Antarctica
In 2005, I was fortunate to accompany a team of research scientists and divers (Sam Bowser – the Principal Investigator - Jack Harris, Neal Pollock, Henry Kaiser and Steve Clabeusch) to Explorers Cove, New Harbor, Antarctica. Our ten-week season on the ice was remarkable in ways both conceivable and inconceivable; lasting friendships were formed, a valuable collaborative partnership was born, various cross-continental conversations and inter-disciplinary projects were dreamed up and initiated. These pages offer a small glimpse into that adventure, and into its ongoing resonances…
Mount Erebus - from New Harbor
(First, a few lines from my Dry Valleys notebooks, October - Dec. 2005.)
Rare sounds abound in these places where wind is dressed in white.
It roars and twists and winds its way into sea and lungs and ice.
Obscure cantatas start and end here, their notation reaches in to head
and heart continues onward, outward, upward.
This absence of heat hurts hands and throat and chest, but ah, a chance
- why not - to bare secrets to an audience of waiting stones.
Ardour casts reason aside in this short season of constant sunshine.
No birds haunt these arid contours, the wind-stretched, wind-wrecked coast.
Erebus sleeps and wakes and wakes and sleeps, a restless sentry
ill at ease beside her own still sea.
Hidden tides raise doubts about weather - and whether – and post-catabatic treasure.
Icebergs chant. Arias are born transcendent as the sun.
Wait.
Watch.
Truth resounds on an inward breath.
Watch.
Wait.
Walking the transition – New Harbor 2005
AT HOME IN ANTARCTICA
In this place, silence has a voice
wide-ranging as the continent.
Some say it’s on the cusp
of madness, the way it hums
and stutters, mutters to itself
in quietest tones.
In this place, the universe
brims. Inside absence,
presence. Inside distance,
dust and our sleeping earth
dreaming beneath her thin blue
mask of ice.
In this place, the necessity
of memory, recollections
of a loved one’s face
shape of laughter, weight
of breath.
In this place, nostalgia
roams, patient as slow
hands on skin, transparent
as melt-water. Nights are light
and long. Shadows settle
on the shoulders of air.
Time steps out of line
here stops to thaw
the frozen hearts of icebergs.
Sleep isn’t always easy in this place
where the sun stays up all night
and silence has a voice.
Trapped iceberg with Erebus in the background
THIN ICE
Step
out
onto
white
not
as
a
body
bearing
any
weight
but
as
a
feather
might
think
of
ink
in
a
quill
drawing
a
cantata
out
of
light.
Ice calligraphy
New Harbor sculpture garden
KATABATIKOS
Love poem for the continent and her rebel windShe never sleeps
deep REM sleep.
No. She tosses
and turns, cannot lie still
with bones and blood
at ease, always keeps one eye
open. The wind
might stir at any time
touch her cold
white skin, travel
every willing curve
and contour. She hears him
long before he comes
without warning
his hands trace her upper valleys,
her mountains and hanging glaciers
travel her frozen
coastline. She anticipates him
as the beloved awaits a lover.
There’s nothing silent
or passive about them. And
when all is said and done
they both know
their meeting will shake them
it always does
but see, it’s nothing more
than temporary dishevelment.
Theirs is a relationship refined
by this curiously lyrical insistence.
FLAG TAUNT
Get on with it
wind.
Show us no mercy
wind
set us a-quiver
wind
red
wind
yellow
wind
green and black
wind
white on white
wind
It’s okay
wind
there’s no one here but her
wind
and us
wind
no one else watching
wind
save light
wind
and ice.
Send a thrill
wind
through our spines
wind
listen when we whistle
wind
lean bodies leaning
wind
Show us
wind
your best and worst intentions
wind
nothing you do
wind
can undo us
wind.
Get on with it
wind.
FLAG LULLABY
New Harbor, Antarctica.The wind is visiting
New Harbor for once
the chill and light
of midnight bow down
and listen.
We shelter
inside the Jamesway. Outside
five flags are live skins
shocked into action
by some ancient command.
They brace themselves
and beat like drums
that thrum and thrum
and thrum till sleep
overcomes.
Crater stars - SEM photograph
QUANDRY
For Samuel Bowser and B-043, 2005
How odd you've not seen
these crater stars before, Sam.
Perhaps the gromias’ intelligence
leads them to consider
there may be some sense in beautifying
their sterile laboratory environment.
Well, why not, Sam? Why not?
We place them in our time frame but
Explorers’ Cove is their domain.
350 million years ago, the same purple
scallops and luminous white
sea stars graced the forams’ seabed.
We are the newcomers here, strangers passing
through. We haul them to the surface,
intent on finding answers to the universe
and yes, they show us many things.
But here we are now talking, and there they are
ancient and silent as always.
We translate what we think they know
into what they know we cannot understand.
And as for these crater stars, Sam? Imagine the ripples
through the science community when you say
you’ve discovered the world’s oldest one-celled creature
designing wallpaper for the heck of it in your petri dish
in Albany, New York?
But wait. There’s another possibility. Perhaps
your gromia miss the old Antarctic
sea stars, and these strange shapes
are simple expressions of their dreams for home
GROMIA DNA POEMS– composed with Sam Bowser
GROMIA DNA CHAIRS
YEARS
Taylor Dry Valleys
Six million years
the Dry Valleys have been waiting
and still no rain.
Old notes remain to sustain
snow and sand.
Come. Rest your ear
against these brittle waves.
The ancient foraminifera never sleep.
They lie awake forever
perfecting their private alphabet.
Tapping in code, they set questions
and clues adrift on currents
beneath the ice.
Phrase-marks with a hint of the familiar
rise and fall
rise and fall
but without the accompaniment of language
our untrained ears can hear
answers and meaning
elude us.
One-celled creatures
have the upper hand here. This much is clear.
Knowledge and ignorance
arrive and leave
arrive and leave
on the same invisible tides
Astrammina Triangularis or ‘Euclid’ - light microscopy photograph & painting by Sam Bowser. This enchanting foram beings life as a triangle, and as it evolves, transform into progressively complex forms – a square, hexagon, hectagon, septagon, octagon, nonagon, etc… A wonderful metaphor for our own process of individuation!
The forams never sleep. They lie awake forever perfecting their private alphabet. Tapping in code, the set questions and clues adrift on currents beneath the ice… one-celled creatures have the upper hand here. This much is clear.
"If we are to be properly humble in our use of the world, we need places that we do not use at all. We need the experience of leaving something alone. We need places that we forbear to change, or influence by our presence, or impose on even by our understanding; places that we accept as influences upon us, not the other way around, that we enter with the sense, the pleasure, of having nothing to do there; places that we must enter in a kind of cultural nakedness, without comforts or tools, to submit to rather than to conquer. We need what other ages would have called sacred groves. We need groves, anyhow, that we would treat as if they were sacred, in order, perhaps, to perceive their sanctity." [Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture 30 (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977)]
"Silence here is both aural and spatial. It is silence with a presence and a voice. Rocks stand mute, but the ice has a wide repertoire of sounds. You have only to kneel amongst the cracks and fissures to tune into its songs... And all this white? White is no more than a disguise – beneath it, the continent is a dressing-up box of endless surprise. It is a place of extremes and contradictions. Honesty and deception compete for supremacy in a land that’s magical and seductive one minute, devastatingly harsh and destructive the next…’
(Excerpts from notebooks – CB, October 2005)