Antarctica and the McMurdo research station

[RonPrice]

ENCOUNTER

 

This evening I watched Encounters at the End of the World(1), a program about Antarctica and the McMurdo research station, the largest research station in Antarctica. Here 1000 men and women live together in close quarters risking their lives and their sanity in search of cutting-edge science. In this TV program viewers listen to Werner Herzog the first outsider and filmmaker to be admitted. He is accompanied only by his cameraman. This rare access to the raw beauty and raw humanity of the ultimate 'down under' was fascinating and led me to write this prose-poem.-Ron Price with thanks to (1)Encounters at the End of the World, SBS TV, 10 November, 10:00-11:55 p.m.

 

What caught my intellectual fancy in this

aesthetic and stimulating visual display

of a frozen continent and its icy waters were

the words of: (a) a cell biologist describing

the frightening world of small creatures----

not frightening to man but to those creatures

under the ice—and his hypothesis that the 1st

creatures to live on the land were driven there

by fear of their life; and (b) a linguist who told

of our losing several languages a day while we

worried about extinction of birds and insects.

 

Fossil evidence of animal-anthropoid tracks

in dunes from around 530 MYA---like our

scorpions---water-based creatures only came

to the land to escape predators or possibly to

mate......These creepy crawling critters came

to the land while evolutionary advancements

were occurring beneath the waves.....the first

vertebrates--the fish---and I mused to myself

on one of the thrusts of evolution: FEAR-----

and in our time this fear will drive humanity

to a global federation for its very survival....

...part of what Teilhard de Chardin called our

planetization and what we call globalization &

which is unifying humanity faster than it knows

amidst a tempest of chaos and confusion...........

unpredictable and catastrophic in its effects.......

 

Ron Price

11 November 2009

(In commemoration of the war to end all wars

which ended 91 years ago today)