Excerpt from The Confusion of Figure and Ground

Mary Burger

1

I came into possession of the apartment in the way these things typically happen, which is to say, someone died. I was the person deemed by the court, and, if she’d thought about it, perhaps also by her, to serve as her estate executor. That meant to dispatch her belongings and settle her financial affairs. To make a decision about the several hundred square feet of space that were, at least momentarily, mine. My responsibility, my opportunity—I didn’t know yet which of those would have more significance.

I hadn’t intended to transform the apartment into a condensary of geologic epochs, to trace the minutia and the maxima of generations of time through room-sized replicas and reenactments.

I knew the skyline from that window. The bit of the Williamsburg Bridge just visible to the east. The mass of office towers to the south, the financial district, the World Trade Center, lit up through the night as if the hustle couldn’t possibly be stopped.

It soothed me unaccountably to stand alone in the empty rooms. The bare walls, peeling in places, dingy from years of neglect, with a few lighter spots where pictures had hung. The parquet floor, original to the building, now eighty years old, water stained near the windows, with a few loose pieces that shifted and squeaked under foot. Every sound from inside or out echoed against the hard surfaces.

The end, the beginning.

“My mother” was the technically accurate term, though one that she and I had almost never used; for my part, it came up only in things like medical questionnaires—mother’s health history, check all that apply, alcoholism, mental illness, stroke. There was never a questionnaire for the good things, accomplished translator and book critic, fluent in multiple languages.

I’d visited her erratically over the years, once I was old enough to get to New York on my own, some years several times, some years not at all. For all the disjunction between us, the apartment had been a constant, stable and reassuring. I thought of it as part of my life, though I’d spent no more than six months with her there in total. In the early years, when I’d had little money and poor boundaries, I’d spend the night there. Later I made sure to find other places to sleep, a friend’s couch, a modest hotel.

__________

The unreality of an empty home. It’s always surprising how big a place feels when everything is gone. As if the rooms have a secret life that goes on behind ours that comes out only when we get out of the way. If we could live in that sparseness, could we have the calm completeness of an unoccupied room? I wanted to sink into the walls, to stay with the sense of nothing. Nothing more to be done, nothing changing except the movement of light.

How long would I stay in the empty space before I’d give in to some comforts? A single wooden ladder back chair, Shaker, to sit in front of the living room window and look at the night sky. A sleeping bag and a cushioned pad laid close to the wall. There would be no more curtains on the wide window. I’d wake up with the sun streaming in at dawn.

I couldn’t imagine taking the sleeping bag into the bedroom. There’d be no need to separate activities into different areas. Sleeping, waking, eating, staring out the window—all could be done in the main room. Even empty, the bedroom held the aura of her private space. I left it for her.

Refuge. A locked front door, empty rooms, a retreat from the objects and activities of a life. Prospect. An unimpeded view from the windowsill to the edge of the island, from the playground fourteen stories below to the infinity of the sky.

What if I kept this space?

What more would I need to stay here? A table, simple, matched with the Shaker chair. A few dishes. A towel.

It was a spare campsite, tucked in at the top corner of the building. Through the window, sounds of car horns, sirens, yelling. Sounds of birds, wind, rain.

What did I want with such a portal?

I’d been bracing myself, in a sense all my life, for the moment when she would be fully, utterly gone. Because she’d never really been there, in a sense she’d always been leaving. And, of course, as with everything else she’d done, her leaving would not be complete.

I wanted to freeze a moment in time that didn’t exist yet. That would never exist.

In the whiteout conditions of the Antarctic, researchers hold on to a rope to move from one building to another. Letting go even for a moment could mean being blown off course and dying before anyone found you.

I wanted the fade-to-white at the end of a film. The absence of imagery. The pause meant for absorbing what had come before. But I wanted the end of absorption.

I let go of the rope. Instead of succumbing to Antarctic chill, I floated like gossamer in the quiet air.

__________

A phantasm in the shape of her body followed me. That is, in the shape of a limbless form that was the size and dimensions of a body wrapped as if in a shroud. It wasn’t always there. Or, there were long periods of time when I wasn’t aware of it. It wasn’t a haunting. It was simply that her body was with me whenever other thoughts fell away. Neither reassuring nor disturbing. It wasn’t quite a part of me, more like a part of my personal atmosphere, like the air that moved in and out of me, that I depended on, that was marked by me.

A human form like a gently rounded pillar. Like Rodin’s Monument to Balzac. Or, like the air displaced by that mass of bronze. Featureless but expressive, immaterial but ever-present. Despite its size, it was tender, like a child. Something I wanted to care for. But since I often forgot about it, I had to admit that it also seemed to be caring for me.

__________

The first thing I’d need to do was paint. I chose a flat, chalky white with the faintest hint of blue. Predictable, I guess. But when light came through the uncurtained windows, I wanted it to bounce from surface to surface like a soft voice. I got drop cloths, a ladder. I took down the curtain rods, the window shades, the ceiling fans. I pried picture hooks from the walls, spackled and sanded, scraped the paint flakes off radiator pipes. Applying a single color to empty rooms—it was a form of meditation.

I spread drop cloths in the kitchen over the counters and fridge and stove and taped the cabinet handles. For the cabinets, I chose a pale shell gray, my only deviation from the monochrome white. In the bathroom, I patched the scars left by generations of failed towel bars. The green variegated tile floor and the buff yellow ceramic fixtures gave a warm tone to the flat white paint. This could be the plant room, a steamy botanical garden.

__________

I don’t know when it came to me. To use the apartment to build a model of the terminal moraine, the line of rubble that marked the farthest reach of the glacier that had covered the city twenty thousand years before. The Laurentide ice sheet had spread south from the Arctic until it covered most of Canada and dipped into the U.S. It pushed into the northern Plains states, carved out the Great Lakes, and blanketed New England, New York, and some of New Jersey, all the way out to Montauk at the far end of Long Island.

The glacier reached as far south as The Narrows, the gap between Staten Island and Brooklyn where the Hudson River mixes with the Atlantic. An ice sheet over two thousand feet thick pressed down, scraping and carving and pushing a load of rocks and gravel in front of its snout like a dirt mustache. It blocked The Narrows with a rubble dam, cutting off the connection between the Hudson River and the sea.

__________

My submersion in deep time was a conscious retreat. I wanted to bury my jangling nerves under the blanket of ice, in a time before any human had walked on this island. Did I also know that in the farthest reaches I looked to, I would always find myself?

I became an armchair glaciologist, collecting the discipline’s peculiar vocabulary, drumlins and eskers, flour, and till. I visualized the ice sheet’s movements, so massive and slow they would be undetectable to human perception, like the movement of the earth itself. To find fifty thousand years of the glacier’s stages summarized in a concise monograph or portrayed in the undulating color fields of a geologic map felt like shapeshifting, like the glacier and I were at the same scale. Which is, I suppose, why I felt compelled to enact it. That is, my plan to build a little model of the terminal moraine didn’t seem like an installation so much as a performance.

The precision and particularity of the glacier, its rock-hard actuality, was like a form of nourishment. I hadn’t realized how the gelatinous, ectoplasmic specter, ever-present, always nearby, but never anywhere in particular, left me feeling famished, ravenous for clarity and definition.

__________

I brought bags of sand and gravel and small stones the size of potatoes up the elevator and into the apartment, load by load, in a two-wheeled shopping cart. It was a slow process, but inconspicuous. No one looked twice at another wire cart, part of the daily parade in and out of the building, rattling along with a load of groceries or laundry or cat litter.

Once I had everything gathered, I laid the path, a base layer of sand and gravel with rocks scattered on top. The path went through the living room in a curving berm, about two feet wide and six or eight inches high, starting on the west side in the hall by the bathroom, then sweeping down toward the south-facing window, and back up toward the kitchen and the front door at the east. Inevitably, some of the loose pile of material would get kicked out of place. But that would only mirror the continued disturbance of the actual moraine. The path’s arc mimicked the outline of the ice lobe that had flowed down through the Hudson Valley and out to Staten Island and Raritan Bay like a tongue.

After I laid the arc, I took off the door to the closet across from the bathroom and finished the line of rubble in a sloping pile that reached about three feet high against the closet’s back wall. The closet was a wormhole that could extend my little rubble path farther west. I wanted to reach even beyond the western edge of the Hudson lobe, where it had rerouted New Jersey’s Passaic River and carved out the bed of ancient Lake Passaic, now the grasslands of Passaic Meadows. I wanted my moraine to go all the way across the Great Lakes and the Plains states, as far as Montana and the Continental Divide, where the Laurentide ice sheet had merged with the Cordilleran ice sheet reaching from the west coast of Canada. I wanted my little pile of rocks to be a transmutation of the three thousand miles of glacial rubble that had spread across North America.

__________

A cord tugged my heart deeper into reaches of time that I could only know by analogy. If I knew I was projecting my own life onto a distant scene, I didn’t know where the scene would lead.

__________

I did the same thing with the closet across from the kitchen. This time, the pile of rubble stood in for the twenty-five-hundred-mile stretch of moraine that had led to the eastern edge of the ice sheet in the Labrador Sea.

__________

My study of deep time was a kind of faith, the only kind I could conceive of. It was faith in the history of the earth, of the cosmos. Faith in the patterns of material change, the physical properties and behaviors that revealed something of the essence of the world that surrounded us and cradled and contained us. It was faith in our own insatiable questioning. For all the wreckage we’d caused worldwide in our ascendency during the comparatively short time since the last ice age, there was a beauty in our urge to understand, to discern the processes that had created everything around us. In our urge to gather evidence, and to pass the evidence on.

__________

Can we know things without destroying them? Is our knowledge always a form of colonization?

I pored over descriptions of the ice sheet’s advances and retreats, repeated over tens of thousands of years. At one point sea level had been higher than today, I read; at one point temperatures had been warmer. I collected these bits of data like putting pins on a map, as if they could help me locate myself, as if our now-inevitable slide toward higher seas and hotter skies could be less of a catastrophe if we could see it as part of what had come before. As if we could reconcile ourselves to our eventual extinguishment, one spark in the cycles of deep time. As if I could find something of my own life in this catastrophe. As if being part of the catastrophe helped any of it make sense.

The ice sheet weighed down the earth’s crust until it sank into the soft rock of the mantle. As the sea level dropped, the continent itself sank too. When the ice retreated, the continent rose again, quickly at first and then more slowly. It’s rebounding still. The same thing is happening in Greenland, at a scale we can see before our eyes this time, as our human spark erodes the glaciers there. Our spark, tilting the cycles of time.

There’s still a trace of the Laurentide ice sheet that once covered half of our continent. After the ice had shrunk back toward the Arctic, it stabilized around two thousand years ago as the Barnes Ice Cap, a small glacier the size of Delaware, on Baffin Island in the Arctic Sea. The ice cap might have lasted indefinitely, growing and shrinking in equilibrium with seasonal changes, until rising temperatures in the twentieth century set it on a course of rapid melting. The melting is accelerating. In about three hundred more years, this last trace of the ice sheet that began forming two and a half million years ago, around the time of the first hominids, will be gone.

Too small in itself for its meltwater to raise sea levels or bring on other catastrophes, the Barnes Ice Cap is a harbinger. It predicts the further melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, that would drown coastal regions, raise global temperatures, and bring the cascade of events we can all recite by heart now: severe storms, wildfires, freshwater shortages, agricultural collapse, habitat loss, extinction.

The little ice cap is a trace of the past that isn’t ready to leave yet. It wants to pull us towards it, to wherever it’s gone.

Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, his wild-haired little angel, faces forward with its wings raised, its large eyes looking warily off to the side. When Walter Benjamin bought the drawing from Klee in 1921, he named it the Angel of History, who looks back in time toward the catastrophe of the past while being blown backward into the future by a storm called progress.

A few gallons of water in the apartment’s kitchen sink could be a memorial for the ice cap.

I washed my hands.

A performance of self-absolution that was also self-incrimination.

__________

How we can be this fragile and hold such time scales within ourselves? Our fragility, a force we unleash on the world. The incongruity between our timespan and the world’s is inscribed in every moment.

__________

The city’s islands reveal their deep past in open secrets. I could take the ferry to Staten Island and travel to its southwestern edge to see a segment of the terminal moraine that survives intact. This was the farthest tip of the ice lobe that came through the Hudson Valley; now it’s the southernmost point of New York state. The beach there is a jumble of clay, silt, pebbles, and boulders left by the retreating ice. A nearby manor house built in 1680 is made with rounded stones gathered from the rubble of the moraine.

I could go to Long Island’s north fork and walk on the beach below the Harbor Hill moraine, looking for erratics left behind as the glacier melted away.

Or I could look right into the milky water of the Hudson River. The glacial lake that had filled the Hudson Valley as far north as the Adirondacks had accumulated a bed of clay and silt more than three hundred feet deep. Now the Hudson carves through the ancient lakebed, picking up sediments and carrying them all the way to the sea. The Hudson’s cloudiness is a trace of the glacier, of how it ground rock to powder and dropped it into streams.

__________

These stories of the history of stones exist as a fragile net made of human minds. The stones exceed the human capacity to know them. When humans and our stories are gone, the stones will carry on.

This was my inheritance from her—the urge to know stories so remote that our human lives simply didn’t register there. She’d always been happiest when the front page of the New York Times had news of paleontology or cosmology—events millions or billions of years removed. As though, in erasing the particulars of her life, she’d been searching for a tolerable way to live.

2

I wanted to rebound like the earth from the weight of the ice sheet. Though it was the forecast of the ice sheet’s vanishing, not the ice itself, that pressed me down. I let the glacier’s meltwater pull me inland, up the river valley. I would follow the Hudson River to its source. From its mouth at New York Harbor to its headwaters in the Adirondacks, it was a spinal cord that connected the city to the far peaks.

It seemed like a trick of symmetry, a series of topographical coincidences, that the largest city was at the end of the largest river that had its source on the highest peak.

__________

A little lake, a pond really, caught in a rock basin scoured out by a glacier. A tarn.

Two acres of calm, glassy water, covered by mist in the morning, edged by snags of fallen balsam firs. Just a few hundred feet of open water, three feet deep at the most. The pool succumbs to the bog at the east end, the source end, where the water grows thick with sedges, needle grass, cranberries, bilberries, snowberries, meadowsweet, leatherleaf, all rooted in thick layers of peat. The bog is five times the size of the pond’s open water. It makes a home for alpine plants that normally show up only above the timberline, at least five hundred feet higher. A cool, wet cradle that draws these plants down the mountain and the birds that feed on them. Juncos, kinglets, creepers, nuthatches, warblers, wrens. A lively little opening in the dense fir forest, water from snowmelt, rain, and springs caught in a basin, spilling over into Feldspar Brook, pouring down the mountain, out of the Adirondacks and into the Hudson Lowlands between the Catskills and the Taconic Range.

My ghost angel looked smaller now, floating up the river with me in its gauzy nightgown. Its quiet persistence pressed me onward. I was Scheherazade, spinning tales of one thousand and one nights to save my life. Not from the threat of beheading by a paranoid husband but from a gray cloud of entropy. My ghost angel kept me searching.

__________

Down we plunged, down through the dense thickets of dwarfed balsam whose dead limbs, clawlike spikes, clutched our clothing as though determined to resist all exploration. Our rubber coats were speedily torn to ribbons, our other clothing ripped and torn, and the icy drizzle of the clouds penetrated everything and chilled us despite our labor.

Hark! What sound was that?

Here in the mud are tracks of some huge beast. The guide says, “Panther.” Perhaps that Cat-of-Mountain is now glaring at us from those cavernous rocks; perhaps he lurks in the thicket just before us.

Can it be? Is it possible? This stream tells a strange story, and surely it flows westward to the Hudson!

Suddenly, before us, through the trees gleamed a sheet of water, and we shouted our ‘hurrah.’ It was the lake, and flowed, not to the Ausable and St. Lawrence but to the Hudson, the loftiest lake spring of our haughty river!

__________

The Hudson’s source was confirmed in the 1870s when a state-appointed surveyor and his guide scrambled through the mountain thickets to reach the little pond. The surveyor, a gentleman adventurer from Albany, named the pond Summit Lake. He described it in his report to the legislature, “a minute, unpretending tear of the clouds.” Summit Lake was soon forgotten, but Lake Tear of the Clouds became a beloved totem.

__________

The north wall of the apartment’s living room, directly across from the large window. I started my drawing there. A mural of Lake Tear of the Clouds.

Monochrome, in Payne’s gray. A dark charcoal blue, made from a mix of Prussian blue, ochre, and crimson, that lightens to a transparent slaty shade when it’s diluted. Prussian blue, the first synthetic pigment, made by accident by a Berlin chemist in 1704. The English watercolorist William Payne, searching for a more nuanced version of black, mixed his namesake gray later that century.

I’ve always been partial to gray blues. At the edge of chroma, where the eye’s sense of color gives out, the deep-hued undertone brings a glow that feels almost warm.

I worked in fine strokes and loose washes, textures built from varied brushwork, the knife-edge blades of grass, rough boulders on the shoreline, the scramble of bog plants, jagged walls of firs, all mirrored in the water’s softly ruffled surface. Like a detail from a Song Dynasty landscape, a small corner of a vast mountain scene, enlarged to fill the wall.

The somber shade was another of my submersions into a distant place, a retreat into mutedness. But the pond’s lively atmosphere burst through. As I painted, I started to remember scraps of laughter. Shared jokes. A time we went to the theater. Her favorite Indian restaurant on 6th Street.

__________

If I could have stopped there, I would have. If the image of a winsome mountain lake could end with the evocation of a few fond memories … but I had to ask. I always had to keep asking. Because my own fond memories so often shattered from within, I had to ask, in my roundabout odyssey through geographical history as a paradigmatic map of my emotional life, what came before that? How did we get here?

__________

A European first saw the Adirondack Mountains in the sixteenth century. In 1535, the Frenchman called Jacques Cartier, on his second voyage across the Atlantic, sailed into a gulf and up a river, looking for a passage to China. Cartier named the gulf and the river St. Lawrence because he’d arrived there on that saint’s feast day. He sailed up the river as far as the island at the confluence of the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa. At the settlement called Hochelaga, meaning “beaver path” or possibly “big rapids,” he and his party were greeted warmly by more than a thousand people living there. They were part of the Haudenosaunee nation, “people of the longhouse,” who occupied the region of central and western New York up to the St. Lawrence River. The word describes the Haudenosaunees’ communal dwellings and is the name they gave to their alliance of nations, formed sometime before European contact, that created a confederation of five linguistically related regional groups. The groups pledged to live together peacefully, like families who share the same house.

Europeans later renamed the Haudenosaunee the Iroquois, a term that suggests violence (“snakes” or “killers”) and might have originated with the Abenaki or the Wyandot, who were rivals of the Haudenosaunee.

Language carves and rearranges at the speed of human encounters.

A small group of Hochelagan men and women accompanied Cartier when he climbed to the island’s highest point, a hill of more than seven hundred and fifty feet. Cartier was impressed by the view from the hilltop, and named the hill Mont Royal, to honor the French king. In less than two hundred years, the name came to refer to the mission that French settlers founded on the island, and then, to the city that grew on the same site.

Cartier described the view from Mont Royal. “Towards the north there is a range of mountains, running east and west, and another range to the south.” With those last five words, he entered the Adirondacks into written history.

The Hochelagans welcomed Cartier’s party with dried fish, beans, and cornbread, performed dances, and brought their babies, their elderly, and infirm to be touched by the strange men. In return, Cartier gave hatchets and knives to the Hochelagan men and trinkets and beads to the women and children. In his log, Cartier complained that their food had no salt.

Is there a way?

What if the story starts earlier? Cartier had first made landfall in North America the year before, in 1534. When he reached the southeastern edge of Quebec, the area now called the Gaspé Peninsula, he met a large party of Haudenosaunee who’d come to the coast for their annual fishing expedition. Cartier seized two grown sons of the group’s chief, Donnacona, to take back to France as his captives. In an improvised language, Cartier promised Donnacona that he’d come back with the two men the following year.

He did that. When Cartier returned in 1535, Donnacona’s sons, Domagaya and Taignoagny, helped him navigate up the St. Lawrence River to their people’s settlement at Stadacona, near present-day Quebec City. Donnacona and the Stadaconans were thrilled at the sons’ return. Cartier wanted the men to help him travel farther up the river to the settlement they’d told him about, Hochelaga, a journey of many days. But they refused. Donnacona didn’t want Cartier to go to Hochelaga at all, maybe because he wanted to control access to the French for trade or military aid, or maybe because he’d lost trust. Cartier went up the river anyway. He reached Hochelaga in about fourteen days.

Hochelaga was surrounded by a high stockade, typical of settlements in the region. Despite the Haudenosaunee alliance, many settlements were braced for conflict.

When Cartier returned to Stadacona, he maneuvered to seize Donnacona and his sons and a number of other Stadaconans, and took a total of ten men, women, and adolescents back to France. Cartier planned to return the captives to Stadacona in another year. But his next journey was delayed, and all the captive Stadaconans died in France.

What did the name Stadacona mean to the people who lived there?

Cartier used the Stadaconans’ word kanata (“village” or “settlement”) to describe all of the territory around the St. Lawrence River that was under Donnacona’s rule. Later, the word came to be used for much of the North American landmass above the 49th parallel, an area of more than three and a half million square miles.

Is there a way to tell this story?

__________

In the early 1600s, the one called Samuel de Champlain made a series of voyages to kanata, renamed New France, to establish a French fur trading colony and continue the search for a route to China. Champlain allied with people from the Algonquian nation, rivals of the Haudenosaunee, and enlisted their help as guides. He sailed up the St. Lawrence to the site of Stadacona, now abandoned, and declared it the best place for the trading post. The Algonquians told him the site was called kebec, “the place where the river narrows.” Champlain built a warehouse and a few small dwellings there.

In exchange, Champlain agreed to join in a raid on the Algonquians’ enemies, the Haudenosaunee. In 1609, he traveled by canoe with two of his men and sixty Algonquians up the Rivière des Iroquois (the Richelieu) and into Haudenosaunee territory. They reached a lake the Algonquians called Bitawbagok, “waters that lie between,” named for the mountain ranges that lined the lake on either side. Or it may have meant the waters that divide the lands of the rival peoples. To the Haudenosaunee, the lake was Kaniá:tare tsi kahnhokà:ronte, “door to the country,” a gateway to their lands that lay to the west. Champlain decided to call it Lake Champlain.

On July 30, the Haudenosaunee clashed with the Algonquians and the French at the place the Haudenosaunee called tekontató:ken, “the meeting place of two waters,” Ticonderoga, where today’s Lake George empties into Lake Champlain. As two hundred Haudenosaunee approached, Champlain aimed his short-barreled arquebus and killed two of the Haudenosaunee chiefs with a single shot. When another of the Frenchmen killed the third chief, the Haudenosaunee fled.

Champlain and his two French soldiers were the first Europeans to set foot in the Adirondacks.

Champlain wasn’t the first European to use a firearm against indigenous North Americans. Though he may be the first who shot and killed.

Is there a way to tell this story where it comes out differently?

__________

You see, in time you’ll know how to do it.

The reason I don’t do it for you is so you’ll learn how.

I discovered the book when I was looking for works in Algonquian languages translated into English. The Autobiography of a Meskwaki Woman by an unnamed author was written in the early twentieth century. The writer describes her relationship with her mother, details of the skills her mother taught her, and her mother’s purposeful efforts to ensure the daughter’s survival after the mother was gone.

Nobody goes on taking care of us forever.

The time comes when we lose sight of the one that’s taking care of us.

Their relationship, though not without pain, was marked by candor and intimacy. I studied the writer’s descriptions like evidence.

I copied the lines onto heavy watercolor paper using a fountain pen that had always been her favorite. My mother’s, I mean. I pinned the strips of paper on the wall.

Notes

Down we plunged… Verplanck Colvin, “Gray Peak,” in Peaks and People of the Adirondacks, Russell M.L. Carson (Doubleday, Doran, & Company, Inc., 1928), 137-144.

You see, in time you’ll know… Ives Goddard (editor and translator), The Autobiography of a Meskwaki Woman: A New Edition and Translation (Algonquian and Iroquoian Languages, 2006), 11, 20.