Finding Edges
Jen Urso
Sir Robert Falcon Scott, who reached the South Pole but never returned, concluded that people between 30 and 40 were best adapted to the cold. That would mean me, at 38 years old, would theoretically be the best to handle the sub zero temperatures.
My body doesn’t do terribly well in the cold. There have been too many trying-to-be-tough moments of exposure while growing up in Pennsylvania, not buttoning a coat or “forgetting” a hat. Or maybe it was all those cold days waiting for the bus that have weakened my hands to the point of painful numbness by simply holding a cold can of soda. If I stop moving for anything longer than five or ten minutes, it seems my circulation system diverts all attention from my extremities to keep my core warm. However, at night you could attach charging cords to my body to generate electricity from all the heat I produce. In the Antarctic, there is too much waiting—too many times you need to be still while waiting for a blizzard to pass. I would be a legless, armless warm torso.
I have been close to frostbite too many times. That stinging, searing sensation that resumes after numb, cold blue-yellow stiffness is not a cozy-ing memory. As the blood flows back into once almost-frozen parts, the pain reminds you that a part of you almost just died.
Imagine losing a nose or a part of your ear. Imagine not being aware of when it happens. Imagine that the only people available to save the rest of your body from being taken over by ice crystallization are in the same or possibly worse condition, the ground below you melts to chilly water with the remaining heat of your body and...you have 700 miles left to walk before getting to a ship that has another thousand miles to travel before reaching warmth.
Several of these attributes make it unlikely or at least unadvisable for me to travel to the Antarctic to attempt any type of excursion. I am no delicate flower but spending weeks, months or years cold and wet may be at the limits of my abilities. My strength is reserved to urban toughness and low-income coping skills, not faring sub-zero temperatures in an unforgiving whiteness of cold and hypothermic, frostbitten danger. Perhaps it’s this awareness of my almost guaranteed inability to manage in that environment or my fear of it that has driven me to obsess over polar exploration, especially that of Antarctica.
There is no usefulness to my now encyclopedic knowledge that doesn’t even touch the nuanced knowledge of boat designer and writer Alan Gurney, author of Below the Convergence and The Race to the White Continent who poured through hundreds of bibliographic references including first-hand accounts of the first travelers into these regions. I picked up these books, and several others at a library warehouse sale on half-off Sunday. One is stamped with the Evansville Public Library and the large block letters “DISCARD”. Each one probably cost me a dollar.
It’s strange how something can turn into an obsession. At first, it started with wondering about this far-off place that no country could lay a claim to (according to the Antarctic Treaty) and how unwelcoming and unforgiving it was to humans. It was the whiteness, the strangeness, the extremity of it. Then it became the fascination with time that was trapped in something as precarious as ice. Layers of ice contained the history of our atmosphere going back hundreds of thousands of years. As glacial ice melts, these little air bubbles and artifacts of bacteria are dispersed and truly gone forever. Our ability to understand and hold on to earth’s past vanishes.
This translated into watching every documentary and film about Antarctica that I could find: Blue Planet, Planet Earth, March of the Penguins, Encounters at the End of the World, Antarctic Journal (this one made me more confused than anything), and every National Geographic, Nova or Science Channel documentary that existed on the subject. On the extras DVD for Blue Planet, there is an entire segment on travels to Antarctica with quotes from explorers’ journals and beautiful vistas of icebergs, migrating birds, penguins, whales, seals, the Aurora Australis, glaciers and tumultuous seas. I played this DVD any night I had trouble getting to sleep. Maybe the names Cook, Ponting, Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen, Ross, Weddell, D’Urville and Wilkes were being fed to my brain as I slept. Images of the landscape became my place.
I applied through the convoluted governmental application for the International Polar Year Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. After being rejected, I researched how much it would cost for me to get there myself. Being $40,000 short didn’t stop me from imagining myself on a blank white plateau experiencing ice blink and vicious 70mph winds. What justification or purpose could I provide to anyone for wanting to travel to the ends of the earth without any experience in freezing, polar conditions?
I have heard and read numerous proposals for Antarctic travels and even though there seemed to be plenty of rational explanations for the excursion—geographic, meteorological, cartographic and commerce—I have a feeling that there was a deeper purpose at work. Seeking out sealing grounds where sailors could club the poor creatures over the head, mapping unknown coastlines while charting the best sailing routes, and collecting volcanic rock for geologic study only seem to strike me as justifications. There had to be more to it. If only I had understood this approach before I applied for the Antarctic artist residency, I could have cloaked my application with some greater purpose of documenting and reflecting on the shifting nature of sea ice or by trying to relate Adelié penguin mating habits to that of young hipsters. It might seem fitting since Adeliés are named after French explorer Dumont D’Urville’s wife.
My own reasons were impossible to explain. I craved being far away from everyone and everything. I wanted nothing—no resources, no shelter, no contact. I wanted bleak nothing without reference points to guide me. I wanted to see what it would take for me to go mad or kill me. What are the edges of my body? What is necessary for me to remain in the realm of living, thinking, doing creatures? There is a caterpillar in the Arctic that goes into a cryogenic hold for years before it reaches maturity—only to mate and die. Why put ourselves through the pain?
If life were going to deal me pain, I wanted to be immediately aware of it so that I could see “this” is life and “this” is death. This is the point where you need something else other than your own body to survive—that water, food, shelter, communication, activity, art, and love are what sustain us. Tear open myself and be exposed to see what happens. I wanted proof that I was not enough and I wanted to be in an environment that disallowed the fragility of the human body.
With this in mind, my attention began to shift from the environment to the people who decided to sail into the unknown for purposes which seemed to relate to something more than accolades or organizing the world into a tidy map. Regardless of the potential for disaster, crowds of men made the decision to get on a sailing vessel sometimes without knowing the real destination, sometimes with unfamiliar crews and unknown captains and sometimes, when captains were given orders they weren’t to unseal and read until they were out to sea. They believed they were sailing to the South Pacific and then found they were to attempt to sail to the furthest point south. Other times, people looked at the caps of the earth and, whether through arrogance or a sense of adventure, decided it was the place they wanted to put their bodies and minds. All of these people, some soon to be wracked with scurvy and dysentery, went on voyages away from comfort and into the Antarctic to seek out the literal unknown.
Were they looking for the edges? Not only did they take themselves to the edges of the known planet, not knowing what to expect, not even knowing that there would be ice there, but they took their bodies to the edges of human possibility. Shackleton’s Endurance crew somehow managed to travel on an ice floe, then a small boat and then traverse an entire island of rugged terrain before reaching people who could save them. The drive to survive and persist simply for the sake of living had to have glowed every day in order to not give up.
At one point, American John Cleves Symmes had a theory that the poles of the earth were hollow. and provided one of the original impetuses behind the United States Exploring Expedition. Instead of expecting land or another civilization, people expected to uncover a whole other unknown world residing within the earth. The concept constructed the possibility of internal space travel—encountering another planet without having to leave our own. If the caps of the earth were so forbidding and unreachable, why couldn’t they be anything we could imagine? To Symmes, maybe there were no edges of possibility, there was just a continuous potential.
For others, they decided to get on a ship, sometimes with unknown crew members and a vague sense of a destination or the sense to wander and the need for something new. “Out there” was a place they didn’t know so they sailed with a captain they tried to believe in and hoped for the best once they were out at sea. Sailing towards the Antarctic Convergence, ships ran into violent waters that threatened to topple them. Sailors encountered pack ice that they had never knew existed before—an impenetrable, unyielding field that might as well be made of stone. It was like coming across an entire continent created of ice. Until the early 1800s, no one was even sure that land existed below the Antarctic circle.
I want to think they were searching for the new, the unknown, the possibly great. Whatever circumstances existed in their lives at the time of stepping on that ship, the allure of the unknown other was stronger. Where was their fear? What state of mind could they have been in to so willingly step off the ledge and into a wide, falling space of unknown? Did they want to be nothing, see nothing, escape into oblivion or fantasize about the prospect of uncovering something that no one had seen before? They wanted to seize that possibility, even if it meant never returning. While fear enters every inch and crevice of some people, paralyzing them, it could also set someone to running and never stopping.
There is something in me that forces me to seek out the limits of my capacity. It can be a lonely road during this process of seeking. Those limits could dwell in retreating from the world—to a self-imposed solitary confinement that may or may not involve traveling to a remote location. I have looked at artist residencies in Newfoundland and the Arctic Sea in the hopes of a more approachable retreat from the world. All of these voyages to the unknown nowhere—it’s as if it were just an escape. After reading so much about all of the expeditions to the south, I sense a huge sadness in the men that went on these several year-long voyages. Photos of them, frostbitten and exhausted, are almost painful to look at. After going so far and seeing how much they could push themselves, maybe the result was ultimately dissatisfying. The only other answer beyond that was to continue to push until life finally gave out.
Without being aware of it, they were helping us determine what we are capable of. When I go out for a run and wonder if I’ve had enough eat that day to sustain me, I think of men dragging sledges of 180 pounds across crevasses and stubborn, wet snow. When I think I’m getting a little chilly, I think of the men trying to sleep in the damp, freezing quarters of a ship trapped in choppy sea ice. Coated in ice, frozen and wet without any hope of drying, they trudged on for something other than advancing science or the pride of a country. It had to be pure stubbornness or retaliation against the force of death and oblivion.
Being faced with isolation from land, civilization and comforts had to forge strange and strong bonds between people. Your survival depended on the cooperation of everyone at hand. Most failed voyages did so due to in-fighting and lack of shared respect. Those that succeeded seemed to find something else from others that might not be possible anywhere else, under any other circumstances. Years after their Antarctic expedition together aboard the Erebus while on a new voyage in the Arctic, Captain Francis Crozier wrote to James Ross:
My dear James,
I cannot allow Transport to leave without writing you a line, altho’ I have little to say...How I do miss you...All things are going on well
and quietly but we are, I fear, sadly late...James, I wish you were here, I would then have no doubt as to our pursuing the proper
course...All goes on smoothly, but James dear, I am sadly alone, not a soul have I in either ship that I can go and talk to...
F. R. M. Crozier
This was his last letter before his ship and the other accompanying him vanished in the Arctic.
These people died, relatively unknown despite a few charts with their names on them, disease-ridden, alcoholic, crippled, sometimes penniless, sometimes shamed. James Cook was murdered and cut to pieces by islanders. Sir Robert Falcon Scott died of exposure and scurvy. Charles Wilkes died bitter and angry in America.
Who are today’s Antarctic explorers? Who looks at the world without a concern for knowing what might happen tomorrow? Who desires the unpredictable and the unsafe for the benefit of being on the edge of what we do not know? Who sees a barrier wall of frigid blue ice and decides to find a way around or through it?
If it is meant to be me, I think I’m failing at it. I am full of fear, wonder and fantasy that intermingles at different levels. So far, it is hard to determine whether I am full of fear or whether I would rather the Antarctic remain a fantasy.
It is possible that I’ve built up the place so much in my mind that a visit there couldn’t fulfill my expectations or image of it. It is much more fascinating to be aware that the experiences I’ve read and the accounts I’ve heard are rooted somewhere in a very real place but maybe it requires me to always keep it at a distance. I remember my mom telling me a few times that she always wanted to go to France to which I thought “then you should go!”. But I knew she never would. It was a greater thing for her to want it than to experience it. For most everything else in my life, if I want it, I work towards getting it. For Antarctica, I have constructed an entire narrative and landscape that would very likely be trumped by the reality. My fantastic construction could be enhanced but it most certainly would be replaced, terminating the fantasy forever. I feel as though the power of my obsession far outweighs any ability I have to draw on a memory.
It’s also possible that I’m afraid of myself and what I want. My mind might take me to a place that my body can’t survive in, just because it wants to find out.
Sir Robert Falcon Scott, who reached the South Pole but never returned, concluded that people between 30 and 40 were best adapted to the cold. That would mean me, at 38 years old, would theoretically be the best to handle the sub zero temperatures.
My body doesn’t do terribly well in the cold. There have been too many trying-to-be-tough moments of exposure while growing up in Pennsylvania, not buttoning a coat or “forgetting” a hat. Or maybe it was all those cold days waiting for the bus that have weakened my hands to the point of painful numbness by simply holding a cold can of soda. If I stop moving for anything longer than five or ten minutes, it seems my circulation system diverts all attention from my extremities to keep my core warm. However, at night you could attach charging cords to my body to generate electricity from all the heat I produce. In the Antarctic, there is too much waiting—too many times you need to be still while waiting for a blizzard to pass. I would be a legless, armless warm torso.
I have been close to frostbite too many times. That stinging, searing sensation that resumes after numb, cold blue-yellow stiffness is not a cozy-ing memory. As the blood flows back into once almost-frozen parts, the pain reminds you that a part of you almost just died.
Imagine losing a nose or a part of your ear. Imagine not being aware of when it happens. Imagine that the only people available to save the rest of your body from being taken over by ice crystallization are in the same or possibly worse condition, the ground below you melts to chilly water with the remaining heat of your body and...you have 700 miles left to walk before getting to a ship that has another thousand miles to travel before reaching warmth.
Several of these attributes make it unlikely or at least unadvisable for me to travel to the Antarctic to attempt any type of excursion. I am no delicate flower but spending weeks, months or years cold and wet may be at the limits of my abilities. My strength is reserved to urban toughness and low-income coping skills, not faring sub-zero temperatures in an unforgiving whiteness of cold and hypothermic, frostbitten danger. Perhaps it’s this awareness of my almost guaranteed inability to manage in that environment or my fear of it that has driven me to obsess over polar exploration, especially that of Antarctica.
There is no usefulness to my now encyclopedic knowledge that doesn’t even touch the nuanced knowledge of boat designer and writer Alan Gurney, author of Below the Convergence and The Race to the White Continent who poured through hundreds of bibliographic references including first-hand accounts of the first travelers into these regions. I picked up these books, and several others at a library warehouse sale on half-off Sunday. One is stamped with the Evansville Public Library and the large block letters “DISCARD”. Each one probably cost me a dollar.
It’s strange how something can turn into an obsession. At first, it started with wondering about this far-off place that no country could lay a claim to (according to the Antarctic Treaty) and how unwelcoming and unforgiving it was to humans. It was the whiteness, the strangeness, the extremity of it. Then it became the fascination with time that was trapped in something as precarious as ice. Layers of ice contained the history of our atmosphere going back hundreds of thousands of years. As glacial ice melts, these little air bubbles and artifacts of bacteria are dispersed and truly gone forever. Our ability to understand and hold on to earth’s past vanishes.
This translated into watching every documentary and film about Antarctica that I could find: Blue Planet, Planet Earth, March of the Penguins, Encounters at the End of the World, Antarctic Journal (this one made me more confused than anything), and every National Geographic, Nova or Science Channel documentary that existed on the subject. On the extras DVD for Blue Planet, there is an entire segment on travels to Antarctica with quotes from explorers’ journals and beautiful vistas of icebergs, migrating birds, penguins, whales, seals, the Aurora Australis, glaciers and tumultuous seas. I played this DVD any night I had trouble getting to sleep. Maybe the names Cook, Ponting, Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen, Ross, Weddell, D’Urville and Wilkes were being fed to my brain as I slept. Images of the landscape became my place.
I applied through the convoluted governmental application for the International Polar Year Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. After being rejected, I researched how much it would cost for me to get there myself. Being $40,000 short didn’t stop me from imagining myself on a blank white plateau experiencing ice blink and vicious 70mph winds. What justification or purpose could I provide to anyone for wanting to travel to the ends of the earth without any experience in freezing, polar conditions?
I have heard and read numerous proposals for Antarctic travels and even though there seemed to be plenty of rational explanations for the excursion—geographic, meteorological, cartographic and commerce—I have a feeling that there was a deeper purpose at work. Seeking out sealing grounds where sailors could club the poor creatures over the head, mapping unknown coastlines while charting the best sailing routes, and collecting volcanic rock for geologic study only seem to strike me as justifications. There had to be more to it. If only I had understood this approach before I applied for the Antarctic artist residency, I could have cloaked my application with some greater purpose of documenting and reflecting on the shifting nature of sea ice or by trying to relate Adelié penguin mating habits to that of young hipsters. It might seem fitting since Adeliés are named after French explorer Dumont D’Urville’s wife.
My own reasons were impossible to explain. I craved being far away from everyone and everything. I wanted nothing—no resources, no shelter, no contact. I wanted bleak nothing without reference points to guide me. I wanted to see what it would take for me to go mad or kill me. What are the edges of my body? What is necessary for me to remain in the realm of living, thinking, doing creatures? There is a caterpillar in the Arctic that goes into a cryogenic hold for years before it reaches maturity—only to mate and die. Why put ourselves through the pain?
If life were going to deal me pain, I wanted to be immediately aware of it so that I could see “this” is life and “this” is death. This is the point where you need something else other than your own body to survive—that water, food, shelter, communication, activity, art, and love are what sustain us. Tear open myself and be exposed to see what happens. I wanted proof that I was not enough and I wanted to be in an environment that disallowed the fragility of the human body.
With this in mind, my attention began to shift from the environment to the people who decided to sail into the unknown for purposes which seemed to relate to something more than accolades or organizing the world into a tidy map. Regardless of the potential for disaster, crowds of men made the decision to get on a sailing vessel sometimes without knowing the real destination, sometimes with unfamiliar crews and unknown captains and sometimes, when captains were given orders they weren’t to unseal and read until they were out to sea. They believed they were sailing to the South Pacific and then found they were to attempt to sail to the furthest point south. Other times, people looked at the caps of the earth and, whether through arrogance or a sense of adventure, decided it was the place they wanted to put their bodies and minds. All of these people, some soon to be wracked with scurvy and dysentery, went on voyages away from comfort and into the Antarctic to seek out the literal unknown.
Were they looking for the edges? Not only did they take themselves to the edges of the known planet, not knowing what to expect, not even knowing that there would be ice there, but they took their bodies to the edges of human possibility. Shackleton’s Endurance crew somehow managed to travel on an ice floe, then a small boat and then traverse an entire island of rugged terrain before reaching people who could save them. The drive to survive and persist simply for the sake of living had to have glowed every day in order to not give up.
At one point, American John Cleves Symmes had a theory that the poles of the earth were hollow. and provided one of the original impetuses behind the United States Exploring Expedition. Instead of expecting land or another civilization, people expected to uncover a whole other unknown world residing within the earth. The concept constructed the possibility of internal space travel—encountering another planet without having to leave our own. If the caps of the earth were so forbidding and unreachable, why couldn’t they be anything we could imagine? To Symmes, maybe there were no edges of possibility, there was just a continuous potential.
For others, they decided to get on a ship, sometimes with unknown crew members and a vague sense of a destination or the sense to wander and the need for something new. “Out there” was a place they didn’t know so they sailed with a captain they tried to believe in and hoped for the best once they were out at sea. Sailing towards the Antarctic Convergence, ships ran into violent waters that threatened to topple them. Sailors encountered pack ice that they had never knew existed before—an impenetrable, unyielding field that might as well be made of stone. It was like coming across an entire continent created of ice. Until the early 1800s, no one was even sure that land existed below the Antarctic circle.
I want to think they were searching for the new, the unknown, the possibly great. Whatever circumstances existed in their lives at the time of stepping on that ship, the allure of the unknown other was stronger. Where was their fear? What state of mind could they have been in to so willingly step off the ledge and into a wide, falling space of unknown? Did they want to be nothing, see nothing, escape into oblivion or fantasize about the prospect of uncovering something that no one had seen before? They wanted to seize that possibility, even if it meant never returning. While fear enters every inch and crevice of some people, paralyzing them, it could also set someone to running and never stopping.
There is something in me that forces me to seek out the limits of my capacity. It can be a lonely road during this process of seeking. Those limits could dwell in retreating from the world—to a self-imposed solitary confinement that may or may not involve traveling to a remote location. I have looked at artist residencies in Newfoundland and the Arctic Sea in the hopes of a more approachable retreat from the world. All of these voyages to the unknown nowhere—it’s as if it were just an escape. After reading so much about all of the expeditions to the south, I sense a huge sadness in the men that went on these several year-long voyages. Photos of them, frostbitten and exhausted, are almost painful to look at. After going so far and seeing how much they could push themselves, maybe the result was ultimately dissatisfying. The only other answer beyond that was to continue to push until life finally gave out.
Without being aware of it, they were helping us determine what we are capable of. When I go out for a run and wonder if I’ve had enough eat that day to sustain me, I think of men dragging sledges of 180 pounds across crevasses and stubborn, wet snow. When I think I’m getting a little chilly, I think of the men trying to sleep in the damp, freezing quarters of a ship trapped in choppy sea ice. Coated in ice, frozen and wet without any hope of drying, they trudged on for something other than advancing science or the pride of a country. It had to be pure stubbornness or retaliation against the force of death and oblivion.
Being faced with isolation from land, civilization and comforts had to forge strange and strong bonds between people. Your survival depended on the cooperation of everyone at hand. Most failed voyages did so due to in-fighting and lack of shared respect. Those that succeeded seemed to find something else from others that might not be possible anywhere else, under any other circumstances. Years after their Antarctic expedition together aboard the Erebus while on a new voyage in the Arctic, Captain Francis Crozier wrote to James Ross:
My dear James,
I cannot allow Transport to leave without writing you a line, altho’ I have little to say...How I do miss you...All things are going on well
and quietly but we are, I fear, sadly late...James, I wish you were here, I would then have no doubt as to our pursuing the proper
course...All goes on smoothly, but James dear, I am sadly alone, not a soul have I in either ship that I can go and talk to...
F. R. M. Crozier
This was his last letter before his ship and the other accompanying him vanished in the Arctic.
These people died, relatively unknown despite a few charts with their names on them, disease-ridden, alcoholic, crippled, sometimes penniless, sometimes shamed. James Cook was murdered and cut to pieces by islanders. Sir Robert Falcon Scott died of exposure and scurvy. Charles Wilkes died bitter and angry in America.
Who are today’s Antarctic explorers? Who looks at the world without a concern for knowing what might happen tomorrow? Who desires the unpredictable and the unsafe for the benefit of being on the edge of what we do not know? Who sees a barrier wall of frigid blue ice and decides to find a way around or through it?
If it is meant to be me, I think I’m failing at it. I am full of fear, wonder and fantasy that intermingles at different levels. So far, it is hard to determine whether I am full of fear or whether I would rather the Antarctic remain a fantasy.
It is possible that I’ve built up the place so much in my mind that a visit there couldn’t fulfill my expectations or image of it. It is much more fascinating to be aware that the experiences I’ve read and the accounts I’ve heard are rooted somewhere in a very real place but maybe it requires me to always keep it at a distance. I remember my mom telling me a few times that she always wanted to go to France to which I thought “then you should go!”. But I knew she never would. It was a greater thing for her to want it than to experience it. For most everything else in my life, if I want it, I work towards getting it. For Antarctica, I have constructed an entire narrative and landscape that would very likely be trumped by the reality. My fantastic construction could be enhanced but it most certainly would be replaced, terminating the fantasy forever. I feel as though the power of my obsession far outweighs any ability I have to draw on a memory.
It’s also possible that I’m afraid of myself and what I want. My mind might take me to a place that my body can’t survive in, just because it wants to find out.
About the author
Jen Urso creates multi-disciplinary works that explore endurance, persistence, change, compliance, and ignored or forgotten moments and places. She is a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant recipient, is included in the Drawing Center Viewing Program, and has exhibited in Arizona, New York, Oregon, Colorado, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro. In 2011, Jen published her book the things in between in conjunction with a solo show at Modified Arts, Phoenix, AZ. Jen received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and completed one year of coursework towards an MFA in Art Practice at the School of Visual Arts, New York. She lives and works in downtown Phoenix, AZ.
http://jenniferursoart.com/
Photo credit: Makoto Ishida
http://jenniferursoart.com/
Photo credit: Makoto Ishida