Untitled (Esmarkbreen), 2022
Drea Zlanabitnig
Untitled (Esmarkbreen), 2022
The artist declares they have no competing interests.
Farthest North
Dianne Chisholm
i
This far north the nearest ice lies south.
ii
Motor all night from Fairhaven in northeastern Spitsbergen to Chermsideøya, an island north of Nordaustlandet, Northeastlands. Two-hundred kilometres as the fulmar flies. We bank on strong westerlies for sailing back. Crossing 80th parallel, we sight Sjuøyane, Seven Islands, Svalbard’s northernmost islands. S records our farthest north in magic numbers –
80°32’07”N; 19°53’04”E
How near we are to the fabled North Pole! Just two days’ sail on ice-free seas.
(That all-too-soon will be.) (But what is the North . . . without ice?)
iii
We read of Nansen, Amundsen, Nobile. The Great Race for the Pole. Setting off, coming short, crashing catastrophically off-course in the North’s “vast frozen wastes.” But our idea of North eludes consensus. Like Glenn Gould’s northbound voyagers, we voice a polyphony of attitudes towards legendary latitudes. With degrees of irony. H regales us with tales of how manly explorer fraternities endured polar night with frilly cross-dressing follies. D shares her plans to stage “overwintering theatricals”–with clowns for “explorers” set in shipping-container “ships” left “stranded” in Battery Park for public revaluation.
The further north we go the more ideas we shed. Embrace instead the elemental presence of what lies before us: ice-aged rock. Billion-year-old gneisses and granites, heaped by Caledonian orogeny into glacier-ground, desert-island mountains. We scrabble up Søre Castréøya’s lichen-painted, moss-garnished boulders (gnarly going for me, in someone else’s too-large boots). Every stone a stepping-stone to summit-vista of rocky elsewheres: Sjuøyane’s craggy outcrops, Vestfonna’s peak-pocked, mainland icecap on opposite horizon.
iv
Our island shingle shores a whale skull. Plus boundless scads of trash. Plastic doll, plastic ball floats, plastic bottles of all sorts, torn sheets of plastic. Plastic multi-colored shards pebble a toxic mosaic. We take up garbage-collecting as our post-heroic mission. Glean matériel for artistic reclamation. V renders “Sundry Articles Found” in polyphonic hymns to oceanic gyres, gives minor voice to historic grand monologues. D salvages ball floats to re-function as props in her forthcoming installation-deconstruction of explorer celebrity.
What we make of farthest North:
not a conquerable wasteland but a refuse assemblage.
Note
Nansen’s memoir, Farthest North, 1897, chronicles efforts to reach the farthest north on record (86°13.6’ N). Chermsideøya (Chermside Island), after Herbert C., logkeeper of Leigh Smith’s 1873 expedition. Norway’s Roald Amundsen was first to fly over the North Pole in a race against Italy’s Umberto Nobile, whose zeppelin crashed on sea ice east of Nordaustlandet. Gould’s radio documentary The Idea of North experiments with polyphonic travelogue. Søre Castréøya (South Castré Island) is in southeast Nordaustlandet. Vestfonna is Nordaustlandet’s western icecap.
The author declares they have no competing interests.
Subjective Heroism 04, 05, 06
Andrea Legge
Subjective Heroism 04. Andrea Legge 2023
Photogrammetric 3D model still of SV Antigua and environment including camera POV data interpreted by handheld iPhone and Agisoft Metashape. Created October 10, 2022, at Liefdefjorden, Hornbaekpollen, Svalbard. Special thanks to The Arctic Circle Residency Program and The Canada Council for the Arts.
Subjective Heroism 05. Andrea Legge 2023
Photogrammetric 3D model still of SV Antigua under sail and environment including camera POV data interpreted by handheld iPhone and Agisoft Metashape. Created October 15, 2022, at Isafjorden, Templefjorden, Svalbard. Special thanks to The Arctic Circle Residency Program and The Canada Council for the Arts.
Subjective Heroism 06. Andrea Legge 2023
Photogrammetric 3D model (point cloud) still of SV Antigua under sail including camera POV data interpreted by handheld iPhone and Agisoft Metashape. Created October 15, 2022, at Isafjorden, Templefjorden, Svalbard. Special thanks to The Arctic Circle Residency Program and The Canada Council for the Arts.
The author declares they have no competing interests.
Arctic: Chicxulub Asteroid
Hannah Larrabee
I kept thinking about how I’d set up
to keep myself alive, except there were
no trees. Not related, I don’t know,
maybe related, but someone really needs
to tell me what happened when I was
young and, also, now, having sheared
off so many memories, a metal planer,
the little wood curls, my compass
made of wood. But the driftwood
in Svalbard travels hundreds of years
and once it washes ashore it misses
the sea. This is a land of movement;
at 80˚ north the moon seems stuck
in the sky but it is always orbiting
in places we can’t see. Moss makes
an eerie kind of music so I’d love
the conversation, but it is silent here,
breathing slowly. And this was once
a lush, tropical place 300 million years
before Chicxulub came in vantablack.
Now they are saying there was no tail,
no sign until it hit the atmosphere
and that’s what I mean: of all the things
I love, no warning.
January 5, 2023
Widenfjorden
Hannah Larrabee
What remains
stays there
heritage
a memory that
starves, lichen
that takes
a hundred years
to grow on grisly
oils, blubber pits
graveyards
not limited to whales,
and the thing is
I can’t think back
to what was beautiful
without stepping
over what was not,
and I was ready,
I really was,
to remember—
but what came
forward was not
the past but some
unrecognizable future,
I don’t know why
I was in Svalbard
but I came back
and nothing
was the same,
I had mistaken it,
my life, and
when our ship
sheltered in
Widenfjorden,
I think it was there
between its long
mountainous fingers
that I confused
the horizon
for a place
and not a feeling,
a feeling I couldn’t
set down,
all I could do
was sleep
and count the ice
knocking
on the steel hull
like a code,
it said I came here
never to come back,
within me
a crack
that could
cleave great
glacial pillars,
I am afraid
that what arrived
was the real
pain, nautical
miles of it,
this place
like a person
a heartbreak
I never saw
coming.
September 6, 2023
The author declares they have no competing interests.
Impermanence
Alexandra Lockhart
Permanence of the Impermanent
You are strewn about the land, you’re in the birds flying, you’ve landed here.
Microscopic bits of you floating, settling in a place they don’t belong.
This place they don’t relate to, only impose upon.
You are on the shorelines, deeply ingrained with the sand.
You’ve woven yourself around the Reindeer’s antlers, entangled.
Your hopes and dreams are flying here too, in imagined untouched space.
You projected your visions dancing wild, in crisp clean air, not near.
Oh, but oh! remember, much more than your romantic fantasy is here.
©2022, Alexandra Lockhart. All Rights Reserved.
Self portrait. Svalbard, Norway. 2022.
©2022, Alexandra Lockhart. All Rights Reserved.
The author declares they have no competing interests.