THE HEART OF WHITENESS

(21 December, written in haste in a break from the weather near Adelaide Island, Antarctica)





A / world lost, / a world unsuspected / beckons to new places / and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory / of whiteness.
‘Paterson,’ William Carlos Williams

It is my belief that we are most human, and potentially humane, when we question our presence. Not ‘WHY AM I HERE?’ as the existentialists’ unbroken orison but as the clearance to moral vertex – for the interrogation of our presence steers us to the grounds of action and underlying motivation, the bedrock of any circumstance and cycle.

This afternoon, on the white shores of Antarctica, I hauled down through a small breach in the snow, beyond a metallised spline of ice, and into a crevasse, an abbey in the ice-field with candelabra of icicles and great glacial organ-pipes. Sheltered from the winds and stooping through the electric-blue sacristy, I doubted my presence. For what purpose was a poet trespassing across rime? Why thrust upon material hostility, the malice of ice? Here in Antarctica, in the heart of whiteness. I do not wish to write poems about glaciers or heighten the literary drumlin of nature voyages, despite Baudelaire and Bachelard’s invitation. So why am I here?

In truth, I see my presence as a kind of retributive metaphor sited somewhere between Williams’ world lost and world unsuspected. Between these two poles, representative (for now) of the damaged past and the erratic future, I stand as one of many poets of a tradition ruptured as uncannily as a crevasse quarrelling the perfect flush of snow. And so into this glorified, polar underworld I descend after the remission of meaning, for my poetry is of the English language, which has stained the page by the stigma of the tongue’s barbarous acts. Its wounds remember in my metre-making argument, and there is no escape from this lingual burden. Though the grandchild, even, more accurately, the great-great grandchild of the lost world, my generation is yet to enter the freshness of the unsuspected. It is an ingress I long for in my lifetime.

In the world lost, the imperialising forces of metaphor sprang from territorial exigency. First articulated by Plato, societies have been expressive of need and desire, and the poet of any society has thus protracted metaphor according to those demands. The history of English, accelerating in the past several centuries, has been an expansion of territory according to the engrossing needs/desires of British (and, lately, American) society. Through colonising processes, metaphor penetrated the heart of darkness, the foreign lands of countries like Africa and India, waged to carry across the needs/desires of the possessing society.

As Ezra Pound’s modernised ‘Seafarer’ has it: “Moaneth alway my mind's lust / That I fare forth, that I afar hence / Seek out a foreign fastness.”

Poetry became a cutlass, a danda, a flick-knife, tooled by the targets of the colonial power – in 19th Century South Africa, Shakespeare sheared the skin from the natives, used by the white men in charge of educating the Africans to the extent of submission. In India, Sir Walter Scott girdled the tongues of Bengalis, chaining them to Ogmiotic eloquence, overtaking through conversion. And the godly light blinded the bearers to the violence of their acts of translation on a landscape and a people. Little wonder there is such fear and denigration of eloquence or linguistic potency in the 21st Century.

Prends l’eloquence et tords-lui le cou! said Pascal. Take eloquence, and break its neck!

In the postcolonial age, English has become the poetry of shame, nearly ‘murdered by its past strength’ (Bloom) because its expressiveness flared out into abuses that our predominant, liberal paper-munching society professes to despise. Yet plain-spokenness, directness of expression – that borrowed by the media and by modern politics in newspeak – is the dangerous tongue of our generation, slanged as an antidote to our civilising forefathers. By its lucid, pellucid promises – its sheer whiteness – it reflects back only that which the user wants to hear. It is a mirror, as reflective as the ice, the hard pool of Narcissus, the inward stare that reveals nothing of depth.

The term ‘white space’ in advertising referred to the broad, empty borders of a page or poster, the clear expanses that emphasised an individual’s connection to an object to be desired (and not needed, for there is never cause to advertise a necessity) – it was a space into which the observer expanded their vision and mind to bring themselves into the picture alongside that being sold: the white space of affected desire. And it was the translation by commerce of the expansion of wants writ painfully upon the landscape by the imperial age. A slogan, a simple, democratised image, and a pagescape of white left in invitation to a buyer teased by simplicity.

Emerging from the eerie neon of the crevasse, I see only white, unwritten into the distance. Browning’s poetry enters my thoughts, “This world’s no blot for us, / Nor blank – it means intensely, and means good.”

The whiteness of Antarctica is so hostile that we cannot fully master it or succeed in translating it to our terms. People are here, nations stake their claims, yet humans and societies cannot fully see a place for themselves or for their wants – not yet. Here, the needs of the language, of the meaning extant within it must flow backwards by a thaumaturgical act of reversal, where the metaphor flows from landscape back to poet. Thus I am translated to its terms.

So, why am I here? Antarctica beckons to those new places, to the blank page. And any English-language poet has Antarctica before them, if they lay their hand flat upon a fresh page – they need not freight the atmosphere as I have done.

“The poetry of earth is never dead,” said Keats. Then we too share in eternity.

WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD

On 13th November, we crossed the legendary Antarctica ice-edge.

“Huge bergs started to appear, and we knew things were augmenting all around us, transiting to somewhere colder, more remote. In the distance, we could see a lemongold light, a faint signal to the iceworld that lay ahead. Suddenly we were upon it, skittishness in our cells, in our souls. The ship pushed in and the world complexified – ice pieces of unspeakable colour, auric sunlight deifying, detailing, a berg thirty miles in length, a colossus with microclimates, solarised by great swathes of cloud against crucibles of sky and cumuli…And suddenly the real ice, and we broke across pristineness, and I felt the bloodiness of my footprint.”

The footprint is the symptom of desire and the emblem of enclosure. It is the corporal assumption of property – the marking or bounding of idea, object, or place. Throughout human history, to strive for the notion of civilisation has been to swedge for space. Different landscapes consisted of sundry assets, and the skill with which any given set of people staked out this wealth conditioned the speed with which they advanced. This was the essential expansiveness of one of the most recent imperialist phases in human history, and one in which my country was errant. The English fell upon the landscapes they colonised almost as vain lovers, and the collateral of their desire was the slaughter of men and the scourging of resources at the changing borders of their society.

My friend, Zlata Filipovic and I spent three years of our life researching young people’s war diaries and, by extension, the history of conflict in the twentieth century. I became acutely aware of the pound of flesh in every turn of the spade, the farrowed miles of our global soils, our agricultural beginnings, and the ruin that such origination brought to us. What had begun as the processes of exciting innovation for the human race became the grounds of hideous exploitation and abuse in the twentieth century, quarried in our poems: “But we shan’t, not since Stalin and Hitler, trust ourselves ever again,” (The Cave of Making, W.H.Auden).

The ‘we’ is universal; let us be under no illusions. All humans lay waste to raw space in order to flag out power.

Don Steinberg, a colleague of ours and vice president of the International Crisis Group, remembers his time as US Ambassador to Angola, when children’s footprints fell in time to cautionary rhythm: “I remember a school classroom of 7-year-olds singing what at first sounded like a beautiful little song. Listening carefully, however, I soon realized it was a song about land mines, warning that the earth is a dangerous place filled with enemies that can pop up and bite your leg off…just consider the long-term psychological effect on children of viewing the ground not as a place to run and play, but as an ever-present danger.”

Our new millennium at the fault of imperialism and capitalist aggrandisement might learn by the unspoken eloquence of the natural mechanisms of Antarctica itself, whose borders witness the sublime exchange of energy and information to the exclusion of everything else. It is the only landmass which regularly reshapes. Each winter, the continent shifts its borders by the cast of its silvery hem, an extension in sea-ice that more-or-less doubles the territory. It is a national convulsion gloriously disobedient to the gagging maps of men.

Most recently, the invasiveness of human desire has manifested in objects. While national borders limited or extended any State’s political or economic desire, the perceived boundaries of social class shored the desire of the individual. Accordingly, notions of self and property became inseparable, and the mass production and consumption of objects in the twentieth century permitted not only the vast extension of the manufacturers’ profits but insatiable social progress for the human household.

Marketing endowed objects with illusory value and the tantalising notion that to own an object transformed the social value of the owner. Yet, once stripped of its packaging and gathering dust, the object proved singularly unsatisfying and was soon junked.

The occurrence of trash on the sinless shorelines of Antarctica testifies to the continuing glut of modern desires, and the limits of their containing space. The albino brink of Antarctica is ten thousand miles from the coastline of my home in the west of England, yet litter from the privileges of my nation finds fault on its shores. Junk anchors to absurdity in the luminescence, seceded from history or ambition.

Yet there are the glimmers of hope in favourable reformation. In human society, junk reaches eloquence; it is the antiworld of consumerism, the fictile object of mass desire and discard become artefact and, before long, Art.

Italian art critic, Germano Celant coined the phrase ‘Poor Art’ in the sixties for the collective of artists marginalised by commercial forces, making-do and making new with the world’s junk. The transfiguring hands of the attentive artist, like those of the beckoning lover, called the pitiable and pandemic object back to distinction, refashioning the wrecked to redemptive singularity.

Trash stood for a kind of transcendence, a virgin opportunity to model meaning anew from the ‘hieroglyphic’ (Edith Wharton) of an object’s prior life as the material descriptiveness of social class and interests. Shipwrecked, the object-become-trash stranded this significance, returning to a pristine state in thrall to potential meaning.

Antarctica, the sparkling, maidenly heart underpinning life on our planet, is the final pristine territory, and one of the only places on earth not smutted by human desire and conflict. To mark it is to weigh upon definition.

In 1959, a decade before the world attended to the signature of man and cold ambition in one small lunar step that presupposed gross progress, twelve nations signed up to the Antarctic Treaty (Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, United Kingdom, United States and USSR). The Treaty stipulated that Antarctica should be free from military activity or conflict, especially nuclear testing, and unoccupied by national greed, particularly mining for resources. Antarctica was envisioned as a “... a natural reserve, devoted to peace and science.” The tabula rasa of the iceworld had yielded one of its first concepts, a revolutionary one in recent human history: landscape as universal benefit, beyond individual or national interest.

As one of the countries signed up to that extraordinary document, the British tread across Antarctica’s freshness not as the mark of ownership but in scientific (and, in my case, lyrical) endeavour. After millennia, the Angels have learned to fear their footfall. Long live trepidation!

THE BOUNDING MAIN

The Bounding Main is the world’s oceans, the dark, stayless waters from which we squirmed to our society. Still largely elusive to the applications of logic, this tremendous entity of floods finds its own politics in complex systems of circulation and partition that remain too dynamic for the models of men. Bodies of water quieten and enliven, clash and uncouple; they harden in conversation with the air, whimpering salt into the depths, changing the nature of the deep waters below. They exist in our minds boundlessly as the protean imagination of humanity, and in the wombs of women vestigially as the aquatic waters from which we birth. The strange layers of the ocean find parallel in the secret divisions that carve the human mind, the frontiers of doubt or superiority, the fringes of identity and ego.

In early English poems, the sea was termed as waelweg, the whale’s way, resounding in the word for foreigner – wealas. Warmongering and plague swept in from its faithless horizons, anchoring to the misery of the shores. Not only was the sea entrenching on the landscape but empowering the successive waves of tribal invasion that wounded and swelled the English tongue to its beautiful tangle. For this reason, the English tongue flows to the seas, and to speak it is to summon the history of the tidewaters by which it has travelled and been challenged. In many ways, Extinction, the book that I will write from my voyage to Antarctica, is this oceanic history.

Spirit breaks from the body’s chest
To the sea’s acres; over earth’s breadth
And whale’s range roams the mind now…‘The Seafarer,’ Anon, 800 AD

On 23 October, the British Antarctic Survey flew me to the Falkland Islands, where I boarded their research vessel, James Clark Ross, to enter the treacherous Southern Ocean. ‘At sea at last,’ I wrote in my journal on 28 October, ‘in my bunk, the storm barriers in place, the chattering metal and bitching architecture announcing our new displacement. I saw my first albatross! A black-browed albatross, as flawless against the air as a carving knife. And a giant petrel, like a touch of night, bringing on the darkness.’

BAS scientists receive international praise for their research into the importance of the Southern Ocean for global climate. Nerilie Abram, Robert Mulvaney, Eric Wolff, and Manfred Mudelsee have recently published their evaluation into the Weddell Sea region of Antarctica, and it is projects like this that will be undertaken while I am south for this season, particularly as it is International Polar Year. Much of the science focuses on the dynamics that occur at boundaries such as ocean fronts, where astounding, fickle features such as meanders and eddies develop, and frontal systems galvanise the air at the transitional regions between ice-covered and ice-free waters.

One legendary front, and the psychological pistol-shot for the start of my voyage, is the Antarctic Convergence. Along its edges, warmer, subantarctic waters touch against the cold polar waters of Antarctica. Superstition and a sudden chill accompanies any crossing of its mist-blurred, particoloured bounding line as the water temperature drops by around four degrees.

We made our crossing on 29 October. In my journal, I write, ‘It is wild outside, and the metalwork keens as the ship reels from side to side. I watch the white arrowheads of the snow-squall dart through the ship’s beams like a million migrating geese, migrating souls. Where the beams illumine the ocean, there is a tiny arena wherein the storm contends against the water’s inconstancy. Only hours earlier, there had been sun and unworried seas in which fur seals hooped alongside the ship, their forms so inelegant on land now unbound in their element, lone dynamites of flesh against the multitude of waters, hundreds of miles from shore.’

The following morning dawned to a day in which the US Senate debated the possible ratification of the Laws of the Sea, a unique document constructed upon assumptions of boundary.

‘Possibly the most significant legal instrument of this century.’ was how the United Nations Secretary-General described the Treaty after its signing in 1982. Much of its ongoing development depends on defining the line separating national and international waters. With Senate ratification, the US would join 155 nations that are party to common rules on navigation, fishing, and economic development of the open seas.

The US didn’t previously adopt the laws as President Reagan deemed the deep sea mining specifics as working against the best interests of the country.

I lend my name, and a great deal of my admiration to the British research vessel HMS Challenger, which was the first major oceanographic expedition of modern times and launched oceanography as a science. On 13 March 1874, in the depths beyond Hawaii, the crew of HMS Challenger lugged aboard the first known deposits of manganese nodules, immensely valuable sources of nickel, copper and cobalt ore.

‘Man marks the earth with ruin,’ Byron says in his poem, ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.’ ‘His control stops with the shore.’ Although the United Nations General Assembly declared the resources of the seabed beyond national shores to be the common heritage of mankind, there are no bounds to greed. Mark my words, as our landlocked resources begin to diminish and our mines reach to extinction, the imperialising of the oceans will intensify and Byron’s verses curdle to credulity.

‘Thy shores are empires,’ Byron once warned.

Adrift on these unbroken, enigmatic waters, I beg only that we do not map similar ruin and vested interest across our oceans.

Welcome to the Mslexia blog

British Antarctic Survey’s Artist in Residence Melanie Challenger will be Mslexia’s official South Pole correspondent during her three-month stay in the southern hemisphere during the 2007-2008 International Polar Year. Living aboard the RRS James Clark and working alongside the region’s scientists, the Forward-nominated poet will be sending us regular updates on her adventures, observations and dalliances with penguins.

‘International Polar Year is so historically important – different countries, governments, and societies converging to deepen our understanding of the planet and its systems in order to project policies for a sustainable future,’ says Challenger. ‘To be standing amid this as a woman and as a poet in a world increasingly inhospitable to sublime thinking or abstract lyricism is profoundly exciting to me.’