The Faraway Nearby (16 page)

If
Path
was a book, it was about not knowing, about being lost, and about darkness, the darkness of the deep interior, a book you read with your feet. But it was wordless and so had the penurious privilege of visual art, of being able to invoke many meanings without being pinned down by the specificities of words. Too, it was the thing itself, not the representation of the thing. It was darkness, a convoluted route, a throbbing sound, faint zones of light, perceptual confusion. It was a space only revealed over time through motion.

Anatomists long ago named the windings of the inner ear, whose channels provide both hearing and balance, the labyrinth. The name suggests that if the labyrinth is the passage through which sound enters the mind, then we ourselves bodily enter labyrinths as though we were sounds on the way to being heard by some great unknown presence. To walk this path is to be heard, and to be heard is a great desire of the majority of us, but to be heard by whom, by what? To be a sound traveling toward the mind—is that another way to imagine this path, this journey, the unwinding of this thread?

Who hears you? Elín had heard me when she read me and then invited me to listen to her darkness. My book and her labyrinth were two exchanges in what had become a conversation. I pictured Alice going through the looking glass when I thought of the way that Elín and Fríða had pulled me through my book into their subarctic world, a journey that seemed to be completed by entering Elín's art so literally.

We live inside each other's thoughts and works. As I write, I sit in a building erected on a steep slope, so that what is the first floor uphill is the second floor downhill. Someone thought through the site and designed this structure specifically for this corner; someone cut the lumber in a forest up or down the coast; someone framed the structure, plastered the walls, laid the oak floorboards, the pipes, and the wires; someone designed and others made the chair I sit on, all of it long before I was born.

Long before that people established ideas about what houses and chairs should be like. I am in this moment hosted by anonymous craftspeople long gone, or rather by their ideas and labor, surrounded by more ghosts in the books in the room and other remnants of trees, the language I speak, the body I inhabit with the adaptations and limitations of innumerable ancestors running through it, the city around me, the countless gestures, acts, devotions, that keep making the world.

I am, we each are, the inmost of an endless series of Russian dolls; you who read are now encased within a layer I built for you, or perhaps my stories are now inside you. We live as literally as that inside each other's thoughts and work, in this world that is being made all the time, by all of us, out of beliefs and acts, information and materials. Even in the wilderness your ideas of what is beautiful, what matters, and what constitutes pleasure shape your journey there as much as do your shoes and map also made by others.

A few decades ago, there was a lot of postmodern anxiety about the idea that every experience was mediated. The anxious believed that some pristine direct experience had fled, as though the mediation had not begun ten thousand years ago and more, as though it were not part of the world worth looking at and the companionship all around even when you are alone, as though there could be a world without thought, without culture, without language, as though you could be outside, and outside was a desirable place. The real question was the caliber of what was mediating experience, and how much you're cognizant of it.

With practice, you can pause the conversation, in your head and around you, but exiting it is not an option; it is you; and if you're lucky, you're it, participating in making this tangible and immaterial world around us and within you. You build yourself out of the materials at hand and those you seek out and choose, you build your beliefs, your alliances, your affections, your home, though some of us have far more latitude than others in all those things. You digest an idea or an ethic as though it was bread, and like bread it becomes part of you. Out of all this comes your contribution to the making of the world, your sentences in the ongoing interchange. The tragedy of the imprisoned, the unemployed, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized is to be silenced in this great ongoing conversation, this symphony that is another way to describe the world.

Part of the opacity of visual art for so many people is that each work of art functions as a statement in the long conversation of art making, responding to what has come before by expanding upon or critiquing or subverting it. To walk into an exhibition can be like walking into the middle of a conversation that doesn't make sense unless you know who's talking and what was said earlier or know the language that's being spoken, though some artworks speak directly and stand alone.

You could view Elín's
Path
as a young woman's answer to the great Light and Space artworks of the very male California artists James Turrell, Larry Bell, and Robert Irwin, who in the early 1970s began working directly with light itself as a medium. Their work was concerned with perception, illusion, and with sublime beauty, as well as with the expanding question of what art could be. A decade or two earlier painters had begun a shift from an emphasis on objects to one on processes, and the logical conclusion was an art of light, of gestures, of interventions in systems, of invitations to act and perceive. The dematerialization of the art object, my friend Lucy called this.

At its best, visual art is philosophy by other means and poetry without words. Visual art asks the grandest questions, about the most essential ingredients of existence: about time, space, perception, value, creation, identity, beauty. It makes mute objects speak, and it renews the elements of the world through the unexpected, or it situates the everyday in a way that asks us to wake up and notice. This kind of art raises fundamental questions about the act of making, about what it means, whom it is for, what happens in that engagement with materials and history and embodied imagination. I arrived in the realm of visual art in my early twenties, and it was a spacious arena in which to come of age, one that opened up the terrain in which I would travel to create and to converse. I was invited into the conversation, to speak and to listen, and to learn.

Who hears you? To have something to say is one thing; to have someone who hears it is another. To be heard literally is to have the vibrations of the air travel through the labyrinth of the listener's ear to the mind, but more must unfold in that darkness. You choose to hear what corresponds to your desires, needs, and interests, and there are dangers in a world that corresponds too well, with curating your life into a mirror that reflects only the comfortable and familiar, and dangers in the opposite direction as well. Listen carefully.

To hear is to let the sound wander all the way through the labyrinth of your ear; to listen is to travel the other way to meet it. It's not passive but active, this listening. It's as though you retell each story, translate it into the language particular to you, fit it into your cosmology so you can understand and respond, and thereby it becomes part of you. To empathize is to reach out to meet the data that comes through the labyrinths of the senses, to embrace it and incorporate it. To enter into, we say, as though another person's life was also a place you could travel to.

Kindness, compassion, generosity are often talked about as though they're purely emotional virtues, but they are also and maybe first of all imaginative ones. You see someone get hurt—maybe they get insulted or they're just very tired—and you feel for them. You take the information your senses deliver and interpret it, often in terms of your own experience, until it becomes vivid to you. Or you work harder and study them to imagine the events you don't witness, the suffering that is not on the surface.

It's easier to imagine the experience of people most like you and nearest you—your best friend, the person who just slipped on the ice. Through imagination and representations—films, printed stories, secondhand accounts—you travel into the lives of people far away. This imaginative entering into is best at the particular, since you can imagine being the starving child but not the region of a million starving people. Sometimes, though, one person's story becomes the point of entry to larger territories.

This identification is almost instinctual in many circumstances. Even some animals do it; babies cry in sympathy with each other, or in distress at the sound of distress. Neurologists now talk about mirror neurons. You see something you crave, you feel something painful, and areas of your brain respond. You haven't only witnessed something but also translated it into your own experience; you have felt with and for that other. But to cry because someone cries or desire because someone desires is not quite to care about someone else. There are people whose response to the suffering of others is to become upset and demand consolation themselves.

Empathy means that you travel out of yourself a little or expand. It's really recognizing the reality of another's existence that constitutes the imaginative leap that is the birth of empathy, a word invented by a psychologist interested in visual art. The word is only slightly more than a century old, though the words
sympathy, kindness, pity, compassion, fellow-feeling,
and others covered the same general ground before Edward Titchener coined it in 1909. It was a translation of the German word
Einfühlung,
or feeling into, as though the feeling itself reached out.

The root word is
path,
from the Greek word for passion or suffering, from which we also derive pathos and pathology and sympathy. It's a coincidence that
empathy
is built from a homonym for the Old English
path,
as in a trail. Or a dark labyrinth named
Path.
Empathy is a journey you travel, if you pay attention, if you care, if you desire to do so. Up close you witness suffering directly, though even then you may need words to know that this person has terrible pains in her joints or that one recently lost his home. Suffering far away reaches you through art, through images, recordings, and narratives; the information travels toward you and you meet it halfway, if you meet it.

•   •   •

In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula up near the arctic circle on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds, under melted glaciers, inside others' acts of making and imagination, inside the reverie of a young woman's darkness and a species' life in endless light, in a lull in the ongoing conversations and at a vantage point from which I could map them. When I think back on it, I see myself the way you remember yourself in events of long ago, a small figure amid a rough landscape of glaciers, waterfalls, lava rocks, rain, clouds, birds, islands, and books. Always, just beyond all these things, was the silver sea, the lace border around all land like the silence around all sounds or the unknowns beyond all knowledge.

N
ot the slender gray book with the Viking ship embossed on its cover. Not the deep blue one with the endpapers that map Greenland and the Canadian arctic. Nor the turquoise one with the Inuit faces on the wide spine. Nor the dark green one with white letters and a white polar bear printed on the coarse fabric cover. But the first English-language book, a thick one titled
Arctic Adventure,
bound in pale blue with an embossed blue dogsled and blue driver. This one tells the tale of what it means to live inside your own breath. A house made of exhalations, as though your body were spinning itself a shell, as though you blew a bubble that froze solid, with you inside.

The Danish-Jewish explorer Peter Freuchen was twenty years old his first winter in the arctic and bursting with vitality and enthusiasm for the other world he'd entered. He volunteered to stay alone on the edge of the ice sheet in Pustervig in northeastern Greenland for the duration of the dark winter of 1906–1907. A few other men were there at the beginning, in a stone and timber house built for the purpose, about nine feet by fifteen feet. Freuchen's task was to go out every day and take weather measurements on the mountain, which sounds easy enough until you factor in that it was dark most of that time and extraordinarily cold, and that the wolves that ate his seven dogs were deeply interested in him as well.

It was so cold that even inside his cabin, even with the small coal stove, the moisture in his breath condensed into ice on the walls and ceiling. He kept breathing. The house got smaller and smaller. Early on, he wrote, two men could not pass without brushing elbows. Eventually after he was alone and the coal—“the one factor that had kept the house from growing in upon me”—was gone, he threw out the stove to make more room inside. (He still had a spirit lamp for light and boiling water.) Before winter and his task ended and relief came, he was living inside an ice cave made of his own breath that hardly left him room to stretch out to sleep. Peter Freuchen, six foot seven, lived inside the cave of his breath.

Vanity of vanities, says the King James translation of Ecclesiastes, and the word that was translated as vanity was the Hebrew word
hevel
. It meant breath or vapor, or something as transient as a breath, as fleeting as vapor. Except in the arctic, where the vapor in Peter Freuchen's breath became a structure, so that you might have been able to take away the house the way builders take away the wooden form in which they cast concrete and leave the ice that was solidified breath.

It was as though in the stillness of a dark winter alone, he had disappeared inside himself. No one to hear him, to answer, to turn the experience into a story, or to tell stories to pass the time, just breath. When he went out to get snow to melt for water or to chart the weather on the mountain, he sang, badly, to keep the wolves at bay. Inside he got so lonely he developed friendships with the teakettle and pots and pans. It was a baptism by ice, and when it was over he was of the arctic, where he would spend the prime years of his life among the Inuit and have the adventures he spent the rest of his life recounting. His books about the north appeared in English and Danish from the 1920s until after his death in 1958.

I first encountered Freuchen when I was in Iceland, reading a more recent book that mentioned him in passing. The passage that struck me wasn't about Freuchen's beloved Greenland, but the far north of Canada that is now Nunavut, the indigenous-administered homeland. It was about a small band of Inuit travelers he met nearly a century ago: “Halfway there, the weather changed suddenly. Oddly, it wasn't the cold that nearly killed them, but heat. During the night their snow huts caved in and the frozen bits of skin, rotted meat and bones used to construct their sleds thawed and were eaten by the dogs. They had no food and no way to travel. After eating their dogs they began to starve. Atagutaluk then ate the bodies of her husband and children. When Peter met Atagutaluk she had since married the village leader. ‘I got a new husband, and got with him three new children. They are all named for the dead ones that only served to keep me alive so they could be reborn.'”

It wasn't the cannibalism but the sled made of frozen scraps that fascinated me at first: cold as a kind of enchantment that turned flesh into solid structures, like the pumpkin turned into a coach in Cinderella, the fairy gold that turns back into leaves in the morning, like the frozen breath I read about when I went deeper into Freuchen's stories, and warmth the curse. When I went to the source, I found that the sled or sleds weren't just scraps, and neither bones nor rotten material was used. Frozen flesh and hide were occasional materials for sled building in a place far from trees and wood and a time of limited access to metals.

As Freuchen describes it, “First they soaked caribou skins in water at the edge of the ice. Then they rolled them together and placed some ice blocks on top of the skins to make them freeze in the exact shape of sledge runners. For crossbars they used thin slices of meat that had been frozen by being placed on the smooth ice and large frozen salmon that they planed down somewhat with an ax. Thus they fashioned useable sledges, and off they went one day just after the sun had returned—a good time to start on the trip.”

Freuchen's first account in his 1935 book
Arctic Adventure
was glib, but the story must have haunted him a little, because he told it twice more, and with each telling the meaning of the story changed. In a book of his published two decades later, the green-and-white
The Arctic Year,
he no longer singled Atagutaluk out for disparagement. This time the crisis that befell her and her traveling companions was something that could happen to anyone. He compared it with a similar terrible thaw that had overtaken his own party.

In this second account of Atagutaluk's ordeal, a warm night wind had arrived while her party was traveling across the interior of Baffin Island. The world around them thawed while they slept in an igloo, the sleds had disintegrated, and the dogs had “taken advantage of the feast the thaw provided for them.” The sleds were gone, the harnesses and sealskin traces were gone, the provisions were gone, and deep soft snow fell and made travel impossible.

Months later, a friend of Freuchen's named Patloq, traveling with his wife, came across an igloo that seemed uninhabited, though the dogs were urgently curious about something inside it. The lack of footprints outside suggested no one was there, and when Patloq went in he saw “two absolutely unrecognizable creatures. At first he thought that he had run up against some supernatural beings and decided to take flight, but then his wife encouraged him to look more closely at the mystery.” Inside were two skeletons, barely alive. In his earlier account Freuchen had not mentioned that another woman had lingered in those desperate circumstances along with Atagutaluk.

The party had eaten the dogs, the skin clothes, and then the dead, and still they starved until only these two were left. Upon being rescued, the other woman gave in to her ravenous hunger and died of devouring more food than her starved system could handle. Atagutaluk disciplined herself, ate sparingly, and survived. And in this version she told Freuchen, “Oh, don't think too much about it. Now I have a new husband and with him I have four new children, so I don't owe anything to anybody!”

And then Freuchen told the story again. This time, being stranded was not something that could happen to anyone and he did not compare his experience with a perilous thaw to hers. It was about the bad old days before new technologies and communications arrived, and he seems to blame much of the trouble on the perishable sled, not the weather. He did not compare it to his own series of calamities and near-escapes in the far north. This time the party who left the Igloolik area were trading fox furs, heading for Ponds Inlet and the Hudson Bay Company trading post there, hundreds of miles almost due north. Freuchen described them as stuck in a district with poor hunting, and said nothing about the snow that played a crucial role in his second rendition.

The two women are rescued, and “Atagutaluk, who knew the art of self-control, lived to a ripe old age. It was she who told me of the whole tragedy. She saw that I was deeply shocked when she told of eating her husband and her three children. It is considered very impolite for an Eskimo to ‘remove the smile from the face of a guest,' so Atagutaluk hastened to reassure me. She had found herself a new husband, she told me. And she had had a child with him and was the stepmother of his other two children, so she no longer had any debt to the ‘Great Being.'”

Three children. Four children. One child and two stepchildren. To get wood for sleds in the first version. To go hunting in the next. To sell fox furs in the last. Because of the warm wind. Because of the lack of modern or at least wooden equipment. Because of deep snow. Because of bad hunting. In every version there's the mother who eats her children, as though time ran backward, as though what had emerged from her and fed upon her was to disappear into her again. Cannibalism in arctic emergencies is rare but not unheard of, among explorers as well as inhabitants, and it's both a terrible transgression and a strange communion, a human body feeding and sustaining another body.

Human bodies sustain other bodies in various ways—the fetus feeding upon the mother, sometimes depriving her bones of calcium and other nutrients if she's undernourished, the baby living on milk for months or years afterward, the starving person's body entering catabolysis, whereby it feeds on its fat and then its muscle until the wasting has gone so far the system begins to collapse. The modern world of blood transfusions and organ transplants has been referred to by one writer as noble cannibalism.

But there is now a global trade in kidneys. Donors from poor countries—Turkey, India, Romania, the Philippines—sell them to the wealthy, while Chinese executions of prisoners are sometimes conducted in such a way as to facilitate harvesting organs for sale. Done against the donors' wills, these transplants are cannibalism of the most ignoble sort, commercial cannibalism. In certain parts of India, selling a kidney to pay for a daughter's dowry has caught on, according to Nancy Scheper-Hughes, anthropologist and cofounder of Organs Watch, in her testimony to a United States congressional subcommittee.

In the 1980s and 1990s there was a widespread belief, a folktale of sorts, in Latin America that children there were being kidnapped by people from the United States to use as organ donors for their own children. People suspected of such activity were attacked and one woman beaten into a coma. It was not literally true, but it was true in a metaphorical sense: the well-being and even survival of Central and South American children was being sacrificed for profit in the global north. It turned the complicated machinations of international finance into something simple and shocking.

I am myself a cannibal in a roundabout way. I was patched up internally with AlloDerm regenerative tissue matrix, a small scrap of what had once been someone else's skin, presumably donated, then sterilized, stripped of its DNA, and turned into an expensive brand-name product. We divide up the world as though there were real borders rather than delicately shaded degrees between the crazy and the sane, the good and the destructive, and I think of cannibalism as also a matter of degree. To what extent, in which ways, are you a cannibal, and how careful are you about who you consume? We consume each other in a thousand ways, some of them joys, some of them crimes and nightmares.

And if we consume each other in stories, then there are an abundance of stories of cannibalistic consumption, Kronos and Tantalus, Sleeping Beauty's stepmother, Hansel and Gretel eating a bit of a house made of food and facing being treated as food in return by its owner. In the German fairy tale “The Juniper Tree,” the stepmother cooks the son and feeds him to his father, though the son is miraculously reconstituted from his bones and birdsong to live again and revenge himself. Cannibalism and resurrection often go together.

Part of the transgression in
Frankenstein
is the recycling of corpses and their resurrection or reanimation by the doctor playing both God and grave robber. Atagutaluk resurrected herself by feeding on human corpses, a transgression by which she set herself apart from the rest of her people—she had to live alone for a year before she could fully return to her community. We are all resurrected in a way by food every day; we live off life, plant or animal. And one of the unmentionable facts of everyday life is that we're all made out of meat, as I remember when I walk alone, regularly, in the territory of mountain lions. The carnivorous Inuit sometimes say, “The great peril of our existence lies in the fact that our diet consists entirely of souls,” which doesn't lessen the trauma of anthropophagy, of eating human flesh, but deepens that of everyday consumption of other sentient beings.

There's a version of an Inuit story that's been making the rounds in recent decades as “Skeleton Woman.” A father throws his daughter into the sea, where the sea creatures devour her until nothing but a restless skeleton is left. Or a woman marries a handsome stranger who turns out to be a bear and she follows him under the ice where he's at home and she drowns. The underwater creatures nibble away all her flesh and leave a living skeleton. In some versions a fisherman catches the skeleton and hauls it out of the sea; in others she wakes up in her home.

Young men run away from her. An old man comes and sings and drums the flesh back on her bones. It is told as a story of the emotional self withered and starved away and then resurrected by kindness and attention, a therapeutic story like “The Juniper Tree,” in which catastrophe is wholly overcome and bodily resurrection is possible, where time runs backward as well as forward, what is suffered can be undone. Even death retreats so that the chance at happiness is given twice.

The story of Skeleton Woman bears a family resemblance to the many versions of the story of the genesis of the arctic sea goddess Sedna, the principal or one of the principal deities of the western arctic. Her story is as varied as Atagutaluk's, though since it's an ancient creation myth, not a report on a century-old calamity, the variations are less vexing. It's about a woman who would not marry. In some versions her father in fury wed her to a dog. Or it's about a woman who went off with what looked like a handsome man who turned out to be a raven. Often the husband she ends up with is a fulmar, a seabird that looks like a gull but is more closely related to shearwaters, petrels, and albatrosses.