OHYAT: Turning Back

The original plan had been to continue south and do scientific/cartographic work in or along the Transantarctic Mountains, but I suspect that in light of the recent discovery everyone's thoughts turned to Campbell and his men, who were, as far as anyone knew, still stranded up the coast. Any effort must be made to reach them, either to rescue them or find out what had happened, so after building Titus' cairn they turned back towards the coast, battling through a blizzard to reach the great cairn yesterday. ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO TODAY, Cherry wrote in his diary:

I think we are all going crazy together – at any rate things are pretty difficult. The latest scheme is to try and find a way over the plateau to Evans Coves, trying to strike the top of a glacier and go down it. There can be no good in it: if ever men did it, they would arrive about the time the ship arrived there too, and their labour would be in vain. If they got there and the ship did not arrive, there is another party stranded. They would have to wait till February 15 or 20 to see if the ship was coming, and then there would be no travelling back over the plateau: even if we could do it those men there could not.

The real reason I've singled out today for special notice, though, is a more personal one. There is one response I hear over and over again from people just encountering this story: I've heard it from people who just watched Mark Gatiss' Worst Journey in the World, people who've listened to Stef Penney's radio play, read it in comments on this blog, and overheard it at the Scott exhibits in New York, London, and Cambridge; it was my reaction when I first got into this madness, after hearing the radio play at work while the building's air conditioning blasted its defiance of the 100°F summer outside, and it prompted me to put a photo of the Polar Party on my desk as a constant reproof. That reaction is this:

I will never complain about being cold again.

Which is why, over a year after my own recitation of the refrain, I was so staggered to find the next line in Cherry's diary entry for the 17th of November, 1912, because his response is the mirror image of the norm, and thereby revealing:

It was almost oppressively hot yesterday – but I'll never grumble about heat again.

For all the high tragedy of the Polar Party's demise, and the vicarious heartbreak of the search party finding them, it was this line that most affected me when I sat down to read The Worst Journey in the World for the first time, and after all my research and immersion since then, it still does.

Imagination

Appropriately for someone struggling with issues of creativity, and my place in my immediate socio-vocational creative context – and in time for the resumption of The Infinite Monkey Cage, with which I seem to have developed a one-person feud – the CBC ran an interesting two-parter on imagination. It's approached through the lens of William Blake, but it veers off into matters scientific and psychological of which he would have been unaware.

Ideas: Imagination, Part 1 and Part 2

We have stories that help us understand who we are and what our place in the world actually is. But of course these are all imagined stories. There's nothing in the material world itself than can give us a sense of identity, that can tell us who we are, and who we should be. If you were to take away imagination, and had a purely objective scientific worldview, and said "this is the chemical structure of your body, this is the biological system that determines who you are, this is the material substrate of the universe around you," that is completely devoid of meaning. That's where imagination comes in, whether it's religious imagination, or some other form of cultural imagination. Because it really gives us a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, a sense of direction, and a sense of identity.

I didn't actually catch who said this

[The imagination] is absolutely essential to our being. In a sense, it is what provides us with a possible future, or hope for a future. And when you're in a situation where you completely lose all hope, it becomes very hard to survive. And you think about what happens to people who have the imagination taken away, people who have no hope to continue ... Of course, it's the objective of torture, is to strip anyone of any hope, or any sense that there can be anything else other than what they're enduring, at this moment, and so in a sense they give up. And the same thing happens with people who have nothing in society, who are left without any means to imagine a possible future for themselves, and it becomes extremely difficult to survive under those circumstances. The imagination is actually life itself, in a way.

– Ron East

To the extent that man has an imagination, he is alive, and therefore, the development of the imagination is an increase in life. It follows that restricting the imagination must then tend in the direction of death, so that all imaginative restraint is ultimately – not that it always proceeds to ultimates – a death impulse.

– Northrop Frye