Antarctica! Where even the butter is primeval!
Meanwhile, this domestic or personal sense of lost time in Antarctica abutted against, even seemed at times to merge with, proliferating scientific understandings of the way the continent stored the past. Indeed they had to jostle, these two quite different scales of time, there being (at least on the spot in Antarctica) no middle ground to separate them, no intermediate social time or landscape time. Look at the way that ‘ice ages and continental drift’ intrude into that Vostok dining room: the Antarctic past of the International Geophysical Year, when Vostok’s first modules were hauled into place, opens straight out on Gondwanaland. Which, of course, the International Geophysical Year did. It was then, with remote sensing techniques that started to strip away the concealing ice, and continental drift brought in as a theory from the eccentric margins of geology, that the rock beneath the frozen sheath began to be, not a static lump repeating processes seen more accessibly elsewhere, but hidden evidence of a planet in motion, a piece carried south from Gondwana to crumple and shove and rift over and over again along the line now marking off East and West Antarctica. The rock was active, so long as you thought of it in rock-time; or, the same thought in reverse, if you thought of Antarctica as a kind of reservoir of slowness, a place where speedier processes were removed, leaving the great surges and pulsations of the crust to set the clock speed. Over the 1970s and 1980s, echo-sounding and radar measurements through the central cap started to reveal a whole preserved landscape down below, with plains and mountains and defiles all solidly packed with ice; and then, most recently and startlingly, it turned out, with liquid lake systems and running rivers at the interface between the rock and the incredible weight of the ice. A landscape not seen for maybe 35 million years.
But the ice, too, turned out to contain a history. It was not just an obstruction. Stephen Pyne puts it very well:
The ice is not simply an opaque veil but substance with its own information content, however meager, and a matrix for embalming air, aerosols, microparticles, and meteorites. The air inclusions that ripple across white and blue ice are vials containing ancient atmospheres. The ice sheets are great archives of past climates. The polycrystalline fabric of the ice contains a history of stress fields. The meteorites that gather into blue ice placers, the debris of interplanetary space, and the cosmic ray interactions with the outer atmosphere that settle into the snow all testify to the power of Ice as a medium of information.7
A library, an archive, a mausoleum, a memory: all things which preserve a past by preventing its decay, and again, it proves, not because Antarctica is particularly hospitable to remembering, but because of the characteristic slowness of the continent, this time measured on ice scales rather than rock scales, a hundred times or so faster than the speed of the rocks, but still at such an infinitesimal crawl compared to the processes of the warmer world that it grants a long, long exemption from the normal scattering of time. Where the weather and the biology and the nice warm reactive temperatures up here keep molecules briskly cycling and recycling, down there in the dry cold desert, they stay where they are put. The borehole beneath Vostok passes through about 100,000 years of molecule deposition, and therefore 100,000 years of past climate, per vertical kilometre. Ice cores covering 400,000 years have been extracted now that the drillers are just about to break through into the lake water below.
So: temps retrouvé, time regained, from the twentieth-century encounter with Antarctica, on the scale of decades, and on the scale of hundreds of thousands, and millions, of years. But not on the scale of longer-term human historical memory. Over centuries, over millennia, Antarctica is blank; though you can line it up with history for the discordant, indifferent thrill of it, as the scientist Bill Green does, for instance, when he writes ‘It was . . . while the young Charlemagne was uniting Europe that an epochal event occurred in Wright Valley’ – and the Lower Wright Glacier discharged fresh glacial water over the briny lower layer of Lake Vanda. The two scales do not mesh.
Now, I called this lecture ‘The Uses of Antarctica’, and all of this changing stuff about lost time does indeed constitute a use for the place, in a very direct and functional way, so long as we’re willing to agree that accumulating the knowledge of climate history, and of the geological history of the planet, and gaining the chance of a reflective encounter with type specimens of our own recent past, are all functional. Whether the southern continent is preserving an ice record or a rock record or an architectural record, it is in effect doing something for us. It is offering us something we can completely assimilate. But perhaps we need to be thinking in terms of a wider, and more ironised, idea of use here, for after all the striking challenge of Antarctica, perceptually speaking, has been one of responding to a place which is overwhelmingly, blatantly not subordinate to our purposes, not assimilated into human systems of use and familiarity. Which we marry up, gingerly, to the word ‘wilderness’, as the best linguistic fit we have available, though Antarctica only has a distant family resemblance to the North American ecosystems that word got its denotation and first connotations from. The experience of Antarctica gives a particular force to the fundamental recognition behind any environmental philosophy, that a place must be respected as existing in and for itself, and not for us, not just for what we can make of it. In this case, the recognition has to go beyond respect for other life, into a kind of respect for the integrity of non-living systems too. Among the geopolitical motives and the climatic self-interest that helped to bring the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty into effect, there was also the attempt to honour this recognition of our non-possession of the continent by, exactly, putting it beyond our use.
And this presents a kind of stumbling-block for metaphor. Thinking from scratch: what does it mean for us that we have, in our world, an uninhabited continent? What does it allow us to feel? First of all, I would argue, a sense of possibility, bare and abstract, like the sense of pre-specific possibility attached to money; except that unlike the generalised (or, significantly, ‘frozen’) desire embodied in money, this possibility is unconvertible, it can’t be defrosted into the satisfaction of particular desires, except by destroying it. It’s a deposit that can’t be cashed. But it can be borrowed against. It can be used as surety for the issue of metaphors; for ways of writing which chiefly take the ice as a source of resemblances, analogies, comparisons to human experience. Starting with, say, the inescapable association between physical and emotional coldness, so that the frozen sea is always metamorphosing into Kafka’s ‘frozen sea within us’, which a book is supposed to be the axe to break. And then going on, for example, since we’re on the subject of books, to the equally inescapable association between white snow and white paper. In writing, Antarctica has constantly vanished into writing, into the act of representation itself, as if being there and describing being there had collapsed into each other, perhaps because of the lack of middle ground I talked about. To travel across the whiteness is to inscribe it, very frequently; footprints have often recalled the other kind of printing. Here, the possibility of Antarctica becomes the possibility of saying anything, anything at all, on an empty page. The presence in the snow of a representing consciousness nudges us towards descriptions in which the snow is doing the writing.
Here I think we hit the one grand exception to Stephen Pyne’s observation that modernism never really claimed Antarctica, aesthetically, despite the apparently irresistible match of sensibilities which makes tabular bergs look as if they were designed by Le Corbusier. Modernist self-consciousness about the act of writing did claim Antarctica, in the small change of all those snow/paper metaphors; and now and again in bigger works, written at a distance from the place itself. Take W.S. Graham’s very wonderful poem of 1970, ‘Malcolm Mooney’s Land’, for example, one of a sequence about his alter ego Mooney, who in this one, thanks to the generous amplitude of polar nomenclature, gets both to have a Land named after him and to be that
Land – on paper. ‘Above the bergs the foolish / Voices’ – of the blizzard – ‘are lighting lamps / And all their sounds make / This diary of a place / Writing us both in.’ As well as aligning footprints and print, white-outs and you-know-what, he even manages to make the lice in Mooney’s furs literary, by lining them up with ‘the grammarsow and the word-louse’. I can’t deny that there are Arctic elements here – those lice, a guest appearance by a polar bear – but I’d argue for the Antarctic pedigree of the final scene in the tent. (What could be more Antarctic than a final scene in a tent?) ‘I have made myself alone now. / Outside the tent endless / Drifting hummock crests. / Words drifting on words. / The real unabstract snow.’ And there’s the stumbling block. Metaphor is not identity; only borrowed semblance. And however anthropocentric our metaphorical uses of the continent may be, there remains the still-unassimilated thing itself, the millions of square kilometres of Antarctica existing but not for us; the real unabstract snow. The anthropocentric metaphors are always in tension, always under challenge. Our awareness of the continent’s dimensions, physical and temporal, mean that even in imagination it is always in excess of metaphor, always mutely huger than the currency we want to give it. There is always an inhuman remainder, after our descriptions are over. Antarctica is never only its uses.
But this means, paradoxically, that one of the major twentieth-century uses of Antarctica is as a focus for just this awareness of how much the world isn’t ours, and isn’t us; an awareness that is impeded elsewhere by the depth and persistence of human familiarity with the planet’s landscapes. I want to look now at one example of this kind of use which is particularly interesting because it is, in fact, so commercial, so carefully calculated in its desire to come up with a version of the awareness I’m talking about which people were willing to pay for, to find desirable in a very straightforward way.
Richard Byrd’s Alone was an enormous bestseller in 1938. It’s an account, very compellingly written, of the four months in 1934 he spent overwintering solo in a weather station on the Ross Ice Shelf, and of the dark night of the soul he endured along with the dark night outside, partly because of the isolation, partly because of carbon monoxide poisoning. But Alone was not exactly written by Richard Byrd. As Raimund Goerler demonstrated at the nineteenth Polar Libraries Colloquy in Copenhagen in 2002, it is overwhelmingly likely that it was worked up from Byrd’s original notes and diary entries by his journalist friend Charles J.V. Murphy. Murphy was a participant in Byrd’s second expedition, and responsible for Little America’s radio communications, so he actually appears in his own text as a minor character, the voice on the radio of good old Charlie Murphy. When he was working on the book, apparently, he told Byrd that the materials he’d sent him had ‘nearly everything necessary . . . but . . . in solution’. What the reader needed would have to be ‘precipitate[d] out’ of it. Clearly he had a beautifully developed sense of what several different Depression-era demographics would respond to, and a considerable command of voice too; later on, his other books would include ghostwritten autobiographies for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. For many years he served as Washington bureau chief for Fortune magazine, and just as there he dedicated himself to finding the romance in American business, so in Alone he set himself to giving Byrd’s experience a sumptuous, streamlined gloss, with a score of film-music strings. Rarely has Antarctica’s orientation away from us been so elegantly commodified. Several times he calls the ice shelf ‘as austere as platinum’, a wonderful phrase which is both visually exact, and also the most deluxe description imaginable for austerity.
Very quickly, on only the second page of the book, Murphy is making a pitch for Byrd’s experience as something universally recognisable, because typical of the age.
I had no important purposes. There was nothing of that sort. Nothing whatsoever, except one man’s desire to know that kind of experience to the full, to be by himself for a while and to taste peace and quiet and solitude long enough to find out how good they really are. It was all that simple. And it was something, I believe, that people beset by the complexities of modern life will understand immediately. We are caught up in the winds that blow every which way. And in the hullabaloo the thinking man is driven to ponder where he is being blown and to long desperately for some quiet place where he can reason undisturbed and take inventory.8
Antarctica as Shangri-La. (James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, with its dream of soothing escape into the Himalayan snows, had come out in 1933, Frank Capra’s movie of it in 1937.) Against that, Murphy had to maintain the powerful selling-point of the experience’s uniqueness, its incomparable unlikeness to everyday life, just as he had to defend the passivity of Byrd’s endurance against any suggestion that it made him less of a can-do kind of a guy. But all these things, it turned out, could be reconciled in his vision of the place. Byrd would struggle against the killing cold, and against the poisoning fumes from his stove and his generator, and he would keep himself stalwartly busy in a Robinson Crusoe-ish kind of way, but as the twilight fell over the ice shelf, and the aurora arose, and the winter wind started to move the loose snow crystals on the shelf’s surface like ‘an incoming tide which creams over the ankles then surges to the waist and is finally at the throat’ – then he would experience the excess of Antarctica, its inhuman scale and indifference, not as something antipathetic (anti-pathetic, opposed to feeling) but as transcendence. I’m emphasising, probably overemphasising, the rhetorical calculation involved, because I want to bring out the particularity of the move being made here:
Harmony, that was it! That was what came out of the silence – a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres, perhaps.
It was enough to catch that rhythm, momentarily to be myself a part of it. In that instant I could could feel no doubt of man’s oneness with the universe.9
In other words, Antarctica isn’t part of the order of things constituted by human needs and uses and usefulness, but it is part of cosmic order (strike up the string section again), and therefore it and humanity, which is also part of cosmic order, belong together in some ultimate sense; they harmonise.
And Byrd holds onto this thought right the way through Alone, we’re told, even when he’s lying in his bunk in the dark too weak to lift his arms to light a candle. It’s his credo, his take-home idea; what cannot be used in wilderness may therefore be seen as spiritual, in a very twentieth-century way that can hover, undefined, between religious and post-religious. Again, the obvious winning schmaltziness of the way the idea is expressed shouldn’t be taken as vitiating it, but as a sign of how potent it is, how reliably it touches on a possibility in the human encounter with Antarctic landscape. It’s a perception that recurs in different forms right through the Antarctic twentieth century, from Frank Debenham saying that if chance rules the Antarctic ‘there is Something behind the Chance’, to Sara Wheeler in the 1990s saying ‘it would be almost impossible, in this landscape, not to reflect on forces beyond the human plane’. Or, as an entrant to the competition Byrd’s publisher ran in 1930 to promote Charlie Murphy’s first ghosted book for him put it, ‘The star that led the Magi across their deserts and the star that led Byrd to the nether pole are not so different one from another as one might at first suppose.’
Stephen Pyne, however, pointing correctly to Thoreau as the distant model for Byrd’s retreat into wilderness, argued in The Ice that picking a floating plain of ice, antiseptic, iron-hard, as your Walden doesn’t make sense. It was nonsense, he said, in thermodynamic terms. ‘On The Ice the Thoreauvian gesture must be reversed: stimulation, complexity, information, must be constantly added to such an environment or else one will succumb to solipsism or a white-out of personality.’ That is, where everything that means anything has to be brought along, there can be no meaning in withdrawal. But this seems to me to be based on a mistaken sense of what’s being inherited from Thoreau here, what the piece of thinking is, about the unuseful wilderness, which has descended i
nto the twentieth-century repertoire of Antarctic responses. Byrd – or should I say, the first-person narrator of Alone – is aware of the thermodynamic implications of his position, but not especially worried by them. Alone contains one elegant evocation of the heat death of the universe, going on locally just outside the weather station, when he talks about the ‘indescribable evenness’ into which the silence, the dark, the cold, and the ticking of his clocks all merge; and one moment of temptation, to give in to entropy. But the Thoreauvian nourishment he’s getting from his wilderness experience clearly isn’t supposed to be an infusion of ‘stimulation, complexity, information’ anyway, so he isn’t very vulnerable to the discovery that the environment sucks instead of blowing.
The cultural point of departure here, I think – the thing that is passing down half-remembered to Byrd, or to good old Charlie Murphy – is Thoreau’s famous moment of revelation, not by Walden Pond, but on top of Mt Ktaadn: when Thoreau poured out a kind of hymn to use-transcending nature at its bleakest, and after it, after an apparent radical separation of it from all human connection, an awestruck declaration of affinity, based not even on sharing life with living natural processes, but just on sharing a common status as matter. Imagine, please, as you listen to this, rather than a summit in Maine in 1846 a storm on the Ross Ice Shelf in the winter dark of 1934.
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