well, because they were like “what is this guy always doing in my wife’s kitchen every morning?” So they had to know me as well to make sure everything was proper. To get to know the males in the town you have to sit in the gas station, I think especially around 10 o’clock. But the funny thing is that it’s not as interesting to be with a man gossiping. S: I agree! G: Because they’re more or less talking about soccer, or politics, and trucks. And it’s very naïve, you don’t go deep, and they have also this bad nature. Because we love to talk about other people. But you always feel if something bad is at the end, like jealousy or lust or whatever. But if there’s something proper at the end like caring for other people, that is different. The men never do, but the mothers do! This good nature of gossiping with women is on a much higher level, and deeper. That’s my experience. I believe in every body there is both a male and a female. And the question is whether the female or the male is running. In men, the woman wakes up maybe a little bit late. She’s not born into your mind fully grown. She’s not matured, you have to get to know her. And you’ll be amazed, it was maybe just ten years ago when I really found my woman was waking up, you know when I started to cry in certain moments watching movies, when they got too touchy, in scenes, you know [crying] “I just…” I got emotional. I also got to have this omen feeling, I started to have you know, “ooh” — all kind of these things, that were always linked with women. C: Like more intuition? G: Yes! Much more intuition. And my senses were activated in a different way. This was interesting. This made me also relieved, because I began to link this awakening with being an artist. The tools of the artist are emotion, intuition, and insight. Those are the basic forces artists use. And when you learn the power of these things making art, well, you are beginning to be a true artist then. Instead of being, you know, technically good and knowing everything about tools, making bigger things, and stuff like that.
A part of being sober was a spiritual awakening. It took me a long time because I was against orthodox religious people — I couldn’t relate to them. But I had to learn a lesson in the difference between being spiritual and being religious. And when I found out — shit… I could be spiritual because I started to connect with, you know, to infuse matter with spirit. When people are making poetry or making songs, it isn’t worth a fuck if ain’t got a spirit. And also, spirits are in schools, they are in houses. You feel them when you enter some joints, like Skaftfell — is the spirit good or not? In LungA School, there is a spirit going on everywhere. When I started to see it this way, I had a spiritual awakening. I started to open my senses for this and feel good about it! S: Did you have an opportunity to talk to someone when you were going through this shift? Did you have guidance through this, or was it just your own research? G: No, well, I had guidance. When I was trying to stop abusing alcohol and drugs, it was not a problem to quit, but it always started again after eight months or six months. And I was tired of this because I was not getting any joy out of life. Not under influence or sober — it was just that everything was boring! It was boring to drink except for fifteen minutes or five minutes. It was boring to smoke pot. Except early in the mornings. And it was boring to be sober. Everything was boring! Then I met a man who had been with me in my first detox, in 1984, it was quite long ago. I was quite impressed by him because he was a pilot on a Boeing 747. And he was extremely clever in my mind, you know a big tough guy. So I sort of asked him for help. I was wanting to make my case so complicated, and he said you have to take a higher power with you. I became so angry in my stomach because I said, “you can’t make me take anything I don’t feel!” It was in the late 90s and he said, “go to a video rental store and get Tina Turner’s biography ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’ and see what happens when she starts to use the mantra ‘Nam Myoho Renge Kyo’ and she starts to meditate!” She was not exactly an alcoholic herself, but she was beaten up by an alcoholic, so she was a co-dependent character. When I would start to drink again it was never really because I was feeling so depressed. I was not really depressed, just bored. And I always started to drink or use drugs again because I met someone famous. C: Oh really? G: Yeah, so my worst gate into hell was vanity. And this guy knew it. So when he was selling me the idea of using the mantra ‘Nam Myoho Renge Kyo’ he said, “you know, all the stars are using this, all the film directors and rock and
roll,” blah blah blah yeah, yeah… Then I remembered even artists like John Cage were interested in Buddhism and I all of a sudden bought the idea of doing this. It helped me so much to slow down the spin inside my mind. Also, the typical thing of getting out of old relationships, because they are bad, until you can keep a plant alive for one year. That was bloody difficult, it took me many years to be able to do that! [laughs] C: Is the plant still alive now?! G: Yeah yeah yeah! But the thing is that I also started to… I’d had many relationships in my former life, but I also found out that I didn’t really need them. When you don’t have to consider other people, and you can do anything, it’s under your own control how you spend your own time. Nobody is making any obligations on you. You don’t have to show any responsibility unless for yourself. All of a sudden, I could find the force of having a really strong relationship with myself. And always, that my friendship with other people is so much stronger with women than men. But I started to be able to be close to women without thinking about them sexually. That was quite an advancement for me, you know, it was just unbelievably comfortable. When you get older your sexual instincts diminish. They’re not maybe gone, but especially when you go into your sixties it’s not as important as it used to be. And it is not as interesting, even, as it used to be when you were younger. They say it will come again when you are in your seventies. You know you go to a place with elderly people and they say women all of a sudden start to use cosmetics again, and men start to comb their hair and polish their shoes. And they start to have dances, and all kinds of games. They say it’s a really riveting life in some of these places! S: So, are you looking forward to your seventies? G: Well, I was maybe even wondering if I should start to smoke pot again… but I’m not sure! [laughter] Or dropping acid. I was wondering… But maybe when I’m eighty! [laughter] Because also what you have to have in mind when you go to places with elderly people, is what kind of music are they listening to? They’re listening to something from when they were young! Right now it’s the old dances. Imagine, when we come to this stage in our lives… C: It’s going to be like The Beatles!
G: YES! YES! And some psychedelic… [laughs] You get it? C: How exciting! S: How did you first get in contact with Jonatan and Lasse and how did they end up inviting you to LungA? G: It was because when I was here every summer, I had the place across Seyðisfjörður, under Bjólfur, and we call it the Blue Factory. It is the junkyard you pass, but I kind of like junkyards. At that time it was full of storage. A place the brothers who own it just put everything in. I had students who came here for the LungA festival, and they loved it so much, but you know young people they were staying awake the whole night and they were swimming naked in the lagoon in front of everyone and making noises and so… nobody wanted them the next year. I had to help them find a place outside Seyðisfjörður, so they could still come. I asked the brothers if I could do use their place and they said yeah, if I would sort of take responsibility. I had then the Skaftfell Residency, and I had the binoculars in the top floor of Skaftfell, and I was watching you know when they were… C: Oh you were spying on them? G: Yeah, spying on them, yeah! Because I had responsibility there. And I knew them. I had permission. And then I saw on Friday night there were twelve cars in front of the place, and they had brought and started to make light fixtures in front of the house, making it cosy. And ok… then on Saturday there were twenty or thirty cars and obviously a big thing going on, even a fire, an outside fire. So I went early the morning after, and it was just you know hell to come there. And I said you can’t leave town unless you tidy everything up. You can’t show this disrespect to the owners, everything has to be spiffy and totally clean, and you cannot leave Seyðisfjörður before you do this. Then two or three of them came some hours later to borrow cleaning equipment from Skaftfell. And in the middle of the day they came and said, “we are done.” I went over there and yeah it looked good and when I closed the door I thought “shit… I could live there!” I asked the brothers, could I live there, just keeping it like the sort of houseman. They accepted, and I was there for five or six years. One of the things I started to do there was a sweat lodge. Jonatan and Lasse started to come, and I knew of course Björt [Sigfinnsdóttir, director of LungA Festival] and I knew the whole story… I knew where they came from, I had even been in Aarhus where they were educated, and Kaospilot, so it was
easy to get acquainted with them through Björt. But they started to come to the sweat lodge, and then when the school started, I held courses in magic and sweat lodge for them. They built a sweat lodge [at Skálanes], but it was too difficult to run it from a distance. We tried last year, but we quit it because we couldn’t get the stones hot enough. We had to rethink the whole thing. And so, we took up the silence part of the week again instead. That’s how it all came about. Also I, in the beginning, became part of the board of the school. We had board meetings both here and in Reykjavik. Board meetings are now held in my studio. So there has been lots of collaboration since they started, I’m like a colleague, running the board of the school. I am like their man in Reykjavik. They need to have one at least who they can phone and say “Goddur, can you print this out?” You know, “in your school, can you scan this for us?” Like this, that’s how it came about! I want to keep coming back because there’s so much more. I know art schools in Europe, I know so well how they have developed, when they went into university status and things like that. And the schools in art lost so many things. Because of administration, and reports, and how they’re funded. You always know where the spirit is, where the groove is. It is never really lost in art schools because wherever there are young people, who want to be artists, together, it’s always fun. But it’s the admin, the faculty which is so boring. But not here. And still there’s a spirit here. C: Do you think it’s because there’s less admin and faculty? Or it just doesn’t really exist at all? G: Yeah, exactly, it hardly exists! It is in Jonatan’s pocket! C: Shhhhhhh! G: Shhhhhhh! But Jonatan is really good in administration. But, he’s only one. C: Yeah, yeah. You mentioned the silence that we observed together at Skálanes this week. How was it for you? G: Well, what this does for me is it opens unused senses. When we are so busy making conversations — and it’s good to make conversations and things like that — but when you are not allowed to do this for a certain amount of time, life and the way you perceive things totally changes. You all of a sudden have to look at things, and you have to listen to things which
you don’t hear when you are talking. And you start to do totally different observations around you. Sort of strange how this develops. Because also for me it reduced the spin in my mind and I almost, you know… C: It slows everything? G: Yeah, it slows down. I sort of feel in a way a bit like being reborn after this. What is called if your computer is full of trash you have to do some re-set, like re-setting your system. Sort of like that. You turn it off, and then you re-set. S: I’m going to ask a selfish question — you spoke about doing courses in sweat lodge and magic. With your practice and time working with magic, do you draw on pre-Christianity in Iceland, like Norse tradition, and working in communion with the landscape? G: The more I learn about Christianity, especially after the reformation, the more I am disgusted by it. How missionaries behave toward indigenous people all over the world is just shit, everywhere. Slowly through my interest in spirituality, it’s helped me to discover, especially when I was in Vancouver, Carl Gustav Jung, and archetypes, and his writings on psychological types, and alchemy. Psychology as we know it was formulated by Freud. Jung himself is from the same generation, but they pulled him apart. Freud made the fundamentals of twentieth century psychology on amphetamines and cocaine, he was never spiritual, he was trying to build up a scientific vocabulary on how to treat the psyche. Whereas Jung knew from the beginning that this is already ancient wisdom. He only was tracing this ancient wisdom in order to understand the psyche. That leads you to polytheism. Before, we had this monotheism of Christianity. We had many Gods in a Pantheon, a circle which was full of Gods, like the Greek gods or the Roman gods or the Nordic gods. It’s the same, just different names. But the Nordic mythology was only made public in the early eighteenth century, because so few people spoke Icelandic. The ancient Eddas and the Sagas were all written in Icelandic and very few people could read this. It was the Swedes, a guy called Tegnér in Stockholm who did the first translation, he did epic poetry called the Frithiof’s Saga, where he mixed one classical knighthood story with the characters from the Eddas, the characters of the Gods, the Nordic Gods. This became an inspiration for people like Wagner, and also many of the English Pre-Raphaelites. Also many people in the nineteenth century got inspired by this mythology, as it was slowly translated into other languages, including the Romantics. It
was called Romanticism because they were so thrilled by Roman ruins and ancient Roman culture, and also inspired by Pallas Athena and by Minerva and things like this. Pallas Athena was the Greek version. These were people who in the nineteenth century were fighting against Monarchism — the rules of the kings — and fighting for making a republic. They were inspired by the Greek republic, and they celebrated a goddess called Pallas Athena. In Rome she had the name Minerva. She is a woman who has children on her knees and is giving an upbringing, telling the children a story. We found in the Nordic mythology someone who is equal to Pallas Athena and Minerva, her name is Saga. She is the daughter of Odin and Frigg. A ‘saga’ is a show and tell, that is the root of the name. And she is the same, she holds wisdom, and she has young people sitting on her, and she makes this poetry because this is before the time of writing. So she had to keep the wisdom in rhymed poetry as a memory stick. It was easier to remember poetry in rhymes than in linear stories, so the wisdom was hidden in the poetry. Wisdom is usually about the night sky. For example, stupid people from the nineteenth century, when they are drawing Askr Yggdrasil they draw a tree. That is so stupid! Because Askr Yggdrasil is the Milky Way. It looks like a tree in the sky, if it is a good night without light contamination, you will see the Milky Way like a tree. Then Loki, one of the Gods in the Nordic mythology, is Saturn. It is the actors in the poetry who are the stars. This then goes in the circles of where you are born and when you are born. It had to do both with navigation, how you could navigate under the night sky, and also how you placed yourself in the world — the spirit of the North, and the spirit of the South and the West and North. And it is even in the National Emblem, we have the spirit of the East as the worm, the dragon without wings. It has claws and it is the worm in Lagarfljót up in, close to Egilsstaðir. It has claws because we don’t have flying dragons. Even the Mediterraneans, when they were describing this spirit of the East they used the lobster, because it had claws. Because the real meaning of Scorpio is just an animal with claws. There’s a famous carved door in the East with the claws in the centre and the dragon wings in a circle. A beautiful wood carving, exactly this protector of the East. And then we have the protector of the West, which is Taurus. The opposite of Scorpio is Taurus. And then you have the South, Aquarius, who’s carrying the water. And the North has the eagle or lion. It is the lion usually in astrology. But the misunderstanding of this is because it was neither lion nor an eagle, it was both of them. It was a lion with an eagle head called Griffin. Because it was a mythical creature. So, this is the cross of the zodiac. Can you imagine this? They are defenders of your placement.
This is important because it is a strong kind of shamanism. Christianity mostly killed the ritual, but the indigenous people in the North America kept it… the ritual was once all over the northern hemisphere. Even in some of the Sagas like Eyrbyggja, in chapter 28, there is a detailed description of a sweat lodge, where they bring the hot stones into a cottage and pour water on it to get the steam. And that is written in the eleventh century. And so it IS there. The sauna in Finland is everything BUT the ritual. Christianity AGAIN cleaned the ritual. In these rituals, usually there’s the metaphor for the tent as the mother’s womb. You go in to the sweat lodge to die and to be reborn. That is the trick of the sweat lodge ritual is that it’s always hot at the top, but there is a thin layer of cold air at the bottom. You will slowly move your nose towards mother earth, and you will lie flat just in order to survive. That is when mother earth takes all your wounds and all your pain, and you crawl out. When you crawl out at the end and you stand up, you get the kundalini effect, the endorphin or the rush goes up from your bottom to your head, and you say “wow,” and you’ll be so happy and kind to other people. That is the only thing that is creepy about sweat lodge is how nice people are when they get out of the tent. I think that the original idea of an artist is the shaman. He steps out of society, he dances, he makes noises, he looks strange. You know? And like they say; some people think he’s not sane. One famous artist once said, “the only difference between me and an insane person is that I’m not insane.” You know, this thin line between the genius and the insane person. S: That’s beautiful. C: I’m a bit stunned. S: I’ve got so many questions, but I feel like we’ll be talking for the next three hours and I know that Goddur has to head off… C: I have one last question! What star were you born under? G: I’m a Gemini. Fifth of June. But I’m a rising Scorpio. My sun sign is Gemini and my subconscious is a rising Scorpio. That is my dark sign, my moon sign. HA! C: Ok! Look out! Thank you so much Goddur, it’s been a pleasure.
LungA School Fall Semester 2018