The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (2 page)

I wondered about Detroit for a long time before my Detroit-born friend Sam Green and I decided to go visit in 2005, and when I got there, I realized that the widespread idea that Detroit was about ruins was out of date; I needed to inquire into what comes after ruin, as I did in the 2007 essay “Detroit Arcadia,” one of the earliest pieces in the book. In that period I was much preoccupied with disaster—it began locally, with a project in preparation for the centennial of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which reawakened my interest in how people behave in disaster. The conclusions were astonishing, and that became an extension of my project on hope—which is a project on how we tell stories about our history, our powers, and our possibilities. Disaster revealed to me that much of what we’ve been taught about human nature is not true, and so I began the research that became my 2009 book
A Paradise Built in Hell
.

Early in the research, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. The colossal social disaster that resulted got me involved with that city, which I have visited about two dozen times since and written about in two books and various essays (including two here). I didn’t go to Haiti; I didn’t have to in order to see the media make the same horrific mistakes there they made in New Orleans in 2005 and San Francisco in 1906. Disaster was also what took me to Japan, and I wrote about the triple disaster of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident in Japan and then later wrote about the lagniappe of the expedition, my day in the Inari Shrine outside Kyoto.

My definition of disaster became broader and broader, and I now see much of our everyday life—for its alienation and its destruction of souls and memory, as well as natural and social places—as a kind of disaster we escape temporarily in those golden moments of uprisings and carnivals. Or reclaiming the story. I see disaster everywhere; I also—as the essay “Icebergs and Shadows” in particular discusses—see generosity and resistance everywhere.

We talk about people coming together, but we sometimes forget that that’s a spatial, geographical business: we are civil society when we go out into the streets to be together, when showing up and standing up becomes free speech, when we live in the plazas and squares, from Tahrir Square in Egypt to Mexico City’s Zócalo to Liberty Plaza near Wall Street in New York. This is civil society in political engagement, the Apollonian form of being in the streets. New Orleans showed me some of the possibilities of the Dionysian version, as the essay “We Won’t Bow Down” points out. There isn’t a virtual equivalent of it, which is why (with essays such as “We’re Breaking Up: Noncommunication in the Silicon Age”) I worry about the withdrawal from public space and public life. Democracy was always a bodily experience, claimed and fought for and celebrated in actual places. You must be present to win.

Wherever I went, I remained preoccupied with democracy and justice and popular power, with how change can be wrought in the streets and by retelling the story, with the power of stories to get things wrong as well as right, with the pleasures and possibilities each place holds, and with the beauties of light, space, and solidarity.

From all this wandering I came home every time, but home began to leave me as San Francisco became Silicon Valley’s bedroom community, the subject of three of the essays in this book. My own dear city had long been the far edge of the country, not merely in geography, but in possibility, the left coast that presented alternatives and refuges from the mainstream; when Silicon Valley became a—and in some ways
the—
global power center, it became something else.

Centers are supposed to be good things, but I prefer edges. That’s in part because wealth and power are also often disasters, with casualties and wreckage. Maybe what often gets called
wealth
in booms should mostly be imagined as impoverishment of the majority who don’t become wealthy and often become displaced or priced out locally, served up with the collateral damage from the concentration of power, resources, and the control of place.

I have been in recent years the author of a bestiary and director of some atlas projects; I’ve written criticism, editorials, reports from a few front lines, letters, a great many political essays for
Tomdispatch.com
in particular, more personal stuff, essays for artists’ books, and more. As nonfiction—that leftover term apotheosizing fiction—gets defined down as only memoir and essay, I’ve wanted to open it back up again, to claim it as virtually everything else.

Nonfiction is the whole realm from investigative journalism to prose poems, from manifestos to love letters, from dictionaries to packing lists. This territory to which I am, officially, consigned couldn’t be more spacious, and I couldn’t be more pleased to be free to roam its expanses. And maybe the variety of forms here is part of the book’s breadth along with its geographical range.

Calling this anthology an encyclopedia was a way to call attention to its range and maybe imagine these almost thirty essays as entries in an extremely incomplete encyclopedia. Essays explore; they also define; every essay is an entry in the author’s personal encyclopedia. Here is the latest volume of mine.

CYCLOPEDIA OF AN ARCTIC EXPEDITION

for Mike D.

Anchor Chain.
The hideous, booming clatter that awoke me our first morning out was, I thought at first, the warning bell that announced we should all assemble on the foredeck and perhaps prepare to zip ourselves into survival suits—those bulky, lurid orange jumpsuits in which you could, they say, float and survive in an arctic sea for up to six hours. Happily, it was the anchor chain going out, meaning that we were at our first destination and that I did not yet have to try out that orange jumpsuit or those arctic waters. The chains were huge beasts in the stern of the boat that rattled like the end of the world on their way up and their way down.

Animals.
There was no wait. The morning of the day of departure, a white arctic fox with a limp and a young gray fox cub came begging at the kitchen of the funky hostel-like hotel in Svalbard’s small capital, Longyearbyen, and all the animals showed up earlier than expected,
all
being a term that encompasses the fox, the walrus, the seal, the reindeer, and the polar bear—that being all the wingless beasts to be found onshore in this landscape that feels like creation on day two, not day seven or year 4 billion. Except for some tiny gnat-like creatures, and spiders.

Antlers.
A skull with antlers was onshore by a rock at the first landing in Magdalenafjord, the antlers whipped back with the particular line that reindeer have and deer lack, a beautiful artifact that seemed to have been placed there as an accent. The skull was bleached white but a bit damp-looking, not like the dry white bones of the desert, and it looked as though it had been planted, an accent piece, a focus for the foreground. Further up the rocks was the lower jaw of an arctic fox. Over the ridge was a school
of seals basking, arcing themselves into curved forms, occasionally swimming in the shallow bay, otherwise napping. Later there were more antlers, and occasionally reindeer. (
See also
Reindeer
) Around the bend were three polar bears.
See
Sleep (Bear)

A crowd of reindeer together in the seasons when their antlers are fully grown—this must be the forest of this Arctic place far north of treeline.

Arctic Terns.
Their Latin name is
Sterna paradisaea
; they are somehow birds of paradise or so named in 1763 by Erich Pontoppidan, the Pietist Danish prelate and contemporary of Linnaeus who wrote a natural history of Norway and an atlas of Denmark in the eighteenth century. He could not have known that of all living things on earth the arctic terns live in the most light and least darkness, but they work for it, flying 70,000 kilometers a year as they migrate from near the north pole to near the south, and when they are not nesting, live almost constantly in flight, like albatrosses. Theirs is a paradise of endless light and endless labor like angels (though they cross the band of day and night on their migration, and the tracking devices set up to plot their migratory course did so by measuring light and darkness). And their scimitar-sharp wings, their fierce cries, their hummingbird hoverings, their swallow-like tails, their gull-like dives.

Cold.
Very. Well, pretty.

Color.
When the sky is not blue, when moss and grass have not accumulated on the land (which is only 10 percent vegetated, 30 percent being rock and 60 percent glaciated), the world here is shades of gray verging toward brown, blue, and black, and it’s white: ice, snow, glacier, cloud. It often looks as though it’s heading into being a black-and-white photograph of itself or rather a Chinese ink painting on watered silk. And then come the tufts of moss like landscapes in miniature, various shades of vivid green and brown-green, here in this landscape where grass less than a foot high is the tallest plant around, and only a few things flower. Indigo evening, water and sky. White morning. Gray world out the porthole. Black land
with white ice. Glowing gray nights. The water, liquid pewter and iron, with gentle ripples rather than white-crested waves.

And the smeared red of a polar bear’s meal on blue-white ice. The cream of a polar bear against the white of ice—our chief guide says at one point that the tiny blob on the hillside is not a polar bear because it’s the wrong shade of white. Shades of white: snow, clouds, glaciers, bones, polar bears, quartz rocks.

Expedition.
Sets out to accomplish, discover, claim, explore. Sets out with an agenda. Sets out often in these regions in earlier times to fail, to get lost, to suffer frozen blisters, frostbite, cannibalism, forms of poisoning and starvation, discord, blame, remorse, death, being frozen for decades until another exploratory party comes across the remains, undamaged by decay but sometimes snacked upon by bears, as was the case of the small Andrée ballooning party—failed in 1897, discovered in 1930—one man in his grave and two who’d died in the tent become gnawed bones in disarray. The Andrée party’s photographs and journals survived intact, and some of the embroidered linens made it to a museum. They planned, but did they anticipate?

Far
. That first morning, out the porthole of my cabin there was a little blue iceberg. We were in Magdalenafjord, the bay at the end of the earth, the northwest corner of Svalbard in the high Arctic, more than a dozen degrees north of the Arctic Circle. Beyond it were stony gray hills with glaciers curving down the valleys in between most of them. The idea of being so far north was exciting enough, and then there were all those things I always wanted to see: icebergs, reindeer, polar bears, along with all the things I’m always happy to see: water, sky, spaciousness, landforms, light, scale. More than anyplace I’ve ever been, this one imposed a dependency: there was no way out except by this boat, and no way to communicate with the outside world except by this boat. Which was also an independency, from the rest of the world. Times when the view went all the way to the horizon and no land was visible on that side of the boat, when the sea was a delicate blue-gray and the sky was the same color, the sea smooth with
billowing ripples that did not break into waves, the sky smooth, and only seabirds coasting along the surface of the sea, coming close to their own reflections, bending but not breaking the smoothness and vastness.

The far edge of the world, at the back of the North Wind, east of the sun and west of the moon, as far as
far
, at the back of beyond, out of reach, out of touch, out of the ordinary, beyond the Arctic Circle, beyond so many things. Far.

Fear. See
Polar Bear
;
Cold

Footing.
Made difficult by the rubber boots worn for landings in the Zodiac and by the rule that you should step on stone not on moss. Sometimes given a choice between one’s own and the mosses’ survival, the moss loses. Sometimes it wins. In a Japanese garden the irregularly placed stepping stones are meant to make you conscious of every step. Same here, but the scale varies and in Japanese gardens you never break your leg or fall down a mountain into an icy sea. Though maybe they imply these things.

Frankenstein.
The cold of the Arctic rhymes with the cold in the hearts of the polar explorer, Walton, who wants to press on though it may mean death for his men and himself. And the cold in the heart of Victor Frankenstein, who pressed on with his experiment and disavowed responsibility for the results. But what does deep cold mean in an era of melting, thawing, heating? What is the virtue of cold, the refuge, the other ways to describe emotion? Cold as calm, as restraint, as stillness, as inaction?

Glaciers.
Pelle the glaciologist speaks to us of glaciers, and the colored lines of his graphs slope down, toward melt and runoff and diminishment and disappearance. The shape of modern gloom is a slant downward from left to right. And of modern despair, the opposite slant—of rising temperatures, seas, carbon.

Graves.
The dead—the main thing left behind by many expeditions and whaling parties, left in graves on which rocks are piled or wooden crosses
erected, which have sometimes been raided for souvenirs, wooden tombstones, clothes, and even bones, says Lisa the guide, deploring it. Sometimes it was the wood of coffins they were after in this place where wood is a valuable import. Some of the whalers were buried with pillows under their heads and a clump of their native soil. Hats and other pieces of clothing survived in the cold environment. In the museum in Longyearbyen are seventeenth-century wool hats, including some striped knitted ones.

Guide.
I had gotten an email from the Swedish photographer and Arctic historian Tyrone Martinsson the preceding January that said at the beginning, “I am writing to you to propose for you to join an expedition tour to Svalbard in September? I have a project here that is getting together 12 artists and scientists on a ship for 7–10 days sailing around Svalbard in the Arctic.” Who would say no to that? Not me. Most of the twelve seemed to be photographers, and masses of black boxes and laptops to download them into would clutter the ship’s tabletops. Every landing involved people peeling off one by one to gaze into their instruments and ignore the rest of us, which is not at all according to guidelines. The guidelines for travel in this part of the world are mostly about polar bears and about sticking close to the guide with the signal gun to frighten a bear off and the rifle with the massive bullets to shoot to kill if necessary. And looking around.