A sudden wind blew up, suspending him in an impenetrable gauze of snow dust. Blind and frantic, he had skied into a haycock and fallen, with a sound of chimes and splintering rafters, through the ice.
EVERYTHING WE CAN SEE IN THE UNIVERSE GLOWS
A giant ice cube at South Pole Station captures
extragalactic neutrinos. Please take me to where you are,
pleaded the pregnant Korean widow to her lost love
in a sixteenth-century letter an archaeologist
found folded in a tomb. Telescopes see only light;
faces from our dreams, unspoken desires, dead stars
go undetected. Come to me secretly and show yourself
she whispered. Hans Spemann plucked a fine hair
from his newborn daughter to tie an embryo egg in half.
The microscope zooms in on a freshly formed eyeball
gazing expectantly back. The archaeologist feels ill,
presses twice-boiled tea leaves to his forehead,
unfolds and refolds the letter again. The fastest thing
in the universe is light; the slowest is forgiving
then forgetting. The seal gnaws a hole in the sea ice,
sunlight flashes on a million emerald cod flitting below.
Captured neutrinos flare pale blue; embryos float
in drops of glistening saline fluid and await their fate.
Quartz cuvettes filled with seawater and lavender dye
slide into a spectrometer, colors the human eye
cannot see fan out inside a box. Please, come in a dream,
there is no limit to what I want to know. I wait here.
Jynne Dilling Martin
From her poetry collection We Mammals In Hospitable Times (2015), written after her stay in Antarctica
Excerpted courtesy of Lapham’s Quarterly Volume VI, Number 3, ‘The Sea’
—
“Aristotle maintains Homer’s words to be bounding, flying, and moving, and consequently alive. Antiphanes, also, said that Plato’s teaching was like words that congeal and freeze on the air, when uttered in depths of winter in some distant country. That is why they are not heard. He said as well that Plato’s lessons to young children were hardly understood by them until they were old. Now, it would be worth arguing and investigating whether this might not be the very place were such words thaw out. Shouldn’t we be greatly startled if it proved to be the head and the lyre of Orpheus? After the Thracian women had torn him to pieces, they threw his head and lyre into the river Hebrus, down which they floated to the Black Sea, and from there to the island of Lesbos, still riding together on the waters. And all that time there issued from the head a melancholy song, as if in mourning for Orpheus’ death, while the lyre, as the moving winds strumming it, played a harmonious accompaniment to this lament. Let’s look if we can see them hereabouts.”
It was the captain that answered. “My lord, don’t be afraid. This is the edge of the frozen sea, and at the beginning of last winter there was a great and bloody battle here between the Arimaspians and the Cloud Riders. The shouts of the men, the cries of the women, the slashing of the battle-axes, the clashing of the armor and harnesses, the neighing of the horses and all the other frightful noises of battle became frozen on the air. But just now, the rigors of winter being over and the good season coming on with its calm and mild weather, these noises are melting, and so you can hear them.”
“By God,” cried Panurge. “I believe you. But could we see just one of them? I remember reading that as they stood around the edges of the mountain on which Moses received the Laws of the Jews, the people palpably saw the voices.”
“Here, here,” exclaimed Pantagruel, “here are some that are not yet thawed.”
Then he three on the deck before us whole handfuls of frozen words, which looked like crystallized sweets of different colors. We saw some words gules, or gay quips, some vert, some azure, some sable, and some gold. When we warmed them a little between our hands, they melted like snow, and we actually heard them, though we did not understand them, for they were in a barbarous language. There was one exception, however, a fairly big one. This, when Friar John picked it up, made a noise like a chestnut that has been thrown on embers without being pricked. It was an explosion and made us all start with fear. “That,” said Friar John, “was a cannon shot in its day.”
Panagurge asked Pantagruel to give him some more. But Pantagruel answered that only lovers give their words.
“Sell me some, then,” said Panurge.
“That’s a lawyer’s business,” replied Pantagruel, “selling words. I’d rather sell you silence, though I should ask a higher price for it, as Demosthenes did once, when bribed to have a quinsy.”
Nevertheless he threw three or four handfuls on the deck, and I saw some very sharp words among them; bloody words that, as the captain told us, sometimes return to the place from which they come—but with their throats cut; some terrifying words, and other rather unpleasant to look at. When they had all melted together, we heard, “Hin, hin, hin, hin, his, tick, tock, crack, brededin, brededac, frr, frrr, frrrr, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, tracc, tracc, trr, trrr, trrrr, trrrrr, trrrrrr, on, on, on, on, on, ououououon, Gog, Magog,” and goodness knows what other barbarous sounds. The captain said that these were the battle cries and the neighing of the chargers as they clashed together. Then we heard other great noises going off as they melted, some like drums and fifes, others like clarions and trumpets. Believe me, we were greatly amused. I wanted to preserve a few of the gay quips in oil, the way you keep snow and ice, and then to wrap them up in clean straw. But Pantagruel refused, saying that it was folly to store up things that one is never short of, and that are always plentiful, as gay quips are among good and jovial Pantagruelists.
From Gargantua and Pantagruel, by François Rabelais, 1552
But the best thing to happen to me reading The Spectral Arctic, was learning of Margaret Atwood’s lasting interest in the doomed Franklin expedition. She has written essays and lectures and prefaces, and this:
—
THE AGE OF LEAD, by Margaret Atwood
From her short story collection Wilderness Tips, 1991
The man has been buried for a hundred and fifty years. They dug a hole in the frozen gravel, deep into the permafrost, and put him down there so the wolves couldn’t get to him. Or that is the speculation.
When they dug the hole the permafrost was exposed to the air, which was warmer. This made the permafrost melt. But it froze again after the man was covered up, so that when he was brought to the surface he was completely enclosed in ice. They took the lid off the coffin and it was like those maraschino cherries you used to freeze in ice-cube trays for fancy tropical drinks: a vague shape, looming through a solid cloud.
Then they melted the ice and he came to light. He is almost the same as when he was buried. The freezing water has pushed his lips away from his teeth into an astonished snarl, and he’s a beige colour, like a gravy stain on linen, instead of pink, but everything is still there. He even has eyeballs, except that they aren’t white but the light brown of milky tea. With these tea-stained eyes he regards Jane: an indecipherable gaze, innocent, ferocious, amazed, but contemplative, like a werewolf meditating, caught in a flash of lightning at the exact split-second of his tumultuous change.
“They were walking inland, walking the mainland—the nunamariq—‘the real land’. They were a raggedy bunch and their clothing was not well made. Their skins were black and the meat above their teeth was gone; their eyes were gaunt. Were they tuurngait—spirits—or what?” (Towtongie quoted in Eber 2008, xi)
0.5 pages into The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration and already captivated by a version of The Terror where instead of being hunted by the tuunbaq, the Europeans become the tuunbaq—in the original Inuit tuurngait definition of unbodied “killing” spirits. Because the thematic echo! The white men as the uncanny presence adrift in this land, becoming their own horror, yesss
Me three days ago: “But actually what I think I like most about the ring is how it shows that The Terror takes place in a closed world, like a terrible snow globe the show shakes periodically. Nothing is really lost in their (Arctic) circle, things come back. The ring, the boots, the body of the drowned sailor, your old wounds your body can’t keep healed anymore. We even found the ships, in time.”
Shane McCorristine: “The Arctic is imagined here as a zone of loss, disappearance and fragility, but also of haunting, uncanny returns and frozen permanence. Stories of Arctic dreams, ghosts and haunting are not just literary decorations: they force us to question who had cultural authority over the Arctic during the nineteenth century. They also help us to make sense of current cultural and political concerns in the Canadian Arctic about the disappearance and reappearance of the Franklin expedition.”
Ho ho cheers I’ll drink to that bro
260-odd pages later, I have finished The Spectral Arctic [available as an open source pdf here!]
For those curious: the central premise is that western white folks have long found the Arctic dreamy and magical AF, as evidenced by our cultural outputs around the region in general, and the lost Franklin expedition in particular, and I think Professor McCorristine has a point. He does not ever bring up The Golden Compass, but I think that’s probably my personal British ur-text for beautiful polar strangeness.
In the section on contemporary culture (mostly McCorristine focuses on the Victorian), AMC’s The Terror is indeed directly addressed, but as this book went to the publisher before the series aired, the most he can say is that it was recently filmed. Instead he briefly discusses the content of Dan Simmons’s novel the show was based on, mostly in accordance with how it aligns with his interest in a high frequency of clairvoyant activity associated with the doomed explorers. Conversely, I find I do not have so much interest in 19th century clairvoyants! I care about ghosts but don’t really care about mediums, no idea why. Anyway, in The Terror the novel Crozier is apparently something of a psychic, which is not at all a feature that survived in the transfer. But the show is indeed spooky and mystical and I’ve used the word ‘haunted’ like fifty times talking about it, all of which would surely have Shane nodding happily.
Other highlights included:
- Whenever McCorristine would casually refer to white people using the Inuktitut word ‘qallunaat’
- Such as this, which also made me shiver: “The Inuit reported that these qallunaat carried iron, acted strangely and ate human flesh.”
- The reveal that poet Alfred Tennyson was John Franklin’s nephew
- “By the nineteenth century, the records of expedition commanders were supposed to be sober narrations of events, rarely interrupted by references to the author’s body, emotions or passions.”
- When I tipsily texted Emily: “The Bictorians LOL mistype but okay the Bitchtorians did not meet a foreign land they could not mysticize”
- When they were overwintering in the ice, Parry made his men run around the deck while he played a barrel organ, and they got really into it and started to, quote, “frolic among themselves” with “much humour.” Like imagine you’re a chill Inuit just hunting some seals, and you come upon a shipful of pale dudes dancing around to this shit in the middle of winter. I WOULD PEE.
- Enchanting and eerie first-hand descriptions of the dark twilit winter on the ice, the sounds on the still air, the lights glowing
- Finally understanding what McCorristine was saying about reveries: to experience a reverie is to dream the world, and so to experience a reverie in the Arctic is to have the landscape be in you and you in it. To be “drawn in,” as he puts it.
- The explorers who found English footprints and initials carved in rocks near their ship, then realized they were from themselves or other explorers years earlier!!! GHOSTS. A FROZEN PERMANENCE.
- “Indeed, as a spatially hybrid entity, the British Empire itself only really worked as an emotional space.” This is actually pretty straightforward at the bones of it but the phrasing makes me imagine a drunk 19th-c lord slurring “England is like, a state of mind, brothren”
- Perhaps the winner of Most Sincerely What The Fuck: this polar-obsessed man named Snow managed to slip a page from a Book of Common Prayer that had been found in the Arctic under a skull of one of Franklin’s men, into the coffin of Abraham Lincoln
- “Coppin’s young son William often ran to embrace the ghost when he saw her standing near the walls in the house, injuring himself in the process.” This fucking Victorian child running into a wall trying to hug a ghost, I fucking…
- As a medical student Arthur Conan Doyle served as a young ship’s surgeon on a whaler that sailed into the north, and you better believe he wrote a polar ghost story after
- But it was about a hundred years later when those anthropologists discovered evidence of lead poisoning that the Franklin speculative fiction scene exploded
- “On King William Island, Inuit used to say that if you found a white man’s grave, you’d never find it a second time—because it had ghosts around it.” [clipped Justin McElroy delivery]: Fuck.
- You don’t tend to read a lot of call-out posts about Canada’s dubious cultural politics vis a vis its national myth-making, and then Shane McCorristine comes along with some lines with enough dry heat to melt the ice
- Margaret Atwood, fellow Frankophile?? More on This to come
OH UNFORTUNATELY, all I want in the world now is one of these bonkers 1900s German bisque “Snow Babies” figurines commemorating Robert Peary and Frederick Cook’s Messy race for the North Pole!!!! THANKS, ANTIQUES FREAKS
(I will note tho to my antiques pals that in fact!–neither of them died in the Arctic, or by murder. But there are like, a hundred other points of interest in this wild shipmates-to-nemeses story)
“They were walking inland, walking the mainland—the nunamariq—‘the real land’. They were a raggedy bunch and their clothing was not well made. Their skins were black and the meat above their teeth was gone; their eyes were gaunt. Were they tuurngait—spirits—or what?” (Towtongie quoted in Eber 2008, xi)
0.5 pages into The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration and already captivated by a version of The Terror where instead of being hunted by the tuunbaq, the Europeans become the tuunbaq—in the original Inuit tuurngait definition of unbodied “killing” spirits. Because the thematic echo! The white men as the uncanny presence adrift in this land, becoming their own horror, yesss
Me three days ago: “But actually what I think I like most about the ring is how it shows that The Terror takes place in a closed world, like a terrible snow globe the show shakes periodically. Nothing is really lost in their (Arctic) circle, things come back. The ring, the boots, the body of the drowned sailor, your old wounds your body can’t keep healed anymore. We even found the ships, in time.”
Shane McCorristine: “The Arctic is imagined here as a zone of loss, disappearance and fragility, but also of haunting, uncanny returns and frozen permanence. Stories of Arctic dreams, ghosts and haunting are not just literary decorations: they force us to question who had cultural authority over the Arctic during the nineteenth century. They also help us to make sense of current cultural and political concerns in the Canadian Arctic about the disappearance and reappearance of the Franklin expedition.”
Ho ho cheers I’ll drink to that bro
“They were walking inland, walking the mainland—the nunamariq—‘the real land’. They were a raggedy bunch and their clothing was not well made. Their skins were black and the meat above their teeth was gone; their eyes were gaunt. Were they tuurngait—spirits—or what?” (Towtongie quoted in Eber 2008, xi)
0.5 pages into The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration and already captivated by a version of The Terror where instead of being hunted by the tuunbaq, the Europeans become the tuunbaq—in the original Inuit tuurngait definition of unbodied “killing” spirits. Because the thematic echo! The white men as the uncanny presence adrift in this land, becoming their own horror, yesss
