by Alicia Kopf
The Icebreaker
I often find myself getting stuck in this project. I see nothing before me, just white. Yet beneath it there are many things. The shrieking of seals. Was it the poles I wanted to talk about? Or is it just the image of the snow that fascinates me? Instability, confusion, cold (it’s hot), determination. Sensations that were the constant companions of the polar explorers, as well as those of us who work with the blank white page. Because I’m not interested in the polar explorers in and of themselves, but rather in the idea of investigation, of seeking out something in an unstable space. I’d like to talk about all that as a metaphor, because what interests me is the possibility of an epic, a new epic, without foes or enemies; an epic involving oneself and an idea. Like the epic that artists and writers undertake.
Some mountaineers have reached their highest peaks after a severe personal crisis, when they found themselves stuck at a dead end. That reminds me of the epic of remaining in the place where we are and enduring what life has dealt us. Yes, that is also epic: not fleeing but staying put—I think of my mother, of so many who take care of dependent parents and children—and of anyone who resists in an intractable situation, like an illness. And that is epic, it is a battle. But there aren’t yet good images or good metaphors for all that.
I am searching for them.
Research Notes V
Heroes
The question in Fitzcarraldo, Herzog’s film in which the protagonist ascends a mountain in a steamship to descend on the other side, is whether we are dealing with a hero or an antihero. This question runs through most of my readings on conquests and explorations, when looking at the personal biographies of Amundsen, Boyd, Cook, Peary, Shackleton, Scott.
In Class
Today in class, with my students, we were writing a story about a man in love with a hippopotamus. One of them declared: “It should be a walrus, they’re harder to kiss.”
Conquerors
At my high school there was a sign that said: “The world belongs to those who read.”
That’s a lie, I thought, a lie, a lie, a lie.
Hunter
I seek. I don’t know when I will return. I’ll bring back the goods, but I don’t know when.6
6 “Hunter” by Björk plays in the background.
The Method
My brother has taught me many things, starting when I was very small. When we had coloring books, I’d fill them quickly with a scribble on each page, while he patiently and systematically colored over my scribble, as if my mark weren’t even there. That enraged me and at the same time amazed me. Similarly, he always finished the sticker albums I left half-done. I’ve always been irritated by systematization, because it goes against my nature, but later, seeing the results it brings, I’ve attempted it. In the end I’ve become someone who scribbles, systematically.
II
Library Atop an Iceberg
The Fault
I’m eight years old. One day when I come home from school, I find my parents waiting for me in the dining room. I sit on my father’s lap. I don’t really understand what they are saying. They explain that I’ll have two homes, that my dad’s going to buy us a VCR. Even though they try to put an optimistic spin on the situation, they don’t seem happy. My brother accepts it calmly, I cry.
The first Christmas I find green pills in the kitchen, at the bottom of drawers, and in my mother’s purse.
My father starts to wear jeans and cowboy boots. He asks the clerks in a record store what music the young kids are listening to. He is thirty-six. He buys a U2 record, War. The second Christmas my dad tries to come back home. Something goes wrong and he leaves again. It’s the saddest day of my childhood. My mother can’t get up in the morning, and she stays in bed.
“Take a green pill, Mom. You’ll feel better.”
She gives me the money and I buy and wrap the gifts. I’m nine years old.
More, similar Christmases and New Years pass. The recession of ’92. My father, a salesman for a big clothing brand, loses his job, I don’t really know how. I hear things like “suspension of payments,” “crisis in the textile sector in Catalonia,” “layoffs,” things I’ve been hearing again lately. For years I don’t know exactly what he does, sometimes he represents brands of jeans, or stockings. He carries the samples in a silvery briefcase. My mother, a teacher, supports us on her own.
In his late thirties, my father runs marathons and triathlons—it’s that or become an alcoholic, he says. The looks and questions from some of my female teachers when he picks me up at school indicate that he is a seductive man. He starts a relationship with a painter who dyes her hair red. A sophisticated woman who’s lived in the capital. She has a daughter four years younger than me. Her parents let them live in an apartment near the center of the city that the family owns and they move in together. The walls are covered in art, loaned by a brother-in-law with a gallery. We play with her many party dresses and her makeup cases. Sometimes I hear them making love and fighting afterward. A record by Juan Luis Guerra often plays. I don’t understand why my father now takes another little girl to school.
I express my consternation at not having him at home in a poem, which I write on cardstock made to look like a window, with fabric glued to the top on either side, like curtains. My father hangs it up beside the drawings made by the painter’s daughter in the bedroom they share. One day when I get back from school and my father isn’t there, she quarrels with me about the poem. My first lesson in censorship and the power of the word. Their relationship lasts four years and breaks up after several passionate outbursts. My father still doesn’t have a steady job and he doesn’t want to show us his new rental apartment on the poor side of town. Years later, his future wife shows me a photo: the apartment is small and sad, its only possession a bicycle. My mother decides to go back to school and isn’t home many evenings. The wedding photos still hang on the wall of the dining room. They remain there for many years.
My father’s family’s version of the separation puts the blame on my mother, “a woman obsessed with her work who neglected my father.” As for my mother, I soon grow used to being her confidante, to listening time and time again about why they separated (my father’s not coming home at night, etc.) like a lesson I failed in school. On both sides they would tell me, both then and later on, to move on, turn the page. So I write and turn the page.
Research Notes VI
Oceanography
Yesterday, as I quoted the names of foreign explorers to C, a woman I work with, she told me about Pepita Castellví, the prestigious Catalan oceanographer. I found a speech she gave in 2007, declared International Polar Year, for the inauguration of La Mercè, Barcelona’s annual festival:
[…] It is paradoxical that at a time when a large part of humanity has reached a level of scientific and technological development that allows it to tackle challenges beyond Earth, there are parts of this planet that are completely ignored by science. The oceans are the most scandalous example. […] The oceans occupy 75% of the Earth’s surface and the underwater reliefs are deeper than those on the surface of the continents. Everest is more than 8,800 meters high, but the deepest sea trench known today is more than 11,000 meters deep. Given these characteristics, it would lead us to think that the most important part of the planet is not the visible land but the large volume of water that surrounds it. […]
At this level the polar regions come into play; their large masses of ice serve as thermal buffers against the warming waters at lower latitudes. The study of the Antarctic is a new field of study for science. It more or less began in 1957 with the celebration of the Second International Geophysical Year. Spain was left out of that movement, since it was unable and unwilling to take on such a large-scale project at a time when even research on a more accessible scale didn’t have the minimum means it needed. […]
I like to say that all the events that take place in nature are recorded in the elements, which we have within our reach, like a great big book. The problem is that we don’t know how to read what we are being shown. Actually, scientific investigation is nothing more than learning that language in order to be able to interpret what nature is telling us.
[…]
I wanted to end with a quote from Ernest Shackleton, the great explorer who led one of the greatest adventures ever in Antarctica: “The Polar Regions leave a profound mark on those who have struggled in them, which is difficult to express to men who have never left the civilized world.”
Ping-Pong
Sixteen years old. When my mother and I argue, which happens often, I try to go live with my father, whom I adore. His new girlfriend—British, childless, and significantly younger than him—makes an effort to grow into the role, but she wasn’t counting on having to live with a teenager. A few days after I settled in on the couch, strange silences and whispering start in their bedroom. I hear a pained voice through the paper-thin walls of the new rental apartment. The next day, the woman sits outside on the balcony and now she’s no longer speaking. I grab my rucksack, hop on my second-hand Derbi Variant and go back to my mom’s house. Ping-pong. In that period I date a skater quite a bit older than me who lives in a squat. He’s twenty-four and his only job, besides skating, is selling hashish. Sometimes I spend the night with him. That’s the end of my good grades and awards. I skip school a lot.
Eight years later, my mother still hasn’t told anyone at work, or at my school, that she’s separated. I imagine that’s to avoid pity. At school—an overcrowded public high school in the nineties, one of those prefab barracks that still today are used as patches on the public education system in this country—the students who come from stable environments and aren’t very curious do well, other students find opportunities to stray: the local bar, with constant card games and table football, the nearby park, with constant pot smoking. An enthusiastic teacher saves more lives than any of the coppers wandering around those places. It’s the art and philosophy professors, not the literature ones, that make me want to stay in class. On my own initiative, I visit the psychologist at the student center. She asks me about the members of my family. She makes some sort of family tree in a file. There are a lot of white spaces. Pieces are missing and the support points are inverted. She looks at me over her glasses, trying to hide her perplexity. She gives me a sheet of paper with a blank schedule. She says I need to get organized. I don’t go back.
One day when I go to look at clothes in an alternative-fashion store, the clerk, who has a Mohawk and platform shoes, offers me a job. He says I should go by the club where he works and they’ll give me a try. It’s the period of the emergence of techno. Laurent Garnier, Jeff Mills, Daft Punk and the best DJs come through that club. After the trial I start working there on the weekends—everybody else is going there too, and that way I can get in free and make some money. I like to dress up and dance.
The guy who hired me, Vanity—he refers to himself in the feminine—also does our makeup, à la Blade Runner, Björk, or inspired by anything that seems futuristic, androgynous or Japanese. We wear our hair short and bleached or colorfully dyed, with Mohawks or really long extensions. Because of our proximity to France, that club was one of the first in the country to make the walls tremble to the techno beat. Fueled by Ecstasy, the promise of shared love floats through the place. My favorite wig—which transforms me into a replicant—is purple, very straight and cut into a pageboy. But today I’ll wear the silvery geisha one, made out of air-conditioning tubing. In the dressing rooms there are gowns made of colorful, deflated balloons and even stranger, transparent pinafores lined with real candies, some of them missing. Since the wig is eye-catching enough, I choose a short, simple, white number.
The place is booming. Vanity rushes to do our makeup. She paints a horizontal white stripe that covers my eyes and puts on false neon eyelashes.
“Alright, kids, get on down to the dance floor.” She claps her hands and lets out a high-pitched giggle.
Outside of the dressing room the decibels are deafening. The club, painted black, is located in a former convent and has three levels: on the top one are the dressing rooms; on the second, a chill-out area with sofas and a small dance floor; on the bottom, the main floor surrounded by various bars, and an outdoor terrace with a swimming pool where most of the regulars have gone swimming in their clothes. Almost six foot one in my white platform boots and white micro-mini dress, I pass through the throng of teenagers, who respond with open smiles and half-maniacal, half-innocent looks of admiration provoked by ecstasy and amphetamines. I leap over the railing on the second floor that separates the foyer from the podium. The DJ welcomes me by slowing down the music’s beat and the light technician puts a spotlight on me, changing the color from purple to white. The spotlight blinds me and I feel a comforting warmth. I lift my arms, and look up at the origin of the brightness. The bass in the music vibrates throughout my entire body, there is a suspended moment; Pris, a basic pleasure model of replicant, awakens. Some part of her brain predicts the change in beats perfectly; progression, rising melody line—her arms respond with tai chi movements—five seconds later, climax; boom boom boom boom the bass drum echoes in chest cavities, arms release, her body reacts with the movements of an automaton brought to life. On the dance floor, those with ecstasy in their veins let their eyes half-close and their jaws unhinge. Black light makes their smiles glow and the first chords of the basso continuo in Daft Punk’s new song are heard; then comes the vocoder:
Around the world Around the world, Around the world Around the woorld.
Euphoria. My counterpart appears, a guy with blue hair, his torso nude, metallic pants and white platforms. We transform into mummies, imitating the steps in Michel Gondry’s music video. The DJ introduces a new sample. A bruising bass line; everyone shakes their heads, some lift a thumb toward us. The rhythm gets more and more dizzying. The dancing becomes a race. They offer me drinks. I dance out of inertia. They give me a pill. I drink. I hop over the railing and leave the podium to my companion.
It’s hard to talk above the music, I can only respond with a slightly forced smile to those who raise their thumbs. Once I get to the dressing rooms I pull the pill out of my pants and toss it into the toilet. At the end of the night, after four shifts of fifteen minutes on the podium, I take off my makeup. Outside, most of the people crowding the front door to the club in varyingly pitiful states are making plans to go to an after-hours spot. Someone says that somewhere on the outskirts of the city there’s a rave. The sun comes up. I turn down the offers to join in, and grab my scooter. My mother doesn’t allow me to stay out that late, I’ll really get it if she catches me. When I get home, frozen, at six-thirty in the morning, I open the door so slowly that the bells tied to the handle don’t make a sound. I undress in the apartment’s foyer very silently. Ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti-ti—an alarm is going off—I quickly hide my clothes in the small studio that is the first door on the right, remaining in panties and a tee shirt. I grab a glass of water from the kitchen. I walk calmly past her bedroom with the glass of water in my hand. The door is ajar, I hear the rustling of sheets.
“That alarm is really annoying, Mom.” I feign a sleepy voice.
After a few months I’m tired of the conversations sparked by a round of shots, I realize that I’m spending most of what I earn keeping up that lifestyle. One day, I just don’t go back.
Reading is my favorite subversive activity, which I don’t identify with the stuffy literature classes taught by ladies who seem like they must have been born fifty years old. Fortunata and Jacinta, Benito Pérez Galdós, the Generation of ’98. Yuck. I skip class to go read in the bar near my high school; I visit Henry Miller’s Tropics, I am Anaïs Nin’s confidante. Reading is an alienating activity that’s more fun, more socially accepted, and cheaper than drugs. I read without any cri
teria: new releases, romantic paperbacks by Corín Tellado, psychology, philosophy and pedagogy text books that I find around the house, inherited from my aunt, a teacher who left us some boxes of books when she moved. My favorite title is How to Philosophize with a Hammer, by some dude named Nietzsche. Its contents are incomprehensible but fascinating to me. N-I-T-X …
Sha-kes-pe-ar-e.
Prust.
Research Notes VII
A Call from the Arctic
My father set up a treadmill a neighbor gave him in my bedroom at my mom’s house, so my brother would get some exercise. The room is small and filled with dressers. It has a window that opens onto the inner courtyard, where we hang up our clothes to dry. I rarely sleep there, but it is important for me to know that there’s some stable place where I can leave my books and whatever’s left over from a move, and come back for them at some other time. An anchoring point. Having that small room completely filled with a machine more suited to a villa than an apartment bugs me. And my brother never uses it anyway. I think about calling someone instead of staying at home writing. My father is celebrating Christmas with his other family, visiting Santa Claus in Lapland. Evenings, when you have no plans to see anyone later, can be menacing. I let my boyfriend go away for the weekend with some friends. It’s not the first time. The little time I have to write is precious to me.
