Thinking Like an Iceberg. Olivier Remaud
of his small sailing boat. He travels towards peace and freedom. He lives in the present in order to ‘forget the world, its merciless rhythm of life’.22
The sailor fears that icebergs will cut his path. His nights become more chaotic than usual. He hardly sleeps at all. When he sees flocks of Cape larks flying around in the distance, he suspects that he is about to enter an area of coastal ice. He is wrong and manages to get around the drifting blocks. He writes: ‘Seeing an iceberg in fine sunny weather. It must be the most beautiful sight a sailor could lay eyes on, a thousand ton diamond set on the sea, glittering beneath the southern sun. It might be enough to last me the rest of my life.’23
Unlike James Cook, Moitessier did not cross the Antarctic Circle several times in an attempt to discover the continent that scholars and ministers talked about in the gilded halls of the British capital. He is not brought to a stop before an impassable wall, peopled by giants. When he returns and publishes his story, the collective imagination does not take off like a grass fire. The world is not enthralled by the ‘islands of ice’ floating in the Southern Ocean. His ‘diamond’ sparkles are not as mystical as those in Brendan de Clonfert. The allegorical tendency of polar romanticism is foreign to him. Unlike Noble, he is not one for rhetorical emphasis. Instead, he relishes simple words that speak of the possibility of a quite profane ecstasy.
He is afraid of icebergs. But he assumes that seeing just one of them will satisfy his wanderlust. He knows that many have wanted to pass through an imaginary mirror and have bumped into their own faces, like Narcissus in the clear water of a spring. Some have perished. He just runs away.
The iceberg is the mirror that the Moderns set up between them and nature to contemplate themselves. They imagine another side in order to get closer to their reflection. Self-esteem needs a magnetic North or South, a specular material.
But, over there, the cold does not become hot, the maps of the world do not invert, the compasses do not come to life like the chess pieces in Lewis Carroll’s tale of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland.
There is no mirror there.
Notes
1 1. Elisha Kent Kane, The US Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin: A Personal Narrative, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1854; also his Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853, ’54, ’55, Philadelphia: Childs & Peterson, 1856.
2 2. Francis Leopold McClintock, The Voyage of the Fox in the Arctic Seas: A Narrative of the Discovery of the Fate of Sir J. Franklin and his Companions, London: John Murray, 1859.
3 3. Louis Legrand Noble, After Icebergs with a Painter: A Summer Voyage to Labrador and around Newfoundland, New York: D. Appleton, 1861, p. 47.
4 4. Ibid., p. 28.
5 5. Timothy Mitchell, ‘Frederic Church’s The Icebergs: Erratic Boulders and Time’s Slow Changes’, Smithsonian Studies in American Art, 3/4 (1989), pp. 14–17.
6 6. Cited ibid., pp. 7–8. For theories of the sublime, see Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, London: Penguin, 1999; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans, J. C. Meredith, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
7 7. Navigatio sancti Brendani: alla scoperta dei segreti meravigliosi del mondo, ed. Giovanni Orlandi and Rossana E. Guglielmetti, Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2014, chap. XXII, pp. 80–4.
8 8. Thomas M’Keevor, A Voyage to Hudson’s Bay during the summer of 1812: containing a particular account of the icebergs and other phenomena which present themselves in those regions; also, a description of the Esquimeaux and North American Indians; their manners, customs, dress, language, &c.. &c., &c. London: Printed for Sir Richard Phillips and Co., 1819, pp. 9–10.
9 9. Coll Thrush, ‘The Iceberg and the Cathedral: Encounter, Entanglement, and Isuma in Inuit London’, Journal of British Studies, 53/1 (2014), pp. 59–79, at p. 73.
10 10. Shane McCorristine, Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration, London: University College London Press, 2018, p. 9.
11 11. Christoph Ransmayr, The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, trans. J. E. Woods, London: Harper Collins, 1992, p. 22. See also ‘Second birthday’ in his Atlas of an Anxious Man, trans. S. Pare, Chicago: Seagull Books, 2020.
12 12. Ransmayr, The Terrors, p. 52.
13 13. Ibid., pp. 52, 77, 109.
14 14. Ibid., p. 25.
15 15. McCorristine, Spectral Arctic, p. 5. Already in 1814, William Scoresby stressed that polar anxiety comes in part from ‘the reciprocal action of the ice and the sea’ that breaks up whalers (An Account of the Arctic Regions, with a History and Description of the Northern Whale-Fishery, Edinburgh: A. Constable and Co., 1820, Vol. I, p. 301). On the obsession with the poles, see Roland Huntford, Scott and Amundsen: Their Race to the South Pole, London: Abacus, 2002; Robert McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005; Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World, London: Carroll & Graf, [1922] 1989; Pierre Déléage, La Folie arctique, Brussels: Zones sensibles, 2017.
16 16. Arthur Conan Doyle, Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012, p. 333.
17 17. Hans Blumenberg, ‘Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality’, in Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm for a Metaphor of Existence, trans. Steven Rendall, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997, pp. 81–102, at p. 83.
18 18. Ibid., p. 96.
19 19. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, London: Verso, 1985, p. 166.
20 20. The term ‘Moderns’, in this capitalised form, is referring to Bruno Latour’s specific ‘constitution’ of modernity in We have Never been Modern, trans. C. Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 1993 [Trans.].
21 21. Bernard Moitessier, The Long Way, trans. W. Rodarmor, New York: Sheridan House, 2003, eBook, p. 214.
22 22. Ibid., p. 149.
23 23. Ibid., p. 194.
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