(after Glenn Gould’s The Idea of North)
(We have administered these vast territories of North in an almost continuing state of mind…)
High latitude
vast flatness of poles
wind a whitewash
breathing lungs
stone-cold
(I have an enormous compulsion to look upon the polar seas and I find that this is growing apace each year, so that I really want to get it out of my system somehow…)
Cold enlarges consciousness
an inner feeling: hinterlands
We are stirred & sharpened
made precise, altered–
a mental nordicity
(The North is almost everything beyond the comfortable and familiar, everything frozen and dark, treeless and windswept…)
Arctic night
blizzard bone
drift of pelt & parka
polar values
break the ice in rime
evoke an introversion
like isotherms
(When men live in the North their values change…)
permafrost/permavision
cold Judas chill
solitude
& idea-flakes
(They live a lifetime and die when they emerge. They become citizens of a different country–that tapestry of tundra and taiga…)
blue-planed spirit
frozen subsoil
keen surface
cutting/nipping
uninhabited
vanishing point
(There was something spiritual about it, elements of magic having to do with the magnetic pole…)
brush-blade pointillism
breath & breathe
vision elemental
inland seas
frozen sonata
(Something really does happen to people up here…)
ice age cold snap
cold storage
icefields
pro-found snow-bound
(It cares so little and sort of diminishes you…)
pack-ice growlers
overhang design
spirit gathers hoarfrost
terminal moraine
(It looks so odd and cold you wouldn’t want to live there…)
chilblain shiver
raw polar night
boreal abstract
a treeline sensibility
gather & evoke
this nordic index