Breastfeeding in Iceland

On a recent trip to Iceland, I spent a lot of time breastfeeding.

I went there in the hope that exposure to a bit of raw nature might do something for the ennui. Anyway, while gazing at senile volcanoes, their slopes balding black or covered in hoary moss, I was reminded of an insight I first had in Japan when climbing Mount Fuji.

Fuji, as any half-decent volcano should, has a glorious form: a perfect cone with an areola of snow, and foothills gently sloping into the surrounding planes. Seen from a distance on a clear day it has a powerful sensuousness that makes you want to do more than just look. If only you could experience that gentle form, that soft snowy texture, more directly, more intimately. Ah, to touch, to stroke, to mount Fuji. And so, you decide that a full consumption and consummation can only be achieved by actual physical presence on the mountain.

Climbing mount Fuji was one of the most exhausting, miserable and disappointing experiences of my life. The driving rain, the strength-sapping monotonous climb up a winding grey ash path, the altitude sickness that prevented me from continuing to the very summit, all these things constituted the haecceity of Mt. Fuji, the essential nature of the thing, and as with all things, this nature was not fully apprehendable from a distance. Nevertheless, as the clouds and my head cleared, I surveyed the scene from the slope I was on and saw an exquisite vista of mountain after feathery mountain receding into the misty distance. I resolved to climb every one.

Two points emerge from this: first, we are very bad at predicting what will make us happy. I regard this mount Fuji disjunction as a metaphor for the imagined futures we spread out before us. Every ambition is a little Fuji - a new job, holiday, weekend away with a suitcase of Danish pastries, will when actually experienced consist of nothing but a fine-grained shale of unforseen moments. It is not even a question of expectations being fulfilled or disappointed, but rather that those expectations are representations of the wrong subject in the wrong media - a crude crayon sketch of a man on a hill instead of a novel about beef, played by an orchestra.

The second point is that maybe, just maybe, this strong attraction to hilly things stems from the fact that they resemble in form the breasts we suckled as babies. As a breastfeeding baby, the image of this areola-capped mound rising up from its surroundings must surely have been the most comforting, most attractive image to form in the blanky mind, and maybe it's impossible for a grown man to look at a breast or breastoid form without stirring up some deep root of comfort and pleasure. Of course I am not saying that when I see a volcano I think to myself 'Ooh, that looks like a breast, but it's too big to suck, so I'll just go and climb it instead' - that would be silly. On the contrary, I believe that when I see a volcano, some primitive part of me thinks 'Ooh, that looks like a breast, and if I climb it, maybe I'll get the milk.'