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!
“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!
4 comments:
I have found Melannie's comments provoking. We are in danger of irrevocably changing our world. I teach 10 and 11 year old children about being 'eco' friendly' - a word bandied about our educational establishments without thought for the current reality. we talk about what will happen when..., what will become of the world if.... But what about now?
That's an awful lot of snow and ice for one poet to cope with. I'm impressed by your fortitude and social conscience and sense of adventure, Melanie. Onward and upward!
Jane x
(Fellow Saltee)
I'm sure I'd love your blog if I could understand every word. Could you make an effort in your writing for people in my situation, I can recommend you a good book : "Cambridge learner dictionary" the author tries to be as clear as possible, a reference for everybody involved in literature. Trust me. I would be grateful. Thanks. Richard
Richard's post made me laugh. When suggesting that someone improves their grasp of the English language, it's always a good idea to ensure your own writing is syntactically correct, properly punctuated and has some sense of style. Otherwise you run the risk of looking like a bit of an arse.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
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