A Most Horrible Place

In his 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World, Werner Herzog visits the humans who work in the remote ice of Antarctica. Scientists, engineers, explores, exiles from one place or another — the menagerie of types most likely to venture to the most desolate place on the planet. It’s a sublime film, stocked with profound moments that illustrate how life deals with Earth’s most oppressive environments. But there’s a certain piece of the film that’s stuck with me in the years since I saw it.

Herzog speaks with a cell biologist named Samuel Bowser, who in Antarctica has fulfilled a dream of seeing the biome of the water underneath the ice firsthand. He expects these latest scuba journeys under the ice to be last of their kind in his career before he hands things off the next generation of scientists.

As Bowser describes life down there in the dark, he is at first a bit giddy — like any geek discussing what geeks him — but as he speaks his eyes soon look past Herzog, first into the distance and then down at the hole in the floor that opens up to the dark water below.

“The creatures that are down there are like science fiction creatures,” he says. “They range in the way they would gobble you up from slime-type blobs, but creepier than classic science fiction blobs. These would have long tendrils that would ensnare you, and as you tried to get away from them, you just become more ensnared by your own actions. And then after you would be frustrated and exhausted, this creature would start to move in and take you apart. And then there are other types of worm things with horrible mandibles and jaws and just bits to rend your flesh. It really is a horribly violent world, that is obscured to us because we’re encased in neoprene, and we’re much larger than that world. If you were to miniaturize into that world, it would be a horrible place to be. Just horrible. “

Herzog asks him, “Do you think that the human race and other mammals fled in panic from the oceans and crawled on solid land to get out of this?”

“Yeah I think undoubtedly thats exactly the driving force that caused us to leave the horror behind,” says Bowser. “To grow and evolve into larger creatures to escape what’s horribly violent at the miniaturized scale.”

I’m reminded of a conversation I once had with a coworker — a student assistant, one of those bright undergraduates prone to saying silly things in order to use the words they recently learned — who lamented how humans were such a fallen species, so brutal and out of sync with nature. “What is the purpose of civilization?” she asked, her smirk insisting that the question answered itself. Leaving aside the present day state of nature — still a nonstop churn of violent death and consumption — her mistake was primarily one of scope. It’s a common mistake in a modernity that separates us from richly felt ancestral history from only a few decades ago, much less centuries and eons. Even as we construct elaborate visions about where we’re going, we have no idea where we’ve been, and the latter dooms the former to delusion.

The world remains a violent place. But what Bowser describes down in the Arctic ocean differs from the world above primarily in terms of the pace of violence. The constancy of it. What we call “civilization” could be all the acquired knowledge, defenses, concentrated violence, and sublimated natural savagery that provides with a little separation from and slowdown of the constant churn. Take away all the art and beauty and other luxuries of civilization, and you still have that breathing time. Many humans these days can go their entire lives without witnessing an event of real savage violence. It is that breathing time — the temporary separation from death — that allows us to create art and new knowledge that engages with the maelstrom. That coworker, as it so happens, was an art student.

It’s all a process, I suppose. Fits and starts, cycles away from and then back toward the water, maybe gaining a little more distance in each cycle. Still trying to drag ourselves out the ocean, while it keeps calling us back.