On a particular place in the world

On a particular place in the world

There is no awe in myths—in their existence, I mean. To a meaning-yearning value-encoding animal there opposes a world of vernal ravines and winter snows and stars. A peculiar place exists in northern Russia, an island by the name of Novaya Zemlya. There Gerrit de Veer saw a sun unlike the sun, a sun contriving a horizontal flame, a sun even more limber and majestic than the sun. He was the first at that as well. The effect is named after the place, the Novaya Zemlya effect. He was the first at many things —as all men are. The first documented case of hypervitaminosis A is in his diaries—an unfortunate voyager that ate the liver of a polar bear somewhere amid the ice.

Surely everything is still and quiet at Novaya Zemlya, surely there everything shirks its existential duty and awaits malingering or slumbering final disintegration. And yet it seems to me nothing is ragged there nor gaunt nor shabby, all must be new and renewed at every instant. I am surely romanticizing. The soviets used the site to test their nuclear arsenal, which contests my pristine idealization. Perhaps everything is dead at Novaya Zemlya, and will persist on its death till all is done, till no more a sun unlike the sun grows to the grieving sky, all gone never to rise or live again. I cannot know. I can only claim this: things exist that prove there is no awe in myths—in their existence, I mean. And that was surely felt by Gerrit de Veer, the voyager.