The Ice-Shirt

William T Vollmann

Do we carry our landscapes with us locked in our ice-hearts, and can we fit them over what was there just as we can clothe ourselves forever in the stiff and crackling cloaks that lie in the churchyard permafrost at Herjolfsness?

The lambs crunch grass very watchfully, but the old ewes and rams do not look up at your approach because nobody has ever hurt them and they do not understand the meaning of the sheep-skulls that lie in the grass they graze on. – The birds, on the other hand, await the worst with hysterical foreknowledge, so that if you venture into their nesting-fields, where the grass is green and then white, as if frosted, thousands of them begin to swoop and scream and flap until their gull-cousins on the rocks offshore are infected with alarm, and sob like babies. (Would you, reader, rather be a sheep or a bird? I say that the sweet sheep have no cares, and for that reason their stupidity is to be prized).

In those days you had to be careful what you thought, because your thoughts would come true. Nowadays you have to be careful what you think because if you think it, it will never happen.

Oh, that game of Changing! The players did not really want to be anything; they only wanted to be what they were not. Nobody saw that change came of its own, unfolding as was ordained, so that one would be as ungracious to rush it as to stay it.

Was a woman something she was supposed to be? But she had not started out being one, and she did not want to be one. She did not necessarily want not to be one, but she wanted to be several things. A woman was not all she was.

So, too, Freydis’s selfish cruelties were not originally hers by nature, but came about simply because her stepmother Thjodhild would not own her in her heart – or so it is incumbent upon a historian to believe in this age of compassionate first causes, for how could we hope, if people could be born wicked?

It seems like there’s nothing like a close brush to bring you down to earth, and make your priorities in your mind very clear (for a good while, anyway). I started considering what the fuck I was doing here and realized that while I think it was a step in the right direction, doing that kind of thing, my priorities were all fucked up, that I just had to quit doing things so much for show, just start doing things just ‘cause I wanted to. Real honest things that I wanted to do. I was so ashamed of myself. After that I had kind of a miserable night. Thought entirely too much. And in the morning I packed up and headed out.

In those days there was Power everywhere. You did not have to be wise to find it. Power lived in pretty feathers; Power was in stars and owls’ beaks; Power was in the patterns that the women painted on everyone’s shirts so that they could find the animals they hunted and kill them; they could bring back meat to eat and clothe everyone in their skins and they could all dream of the Star People who dwelled on the black roof above the trees and sparkled at their images in brooks and lakes; they dreamed also of the Plant People who came on green legs bringing corn-gifts and tobacco-gifts; and all the gifts had Power; but the most Powerful color was red, and the women made paint from red earth and birds’ eggs and painted special things on everyone’s shirts, so that red cloth of the Jenuaq was highly prized.

The first part of Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, Vollmann begins an impressive project--to detail intimately the various first interactions between North Americans and Europeans. Vollmann's choice to embrace the story-telling histories of various places and peoples instead of generating the traditional history or historical novel, provides a startling conception of our history. Seven Dreams (or what I've read of it so far) opens the mind to a host of new thoughts on history.
Often times histories attempt a detailed look at where we were then but fail to acknowledge where we are now, and comparatively many fictional works attempt to reveal what then was through a reality of now. But Vollman, by a combination of interviews, histories, myths, fiction, and personal experiences, finds a way to tell the story of then and now. What makes him so succesful is his basic theory that he must walk in the footsteps of the histories he is going to tell. The Ice-Shirt circles around the Viking discovery of North America; Vollmann writes their story while he is walking along the shores of Greenland and moving about from island to island in Northern Canada.
There are so many understated but interesting approaches to history in Vollmann's Seven Dreams that one has a strange sense of urgency reading the books. Like any truly novel idea, you read it with some strong sense of disbelief--like watching magic trick, or better, like seeing the impossible made reality before your very eyes. It's very exciting.