by Tom Jacobs Why should we not enjoy an original relation to the universe? ~ Emerson, “Nature” One of the most important and enjoyable responsibilities given to a young altar boy is to ring a set of bells at the moment the priest holds the communion host above his head and proclaims something along the…

by Tom Jacobs How on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one another by letter! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold – all else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts,…

by Tom Jacobs

I stick a patch on my shoulder and I think of Einstein’s brain. It’s in a vat, the brain, that is. A brain in a vat. The body is long gone, but the brain remains. A controlled-release of nicotine enters my bloodstream and I also think of Dean Moriarty, the father I never found. I think of Einstein’s brain and of old Dean Moriarty, each barreling down toward the vanishing point of I-80, one beside the other, pursuing the ever-receding sunset.

  Einstein’s brain travelled across country in a jar. His brain sat shotgun (well, in the trunk, actually, but it’s nicer to think of his brain sitting shotgun). Then there is Kerouac/Sal Paradise with Cassady/Moriarty, careening down I-80, the interstate that slices right through the US all the way out to San Francisco. And then back again, culminating at the? ass end of I-80, at the George Washington Bridge, the view of which was once afforded to me out the bedroom window of one of my first apartments in the city. I would look at the bridge and imagine the road beyond, and the bald head of the sun sinking into the earth, and think of “all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it.” My mind travels Westward into the night like Einstein’s be-vatted brain, but my body remains rooted in my apartment on 181st street. And really, my mind, too, is trapped in the envelope of my body, such as it is, that stares out the window imagining all the people dreaming.

Dickhead that I am, I don’t know if this is important or silly.

I lived in that apartment by the bridge a good decade ago. I feel the same longings and boredoms and worries now as I did then, but I don’t think I’d quite recognize that guy staring out into the night and smoking and thinking. The physical envelope remains similar (sure, a bit pudgier, wrinklier, a little less spry—I’d recognize me), but my mind has morphed in unexpected ways. If my brain, as it existed then, were preserved in a vat, I’m not even sure I’d want to have a beer with it, so different are our interests and priorities. Somewhere in mist of projected disciplines and life designs, there are the fragments of my desire to do what I think is right and good, of how I should spend a proper evening. But even that is susceptible to doubt.

Since I am trapped in the curious hive of my own enskulled mind—as I assume we all are—I have also to assume that my own experience has some resonance. What is common and normal? Very hard to say. I, for instance, took up the perverse habit of tearing hangnails all the way back until they bled and caused a certain amount of pain and trauma. I remember the first time I did this in college. I do it today, as well, although less often than then. But this tiny little practice brings me into some kind of communion with my former and prior selves. It is a kind of ritual, actually. The only reference to this sort of thing in literature that I’m aware of is the following, from DeLillo’s Point Omega:

Before I fell asleep, eventually, was thinking when I was a small kid how I’d try to imagine the end of the century and what a far-off wonder that was and I’d figure out how old I’d be when the century ended, years, months, days, and now look, incredible, we’re here—we’re six years in and I realize I’m the same skinny kid, my life shadowed by his presence, won’t step on cracks on the sidewalk, not as a superstition but as a test, a discipline, still do it. What else? Bits the skin off the edge of his thumbnail, always the right thumb, still do it, loose piece of dead skin, that’s how I know who I am.

This is, in some small way, how we know who we are, how we recognize ourselves, through these little unrecorded riguals and private practices that provide some kind of inter- or underweaving of our sense of self. There are those moments when I find myself reluctant to step on a crack, or desirous to tear the skin off my thumb. Sometimes, even, I will be walking down a blacktopped road and recall myself driving my Mongoose dirt bike down a similar blacktopped road in 1983 on my way to the public pool in Seward, NE, my towel bedraped around my shoulders like every other kid driving his bike to get there. Past and present fuse into some uncomfortable temporary whole of momentary being.

I feel the desire to shape and carve my own adamantine being out of the mess of my physical being, which is so unwieldy and unformed, like one of Michelangelo’s slaves emerging from a block of marble. Cigarettes are relevant here.

The cigarette: a “symbolic instrument,” a “sacred object or an erotic one, endowed with magical properties and seductive charms, surrounded by taboos and an air of danger—a repository of illicit pleasure, a conduit to the transcendental, and a spur to repression.” (Richard Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime). Smoking, particularly now that I’m trying to forget it and leave it behind me, seems a form of incantation, commingling of self with thought. This sounds overwrought but I’m serious. I find it hard to write or think without cigarettes.

Time was, I would wake up with a hacking cough. A cough that seemed to reverberate beyond the physical. As if my very soul, my very being, were tensed and constricted and would then release into some kind of unknotted sense of liberation. There is something about smoking—it’s enjoyable and deadly; it films extremely well, and it does, despite whatever anyone else might say, make you look cooler in certain contexts.

The hacking cough immediately alienates my soul from myself, my mind from my being. The two couldn’t be further apart. One is palsied and hacking up terrible things, the other is floating out over the world in a state of ecstasy and wonder. My mind is reminded of my body, and neither gets along with the other. And yet there are moments.

Mental elegance and eloquence and are always impressive. But there are few things more marvelous than physical grace. Brian Doyle defines it thusly:

Physical grace: a certain easy carriage, an authority of lightness, a liquid quickness or liability to litheness .. an unselfconscious ease, a comfortable residence in the body and world. All cats and women have it. Nearly all vegetative things. Most children, most animals, most trees. Many men. Generally the larger the entity the less grace; this is why we are agog at grace in the largest athletes and animals…

Tennis, soccer, football, dance. It’s all amazing to watch slackjawed and with dilated eyes and eyeballs.

Some of my friends are dancers. I often wonder how their relationship to the envelope of their body differs from my own. Rather dramatically, I suspect. Coordinated and integrated and fused in some way. My own body, while still relatively young and not completely ravaged by time, is, however, getting there…it’s moving in that Bukowski-an direction. My body and myself are not really on the same page. It is in sickness that I feel physically bound to the world. The body. The body politic. Anatomies of things. The body is the cardinal metaphor, the way we understand things. Crisis, trauma, and wounds may be one of the most basic ways we understand experience, beyond concepts. Or maybe even language.

The thing that is bad for you is sexy, pleasurable. You want to eat it, kiss it, whatever it. The taste of a cigarette—so disgusting to the non-smoker—is, in fact, a kind of taste of mortality. The cigarette brings you necessarily into some kind of relationship with the world, rather than the earth.

The envelope that contains me and the thing or spirit that I imagine myself to be are not the same. Not reflexively mappable, one on to the other. We don’t even share the same interests. This is a problem. How to bring body and mind into some kind of harmonious convergence?

I have the desire to escape my skin—like ectoplasm, the nonsensical idea that an immaterial entity can leave a material residue. The goo of ghosts. What the non-tangible spirit leaves in our material realm.

When I first visited my son, who is now sixteen (?!) , in his new home in Duluth, he showed me around the house and eventually took me to his room. He had, of course, a secret laboratory (with microscopes and telescopes and even some dangerous looking batteries that he had taken apart to observe the constituent components). All of this was pretty cool and I was impressed. But then I looked at his bed. There were, perhaps, a hundred little post it notes spread around the perimeter of his bed. Each had either words or sketches on it. I asked what it meant and he explained that when he goes to sleep, there is a moment between consciousness and unconsciousness, a moment when ideas come flooding into his brain faster than he can keep track of them. So he has the post it notes by his bed so that he can record whatever it is that passes through this sophisticated mind of his. There are notes on poems, on perpetual motion machines, on possible designs for human flight apparatuses. The very things that truly matter in some way.

I stood there breathless and aghast. What had become of me? Why don’t I have an array of post it notes?

Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen—there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark. Without the sign it is there. The stain so intrinsic id doesn’t require a mark. The stain that precedes disobedience, that encompasses disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding. (The Human Stain)

The deathly pleasures of the cigarette, the shudder of an involuntary cough, the habits and rituals of physical debasement and bad decisions. These are the things that make monists or dualists of us all. Me, I think I’m a monist. We are made of dirt and breath and stars. But still I feel the peculiar sense that I am not reducible to me, to the matter of my being. None of us are, of course. Dean Moriarty and Einstein are instructive here.

They are humming down some forgotten highway. The sun is setting and they don’t know where they are going to spend the night. I imagine Moriarty turning up the radio and lighting another cigarette, thinking that somehow, someway, things will work out. And in the background, even if it’s only in the quietest aspects of his cortex, there is a voice that whispers. And it whispers this:

I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift in lacy jags.

Moriarty pauses to gaze at Einstein, then the road, then at both you and me. His mind continues to whisper:

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

by Tom Jacobs All the time there is this split in the American art and art-consciousness. On the top it is as nice as pie, goody-goody and lovey-dovey. […] You must look through the surface of American art, and see the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning. Otherwise it is all mere childishness. That blue-eyed…

by Tom Jacobs …our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. –Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940)…

Here.

Spelunking the Space behind the Bathroom Mirror

One night more than a decade ago, I found myself alone in the apartment I shared with several friends from college in Minneapolis. It was one of those humid summer nights where the only reasonable thing to wear were one’s boxers and a t-shirt. I was, at the time, seeking to cultivate a pompadour; this was long before there were a raft of metrosexual hair products to assist in such a project, so I was reduced to buying bryl-creem from the local old-school pharmacy. Bryl-creem, by the way, reeks: whenever you see those black and white photographs of crooners from the ‘30s and ‘40s, know that they must have trailed clouds of vaporous, vaguely mint-smelling fog.

None of us were what you would call “gainfully employed” at the time, yet all of my roommates had gone out for the evening with their girlfriends. These were the days of what DeLillo calls “languor and drift,” when the notion of a “career” was a distant horizon that can be safely ignored for the brief but more intriguing possibilities of pursuing sensuous intensities and simple drunkennesses with little thought or care for tomorrow’s hangover. I was, then, left to luxuriate in the pleasures of self-pitying loneliness and solitude. I thought that perhaps I would practice my pompadour in the bathroom mirror. This was an older apartment—perhaps built in the ‘30s—and the lighting wasn’t so good—everything was cast in a lovely golden haze, like the opening scenes of The Godfather with Don Corleone massaging his cat. In this flavescent light signaling nostalgia (or maybe I only remember it that way…ha!) I reached atop the medicine cabinet to grasp the foul-smelling pomade and inadvertently knocked it over. It fell behind the medicine cabinet, into one of those non-spaces like the walls that separated room from room, one of those unthought about regions that contain things like pipes and wires that we tend not to want to see or think about. Realizing that I had lost my bryl-creem and thus, my pompadour, I grabbed a flashlight and stood atop the commode to see if I could retrieve it from its crypt. Leaning over the sink I strained to see what had become of the tube; shining the light into the small crevice that separated the top of the medicine cabinet and mirror from the bathroom wall, I observed a range of other objects lying on the pink fiberglass insulation—a razor, what looked to be a receipt, a variety of q-tips, a comb, and a tube of hair gel, and other things that I can’t really remember.

I was overcome with a wash of complicated and interwoven feelings and emotions. I felt that I had inadvertently discovered a lost and forgotten reliquary; I understood that I was looking at one of those little museums of lost objects that no doubt surround us unseen everyday and all the time (so that’s where my eyeglasses went…); I also understood that I was only one in a line of people who must have performed the exact same motion in the exact same space over the years, all of us having nudged when we should have grasped and felt the momentary sense of displeasure at having knocked an object of some small significance into the oblivion within the wall. I also felt the tug of inarticulate kinship with all of these ghosts of residents past who suddenly came pouring in to the small intimate space of the bathroom. I stood there on the toilet for a few moments, and felt like William Stafford (http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/traveling-through-the-dark/), pausing to reflect before pushing the doe that he had just hit with his car on a lonely stretch of highway:

I thought hard for us all–my only swerving–,

then pushed her over the edge into the river.

I, too, thought hard for us all, and then realized that I could not retrieve my bryl-creem, but also that I didn’t want to. Better to let it lie there in its forgotten mausoleum with the rest of the objects. There in the river of history that exists as a “a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension,” with all of the other data and information that Don DeLillo imagines to continue to hover at the edges of human perception and understanding.

So much passes by our ability to perceive and assimilate and apprehend. Nicholson Baker speaks of “things, like gas pumps, ice cube trays, transit buses, or milk containers,” each of which have “undergone disorienting changes” over the past few years (he was writing in the mid-eighties…today, one might substitute phones, books, yellow pages, the internet…”); Baker contends that “the only way that we can understand the proportion and range and effect of those changes, which constitute the often undocumented daily texture of our lives” is to trace them back to those “kid-memories” that are directly connected to the “violas of lost emotion.” We can only really understand our “adult” fascinations in relation to our childhood fascinations—these are what “furnish the feedstock of my comparisons and analogies and sense of the parallel rhythms of microhistory.” The child is, as has reasonably been said many times, is the father of the man. http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww194.html

It is hard to retrieve this sense of pleasurable confusion when we encounter objects. Everything seems to come to us through prepacked and preconceived routes of supply and demand, producer and consumer. But there are places and moments when this uncertainty re-prevails. Places like the Museum of Jurassic History.

I won’t rehearse all of the details of this place, as they have been written about extensively in far more detail and poetry than I can muster here. I will simply direct you here: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE5D7143EF93AA15753C1A963958260

In short, David Wilson, the proprietor/curator of his peculiar museum, has assembled a range of objects and Things that seem to defy the ways we normally conceive of reality. If you’re curious, check out Megaloponera foetens, the “stink ant of Cameroon,” or the Sonnabend Model of Obliscence [sic], or myotis lucifurgus, the bat from South America that is capable of penetrating solid objects and that was captured in a mass of solid lead. Is this all true? Is it complete bullshit? Does it matter?

The experience of passing through Dr. Wilson’s museum is (like every important experience) essentially non-communicable because it posits itself in that key word between understanding and total incoherence, between knowing and not-knowing. As a museum director contends:

Everything initially just seems self-evidently what it is. There’s this fine line, though, between knowing you’re experiencing something and sensing that something is wrong. There’s this slight slippage, which is the very essence of the place.

Telling you this is to wreck the pleasure of the place, but I’ll do it anyway. The Museum of Jurassic Technology hinges upon your capacity to revel in the sublime, in the interstices of empirical reality and the miraculous. As Lawrence Weschler puts it:

the way it deploys all of the traditional signs of a museum’s institutional authority—meticulous presentation, exhaustive captions, hushed lighting, and state of the art technical armature—all to subvert the very notion of the authoritative as it applies not only to itself but to any museum. The Jurassic infects its visitor with doubts—little curlicues of misgiving—that proceed to infest all his other dealings with the Culturally Sacrosanct.

These little curlicues of misgiving are what make the place the most interesting place in the world, in my view. One doesn’t quite know what to make of what one is looking at. Bill Brown makes the useful distinction between “objects” and “things,” an analytical distinction that hinges not on the material qualities of the item in question, but rather on its triangular relation to both the social context of the subject and to the “generalizable circuits of exchange and consumption” that “produce use value, sign value, [or] cultural capital.” If “objects” are those items we perceive and recognize as familiar without having to think about them – those objects, in other words, that come to us through the typical paths of commodity flow – then “things” designate those material entities that resist immediate recognition or categorization, that emerge when those typical circuits of exchange and consumption are blocked or held in abeyance. It is only through what Brown calls “misuse value” that “thingness” properly emerges; when an object is fetishistically overvalued or misappropriated, dislodging it from the “circuits through which it is what it typically is,” it is only under these conditions, according to Brown, when the universal fungibility of things is interrupted, that “aspects of an object – sensuous, aesthetic, semiotic – […] become legible, audible, palpable when the object is experienced in whatever time it takes […] for an object to become another.”

These moments of thingly dislocation—when things fall behind the bathroom mirror and you suddenly see them anew—are important. They stop being objects and become Things. One last thought: John Locke (the philosopher. Not the guy on Lost) understood this problem when he considered the relationship between empiricism and the senses. If the rules of empiricism make it impossible for the functioning mind to escape the prisonhouse of the senses, there can only be one other way for us to engage the world: through Poetry (or what Locke called “Fancy”). If, on the one hand we have Judgment, which separates and classifies the data of our senses, we also have “Fancy,” which synthesizes and recreates—the very thing that leads to music, dancing, and more generally having a good time.

I align myself with the “Fancy,” the members of which nod and bow toward the awesomeness of science and its powers to make things better in a general way. I prefer those moments of uncertainty, of “mis-use,” of not knowing what the hell is going on.

I never did acquire the pompadour. The grain and quality of my hair was never conducive to the shape, despite years of trying. Unless they’ve remodeled the place, I can only assume that the tube of Bryl-Creem still resides in its forgotten and unvisited crypt, like the unruly and now mostly gone hair at the top of my head.

And here’s a holiday story. It has nothing necessarily to do with what I’ve posted above, but it’s a lovely story about the necessity of fiction (i.e., lying to ourselves about who we are and what we do), love, and the gift. It’s perfect for the holidays. I’m sure you’ve already seen it (or read it—the video is actually better than the verbal form in this case), consider the following question: why do Auggie and “Paul Auster” laugh after Auggie tells his story? It’s not, of course, that difficult to figure out, but that seems to me to be the key to unlock the meaning of the whole episode.

The Malignancies of
History, or “Polewards” with My Forgotten Neighbor, Frederick A. Cook
Every explorer names his island Formosa, beautiful. To him it is beautiful because, being first,
he has access to it and can see it for what it is.  
            ~ Walker
Percy, “The Loss of the Creature” (1966?)
But my compass takes its cardinal point from tragedy.
            ~ Richard
Rodriguez, “Late Victorians” (1990)
It is not down in any map; true places never are. 
~ Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)
Although indigenous peoples have lived for at least the last
three thousand years within striking distance of the North Pole, the idea of
obtaining the northernmost summit of our planet never seemed to have presented
an appealing or even an interesting proposition. As American and European explorers began
passing through and occasionally staying with local communities during their
tentative efforts to set foot on and poke a national flag into the North Pole
around the turn of the twentieth century, Inuits and other locals must have
asked themselves (if not the ghostly white fanatics) something to the effect,
“what kind of crazy person would bother with such an enterprise? What could possibly be the motive, goal, or
point of such a thing?” And it’s an
undeniably strange proposition—risking death to plant one’s flag on a remote
site of an almost purely symbolic nature if only to say that I/We’ve been there
first. Aside from the obvious notions of
national pride and some enlightenment idea of exploration, the question still
remains: how have explorers justified
such a silly mission? And why didn’t the
North Pole draw the imagination of precisely those people who were in the best
position to attain it?
Questions like these imply further corollaries: how, at the
turn of the last century, could anyone definitively prove that they were there
anyway? A photograph? A diary? 
A chronicle of coordinates obtained and passed through? In an era of rampant confidence games and
men, who would believe you even if you produced such evidence? The will to believe is, of course, always a
powerful element in public credulity, and, as the competing stories of
Frederick Cook and Robert Peary would illustrate, the conditions in the States
were such that people were ready and willing to believe. 
1908 was a big year for the North Pole. Although attempts had been made on this
symbolic summit previously, 1908 saw American and European explorers began to
make their way “polewards” in earnest and in such a way that this most
inaccessible and meaningless of geo-symbolic spaces was, for the first time, at
risk of becoming just another demystified and disenenchanted set of coordinates. 
What is it about places like the North Pole (or Mount
Everest, or the Moon) that so incite the imagination of Western explorers? It’s a dumb question, from many points of
view—the simplest answer is that it is the more or less natural product of
masculine narcissism: one goes there in order to say that one has been there,
and then, perhaps, to reap whatever fame and rewards might follow. No doubt there’s truth to such an answer. But it somehow misses the more philosophical
dimensions of the project—the sheer overdetermined plenitude of unmapped and
unknown spaces that draws people into their magnetic influence. What damn fool’s errand sends people off on a
nearly certain Arctic Death Trip?
There is, of course, something about the antipodes that
animates the mind—we need binary oppositions and dialectical tensions not only
to make sense of but also to position ourselves within the world. They provide a conflict that we
simultaneously do and don’t want to have resolved. One of the ramifications of consciousness is
that we are left with no other option than to inhabit the transitional and
endlessly liminal spaces between God and Satan, Good and Evil, East and West,
and North and South, and life and death. 
Binaries and dialectics put us into motion, they get the mind to
racing. And the difficulties involved in
resolving them invariably produce an entirely new set of problems. We become sorcerer’s apprentices from the
moment we begin synthesizing and aufhebung-izing
the conflicts and contradictions that the world puts forth. 
However muddle-headed and kooky the motivation, these crazy
bastards who set out for the North Pole in those heady days of 1908 are as dumb
as they are noble. We all want to live
multiple lives, to see other dimensions, to know what it is to exist and
survive in other, unfamiliar environments. 
For the bourgeoise, this desire can assume extreme form. As Jon Kracauer writes of Christopher
McCandless (a.k.a. Alexander Supertramp), who gave all of his inheritance away
and struck out for Alaska to see if he could make it on his own in the
wilderness: “although he wasn’t burdened with a surfeit of common sense and
possessed a streak of stubborn idealism that did not readily mesh with the
realities of modern life, he was no psychopath.” This confluence of idealism, alienation from
one’s upper-class background, and an absence of common sense is all straight out
of Thoreau.
****
Although it glides atop the Arctic Ocean like a floating
signifier, the North Pole is one of those sites (like the equator, or the prime
meridian, or the South Pole) that organizes our earthly coordinates and imbues
them with a more than merely cartographic meaning. Neither the South Pole, nor the equator, nor
the prime meridian capture the imagination in quite the same way as the North Pole
does. There’s a kind of symbolic
imperialism involved. Like Wallace Stevens’
jar, the North Pole organizes emptiness: a featureless space becomes a destination. As the cardinal point on our cartographic and
libidinous compasses, the North Pole anchors what might otherwise be a wild,
chaotic instability: desire needs a
direction. That’s why Santa lives there,
of course: as a figure representing either the culmination of capitalism or the
purest form of the gift economy, we can only imagine him living elsewhere, at
the extremities of the world. 
In a world increasingly cubicled and time-clocked, the North
Pole (still?) offers a material monument that is at once abstract and
enticingly material monument to pursue and seek. A monument to obtain and
conquer. The remoteness and
near-impossibility of “obtaining” or “conquering” it is part of its obvious
allure. 
Zero degrees North is no place for humans. Even the natives knew that. Here are some interesting facts about the
north pole. Early European explorers
wore the latest in technology—wool and cotton, and fared poorly. It took someone attuned to the lifestyles of
those who actually inhabit the Arctic Circle to realize that things are not
that complicated: the Inuits knew that Caribou fur, because each follicle is
hollow, is all you need to remain (relatively) comfortable. It is mildly amusing to observe that those flavescent
photos of the early explorers standing in the frozen tundra wearing Caribou
skin are often wearing nothing more than their tighty whiteys beneath the
fur—you need only one layer of fur facing outward and another layer mapped onto
that facing inward to be fuzzily warm and happy. 
Polewards, ever Polewards!
I had never heard such fervour, such longing, not even
in the voices of preachers when they spoke of heaven. […] It was as if only those who got 'there'
first would see it as it really was.
~ Fredrick Cook's protégé, Devlin Stead, on his
captain’s avowed dream of claiming the Pole.
In the recorded and unrecorded history of human desire for
unreachable objects, the edge of the Earth must surely constitute the most
extreme and profanely alluring target. 
In February of 1908, a thirty three year old explorer from
the small town of Hortonville, New
York, set sail from the now-abandoned village
of Annoatok, Greenland
on a lunatic journey to the North Pole. 
One year after completing his training as a surgeon at New York
University—training that might have led to a comfortable bourgeois life as a
general practitioner in Brooklyn—Frederick A. Cook signed on to Robert Peary’s
expedition to North Greenland as the ship’s surgeon. Although this journey would come within six
degrees of the geographic tip of the world, the crew would turn back when faced
with the impossibility of obtaining the Pole. 

Neither Cook nor Peary could have known it at the time, but their
apparently mild differences in character and perspective would culminate in one
of the great, unrecorded conflicts of the past century. It was a conflict that would resonate
inchoately in way that encompass the competing priorities of imperialist
expansion, cultural understanding, knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and—perhaps
most importantly—the pursuit of making an indelible mark in the “book” of
history and the pursuit of something much less certain and determinable…the
very thing that keeps little boys up at night dreaming of the stars. In fact, Cook wrote of his early years that
he always had a “yearning for something that was vague and undefined.” (By the way: this seems to me to have been a
rather thoroughly gendered fantasy, but such distinctions are far more fluid
and uncertain today…)
So Cook and Peary would become antagonists in interesting
ways. Cook was anthropologically-minded
and patient; Peary was imperialistic and ambitious. Cook seemed to have insisted upon living with,
or at least getting to know, the life ways of the indigenous peoples for
several months until he understood how they traveled so seemingly effortlessly
through the Arctic landscape. Peary, on
the other hand, pursued different dreams; comparatively indifferent to the ways
of the “locals,” Peary forged ahead to the Pole with a crew wearing wool and
cotton (neither of which held up well in the frozen North: heedless and
unmindful of the advantages of Caribou fur. 
Wool and cotton freeze in the arctic conditions up there, locking the
limbs into what one must assume are robotic, break-dance-like movement as one
seeks one’s way northwards. Peary would
also, most famously, bring back a young boy from an Inuit tribe to “exhibit”
before metropolitan audiences in cities around the globe. 
In short, Peary seems like more of an asshole, whereas Cook,
however desperate he may have been to claim his place in the pantheon of
explorer-history, seems more congenial.
Peary also had big friends in powerful places—the National
Geographic Society and the New York Sun and the New York Herald, amongst
others—and whatever the validity of Cook’s claims or Peary’s attacks, he
successfully discredited Cook. Although he claimed to have reached 90 degrees
north (or 0 degrees South, depending on how you look at it) on April 21st,
1908, Cook’s contention to have been the first human to have reached the Pole
would be disputed and, according to many if not most, discredited by Peary,
whose claim to be the first to the top of the world (in April of 1909) would be
recorded by official history (although, even here, there is controversy: it
seems likely that if Peary was the
first to make it there, it wasn’t actually he himself who set foot on the polar
antipode; rather, it was his African American assistant, Matthew Henson, who attained this feat and who actually planted the
American flag on the pole).
Cook returned to the city to a ticker tape parade. He was lauded and celebrated by tens of
thousands of New Yorkers. The New York Times and Herald, Harper Brothers, Hampton’s,
and Cosmopolitan magazines all cabled
seeking to negotiate rights and exclusives to Cook’s story. Buffalo Bill Cody telegraphed his
congratulations, and children from all over wrote to ask whether he had perhaps
encountered Santa Claus at the pole. He
moved into a gorgeous, red-brick mansion that sits astride the convergence of
Bushwick and Myrtle Avenues—the home of one of owners of the many breweries
that used to dominate the neighborhood. 
Although from this side of the century, the combination of
surgeon-explorer would seem unassailably happy (one thinks of Indiana Jones—the
archaeologist-explorer-badass), Cook’s happy life in Bushwick would be
short-lived. Within a decade, he would
be disgraced: his claims to have reached the pole would be discounted; his
ventures in oil speculation would leave him bankrupt and imprisoned in Leavenworth; and his life
must have seemed lost. Cook, like most
of us, is left to rest in an unvisited grave. 
There are profound resonances with P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, here, if one were so inclined to pursue them.
The “truth” (and I hate to use both quotations and
parentheses here, but they both seem appropriate) is that it is quite likely
that neither Cook nor Peary [nor
Henson, for that matter] ever reached that actual physical coordinate of the
north pole; it remained a kind of Cartographic asymptote for many years to
come. After a thing has been
“discovered,” what’s the point? Who
wants to be second? 
*****
It is with this notion of discovery that I want to end. With the ambivalences and contradictions that
animate the idea of discovery. The
notion that one “discovers” things—whether it’s calculus, or the North Pole, or
a new species—the term immediately breaks down. 
“Discovery” is of a piece with the enlightenment, the scientific
revolution, the gradual mapping and disenchantment of the world, as they
say. No one but a fool would deny the
benefits of this endeavor—everything from aspirin and Viagra to microwaves and
washing machines have resulted from this project. These, and many more than I can list here,
are all great things. 
Yet the project behind this pursuit of extraction and
collection an recontextualization tends to produce an image of the world based
upon a very limited Euro-American perspective (I am reminded of all those wall
maps from high school that show the U.S. dead in the center of it all). On a more primary level, there is the
assumption that one can’t know something until one sees it, which often means
mounting it on a slide or pinning it to a wall and observing it. And I’m not sure that’s true. The way we have traditionally come to know
things, whether it’s a specimen pathologically squished on a slide or preserved
in some solution, or whether it’s a living idea that is observed in its
habitat, still undefined and in flux—the way we come to know these things is to
kill them and “mount” them (in every sense of that word) so that they might be
autopsied, essentially. We’ve never been
good at observing things and letting them be. 
And I am thinking now of those deep sea modules that descend miles
beneath the sea and almost every time “discover” a new creature that had
previously been unknown. And every time
I watch one of these shows about the extraordinary life that lives miles
beneath the surface, in total blackness and unobserved by and large by humanity
(they say we know less about the bottom of the ocean than we do about the
surface of the moon, which is a wildly compelling and poetic notion)—whenever I
watch these shows, I feel an odd tug of both complicity and hope. I want to
see and know these creatures, but more profoundly, I don’t: I want to let them
be. We need mystery in this life and this world. The giant squid has long been one of those
mysterious creatures that we knew existed but had never observed. Then we observed it. We have photos. 
The melancholy I felt is hard to describe or ascribe. But I like—nay, I love—the idea of undiscovered places and unobserved creatures. Without them, what is there for desire or
imagination to hold on to. Perhaps the
stars. 
I love the idea that there are earthly things that will
always, despite our best efforts, escape our grasp and our cameras. And there—in the borderlands and liminal spaces,
in the darknesses at the edge of town, in the gap between knowing and not
knowing, a different type of discovery may lie. 
Those are the spaces we should seek to inhabit in full uncertainty, ambivalence,
and ambiguity—to peer in to the dark, catch a glimpse of what’s there, and then
depart back into the light in wonder.