Seals and scurvy

This winter well-exceeded dim Chicago's average greyness. Repeated week-long stretches without sun were beatings with a phonebook: all injuries internal. Now Spring's light brings both relief and trouble, a tornadic swirl of turbidity.

The perfect antidote has been Gretel Ehrlich's dream-time descriptions of consciousness in Greenland's all-or-none sun. In This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland, she writes of the Summer that:

“I lay on the floor with my eyes wide open. Undoubtedly I was short on melatonin. There was no night in me. I felt lit up, translucent, as utilitarian as a light bulb. Perhaps the best way to sleep in this season was to stay wide-eyed and stand like a horse. To shut my eyes against light was to go against the rhythm. I imagined my body as tympanic, a composite of clocks, hundreds of ticking mechanisms buried inside my eyes, in cardiac cells, and under my skin, all pointing toward the sun, all beating and oscillating synchronously and keeping me wakeful.”

Ehrlich's own years of Greenlandic visits are deepened by her inclusion of the detailed journals of Dane/Inuit explorer and ethnographer Knud Rasmussen, who traveled across Greenland, and then Arctic North America to Siberia, in seven expeditions from 1910-1935. (Oh to add Rasmussen's journals to the Lewis and Clark shelf.) Rasmussen's reportage of native peoples steals stories from history's tomb:

"Sleep and death are allies. When someone sleeps their soul is turned upside down and they hang on to the body by the big toe."

“Greenlanders thought the aurora borealis represented the souls of stillborn children kicking their umbilical cords.”

“Before being Christianized, East Greenlanders believed that a human being had many souls that resided in every limb and joint, all over the body, and were shaped like miniature people the size of a thumb. The souls in the throat and groin were larger than the others: they must have known that singing and sex were demanding human needs."

Ehrlich doesn't seek to retrace Rasmussen's steps, so the ur-journey-within-journey author remains (for me) Tim Mackintosh-Smith ("TMS"), who retraced the peregrinations of Tangier-born Ibn Battutah in books including Travels with a Tangerine. Although the Ibn was a traveler of the Middle Ages (covering 75,000 miles between 1325-1354), his footsteps oddly were the more replicable. Even TMS is surprised by this.

One piece, of course, is each author's language (and culture) fluency. Ehrlich speaks only some words of Greenlandic (although her gestural abilities must be beyond compare.) In contrast, TMS had landed in Yeman with a fresh degree in Classical Arabic from Oxford, and there remained. Seventeen years later, he was fluent in language, mores and qat-consumption. Every few pages, he recounts an instance in which someone seeks to drag him to a mosque, refusing to accept him as non-Muslim.

Ehrlich cannot return to a time before market economies and marketed religions, when sleds had peat-moss runners and frozen-fish handles. Structures built even by post-Rasmussen visiters had crumbled. At best, she finds Rasmussen's (now demented) 90 year-old son, born of an Inuit traveling companion and then abandoned upon R's return to Danish wife and family.

TMS, in contrast, often locates still-extant shrines and tombs, in Egypt, Syria, Oman, Turkey, through the Ibn's own words. (The Ibn's travel-book is -appropriately grandly - titled An Armchair Traveller's Treasure: the Mirabilia of Metropolises and the Wonders of Wandering.) Even more startling, TMS repeatedly encounters people at those locations who themselves recite the Ibn's descriptions, from memory.

TMS gleans the benefit of culture in which time is tethered to burial sites. As TMS notes, "[f]or many Muslims, tomb visiting is something to be done regularly, like changing the oil in a car: it ensures the smooth running of history."