by Abi Andrews
SEEKING BUT NEVER QUITE FINDING
I am too confused and upset to reason over it any more, so I go for a walk. When I jump-turn down from the last rung of the ladder there it is, stock still as always. I have never seen it that far from the tundra, never. And right at that instant I hate the bloody thing, for being so illusive and taunting me so, and how fucking dare it appear with nothing to say when it knows I am struggling.
I yell at it. I bend for a stone and throw it at it. It is a pathetic throw, it bounces on the ground to the side of it and the reindeer flinches and sidesteps, eyeing me warily.
I yell at it some more, shouting, go on, then, go. Then sob.
But it doesn’t. It does not move. It stands just grazing a little for minutes on end with me just watching and sniffling snot onto my sleeve.
And then I think to myself that multiple exposures to coincidence accumulate into destiny. It must have something to show me, I only have to try my very hardest to follow it this time. Why else would it keep coming back and standing so persistently? It is ready to speak to me.
Sometimes it runs so then I run, only I can’t run too far until I get a stitch, but then it slows too, as though waiting for me to catch up.
Hours of this through the forest finds us out on the tundra and by the river, where it cuts deep against the banks before it becomes braided with sandbanks further down. The sun is in the centre of the sky. The insects come up from the grass in little clouds. The reindeer lopes into the river without even stopping for a thought.
It only takes it around ten seconds to make it across, being moved at a diagonal by the water only slightly because it is gliding so fast, then it struggles a little out the other side, its bandy legs tremoring slightly, a forlorn old man trying to lift himself off the floor with crutches. When it has heaved itself out, it turns to face me. There it stands, shakes itself down, and looks at me. It lowers its head and snorts.
So I hold my breath and jump in before I can think any better. The water is cold as hell, from running off the mountain after sitting around as ice up there. It is much harder to swim when your ears and mouth are full of ice water that makes your brain freeze and there are sirens in your ears and the water in your mouth makes you gasp and choke. And the sudden and real shock from the water brings me rapidly into the reality of the situation. For all of ten seconds I am flailing in the water in panic, being dragged along and not much able to sort myself out.
Flapping my arms down to bring my body up, I try to turn my head to where the reindeer had been but I cannot see it. Obviously it is not going to jump in for me, we are not about to have one of those inter-species rescue moments of empathy and connection. My comrade reindeer has renounced its one job, and I lose all hope.
I have thoughts like I had better think about my life in retrospect like you are supposed to and remember the time I found an injured squirrel and fed it water from a syringe and wrapped it in socks in a cardboard box but it died in the night. I wonder if my mum will feel a psychic maternal twinge, stop stirring her tea and drop the spoon. I see her ears prick up like Beethoven the St Bernard dog from the film franchise, when the little girl falls in the swimming pool ten blocks away. Thinking about things like this I feel so far away and apart as though I am in another life altogether, having a look through the eyes of some girl called Erin.
And in an instant I realise it is the first time I have really thought about elsewhere since being here. And in an instant I see everything all at once. ‘It was in this state that I experienced “myself” as melded and intertwined with hundreds of billions of other beings in a thin sheet of consciousness that was distributed around the galaxy. A membrain,’ said John Lilly from his isolation tank.
I see a bright light every time I go under the water and screw my eyes shut hard and watch the green shapes like in a lava lamp then emerge and the sun bursts through for my having been starved momentarily and therefore malnourished and more susceptible to its intensity.
But then the adrenaline kicks in and my body takes over and being the rational one manages to get me right and make me swim with my head up. My rucksack has the dry-bag inside, which is full of air along with all my valuables and is buoyant so keeps me from going too far under. I had the foresight to pack it in case I got caught in the rain. I am heavy with all the water in my boots and it crosses my mind to take them off to stop them dragging me down. But I cannot stay out here without shoes. I honestly think in that moment that I actually would rather die than give up and go home without having found out whatever it is I am trying to find out.
The crew of Apollo 13 did not get to land on the moon. An oxygen tank exploded and they had to abort their landing, spending almost a week in space trying not to die. They had limited power, only enough to propel themselves around the moon back towards Earth then float on unaided, hoping they would hit the exact angle they needed so as not to skim off the atmosphere like a flat pebble off a placid lake. They essentially had to catapult themselves and hope for the best while steadily running out of oxygen and freezing.
While I am gulping water I wonder if they thought about making a suicide mission to the moon instead. With sudden clarity, as if seeing the moth that had been camouflaged against the tree’s bark, I get it. Looking down on the surface as they circled around, this place that they had seen as their life’s pinnacle, and everything built up to that promise of standing on the moon’s face, basking in majesty and in singularity; it might have seemed worth abandoning living for. To end at the crescendo.
But for whatever reason they chose to try to go back, even at the risk of miscalculating and veering off into the void. They said ‘Let’s go home’ and the whole world stopped turning to wait to see them tearing through the roof of the sky. It is strange how it is framed as what could have been the loneliest death in history. Not a death in solitude for the envy of Mike Collins and Adam.
The difference is the element of choice, of intent. It is not a casting out with purpose but a getting lost. It is the difference between solitude and loneliness. Newton’s ball was lonely because he drew it, the ball did not will itself there. And like Newton’s ball a woman’s body like Rachel Carson’s body is not her own to choose to keep in chastity or solitude.
Marianne Moore said that solitude is the cure for loneliness, which was very crafty of her, and perhaps my trip’s whole mantra. She was saying take your lonely body and reclaim it as your own, think it solitude!
But drowning is hardly reclamation. That is why I do not want to let the river take me, or give up my shoes. After clambering onto the grassy bank, I lie panting on my back, trying to get steady, watching the clouds pass overhead in indifference. The mosquitoes are quick to jump on me like carrion. I am too tired to swat them away and get bitten to a pin-cushion through the fabric on my forearms.
It is a long walk back because I was dragged downriver quite fast, and my body is lead-heavy and stiff from cold. I fall over in the mud that goes slick when the rain starts pouring. I have to laugh at the sky opening up minutes after I start walking. I could wade my way back up the river and end up drier than I am. I go despondently back to the cabin and not the tower because in the cabin I can make a fire.
It takes me into the evening to get myself there and then it is all I can do to make the little fire in the grate to try to get warm by, because once I stop moving my body will not really do what I want it to. I just about peel off all my clothes and shake them out at the door, then place them on various surfaces and protrusions next to the fire. I lay down a makeshift rug and dry myself with my scanty micro-towel, not allowing myself the blanket until the fire has properly dried my skin off. My hair is matted with river bits in.
The panic starts when I notice that my feet are blue, like really blue, and it dawns on me that I have not yet stopped shaking. I remember reading a survival manual that went into the stages of hypothermia. The first stage that signals the onset of the severe and death-causing kind of hypothermia is called Paradoxical
Undressing, where a person’s brain tells them wrongly that they are really warm, so that they take all their clothes off and seek out snow to roll around in. I try to decide if I feel warm or cold, and if my undressing could be classed as paradoxical. It is hard to tell when you feel so cold and yet your limbs are very definitely burning.
The survival handbook also said things about delirium, and the final stage to look out for has a sinister name; it is called Terminal Burrowing. When a dog can feel death coming it takes itself somewhere quiet and solitary to die if it can. The final stage of hypothermia triggers the same response; the afflicted will look for a small and enclosed space to curl up in.
I am just going outside and may be some time is what Lawrence Oates said, perhaps as a prelude to burrowing. Some German researchers decided that this is an automatic process triggered in the brain which sends us into a primitive mode that thinks up burrowing as a protection behaviour, the same trigger that sends animals into hibernation. So it is possible Lawrence Oates did not have cryogenics in mind. He could have instead been undone to the most basic level of his humanity (benefit of the doubt should be put into practice here, in fairness).
It hits me that Damon’s odyssey to this cabin was an elaborate Terminal Burrowing, was a dog’s death. After the onset of the burrowing mode it is already too late. It would not have been possible for him to change his mind.
I figure that as long as I am aware of this final stage and avoid it, I will not end up dead in a hollow. Just have to stay warm, warm. I scramble to put as many layers on as possible. I tell myself, even if you feel hot leave those clothes on. How hard can it be to stay dressed? I consider maybe tying my hands together to stop this, then think better of it. I settle for attaching a little note with a paperclip to the zip on my ski jacket. The note says ‘paradoxical undressing’; I hope that this will suffice to remind me to stay dressed. I put my hands in my pockets because they are making me anxious with how dead-looking they are, skin like tracing paper and all the veins blue crayon.
I feel so very tired. But sleep is hibernation, hibernation is burrowing, so sleep could not be a good idea. I try to think of ways to stop from sleeping. I so badly want to lie in the cot but instead I sit upright on the chair, so that if I slump I might fall off and wake.
MUCOUS MEMBRANE LINING THE GUT CAVITY OF A MARINE WORM LIVING IN THE VENT GASES ON A FAULT BETWEEN CONTINENTAL PLATES
How do I find a way back and do I even want to?
In the visitors’ centre were relics and photographs, each attractive in some visceral way that made a magpie of me. Sometimes an object appears before you and seems to fit itself into your chronology like a fusing cell.
There were eerie masks with grimaces and rectangular grins, on animal and people faces. The masks were worn for rituals and then destroyed directly after. They were an immediately physical way to don an identity for the expression of something particular and temporary. An uttering of varying identities.
When the Eskimos gave a name to a matured spirit, after the danger of childhood had passed and the spirit of the young person was thought to be well and truly lodged inside, the name given was always the name of the last departed person, because the spirits were thought to transmigrate through the generations. Young children were brought up in mind of the gender of the last person to have their ancestral name, and then usually reverted to roles based on their biological sex when they reached puberty. They have a very rudimentary taxonomy – animals have names so that they can talk about them but are not separated into families in such detail, are not unwoven. A person could don a mask and become any gender, any life form. Transmigration allows them to do away with taxonomy; a queering of the animals like their queering of gender that is really a way to acknowledge symbiotic association; like Lynn Margulis said, we cannot live apart from each other.
And then along came the white Christian missionaries! They reorganised their society, imposing patrilineal names and social customs. They undermined the Eskimo women’s respected positions. They saw this animism as evidence that the Eskimos worshipped bad and ungodly spirits, that they needed to be saved from the burden of their devil worship and impure customs. In the missionaries’ myth, women were blamed for the mortality of Man, for even daring to eat an apple, which stood metaphorically for their knowledge or heaviness (myths are so easily inverted). Men were ambassadors for the people now; the missionaries’ one male god told them to go forth and fill the world and subdue it. To rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and everything in between. This god said SEW YOUR SIGNATURES INTO THEIR NAMES. Adam named the animals, and in so doing, he thought himself apart.
The stewarding approach to the natural world took the Eskimos outside of their circle and tried to make their thinking linear. The missionaries made them speak a language which divides everything into opposites, and pitches each against the other and categorises them good or bad, masculine or feminine. In this language the differences between each opposing pair justify the subjugation of one to the other. Better is determined by what is associated with masculine: rational, civilised, intellectual and strong, so anything that connotes these categories holds value. Worse is the opposites: natural, primitive, spiritual and all their associates. Masculine is better just because masculine is better. This is not a reflection of reality but a structuring of it. A breaking apart and stacking of what could otherwise be fluid and fluctuating, but languidly.
Once you divide things into constituent parts you can stack them and you can subdue some parts with others, and this way those doing the building can sit on the top. The missionaries had already trialled this technique in Europe. Casting shamans or strong female figures as demon worshippers and witches scared people into thinking that women who deviated from their new subordinate function were evil and bad. In a theft of body, women were burned at the stake for practising birth control and midwifery. We were enclosed at the same time the commons were enclosed. And women feel connection to what came before even if only because they are made to feel more vividly what has been lost or kept from them.
Like the animals were atomised by species and set apart from Adam, the physical world was stable and geometric and absolute. But now this myth is being undermined with a new one. Science is our rational way of seeing and knowing. We have been looking very hard, very closely, with new aids to vision. Now a new science is falsifying our apartness. A queer science of approximations and non-objectivity. Things are not absolute Mountain Men either/or. Another book that Larus gave me that I have been reading is The Tao of Physics. It told me that when Niels Bohr the physicist was knighted (Order of the Elephant) in Denmark in 1947 he had to choose a coat of arms and for it he chose the t’ai-chi symbol, the yin-yang, and that his inscription read ‘opposites are complementary’.
Bohr said that dualisms – is it a particle or a wave? – do not describe exactly the true nature of things, but that the interplay between the two poles brings us closer to their reality, because everything is always both things at once depending on how you are looking. He said that ‘only the totality of the phenomena exhausts the possible information about the objects’. Much like objectivity in naming animals or peoples does not describe exactly, leaves something diminished.
I think about Rochelle and all the words I can never find for her. I think instead of finding many, many almost true words for her. Then it all ties together in my head so suddenly, coming to shape like the image that emerges with just one missing puzzle piece and abruptly you know exactly how it will be. Now science, quantum physics, is our ally in the war against patriarchy because it says you can’t ever touch the atom of another thing, Alfred Worden, not really; there will always be a force between the electrons of you and it which repel each other on an unfathomably small level. Nothing is solid. Can you feel the hollowness of things as you touch them?
Rochelle is a little to me like the moon is to Alfred Worden. She does not want to be spoken of. I did not know if the best way round her was to o
mit her from the documentary completely. I did not know before why I could not just be a man about it. Just say it like I think it and possess it when the whole reason I set out was to make this documentary just to prove I could.
In the quantum realm this is called the Observer Effect. Your measuring of a thing alters the thing itself. The very act of measuring forces the universe to make a decision at random from a bunch of probabilities. When we measure, the probabilities become a single actuality and this is called a collapse of the wave function.
This is the reason I did not know what I wanted my documentary to say. I can’t talk about Rochelle without talking about my own subjective observation of her. I do not want to collapse her wave function and so I just should not talk about her at all. And the same of this place, this whole experience.
Maybe ‘a feminist documentary on wilderness’ is a semantic impossibility. A woman knows the burn of the power and impact of eyes on skin, she knows the observer effect, she feels herself behind the eyes when a man does not because a man does not know the burn, never has his vantage as detached observer brought into question.
The instant you speak about the thing or you try to pin it down it slips from your hands like soap. The thing can’t be pincered. Matter is a particle and a wave all at once. Both aspects are valid, it just depends on how you look at the matter. And the problem with symbols like words in place of things is that as time passes, like matter in entropy, a symbol will move away from the source at accelerating speed. The markers for nuclear waste sites are never truth, even before the language dies.