Gleams and Shadows, Stillness

“With her anchor at the bow and clothed in canvas to her very trucks, my command seemed to stand as motionless as a model ship set on the gleams and shadows of polished marble. It was impossible to distinguish land from water in the enigmatical tranquillity of the immense forces of the world. A sudden impatience possessed me.”

– Joseph Conrad, from “The Shadow-line”

I've hit a wall. Or, I've become bogged down. Or this damn rock keeps rolling back down the hill. Or maybe I'm just floating, still. The prevailing winds have become too calm for too long, and it seems only for me. Someone identified the etymology of the expression doldrums the other day. We were in a no wind situation, which is an interesting circumstance up here. The Temporary Atmospheric Watch Observatory (TAWO) measures the cleanliness of the air in parts per million. There are multiple and similar stations across the globe. TAWO has been there for years. So, I'm unsure how temporary it actually is. When the winds are from the north (known as “North Winds”) we cannot operate machinery on station because the exhaust is blown south and affects the data. A request for exception might be made. It's called a variance. The same goes for no winds, things are shut down in the event that our particulate or exhaust will register with the very sensitive equipment and therefore affect the experiment.

Somebody farted quite loudly outside my door this morning. I would never condemn a person for passing wind up here. Warms you up. And the atmosphere is shallow and does weird things to the insides for some people. That said, this was a protracted event and distracting. Out of good manners, I did not turn around to identify the perpetrator or make any notice of the sound beyond slowing my fingers on this keyboard. It most certainly broke my concentration. I might have laughed aloud otherwise, but was and have been concerned with my own silence of late. Head down. Mouth shut. Do your job. Go home. Which is all a variance I requested and was granted. The pre-deployment supplication my wife proffered when I left for Greenland was quite insistent. But I'll address that later.

I keep my door open in the morning, my back to it, as I sit at this little desk and drink my coffee from a mug. The mug was left by someone named Benjamin. Ben, if you're reading this, I'm using your Dolly Parton coffee mug. The coffee cup has Dolly Parton's red-lipped, too white face emblazoned across the surface. Her hair is a cascade of Aryan giddiness, and there is a train blowing off, and the word Dollywood along the bottom, but the double-u is a butterfly and the wings are multicolored. There is a mill; water appears spilling from above and will never turn the waterwheel. The grist remains unground for eternity. And there is also the suggestion that Dolly “will always love you” printed above a pristine white house that looks more like a church, but might very well be the ancestral home of Ms. Parton. Fuck if I know. I do know that I don't believe this absurd claim of her undying affection.

I write at this desk most mornings, or read the news and become angry, or simply stare at my favorite picture of my wife. She's sitting thoughtfully, clutching her knees on a rock beside the Mediterranean, and is wearing a colorful shirt, and the water behind her is foaming and crashing, and phenomenally blue. The shirt is red, orange, and black and it all contrasts so perfectly. Well, perfectly to me. We took a trip to Sicily a few years ago. Rented a car in Catania and this picture, my favorite of her, was taken in Siracusa just about a day later. We were thankfully together and investigating the island. It is often a fine thing to travel with the one you love, to be one half of an us. This picture reminds me of that.

The pre-deployment supplication: my wife told me to be calm and kind over the course of this contract. I am an historic curmudgeon. A friend and I organized a drunken soccer league at college. We all had nicknames stenciled on the backs of our jerseys. My nickname was Asshole and I was entirely fine with that. It is not that I am an unkind person. I'm just not the nicest person. Sincerity is important. If I detect deceit, I lose respect for a person and proceed to treat them disrespectfully. And I know I am also a sensitive person, and passionate about certain topics. So her supplication was more of an admonition and was quite apt, and helpful, and I've tried to adhere to it. Been successful in the aggregate, for a month and a bit.

I was corresponding with one of my little brothers the other day. He's going through his own crisis right now. Those feelings and thoughts he describes to me are not unfamiliar. And he is moving toward the drift, a state of being and a language of description I am equally versed in. I've drifted myself. I told him that Summit Station is a microcosm of the world. That the same sort of problems extant outside of this camp also exist within, regardless of how positive one tries to be. Here these issues are more focused and, to me, more hurtful because these people are no longer strangers. We live together and eat together and there is nowhere to run, to drift.

Here I've witnessed deceit, betrayal, selfishness, cowardice, pettiness, and frequent failures of leadership, more so in recent days. It is disheartening. I told my brother, we must continue. We must persist.

One person I've known off and on for nearly a decade, and who I considered a friend, turned out to be two-faced. This has not been the only instance of overt deceit I've witnessed this season, but it is the one that hurt the most. The other deceit is omnipresent in some of the people here, and it is painful to witness and to bear. What hurt the most is that this person could have come to me if I did or said something destructive or hurtful, but this person chose not to. Chose instead to disparage me behind my back and treat me with contempt. As I've stated, I am not the nicest person in the world, but when faced with my clear wrongdoings, I am quick to apologize. Those apologies are sincere because I know I make mistakes as much or more than anybody. I am as human as the next person. It does often hurt, however, when people who possess qualities one admires turns out to be of much lesser value than was formerly thought. I described all these things to my brother in more detail than I am willing to go into here. And I sent him poetry, and a few pages of philosophy to which I try to adhere. I hope these little anecdotes and the intelligent words of others give him some calm and solace within the tumult he finds himself currently.

I told him that it is not just that life is hard. He knows this as much or more than anyone. Kith and kin who know him will attest to the accuracy of that statement. And I told him that it is not that people suck (they do). We just need to keep living and working with these people. And we don't have to be friends with them, but we have to share the planet with them. We must remember there are pockets of goodness out there. There are moments of happiness and pleasure and pure fucking joy. And yes, they are few. But rarity equals value. I asked him to trust me and to meditate on that. To hold fast to that truth.

While I may have witnessed deceit, betrayal, selfishness, cowardice, sheer egoism, pettiness, and frequent failures of leadership, I've also witnessed their opposites. That fills me with some light. Our lives are protean things. And protean things are ever shifting. Drifting. They'll surprise us with gleams and shadows and stillness. They'll strike awe like a bear outside your tent, or momentarily distract like an early morning fart in a quiet hallway. There is no always. Even Dolly Parton's love can't last forever. But I ain't sad. Almost titled this post Farts and Dolly Parton, but wasn't sure anybody'd read past the first paragraph. Anyway, fuck all this noise. Head down. Shut your soup cooler. Do your job. Go home.

“All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” – Albert Camus, from “The Myth of Sisyphus”