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A Room that Trusts Narrative
Eccentric Islands: Travels Real and Imaginary
by Bill Holm.
Milkweed Editions, 2000. 346 pages.
Reviewed by Michael Wilt
Poet, essayist, raconteur, Bill Holm begins his new book about islands with himself. "Call me island," he writes. "Holm" is the Icelandic word for island. "It's a satisfactory name, and I'll keep it." From his lifelong home on the prairies of southwestern Minnesota, where as a boy he invented islands for himself, Holm travels to Iceland, his ancestral home, to Moloka'i, Madagascar, and other geographical islands, as well as visiting the islands of pain, music, and the imagination. He explores the idea that "islands are necessary for us to be able to think about what is true at the bottom of our own character; we need to reduce the world for a while to count it and understand it." Eccentric Islands is marked by Holm's breadth of knowledge and depth of reflection, his keen power to observe, and the way he revels in language and narrative.
Comprehending the world from the perspective of "islandness," Holm faces reality at its earthiest and its most divine. Writing about Father Damien, the Belgian priest who lived and died among the lepers banished to the Hawaiian island of Moloka'i, Holm offers unsettling facts about the disease: "Leprosy, evidently, wants only to torture you while you are sentient." After death, "the bodily swellings, discolorations, distortions leave. . . . You now boast a robustly healthy-looking corpse, as if you had died in your sleep at a great age with complete calm."
The same topic provides a context for musings on the human race and all that it fears. "As our longevity grows almost at a geometric ratio, compared to any previous age in human history, anywhere, we become more hysterical in the presence of death, sure that by right action and careful planning we can evade it." Holm's observations about the death, by AIDS, of a dear friend, demonstrate that we have progressed only so far from our tendency to banish that which we fear to isolated islands.
In his essays on Iceland, Holm celebrates a culture that celebrates language. At a gathering of Icelandic writers, Holm remarks, "It is good to be in a room that trusts narrative," as distinct from a similar gathering in America, at which "you are besieged with opinions and preferences." An eighty-year-old friend tells Holm, "An Icelander must always keep a book pile by his bed. You are never reading just one book but many," and proceeds to give an annotated tour.
He would, by God, think till the lights went out, and the whole world was his province -- oceans, ideas, capitalist plots, the state of trout, the mystery of the origin of the cosmos itself, human nature, poems. If you are a human being, it is all your business. Until you die. No letup. No slacking.
As island made of marble, in the middle of a decorative pool in a Chinese hotel lobby, provides the locus for Holm's thoughts on the island of music. That marble island is the residence of a grand piano, and playing piano is one of Holm's passions. Again, his observations on the physical place and on the history of the piano, interesting in themselves, are accompanied by more sublime comments.
When the strings were set vibrating, the divine came out to dance the sacred dance in the currents of sound, misstrikes, botched tempos, and all. The gods don't care about a few wrong notes if you strike them with a full heart.
Eccentric Islands concludes with Holm's musings on "The Necessary Island," the imagination. In just a few sentences he manages to critique the world of NASDAQ and Pentagon and corporate conglomeration, and makes a bold case for the imagination, which is "the only divine spark in us -- kill it, and you kill any possibility of growing a soul."
To read Eccentric Islands is to travel to places and concepts with a writer whose singular voice will ring in the ears for days or weeks afterward. Bill Holm is outspoken and cantankerous, curmudgeonly and contrarian, but he is always eloquent, and all that he has to say originates in a desire to see human beings live more fully, fearlessly, and, despite our islandness, connectedly.
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