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.