But obolus is also oubliette (in Latin, oblīviscī): absolute interiority. Closed and locked, it is a room without language. One cannot speak of the sub-plot, but only its skin. Once it is covered with palm leaves, laid with fresh soil for seeding and planting, and then grown thick with vegetation, the sub-plot is dream, and the dream is always already obliterated the moment it is enacted—oblīviscī, forgotten.
Instead, we may lie down in some garden and close our eyes and test the space by thunking upon it.
5.
The sub-plot, then, reminds us that the garden never draws to a conclusion. It is the perpetual question When? Whereas the garden will proceed chronologically, the sub-plot may exist kairologically; that is, it has always already existed, and in doing so, it is always already forgotten.
6.
At the end of the season, say, in late summer, when the kale begins to yellow, the tomatoes are touched with frost, or the broccoli has been cleared of its crowns, we pull the stalks and rupture the soft soil. When the pulled roots are especially deep, one might get down closer to the soil and peer at the earth as it is carried away in bits, both clinging to the excavated roots and also as it piles concentrically around the new lack. From the fissure arises static, an aggregate noise (Latin, nausea; Greek, ναυσίη). But one realizes that the static is unsourced—it seems as if it was already there, somewhere in the color of the excavated plants, the garden itself, maybe the space around the garden.
Soon snows begin to fall. The ground is covered in a fine white sheen. When the first deep freezes come, the grubs and nymphs bury themselves deeper in the soil, protected by the blanket of snow. It is the season when all things kneel before Boreas, who dwells in the cave of Mount Haemus in Thrace. He is god of the north winds, bringer of winter. “By force I drive the weeping clouds,” says Boreas.
I whip the sea, send gnarled oaks crashing, pack the drifts of snow, and hurl the hailstones down upon the lands. I, when I meet my brothers in the sky, the open sky, my combat field, I fight and wrestle with such force that heaven’s height resounds with our collisions and a blaze of fire struck from the hollow clouds leaps forth. I, when I’ve pierced earth’s vaulted passageways and in her deepest caverns strain and heave my angry shoulders, I put ghosts in fear, and with those tremors terrify the world.
—Ovid
* * *
In spring the garden is reseeded. We plant spinach and kale, collards, turnips, carrots, parsnips, lettuce, radishes, and peas. Sometimes the nights dip to freezing, and in the morning the seedlings are a deeper and more fragile green. But if the day is warm, the plants recover, and by late afternoon it is as if the night never was. Soon the fruit trees bloom, the apricot a thousand buds of white. And then, when the promise of frost is forgotten, the tomatoes and peppers and eggplants and squash are sown. Sunflowers are already a foot high. Scapes are clipped from the garlic and onions. Soon summer will be upon us. The cycle is replenished.
And yet: There is always a lurking space, neurosis of the terra. It is there in the night. In Aeschylus, the seven warriors sacrifice a bull; “touching the bull’s gore with their hands,” they swear an oath to Phobos, god of fear, who delights in blood. But their promise is false. Gore will not undo gore. Tautologies, which are intractable, cannot be undone.
Gaia, earth and mother, daughter of primal Chaos, has her secrets. When we draw the space below the garden, so do we pay tribute to the silence from which all life springs.
The sub-plot is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.
—Judah Moscato, Sermon 31
The sub-plot is the song of our bodies. Always already lost, it refuses us. And we embrace it in discomfort.
1 Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle, Volume 4.
TABULA RASA, OR, SOME VERSIONS OF THE ICE
I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There the sun is forever visible, its broad disk just skirting the horizon and diffusing a perpetual splendor. There snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe. What may not be expected in a country of eternal light?
—R. Walton, Saint Petersburgh, Dec. 11, 17—
1.
At the South Pole, three oceans converge: the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific. In contrast to the immense sheets of ice and bergs, the waters are a profound blue. In his 1772 journal recording the crossing of the Antarctic Circle, Captain James Cook writes that the color can only be described as a tautology: “Blue is that blue is.”
Cook’s words echo the tetragrammaton of the Hebrew Bible: ’ehyeh ’ašer ’ehyeh (), “I will be that I will be.” Rabbi Moses de León, a thirteenth-century kabbalistic scholar, notes that ’ašer () is a mere anagram for rosh (), or “beginning.” Secreted in the tetragrammaton, then, is the origin.
Thus, in Cook, the eternity of the ice.
One hundred and twenty years later, when Robert Falcon Scott successfully lands on and explores areas of the Antarctic, he carries the words in his pocket, written on a scrap of paper. Scott’s 1910 journey was his last. The entire crew perished of starvation and cold. Some years later his journal was found, and the record of the tragedy is clear and hopeless. Near the end, the rations are gone and the men starve; blizzard upon blizzard pummels them, erasing any hope of exiting the icy, barren maze: “Oates’ last thoughts were of his Mother, but immediately before he took pride in thinking that his regiment would be pleased with the bold way in which he met his death. He slept through the night before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the morning—yesterday. It was blowing a blizzard. He said, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since.” Says Scott: “We all hope to meet the end with a similar spirit, and assuredly the end is not far.”
The men had made their way into the interior of the Antarctic, where three oceans converge and disappear, the beginning and the end, themselves disappearing into the most profound blank of space.
2.
Since the time of the ancient geometers, the arctic regions were the boundaries of the world. The North Pole is Arktikos, after the constellation Ursa Major: Arktos, the bear. Arktos is the guide, never dipping below the horizon and always visible to travelers:
the Great Bear, that some have called the Wain,
pivoting in the sky before Orion;
of all the night’s pure figures, she alone
would never bathe or dip in the Ocean stream.
—Homer
The South Pole is Antiarktikos, the beginning. There, in the caves of Nox, sleeps the dreamer Cronus,
confined in a deep cave of rock that shines like gold—the sleep that Zeus has contrived like a bond for him—, and birds flying in over the summit of the rock bring ambrosia to him, and all the island is suffused with fragrance scattered from the rock as from a fountain. And the prophecies that are greatest and of the greatest matters they come down and report as dreams of Cronus.
—Plutarch
Over the South Pole rises the constellation Centaurus. Half man, half horse, the centaur is the symbol for transition, existence posed on the threshold of two worlds. Beyond the gates of Cronus is the timelessness (aiónios) of the gods:
For you are infinite and never change. In you “today” never comes to an end. And since your years never come to an end, for you they are simply “today.” But you yourself are eternally the same.
—Augustine of Hippo
In Aristotle’s Physics, the poles become a model for the universe. The ice is entelecheia—a combination of enteles (full) + telos (purpose)—and dunamei—potential or power. The ice is poss
ibility. In De Anima, Aristotle uses the unwritten tablet (grammatei) analogously. Suspended between the poles of birth and death, we are coming-to-be (genesis) and ceasing-to-be (phthoras). Mankind is time (chronos), the unceasing perfection of the ice.
When Cook wrote “Blue is that blue is”; when Scott, carrying the words on a scrap of paper, perished in the abyss: There was the absolute confronted.
3.
He was the first man who desired to break the close-barred gates of Nature down. The vital force of his intelligence prevailed, and he advanced his course far past the blazing bulwarks of the world, and roamed the whole immeasurable Cosmos.
—Lucretius
Tracing the forgotten paths of the alchemists, Victor Frankenstein pursues nature to her hiding places. Says Frankenstein, “They had left to us, as an easier task: to give new names, and assemble, in connected classifications, the facts which they in a great degree had been the instruments of bringing to light.”
With only the moon to gaze on his midnight labors, Frankenstein collects the bones of the dead, and disturbs, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. “A churchyard was to me merely a library of bodies deprived of life,” he says, “which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. I paused, perusing and analyzing all the minutiae, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me. After days and nights of incredible labor and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.” His is the power to command the thunders of heaven, to mimic the earthquake. More, to rewrite the visible world with its own shadows.
Yet at the conclusion of his work, Frankenstein finds the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust fill his heart: “A cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed. By the dim and yellow light of the moon, I beheld the wretch as it forced its way through the window shutters.” Like the Arabian who had been buried with the dead, Frankenstein finds a passage to life; aided only by one glimmering, and seemingly ineffectual, light, he authors the dream that poisons sleep: the monster.
As one who has come breech through Cronus’s threshold, the monster is neither time nor timelessness. Scarred by his own liminality, he is cast abroad. Where he seeks protection and kindness, he is despised. He is an object for scorn. He is profoundly alone.
And so, united by no link to any other being in existence, the monster flees to the everlasting ices of the north. Says the monster, “Everything is related there, which bears reference to my accursed origin; the whole detail of that series of disgusting circumstances which produced it is there inscribed to mock me; the minutest description of my odious and loathsome person is written, in language which painted your own horrors and rendered mine indelible.”
Formed from primordial chaos—known to the alchemists as nigredo, the shadow within—it is to chaos that the monster seeks his return. At the threshold of night, where sleeps the dreamer, the monster will build his funeral pile and ascend it. He will exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away, and his ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. From the ice he will be absolved and unwritten: “My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus.”
Yet in Arktikos, desire is anathema. Hope is made grotesque in darkness and distance. The monster burns himself on the pile, and his ashes form hieroglyphs on the ice. His bones are masked by frost. Borne away in his glacial coffin, he is carried to the sea; and with the mighty shock of an earthquake, the ice splits and cracks and the monster is cast adrift, one of the numberless bergs in the frozen Arctic waters.
Perhaps, one day, the monster will be revealed to himself. One day, deep in his forever dream, the monster will hear the whisperings of a stranger. It is a voice that will come to him from beyond the threshold of time. “You perceive, now,” the voice will say, “that the life you’ve dreamed of is impossible except in a dream. You perceive that it was pure and puerile insanity, the silly creation of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks.
“Strange, indeed,” says the voice, “that you should not have already suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; a God to whom you ought to have been Adam, but were, rather, the fallen angel, driven from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere you have seen bliss, from which you alone have been irrevocably excluded. ‘Make me happy,’ you have said, ‘and I shall again be virtuous.’ You were benevolent and good; misery made you a fiend.
“Yet you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no bones. Frankenstein has no existence; he was but a dream—your dream, a creature of your imagination. And you are but a thought, dreaming at the threshold.
“Some day you may realize this. Then you will banish Frankenstein from your visions and he shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made him. On that day you will be free—to dream other dreams, and better!”
Until then, the monster is blind in his grief. He is a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought. By his nature he is inextinguishable and indestructible, dreaming forlorn among the empty eternities of his solitude.
4.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
—T. S. Eliot
Between the years of 1903 and 1905, Roald Amundsen became the first explorer to successfully traverse the Northwest Passage, a route that traces the southwestern coast of Greenland, and the northern coasts of Canada and Alaska. In December 1911, he reached the Polar Plateau. When asked how he was able to accomplish his many feats, he replied that he owed a great debt to the indigenous peoples. It was from them that he learned Arctic survival, using sled dogs for transportation and animal skins for warmth.
On June 18, 1928, while attempting to rescue part of an Italian exploration team that had crashed on their return from the North Pole, Amundsen’s plane disappeared in a fog near the Tromsø coastline. Focusing on a forty-square-mile area of the seafloor, the Royal Norwegian Navy’s unmanned submarine, Hugin 1000, searched for the wreckage. Nothing was found. Amundsen was the last of the Heroic Age of Arctic explorers.
In some versions of the ice, it is the unbroken silence that attracts and repels us. Says Aristotle, “as someone waking is to someone sleeping, as someone seeing is to a sighted person with his eyes closed, that which has been shaped out of some matter is to the matter from which it has been shaped.” In Aristotle is the hope of the unwritten, the coming-to-be.
At that certain hour, however, when solitude overwhelms us, we may try to make the ice speak. We author a demon, who, alone and anguished, kneels before his creator and asks, “Why did you form a monster so hideous that even YOU turned from me in disgust?” His ruined cry evaporates in the frozen absolute. The ice is mute.
Each year, as the earth grows warmer, the polar ice caps begin to melt. The oceans rise. Various species disappear or alter their migratory routes, and villages are in danger of flooding. Soon the earth may again become the hourless tranquillity of unbroken seas. Mankind’s destiny will be fulfilled, and the page, itself unwritten, will reveal its sublime secret. “Heartless void,” says the poet: “The ice is the fantasy our own annihilation.” And
here, perhaps, is the true terror of the ice: It is duma, silence. Called “the wielder of fiery judgment, the destroying angel,” Duma is eternal death.
Unless the Lord had given me help, I would soon have dwelt in the duma.
—Psalms
Among the descriptions of his South Pole expedition, however, Amundsen records another version of the Arctic:
It is some hourless moment in the early days of the world. The sea, absolutely still, so perfectly mirrors the night sky that I cannot tell where the universe begins and ends. And then, from amid a ring of stars, some thing appears to me. Soon it comes near to me. It might have once been a seal; but now, touching the fine hairs, and staring into lifeless eyes, I only see death.
As the thing floats before him in the abyss of starlight, Amundsen watches ice crystals sprout upon its body. Time moves at a great pace. Soon the thing is nothing more than a dark kernel within the ever-growing mass of ice. Aeons pass, and the seed is lost to him. “In those far-off days when the mighty mass of ice pushed on with awful force,” he writes, “without meeting hindrance or resistance, it met a superior power that clove and splintered it, and set a bound to its further advance. It was a frightful collision, like the end of a world. But now it is over: peace—an air of infinite peace lays over it all.” Where there once were placid seas, Amundsen now gazes at the great expanse of the Arctic.
In Amundsen’s vision, the ice is neither the beginning (rosh) nor the end (ehyeh); neither in time (chronos) nor eternal (aiónios). Instead of gods or deities or magic, the ice is a cocoon, inside of which is a thing: the sad opacity of flesh, robbed of spirit. It contains no secrets, nor does it proliferate them. Deep within the ice is death all the same, but it is death: unspeakable perfection.
Speaking Volumes Page 15
