Exploration Imagery

Exploration Imagery Miranda F. Mellis Land of the Snow Men George Beiden Edited by Norman Lock Calamari Press http://www.calamaripress.org 86 pages; paper, $10.00 In the preface to his novella Land ofthe Snow Men, Norman Lock writes that the tale therein is the "pure fancy" of its purported author, George Beiden. But it is actually George Beiden who is the pure fancy of author Norman Lock, whose work in general reflects a Borgesian/Pessoan proclivity for false-bottom topographies. The novella can be "judged by its cover," which looks like a sort of invaded, disintegrating map and promises beauty to the reader, a promise which is kept. The central image is of three perfect circles, the body of a prismatic snowman afloat in a painterly shipwreck of rich blues and detritus, rose petals, gems, halos, and rays. The cover is a visceral surface, flat but teeming underneath, as in a sea of ice. The entirety ofthe narrative may be found rather crazily nesting there, compressed. The premise of Land of the Snow Men is ¦ that Beiden, an architect commissioned to build a cenotaph memorializing the ill-fated Robert Falcon Scott expedition, has imagined mat he accompanied the crew on their failed race to the South Pole from 1910-12, and kept ajournai of his experiences. The content of the journal (text "found'Vwritten by Norman Lock and art "restored'Vcreated by Calamari Press's Derek White) comprises the manuscript, Land of the Snow Men. Norman Lock "discovers" said manuscript/journal in the basement of a mental hospital, where Beiden was supposed to have lived out his last years and where Lock has been recovering from a nervous breakdown, brought on while writing a novel in Africa. (An affective link is established here between Lock and his creation, the frail, visionary Beiden.) The increasingly dangerous, illegible environment, the collapse ofspatial and temporal coordinates, incites the characters to play Oulipian games. Belden's lyrical and anxious journal entries fantasize about the mind-states of himself, Scott, and the crewmembers (who historically manned the Terra Nova) as the expedition fatally unravels. Entrapped in fog, lost and doomed, their quest failing, they start acting like poets. The increasingly dangerous, illegible environment, the collapse of spatial and temporal coordinates, incites them to play Oulipian games, reassigning signifiers so that objects become absurd, detourned, unrecognizable. Shadows trapped in chunks of ice walk away when the ice melts. The men hallucinate visits from women, one of whom leaves behind a mysteriously "real" handkerchief. Beiden articulates their glowing unreason: All ofus must have known mat the women who had suddenly appeared at the bottom of the world were, none of them, real. But we did not say so even to ourselves. (No, I cannot explain the handkerchief! I will not even try.) Beiden consistently refers to his surroundings as an illusion; the landscape and his perceptions are one and the same, slippery and infinitely variable atmospheres, refusing dominance, univocal interpretation or mediation by reason. He perceives and writes the Antarctic as though an afterworld. From the beginning, Beiden (unsure ofhow he even arrived on board the Terra Nova, vaguely suspecting that he has been kidnapped) writes as if dying of cold: If I'm only a figure in a dream, I might not be able to wake myself. So I sleep on. . .waiting for the dreamer to wake and give me back my self, where the walls are stone and plumb. And the windows reflect green leaves. If Beiden is negative capability, Robert Falcon Scott, a self-avowed hater of ambiguity, stands for Detailfrom cover the literal-minded, heroic ego. He fights against encroaching madness and poetic games. He came to the Antarctic, he proclaims, "to enter a realm without meaning, one devoid of symbols." Scott insists, "metaphor is a bridge leading to confusion." (Earlier he quips, "At least a simile announces its intentions.") But the apparent dearth of life that characterizes the Antarctic— which for Scott is what makes it so desirable, a veritable laboratory—does not preclude slippage. Any seeming absence may be filled with the projections of the mind, formlessness with language formations. (As John Cage famously demonstrated, there is always noise...