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.

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

Photographic Excesses

Straddling a puddle at Taylor's Head Park, Nova Scotia

I've been taking lots of photographs lately. Since July, hundreds and thousands of them--twelve gigabytes of digital record (or some 3000 + images) during the three weeks we were in the Arctic for example, and probably at least half as many again since then.

Professional photographer Rob Poulton shoots moving ice; we shoot him

I was not the only traveler on that trip so electronically voracious. The voyage was billed as a photographic opportunity; view and record animals, people and places rarely seen. A northern safari, packed to the roof tiles, as safaris are, with colonial baggage and a loose, if mostly misplaced sense of danger and daring.

Some of our fellow passengers were professional photographers; others were simply affluent and passionate amateurs with, in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars worth of professional equipment--lenses of a variety and quality I'd never before seen. In this environment, it was virtually impossible to be anywhere--even long after midnight, for of course the sun did not set in August above 75 degrees north latitude--without someone clicking away.



An iceberg? Click. A bergy bit hissing as it dissolves in the sea. Click. A polar bear too far away to look like more than a yellow-white smear against the pack ice. Click. A rumour of muskox in the distant hills. Click. Mossy caribou horns or a stripped and perfectly clean skull. Click. Narwhal swimming along the bow. Click. Polar bear skins hanging on a clothesline. Click. Children crowding into a community center, hoping to get a couple of mouthfuls of bannock. Click. Barges carrying away dismantled bits of an old DEWline station. Click. An abandoned Hudson's Bay Company post, a gravesite, another, a rusted bucket on the beach, a desolate and now disbanded RCMP detachment post, seal skulls littering the yard. A rotted Singer sewing machine. Oil drums everywhere. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.

Polar bear on pack ice

Muskox skull

I have photos of all of these things. Some are lovely. All are thrilling to recall. But I did start to think that things were getting out of hand when dozens of passengers repeatedly fled dinner or conversations or other activities to rush on deck and snap photos of one thing or another. Even as I too, joined them.

Girls in caribou parkas, Grise Fiord, Nunavut

Abandoned Hudson Bay Company outpost, Bellot Strait, Northwest Passage

Some entrepreneurial types began to stage events for the cameras: catch this leap over the outcrop at 74 degrees north! Strange creature appears in the bush, will arabesque for shutterbugs! You'd see the mad rush of bodies and tripods stop and start over the treeless autumnal landscape, stutter along the ridges, mass and scatter like a tiny lost herd of caribou wearing muli-coloured gum boots.

Abandoned materials from abandoned Hudson Bay Company and RCMP sites in Nunavut

During our waking hours (which were many--who sleeps when the sun doesn't set?) we strapped our cameras to our bodies as if they were heart monitors, jumping up every time something, anything, oh my heart, skipped a beat. It started to seem like a sickness, a mortifying illness: no rest for any body, here. You could not point without a host of cameras turning, shooting, often before their operators were fully engaged. Marike began to complain of being abandoned to walk or eat by herself, a widow to the camera.

Houses in Qaanaaq, Greenland

I began to long to stay in a place long enough to sit quietly in a corner and draw. Muse. Inhabit the landscape. But there was no time for that--we traversed more than 3500 miles in 22 days--and so out came the cameras to keep the traces of a record. Impossible to remember so much clearly otherwise. The images became a memory deposit, a place to leave the previous days as we rushed onward, to the north as far as we could go and then west through the northwest passage.

Filmmaker Steve Smith captures a soccer game in Upernavik, Greenland

At some point during the voyage--when we were smashing slowly up against pack ice in fog in Smith Sound, between Greenland and Ellesmere Island--I happened upon what seemed an appropriate text in the ship's library: a chapter in Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel (Vintage, 2002) entitled "On Possessing Beauty." Since there was nothing "out there" to see but fog, and, like anyone who has lived in Nova Scotia for some years, I've seen more than my share of that, I fell upon the book with a voraciousness previously reserved for the view.

De Botton reviews Victorian art and social critic John Ruskin's reflections on "the traveler's dilemma": "how is one to possess beauty?"--which is to say, how is one to relate to the things one sees or encounters? How indeed?

On the Coppermine River

Apparently, as a young man on his first "continental tour" to Italy, Ruskin developed an enormous enthusiasm for the camera, then a brand new bit of technology. He wrote to his father about how "faithfully" the camera might capture images of the architecture of Italy; such "true" copy would surely alter the arts forever.

Very soon, however, Ruskin turned against the camera eye, characterizing it as a "lower" order expression: to take possession of something by photographing it was akin to scratching one's initials into a tree truck or a table top. The only way, truly, to possess beauty--or even to see it really--Ruskin began to argue, was to try to understand it, to try to meld, consciously, vision, affect and intellect. Such a relationship could only be achieved by writing or drawing: slowly, painstakingly learning to see, to apprehend relationships between spaces, persons and things, within and despite appearances.

Kap York, Greenland

Drawing or writing were metabolic acts--one pulled the delicious external into oneself and digested it slowly. As Ruskin put it, drawing was something he did on the basis of "a sort of instinct like that of eating or drinking." And like eating or drinking properly, it took time--and the time it took was, at once, essential and a pleasure.

In fact, Ruskin would be still more pointed about the uselessness of accessing landscape at great speed: "No changing of place at 100 miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, happier or wiser. There was always more inthe world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being" (Ruskin, cit. de Botton, 218).

Cemetary, Upernavik, Greenland

The problem with photography then is that it can infinitely multiply its views without ever, necessarily, entering a digestive stream. To click is not to see; to click is not to know; to click is simply to capture something just there, then. The danger of photography, according to de Botton, is that "rather than employing [photography] as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, [we tend to use] the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world [than before]...The camera blurs the distinction between looking and noticing, between seeing and possessiong.... It suggests that we have done all of the work [of looking, thinking, apprehending, understanding] simply by taking a photograph" (de Botton, 219-220). It is, at bottom, a species of conquest, a narcissistic claim: here was I, I was here, suffer my record.

Late night napping, Marike photographs Karin

There is something to this argument, however wrong-headed it might also be, for it doesn't take account of the digestive review: the editing, cropping, representing, selecting, presenting aspects of photography, the way these images play and replay, instigating--as here, as elsewhere-writing and other undertakings.

Gumboots on the beach

But it is also true that to see with the camera eye can become an obsession. What it sees is not what you see--I've begun to look at things as it might see, to pick out and get better at planning for its eye--or rather, particular lenses' eyes.

My own continue elsewhere, too. Thankfully.

Photographer-author at work

Links to Karin's Arctic photos:
http://picasaweb.google.ca/karin.cope/GreenlandHighArctic?feat=directlink
http://picasaweb.google.ca/karin.cope/HighArticImagesAugust2009GreenlandCanada?feat=directlink
http://picasaweb.google.ca/karin.cope/NWPassageEToWAugust2009?feat=directlink

Rob Poulton's site: www.rpoulton.com