“Really!” she said, surprised. “Well. Our contact is confidential, you understand, and he’ll want to keep it that way. But given what you want to do, I think he would be willing to talk to you. I’ll give him a call to make sure first, if you don’t mind. Then if he agrees, I can give you the number we use, and his encryption codes.”
“Thanks, thanks. I’m sure it will help.”
Mai-lis went back to her table, and Wade stared at the empty bowl in his hand, then put it back and went over to the line for hot food; suddenly he was starving; but he didn’t think he’d ever again be warm enough to eat ice cream.
At the end of his meal Mai-lis walked by and gave him a phone chip. “Sam says give him a call.”
“Thanks, Mai-lis. Thanks for everything.”
“No problem. We Antarcticans have to stick together.”
“Yes.”
Wade finished eating and walked over to his room in Hotel California. He inserted the chip into his wrist phone, then pushed the call button.
“Hello.”
“Hello, I’m Wade Norton, a friend of Mai-lis’s? I’m an assistant to Phil Chase—”
“Down in Antarctica, yes. In the Hotel California I take it.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Wade said, looking around at the ceiling. “And you must be Sam. Hi. Listen, I’ve been talking to Mai-lis, and to Sylvia, and thinking about the situation down here, and I’ve got some questions for you.”
“I’ve got some questions for you too.”
“Oh good, good.”
Wade pulled a pad of paper out of his briefcase.
My friends, we are back in McMurdo, on Observation Hill, but our travels are not yet over. Now we have spaces to get through colder even than Antarctica; the timespace of human history, and our life together in these overshoot years. There are more people on this planet than the planet can hold, and how we act now will shape much of the next thousand years, for good or ill. It is a bottleneck in history; the age beyond carrying capacity; the overshoot years; the voyage in an open boat, weighted down beyond its Plimsoll line. There is the possibility for very great tragedy, the greatest ever known.
But tragedy is not our business. So now we must learn this Earth as closely and completely as our paleolithic ancestors knew it on the savannah; we must know it in the mode they knew it, as scientist and lover wrapped together in one. The loverknower. We must draw the paleolithic and the postmodern together in a single design. I sense the dragon arteries have knotted together on this promontory in such a way as to allow some early precursor glimpse of this knowerlover knot. Because people come to this place to study it, and in doing so they invariably fall in love with it.
But why, you may well ask, seeing only the cold images I have been sending you. Why fall in love with it, so stripped and bare as it is. I wish I could explain it more clearly. But truly this place beggars the language.
Still I must try one last time. You see, the air is so clean. Mountains so distant, yet still focused and detailed; as if your eye had become telescopic. Water lying there glossy and compact, like shot silk in the sun. Never have you seen such clarity before, where the spiritual landscape stuffs the visible landscape until it bursts with luminous presence. Seeing things this clearly makes you wonder what the rest of the world would look like in such clean air. Not that more northerly air could ever be as clean as this, so cold and dry, so dustless—but on certain days, on certain mornings, all the world must once have had this clarity, and we the eyes to see it, and the desire to look. It must have been so beautiful.
And then also, as you see again from this glorious p’ing-yan vantage point on Observation Hill, it is all so big. Big, huge, vast, stupendous, gigantic—I have said these words many times, I know, and still I must say them over and over, until they react in your heads like paper flowers dropped in water, expanding there to their original size. Really very big! Suggestive of the infinite. Immense simplicity and brio, as in the brush strokes of a bold wise painter. Everything in all five dimensions, all visible at once. This too is so lovely.
Then the mantle of ice provides such elaboration, on microscales you can barely see in my images, scales of vision you can only experience when you look down at your feet as you walk—visions of the infinitely bedded, planed, crosshatched, and contoured textures of snow and ice, prisming everywhere the colors of the rainbow, spiraling inward all the way to the crystalline patterns in snowflakes, spiraling outward to the massive sculptural bulks of the tabular bergs, each one a masterpiece. Beauty is fractal to infinity in both directions.
Clean, big, icy, prismatical—somehow I feel that I’m still not capturing it. Surely these are not the attributes that make this place so ravishing. Perhaps all beauty has a mystery in it that cannot be explained. For this place is beautiful; and once the whole world was beautiful just like this. Seeing the former, we realize the latter. We understand just how beautiful the whole Earth once was.
And we can make it that way again. On the far side of our hard time I see a returned clarity, as fewer of us get along ever more cleverly, our technologies and our social systems all meshed with each other and with this sacred Earth, in the growing clarity of a dynamic and ever evolving permaculture. Clean air then, not just so we will live longer, but so we can see again. Big things and small things in their right place. It will come. We are the primitives of an unknown civilization. And here that becomes so clear. This primal icescape brims, with chi’s vital breathing, its winds blow clear every nook in our brains, balloons them as it did in the original coevolution; and so when we’re here love fills us, that’s all.
Then this love for the landscape that is our collective unconscious, this knowerlover’s apprehension of the land’s divine resonance, blossoms outward and northward to encompass the rest of the planet. Love for the planet radiating from the bottom up, like revolution in the soul.
So it has always been, loving and knowing together; and thus from the moment humans first arrived on this continent, it was the scientists who stepped up and said This is our place.
And now they have to decide again if that is really so.
It’s part of a process that has been going on for a long time. For instance, see the town below us. An American town, as in Alaska. Inhabited for generations. A big part of the Antarctic story.
But only now is it becoming its own place. Because the Americans who founded the town in the International Geophysical Year, a very great feng shui event, were military men. They were there to support scientists, and they made Antarctic culture a military thing. The soldiers and sailors were young men, taken away from women, commanded by older men who for much of their lives had also been away from women, in a social structure that looked back to the hierarchies of an older time. To put it in its simplest terms, there was too much yang.
In most histories we think of that world dying in the First World War, and being replaced by our ferociously knowing and hermaphroditic modernity. But in Byrd’s expeditions, and the early American stations, you find men living in a nineteenth-century style, in the Peter Pan world that we saw Scott’s men inhabiting some decades before, but now long after most of the rest of society had given it up.
And slowly this mode of life became harder to maintain. When Scott’s men came back to the world and described what they had done, people said Wonderful, marvelous. But when the United States Navy men returned to the north they were met with incomprehension, and a neglect like contempt. Why bother? people asked. And the men themselves, coming from the uprooted placeless culture of Cold War America, had no way to talk about their experience of this extraordinary continent. As I have said, in any language it is hard to know what to say. But these men were triply dislocated, in language, space and time; they were like the travelers in space stories who fly so fast that relativity effects come into play, and though they are only away for two years as they see it, return to a world several centuries farther on. They were refugees in time.