Karen Solie

When I learned I could own a piece of The World I got my chequebook out. Eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. My wife's bright eye affirmed it. As do the soothing neutral tones and classic-contemporary decor of our professionally designed apartments, private verandahs before which the globe, endlessly and effortlessly circumnavigated, slips by, allowing residents no end of exotic ports, a new destination every few days to explore with a depth we hadn't thought possible. It's not how things are on The World that is mystical, not the market and deli, proximity of masseuse and sommelier, not the gym, our favourite restaurant, our other favourite restaurant, the yacht club, the library, the golf pro, the pool, but that it exists at all, a limited whole, a logic and a feeling. What looks like freedom is, in fact, the perfection of a plan, and property a stocktaking laid against us in a measure. The difference between a thing thought, and done. One can ignore neither the practical applications nor the philosophical significance of our onboard jewelry emporium, its $12 million inventory, natural yellow diamonds from South Africa no one needs, thus satisfying the criteria for beauty. Without which there is no life of the mind. What we share, though, transcends ownership, our self-improvement guaranteed by the itineraries, licensed experts who prepare us for each new harbour and beyond, deliver us into the hands of native companions on The World's perpetual course. The visual field has no limits. And the eye— the eye devours. Polar bears, musk oxen, rare thick-billed murre. We golfed on the tundra and from The World were airlifted to pristine snowfields, clifftops where we dined alfresco above frozen seas. The World is the entirety. The largest ship ever to traverse the Northwest Passage. How the silent energy coursed between us. Fundamental rules had changed. Except, with time, it seems a sort of accident— natural objects combined in states of affairs, their internal properties. Accusatory randomness and proliferation of types, brutal quantity literally brought to our doors. Or past them, as if on the OLED high-def screen of our circumstances, which hides more than it reveals. For what we see could be other than it is. Whatever we're able to describe at all could be other than it is. Such assaults on our finer feelings require an appeal to order, to the exercise of discipline a private Jacuzzi represents, from which one might peacefully enjoy the singular euphoria of the Panama Canal or long-awaited departure from fetid Venice. There is some truth in solipsism, but I fear I'm doing it wrong, standing at the rail for ceremonial cast-offs thunderously accessorized with Vangelis or "Non, je ne regrette rien," made irritable by appreciative comments about the light. In Reykjavík or Cape Town, it's the same. Familiarity without intimacy is the cost of privacy, security of a thread count so extravagant its extent can no longer be detected. Even at capacity, The World is eerily empty: its crew of highly trained specialists in housekeeping, maintenance, beauty, and cuisine—the heart and soul of the endeavour—are largely unseen and likely where the fun is. We sit at the captain's table but don't know him. He's Italian. I think on my Clarksville boyhood long before EPS, ROE— retractable clothesline sunk in concrete, modest backyard a staging ground for potential we felt infinite to the degree our parents knew it wasn't. The unknown is where we played. And while fulfilment of a premeditated outcome confers a nearly spiritual comfort of indifference to the time of year, a paradise of fruits always in season, the span of choice defines its limit, which cannot be exceeded. The sea rolls over, props on an elbow, and now is heard the small sound of a daydream running softly aground. Dissatisfaction, in a Danish sense. On prevailing winds a scent of compromise; for one tires of the spacewalk outside what is the case. Beyond immediate luxuries lives speculation and the tragic impression one is yet to be born. It could be when all pursuits have been satisfied, life's problems will remain untouched. But doubt exists only where questions exist. The World satisfies its own conditions. It argues for itself. Herein lies an answer.

Dinner finished, wine in hand, in a vaguely competitive spirit of disclosure, we trail Google Earth's invisible pervert through the streets of our hometowns, but find them shabbier, or grossly contemporized, denuded of childhood's native flora, stuccoed or in some other way hostile to the historical reenactments we expect of our former settings. What sadness in the disused curling rinks, their illegal basement bars imploding, in the seed of a Walmart sprouting in the demographic, in Street View's perpetual noon. With pale and bloated production values, hits of AM radio rise to the surface of a network of social relations long obsolete. We sense a loss of rapport. But how sweet the persistence of angle parking! Would we burn these places rather than see them change, or just happily burn them, the sites of wreckage from which we staggered with our formative injuries into the rest of our lives. They cannot be consigned to the fourfold, though the age we were belongs to someone else. Like our old house. Look what they've done to it. Who thought this would be fun? A concert, then, YouTube from those inconceivable days before YouTube, an era boarded over like a bankrupt country store, cans still on its shelves, so hastily did we leave it. How beautiful they are in their poncey clothes, their youthful higher registers, fullscreen, two of them dead now. Is this eternity? Encore, applause, encore; it's almost like being there.

When they were together she thought it God’s punishment. When he left she thought it God’s punishment. When vermin overrun the city’s boardinghouses and highrises it’s God sticking a hose into the Devil’s hole to flood him out. And when the floodwaters rose, where was everyone? When fog risen from the lake assimilates varietals of exhaust, evolves through the financial district, renders toxic the neighbourhoods, swells over suburbs, the Devil has forsaken another project, saying sometimes I can’t fucking concentrate on anything. He says he does what he does sometimes because the Devil gets in like water through his weak places. When it rains like now the Devil yells at God I’ve told you not to call me that. When it rains like now. And every time God laughs at this roofs lift off along the Eastern Seaboard. The Eastern Seaboard will never understand. When we are broken, to whom are we opened? God’s taken all the fish home to live with him, honey. And when the earth shakes that’s God rearranging furniture not a bomb in the subway like we thought. If you feel the Devil with you, he is there. If you think God has abandoned you, you are abandoned, his attention on the World Series, more important than any one man, smiting the hell out of the Rangers’ big bats as the Giants lift fingers to the sky in praise and the ordnance deployed in his name, in making straight the way, would fill the oceans. And each foreclosure is a failure of belief, each immortal jellyfish a failure of belief. When those who will ruin us are elected, where is everyone? And when I return from the desert it’s with the Devil cast out. With God cast out. Because it wasn’t really me who did those things before, that wasn’t me.

Warmth activates the sugars, and sugars rally in the gorse, in the flowers it sees with, the scent that is its voice, the nontoxic fragrant wood good for cutlery, and for burning, though it flares out quickly, unlike smoldering peat. Are they converting sugars of their loneliness to conviction? Burning their sugars on the wicks of their frailty, one can nearly read by them, as Fillan in his own cave read by the light of  his broken arm, one of the horrible miracles of the times — St. Fillan, the Human Flashlight, patron of the mentally ill — an unenviable between-worlds position. Whereas marsh orchids, fully in this one, change their clothes out in the open, hard candy in their mouths, the sugars plump, round, smooth, unlike seawater’s jagged molecules, which when drunk like anger will tear through you. Like bitterness, desiccate you. To survive, suffering burns the strength of the afflicted. If, left in Fillan’s cave, bonds of the stricken were loosened by morning, his spirit had intervened to convert the molecules of their madness, and still later did smugglers stash there some of those little things that make life worth living. The highly edible sweet gorse flowers produce a coconut-flavored wine if one enjoys the luxury of time, and a tea prescribed in cases of uncertainty, for those who appear to have lost all hope.

One might understand Turner, you said, in North Atlantic sky east-southeast from Newfoundland toward Hibernia. Cloud darker than cloud cast doubt upon muttering, pacing water, even backlit by a devouring glare that whitened its edges, bent the bars. Waters apart from society by choice, their living room the aftermath of accident or crime. When the storm comes, we will see into it, there will be no near and no far. In sixty-five-foot 
seas for the Ocean Ranger, green turned to black then white as molecules changed places in the Jeanne d’Arc Basin, the way wood passes into flame, and communication errors into catastrophic failure for the Piper Alpha offshore from Aberdeen. It burned freely. If I don’t come home, is my house in order? Big fear travels in the Sikorsky. Twelve-hour shifts travel with them, the deluge system, aqueous foam. Machinery’s one note hammering the heart, identity compressed with intentions, drenched, the tired body performs delicately timed, brutal tasks no training adequately represents and which consume the perceivable world. In beds on the drilling platform in suspended disbelief, identified by the unlovely sea’s aggression, no sleep aids, should a directive come. Underwater welders deeply unconscious. Survival suits profane in lockers. By dreams of marine flares and inflatables, buoyant smoke, percolating fret, one is weakened. Violence enters the imagination. Clouds previously unrecorded. Unlocked, the gates of light and technology of capture in bitumen oozing from fractures in the earth or afloat like other fatty bodies, condensed by sun and internal salts, harassing snakes with its fumes. Light-sensitive bitumen of Judea upon which Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce recorded the view from his bedroom. It looked nice. A new kind of evidence developed from the camera obscura of experience and memory, love-object to dote on and ignore. Collectible photochrome postcards. Storm surge as weather segment, tornados on YouTube relieve us of our boredom. In the rain, drizzle, intermittent showers, unseasonable hurricane threatening our flight plans, against a sea heaving photogenically, straining at its chains like a monster in the flashbulbs, on wet stones astonishingly slick, we take selfies, post them, and can’t undo it. Meaning takes place in time. By elevated circumstance of Burtynsky’s drone helicopters, revolutionary lenses pester Alberta’s tar sands, sulphur ponds’ rhapsodic upturned faces, photographs that happen in our name and in the name of composition. Foreground entered at distance, the eye surveils the McMurray Formation’s freestanding ruin mid-aspect to an infinity of abstraction. A physical symptom assails our vocabulary and things acquire a literal feeling from which one does not recover. Mineral dissolution, complete. Accommodation space, low. Confinement, relatively broad, extremely complex stratigraphy, reservoirs stacked and composite. An area roughly the size of England stripped of boreal forest and muskeg, unburdened by hydraulic rope shovels of its overburden. Humiliated, blinded, walking in circles. Cycle of soak and dry and residue. The will creates effects no will can overturn, and that seem, with the passage of time, necessary, as the past assumes a pattern. Thought approaches the future and the future, like a heavy unconventional oil, advances. Hello infrastructure, Dodge Ram 1500, no one else wants to get killed on Highway 63, the all-weather road by the Wandering River where earthmovers remain unmoved by our schedules. White crosses in the ditches, white crosses in the glove box. The west stands for relocation, the east for lost causes. Would you conspire to serve tourists in a fish restaurant the rest of your life? I thought not. Drinks are on us bushpigs now, though this camp is no place for a tradesman. Devon’s Jackfish is five-star, an obvious exception. But Mackenzie, Voyageur, Millennium, Borealis — years ago we would have burned them to the ground. Suncor Firebag has Wi-Fi, but will track usage. Guard towers and turnstiles at Wapasu — we’re guests, after all, not prisoners, right? Efficiently squalid, briskly producing raw sewage, black mold, botulism, fleas, remorse, madness, lethargy, mud, it’s not a spiritual home, this bleach taste in the waterglass, layered garments, fried food, bitter complaint in plywood drop-ceiling bedrooms strung out on whatever and general offense and why doesn’t anyone smoke anymore. Dealers and prostitutes cultivate their terms organically, as demand matures. The Athabasca River’s color isn’t good. Should we not encourage a healthy dread of the wild places? Consider the operator crushed by a slab of ice, our electrician mauled by a bear at the front lines of project expansion into the inhumane forest. Fear not, we are worth more than many sparrows. They pay for insignificance with their lives. It’s the structure. Jackpine Mine photographs beautifully on the shoulders of the day, in the minutes before sunset it’s still legal to hunt. One might, like Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer, at a certain remove from principal events, cut a sensitive figure in the presence of the sublime. Except you can smell it down here. Corrosive vapors unexpectedly distributed, caustic particulate infiltrates your mood. As does the tar sands beetle whose bite scars, from whom grown men run. Attracted by the same sorrowful chemical compound emitted by damaged trees on which it feeds, its aural signature approximates the rasp of causatum rubbing its parts together. The only other living thing in situ, in the open pit where swims the bitumen, extra brilliant, dense, massive, in the Greek asphaltos, “to make stable,” “to secure.” Pharmacist’s earth that resists decay, resolves and attenuates, cleanses wounds. Once used to burn the houses of our enemies, upgraded now to refinery-ready feedstock, raw crude flowing through channels of production and distribution. Combustion is our style. It steers all things from the black grave of Athabasca-Wabiskaw. Cold Lake. Rail lines of Lac-Mégantic. The optics are bad. We’re all downstream now. Action resembles waiting for a decision made on our behalf, then despair after the fact. Despair which, like bitumen itself, applied to render darker tones or an emphatic tenebrism, imparts a velvety lustrous disposition, but eventually discolors to a black treacle that degrades any pigment it contacts. Details in sections of Raft of the Medusa can no longer be discerned. In 1816, the Medusa’s captain, in a spasm of flamboyant incompetence, ran aground on the African coast, and fearing the ire of his constituents, refused to sacrifice the cannons. They turned on each other, 147 low souls herded onto a makeshift raft cut loose from lifeboats of the wealthy and well-connected. The signs were there, risk/reward coefficient alive in the wind, the locomotive, small tragic towns left for work, where the only thing manufactured is the need for work. Foreshortening and a receding horizon include the viewer in the scene, should the viewer wish to be included in the scene. One can’t be sure if the brig,Argus, is racing to the rescue or departing. It hesitates in the distance, in its nimbus of fairer weather, the courage and compassion of a new age onboard. Géricault’s pyramidical composition — dead and dying in the foreground from which the strong succeed upward toward an emotional peak — an influence for Turner’s Disaster at Sea, the vortex structure of The Slave Ship: all those abandoned, where is thy market now? It’s difficult to imagine everyone saved, it’s unaffordable. Waves disproportionate, organized in depth, panic modulating the speaking voice. The situation so harshly primary and not beautiful when you don’t go to visit the seaside, but the seaside visits you, rudely, breaks in through the basement, ascends stairs to your bedroom, you can’t think of it generally then. The 
constitution of things is accustomed to hiding. Rearrangement will not suit us. Certain low-lying river deltas. Island states, coastal regions — floodwaters receding in measures like all we haven’t seen the last of reveal in stagnancies and bloat what’s altered, as avernal exhalations of mines and flares are altered but don’t disappear. Still, iceberg season is spectacular this year, worth the trip to photograph in evening ourselves before the abundance when, aflame in light that dissolves what it illuminates, water climbs its own red walls, vermilion in the furnaces.