On the steep northern slope of the fjord, three polar bears have climbed two thousand feet. Against the purple and ash gray of the scree they stand out in a way they never would, white on white on a glacier. Too far away for detail they are instead a point of reference. Without them, impossible to gauge height or distance and the way they lean in as they climb describes a smooth, increasing verticality. Though, more than anything what they reveal is the emptiness. Which is vast. The polar bears continue. In another hundred yards which they have every intention of achieving they will be literally in the clouds. Where it is cool. Which down here where our ship slips through, it is not. The polar bears reach the vanishing point, the landscape which is their context and their fate, now apparent.
Field Note:
Landscape is not the scenery. It is the necessity wherein literal and figurative converge. What is a fish outside the context of water, which is its Landscape but a “Fish Out of Water.” What is bison without prairie. What is polar bear, without ice.
And so the bears climb. To the whitest place they can find. Into the clouds. In the cool of the air, high on that slope at a distance where binoculars and long lenses don’t help even with an animal as large as a polar bear, and we are disappointed. We sense a missed opportunity. Unless, instead of focusing on what we want, that tight and intimate closeup view, we broaden the senses and capture the Totality.
What then is my context? Looking at the view, inhaling the air, walking on rough and rocky ground consciousness turns to the Self. How does the air smell, to me. How does the ocean seem, to me? Calm or livid with rage? The boulders in my path, are they handhold? Or impediment? In every conceivable way I depend on the ground on which I stand, the thin envelope of breathable air we call the atmosphere, on the forbearance of the ocean no matter how great the ship nor the interval required to reach the other shore; and yet how easily I lose sight of the vital and necessary nature of what surrounds us, top, bottom, length, width and all within the eroding envelope of Time where every living thing is only small. Landscape is the Reality we forget.