Journeys: Fårö

“Fuck the canon, because the canon’s been fucking you for years.” These words from poet-activist So Mayer came to mind as I closed in on Fårö, the remote Swedish island (population: 505) where Ingmar Bergman lived and worked from the 1960s until his death in 2007. He is buried in the peaceful graveyard of Fårö Church, separated by only a small rock wall from frolicking black sheep in an adjacent field. Fårö is such a tranquil and beautiful place, its roads flanked by glistening water, windmills and seemingly endless, , , and . Truly, this discordance bears out of the line from John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’: “The mind is its own place and can make a heaven out of hell and a hell out of heaven.” Bergman has made an advance by spreading his hell-mind across a paradise, for his ghost still casts a pall across the island. But more on that shortly.