Help, Thanks, Wow Rebecca!

I’ve just finished the  first of Rebecca Sonlit’s new collection of 29 essays titled The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness. Mimi uses the word “transported.” I was this. And what came to mind after finishing the first essay was Anne Lamott’s Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers: 

• HELP! Help God, help me write this well*. (I’ll need 3000 prayers and still not sure He would have the requisite raw material to shape this putty.)
• THANKS! Thank you Rebecca for this sharing this wondrous talent.
• WOW! As I sit here reading and re-reading passages. Wow!

Here’s a few excerpts from her expedition to the Arctic Circle titled Cyclopedia of an Arctic Expedition.

A passage on Arctic Terns:

Arctic Terns. Their Latin name is Sterna paradisaea; they are somehow birds of paradise or so named in 1763 by Erich Pontoppidan, the Pietist Danish prelate and contemporary of Linnaeus who wrote a natural history of Norway and an atlas of Denmark in the eighteenth century. He could not have known that of all living things on earth the arctic terns live in the most light and least darkness, but they work for it, flying 70,000 kilometers a year as they migrate from near the north pole to near the south, and when they are not nesting, live almost constantly in flight, like albatrosses. Theirs is a paradise of endless light and endless labor like angels (though they cross the band of day and night on their migration, and the tracking devices set up to plot their migratory course did so by measuring light and darkness). And their scimitar-sharp wings, their fierce cries, their hummingbird hoverings, their swallow-like tails, their gull-like dives…

A passage on Color:

Color. When the sky is not blue, when moss and grass have not accumulated on the land (which is only 10 percent vegetated, 30 percent being rock and 60 percent glaciated), the world here is shades of gray verging toward brown, blue, and black, and it’s white: ice, snow, glacier, cloud. It often looks as though it’s heading into being a black -and-white photograph of itself or rather a Chinese ink painting on watered silk. And then come the tufts of moss like landscapes in miniature, various shades of vivid green and brown-green, here in this landscape where grass less than a foot high is the tallest plant around, and only a few things flower. Indigo evening, water and sky. White morning. Gray world out the porthole. Black land with white ice. Glowing gray nights. The water, liquid pewter and iron, with gentle ripples rather than white-crested waves.

And the smeared red of a polar bear’s meal on blue-white ice. The cream of a polar bear against the white of ice— our chief guide says at one point that the tiny blob on the hillside is not a polar bear because it’s the wrong shade of white. Shades of white: snow, clouds, glaciers, bones, polar bears, quartz rocks.

And finally a passage titled Journey:

Journey. The pleasure of the boat chugging along and sometimes rocking and swaying when we were on open water, the sense of a continuity of movement and a continuity of landscape flowing by on one side, or the other, or sometimes both, the minor wistfulness that not everything could be seen, not even the landscape on both sides of the boat, the constant measuring comfort against going out on the deck for an unobstructed view, the mystery of what went by in the night when I was dreaming of home in the form of many strange landscapes representing my city with trees, with mounds, with familiar companions amid those nonexistent places, the punctuation of the flow of time in a boat, the clashing boom of the anchor chain going down, the silent business of the crane dropping the Zodiac overboard with a guide inside it, the clambering down the ladder to be transported to another shore, the moment pausing on one of those Arctic shores when I recalled Virgil’s Aeneid: “Ah, Palinarus, too trusting of the tranquil sea and sky / You will lie naked on an unknown shore.” Though we approached ours in layers of down and wool and silk and synthetic fibers and rubber boots and insulated gloves.

Notes:

• Find Rebecca Sonlit’s book at Amazon: The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness
• For a Book Review by Sven Birkerts in The Los Angeles Book Review: The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness
• Photograph: Arctic tern hovering in flight, Iceland. Image by Markus Varesvuo via The Guardian.
• * Thank you Nancy Das for the grammatical correction! (“Well” not “Good”)