Icefields

It would have been fruitful to ‘capture’ some of the ideas, but they are fleeting, like the delicate creatures that live in the bottom of the ocean. To go after them would be to destroy them, to spook them. The abyss is terrifying for some. All men face fear, all men face anxiety. Even the Eskimo—when he faces a wind of 60mph, when he faces cold of -50F, when he faces a white out—a man can die in such conditions, and if he dies, I cannot imagine—is this man hunting alone—that is to say, is this man hunting only for himself? Or is this man part of a band? Does he have a son waiting for him? It makes a difference because death may be peaceful if a man is doing what he wants and is not burdened by a horizon. Is the man on a voyage far across an ice plain? Does he wish to see the other side? Perhaps he could be at peace that he dies while moving across his ice plain, dying with so many friendly voices, dying with so much good ice. Yet what if the man had not yet made friends with his ice and the voices? What if all this man thought about during his whole journey was ‘the other side’? What if the other side is all the man wants? Wanting is an affliction. So much is around a man for all of what is around him to be his friend. The affliction of the white man, his great psychosis is a project, a goal—and all else before the man is seen by him as lost, or a journey but not the goal, a series of phenomena that will occur along the way (the journey) that must conquered, overcome, but do not themselves constitute ‘the objective.’ Objectives, goals, purposes, projects—this western mindset is an excellent form of living suicide—all else dies, all else is murdered, all else is sacrificed as irrelevant. A man must have goals, objectives, some project. A man must be a demon and a bastard to all that inhabits the now and live only in the objective, that white, silent hollowing cancer, the killer of childsouls, the apologist of the destruction of forests, beaches, the theme songs of wars, office buildings, it is the chlorine gas cancer of the west, and it is what makes The West precisely what it is. Let these men and women have their projects and goals until their graves. The white man speaks of his struggle as he carries his body over vast stretches of land? What is his struggle, what is he worried about? Why is the white man so unhappy? Why does he wish to destroy everything in his path and catalog what remains? So what if he does not reach the other end of the great ice field. He makes such a fuss about everything. He will be silent when he freezes.