Part of the opacity of visual art for so many people is that each work of art functions as a statement in the long conversation of art making, responding to what has come before by expanding upon or critiquing or subverting it. To walk into an exhibition can be like walking into the middle of a conversation that doesn’t make sense unless you know who’s talking and what was said earlier or know the language that’s being spoken, though some artworks speak directly and stand alone.
You could view Elín’s Path as a young woman’s answer to the great Light and Space artworks of the very male California artists James Turrell, Larry Bell, and Robert Irwin, who in the early 1970s began working directly with light itself as a medium. Their work was concerned with perception, illusion, and with sublime beauty, as well as with the expanding question of what art could be. A decade or two earlier painters had begun a shift from an emphasis on objects to one on processes, and the logical conclusion was an art of light, of gestures, of interventions in systems, of invitations to act and perceive. The dematerialization of the art object, my friend Lucy called this.
At its best, visual art is philosophy by other means and poetry without words. Visual art asks the grandest questions, about the most essential ingredients of existence: about time, space, perception, value, creation, identity, beauty. It makes mute objects speak, and it renews the elements of the world through the unexpected, or it situates the everyday in a way that asks us to wake up and notice. This kind of art raises fundamental questions about the act of making, about what it means, whom it is for, what happens in that engagement with materials and history and embodied imagination. I arrived in the realm of visual art in my early twenties, and it was a spacious arena in which to come of age, one that opened up the terrain in which I would travel to create and to converse. I was invited into the conversation, to speak and to listen, and to learn.
Who hears you? To have something to say is one thing; to have someone who hears it is another. To be heard literally is to have the vibrations of the air travel through the labyrinth of the listener’s ear to the mind, but more must unfold in that darkness. You choose to hear what corresponds to your desires, needs, and interests, and there are dangers in a world that corresponds too well, with curating your life into a mirror that reflects only the comfortable and familiar, and dangers in the opposite direction as well. Listen carefully.
To hear is to let the sound wander all the way through the labyrinth of your ear; to listen is to travel the other way to meet it. It’s not passive but active, this listening. It’s as though you retell each story, translate it into the language particular to you, fit it into your cosmology so you can understand and respond, and thereby it becomes part of you. To empathize is to reach out to meet the data that comes through the labyrinths of the senses, to embrace it and incorporate it. To enter into, we say, as though another person’s life was also a place you could travel to.
Kindness, compassion, generosity are often talked about as though they’re purely emotional virtues, but they are also and maybe first of all imaginative ones. You see someone get hurt—maybe they get insulted or they’re just very tired—and you feel for them. You take the information your senses deliver and interpret it, often in terms of your own experience, until it becomes vivid to you. Or you work harder and study them to imagine the events you don’t witness, the suffering that is not on the surface.
It’s easier to imagine the experience of people most like you and nearest you—your best friend, the person who just slipped on the ice. Through imagination and representations—films, printed stories, secondhand accounts—you travel into the lives of people far away. This imaginative entering into is best at the particular, since you can imagine being the starving child but not the region of a million starving people. Sometimes, though, one person’s story becomes the point of entry to larger territories.
This identification is almost instinctual in many circumstances. Even some animals do it; babies cry in sympathy with each other, or in distress at the sound of distress. Neurologists now talk about mirror neurons. You see something you crave, you feel something painful, and areas of your brain respond. You haven’t only witnessed something but also translated it into your own experience; you have felt with and for that other. But to cry because someone cries or desire because someone desires is not quite to care about someone else. There are people whose response to the suffering of others is to become upset and demand consolation themselves.
Empathy means that you travel out of yourself a little or expand. It’s really recognizing the reality of another’s existence that constitutes the imaginative leap that is the birth of empathy, a word invented by a psychologist interested in visual art. The word is only slightly more than a century old, though the words sympathy, kindness, pity, compassion, fellow-feeling, and others covered the same general ground before Edward Titchener coined it in 1909. It was a translation of the German word Einfühlung, or feeling into, as though the feeling itself reached out.
The root word is path, from the Greek word for passion or suffering, from which we also derive pathos and pathology and sympathy. It’s a coincidence that empathy is built from a homonym for the Old English path, as in a trail. Or a dark labyrinth named Path. Empathy is a journey you travel, if you pay attention, if you care, if you desire to do so. Up close you witness suffering directly, though even then you may need words to know that this person has terrible pains in her joints or that one recently lost his home. Suffering far away reaches you through art, through images, recordings, and narratives; the information travels toward you and you meet it halfway, if you meet it.
• • •
In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula up near the arctic circle on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds, under melted glaciers, inside others’ acts of making and imagination, inside the reverie of a young woman’s darkness and a species’ life in endless light, in a lull in the ongoing conversations and at a vantage point from which I could map them. When I think back on it, I see myself the way you remember yourself in events of long ago, a small figure amid a rough landscape of glaciers, waterfalls, lava rocks, rain, clouds, birds, islands, and books. Always, just beyond all these things, was the silver sea, the lace border around all land like the silence around all sounds or the unknowns beyond all knowledge.
11 • Ice
Not the slender gray book with the Viking ship embossed on its cover. Not the deep blue one with the endpapers that map Greenland and the Canadian arctic. Nor the turquoise one with the Inuit faces on the wide spine. Nor the dark green one with white letters and a white polar bear printed on the coarse fabric cover. But the first English-language book, a thick one titled Arctic Adventure, bound in pale blue with an embossed blue dogsled and blue driver. This one tells the tale of what it means to live inside your own breath. A house made of exhalations, as though your body were spinning itself a shell, as though you blew a bubble that froze solid, with you inside.
The Danish-Jewish explorer Peter Freuchen was twenty years old his first winter in the arctic and bursting with vitality and enthusiasm for the other world he’d entered. He volunteered to stay alone on the edge of the ice sheet in Pustervig in northeastern Greenland for the duration of the dark winter of 1906–1907. A few other men were there at the beginning, in a stone and timber house built for the purpose, about nine feet by fifteen feet. Freuchen’s task was to go out every day and take weather measurements on the mountain, which sounds easy enough until you factor in that it was dark most of that time and extraordinarily cold, and that the wolves that ate his seven dogs were deeply interested in him as well.
It was so cold that even inside his cabin, even with the small coal stove, the moisture in his breath condensed into ice on the walls and ceiling. He kept breathing. The house got smaller and smaller. Early on, he wrote, two men could not pass without brushing elbows. E
ventually after he was alone and the coal—“the one factor that had kept the house from growing in upon me”—was gone, he threw out the stove to make more room inside. (He still had a spirit lamp for light and boiling water.) Before winter and his task ended and relief came, he was living inside an ice cave made of his own breath that hardly left him room to stretch out to sleep. Peter Freuchen, six foot seven, lived inside the cave of his breath.
Vanity of vanities, says the King James translation of Ecclesiastes, and the word that was translated as vanity was the Hebrew word hevel. It meant breath or vapor, or something as transient as a breath, as fleeting as vapor. Except in the arctic, where the vapor in Peter Freuchen’s breath became a structure, so that you might have been able to take away the house the way builders take away the wooden form in which they cast concrete and leave the ice that was solidified breath.
It was as though in the stillness of a dark winter alone, he had disappeared inside himself. No one to hear him, to answer, to turn the experience into a story, or to tell stories to pass the time, just breath. When he went out to get snow to melt for water or to chart the weather on the mountain, he sang, badly, to keep the wolves at bay. Inside he got so lonely he developed friendships with the teakettle and pots and pans. It was a baptism by ice, and when it was over he was of the arctic, where he would spend the prime years of his life among the Inuit and have the adventures he spent the rest of his life recounting. His books about the north appeared in English and Danish from the 1920s until after his death in 1958.
I first encountered Freuchen when I was in Iceland, reading a more recent book that mentioned him in passing. The passage that struck me wasn’t about Freuchen’s beloved Greenland, but the far north of Canada that is now Nunavut, the indigenous-administered homeland. It was about a small band of Inuit travelers he met nearly a century ago: “Halfway there, the weather changed suddenly. Oddly, it wasn’t the cold that nearly killed them, but heat. During the night their snow huts caved in and the frozen bits of skin, rotted meat and bones used to construct their sleds thawed and were eaten by the dogs. They had no food and no way to travel. After eating their dogs they began to starve. Atagutaluk then ate the bodies of her husband and children. When Peter met Atagutaluk she had since married the village leader. ‘I got a new husband, and got with him three new children. They are all named for the dead ones that only served to keep me alive so they could be reborn.’”
It wasn’t the cannibalism but the sled made of frozen scraps that fascinated me at first: cold as a kind of enchantment that turned flesh into solid structures, like the pumpkin turned into a coach in Cinderella, the fairy gold that turns back into leaves in the morning, like the frozen breath I read about when I went deeper into Freuchen’s stories, and warmth the curse. When I went to the source, I found that the sled or sleds weren’t just scraps, and neither bones nor rotten material was used. Frozen flesh and hide were occasional materials for sled building in a place far from trees and wood and a time of limited access to metals.
As Freuchen describes it, “First they soaked caribou skins in water at the edge of the ice. Then they rolled them together and placed some ice blocks on top of the skins to make them freeze in the exact shape of sledge runners. For crossbars they used thin slices of meat that had been frozen by being placed on the smooth ice and large frozen salmon that they planed down somewhat with an ax. Thus they fashioned useable sledges, and off they went one day just after the sun had returned—a good time to start on the trip.”
Freuchen’s first account in his 1935 book Arctic Adventure was glib, but the story must have haunted him a little, because he told it twice more, and with each telling the meaning of the story changed. In a book of his published two decades later, the green-and-white The Arctic Year, he no longer singled Atagutaluk out for disparagement. This time the crisis that befell her and her traveling companions was something that could happen to anyone. He compared it with a similar terrible thaw that had overtaken his own party.
In this second account of Atagutaluk’s ordeal, a warm night wind had arrived while her party was traveling across the interior of Baffin Island. The world around them thawed while they slept in an igloo, the sleds had disintegrated, and the dogs had “taken advantage of the feast the thaw provided for them.” The sleds were gone, the harnesses and sealskin traces were gone, the provisions were gone, and deep soft snow fell and made travel impossible.
Months later, a friend of Freuchen’s named Patloq, traveling with his wife, came across an igloo that seemed uninhabited, though the dogs were urgently curious about something inside it. The lack of footprints outside suggested no one was there, and when Patloq went in he saw “two absolutely unrecognizable creatures. At first he thought that he had run up against some supernatural beings and decided to take flight, but then his wife encouraged him to look more closely at the mystery.” Inside were two skeletons, barely alive. In his earlier account Freuchen had not mentioned that another woman had lingered in those desperate circumstances along with Atagutaluk.
The party had eaten the dogs, the skin clothes, and then the dead, and still they starved until only these two were left. Upon being rescued, the other woman gave in to her ravenous hunger and died of devouring more food than her starved system could handle. Atagutaluk disciplined herself, ate sparingly, and survived. And in this version she told Freuchen, “Oh, don’t think too much about it. Now I have a new husband and with him I have four new children, so I don’t owe anything to anybody!”
And then Freuchen told the story again. This time, being stranded was not something that could happen to anyone and he did not compare his experience with a perilous thaw to hers. It was about the bad old days before new technologies and communications arrived, and he seems to blame much of the trouble on the perishable sled, not the weather. He did not compare it to his own series of calamities and near-escapes in the far north. This time the party who left the Igloolik area were trading fox furs, heading for Ponds Inlet and the Hudson Bay Company trading post there, hundreds of miles almost due north. Freuchen described them as stuck in a district with poor hunting, and said nothing about the snow that played a crucial role in his second rendition.
The two women are rescued, and “Atagutaluk, who knew the art of self-control, lived to a ripe old age. It was she who told me of the whole tragedy. She saw that I was deeply shocked when she told of eating her husband and her three children. It is considered very impolite for an Eskimo to ‘remove the smile from the face of a guest,’ so Atagutaluk hastened to reassure me. She had found herself a new husband, she told me. And she had had a child with him and was the stepmother of his other two children, so she no longer had any debt to the ‘Great Being.’”
Three children. Four children. One child and two stepchildren. To get wood for sleds in the first version. To go hunting in the next. To sell fox furs in the last. Because of the warm wind. Because of the lack of modern or at least wooden equipment. Because of deep snow. Because of bad hunting. In every version there’s the mother who eats her children, as though time ran backward, as though what had emerged from her and fed upon her was to disappear into her again. Cannibalism in arctic emergencies is rare but not unheard of, among explorers as well as inhabitants, and it’s both a terrible transgression and a strange communion, a human body feeding and sustaining another body.
Human bodies sustain other bodies in various ways—the fetus feeding upon the mother, sometimes depriving her bones of calcium and other nutrients if she’s undernourished, the baby living on milk for months or years afterward, the starving person’s body entering catabolysis, whereby it feeds on its fat and then its muscle until the wasting has gone so far the system begins to collapse. The modern world of blood transfusions and organ transplants has been referred to by one writer as noble cannibalism.
But there is now a global trade in kidneys. Donors from poor countries—Turkey, India, Romania, the Philippines—sell them to the wealthy, while
Chinese executions of prisoners are sometimes conducted in such a way as to facilitate harvesting organs for sale. Done against the donors’ wills, these transplants are cannibalism of the most ignoble sort, commercial cannibalism. In certain parts of India, selling a kidney to pay for a daughter’s dowry has caught on, according to Nancy Scheper-Hughes, anthropologist and cofounder of Organs Watch, in her testimony to a United States congressional subcommittee.
In the 1980s and 1990s there was a widespread belief, a folktale of sorts, in Latin America that children there were being kidnapped by people from the United States to use as organ donors for their own children. People suspected of such activity were attacked and one woman beaten into a coma. It was not literally true, but it was true in a metaphorical sense: the well-being and even survival of Central and South American children was being sacrificed for profit in the global north. It turned the complicated machinations of international finance into something simple and shocking.
I am myself a cannibal in a roundabout way. I was patched up internally with AlloDerm regenerative tissue matrix, a small scrap of what had once been someone else’s skin, presumably donated, then sterilized, stripped of its DNA, and turned into an expensive brand-name product. We divide up the world as though there were real borders rather than delicately shaded degrees between the crazy and the sane, the good and the destructive, and I think of cannibalism as also a matter of degree. To what extent, in which ways, are you a cannibal, and how careful are you about who you consume? We consume each other in a thousand ways, some of them joys, some of them crimes and nightmares.
And if we consume each other in stories, then there are an abundance of stories of cannibalistic consumption, Kronos and Tantalus, Sleeping Beauty’s stepmother, Hansel and Gretel eating a bit of a house made of food and facing being treated as food in return by its owner. In the German fairy tale “The Juniper Tree,” the stepmother cooks the son and feeds him to his father, though the son is miraculously reconstituted from his bones and birdsong to live again and revenge himself. Cannibalism and resurrection often go together.
The Faraway Nearby Page 16