it was really - Mathias Kessler

He sat on the bench behind the small veneered plank
that served as our galley table. It was too small even
to play a proper card game on or to share a meal, but
we had not brought playing cards and we never sat at
the table together for any reason. It is just so empty
here, he said, that I have lost interest in my maps. This
was true, I hadn’t heard their rustling in days. There
is nothing to touch, and my fingers are so cold that
if I touch the boat I do not feel it. If I touch myself,
my face, I feel nothing. Only a vague resistance, and a
dull and dislocated pain, Oswalk told me, in so many
words. I do not sometimes even know that I am
here, or that I was there. He pointed. It is like outer
space, he said bluntly, as though familiar with this
experience. We may as well be floating on an ocean
of methane. This last notion startled me, and I said
nothing. But for all that, it was still too obvious for
words. I had nothing to say. Go to bed, Oswalk.
There was a heavy silence between us and at that
moment I heard the diesel engine of the boat as if for
the first time, though it ran at all times. I looked at
Oswalk and, silently, an acknowledged synchronicity
of experience passed between us. Like the eternal,
deafening waters of our Hallingskarvet range, I said
to Oswalk.
Only in silence will it come. I instructed Oswalk
to cut the engines for a period of 24 hours. For
one day, I estimated, we could gear up and bear the
cold and the lack of electric light. I remembered
only now that I had in fact anticipated this tactic
early in my planning, and I reached up just past
Oswalk’s head into a storage hatch and pulled out
an old cardboard box and set it down before him. It
had factory reinforced corners. I grinned broadly at
Oswalk before opening the hinged top to reveal, set
in their molded cardboard crating, a set of old-style
magnesium flashbulbs brought for the purpose—the
silent phase. Oswalk looked up from the package,
and in reflexively returning my smile, his face twisted
into an involuntary and pained grimace. I was more
energized than ever now, whereas I believe Oswalk
saw his own role as suddenly greatly diminished by
this turn of events. Now, it must have seemed to him,
we were at odds.
Oswalk, I continued, half-seated in an unoccupied
seat across the aisle from him on the train, one
knee tucked beneath me. This expedition has already
begun. I began this expedition not in Oslo, not in
Brighton, not even in setting out from Perth Amboy
for a superfluous rendezvous in Scituate. I began
this expedition at the end of November of nineteen
hundred and fifty-four in Sylacauga Alabama. Oswalk
could not have known what I meant and yet it was
clear he needed to hear no more of what I had to
say concerning the origins of my expedition. It was
enough for me to say “Sylacauga Alabama,” or even
“nineteen hundred and fifty-four,” and Oswalk set
into his deliberate process of preparing a cigarette to
smoke on the platform in Gol, or Geilo, whichever
was next. That was when it first occurred to me
that Oswalk could, in theory, be my man, if I were
looking for a man at the time, but at the time I felt
I would find my man in Reykjavik. Instead I found
him in Flåm, where the mountain met the sea, and
I never set foot in Reykjavik, and it was Oswalk.
Traveling into this pre-human darkness, which
may now already be closer to post-human darkness,
to these primordial, fictitious structures in these
inhospitable climes, and looking for what? This is
the question that I am asking, Oswalk, just as you
are. Not any other. We are not at odds, we are joined.
I was speaking to myself, in the dark, on deck behind
my cameras. I could not bring myself to share these
thoughts with Oswalk, and besides, he was asleep.
He was not a man driven by passion, not like me.
Oswalk merely had enthusiasm. I turned the lens on
myself and the flashbulb cracked in a blinding white
56
light. It was the only time I did this over the three
weeks of the expedition, and it did not occur to me
to do it a second time. I realize now, with feelings
of both regret and relief, that I had not once turned
the lens on Oswalk. I had hoped to immortalize him
in the posture of the hunter, in the act of enjoying
his only pastime, shirtless in the sunlight like Apollo,
silently propelling his hand-carved ice arrowheads
deep into the bergs with his compound bow. As it
happened, however, I took no photographs in the
light of day.
But now we know it. I saw it. Oswalk saw it. It is
on film. It is on camera. We filmed it living. If I liked,
it could be everywhere tomorrow. But it no longer
matters. It is like rebuilding the log from its ashes,
tedium and senselessness, mere taxidermy.
Spreading the maps out on the double bed in
his hotel room in Bergen, Oswalk kindly points out
their features. At first, it isn’t easy to read them. The
first few have the North Pole as their center point
in order to provide the best possible view of the
entire Arctic region, and the others are scaled at close
proximity to unfamiliar land masses.
We know a lot about the cryological constellations
in which icebergs are found around the world,
says Oswalk, smiling from behind his black-
rimmed glasses, which he had not worn in
my presence until now. The icebergs are not
randomly distributed, so you need more than
just luck to find them.
It will be difficult to find an iceberg? I ask, studying
the changes in Oswalk’s face now that it is framed
by two squares of thick black acetate. How is
that possible?
Oswalk shrugged. Absurdly, he did not answer my
question. I no longer knew whose expedition we
were on now, mine or Oswalk’s. But I was certain of
one thing, Oswalk was flawless. Let it be his for now.
Software from Germany has also been helpful in
locating the ice structures, said Oswalk. Cryo-
Mod from Aachen-based Integrated Explora
tion Systems is a standard tool in the industry.
We enter the thickness, characteristics, and age
of the icebergs into the program, says Oswalk.
The computer then reconstructs the cryological
history of the corresponding site. Should we gain
access to the software, we will know what is there
before we arrive.
Very interesting, Oswalk. Thank you.
Will the human mind undo the deadness or will
the deadness undo the human mind? When we discover
the dead presence of it can we continue to live
in it, this presence? Oswalk, I am not pulling the wool
over your eyes. I am not robbing Peter to pay Paul,
metaphysically. I am giving you the straight dope.
We must first look at it, that is the first step because
there is no object here before there is light if we do
not get off the boat and we are not getting off the
boat here, Oswalk. If the light goes out we will never
find it again. With light we define how the structure
created us and with it we write the battle against the
more absolute hounding emptiness of the bald face,
the faceless, featureless, original human made of clay.
Is that a myth? The blank, the faceless head?
The first human, so inhuman. The last human,
a monster.
In a state of deep calm I watched it crowning
from out an inset disk of unearthly blue and glossy
ice, a movement almost digital in its unreality, its
impossibility. A primitive blue fire emerging from
the birth canal of some implacable white monolith,
I was unsure if it was best characterized as coming
from the past or coming from the future. One hears
tell of such things but only from people who don’t
themselves believe that they saw what they are telling
you they saw. But what did any of this matter in the
true and living face of it?
Immediately shadows formed in the featureless
face of the ice from the light cast by the blue
fire, giving out the imagined contours of the form,
a referent by which to distinguish it from the bald
fact of the inert face of the so-called natural world.
The world without us, amen. Fire cures clay, Oswalk,
clay holds fire. Light makes the image, the explorer,
I am the explorer, works backward, paring away the
bedeckedness that obscures the horrific blank origins,
the hole at the center of the earth, a whirlpool of
nothingness at a pole where the rock has become
one with the water, and the water is shifting, it is
heaving. Without us, Oswalk, the world is at home.
The explorer, that is me, stares into the fire and sees
the forms that are in the fire, not the forms the fire
casts out, but the forms that make up the fire, the
real whole forms: the sharp flashing tongue of evil
and the smooth inert dawning of benevolence. The
whole in time disappeared by an overabundance
of light. That is you, Oswalk, with all your daylight
blinding me into submission just as I was knowing
it. That was you, you were doing that.
There is something out there, Oswalk, after all.
I tell him in the morning. I saw it. The white terror
has gripped me. I think I said that to Oswalk, though
it was not my custom to share such thoughts. That
has changed, I am more candid now.
I swear that I did not know it—though it began
to occur to me sometime in the second week on the
boat—but I swear until that point, Oswalk, I did not
know that you did not stand a chance. It was only
Oswalk that was not accounted for, Oswalk. We ventured
into this darkness, this cold, this overexposed
dead end of rock wall only in defiance of God. That
much you must have known, we accounted for all of
that. You cared for God as little as I did, on that we
could agree. We agreed so completely we never spoke
of it. We were blue fire’s divine retribution of God,
born against nature, from the forehead of a god.
This is the only success left in hunting that can
bring real hunting success. Hunting is now a survival
economy, Oswalk, in the adult world. The hunter
without a second line of work is poor. Work time is
greater, profitability is less. The equipment is in part
bought and not built by the hunter. The profession
is low-status. Working two jobs: administrative
employee in a junior position. These are the consequences,
Oswalk. The hunter is no longer a free man.
His hunting culture is on the way out. This is our
chance. This is it.
Prometheus, ingeniously, is in the rock, high in
the Caucasus, his liver whole and protected. Oswalk
is frozen at the bottom of the sea, his liver a cold feast
for squids to tear at with their beaks. Sorry, Oswalk.
But believe this, that you too will one day rise up,
safely embedded in a raft of ice, and weigh the possibility
of a weary, meaningless freedom.
My isolation has been particular. It is what
brought me to Disko, to Oswalk. It has done things
for me, I insist on maintaining it for those reasons,
to honor those things, even to honor individuals,
and also because I fear to lose it. But I cannot escape
the fact that it has cost me a great deal. I am not
conversant in many of the topics in which those who
I admire converse so nimbly. My lack of interaction
with others in my professional pursuits has crippled
the agility of my intellect. My work detailing the significant
findings of the Disko/Baffin expedition has
not been received favorably, I have failed to lay it out
in a coherent manner consistent with the standards
of the discipline. So please be kind to me when I tell
you this story. Please understand that it is the truth,
and that if Oswalk, my sole peer in this matter, were
here, he would corroborate it. He would confirm
that my story is true, and he would congratulate me.
He, at least, would strike the match, light a candle,
and grant me peace.