In his essay, No Vacant Eden, Paul Simpson-Housely begins by citing a poem by Patrick Anderson. The essay is one of a collection about Canadian landscapes. With only minor alterations, Anderson’s Canada could be Antarctica:
…and the North was. With winter the snow came.
Whole folios of it. Yet nothing written
except one thing, a bleak expectancy –
the possible with its strenuous shade of whiteness
where an intuition almost without equipment
could trek into the faint wind of the future…
.What are you…? they ask, in wonder.
And she replies: I am the wind that wants a flag.
I am the mirror of your picture
until you make me the marvel of your life.
Yes, I am one and none, pin and pine, snow and slow,
America’s attic, and empty room,
a something possible, a chance, a dance
that is not danced. A cold kingdom.Patrick Anderson, “Poem of Canada”
in The Winter Centre (1946)
Cited by Simpson-Housely on page one of A Few Acres of Snow: Literary and Artistic Images of Canada, Dundurn Press, Toronto & Oxford, 1992
Is Antarctic Australia’s basement? Is she our ‘cold kingdom’ who nobody can rule, who simply reflects the desires of those who try?
With a flag, perhaps, or some other image, some want her to be what they desire. How can we see the marvel that she is in her own right?
Habitual choreography has no chance here. Like an everyday word spoken in Antarctica, and heard as if for the first time, disembodied, the old dances we know lose all meaning in Antarctica.
A new space calls for new dances, to connect with its new forms and rhythms. But how can we avoid projecting, to attend to what is there before us?
In an earlier study on Antarctic metaphors, Simpson-Housely writes,
Perception is a learned process, and not simply a response to a stimulus. People often see in an object what they anticipate rather then what is actually there. It is not so much that seeing is believing but rather that believing is seeing…
Antarctica: Exploration, Perception, Metaphor Pub. Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 1992, p. xxv