Nature Is a Story That We Live: Reading and Teaching "The Ancient Mariner" in the

Drake Passage
Author(s): Charles Bergman
Source: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment , Autumn 2012, Vol. 19,
No. 4 (Autumn 2012), pp. 661-680
Published by: Oxford University Press

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 Charles Bergman

Nature Is a Story That We Live:

Reading and Teaching "The Ancient
Mariner" in the Drake Passage

About one-quarter of a mile behind us, several albatrosses rode the

wind in low gear, slow and steady above the churning wake of our
ship. Through spitting waves and a slashing rain, the birds are
indistinct- stiff- winged silhouettes against a dark smear of sea and sky.
I'd been waiting for these birds. I wanted my students to see
them. But there was no point in trying to point the birds out now. My
students wouldn't know what to make of these vague shapes.
Besides, we could hardly take our eyes off the sea itself.
Several students and I had gathered on the rear deck of our ship.
It was the only place where we could be outside and still find some
protection from the violent winds. Through the night and morning,
we had ridden north from the Antarctic Peninsula, across the Drake
Passage, straight into the fury of an oncoming storm. Gale force
winds exceeded 60 knots. During the morning, the captain
announced over the intercom that we must all keep to our cabins for
our own safety. Many people, including a few of my students, got
nauseous and sick.
My students and I were traveling in Antarctica as part of a one-
month study-abroad course. It's a unique course in many ways, not
the least of which is that we are literature students in Antarctica.
By early afternoon, we were released from our cabins. That's when
several of us emerged to watch the Drake Passage- 600 miles of the
stormiest seas in the world- in a wild mood. On deck, our attention

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.4 (Autumn 2012)

Advance Access publication December 19, 2012 doi:10.1093/isle/issl03
© The Author(s) 2012.Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the
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 662 isle

was compelled
the onslaught
the sea, we co
ing, stupid sta
see the ocean i
butt-clenching
with the spum
Even as the st
the 300-foot
waves hit us o
current creat
into the bigge
drenching th
dousing us on
evoked outsize
ity. Even thoug
"It's hard not
Jillian Bartlin
ship, and we'r
The writhing
-and its specta
Jillian was the
stern.
"Is that a bird?" she asked. "It looks almost like the foam off a
whitecap."
Even in this poor light, the bird flashed white as it banked above
a breaking wave, and dove along the trailing edge of the wave. It
disappeared into a deep trough, and then reappeared on the rolling
face of a huge wave. Even at a distance, we could appreciate the
close interaction between bird and wave, connected by the invisible
wind. Watching it was as thrilling as our own rollicking ride on the
waves.

At distance, the bird looks like a pair of long,

wings. Mostly white, the wings are bordered in
sharp black tips. It's a wandering albatross, with th
of any bird in the world- over 12 feet. Wheeling a
the albatross flies like a flung knife. There's no flap
gliding, for cruising on hurricane force winds,
energy from the eddying drafts and currents along
and waves. The wings tilted, bent, shimmied. They
actually were remarkably flexible. The albatross
inward, cupping at the elbow into a thin arc. The w

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 Nature Is a Story That We Live 663

wind. The bird gained speed and pulled toward the ship. Still no
flapping.
Dipping lower, it flew only inches off the waves. A wing tip
slashed the water, leaving a streak of almost instantly vanishing
foam. Then it catapulted upward on the wind, pivoting on the axis of
its wings about 20 feet above the cresting waves.
We were watching one of the greatest sights in nature- an alba-
tross navigating the great Southern Ocean in a blowing storm. It's an
image that's inspired lots of great poetry and writing, including
Coleridge and Neruda and Chatwin, all of whom we had read. The
wandering albatross is arguably the greatest flying creature ever.
When you see it, really see it, you ride a rush of emotion, an almost
physical surge in your chest, up and down with the bird as it handles
wind and wave with such expert skill.
"Oh my God," Jillian said, "I'm popping Dramamine like candy,
but this albatross almost mocks my squeamishness. It's so incredible
to me that I can feel so moved by a bird. My God these birds are
beautiful."
And then Jillian refers to one of the poems we've read as we
headed south to Antarctica, across these same seas about two weeks
earlier. "It's like the poem where the albatross follows the ship," she
says. "It cheers me up."
She's referring, of course, to "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
Waves and bird and poem collide in a wild and meaningful moment.
I've designed this course around just this kind of epistemological and
ontological entanglement, and others like it, and want to consider
here what might be at stake for me and for my students in moments
such as this.
One of the students on deck excused herself. Overcome by a
sudden wave of nausea, she left for her cabin to vomit alone. The rest
of us stayed on the rear deck for several more hours. The albatrosses
were not done with us yet.
* jf *

People are usually surprised w

study in Antarctica. It's possibl
college class from the United S
even more surprised to learn t
ecology, or geology, or oceanog
literature course in Antarctica,
Sometimes, I tell them that we
know what that means, since it
Usually, I tell them we are stu

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664 isle

Mentioning C
questions to an
The puzzled
Modern Englis
I've taken a nu
nal life. I conf
jectory of my
nature and an
hinted at the c
ing literature.
In graduate s
watching, or "
on conservatio
Though in mo
to literature, i
into my writin
Soon I was ta
January term
"wild reading
and northern
Ecuador. I lea
Ecuador, and
abroad as well.
that even on m
national educa
graphical env
students were
for the course
I've now offer
always with t
much to say t
of education o
in our school f
in other words
university and
Antarctica, do
significance fo
The populari
unarticulated h
nificantly, to
interpret as "m
educational pr

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 Nature Is a Story That We Live 665

So, if perhaps I'm not the first to take an undergraduate class to

Antarctica, I am sure that I'm the first literature teacher to do so. And
I'm certain that I'm the first person actually to teach Coleridge's
famous poem in the Drake Passage on the way to Antarctica-
precisely where many of the crucial events of the poem take place.
The sense that literature and nature have little to do with each
other, and are even jarring when juxtaposed, is not just a cliche in the
popular imagination. We inherit deeply held notions that science and
the humanities form "two cultures." Scientists are likely not to appre-
ciate the central role of metaphor and story, image and narrative, in
shaping our understanding of nature and animals, as if these repre-
sentations could be dismissed in favor of an immediate, empirical
understanding of, say, the animal in question. Humanists on the
other hand are likely to privilege a "human exceptionalism" that
makes the study of nature and animals easily dismissible. These
"earth others," as Val Plum wood calls them (137), are largely viewed
as lacking language, of being defined by privation, of not having that
which makes us uniquely human. Even as eco-criticism has estab-
lished itself in literary programs, and as "animal studies" has
emerged recently, there is still a sense that the humanities don't really
have much to say about nature and the lives of animals.
One way to put this conflict is that few literary critics would likely
think that it is important to know much about living albatrosses,
much less see one in the wild. And biologists would likely view
Coleridge's literary albatross as a kind of metaphoric burden on the
actual birds. As Carl Safina wrote in National Geographic about alba-
trosses, "Let's not burden albatrosses with our metaphors. Doing so,
we fail to see the real birds."
I understand that our relationships with the world are inescapably
mediated by language and that we and the world are shaped by our
representations. Indeed, Slavoj Zizek in Interrogating the Real calls the
inescapability of language "a philosophical commonplace." He
writes: "At least from Hegel onward, our immersion into the immedi-
acy of the real is forever lost, we are forced to assume an irreducible
loss, the word entails the (symbolic) murder of the thing, etc." (141).
Yet it is this theoretically vexed, but emotionally charged space
between the text and the world that I invite my students to enter on
our excursions to such places as Antarctica- the space between the
literary and living creature. What I've found- what I've learned from
my students- is that literature has remarkable powers to open the
world to us, and as a result, to open up ourselves. We encounter crea-
tures that are not only or merely literary conceits. In this space, which
Donna Haraway in When Species Meet calls a "contact zone" (216), we

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 666 isle

find ourselves
Contact zones
takes place (219
In these cours
our education.
trosses provid
affecting book
writes that h
Literariness o
poetry examin
life feeds mate
conferring fo
here, in a com
like Antarctica
our interaction
turn open us t
with new eyes
When Jillian r
ship reminded
actually enable
had become me
experiences all
it. She and th
power of a stor
a nature we als
we read, and n
to us in the stories that we live.
* * *

Among other things, the c

what it means to read literature embedded in the natural world and
under the gaze of an animal. The poem renders the animal visible to
my students, literally. Before the poem, they actually have trouble
seeing albatrosses as anything other than "seagulls." Also, reading
"The Ancient Mariner" with albatrosses circling the ship foregrounds
questions about the animal in the poem, and helps the animal as
theme take a meaningful and pressing place in our understanding of
the poem. The result is a complex interaction between material and
the semiotic worlds. What becomes clear is that the circumstances of
living, flesh-and-blood albatrosses are eerily and even prophetically
figured in the poem.
I use the 1817 edition of "The Ancient Mariner," since it is more
accessible than the first version, and I'm teaching a course that may

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 Nature Is a Story That We Live 667

include few English majors. It is a general education course attracting

majors from across the disciplines, including chemistry and engineer-
ing, social work and education, and religion and philosophy. We read
the poem on our southward journey to Antarctica, in the same waters
that the Ancient Mariner describes in the poem.
Our reading of the poem is also situated in an increasing body of
ecological and animal-studies criticism of the poem. The poem is
clearly "about" a man in nature, a man and animals. In In Patagonia
(which we read before we travel), Bruce Chatwin succinctly describes
"The Ancient Mariner" as "625 controversial lines" of a "story of
crime, wandering, and expiation." And the Ancient Mariner? He is
Coleridge: "For the mariner was himself" (90).
While the animal element of the poem was recognized almost
from the poem's publication, the environmental dimensions have
been getting renewed attention from critics. Jonathan Bate perhaps
originates this emphasis with Romantic Ecology. In "Coleridge and the
Economy of Nature," James C. McKusick calls the poem "a parable
of ecological transgression," and says the Ancient Mariner begins as
a "Cartesian dualist, a detached observer cut off from any feeling of
empathy or participation in the vast world of life that surrounds
him." But this is a transformational tale, as he is "released from his
state of alienation from nature" (385). Kurt Fosso examines the role of
the animal-human boundary in Coleridge:

Coleridge's Ancyent Marinere is in this sense an allegory

not just of human benevolence toward animals- an
RSPCA forerunner of sorts- but of the binding invisible
connections between human and animal realms. It tells
how such connections can form communities of human
beings bonded by their shared observance of past trans-
gression and present or future atonement. (Par.20)

Though he does not address "The Ancient Mariner" directly, David

Perkins's study, Romanticism and Animal Rights , describes "Coleridge's
pity for animals" (112) in the broader context of contemporary
writing on the question of the animal.
In the poem, as we read it at sea, heading like the Mariner to 'The
cold Country towards the South Pole," the tracks or traces of the
animal are our main focus, particularly in relation to the violence
against the creature and the transformation of the mariner. The
descriptions of (he ice, so dreamy in the poem, also strike a chord
with us, as does the sense of being "the first to burst" upon the
Antarctic world. (Even though we know many have preceded us,
there is still a powerful feeling of exploration in the journey.) Killing

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 668 isle

the albatross
animals is com
been institutio
subjects anim
animals are vir
and extinction
relationship to
moving narrati
Telling his sto
driven by a fie
Tierra del Fue
Antarctica itse
source for this
Round the Worl
the "second cap
dangerous wat
Sea." The viole
fit (41).
Out of the icy fog, an albatross approaches the ship as if it were a
"Christian soul," a strangely humanized bird that "came to the
Mariner's hollo!" (74). The bird follows the ship, roosts in the rigging,
and even eats the sailors' food. If the Ancient Mariner is a Cartesian,
the albatross seems to emerge out of a pre-Cartesian spiritual world.
The bird is a "good omen," but it's also more than that. It is a spiri-
tual presence: "We hailed it in God's name" (66) and it "perched for
vespers nine" in the mast and shrouds (76).
The Ancient Mariner inexplicably shoots the albatross, and all
sailors are plunged into horrible suffering under the sign of the dead
albatross hanging from the Ancient Mariner's neck. He is released
from his penance, finally, when he looks upon glowing "water-
snakes" circling his ship, "a thousand thousand slimy things" (242),
he says. In a surge of love, he blesses them:

O happy living things! no tongue

They beauty can declare:
A spring of love gusht from my heart,
And I blest them unaware! (286-89)

It's significant that his release is felt not for charismatic creatures, but
for despised animals. In this new creaturely love, the albatross slips
from his neck and falls "like lead into the sea" (295). The poem's
explicit moral stresses what Perkins calls "a metaphysical intuition or
religious sentiment of the unity of all life" (109):

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 Nature Is a Story That We Live 669

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all. (618-21)

It may be that this overt advocacy of animal strikes many readers

badly, and even might deflect them from the animal theme in the
poem. Anne Williams, for example, writes, "Thus the Mariner's cog-
nitive conclusion . . . concludes nothing" (239). Raimondo Modiano
is an example of focusing on the albatross and its killing as symbol:
"The prominence of the theme of hunting in 'The Ancient Mariner'
and other romantic poems has a historical referent in the violence of
the French Revolution" (207). These readings suggest the complex
ities of the poem, particularly the complex relations between ethics
and aesthetics at play. Yet a reading of the albatross as symbol ought
not entirely deflect us from the albatross's embodiment of the animal
theme in the poem. The bird can symbolize itself, both a literary
conceit and a gesture toward itself.
Coleridge had his own troubles with the albatross and the animal
thematics in his own poem. Decades after writing the poem
Coleridge said in Table Talk 273 that "the poem's chief fault, if I migh
say so, was the obtrusion of a moral sentiment so openly on a reader
as a principle cause of a work of pure imagination" (qtd. in Lowes
302). The appeal to the imagination as the proper domain of literature
is powerful, and hints at a recantation of the defense of the animal in
the poem. Despite the appeal of a literature whose appeal is confined
to the imagination- a kind of withdrawal into the imagination from
the world- the poem itself suggests a more complex role for th
imagination in relation to nature, of the word and the world. The
poem's treatment of the albatross, and of the natural world of
Antarctica more generally, implicates us in the world, and imagina-
tion helps us feel the suffering of creation- a suffering which, in
large measure, we ourselves have inflicted.
Jacques Derrida asserts, in "The Animal That Therefore I Am,"
that poets write better about animals than do philosophers and liter-
ary critics. Poets are able to write about animals without the "dis-
avowal" of the animal as animal. They can return the gaze of the
animal. He claims that an animal-friendly discourse of animals is
found, "first and foremost," among "poets and prophets," and that
what they share is the ability through imagination to " take the point of
view of animals" (emphasis his; 13). Unlike philosophical discourses,
which he argues have "denied as much as misunderstood" th

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670 ISLE

animal, poets do
leaves in their wr
The difference,
that acknowledg
sees and does no
Did Coleridge ha
an animal? Cer
Antarctica. And
"The Ancient M
Nevertheless, so
and their suffer
to the poem, "To
tion the sinceri
animals. If the e
uted all the mo
moment and tha
Derrida's genera
cal. Perhaps they
philosophy. Th
Coleridge the po
truer to his feel
critic.

In an essay on H
amazing ability
to Hamlet's role-
is not an accide
of fiction and
about life, that
Ancient Marine
binoculars. Thro
the first time.
After we read t
watch albatross
meaning. Colerid
birds. No one els
the poem prefigu
* * *

"Okay, I really didn't get

rear deck of our ship. A re
that slid low on her face, a
really sure why I'd be excite

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 Nature Is a Story That We Live 671

More and more albatrosses shadowed us off the stern as the after-
noon stretched into early evening. The sky broke up and streaks of
sun glanced off the dark water. Still high, the waves had quit break-
ing in whitecaps, instead lifting us on long rollers. By now, we had
five species of albatrosses trailing the ship: wandering, northern
royal, gray-headed among the large species; and the smaller black-
browed and light-mantled sooty albatrosses. The last two are the
prime candidates in the speculation about the kind of albatross the
Ancient Mariner shot.

We have been watching the albatrosses for hours, endlessly fasci-

nated, and the birds achieve a kind of agency that even rewrites the
poem in our minds.
Heather asks the question that is echoed over and over again, as
we watch these birds in awe: "Why would anyone want to kill an
albatross?"
In a visit to Puerto Deseado (Port Desire), Bruce Chatwin has a
similar moment. He says he spent the night talking with an ornithol-
ogist studying the migration of penguins. He wonders about our
own incessant wanderings, so similar to those of albatrosses and pen-
guins. He concludes: "Albatrosses and penguins are the last birds I'd
want to murder" (87).
It's an implicit comment on the Ancient Mariner's crime. Some
critics apparently have disliked the poem, feeling that the consequen-
ces for killing the bird far exceed the actual crime. In other words, an
albatross is too insignificant to cause such human suffering.
When you see one, however, it is perhaps easier to understand
why albatrosses figure so greatly in the lore of the sea- why Darwin
remarked on them in a fierce storm off Tierra del Fuego, why
Shackleton speaks of an albatross that accompanied him in his stag-
gering open-boat journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia
Island, why Robert Murphy Cushman felt he belonged to a "higher
cult of mortals" for seeing one (148). Or why sailors often think of
albatrosses as bearing the souls of people drowned at sea- just as the
Ancient Mariner and his shipmates thought of their albatross as if "it
had been a Christian soul."
When my students ask who would kill such a creature, my
response is that now, apparently, we all would. Humanity wears the
albatross around its collective neck. It may be accidental, but it is
almost spooky that the poem anticipates the widespread killing of
albatrosses in the Southern Ocean, like ecological prophecy.
Industrial fishing has turned its voracious capacity to the Southern
Ocean, and the result is that albatrosses are considered the world's
most threatened family of birds in the world.

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672 isle

The albatross
on the winds
currently reco
south, and 18
BirdLife Inte
"Save the Alba
Every year,
large-scale fish
euphemism th
by-catch is est
The Falkland
albatrosses- v
black-browed
4% per year.
baited with ho
to ships, they
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We are all lin
global supply a
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Patagonian too
target fish th
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and some fairl
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from an explici
ing albatrosses
My students r
across norther
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share the worl
can't forget hi
Matt Schmitz,
later that wa
event." The al
eyes that I can
Many biologi
trosses. Conside
ing to Safina,
single foragin
not return to
Southern Ocean

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 Nature Is a Story That We Live 673

fly over 90% of the time. Long-lived birds, a wandering albatross of

50 years old may have flown on its incomparable wings a total of 3.
million miles (Eye 122-23).
Biologist David Campbell calls albatrosses the world's true
"global citizens" (110). They are ocean nomads, the winds incarnate.
They can lock their wings in place and glide on the winds. They are
almost as relaxed when flying, as measured by heart rate, as they are
at rest. Watching an albatross in flight is an exercise in wonder. "It's
almost painfully beautiful," Jess Caulkins, a nursing student, said.
"It's visual ecstasy- this is the kind of moment I came for."
As we watched them from the ship, I found myself wondering
what the albatrosses themselves experience in their superb gyres of
flight. Biologists are brilliant in describing the skills of albatrosses.
They make it clear that animals need to be understood on their
terms, not in terms of lack. But none that I have found has asked
what kind of subjectivity and agency an albatross might have.
In appreciating the "agency" of an albatross, I turn to writers like
Donna Haraway. At times theoretically dense, at times movingly per-
sonal, she writes in When Species Meet of the ability to transcend our
tropes and conceits of animals, of creatures' ability to shape us as
surely as we construct them. She calls this the "co-shaping" power of
our inescapable interdependency with animals. About this coagency,
Haraway writes:

We are in the midst of webbed existences, multiple

beings in relationship, this animal, this sick child, this
village, these herds, these labs, these neighborhoods in
a city, these industries and economies, these ecologies
and cultures without end. This is a ramifying tapestry
of shared being/becoming among critters (including
humans) in which living well, flourishing, and being
"polite" (political/ethical, in right relation) means
staying inside shared semiotic materiality. (72)

On the rear deck of the ship, we are re-shaped by the albatrosses as

surely as we shape them by the stories we carry with us into our
encounters. It's a shared "becoming/being," a "shared semiotic mate-
riality." She calls such moments, when we risk meeting the gaze of
another animal, an experience of "other worldling" (21), opening up
the question of what the world looks like for an albatross, and how
we are experienced by this creature.
The albatross reconstitutes poem, is a living commentary on the
poem, so that it is "about" albatrosses and what's happening to
them, in a way that has not been recognized.

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674 isle

I often feel th
or other litera
occasions for
meaning that i
selves reconst
encounters wit
tions. As Haraw
Andy Guinn,
put it this way
moving imag
them." Which b
tuting surge of
No wonder, r
company of t
other self seeme

* * *

Before concluding, one fi

decades, I've written widely
issues. At the same time, I'
writing. I've been unable to
becoming endangered in my
students don't read literature
have found myself wonderin
connection between the enda
licized decline of reading in o
Patricia Zaradic and Oliver
rent paradox: even as we h
health of the planet in the la
away from direct contact wi
tion biologist in the Envir
Mawr; Oliver Pergams is also
of Illinois at Chicago. Their
capita "nature recreation"- c
visitation- over the last 30 y
was about 1991, and we're lo
ticipation in nature. The res
phenomenon known as "natur
increasing and is not unique
that Americans have turned
television, video games, onl
("Electronic" 387; qtd. in Gam

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 Nature Is a Story That We Live 675

It's also widely known that the National Endowment for the Arts
has conducted a series of surveys over several decades that suggests
that literary reading in America is declining and that the rate of
decline is accelerating, and the younger the category, the sharper the
declines. Literary reading is defined as poetry, fiction (novels and
short stories), and drama. In Reading at Risk , the NEA claims that less
than half of the adult American population now reads literature,
according to their survey. Such reading is declining at all education
levels, but is greatest in the youngest groups, particularly high school
and college age kids. Since 1982, this group has gone from being
most likely to read literature, to least likely- over a 20% decline.
"Total book reading," they say, is similarly declining. The report con-
cludes that this is an "objective but distressing overview of national
trends" (see "Executive Summary" ix-xiii).
I might be less concerned about these statistics if they did not res-
onate with my own personal experience in college teaching over the
last three-plus decades. It's not just that my students may in general
read less and are likely to complain more about longer reading
assignments. All this is accompanied by a shift in attitudes. Students
not only tell me now more commonly that they don't like to read, but
what's more, they'll say so without a trace of shame or embarrass-
ment. They just don't think reading is important to them. Much of
my job as their teacher is showing them the pleasures and joys and
benefits that reading offers.
I've wondered why my two most passionate professional commit-
ments-nature and literature- both seem to be endangered. I suspect
that there is a connection. A love of nature and a love of books may
in fact be more closely connected than generally thought. In an inter-
view in Smithsonian magazine, Zaradic suggests that reading a good
book has not historically been opposed to enjoying nature. Their
recent research has shown a strong correlation in children who are
not exposed to nature and attention deficit disorders and poor aca-
demic performance (Gambino 29).
A poet like Pablo Neruda hints at a connection. My class reads
and discusses Pablo Neruda as we travel in Patagonia. He was born
in Patagonia, Chile, and considered his childhood amid the rainy
south of Chile an abiding influence on his poetry. In a poem called
"Bestiario" ("Beastiary"), he imagines a variety of witty and
tongue-in-cheek conversations with several animals. The poem was
published in Extravagario in 1958 (the title is probably a Nerudean
neologism, made up of estrave , a boat keel; extraviar to get lost; and
vagar , to wander aimlessly). It's a poem in the subjunctive mood. He
imagines talking with "exemplary penguins," "erotic rabbits,"

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 676 isle

"raucous frog
learning, but t

En este mund
quiero más co
otros lenguaje
quiero conoce
In this world
I want more communication,
other languages, other signs,
I want to know this world. (My translation)

It's not just that Neruda locates much of his inspiration as a poet in
nature and animals (he even posed as an ornithologist when he had
to flee Chile in disguise). He also recognizes that the world of nature
and animals presents us with languages and signs. Like literature,
nature requires readers, and perhaps as Derrida suggested, poetry
and the imagination are best able to read nature from the inside.
There might also be another way in which literature and nature
are connected: in their power both to present us with figures of the
other, the unfamiliar, and even the despised. The Russian literary the-
orist Viktor Shlovsky, in Energy of Delusion , invents a word that
describes a story's ability to change our view of the world. Shlovsky
created "vdrugoi" by combining three Russian words that mean
"other" and "suddenly" and "friend." In his theory, literature con-
fronts us with a world we thought we knew, but which suddenly
appears to us to be unfriendly, unfamiliar, "other." In this destabiliz-
ing power of literature, we confront the world's "otherness," and
must come to terms with it. Through unpredictable and sometimes
sudden insights, the world changes again, and the other becomes a
"friend" we know more deeply and richly (339-40).
Shlovsky might have been describing our experiences with alba-
trosses in the Drake Passages. Antarctica renders the familiar world
strange, a radical otherness. The world, so easily taken for granted,
so easily not seen, is rendered strange by a huge and stormy ocean,
and is reconstructed in our imaginations by the intersection of poem
and albatross- an unforgettable mixture of poetry and presence.
* * *

This January-term class

campus, and not just becaus
allure of Antarctica draws
praise about the course is t
creatures speak back and

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 Nature Is a Story That We Live 677

generation of students is looking for powerful, meaningful experien-

ces in their lives, and they find that in this course. I have come to
believe that literature can speak to them, perhaps uniquely, about the
world they live in, their place in that world, and who they are. In the
Lutheran tradition, this is called "vocation/'
Literature and nature are beautifully suited to call students to a
deeper sense of themselves and the kind of responses they will make
to the tangled beauty of the world. We travel in the reverberating
space between ideas and experience, and they speak to each other. It
is a progress in the world through what Donna Haraway calls the
"material-semiotic exchange" (206 and passim). In reflecting on the
course and our journey, my students often say that our discussions
were their favorite or most powerful experiences in the class.
Antarctica epitomizes the opportunities we have as teachers for
exploring the way literature helps us construct worlds and live inside
them. It is the opposite of everywhere, the absolute other of our geo-
graphical imagination. It existed as a fantasy before it was discovered.
Aristotle believed that there had to be a huge southern continent to
balance the north. The Pythagoreans of ancient Greece posited a chi-
merical continent at the bottom of the world. It was the opposite of
the north, the "anti-arctic," the "anti-pole." The Antipodes.
Antarctica still seems unreal. The shimmering fantasies of ice, the
abundant and unafraid creatures, the spectacular beauty of impossi-
bly immense landscapes- it all feels like a fairy tale, like an illusion.
We all feel the force of this adventure. We feel like we've come to the
edge of the world, and that we've had to push ourselves across many
personal boundaries to get here.
Here's how one student, Kate Fontana- a sophomore religion
major when she traveled to Antarctica- described her experience,
writing in her journal after she got home:

Imagine slicing the earth along its meridians, spinning

it so the skin splayed out into a star-shaped map. Most
of the continents would be segmented; but Antarctica,
so often the forgotten white strip at the bottom of the
map, would be whole and centered, the sepal of the
flower, the palm of the hand. This is how I see it now,
because I was there. I watched penguins porpoise like
fireworks, feed their downy chicks, waddle in preten-
tious procession to the ocean. A minke whale stared at
me, claimed me in Paradise Bay. What a blend of
estrangement and belonging- for as much as I did not
belong there, I was embraced like an old friend.

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 678 isle

Together, th
learning pote
With albatro
read Colerid
And we journ
bally our vi
Polo, back fr
to each new
show you how

Kate bears wi
changed lives.
On the rear o
evening. The s
flashed again
Middleton, joi
laughed. "Let's
Albatrosses we
houetted shape
dering albatro
close, its size b
as any of us w
away from us
its wings adju
see. The slanti
live in the shadow of the albatross.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Bart Welling, Kurt Fosso, Tom Campbell,
and Jim Albrecht for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.

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