Editorial 1

What are the definitions of smuggling? Goods that are moved illegally between countries comes up quickly if you search for the definition online. Also: to move goods illegally into or out of a country, to move objects, substances, information or even people. People who can somehow be illegal, just by being. Essentially, smuggling has a pretty bad rap as a word.

But dictionaries usually only tell us what the words mean, or even what most of us feel they mean. They rarely tell us what the words can become. They don’t tell us what the word wants to become when it grows up. If we allow them to grow and prosper and even claim new and unexpected and complicated and contradictory meanings.

 

If only we allow the words to be as complicated as the world they describe.

 

We must therefore smuggle words, thoughts and culture between borders, between souls, between us. Between us and the other, whoever the other may be. We must talk and write and communicate and whisper across borders.

If not, it’s all going to go to hell. Perhaps it will anyway, but at least it’s no use staying silent while it does.

The webpage you’re reading has been around for years – yet not really. It’s mostly been a shelter from the storm, a way to store older articles, translations of Icelandic ones or some homeless thoughts. But it was always meant to be something more, when it grew up. Perhaps it will now. This is an experiment, a driving test for a cultural blog. The experiment will last for the rest of the summer and into the fall – and if it succeeds it will graduate this winter and continue to sail around the highways of the internet and continue to confuse different modes of transport.

This will be a space car for travel stories, a sailplane for movie reviews, a telescope for art. A pirate ship that you must help me keep afloat.

Text: Ásgeir H Ingólfsson