“Funny to think of this place as home, isn’t it?”
Photo of an Inuit drawing depicting men playing football by an unidentified masted ship, possibly Erebus or Terror:)
Tarra watches The Terror
Contains discussion of plot points over the entire season
I feel like *I* got stuck in the ice and have been trying to walk out for days now. I’m tired, and I’m haunted. I cling and I recoil. I no longer know what I feel. I have written so much. Close? (Close) (HAUNTED)
People have asked for my thoughts on AMC’s The Terror. Quite a number of people, starting back in 2018 up to just recently. I have finally watched it, and at the end, I don’t know quite what to tell you! But I’ve tried, for about 6000 words.
What I can say: The Terror is like the arctic-set The Luminaries, only The Terror does not begin outright with a diagram of all the characters mapped onto what part of the zodiac they correspond to and where the story starts in the planetary year. Because it is up for question how aware The Terror is that it is peopled by representations of vices and virtues (Pride, Avarice, Kindness, etc) rattling around in an ice-rimed clockwork mechanism ticking ever closer to their final fate, when the bottom will drop out and all the remaining pieces fall on the boards, to join the others whose time had already run out.
Eleanor Catton knew just what she was doing with her own tale of a bunch of white men tromping into a land that wasn’t theirs, and gave us the key right at the front. Chris Nolan, for another related example, knew just what he was doing with his own tale of British military men circling toward doom, and in Dunkirk set his barely distinguishable characters against the sound of a ticking pocket watch, never even naming several of them on screen because that wasn’t the point. Did David Kajganich and Soo Hugh also intend to do this? I don’t know. I don’t think fully, because if so I think the show would have been more clean on certain points than this is. I love ambiguity, but I dislike muddledness. What bothered me most about The Terror was what I finally managed to articulate to my very patient dad while I was watching the eighth episode of a show he had never seen when home on vacation. Futilely gesturing at the screen in irate laughter as sudden carnage ripped through both an arctic fog & a Moment that had already been full enough with grisly morbid horror, I at last broke out: “It’s, it’s a hat on a hat.” And just, no amount of them is going to keep you warm, my frozen buddies.
evgenia arbugaeva documents vyacheslav korotki, a meteorologist who has spent the past thirty years living alone at a remote arctic outpost on the barents sea, in a century old wooden house that became a meteorological station in 1933, where he was sent by the russian state to measure and log climatic conditions and then transmit the data via radio to moscow.
notes evgenia, “the world of cities is foreign to him. he doesn’t accept it. i came with the idea of a lonely hermit who ran away from the world because of some heavy drama, but it wasn’t true. he doesn’t get lonely at all. he kind of disappears into tundra, into the snowstorms.”
Polar explorers - one gathers from their accounts - sought at the Poles something of the sublime. Simplicity and purity attracted them; they set out to perform clear tasks in uncontaminated lands. The land’s austerity held them. They praised the land’s spare beauty as if it were a moral or a spiritual quality: “icy halls of cold sublimity,” “lofty peaks perfectly covered with eternal snow.” Fridtjof Nansen referred to “the great adventure of the ice, deep and pure as infinity… the eternal round of the universe and its eternal death.” Everywhere polar prose evokes these absolutes, these ideas of “eternity” and “perfection,” as if they were some perfectly visible part of the landscape. They went, I say, partly in search of the sublime, and they found it the only way it can be found, here or there - around the edges, tucked into the corners of the days. For they were people - all of them, even the British - and despite the purity of their conceptions, they man-hauled their humanity to the Poles.
Annie Dillard, “An Expedition to the Pole,” from Teaching a Stone to Talk
(via lipstickmata)
(via lipstickmata)
“Icebergs. The color blue that is cold, pure, fierce, and somehow the blue that you always wanted and had to come to the end of the world to get, the blue you can’t have since these sapphires are too big to take and too prone to melt. It’s odd seeing an iceberg after so many pictures of them for so long, and odder to make pictures and turn them back into the familiar and maybe safe after seeing these great chunks calved by glaciers actually afloat in an icy sea. Their reflection in the sea doubles them, makes them into great faceted jewels that no one can wear and that won’t last forever, and it only doubles their visible self when beneath the reflection is so much more.”
— Rebecca Solnit, “Cyclopedia of an Arctic Expedition,” The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness
Ilulissat by Olaf Otto Becker, 2015-16
Archival pigment prints
Huxley-Parlour Gallery, London, England
