Reviews for Explorers and exploration

The average rating for Explorers and exploration based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-08-07 00:00:00 Gene Fogerty Here in the American Mid-Atlantic the winters seem to be getting shorter and milder. I remember great ice storms in my youth, walking on what seemed ice a meter high, ice pelting the roof all night long, like a hundred cats' nails clacking on a chapel floor or millions of insects hitting the window; I remember the creaking and groaning of limbs heavy with ice up there invisible in the unending darkness of a pitch black winter night as I walked out against my parents' warnings; I remember the brief thunder of their crashing through the other ice-heavy limbs as they plummeted over-laden, and their black limbs emerging upright from the snow piles where they speared themselves- they pointed back upward from where they dropped, maybe longing to be reconnected to that mother-trunk. I remember ice inches thick on cars and we would be stuck in the house for days, logs hissing in the fireplace. This happened numerous times. Maybe I remember the snowfall as higher because I was smaller; maybe the ice-clothing on the trees and the porch seemed more armor-like and thicker because I was young and more easily awe-struck. Today and yesterday, the 30th and 31st of January 2013, it was in the mid-sixties in Washington DC and my sleeves were rolled up and I ate lunch outside in the unexpected warmth and pale light. The trees are still bare. Strangely, three days ago work was delayed because of ice. Three days ago ice did rain down and once again percussed my roof (a different roof, a different habitation, a different ice-pelting than the one earlier thought of) and the wind screamed at my windows and the walls of my house trembled as if their blood too was freezing. The Frost is still in Vinland, but it has changed. And it was never like it was in the Flateyjarbok anyway, because that was all a myth- but what do we know of those dark centuries that came before we were born other than myth? All history is myth and dream. My memories of the ice storms of my childhood are lies. I am remembering them now decades later and hundreds of miles away, through a mind greatly altered by years and situations. Yet my mythology is my only history, it's all I have; my memories are my own skin-bound book that tell my fiction, on which one day the final page and end cover will be closed up forever. So it goes with all of history. In retelling the Norse and Icelandic myths, the Greenland sagas dealing with the discovery of North America (in this first of his Seven Dreams) Vollmann is simply taking the reins from centuries of storytellers and recounting again, as generations have by the fireside, an origin myth. His prose alternates from landscapes painted in overwhelming detail of flora and fauna, Eden-like descriptions of primitive pastorals, where lichen grows like rainbows on stones and grass waves like women's hair in the wind, and some sad-eyed reindeer disappear over the horizon and a gull screams and circles over indifferent tides,and there a human is lost among the rocks, out hunting- to the vast oblivion of oceanscapes, where sky is no different from sea, and mists roll in from unknown and unseen lands to clothe everything in a dream-vision- to hellish underworlds and rivers of blood carrying worm-eaten corpses pecked at by ravens whose feathers are coated in flesh-filth and walls of snakes drip venom on the unfortunate dead cast there. Oh, there is a wealth of imaginative detail spilling out of the pages of this book; how much of it is Vollmann's and how much of it comes from the Viking sources I don't know and frankly don't care; the experience is all. Throughout the telling of the Viking-dream, holes are pierced into modern days- Vollmann the author in Greenland, Iceland, the east coast of North America, observing these lands today. A few purposes are served by these sections. One is that the intervening years disintegrate instantly, and we are standing on the ruins of the houses which a moment ago were inhabited by our mythic characters; we feel the centuries in their quick absence, we see how far we have come and how much has been lost. A kind of mysterious sadness pervades these modern sections, as if something abandoned the earth long ago, or as if men's imaginations have become only more impoverished by the years, or as if in giving up our more wild Shirts and modes of life we have sterilized something about what it is to be viscerally alive and believe in our ability to shift forms (change our fundamental selves) and imbue objects with power (the lifeless technology we are ever more beholden to, which lessens our autonomy) or to have faith in something other than a life of materiality, function, and habits bent toward stale progress (the businessman's homogenizing garb and dead tongue). Who doesn't at times feel the urge to take to the road and plunder? Who doesn't long at certain hours to go a-Viking across unknown deadly seas in search of new lands? (Well, the unfortunate answer is "the vast majority of us")... Which brings me to another function of these brief sojourns to modern times- they illustrate that we haven't changed that much at all, that we merely repress more, that the extreme violence and chaos (believe me, this book has much extreme violence) of the warrior races of myth is still pulsing through our veins- it just erupts more strangely, less often but in spectacular explosions, in mass killings, in wars hidden from view (so that we might more easily believe ourselves to be civil), in the stylization and sterilization of our banal entertainments that are dishonestly lascivious, in our perversions, in the banal veneer we uphold of the normalcy of our lives that is always and ever anything but normal. We are still kin and relative of these pagan Vikings, we still go a-plundering and bring the Frost-Seed wherever we venture, only the death we bring is in vapid forms- pollution and exploitation of foreign workers and convenient backing of despots when it benefits our bottom line. We don't tell ourselves honest stories. The stories we tell ourselves now, for the greater part, are lies of gentleness, lies of beauty, lies of heroism, lies of order; at least the sagas of the Vikings recognized our ugliness and brutality and gave them the place they warrant; and when beauty and goodness does bloom in this savage and spellbound tale (Gudrid), it stands out all the more against the background pallor of death, and is thus elevated to its rare and proper place. True beauty comes into fruition at moments when all beauty is under threat. Much of the earth is wastes of stone and depthless seas. Vollmann dreams of a first aborted colonization of North America; he dreams of Europeans first coming to America clothed in the mantle of war and armed to the teeth, in search of wealth and set to plunder and manipulate and murder and rape to obtain that wealth; he dreams of a past steeped in blood lying down at Hell's mouth; he dreams of two sisters, one the thrall of Evil and one the daughter of Good. They are still at each other's throats, they are still fighting their fates out in our days, in our lives; the Frost-Seed is planted deep in Vinland's soil; the ice always returns.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-09-29 00:00:00 Hollie Lopez How skewed a vision of distance you can develop from looking at our standardized world maps. Geography is such a malleable, unfathomable thing. I can take a beach ball globe of the world, deflate it and make all of the continents touch and overlap and commune with one another. I can spin it around and pick any dot and call it the Centre of the Universe, erase all the political lines we've scarred the landscape with and focus on the dreamy blue of the sea. Who says the ancient peoples were isolated from one another? There are so many islands in the Northern reaches of the Atlantic, with vulnerable human beings plying the unmarked and stormy way from one to the next in frangible wooden ships. There were islands as numerous as stars, so that men went dreaming from archipelago to constellation, wind-blown and wave-tossed to flowery little coasts where they were deafened by the booming of waterfalls that no one had ever heard before. One thousand years ago, these wooden playthings were swept far off course and driven to the unknown coasts of a landmass formerly known as Vinland, not once but twice in a decade. Suddenly the distance between two continents is foreshortened and the "discovery" of the Americas in 1492 hardly seems impressive. Greenland was settled, but gradually creeping frost and frigid relations led to its abandonment by white folk. We have records of all these long-ago voyages in medieval saga literature, a window into the lives of those first adventurers. William the Blind draws on The Sagas of the Icelanders to revisit this violent age, when so many men were burnt in their sleep, and weaves in elements of Inuit lore and his own travels to the Arctic. Shunted abruptly to the present time, we look at the same places through the lens of today, but are they really the same? Greenland is colder and bereft of driftwood, rivers braid and change course incessantly, and glaciers bear down on mountains at formidably slow speeds. By revisiting these places, the impermanence of our short human lives is brought into sharp relief. The meeting of two peoples: the Norsemen (Icelanders, Greenlanders... it is difficult to pin a nationality on people that flit across the map, then as now) and the First Peoples, the Inuit, the Skraeling. William the Blind blurs the lines between fiction and non-fiction, bringing paint and colour to the lives of historical figures who really did walk this earth. Is it his use of primary sources that makes this story uneven? We are always telling this story from a white person's perspective, and I was hungry for a deeper plunge into the Inuit or Micmac experience of this first encounter, but such is not Vollmann's project. Alas, saga literature is vast and reams have been written about these characters, a mound of riches for Vollmann to excavate. By comparison, much of Inuit lore remains oral history, and the cultural recollection of these millennium-old happenings is scant at best. Another way of knowing the past, insofar as it is possible, is through its material record - and clothing is a recurrent motif. How can we know anything of history that is not superficial? Does clothing really define a person, in the way the bear-kings channelled the power of the beast by donning their bear-shirts? I know the robes better than the people, for I have seen photographs of the clothing excavated from the frozen graves at Herjolfsness. But oh, William the Blind, how you drew me in with your worlds of ice. The story came alive for me when Freydis and her wicked heart scaled the craggy heights of Blue-Shirt. The terrifying truth behind the failure of that first settlement, its vivid other-worldliness, the inner frost that chills the core of this novel - my words cannot do justice to the artistic genius behind this first Dream. Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?