Ice Diaries

by Jean McNeil

  Wolff went on to ask the tough questions, the ones that extended far beyond the remit of glaciology: do we suffer from a preprogrammed fatalism? Why are we persisting in our European enlightenment and romanticism frame, talking aesthetically more than scientifically, revelling in gamesmanship, in apocalypse visions, when the hard work of adaptation, of creating the political will to deal with warming, are absent? He noted that we hang on the notion of fulcrums — the turning point, the tipping point, the vanishing point — a moment in time usually identifiable only long after it happens. You only knew afterwards that this was a moment in time and space when there was a recognizable before and an after.

  After Wolff’s talk the audience, some three hundred people, filed out for coffee and tea in a sweeping foyer. I saw familiar faces from the Antarctic world. I met one of the visual artists, a painter, who had gone to the Antarctic the previous year. We compared notes. It turned out he had felt the same oscillations between euphoria and crushing depression. His moments of gloom there were not personal, or not as personal as other episodes of melancholy in his life, he told me. “It was climate change that freaked me out. Now it’s all I can think about.”

  We stood together, the painter and I, clutching our teacups, sobered into silence.

  We had just been told that within two hundred years, give or take a couple of decades, the planet may well become uninhabitable for all but a few pockets of human life. It’s a bit like a gradual nuclear war, this slow apocalypse, but worse, in a way: radioactive material ceases to be harmful after its half-life of 490,000 years. But we are approaching the point of runaway warming. The planet will not cool in time for us humans and the species we share the planet with. There will be no half-life for us, no point in the distant future when the malign will regress into harmlessness. We will never be able to claw our way back to the equipoise between climate and civilization we have enjoyed for the best part of the last two millennia. Despite this imminent danger, our innumerable collective actions continue to add to the steepest peril our race has ever faced. We know we are doing this, but we cannot stop. We know we personally won’t have to face the consequences.

  A related problem, it occurred to me that November day in the British Library’s cavernous auditorium, was one of imagination.

  We do not entirely believe in the future. The past and present convince us with their reality because we have lived it, are living it. But through a cognitive slip, I think we are unconvinced that the future is real and will arrive, particularly the future beyond our lifetimes. There is another blind spot in human consciousness — we are hopeful beings. Prodding ourselves with fearful scenarios of the future to try to jolt us into action seems to have the opposite effect: we rebel against such negativity and lack of hope, and take refuge in stasis.

  Eric Wolff, with his modest but meticulous approach, reminded me what I have learned to admire about science in these past few years: its single-minded thoroughness in a search for the truth, its need for argument and disagreement in order to arrive at that truth.

  What we were also talking about in these august surroundings, the auditorium’s plush seats, the lights dimmed, is the revenge of nature, a sort of divine justice at work. Our dread of ice has shifted from the Romantic vision of a frozen to a melt apocalypse. Ice will herald a very human fall from grace, through our wilful ignorance of natural rhythms and the dependency of society on nature. Like the humans and gods alike in Greek tragedies, we will be victims of our own arrogance.

  “But we are also adaptable,” Wolff said. “We are living in a solution-oriented time, rather than a superstitious, fatalistic Dark Age. We are tough-minded.”

  Wolff’s optimism was gritty, hard-earned. I had the impression that he had taken a decision to view our future with some hope, because the alternative was unacceptable.

  We clapped in a chastised, awed applause, and Wolff left the podium, taking with him the stern, metallic ring of ice language: tarn, firn, flux. These words seemed to me more than terms; they somehow convey a tangled forest knit of rules: mathematical facts as stark as life and death, but also the possibility of change, or at least of motion.

  Wolff’s talk reminded me, too, of the mysteries at the core of ice: How do the molecules loosen in the melting process? What is the nature of the bonds between the hydrogen and oxygen as ice breaks down? Why do ice crystals form with a small space around them, like a moat around a castle? Why are no two snowflakes alike? Is this really possible? Why, when it is so cold, does it feel hot to the hand?

  “We hang on the physical fate of the ice,” writes the scholar and poet Anne Carson, of Sophocles’ poem, the one I read on the ship and which compared the experience of love to a lump of ice melting in warm hands. Sophocles writes of how love takes shape through a series of crises of the senses, how crisis calls for decision and action. We have unwittingly entered into an age of, as Eric Wilson writes in The Spiritual History of Ice, “wanton melt achieved through greed and waste.” Welcome to our tragic ecology. We don’t yet know if this will be a primal catastrophe, or another sidereal slip into the flux of evolution — just another in a cycle of death in the name of renewal, of new life.

  We filed out of the auditorium into the early November night. Day one of the conference was over. It was mild enough that we delegates milled about in the British Library plaza for a while, as if reluctant to disperse. It was good to be among polar people again — anthropologists, cultural historians, artists, glaciologists, geochemists. It really was a fraternity. Here, a stranger was not quite a stranger, because you had both lived in the Antarctic, or the Arctic. I felt that reckless list again into euphoria, like a ship leaning over too far after encountering an unexpected wave.

  But the British Library was closing for the evening, and this was London — everyone had somewhere to go, somewhere they had to be. As I walked to my bike, it struck me that exactly two years ago to the day I had boarded a plane to Madrid, then another to Santiago, then the long hopscotch flight to the Falklands. It was the beginning of something. I was going into the light.

  I met the man I call Loki at a conference on hunger, two years before I went to the Antarctic. For years I worked in academic publishing and attended conferences on politics, economics, sociology. Loki was a professor of political science, British, but for years he had been teaching at an east-coast American university in a tidy, prosperous town where he lived with his wife and daughter.

  We carried on the stilted, if friendly, conversation of two people seated randomly at a dinner table. He specialized in failed states. Most of his work was in Africa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia — all the top failed states of our epoch. He was tall and lean. There was a rigid, daring quality to him: he looked like a man accustomed to living among dangers.

  His was of the most moving faces I have ever seen: strong, not cruel, not fine featured, but with no coarse notes. Each expression was a fascinating interplay of angles and creases. He had a sudden, quasar-burst smile.

  I was sawing my way through yet another institutional chicken breast and looked up to respond to something he had said, and saw he was looking at me. His eyes had softened into a look which was unmistakeable. My eye went to the ring on his fourth finger, as if to check it was still there.

  For the rest of the conference I observed him closely. Black eyes, in his mid-forties. There was something static about him, a wax figure of a handsome man. This artificiality followed him through space, as if he had just burst onto a stage. In part it must have been the handsome man’s awareness that he is being watched. His movements were lean and taut, as if he were keeping something under wraps.

  That I knew him, knew his face, expressed itself as a low hum of contentment. It was beyond the buzz of attraction; it was as if he emanated an energy completely different to anyone I had ever met. I had tuned into a lost frequency.

  If I stood near him I felt relieved, as if I had come ba
ck from exile, from a long way away, with no hope of ever seeing my family again, only to find them in him. All along, I had been living in a howling, echoing void, without realizing it. Suddenly, in his presence, I felt complete.

  A thought surfaced from a great depth within me: Who are you?

  After the conference I tried to go back to my life, to live normally. But every moment shimmered with threat, bloodlust, but also a dark love. I was under the spell of a base elation. Also something that could easily have been fear. I knew how necessary this man was to my existence. I knew that mine had been a life lived half asleep. Now I had woken.

  Nights became a place of bleached, inevitable torments. I woke in soaked sheets. The same cold fire that had taken over my innards set up camp in my brain. I was either unable to think straight or I was thinking with the greatest clarity of my life.

  At the same time, I felt as if I had had a million volts of electricity put through me. Every cell was altered. For eight months, I did not sleep through the night. At four a.m., I would be jolted awake by a panic, a black elation of a kind I would not feel again until those final days in the Antarctic.

  I saw him intermittently. Each sighting of him ignited within me a physical hunger, ragged and dark. I had never felt lust before, or not at that pitch, and for a while didn’t recognize it. I felt as if I were dying. I couldn’t keep food down. But I could drink. I began to eat less and to drink more, to try to quell the crashing symphony of anxiety my body produced. At work I roamed the internet for pictures of him and when I found one I felt sick to my stomach. Some days I actually threw up.

  I began to be ill — an illness I would later learn was a bad-luck sickness, something that pounced when you were low. I craved his presence. More than that, my alarm stemmed from feeling that my existence was linked to his, but that we had been separated. I had found him again quite by chance, and my survival once again depended on him. If I could not have him, I felt sure I would die.

  This was hysteria of a kind, of course, and I recognized it as such. But as with the anxiety episodes I would later experience in the Antarctic I couldn’t seem to do anything to quell it.

  We only saw each other at conferences, at meetings. We were correct and friendly. Professionally he was astute and quick-minded, and seemingly principled. We never schemed to see each other, although we emailed from time to time. Over two years we saw each other many times, and each of those meetings I felt pinned to a wall. Even the thought of him, or meeting someone who knew him, made me tremble.

  We never did more than kiss. But I have never had a more powerful kiss, authoritative, but also tender. Prowling and sincere. It was more than a kiss — it had the density of sex.

  What did Loki feel for me? He was only capable of a cold adoration. I had taken up residence on the outskirts of his vision. I lived far away, after all. He had a wife and a child. I knew how these things worked — marriages and families lasted, even when there was not very much love, through inertia and fear, the pressure of daily baths and food and cars and childcare arrangements.

  I had no such glue to weld me to my life. I gave up my partner of six years immediately, or he gave up on me. I wasn’t sure what was happening and I didn’t much care. I wanted only to feel that fever gloss of love.

  My illness intensified. I didn’t know what it was at first. I felt I was fermenting with neglect. This desolate lust I felt had nothing to do with my conscious life or my intelligence. There was something deeper going on, something beneath the patterns of lived life, of daily existence. It was larger than me, what I felt shimmering between us, something beyond rational thought.

  In The Spiritual History of Ice, Eric Wilson writes of the difference between white (cosmological) and black (daemonic) magic: “The ‘black’ magician is a supreme egoist. He is bent on transforming the world into a double of his wishes, on controlling the forces that threaten the persistence and power of his ego. Though full of hubris, he is consumed by fear and desire — terrified by forces that compromise his ego and desirous of destroying these forces.”

  I won’t recount the details here, but I would discover that Loki was a kind of decoy, a dank pear, the uncanny double who discloses the shadows of the unconscious, the dark interpreter that Shelley, Goethe, Wordsworth dreamed of. He existed only to project back at me a negative vision of my capacities — negative not in its usual meaning, but as in a dark mirror, like the Claude glass landscape mirrors Victorian aesthetes carried, to better admire the landscape. Why are you pursuing me? His response said. But then why give me licence for pursuit? I protested. He needed me to enact upon him what he wanted most to do himself, then to sanction me for it.

  In Norse myth, Loki is an ambiguous character, with a complex and shifting persona: on the one hand he is the Trickster — he fools you and in doing so forces you to confront your weaknesses. He has an animal nose for weakness; it interests him, in a predatory way. In this incarnation he is not necessarily dangerous, rather mischievous: a character driven by multiple instincts, someone sent to enliven, shake people up, keep them on their toes, as well as to deliver complex fates to their individual owners.

  The other face of Loki is the Devil — it was Loki who tricked Balder, the golden son of Odin whom the gods decreed could not be killed except by mistletoe, the one substance thought too harmless to exclude from Balder’s invulnerability. Loki who tricked Balder’s blind brother, Hod, the god of darkness, into brushing Balder’s chest with mistletoe, killing him instantly.

  In Loki, both the real person in my life and the mythic figure he brought me to learn about, I understood for the first time that there really were dark energies in the world, and indeed within us. There are forces of light and darkness, forever locked in combat. As adults, we can’t be innocent to this Manichean duality. The task was to believe that white magic — cosmological magic — of which ice would become a part, for me, was the stronger of the two.

  In the year before I went to the Antarctic, my life felt like a conspiracy I had wandered upon but not generated. I might not even have a part to play in this weird script populated, like a Shakespearean play, by casual black jolts of fate, by winter hungers and a castle of ruin.

  I began to suspect I was being lured to the Antarctic by an intuition that it would reveal to me an inner mythological drama I needed to understand. Stephen Traynor, a Jungian psychoanalyst, writes, “Unconscious content will seek expression in the world, all the more so when the subject is unable to come to terms with it in the inner world.” I was becoming aware of the paltriness of the conscious mind, how tangential its plans and awarenesses are to our existence. The unconscious mind meanwhile is powered by dark energy, fuelled on motifs, tropes, myths — an alliance of symbols and powerful narratives common to many people across time and space. These seek expression in our consciously lived lives, although we are not necessarily aware of their needs.

  It’s a frightening concept, in some respects, but also alluring — the idea that there is a separate self inside us. Jung called it the shadow self. In some people’s lives it grows in power until it threatens to flood the will of the conscious self.

  To accept this idea is to agree that we live in a dark fable. At any point the dangerous quests of the unexpressed self can overwhelm our lives. The idea, which has its best interpretation in Jungian psychology, is that certain things we do, or people whom we take into our lives, are an attempt on the part of the unconscious to expiate a tension that has become so powerful that it demands overt expression. It is the inner narrative turned outward.

  This was the source of the anxiety that overtook me in the Antarctic, I came to understand in that year of symposia. I felt I would become trapped there, as I had been trapped those winters of my childhood and adolescence. I did not avoid the Canadian winter for twenty years because of a lack of grit or a dislike of extreme cold, but because of the emotional properties winter held for me, what I’d experie
nced in my childhood and adolescence.

  My anxiety only bloomed after friends such as Tom and Xavier had left, the planes had left, and winter arrived, with only one way out. I am normally good at being alone. But in the Antarctic we were exposed to others’ scrutiny in a way that is no longer familiar to most of us, or certainly not those who live in cities. There was nowhere else to go, no distraction, no escape. But unlike a medieval society, we were not kin either. There was no protection. Some part of me began to be overwhelmed and demanded that it be taken out of that place, before further harm could be wreaked, before memories could be unpeeled.

  The Antarctic was an attempt to resolve inner conflicts in my existence. I would not return to Canada to do it; it was safer to enact it far away, under an upside-down heaven, in a frozen foreign colony. How appropriate that I would go to that continent at the bottom of the planet, that place onto which we project our dark fantasies, as much as our utopias.

  The symposium ended on that Sunday in silence, with a sequence of photographs shown by Rachel Weiss, an American art historian and cultural theorist. Panoramic photographs, bleak in their intensity, they showed an infinite ice field, snow that went on and on, until it disappeared into a convex horizon.

  The night Tom and I flew back from the Ellsworths via Ice Blue, about 100 kilometres from base Tom took the controls back from me, so that I could look out the window. He dropped us low to the ground, only two hundred metres from the deck. We skirted the mountains of Alexander Island to the west, flying over sliding oxbow rivers and turquoise glacial melt pools. Some had amoebic, formless shapes, others drew sharp calligraphy with sudden upright characters.

  Then the plane whipped over a cold white river, an ice stream. In between were long blank periods of ice field, so devoid of features that my mind — through fatigue or hallucination — began to produce a prairie, and I saw wheat, trees, a floor of flowers; faint things becoming visible, then melting back into the whiteness. I thought I saw wolves loping over the ice, but this was only the light, grey and feral, and the shadow of the Twin Otter with the sun behind it.