The Cartography of Dreams

The Cartography ofDreams The image that comes first to mind is of darkness smouldering at the edges; the sky is obsidian and the snow-bound earth, in deep shadow, as smoking emanations of the early morning wind excoriate the night. You cannot see your skis, yet. You are invisible; but the cold defines your extremities with precision. You can hear your heart beat through your veins, feel exhalation freeze against your face. The pellucid air turns gradually opaque; strengthening day obscures the universe, highlighting, then obliterating, the brightest stars. You cut swiftly through the cold, hardly aware that you are moving. There is no limit between the snow and sky; the whirling ground-wind blurs the edge of everything. You ski by instinct the intimations of a land without horizons; you inscribe the landscape with your mind. And as the dawning spreads, you begin to make out other skiers, skiing the same line; at first spectral figures, each hunched under a pack, then real, and linked, like the segments of a centipede cascading rhythmically across the frozen surface of the world. This is the second morning, skiing from the darkness into light. You don't care much about the race itself. But a visceral encounter with the soul, your spirit contiguous with landscape and the weather, that's another thing. The wind chill is minus forty-one. You slept warm, though, bivouacked in snow, and opalescent visions of the night refuse to fade with the rising light of day. This is not the Arctic, even in imagination. But whatever of the Arctic landscape and its narrative transfiguration that so enthralls, the same is here. Every outsider travelling the Arctic becomes a writer by default if not desire, transcribing mental field notes 140 into memories inseparable from dreams of writing, some written, others not; and every writer of the Arctic is a traveller, · whether having travelled there or not. Read about the Arctic; the text reads youthat , by now, is understood; the line between reader and written, a convention, at best. But the Arctic, too, writes into reading itself being read. Most of what you will experience when you enter Arctic landscape has already happened. You have only to imagine yourself to be there. When you encounter Arctic passages, it is .difficult to sort your own familiarity with the landscape, shaped by memories of previous reading, or by dreams or empirical experience, from shared assumptions looping through the language, gathering the inchoate particulars of their actual or imagined journey into line. Conventions of the text precede, determining how the wilderness is read; limits of narrative become the boundaries of landscape, and grammar, topography. The images of elsewhere, sometimes driven to extremity, define the terrain and make the alien appear accessible. The imagined Arctic, shaped by the imperatives of the culture into which it is being written, and read, is a reminder, at best, of what's real. We're dealing here with the lie of the land, the nature of story, with continuity, comprehension, and the conventions of narrative. We're dealing here with lines of language and culture, personality and vision; lines of containment and of connection, routes and boundaries, dream-lines and map lines, lines of entry and escape; Revue d' etudes canadiennes Vol. 28, No. 3 (Automne 1993 Fall) the lines of landscapenot geography, meridians and parallels, but river-lines, shorelines, sastrugi, horizons, fissures and eruptions, turns and bendings of the mind, of earth; not planes and dimensions, but the edges of planes, contours of dimension. We're dealing here with the shaping of imagination, upon entering alien terrain; and the shaping of landscape by imagination. Whether you traverse the page, exploring lines of narrative design, the dream-lines of another traveller, or travel there yourself, both writing and the land precede you. To put it another way, from a canoe the landscape is always rising. You paddle flooded folds in the surface of the earth, in a quest for closure, the completion of a line to be sketched across the lowest courses of encountered land. But the landscape is prophetic; iu its contours, your journey is predetermined. You follow, rapt in romance; the land does not follow...