I’m at Esrange Space Center, 90 miles north of the Arctic Circle, near the town of Kiruna.
My pencilled list shows me the following:
TO SHOOT: Est shots, Meals, Details, Signs, Cutaways, Landscape, Driving, Get release forms signed.
I am having so much fun. Absolutely open to impulse, everything looks good, long takes, trying to do too many things at once because the plan is neither fermented nor congealed. In the moment.
The light is great. It’s cold. The pine trees go on and on. Some of them hide enormous satellites I am told not to film. Resemblances to bunker life. Scientists at work. Styrofoam, wood blocks, screws, glue, velcro. French fries at dinner. The clouds move along in the sky, unperturbed.
I heard people going outside last night and wondered why. Today they told me there were auroras all over the sky and Saturday there will be more. The schedule written on the whiteboard as “SUNDAY: LAUNCH?” because with all the preparation, the tools and teams, there is no certainty on when this balloon will actually be taking off into the sky.
That’s all I’m going to write right now about being here because it’s too soon and I haven’t processed anything yet, really.
What I do have for you this week, dear readers, is a transcript of “Eureka,” the film that I posted last week. I need to see how it fits with what I am doing right now. Because somewhere inside I do know these things go together, but wearing the “documentarian” hat at a space station in the far north is very different from sitting in a studio animating about 19th century literature.
I wrote “Eureka” while at the same time I was animating it. There was no pre-written document that I copied. It came out letter by letter as I went along, for about six weeks. I do not know how it looks or works as a piece of writing. So I’m transcribing an already written piece of writing, which is funny and unexpected.
Here it is for you. While you save 40 minutes of watching, it’s not the same as the film. But it doesn’t have to be. I’ve included the only two images in the film in the same place that they would be if you were watching it. And I have divided the text into something resembling paragraphs instead of in the film’s shorter panels.
***
1818
John Cleves Symmes (Jr.), of Hamilton Ohio, proclaims to the world: “I declare that the earth is hollow and habitable within; I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if men will support and aid me in this undertaking.”
Symmes appealed for a hundred volunteers to start from Siberia with reindeer and sleighs, on the ice of the frozen sea. At the pole, Symmes promised, the intrepid group “would enter into a warm and rich land stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals, if not men.”
Symmes sent his appeal to five hundred prominent citizens, to legislatures, colleges, philosophical societies and foreign governments. Everyone laughed and ridiculed Symmes’ theory. They called him crazy. But he didn’t care.
Symmes kept at it, publishing, advertising and giving public lectures. After a few years, Symmes gained a few followers. The young newspaper editor, explorer, and author J. N. Reynolds believed Symmes. Together, Symmes and Reynolds travelled around the U.S. giving their hollow earth lecture to audiences both large and small.
Reynolds managed to convince some of President John Q. Adams’ cabinet and Congress to fund a South Pole hollow earth expedition, but begore he could get started, a new president, Andrew Jackson, came to power and cancelled the whole thing.
Undeterred, Reynolds raised enough private money to sail, in 1829, from New York harbor to the icy shores of Antarctica, But the South Pole hole was not found, as it was “blocked up with an icy continent.”
Half the crew, including Reynolds, found themselves stuck on a big rock surrounded by icebergs and not much else. They survived on sea lion meat.
After two weeks they were able to extract the longboats from the ice. They then rowed for forty hours until they reached the ship. All rejoiced at the safe return. And realizing the pole hole was blocked, Captain Reynolds gave the order to turn back and sail for the mainland.
Arriving in Chile, the entire crew mutinied, dumped Reynolds and his patron Dr. Watson ashore, and took off in the ship to become pirates in the South Seas. Reynolds ended up roaming around South America for a couple of years.
Let’s leave Reynolds for a while. He’s busy making a mess.
the high and combing waves
sheets of flying foam
vast and moving pyramids of angry foam.
struggling up from one wave
buried by another
as if by magic
a perfect wilderness
of foam
***
Edgar Allan Poe was working as a critic at a brand new magazine, the Southern Literary Messenger. In the January 1837 issue, Poe reviewed
A SOUTH SEA EXPEDITION
by J. N. Reynolds.
Poe praised Reynolds’ report.
The same issue contained more by Poe, including four more reviews, one sonnet, one ballad, and Part One of his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.
This wild, unruly, mysterious, and gory book tells Pym’s adventures with a first-person account written in a dispassionate, almost clinical tone.
The measured way Pym describes the horrors at sea resemble other tales by Poe, like “Descent into the Maelstrom,” which Poe wrote in 1841, after the critical and financial failure of “Pym” saw the renowned but poor author return to the short story, a quicker, more intense, and more lucrative form at the time.
Poe’s “Pym” also uses another distancing technique that, while not uncommon at the time, creates further anxiety and instability in the reader. The entire novel presents itself as a true account, complete with wordy titles, end notes, and explanations for its fragmented form.
In fact, Poe’s novel borrows from the tumultuous trials and tales by the same J.N. Reynolds whose Antarctic debacle Poe reviewed.
“Pym” ends in a fog from which neither protagonist nor reader can ever emerge. Approaching the South Pole in a tiny battered boat, the water heats up; the wind stills; the current pulls more. The boat is a speck.
White ash rains down. Vapor fills the horizon from sky to sea, “and now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us.”
I wouldn’t want to spoil the ending for you, so you’ll have to read it yourself to see if Pym makes it into the pole hole—or not.
say something for me
say I was not afraid
of the sea.
Why do all this? I hear you ask.
These are my tides, the currents, the swells of mind. I dolphin-leap, otter-twist, and, like a barnacle, glue myself to the flotsam of stories past and present.
Out of scraps and bits I build new shipwrecks, passing between jagged hollow rocks, I hear you all, sirens of America, and my heart breaks against sharp shoals of your sweet songs.
Imagine, for a moment, that together we fall into that hole, down, down, down, so down it becomes up. We emerge from Symmes’ & Reynolds polar hole, not falling, but floating.
“April 7. Arose early, and to my great joy, what there could be no hesitation in supposing the Northern Pole itself, It was there, beyond a doubt, and immediately beneath my feet; but alas! I had now ascended to so vast a distance, that nothing could with accuracy be discerned.”
Now we’re up.
Way up in the stratosphere with one Hans Pfall, a genius inventor who flies up to the moon in a balloon of his own making. He does this both to see if it’s possible and to escape being arrested for killing the debt collectors who’ve been threatening him and the good Mrs. Grettel Pfall.
You can almost see Poe sitting there, pen scribbling as fast as he can make it, trying to get a jump on the “balloon fad,” play a trick on readers and exact murderous revenge fantasies on creditors who had been plaguing him for his whole life.
Hans Pfall’s story of his miraculous fight comes to us wrapped in so many layers of storytelling, it’s absurd, and intentionally so. A mysterious Moon-man descends in a balloon entirely made of old dirty newspapers. Moon-man throws a huge letter down and flies away in the grimy paper balloon.
The tale is a letter, a diary, a hoax, a scientific treatise, a fantasy, a retort a plea, a bargain, it blocks any completion or resolution. Much like the ice and stone that kept J.N. Reynolds from the pole-hole.
Poe’s shifting sea ice of language disorients us until our small boat either breaks into pieces or turns back to shore.
What I meant to say is that Hans Pfall, in closing his letter, offers to make a deal with the mayor and authorities of his city: in exchange for a full pardon for his crimes, he will return to Earth and reveal all the scientific wonders of the Moon and its strange, earless people “of their substitute for speech in a singular method of inter-communication.”
Yet even as Professor Rubadub and Mynheer Superbus von Underduk read Pfall’s pardon, they realize that the balloon Moon-man messenger floated away long ago and cannot deliver any pardon.
So either Pfall’s still there, full of knowledge and experience, wishing he could float home, or it was all a big hoax.
And we, like the professors and astronomers of Poe’s tale, are “to say the least, not a whit better, nor greater, nor wiser than they ought to be.”
***
“To the few who love me and whom I love—to those who feel rather than to those who think—to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities—I offer this Book of Truths, To these I present the composition as an Art-Product alone:—let us say as a Romance; or if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem.”
EUREKA: AN ESSAY ON THE MATERIAL AND SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE.
“My general proposition then, is this:—In the Original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause of All things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation.”
Well, yhat sounds serious, so before we continue, there are a few necessary digressions to make.
For example:
This
film
is
two
hours
long.
Don’t
worry.
That’s
just
a reference
to
a
film
from
1982
by
Michael
Snow,
called
So
is
This.
The
film
consists
of
white
text
on
a
black
background,
one
word
at
a
time.
Snow
says
this
film
is
two
hours
long.
The
audience
sighs.
But
So
is
This
is
actually
only
43
minutes
long.
***
Returning to the subject of J.N. Reynolds, whose failed quest to access the South Pole hole had a great influence on Edgar Allan Poe, that Reynolds had a persistence to rival even the most dogged pioneer of the time.
Reynolds continued his relentless appeals to the U.S. Government to finance an expedition to Antarctica and the South Seas.
America was desperately in need of conquests to assert its place on the world stage. Naming and mapping, establishing trade routes, cataloguing specimens, Reynolds promised it all.
But while Congress did approve funding for Reynolds’ expedition, they rejected Reynolds, choosing the sterner and younger Charles Wilkes as captain and leader of the massive United States Exploring Expedition.
350 men on seven ships set sail on August 18, 1838. By the end of the expedition, four years later, word of Wilkes’ monomania and cruelty had reached American’s shores. Wilkes was court-martialled but acquitted.
Eighty Fijians killed.
Two villages burned.
Twelve Gilbertese killed.
Two more villages burned.
Sailors whipped, flogged, starved, and chained in darkness below deck.
Wilkes ruled through force and terror. Many people in the United States read the reports from Wilkes’ trial with interest. One of those readers was a young author from New York who was looking for ideas.
That author had recently finished reading a gripping adventure tale of the South Seas: Mocha Dick: Or, The White Whale of the Pacific, written by one J.N. Reynolds.
Our New York author was, of course, Herman Melville, who ensconced himself in the mountains of Western Massachusetts for nearly two years, writing Moby Dick; or, The Whale, a critical and commercial failure now regarded as one of the greatest works of American literature ever written.
Exploration, expropriation, exploitation, extraction, expansion: the newly formed United States piled its structures high atop these hollow foundations, and painted them with patriotic slogans and thin coats of red, white, and blue.
Those colors fluttered in abundance at the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on a clear, cold January morning in 1793. Jean-Pierre Blanchard, France’s renowned and daring aeronaut, had come to America and as a gesture of solidarity, would present the first manned balloon flight on its shores.
Blanchard’s previous flights in Paris, London, and across the English Channel, caused an upswell of balloonomania throughout Europe. Books, toys, clothes, entertainment, all took on the theme. Of course, land surveys and military strategy developed as quickly as balloon-shaped dresses.
The United States was only seventeen years old when Blanchard arrived and began inflating his balloon in the prison yard of Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail. One wonders what the inmates thought as the sun rose, the balloon grew, and the dignitaries arrived.
President George Washington. Future presidents: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, governors, ministers, and hundreds more, all eager to witness the great adventurer rise up into the sky.
The prison yard became a tiny square; famous men, ants. As Blanchard escaped the prison walls and the force of gravity, he was happy. The winds were fine, pushing him inland and not out to sea, and in his coat pocket he carried a letter from George Washington himself.
For Blanchard spoke no English. So the President’s letter was meant to help the aeronaut explain who he was and what on earth this monstrous thing was that had fallen from the sky.
the river a ribbon
the land unfolding
the cloud obscures
the clear view
of America
The first two times Blanchard tried landing there was too much forest. He had to drop a lot of ballast and just managed to clear the trees in time. Third try a success. The dog, the experiments, the aeronaut, and the bottles of wine survived.
From under the folds of the deflated balloon, Blanchard saw a man approaching with surprise and fear in his eyes. Blanchard called out and offered Washington’s letter, but the farmer couldn’t read and Blanchard spoke no English.
The clever aeronaut then offered some wine. The farmer accepted, but only after Blanchard drank from the same bottle.
Then came the man with the gun. But he could read.
To make a long story short, the guy with the gun read the letter aloud, Blanchard was hailed as a hero and he and his balloon (and his little dog too) were transported back to Philadelphia where the celebrations awaited.
Blanchard’s feat of ballooning prowess had landed him in New Jersey. 15 miles through the air for 46 minutes.
There was a large tree close by, it was called the Clement Oak. In Blanchard’s time the oak was already over 200 years old and had been a living shelter for Lenape people long before the colonization and destruction of their traditional hunting grounds.
In 1964 the town placed a plaque at the base of the Clement Oak to honor its status and site of Blanchard’s landing. The tree by then was around 380 years old.
In 1989, Wal-Mart planned to uproot the Clement Oak to make way for the seven-acre “Deptford Landing” superstore. Fierce community outcry saved the Clement Oak then, and its quiet watch over America’s heedless transformation continued from its shrinking clearing behind the enormous store.
In June, 2021, the 440 year old Clement Oak was reduced to a shattered stump, possibly by fierce storms.
I love you
I have written this because of love
we share the pictures
in our minds
we share that love
as we read
together
***
Edgar Allan Poe was born in January 1809, just 16 years after Blanchard’s historic flight and landing at the beautiful Clement Oak. Forty years after Poe’s birth, and a mere hundred miles from the Clement Oak, the celebrated author crashed, delirious, in the street near Gunner’s hall. He was taken to the hospital where, four days later, he died.
No cause of death was ever confirmed, and rumors spread.
It’s been told, for example, that during one night, the tormented author cried out:
“Reynolds! Reynolds!”
Whether the dying poet was calling out to the invisible inspiration for his many maelstroms or a different Reynolds or to no Reynolds at all is completely unknown.
Poe’s last work, which he called “A Prose Poem” was, as mentioned earlier,
EUREKA: AN ESSAY ON THE MATERIAL AND SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE
in which Poe describes, using satire, spirit, and science, how the formation of the universe and that of our being come from the same source. And that we know and feel our connection to the atom and galaxy alike.
Like Pym, like Pfall, we disappear into mist or planet.
But the poem remains.
—
EUREKA
an ongoing film by Jenny Perlin
copyright 2022 The Hoosac Institute
**
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