The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica
Bernadette Mayer
Be strong Bernadette
Nobody will ever know
I came here for a reason
Perhaps there is a life here
Of not being afraid of your own heart beating
Do not be afraid of your own heart beating
Look at very small things with your eyes
& stay warm
Nothing outside can cure you but everything's outside
There is great shame for the world in knowing
You may have gone this far
Perhaps this is why you love the presence of other people so much
Perhaps this is why you wait so impatiently
You have nothing more to teach
Until there is no more panic at the knowledge of your own real existence
& then only special childish laughter to be shown
& no more lies no more
Not to find you no
More coming back & more returning
Southern journey
Small things & not my own debris
Something to fight against
& we are all very fluent about ourselves
Our own ideas of food, a Wild sauce
There's not much point in its being over: but we do not speak them:
I had written: "the man who sewed his soles back on his feet"
And then I panicked most at the sound of what the wind could do
to me
if I crawled back to the house, two feet give no position, if
the branches cracked over my head & their threatening me, if I
covered my face with beer & sweated till you returned
If I suffered what else could I do
Of all the places on the globe, barring war torn countries, the unrelenting cold of Antarctica is the most frightening to contemplate.
In Kevin Brockmeier's brilliant novel, A Brief History of the Dead, scientist 32 year old Laura Byrd is on a research mission to Antarctica to explore the environmental impact of using rapidly melting polar ice to manufacture soft drinks, when she discovers that she is the only survivor of a biochemical attack via Coca Cola.
The premise of the book is that you exist as long as someone alive remembers you. When all the people in whose memory you reside die, you disappear completely. I really like the idea that we hold our dead in our memories, so we're never, ever really alone.
The most chilling (hahaha) moments are not when Laura finally understands that she may very well be the last person alive on Earth, nor when she hears the dead calling her name from their city of the dead, but when she is inside her sleeping bag and must break the ice strings that have formed from the moisture of her body and her breath.
Get the book! Here's an excerpt:
CHAPTER ONE
THE CITY
When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had traveled across a desert of living sand. First he had died, he said, and then–snap!–the desert. He told the story to everyone who would listen, bobbing his head to follow the sound of their footsteps. Showers of red grit fell from his beard. He said that the desert was bare and lonesome and that it had hissed at him like a snake. He had walked for days and days, until the dunes broke apart beneath his feet, surging up around him to lash at his face. Then everything went still and began to beat like a heart. The sound was as clear as any he had ever heard. It was only at that moment, he said, with a million arrow points of sand striking his skin, that he truly realized he was dead.
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