by Maria Mutch
I keep coming out to the stairwell to feel the white walls’ entirely new presence. There isn’t a seam anywhere, crevice or trowel mark. Just this astonishing white surface.
People keep asking what colour I’m going to paint the walls. I abandon all the colour cards I’ve collected and go back to the paint store. It seems obvious to me what I should do, as the blank, this intriguing silent elegant blank, seems to call for more of the same. But you know by now that white isn’t really white, and ice isn’t just ice, and that a blank, like flypaper, gathers things to it, and so you look, and look again, and there is always more. I gather up the variations of colour slips, stuffing them into my pockets: Frost, Snow, Rice Paper, Studio White, Popcorn, Whitecap, Journal, and Goalpost. Also: Brilliance, Lightning, Fresh Start, and Nirvana. Possibility. Whipping Cream and Whitewash. Whiteout.
provisions
The books about Antarctica turn up on the steps or are wedged in the storm door by men from UPS trucks, typically after 4 p.m. I recognise the purr of the trucks as they pull in and then away. Ordering the books has become a bit of a ritual, a way of receiving this distant but vivid place, a way to govern its presence by summoning them one or two at a time, the books that tend to have a penguin or a berg or a ghost-ship on the cover.
The problem with this sort of exploration, aside from the way that it can communicate only certain aspects of the experience of being there, is that the books tend to hew to the periphery, which is generally where the animals and plants are, because how, really, do you write a book about a blank? The periphery is cold enough but almost baroque with detail: lichens and mosses and stout flowers, cacophonous birds and seals, and icebergs that tour the seas like cruise ships, except bigger (much bigger). There is an algae that turns the snow pink and a fish with white blood. The coastal water’s comparative warmth seeps into the cracks in the ice, causing its disintegration, frills the berg bottoms with enough sustenance for creatures to dwell, while the entire collection of pack ice turns in ancient rotations propelled by ocean currents. Add to this the absurdities of contrast: huge ice shelves composed of tiny crystal prisms and the whales that sustain themselves on krill.
It is the blank to the south, though, its sameness and lunar severity, that haunts us, though students of ice will list the variants they find, the rub of proximity that cleaves tabular bergs from shelves, growlers from bergy bits. They will rattle off: frazil ice, congelation ice, infiltration ice, undersea ice, ice cakes, pancake ice, ice bastions, shore ice, ice that is vuggy or rotten or fringed; blue ice, green ice, dirty ice, and brash ice; ice in rinds and folds and pinnacles. Ice that looks like pencils, or bullets. Ice that basically keeps its minute distinctions endless under a curtain of simplicity.
The South Pole, reached by calculation, is a figment of a beating heart. The universe comprehends itself through its living beings, extending only a few humans onto the ice, nudging the filthy, clumsy, and slow-moving creatures deeper into the landscape to reach the centre. Endpoints here are achieved by celestial calculations and tallies and reckoning. The humans say, hereabouts, and stick their pins. Roald Amundsen, in December 1911, was the first to do this, arriving a month ahead of Robert Scott. He left nothing to chance, making a radius of twelve miles around his guess of the Pole’s exact location, so he could say with some certainty: we are here. When he and his men were getting close to the Pole and about to be the first humans to claim it, they made a stop where the dogs sniffed toward the scentless South as though, Amundsen wrote, there was something remarkable to be found there.
Robert Scott did not follow Amundsen’s example and use dogs on his journey—some of which, with painful hearts, Amundsen’s men had finally eaten—but had starving, depleted men instead, and they came upon the Pole about a month later, only to find Amundsen’s dark flag already there. It is an ironic idea that the Pole can be claimed, because what else is there to do but reckon a spot and run toward it? The first to see is the first to own, except that in this place, everything moves in its invisible rotations, the cycle of crystals from the interior out through the ice pack, as the ice heads blindly but unceasingly to the distant sea, hauling any pins in the map with it.
Prior to Byrd’s second expedition, in 1933, the pack ice was the scene of entrapments and slaughters. The ravaging of fur seals in the early nineteenth century was a long red gash over the Ice that nearly extinguished the species and left other wounds behind it. Sailing southwest of the Antarctic Peninsula, the crew of the Belgica in 1898 became ensnared in the pack and wintered over, suffered the night with scurvy and madness. On the expeditions of Shackleton and Scott, ponies and sledge dogs perished or were killed by their owners for food; Amundsen was mesmerized by the cutlets of what were once his dogs being trimmed and laid out on the snow. Curious seals and penguins that wandered too close to the men’s camps met a similar fate. And faced with the Ice’s simplicity, the Nazis flew their planes over it and shed a black rain of swastika flags. The flags, no doubt, suffered the same fate as everything else, buried in drift and moved inch by inch to the sea.
So there is Byrd in his suffering, on the Barrier, and all around him a moat of crystals.
The periphery’s elaborations, the exposed rocks and wild seas and trapped ships, are long gone, and even the crammed world he tried to bring with him and store in his hut is dwindling. The place he inhabits now is a honed one that doesn’t refer to humans but to the general absence of them. An absence, in turn, that could be investigated only by a single person.
When I lie in the dark, I try to remember the light, hold on to it, to my daily runs when the sun is coming up or going down; the day when I ran through the woods along the ocean and the falling sun lit the trees sideways with orange spots that looked like trail blazes, so that it wasn’t until my shadow erased them that I understood they hadn’t been painted on. And the autumn day that had been as dim as a burrow, the ocean had looked like lead, and most of the leaves were down, but I found some maples still dangling their light high up; they were black sentries with yellow campaign flags. And the times R and I have sat on the beach with the boys in late afternoon just to experience the light turn peach and gold and the illuminated grasses hold back the dunes. I stroke these moments like rosary beads.
provisions
There was the morning R and I went to New York City without the boys—we went by train, riding along light-saturated, weedy Connecticut fields, past graffiti and junkshops and wetlands, which always seem to me like the behind of things, like being backstage except well lit. We’d wandered through Central Park, past marathoners and a man wearing a bath towel praying fervently on the sidewalk, facing the rising sun. There was something remarkable about the sun that day—that when setting, it would align itself with the cross streets, fully illuminating them in long slices; the effect, occurring twice yearly, has been dubbed Manhattanhenge.
We got into the Metropolitan Museum of Art before the crowds only just beginning to gather at the main entrance, and wandered through the galleries, which seemed larger and stranger than usual because, except for the guards, we were alone. I wanted to see the iris painting by Van Gogh—one of the two that he mentions in his letter to his brother, Theo, in May 1890. At the moment the improvement is continuing, the whole horrible crisis has disappeared like a thunderstorm, and I’m working here with calm, unremitting ardour to give a last stroke of the brush. I’m working on a canvas of roses with a bright green background and two canvases of large bouquets of violet irises, one lot against a pink background in which the effect is harmonious and soft through the combination of greens, pinks, violets. On the contrary, the other violet bouquet (ranging up to pure carmine and Prussian blue) standing out against the striking lemon yellow background with other yellow tones in the vase and the base on which it rests is an effect of terribly disparate complementaries that reinforce each other by their opposition.
I imagined that Van Gogh wasn’t sleeping much at the asylum in St. Remy in 1890. He would soon be dead
. I stood in front of the irises and watched them as though waiting for a camouflaged bird to move and reveal itself. Of the two works mentioned in his letter, the one in the museum was the one with the pink background. Or rather, at one time it was pink, but was now just about completely white. So not-pink, in fact, that the viewer wouldn’t know simply by standing in front of it that the background used to be a different colour, so nearly complete was the transformation. The explanation for such an absence, as written on the information card attached to the wall, was owing to a fugitive red pigment.
The words were almost as magnetic to me as the painting. A red in the act of fleeing. In the act of being unreliable, maybe hiding. There, and gone. Red, despite its volatility, despite being errata, and arousal, a pumping heart, was—in the painting anyway—retreating. Van Gogh had merged a dollop with obliterating white to create the pink he intended—pink, which is erasure and rapture. His gesture had been full of intention; he’d meant to enforce a kind of harmony. Was the change something he anticipated, as he was well versed in colours’ transposing nature? Maybe he understood well enough that the motion he extended into the painting would be instable, something living. The paint that was now white held a secret, one about mutability.
I could stand before the painting as the sleepless parent of a wordless child and make these sorts of connections, teasing out the weakest threads between seemingly isolated and irrelevant occurrences and tying them together until they meant something. I can’t say why I would do this, only that it occurs in the same way that weather happens or tides, though to make the connections, I suppose, is to bear witness, to become a conduit for a language without words. There is a supposition at work that meaning wants to be found. When I was standing in front of Van Gogh’s irises, just about eclipsing the entire show was the behaviour of red and something about the nebulous territories we believe to be ours. Something, too, about another force concentrating its will upon one. In the emptied background, then, a simple truth of our situation, that unreliability is an essential trait of what is living.
R and I, along with friends, take Gabriel to a different jazz club, this one in New London, Connecticut, about an hour from our house. We’ve been here a few times before. I walk Gabriel through the puzzle of bodies on the club’s upper level, which is a sports bar, to get downstairs to our table in the basement, where the floor is a grey mesh of footprints and every surface is sticky. Fries come in plastic baskets with wax paper liners, and the light fixtures don’t match. A brick wall on one side is topped by chain link and coloured lights and seems faintly like a psych ward at Christmas. The room, painted deep red, is long and narrow, and the band—sax, trumpet, drums, stand-up bass, and piano—fits on a small stage about six inches off the ground, and looks out to an audience that wakes around 10 p.m. The musicians wear jackets and ties and, in his other life, the guy leading them with his trumpet is an emergency room doctor. The sound for him must be full of subtlety or sirens.
They play “Sandu” by Clifford Brown, and the deeper they go, the more alleys appear. A passing train hoots its hollow blast into the club, and the sound links with the horns before fading. Baby Grand Davis pinches some dissonance from the piano with his right fingers, then does a melodic slide down the keys that moves him straight off his seat and almost onto the table of two women who are seated near the stage. He mugs at them, pulls himself back in, and the band is jumping. It’s like the stage is a griddle with water drops bouncing on it. Gabriel isn’t rocking and clapping as he usually is, he is utterly transfixed.
Hoagy Carmichael talked about a night in 1923, at a black-and-tan joint, listening to and then joining in on piano with cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. He showed me that jazz could be musical and beautiful as well as hot. He showed me that tempo doesn’t mean fast. His music affected me in a different way. Can’t tell you how—
like licorice, you have to eat some.
A radio announcer called Monk’s music extraordinary, in spite of him playing the wrong notes on the piano. Monk dropped notes from his chords like he was shucking peas, and within the newly created space the remaining notes joined edgily to create his signature sound. There was this and his silences, hesitations like colours. Monk called the station switchboard: … the piano, he said, ain’t got no wrong notes.
Hoagy Carmichael: It was the music. The music took me and had me and it made me right.
S’s friend A is over at the house. A is the kind of kid who’s going to educate him on a few things, throw light into some dark corners. The first time A’s mother dropped him off, she was heading back down the walkway when she turned and said, Oh … Don’t let him near any matches. For Hallowe’en, before she’d put a stop to the idea, he wanted to be a pimp. When I took them out to lunch one day, he perused the cocktail menu while laughing heartily.
S and A are playing upstairs while I’m in the kitchen, moving between occupying Gabriel and chopping vegetables. I hear S run down the stairs, a pause and a rustle close by me, then the thup-thup-thup as he runs back up. A few feet away from me, just around the corner, a crackling sound materialises, the intimations of distance and far-off places. I find the walkie-talkie he’s put on the floor and pick it up. His transmission then: We’re thirsty. I think of Byrd, and also Monk, his incident in the Delaware Hotel with the water and the silence.
He’d stopped at the hotel and walked into the lobby because he wanted a drink of water. According to the hotel owners, who called the police, he just stood there, saying nothing. There was silence as heavy as armour and the owners delivering their rage to the black man in need of something. 1958. You have to admit, silence shakes things up.
Only months before, Monk had played Carnegie Hall with Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, and Sonny Rollins, among others; he’d played the Newport Jazz Festival, been photographed by Esquire and the subject of a profile in Downbeat magazine after winning the critics’ poll. Then there he was, thirsty and saying nothing.
His friend Nica—Pannonica, the baroness who’d been driving him to Baltimore in her Bentley—told the police officers that he was ill. (In another six months, he would come late to a gig, sleepless and wild with pacing, would play and pace, then sit at the piano without moving until all of his musicians, Rouse and Jones and Taylor, had gotten off the stage and left. It was possible for him to sit and cause an unfolding all around him.)
She told them he was ill, and the police officers replied that they should leave, but then they followed the Bentley along the highway and pulled them over. Monk tucked into his silence as he held the car door and one of the cops started beating him, beating his hands. A drumming of hands and sticks, and a gap in the night.
There is another story, too, of Manhattan covered in snow and Monk sliding his Buick into the back of another car. He slid into the car, and then his silence, which provoked the other driver. Snow, and silence. The police came to get him and took him to a hospital. On his car, his beloved Buick Special, they left a piece of paper:
Psycho taken to Bellevue.
At the market where I shop, there’s a woman, J, with a vague disability who bags the groceries. She’s probably forty-five or fifty years old and, in the current parlance, she is high functioning. She smiles enormously when she recognises her customers, then looks through her thick glasses as if down a well and begins slowly to bag the items. On a recent day, the clerk who was operating the cash register and who was apparently annoyed, snapped to J that there were already cloth bags in front of her, she didn’t need to use the plastic. J drew out a slow smile and said amiably, Oh … okay, and gingerly opened a cloth bag. The clerked hissed and jerked a box of pasta across the scanner. I watched how J, unruffled, continued her careful process, placing a few items in the cloth bags before returning to the plastic ones. I saw something I recognised, the retreat with the hint of defiance, a wall around her. The back-and-forth between the clerk and J unfolded as if pasta and apple juice were symbols of will and acquiescence. J finished filling the
bags, lifted them into the shopping cart. I saw a flicker of humour, and we grinned at each other.
Autonomy finds a way. Gabriel’s autonomy expanded with his discovery of willful sitting. Or the plop-and-sit, if we’re out walking somewhere. He’s been known to settle to the ground in the middle of parking lots, sidewalks, beaches, and dirt trails. Or if he’s already sitting, he can refuse to stand. It seems when he does it that there’s an essential honesty, not because he isn’t capable of subterfuge, or can’t understand mischief or sleight of hand, but because his alternative language, in the instance of rebel sitting, uses his whole body; he embodies defiance with a whole note. I know its power because both R and I have stood in impotent rage before it, panicked to find ourselves unable to move him, have him do what seems so important at that moment for him to do. Like Monk, he can cause an unraveling all around him.
Gabriel and I listen one night to Monk’s “Blue Bolivar Blues” in R’s and my bedroom, and I sit down on the bed with him, being careful to stay close to the edge. As much as silence is a function of his being, so is space, and he sometimes needs a good deal of it. The bed, when he’s listening, is his. It is possible for me, faced daily with his interior rules, to want to flout them—sometimes you just want to sit on the bed. My presence beside him intrigues him, then it seems to disturb him. It’s a familiar scenario, with the usual loops and repetitions, set to Monk’s upbeat tune (which Monk also named “Bolivar Blues” and “Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are”; one of the places his friend Nica lived was the Bolivar Hotel). His focus shifts from Monk to me, as he reaches across the white duvet to my leg and touches it, gently at first, stroking my pant leg, before starting to try to move me. The white space is an ice floe that has gone unnoticed until he indicates it, shows me it’s there. I stay a moment, despite knowing he’ll be held in the grip of one of his thought circles until I get up. Typically, I try to keep him out of the loops or break them as soon as possible by distracting him—anything simple will work: singing a song, giving him a drink, moving him to another room, or in this case, if I simply get off the bed, he’ll stop. But I stay there a bit longer, watching his eyes, which have become black, and his electrified focus while Monk plays in our ears, in part because I’m having a moment of my own—I’m tired and just want to sit on the damn bed—and because I want to examine the space and his reaction, find what they mean. That there is possibly no meaning to be found doesn’t seem to bother me. Somewhere in the tiniest particles of the space is the secret. Okay, Gabe, okay, I say. I’m up.
