Brother in Ice Read online

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  ‌Below

  Every month all the things we couldn’t buy, and we won’t buy in the months to come, end up somewhere, out, under the ice. The platonic loves form into crystals and also get stuck beneath the snow. Unfulfilled desires, when they accumulate, cause cracks that appear on the forehead. Sometimes we slip on the ice and fall into deeper crevasses. After a long time there can be a thaw and everything below emerges like the mammoths on the Siberian plains in summer. The remains are damp and smelly. Then we no longer want them. We think they’re not worth it. Money wasted or love squandered on the undeserving.

  The desires frozen for lack of money or unrequited love are different from the ones we freeze because we’ve given up on them. The latter have the gleam of stoic heroism. Even though we might be renouncing our desires out of fear, and we’ll spend our lives blind, without feeling or seeing anything … On the other hand, if we obey our desires we could end up lost. What makes Odysseus a hero is that he renounces and does not renounce. When he allows himself to listen to the sirens’ song, he remains careful but allows himself his desire.

  Captain Shackleton and his entire crew suffered a shipwreck while trying to cross the Antarctic. They were adrift for months, hearing the song of the orcas; his feat, like Odysseus’s, was returning home. But there on solid ground something sank inside the captain—the domestic realm can be the most difficult territory to settle—and in 1920, just three years after having miraculously escaped death several times, Shackleton abruptly announced that he needed to return to one of the polar regions. He didn’t care whether it was the North Pole or the South.

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  ‌Cook, Peary, and the Truth

  I imagine the moment in the early twentieth century when an explorer puts down his compass—which spins, lost, at the poles—and makes observations on his position, then decides to plant a flag in the middle of a field of white.

  The Pole at last!!! The prize of three centuries, my dream and ambition for twenty-three years. Mine at last …

  Robert Peary

  According to many documents that can be found on the internet, Peary was the first to reach the North Pole. Frederick Cook is depicted as the imposter who used fake evidence to claim he had got there a year earlier. Currently most studies conclude that neither of them ever really reached the Pole. Peary’s assertions have been challenged for the following reasons: a) in the small group that traveled with Peary, there was no one with sufficient navigational knowledge to independently confirm their position; b) the speeds that Peary claimed to have hit on his return were three times faster than on his way there; c) his account of a straight route to the Pole and back—the only way he could have done it—is contradicted by Matthew Henson’s description of a tortuous detour. In 1996 a analysis of some Peary’s records was carried out, using new scientific knowledge. It indicated that Peary was almost 37 kilometers from the Pole.

  Laurell Hamilton described Cook’s situation in these words: “If people will not believe the truth, and you don’t want to lie, then you’re out of options.”

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  The Truth About The Pole (1912). Still from the film by Frederick Cook.

  In the United States there are still those who defend Cook as the true discoverer of the North Pole (Frederick A. Cook Society http://www.cookpolar.org).

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  ‌S.O.S. Eisberg

  Once I was into a guy who wasn’t into me. That made me like him even more. After a while, his absolutely indifferent attitude toward me made my attraction shift into fascination; an image I could moon over, fully aware I was being masochistic.

  Sometimes I imagined that he knew, and that his behavior was caused by something keeping him from getting closer to me, perhaps some obligation I was oblivious to, some mission he had to accomplish before he could return. Like an explorer’s wife, I waited for him. I dubbed him Iceberg, believing I could only see one ninth of him. Icebergs have a sublime, dangerous beauty; they can sink a ship. There are also moments in which my fantasizing stopped and I simply felt disgust at my attraction to that being who was so icy and insensitive, at least toward me.

  Some time later I experienced one of those loves that make you understand the meaning of the word home. I stopped thinking about him, but sometimes I still dreamed about him. In the dreams he was distant too. The Arctic is etymologically the land of the bear. It is there where I situated Iceberg’s geography. He was, in fact, a tall, solitary, and phlegmatic man.

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  S.O.S. Eisberg. Arnold Fanck (1933), with Leni Riefenstahl.

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  ‌The Frozen Explorers

  On January 17, 1912, Scott reached the South Pole. The photograph he took there documents his failure—arriving in second place—after Amundsen got there on December 15, 1911. It is a full shot of a group of men, isolated on the Antarctic plain, in profile before a tent that flies a Norwegian flag. The photograph of Scott, who arrived a month too late and found proof of his defeat, documents his own bleak state. The comparison between the photographs is terrible: the victory is cold and the defeat is epic.

  The race between Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott to conquer the South Pole ended in tragedy. Scott and his expedition companions died of cold and hunger on their way back to the base.

  According to Amundsen’s diary, on December 14, 1911 they reached the spot where his previous calculations had indicated the South Pole was located. They took precise solar measurements to be certain of their position. Meanwhile they decided to travel a certain extra distance in the three remaining directions from that camp, omitting only the direction they’d come from. A different direction was assigned to each member of the team and they headed out without resting for twenty more kilometers. They were risking their lives in this operation; without navigational instruments, a storm could easily have led them astray and they would have been lost forever. The next day they returned almost simultaneously after covering those forty kilometers. While they were gone, Amundsen and Hanssen had been able to make more accurate measurements, which confirmed that they were still a few kilometers from the Pole. With this information, they estimated the correct direction and covered the remaining distance in one day. They camped at the location that, according to their instruments, could be considered the South Pole. Then on December 17, Hanssen and Bjaaland again covered seven kilometers in another direction to ensure that they had reached the South Pole.1

  1 Amundsen’s conquest seems so formal and unheroic, with its constant measuring and corrections, like the process of writing and editing a text…

  According to various polar historians, Amundsen’s success lies in his use of skis and above all to his embracing of Inuit expertise. Amundsen was pragmatic, even eating his dogs when necessary. Scott’s aversion to sacrificing dogs led him to instead bring ponies, although he refused to kill them as well, even when his companions were starving to death. So Scott’s story reveals the contradictions of a character in whom some see a model of ambition and perseverance while others see incompetence. The especially low temperatures in the region when they set off on their return trip were another hurdle.

  When he realized on the way back that he would soon starve, Scott wrote to his wife: “I had to force myself into being strenuous, as you know—had always an inclination to be idle.” Close to death he seems satisfied: “What lots and lots I could tell you of this journey. How much better it has been than lounging about in too great comfort at home.”

  The corpses of Scott and his four companions were found some months later, in November of 1912, with the expedition diaries intact: “These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.”

  The inscription on the cross marking the spot where Captain Scott and his companions died is a quote from the poem “Ulysses” by Tennyson: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” This heroic epitaph is much more sympathetic to the heroes when we look at it in more context:

  It may be that the gulfs will wash u
s down:

  It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

  And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

  Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

  We are not now that strength which in old days

  Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

  One equal temper of heroic hearts,

  Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

  To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

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  Amundsen’s victory. December 14, 1911. Photograph by Olav Bjaaland.

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  Scott’s defeat, January 17, 1912.

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  ‌Research Notes II

  Epic I

  Is it possible for an epic to not be imperialist, athletic, or totalitarian?

  Epic II

  Isn’t there a territorial struggle in every family story? Domestic and emotional spaces as territories to be conquered.

  Ahab

  Sometimes I feel like Captain Ahab, pursuing my white whale. With me is E, who, like Ishmael, is spectator to an obsession he does not always understand.

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  ‌Zeppelin

  As for Peary, some historians believe that he truly thought he had reached the Pole. Others have suggested that he purposely exaggerated his feat. There are those who say that any and all indications that Peary didn’t reach the North Pole are the discrediting work of conspirators in favor of Cook.

  Each of the men mounted a publicity campaign, resulting in a very public face-off. They were both convinced of their version of the facts, but in an age without the technical means to verify them.

  In 1926, the members of Amundsen’s expedition by dirigible were the first to unquestionably see the North Pole as they flew over it. On the other hand, the first to set foot there with any proof were the twenty-four scientists under Aleksandr Kuznetsov’s command who reached the Pole by plane in 1948 under Stalin’s orders. And it wasn’t until 1969, the same year as the moon landing, when an expedition headed by Wally Herbert got there without mechanical means, by sled.

  Conquering the North Pole had been a dream for centuries, but as the Arctic historian Christopher Pala said, those who achieved it weren’t those who had been dreaming of it.

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  Norge airship.

  Amundsen-Ellsworth-Nobile Expedition, 1926.

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  ‌Research Notes III

  Thursday, August 16, 2012

  I’ve found the southernmost Spanish scientist. During the winter months in the Antarctic he and a few colleagues will be alone there maintaining the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

  Reading his blog, I find this:

  Today, to welcome in the civil twilight and bid farewell to the nautical twilight, I went for a walk. In each of the four directions (N, S, E, W), there are a series of panels that serve to check visibility in the summer for arriving flights. To the east, the first one is half a mile away. From there you can see the next one, a mile away from the base. When you get there you can see the next one, a mile and a half out. My heart started to beat faster because the base already seemed distant. I was tempted to go on. When I got to the third one, I could see the fourth and last one another half-mile ahead, so I continued. It was spectacular, and a bit unsettling, when I turned around and could no longer see the base, which was two miles away. There was no sign of any geographical feature or texture; it was all uniform, white. Beautiful. Soon, since I knew where to look, I figured out more or less where I was. In any case, I could follow my footprints back. Out there I couldn’t hear a thing, except for the whistling in my ears. There was barely any wind. Total solitude.2

  2 Carlos Pobes. Facebook status update from September 6, 2012. The author’s website: http://www.eldiamaslargodemivida.com/es.

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  ‌Atlas Crystal Works

  The snow globe had been left at the back of a drawer in an old dresser in the rented apartment. I put it on my desk on a pile of papers—research documents of my white obsessions—as a paperweight. Inside there are two innocently imprisoned angels, who pray half-naked as if the water and floating snow had nothing to do with them. The glass sphere rests on a plastic book, a miniature Bible. I wish the globe was empty; I express that desire to the internet. I find some factories in the United States that make them to order, you can even put a photo inside. According to the website, there is little written on the history of snow globes but it seems the first ones were made in France in the nineteenth century. This object could have been conceived as a successor to the glass paperweight—another fascinating object—that was popular in previous eras.

  Snow globes arrived en masse during the 1878 World Fair in Paris. They became the souvenir of choice of those attending. At that time, at least five American companies were producing snow globes and selling them to Europe. A snow globe containing a model of the newly built Eiffel Tower was made for the 1889 Fair, in commemoration of one hundred years since the French Revolution. The image of a snow globe with a tiny guillotine inside runs fleetingly through my mind.

  Snow globes became popular in England during the Victorian era. In the early twenties they gained traction in the United States among collectors. Many of them were made by the Atlas Crystal Works. In the United States, during the forties, snow globes were often used as an advertising tool. In Europe, during the forties and fifties, globes with religious scenes became a common gift for Catholic children. Snow globes have made appearances in many films and were a key visual motif in Citizen Kane (1941). After saying “Rosebud,” Kane drops the snow globe and dies. It had been a gift from his former lover Susan and held a humble log cabin, his childhood home.

  When snow globes contain human figures instead of buildings or objects, they give the sinister, damp sensation of containing people imprisoned and tossed out to sea.

  I search for the Atlas Crystal Works factory online. I find an address:

  425 E Pleasant Ave., Covington, TN 38019 (901) 476-9797

  Covington, Tennessee, USA

  The famous factory that produced so many snow globes, right around the time that Citizen Kane was filmed, is in Tennessee, in the American South. Google Street View shows a small white industrial unit on a street of low houses with porches. The kind of house in the deep South where little Mick lived, the girl from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, a novel published during the height of snow globes’ popularity. McCullers’s debut is usually described as fiction that deals with the spiritual isolation of misfits and the marginalized in the American South during the thirties. The gallery of opaque lives that fills the novel includes the deaf-mute Singer; Copeland, the doctor who fruitlessly tries to free his fellow negroes from slavery through education; and Mick, a girl who likes jazz, smokes in secret, and dropped out of school to work:

  Sometimes it was like she was out in Switzerland and all the mountains were covered with snow and she was skating on cold, greenish-colored ice. Mister Singer would be skating with her. And maybe Carole Lombard or Arturo Toscanini who played on the radio. They would be skating together and then Mister Singer would fall through the ice and she would dive in without regard for peril and swim under the ice and save his life. That was one of the plans always going on in her mind.

  McCullers presents us with her characters’ mute struggle to emerge on the surface and breathe. I look for snow globes from the forties, when the novel was just published. I find a few, made at the Atlas Crystal Works factory, on a website devoted to second-hand sales. In most of the old snow globes the water level has decreased. There is one that holds a figure of a black servant woman. The inscription on the base reads “Just a Little Mammy Down in Dixie.”3 The seller of this antique informs potential buyers that the water might be a bit murky because of dissolved “snow,” which was made from sawdust or bone shavings before they started making it from plastic. Inside the snow globe the level of the liquid is now at the figure’s shoulders, so her head emerges.

 
3 http://www.atomicmall.com/view.php?id=Mammy-Snow-Globe-Atlas-Crystal-Works_884055.

  I wonder at what point in history this woman began to “breathe.”

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  ‌Shackleton

  After the conquest of the North Pole by Peary and the South Pole by Amundsen, there were no conquests left for the British nation. Ernest Shackleton, who had traveled with Captain Scott during the Discovery expedition (1900–1904) to the North Pole, thought up a new challenge for the heroic age of discovery:

  From the sentimental point of view, it is the last great Polar journey that can be made. It will be a greater journey than the journey to the Pole and back, and I feel it is up to the British nation to accomplish this, for we have been beaten at the conquest of the North Pole and beaten at the conquest of the South Pole. There now remains the largest and most striking of all journeys—the crossing of the Continent.