The Expedition
I have placed a quote by Annie Dillard at the beginning of this story. I do this with the utmost respect for who she is and what she has given me. More to the point, perhaps, is what I have been able, in my small way, to take from her!
“The Pole of Relative Inaccessibility” is, in fact, a 'real' place. You can google it! And the “Tropical Convergence Zone” is a 'real' place and is also called “The Doldrums” which, as everyone knows, also means “The Blues” which, as everyone knows, is a very real place.
Of course, between you and me and the gate post, we all know that love is the final and most elusive pole, the most impossible pole. Love is the pole we all search for again and again and the damn thing is somewhere just beyond, always over the horizon, over the mountain, across a narrow and dangerous channel. Always, always, always, just out of reach. Annie understands this most clearly and concisely. It is one of the things that makes her so beautiful, so haunted. All her musings twist and turn toward this lode stone and she is relentless in her pursuit. I do love her for that.
“It is for the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility I search and have been searching in the mountains and along the sea-coasts for years. The aim of the expedition is, as Pope Gregory put it in his time, “To attain to somewhat of the unencompassed light, by stealth and scantily.” How often have I mounted this same expedition, has my absurd barque set out, half caulked, for the pole.”
“I have, I say, set out again. The days tumble with meanings. The corners heap up with poetry: whole unfilled systems litter the ice.”
Annie Dillard
I had a friend who went on an expedition. He said he was going to the South Pole of Relative Inaccessibility. There was a big fuss in our town about this great odyssey and he recruited local people to go with him. ‘Local talent’ he called them. ‘Good Pay and Adventure!’ was how he promoted his enterprise. I auditioned but was refused, because of my ‘instability’ he said. He managed to get about eight people to sign up. They were a motley crew indeed, which made my rejection even more painful. After all, only the most desperate and confused and terminally unemployed would leave our safe little village to wander off on such a dangerous and impossible journey.
My friend had a sextant and maps and a slide rule and a compass and claimed to have established exactly where the South Pole of Relative Inaccessibility was located. He had the coordinates nailed down, he said. His crew had their gear strewn all over the floor of his house, in piles. A pile for each function; food, clothing, sleeping bags, books, tools and so on and so forth. My friend’s wife just shook her head and stood there in her flannel bathrobe and sipped her martini's and shook her head some more. She wandered in and out and threaded her way between the piles of dry goods.
My friend marked their route on a map with a thin red line. He was still nice to me but somewhat dismissive of any comments I made because of my ‘instability.’ He said,
“You don't understand the bigger picture. You don’t have the powers of concentration.” I would point to a spot on the map where the red line crossed some mountain range or floated across an expanse of ocean and say,
“How will you manage that obstacle?” He would give me a condescending frown and go back to his mathematical calculations and checking his list of supplies and instructing his crew.
During the day, the crew trained with ropes and sticks and medicine balls and in the evenings, they sat cross-legged on the floor and listened intently, enthralled and excited as my friend described the various beasts they would encounter on the way. The beasts they would battle and subdue, the mountain ranges they would cross, the hostile natives they would befriend and enlist to help them. I asked,
“What about mosquitoes, snakes, sea serpents, bed bugs, bad weather?” But I was ignored.
The crew had never been outside of our valley. Most of them had barely been outside of our little village in the middle of our little valley. There was a fence around our village and I had seen many of them with their noses pressed between the slats peering into the vast unknown. But they never climbed over the fence. They just peered and squinted for a while and then they wandered back to their various 'safe zones' like the pub or cafe or pool hall or bowling alley or one of the many churches. They went to the churches for food and sometimes a place to sleep and all they had to do was shout,
“Praise Jesus!” once in a while and the Christians would give them pie with whipped cream on top. Really, it was a good life despite the scorn they endured from the respectable citizens.
But now they were preparing for the greatest adventure of their lives! Those dismal days of disdain were in the past. Now, they had purpose. Finally, they were going to be somebody. They did push-ups and stomach crunches and deep knee bends. They encouraged each other with, “Atta boy Billy,” “Atta boy Jack,” “Way to go Janey,” “Stay focused William.” That sort of talk.
I wondered a lot about The South Pole of Relative Inaccessibility. I thought it must be the place you will never get to no matter how hard you try. I thought it must be like arriving at love. Everyone knows you cannot arrive at love because love is not a place. Love is not a noun. Love is always moving around. First, it is lodged in your liver and your piss is a terrible colour. Then, it is lodged in the pit of your stomach and you feel like you are going to throw up all the time. Then, it lodges in your throat and you are laughing and shouting and certain that you have arrived. You’re convinced you have finally made it! And then, it is lodged in your brain and you know that your throat lied to you and your stomach lied to you and your liver lied to you. You think the only one telling the truth is your brain and your brain is saying that there is no such thing as love in one place. Maybe no such thing as love at all! Your brain says look at the facts. Objectively. And you do look at the facts and you can see that your brain is right. And you are very sad because you wanted to find a place that is love, a permanent home with a cup of tea in the garden. Then you feel funny in your chest and your heart is fluttering and your breath is short and your heart says, “Here it is. Here is where love resides.” But when you go to chase that flutter it runs away back to your liver back to your stomach back to your throat. You know your heart is just making a fool of you and your brain is laughing at how ridiculous your heart is and your heart is crying for your brain because your brain is so damn stupid and does not understand any real truth but only facts, facts that are only a skeleton of the truth. Bones with no flesh on them. And there is quite an argument raging all through your flesh. A war is raging. You feel like that Salvador Dali painting called ‘Civil War’ where the body is killing itself and eating itself and stretched all out of shape. It is a horrible painting of a horrible thought. It is a painting about love gone bad. Very bad. You are in quite a state with your breathless breath and your thumping heart which is jumping up into your shouting throat, and your liver pissing out unusual colours. Your body is in big trouble and your brain is trying so hard to keep control.
“Settle down all of you!” He cries, as if he is in charge. But your brain is not in charge.
When my friend, Sam, said he knew the coordinates for The South Pole of Relative Inaccessibility I knew he was wrong. I knew the coordinates would shift as he got closer. I knew that this pole, this most terrible of all Poles, would simply move around, would not stay still. This Pole is not the iron-obsessed ‘Magnetic South Pole’ or the honest and reliable ‘True South Pole.’ This is a Wandering Pole. An Unstable Pole.
I didn’t have a sextant or a slide rule but I knew plenty about instability. I understood the Laws of Instability, intimately, personally. And I knew I could not make love stand still and I knew my friend Sam could not make the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility stand still either.
Love is the Pole of Impossibility. That’s what I thought. It’s somewhere near the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility but even harder to get to. In fact, as the name suggests, probably impossible. At any rate, that’s what I thought. So, I figured Sam and I were both trying to go in the same direction, maybe even to the same place. Maybe we could combine our Poles and call it “A Journey to the Pole of Impossible Inaccessibility.” That’s a complicated name, but we could call it something else. We could come up with a better name. And then off we would go together to a place that does not exist or only exists in a flash and then slips left or fakes right and feigns a pass or shouts an echo, like balls bouncing off walls in a big gymnasium. An Athletic Pole performing incredible feats of distraction.
There you are, standing alone in a circle of wind, flat footed, while this Pole rushes around you like a professional basketball player, like those guys from the Harlem Globetrotters. You get a crick in your neck from whipping your head around trying to catch a glimpse of him as he rushes around you and through you and over you and under you. When he goes under you, your compass points straight down and twists and spins and flips like an Olympic diver heading to the centre of the earth. Totally useless. Even the molten iron core of the earth is laughing at you.
I knew all this but I couldn’t explain it to Sam but I still wanted to go with him on his expedition because I wasn’t having any success at home because of my instability and because of love’s instability. I spoke to my love interest and I said,
“I see that you want to talk about love.” And she said,
“Yes, and that is why I will say nothing at all.” She was right of course. If you want to talk about love it is better to talk about your socks or your new shoes or the bad noise your car is making. It is better to make small talk about the weather. It is better to re-arrange the furniture. Because love is ridiculous and difficult to discuss and love is not one thing, it is many things, so it’s very confusing and causes unhealthy emotions. I could see her body fighting with itself just like my body was fighting with itself and her mind was trying to stay tall in the saddle and control that unruly love horse. My mind was entertaining pictures by Salvador Dali and ripping my body apart. Her mind was painting trompe l’oeil’s to wander through. She painted sea shells and orchards and sunsets, and then she walked into her picture and ate the apples in the orchard and admired the seashells on the beach with the sun going down. I could see that her mind was much stronger than my mind. She had a plan for dealing with her emotions. She was going to paint her way into, or out of, or through, or beyond them.
And then one day I went over to Sam’s house and they were all gone. The floor was cleared of all the piles. Sam’s wife sat on the couch in her bathrobe and sipped her martini. She seemed unconcerned one way or another, what will be will be, Que Sera Sera, only time will tell, the bear went over the mountain, a fool and his money are soon parted, there is no fool like an old fool, easy come easy go, a refill please more gin please thankyou very much, sit down and tell me all about your instability, and what was your name again, come over here sit closer to me, my you are quite handsome, and so on and so forth, with her hand stroking my knee.
I tried to keep track of the expedition. I found little items in various local newspapers that I came across. Towns and cities that appeared on the thin red line of their progress. Some of the adventurers had dropped out. Jack married a local woman and set up camp in a foreign village, learned to speak a language that was clicks and clacks and glottal stops. Quite happy I understand. Billy found religion, wore nothing but a loin cloth and spent his days standing on his head. Quite happy I understand. Janey learned to dance the Polka and became well known for playing the accordion! She was adored by the locals. Very happy I am told. A couple of them died by misadventure such as stepping on a snake or eating a poisonous snail. Not so happy but quite conclusive. William drowned in a shallow pond. The article said he was delusional and believed he was Lord Byron swimming across the Bosporus. So, of course he drowned! Was it fate or was it was self-determination? They certainly had fun. They certainly had an adventure. As promised.
The last I heard Sam had arrived at the Intertropical Convergence Zone, about half way to The South Pole of Relative Inaccessibility. His boat sunk because the planks shrunk and the sea poured in. He built a raft with rope and sticks. And there he was, stuck on his raft, swirling slowly in the centre of that mighty Convergence Zone, going around and around in a lazy circle. He lay fully exposed to the sun and his skin cracked. Then bump! He banged up against another raft and on this raft was an Ancient Mariner so the two of them lashed their rafts together and made a team of two. He wrote messages and put them in bottles. He swore he had not killed the Albatross. But nonetheless, he was being punished anyway. “Not My Fault” was the general tone of the messages. “Not Guilty” he repeated over and over. “God is Not Nice!” he scrawled at the bottom of almost every page. But nobody believed him, not even the Ancient Mariner. The Ancient Mariner had shot the Albatross and Sam had been starving and he shot the Albatross too. Most certainly. And Sam drank the blood to slake his thirst and ate the flesh of the Albatross. And he shat the Albatross out of his arsehole and into the sea. Most certainly. No wonder God was not nice to the Ancient Mariner, or to Sam. No wonder God had stuck them together, day after day with no breath no motion, in that silent sea. They had committed an atrocity, a murder, a mortal sin. After all, God loves the Albatross.
I lay awake at night and imagined how Sam must feel spinning slowly around way down there in the doldrums with water everywhere and not a drop to drink, with blackened lips and swollen tongue and slimy things that crawled with legs upon the slimy sea.
I felt very bad for him so I tried to mount a rescue mission but who would come with me? Sam had already conscripted the only fools who would venture outside the fence that surrounds the village. And they were all MIA. The only people left in the village were good people. People with jobs and prospects, sensible people with their heads screwed on right. They had no interest in the South Pole of Relative Inaccessibility or The Impossible Love Pole or the Intertropical Convergence Zone or the tribes of hostile natives or the inclement weather they might encounter. No interest at all. None. They did not even peer between the slats of the fence that surrounded our village. They did not want to peer into that terrible unknown. They said, “Why bother?”
I asked my love interest if she would come with me on the rescue mission. She was my last hope for companionship on the trail. She was an intrepid traveler and knew her way around. Far better than me, with my clumsy feet, my dizzy head, my unstable mind. She said to me,
“Sam is soft in the head, even worse than you.”
When I asked her to come with me to rescue poor Sam, Sam with the soft head, she said,
“Maybe. But first, because you are so clumsy, you need to learn to dance or you will fall into a ditch or a canyon.” I said,
“Okay.” She said,
“Will you practice?” and I said,
“Yes. But what about my dizzy spells and these hallucinations?” She said,
“I don’t feel sorry for you and I won’t look after you when the going gets rough.” She said,
“If I go with you, I will abandon you somewhere along the way. I will hurt you, maybe by accident, but probably on purpose.” I asked her,
“Why?” She said,
“It’s who I am. It’s what I do. I have lovers scattered all over the world and I may meet up with one of them and decide to stay with him.” Then she walked into one of her paintings and changed the colour of her sky to a bruised purple and in the middle of the sky she painted a black vortex and in the middle of the vortex she painted a clear blue circle, a patch of blue sky that went on and in and up forever. And in the middle of that blue patch of sky she painted a bird. She intended to fly through the bruising storm, endure the vertigo of the black vortex, and then, with a few sturdy wing beats, disappear into that calm blue circle. She had an impressive plan for dealing with her emotions.
The thought that I would be left on the trail all alone, without anyone to discuss the best route or to keep their eyes open for bandits or share a cup of tea, that scared me badly.
I had a dream that I was standing way out on the prairie on a wide empty highway. The highway was brand new, four lanes, and cut through the prairie, over the rolling hills as far as the eye could see. And there were no cars on the highway and no human sound, only the sound of a cold wind through the tall grass. My clothes were too thin for the weather and I had lost my backpack down in the dark town, back in the river valley, so I had no food and no extra sweater. I just kind of woke up standing in the middle of nowhere wondering how I had gotten myself there. And it was too far to go back. And going forward was endless.
I told my love interest about the dream and she said,
“Maybe you should hitchhike?” And I said,
“But there are no cars, not a soul in sight.” I guess I was hoping she would be the first car to come along and she would give me a ride and we would head off across the open prairie with the heater turned up high and maybe even a blanket. She would laugh kindly at my blue lips and say,
“There’s a thermos of coffee in the back,” and I would warm my fingers around the cup and my insides would get warmer with every gulp. Maybe she would reach over and stroke the back of my neck as we sped along the empty highway. But maybe she was too busy with her other lovers, way back there, in the dark town I had left behind, because she didn’t show up and I was feeling really lonely and exposed in my thin shirt in the cold wind on the lone prairie.
Now I was really worried. I was not sure about this rescue mission. Not sure at all. The logistics were daunting. Train tickets and plane tickets and boat tickets and so many languages to understand. And even if I did find poor Sam swirling about in the doldrums, what then? I would have to nurse him back to health, a health he had never known. I would have to nurse him into a new-found health where he was strong in mind, body and spirit. I started to pack bandages and salves and extracts and laudanum and hypodermic needles and herbs. Any medicine I could think of that might be useful. But when I looked at my medicines, they looked kind of pitiful. Who did I think I was, a doctor?
I got so scared that I cancelled my plans for a rescue mission. Sam was dead or dying and way beyond my reach. I didn’t have the skills or the physical stamina or the courage to make this journey all alone. Who did I think I was, an explorer?
I got so scared I quit chasing my love interest, even though she seemed like my last hope to ever get to that Impossible Love Pole. I quit following her around like some wounded animal. After all, she wanted to keep multiple lovers and I was only one of those multiples and I found that arithmetic too painful. For me, one plus one did not add up to five. I wasn’t mature enough to manage that kind of situation. Because of all the books I had read, I had another idea of an ideal love. Because of all the books I had read, I knew how absurd, how impossible, my idea of an ideal love was. But I clung to it anyway. I clung desperately. I did not want to face the facts that love is a dreadful business. But I did wonder, who did she think I was? A player? A play thing? A toy soldier? Or maybe she didn’t think of me at all. Maybe she hardly noticed I was gone.
I moved in with Sam’s wife. She wore her flannel nightie and we drank gin together. We fucked quite often, in a loveless hopeless way. We watched TV and I tried not to think about my elusive Love Pole way out there, sending out a dim beacon every once in a while. An old lighthouse blinking sporadically, weakly warning wayward ships of love’s perilous shoals. An abandoned light house calling me to my dissolution.
I buried my compass in the backyard and I never pressed my nose between the fence slats that surrounded the village. I didn’t squint into that vast unknown. Life was pretty good.
The last note I received from Sam said,
“All in a hot and copper sky,
the bloody sun, at noon,
right up above the mast does stand,
no bigger than the moon.”
He noted in this note that he was writing an epic poem with the help of his only friend, The Ancient Mariner. He was never seen again, but his poem was found in a bottle and has become quite famous. Have you heard of it? Have you read it?
