Caspar David Friedrich freezes up on our shore

I have to admit, it was Bree Zorel's hilarious photographs of mini-bergs--tiny accumulations of snow around Halifax, each one resembling a minor iceberg--that started me wondering, "and what do the pans of ice that stack up on our shore look like?"

Because I'm much more serious than Bree is (well, in demeanor only; a comedic artist is really about as serious as one can get, and that's what she is), my thoughts turned instantly to romantic images of ships stuck fast in the ice. (Ah, the tragedy, the mockery of human ambition, the dashing of the well-laid plan! You see how German philosophy fits me like a glove. I'm steeped in it and cannot get these tea stains out of my head.)

In particular, I thought of Caspar David Friedrich (a Swede by birth, a fact that did not exempt him from darkening romantic thoughts; he too received German training and is usually considered German), and of that painting known variously as The Wreck of the Hope, The Polar Sea, and The Sea of Ice.  Completed in 1824, during a period of great despair in the painter's life, the work was not particularly well-received.  Even contemporary commentators have described it as overwrought--a work that "goes beyond documentary into allegory: the frail bark of human aspiration crushed by the world's immense and glacial indifference." (This is, itself, quite dramatic wringing commentary--was the painter ever particularly "documentary" in ambition or execution? Really?)

But there we are. I have my model, such as it is, for what this ice resembles, and what--perhaps--it means.

Do you see the Hope there, a dark shape, a crushed and splintered ship to the right of the largest stack-up of slabs of ice? That it will founder is a conclusion we cannot avoid. Still, how beautiful the ice!

Caspar David Friedrich, Wreck of the Hope, 1823-4, Kunsthalle, Hamburg

Caspar David Friedrich freezes up on our shore, a set on Flickr. To see enlargements of the photographs, click on each one.

Quote about Friedrich's painting comes from "Art: the Awe-Struck Witness," Time, October 28, 1974.

Sea Ice Breaks On the Shore

It begins, slowly, the ice-up.

Freshwater freezes first, and near the shore, skims and plaques of ice form on the surface. They float in on the high tide and, then, as the water sucks back out, the ice is left behind to crack over rocks and barrels and tree limbs and other detritus.

At first the ice is very thin, and because it contains some salt, brittle, like shattered glass. Then it thickens, breaks, forms again, breaks, thickens, until huge boulders and pans of ice lie scattered across the beaches, an impassible wreckage, the sea a solid frozen mass without colour or visible movement.

Then the seals come deep into the bays to pup; we see them out on the ice, moving first one flipper, then another.

But we're not at that point yet. The icing up is just beginning here....Breaking, reforming, thicker than before.

Click on each small photograph to see a larger image in Flickr.

Fata Morganas Studied, Seen and Found

FATA MORGANA STUDIED

Q: What is a fata morgana?

A: A fata morgana is an elevated, distorting mirage that usually appears over large bodies of water, grass or sand, though apparently it can be seen anywhere, even in the air from an airplane if the conditions are right. In a fata morgana mirage, islands or ships at sea appear to lift off of the water or to be stretched and stacked upon the water, typically in great layercakes alternating right-side up and upside-down forms.

Sometimes, fata morganas make objects appear where none are. One day off of the west coast of Greenland, for example, we saw, in the distance, what seemed to be a large modern city rising out of the sea. It looked as if Panama City had suddenly sprung up north of the arctic circle. No such thing was there of course; nothing at all was, although for a time, it looked as if numerous glass and steel towers clustered on some edge of land to our east.

This was not the first time sailors in the far north thought they saw things where there were none: in 1818, while hunting for the Northwest Passage, Sir John Ross arrived in Lancaster Sound and thought he saw a mountainous mass of land.  Several of his officers argued that he was seeing a mirage, but he would not heed them,  and because he thought he could not pass, turned around and sailed back to England. He named his vision Crocker Mountains, after a man who was then First Secretary of the Navy. A year later his first mate, William Edward Parry sailed through those mountains and further west, into the Northwest Passage, leaving the reputation of Sir John Ross in tatters.

Nearly a century later, in 1906, Robert Peary sighted what he believed was a land mass, which he placed at about 83 degrees north latitude and 100 degrees west longitude. Ironically enough, he called his vision "Crocker Land," though his Crocker was not the same Crocker, but a fellow in the Peary Arctic Club. Seven years later,  in 1913, at great expense, Donald Baxter MacMillan launched the "Crocker Land Expedition," to find and chart Peary's imaginary landmass. They thought they found it; according to MacMillan's notes they saw "hills, valleys, snow-capped peaks extending through at least one hundred and twenty degrees of the horizon.” Piugaattoq, an Inuit hunter traveling with the expedition told the explorers that what they were seeing was "mist," an illusion, but, naturally, in typical arctic explorer fashion, they didn't believe him and pressed on for days through dangerous breaking sea ice. Finally they gave up, admitted Piugaattoq was right, and turned around.

Q: What causes a fata morgana?

A: Typically, warm air lies in a layer over the earth, while cooler air rises into the atmosphere.  But sometimes, in calm weather, this order is inverted, and a layer of warm air lies above a significantly cooler surface layer.  The sharp temperature gradient between these two layers may create conditions where what is called an atmospheric duct, a zone of refraction between the two layers, functions like a lens, bending light rays more strongly than the curvature of the earth.  When this happens, you get fata morgana effects, in which reflections from the water or ice or land or air are refracted upward, from denser cool air towards less dense warmer air and stacked on top of one another or otherwise distorted.  These can be photographed because they are not simply optical illusions, but real atmospheric effects.

Q: Where does that name, fata morgana, come from? What does it mean?

A: According to writer Morgen Jahnke, "Fata Morgana is the Italian name for Morgan le Fay, the half-sister of King Arthur in Arthurian legend. Reputedly a sorceress and able to change shape at will, Morgan le Fay was sometimes said to live below the sea in a crystal palace that could also rise above the surface. The fata morgana effect was so named for the superstitious belief among sailors that she created illusory visions to lure men into a false port and to their death."  

The term was in usage in English in 1818, to describe a "peculiar mirage" that appeared in the Strait of Messina, a narrow body of water between Sicily and the southern Italian region of Calabria, and was locally ascribed to "a fay Morgana."  Soon however, the use of the term was more widespread.  Thus, for example, in 1873, in his poem, "Fata Morgana," a tiny fragment of a much longer work entitled Birds of Passage, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow writes:


The weary traveler sees
In desert or prairie vast,
Blue lakes, overhung with trees
That a pleasant shadow cast;

Fair towns with turrets high,
And shining roofs of gold,
That vanish as he draws nigh...

FATA MORGANA SEEN--Look, that island is standing on its head!

8 February 2012

Glittering sunshine, cold blue air.  An edge of Ship Island lifts up off of the water like the sole of a shoe coming unglued. Not yet a fata morgana, but when the water gets colder, it will be. Funny how light shimmers in the heat or mimics water, tossing illusory puddles in the road, but elevates in the cold and mimics air, building fantasy castles and other odd forms.

I wonder if we find ourselves fascinated by mirages because they fight against the notion that our senses impart truths to us about the world.  But when our senses show us things that aren't "really true," or "really just as they seem," it is perhaps not our senses that are out of order, but our interpretive capacities.

The positional information we receive from our senses rarely designates "true points," as any navigator knows. Everything is perspectival; everything lies in parallax. As you approach any object or island or land mass, shortening the angle of your view, the object's position seems to shift.

This is one of the pleasures and wonders and dangers of seeing. And drawing. What you see or what you sense is not as you think it should be, but as it is, elsewhere, according to some other logic, which is what you must then discover.  Such labour of discovery is ultimately the work of living. Truly. Deeply. And yes madly.  Who would want it any other way?



FATA MORGANA FOUND

Because it's shifting.  And enchanting.

Werner Herzog, Fata Morgana, 1970 (http://youtu.be/pZX45lVaGu8)

Notes

Photo: Beaver Harbour Light, Harbour Islands seen from Sober Island. January 2012

Andy Young, "An Introduction to Mirages," http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/GF/mirages/mirintro.html

Morgen Jahnke, "The Fata Morgana Effect" Interesting Thing of the Day, July 24, 2006, http://itotd.com/articles/583/the-fata-morgana-effect/
http://www.athropolis.com/arctic-facts/fact-mirage.htm
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Fata Morgana," 1873, http://www.hwlongfellow.org/poems_poem.php?pid=147

Bog Walk

Finally, a day of light.

It is sunny, bright, cold; the frozen sea glitters and the snow-covered pond lies in blue shadows. Our salt-caked windows refract and soften the light, turn it golden as the tones in an old photograph.

We decide to walk across the barrens, as the spruce bog that stretches between Port Dufferin and West Quoddy is called here. Impassable to humans in all but a deep freeze, the barrens are anything but empty land. Coyotes live and hunt and pup in the bog; we've come across the remains of downed deer while skiing, and stood at the edge of the tamped down ring from whence the coyotes howl. And twice we've followed the tracks of a black bear through the snow. The barrens are not a place to be at night, but they're fine to explore in the midday sun, the dog trotting sniffing happily beside us.

Deep ponds extend beneath the roots of the spruces and other arctic succulents native to the bog. This is really a rough and brushy northern desert, a place that stores water and nurtures plants with hardy, spiny, even carnivorous properties, like the rare--though not here--pitcher plant, which lures insects with its flower, and then, when they tumble into the waiting tubular stem, digests them. Hillocks of juniper shelter tiny sheepskill bushes, and short trees, no higher than my waist, gnarl in the wind.

Lichen and moss-covered ridges of slatey stone run at odd angles across the landscape; taller spruce forests grow up in their lee, and are quite impenetrable, forcing us, and the deer, to meander in circles on the perimeters of the barrens. Now and then, despite the cold snap these last few days, we break through the ice to the black water below. Ice gathers on our boots.

It is easy to get deranged in this landscape.  The bog appears to be a vast bowl surrounded by trees, though there are higher and lower sections, bounded--and thus hidden from view--by the ridges.  The landscape can look the same as itself from any direction; often you cannot quite see where you are going, or where you have come from.

It is warm on the barrens; here, in this bowl, we are sheltered from the bitter northeast wind blowing across the water, and we stop now and then to turn our faces to light. We take the sun as our guide and listen for the sound of the road so that we know which way to turn as we wander from one deer trail to another.  In this way we orient ourselves until we come to the edge of the barrens and see the backs of shut up summer cottages and an old barn, dripping icicles in the sun.

Elisabeth has been here before us; we see her tracks.  With the dog in the lead, we follow her footsteps back to the house, and Marike heats up squash soup for lunch.

The Summer I Was Twelve

The summer I was twelve, my family left the suburbs, and with them, the good opinions of just about every friend, neighbour and relation, and moved into the inner city. This was a very strange thing for ostensibly middle-class white people to do in Columbus Ohio in 1976. Even if they were missionaries.

Our new neighbourhood was a forgotten place bounded on four sides by lately built freeways and freeway ramps. Those rushing from one end of the city to another no longer had to pass through our streets with their depressing and neglected tumbledown houses, and the yards full of junk, chickens, children and dogs. And so increasingly they didn't, unless they were looking for trouble or cheap sex and drugs.

The roar of traffic was constantly with us (I liked to imagine it was the sound of the universe expanding); so were police sirens, helicopters, fires, gunfights, afterhours joints, longhaul trucks leaking toxic sewage, and churches.  That year I counted 84 places of worship within an eight block radius of our house. 

 
The only sites more plentiful than places for prayer were vacant lots; in 1968, after Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot, this neighbourhood, like so many other poor segregated zones in the country, burned for months with rage and riots. In later years, its houses continued to burn and tumble thanks to faulty wiring, old gas stoves, depressed or stupid people smoking in bed, murderous feuds, and general neglect.

There were no trees in the neighbourhood, save for the one across the street in the church yard, from which hung an old tire swing.  Those hardy trunks we called "stink trees"--or less often, "trees of heaven"--like the other populous residents, roaches and rats, required almost nothing to survive in cracks in the pavement or garbage heaps.

The people who lived there were treated like their human equivalents: fearsome pests, for whom no respect or care was required.
 

Our stories were rich, but lives in the neighbourhood were short, rotten and rough.  In fact of those I grew up with, almost no one survives, save those who joined the military or wound up sentenced to life in prison.  Killing, it seemed, was about the only way out.

Notes

I took most of these photographs in the near East Side of Columbus Ohio in April and May 1977 with a little Kodak 110 pocket camera. The photos became a part of my first attempt at photojournalism, a 25-page essay entitled "The Inner City," a final grade 7/8 anthropology/English project.  

Watching Richard Roy's Frisson de Colline, a recent nostalgic-melancholic film about a season in the life of a 12-year old boy in rural Quebec in 1969 made me think about my own experiences at the age of 12. I've barely begun, and already it's almost too much. Hard as life could be there then, for America's poor, it is much more brutal now still.  


1. Me, at the age of twelve on our porch, crocheting. I'd tie-dyed my own shirt of course. I think my sister Lisa took this picture.
2. Man turning from 22nd street onto Main.
3. JP's Rib Joint, where in 1977, a whole slab of bar-b-qued ribs would set you back $4.95.
4. The Camel Bell Bar.
5. Laundry.
6. Larry with a balsawood airplane on the steps of First English Lutheran.
7. Back yards of houses on MacAllister Street.
8. Waiting for the free lunch program to open up and playing on the jungle gym in First English Lutheran yard. Sweet Meat [Sabrina] struggles up the "swinging bridge"; her older sister Dede looks at the camera.
9. Webby does Amanda's hair on the church back steps. With her, left to right, are Dede, Sweet Meat and Michelle.
10. Sue sits on her porch and laughs.
11. Next door neighbours Missy and Michael "just goofing" as I said in my 1977 essay. MacAllister Street and afterhours houses in the background.
12. The ice cream truck (Billy and Lynn).
13. Theresa, Mrs. Wallace and her baby.
14. Roger, Sue's son, and Billy, Larry and Theresa's brother.  I wrote in 1977, "I told Roger I would take his picture when he didn't expect it."
15. Michael, eating a piece of cheese, with another friend, also--I think--named Michael.