Dies Nihil Est: Not Dying, Or At The Very Least Being Alive, Is What Youth Does Best

But it doesn’t last.

Nýhil was a pretty sizable group of people with a fluid membership, active from around 2001 to 2010, and formed around a pretty ill-defined idea (it had to do with black holes and fun). Friendship is and isn’t the right term because many of us were not friends when the thing started, and lots of us ended up enemies after it was all over. Artist collective is the most general term – a collective that went through phases of joyful nihilism interspersed with moral and political engagement, avant garde nonchalance and social realist wrath. For a while it was even a company. It’s hard to imagine now but it had a CEO. The CEO sold its soul to Landsbankinn and that was probably the end of it, at least the beginning of the end of it. It seemed harmless at the time. The business was mostly poetry although there was also music, prose, alcoholism, movies, festivals, uncontrolled personal issues, publishing, protests, love, posing, sobriety, essays, instruments – there was even a sports bag made. The people were students, journalists, nightwatchmen, shipyard workers, philosophers, translators of manuals, caretakers and welfare layabouts. Most were in fact all of the above.

One of the last things we ever did was publish a poetry book called Endalok. It wasn’t meant to be the end, but of course it was. Endalok was the author’s first book and at 92, Trausti Breiðfjörð Magnússon was the oldest nýhilist by a fair bit – and he outlived his publisher, reaching 101 before he died in 2019. Trausti was the first to die and for six years no one died. Then a little over a year ago Ásgeir [H. Ingólfsson] posted on Facebook saying he would no longer be all the things he’d been – a poet and a culture crusader, amongst other things – for now he would soon be dead. To mark the occasion Ásgeir wanted to throw a party. Dying might not be fun, but there was no reason getting there couldn’t be. Would we come to Akureyri and join him?
“Trausti was the first to die and for six years no one died.”

I got in the car in Ísafjörður on what was probably a Saturday morning last January. About an hour in – somewhere in Ísafjarðardjúp – I got a call. I can’t remember who was on the line and now when I think about it, I think maybe I got called twice, but I remember being told that Ásgeir had died, but the party would go on as planned.

I parked the car for a while – to grieve, to breathe, to focus – and then drove on. About an hour later I came to a place called Staður. Place. What a name. Stranded in the cove directly in front of Place was a pretty sizable sperm whale. It was still morning and there was no one around and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to notify someone. Who do you call when you find 40 tonnes of dead mammal on the beach? I parked the car and loafed about for three quarters of an hour, hoping someone would show up and tell me what to do. Then I just drove on.

Akureyri was a reunion. Not just of Nýhil people – Ásgeir had friends far and wide. It got chaotic. I don’t remember all of it, and I was in no shape to drive the morning after so I stayed an extra night. This was good. As it should be.

Then suddenly no one died till November. I was sitting at a café in Warsaw when a Nýhil friend – who’d been an enemy for a while, but with whom I’d made peace because hating people you love eats you up, and most of us are idiots anyway – called to tell me the news. Böðvar Yngvi Jakobsson – aka, Oberdada von Brutal – had died. Böddi was someone I’d gotten to know when we both lived in Helsinki but whom I’d originally seen on TV as a kid – he’d been on Hemmi Gunn’s talk show to display his uncanny ability to spew back any sentence he was given backwards. And for a lot of the Nýhil gigs this is what he did – he’d sing backwards, mostly “Öxar við ána,” to raucous applause. I don’t know what killed him and I haven’t asked, and I’m not sure it matters. Böddi was pretty straight (for Böddi) during the years I knew him but he had a William Burroughs aura about him – he was a year older than me but he felt ancient – and a reputation for substance abuse. We never kept contact, but I’d run into him through the years and without drawing any wild conclusions, he never seemed to be doing well, and I assume whatever the medical records say, not doing well was what killed him.
“Stranded in the cove directly in front of Place was a pretty sizable sperm whale.”

Some weeks later, shortly before Christmas, I stumbled upon a recording of Böddi singing “Raxö ðiv aná” – something from the Nýhil MySpace page – and sent it to some friends. The morning after, as if by divine plan, I saw an ad for a concert in Ísafjörður where a Danish singer, Eau Pernice, would herself be singing backwards. I went to hear her sing three songs – Bráðum koma blessuð jólin, Let the Sunshine and Silent Night in Danish. She recorded herself and then played it forwards for us. It was strange and touching.

After the concert there was a Q&A, and she said that she’d started this habit of speaking words backwards as a child – just like Böddi, I thought. And I wanted to tell her about him but when you’re touched you turn soft, and when you turn soft you turn shy. And she also had a baby hanging on her chest, and for whatever reason it felt wrong to tell the baby’s mother that she reminded me of someone who’d just died from whatever you call what killed Böddi – confusion, sadness, addiction, unwellness – so I didn’t, there was just too much life there, too much youth that didn’t need to know that the older we get, the worse we are at the seemingly simple (and seemingly impossible) task of just staying alive.

Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl is a poet and author. His latest novel is Náttúrulögmálin (The Natural Laws). The Nýhil group published and promoted writing and social criticism in Iceland from 2001 to 2010, and many of their writers contributed to The Reykjavík Grapevine.