Fading Ghosts

In 2005 I lived in Antarctica, not on the continent itself, but close enough, on a frozen island that lies midway between it's farthest reaches and the south pole. From February through October I worked and slept and dreamt under the Southern Cross, the fading ghosts of British explorers careening off the corrugated steel and concrete of McMurdo Station, their numb souls caught up in the swirling, driving winds.

And what of it? What did I learn? What did I bring back? Was it the memories? Is that all I have, more boring sea stories to add to my collection?

It's time to say something, anything, something of value that I only learned by living through that year on the Ice. Even now it pulls me, as if those ghosts, recognizing in me a kindred spirit, a lonely soul, did follow me home to haunt my dreams and beckon me back to the bottom of the world, as if they had some Thing of great importance left sadly unsaid. Perhaps it really is them speaking through me, the whispers of the shadows of long-dead men, men who did indeed learn something down there, but never returned to share the precious knowledge they fought so very hard to win.

I speak for them then, the silent ones, with all humility and the greatest respect, and this is what I have to say. . .

What have we done? I sit here in a room, in a town near a city by a river. The river is held in place, lashed down by bridges like so many shoelaces pulled taut. Asphalt covers cobblestone streets laid down stone by stone over long-forgotten dirt roads, those roads built over narrow forest trails trampled flat by horses' hooves where whitetails once cut hidden paths through the forest. Some of today's busiest streets, and the bridges that connect them, the residual, lingering traces of natural deer trails from hundreds of years ago.

But the deer did not pick those paths at random, their behavior was shaped by that which hunted them. The primeval forest had its predators, its wolves and mountain lions, the black bear, and sometimes even that strange animal called Man.

We have since replaced the trails with streets, the horses with cars, and the wolves and mountain lions. . . these we have gladly set aside. We have moved on, advanced, shaped our world and improved our lives and more importantly (we tell ourselves) the lives of our children. At first glance, what could possibly be wrong with that? (And here, I must strain to hear the faded voices of those Antarctic dead.)

I will tell you what is wrong with that.

For two million years or more, our species fought for its very survival, just as all species do. We did not live side-by-side with the natural world. We were part of it. We always have been. Recently though, society has tried to forget this basic and profound fact, instead building artificial environments for us.

If you were to ask the average man what he thought of that he might reply "I've got nothing to complain about" - and he might even believe it. But his genes don't believe it. For millions of years his kind provided for their offspring, and themselves, in a radically different way. They hunted for food, fresh food, defended themselves when attacked (not with lawyers, but with their hands), and faced a world they had been genetically designed to survive in. We compare Wall Street to a battleground. We speak about "survival of the fittest" at work. We watch professional sports on Sunday afternoons. And we pretend that these modern substitutes are valid equivalents for what came before. They are not, and this leaves every man in the civilized world with a feeling he cannot possibly express.


That nameless feeling has always been there, constant, unchanging, suppressed, and all but invisible. It is simply this: We do not feel like men anymore. We feel as artificial as the world we have made. And that changes everything! We are no longer hunted by the wolves, but by a nameless pain, an unnecessary emptiness that men cannot fight nor evade. It is a deep genetic revulsion to the artificial construct of our modern world. The meaningless taste of paperwork, data entry, car insurance, and credit ratings cannot nourish the hunger we have to live as men. We cut great asphalt highways through the forest believing ourselves the hunter, but we have become the hunted, running from our past as if it were some great predator, leaving our legacy, our birthright behind as we zig and zag between the trees. We have become the deer, mindlessly influenced by forces we do not understand, and we are unhappy.

Modern man is, quite simply, suffocating himself. The relationships between men and women - unnaturally strained by the artificial, unfulfilling roles we play. The battles we fight (I believe) in some unconscious effort to replace the wolves and the mountain lions we foolishly destroyed. The petty power struggles of the corporate world, pointless and pervasive. The sadness in our souls that men never speak of. We have minds, yes, but our brains have been wired to live a certain kind of life, and that wiring did not change simply because we invented television. It did not change the day we landed on the moon. We are animals, flexible and smart, but animals just the same - physical, genetically predisposed to live as part of the natural world. Turning our backs on our genetic memory is making us miserable. We are denying ourselves in exchange for the security and comfort of countless rivers tethered by countless bridges - shoelaces pulled taut.

The ghosts of Antarctica understood what I have only recently come to realize. I too carried that nameless feeling, something akin to frustration mixed with helpless indignation, and blamed myself for it. Most men blame themselves for it. We silently wonder what is wrong with us, why we never feel truly at peace with ourselves, even at the best of times.

Now I know. This is what I learned in the Antarctic, free of the trappings of civilization: That mankind's true nature is not what civilization wishes it to be. We are not, in fact, artificial, and were never meant to live this way. Modern society has stripped us of our identity as a species and replaced it with neck ties and High Definition TVs. The unquantifiable, nameless feeling of frustration this breeds - it colors our actions, twists the development of modern society, leaves us unfulfilled. Our genetic memory is alive and well, waiting for us to find ourselves again, but we are now at odds with that memory, even as it continues to be stitched into every human cell; the fiber of man's being at war with his modern life.

In the winter of 2005 I heard no fading ghosts, only the moaning of the wind. But if they could speak, I believe this is what they would say - that down there, for a short while they lived as men, reveling in their existence as all men should, facing that nameless frustration that haunts us, until even that... a fading ghost in the shadow of the pole... was gone.

~ MAB, January 15, 2009

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