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“IRRETRIEVABLE BEAUTY”
FIELD NOTES for
“Irretrievable Beauty”
"In 1905, along the Narrows of St. John's, the people saw something so mysterious you might say that it almost wasn't there..."
Below are fragments of a letter from the early 22nd Century, written by William Storrow to his daughter.
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Ours is both a delicate and durable world, love.
You may’ve forgotten, but once great swaths of ice stretched from both poles. Now the last icebergs are spread so thin in the warm and widening seas, they’re as rare as ghost orchids.
In 1905 along the Narrows of St. John’s, the people saw something so mysterious you might say that it almost wasn’t there (but of course some things ARE there, even if only in our imagination).
Best to call it what it was, on the left side of the photo: the Virgin Mary rising crystalline from an iceberg.
Kodak had recently pioneered what’d been up-till-then untried: the manufacture of a mass-market camera. A string of photos purporting to capture the supernatural came to light in the following years, of which the “The Crystal Lady” — as it’s called — was the very first.
Do you “believe” the photo?
If there's choice then there's choosing; so go with your gut. What’s captured in black and gray and white: Hoax? Miracle?
Either way we’re never going to know for sure. All witnesses, to say nothing of the iceberg itself, are lost to time’s ceaseless cause in which all things, all effort, all love’s a kind of losing.
Irretrievable beauty is the real subject of the photo. “A lost sense of the sacred,” as one writer remembered it.
Some things — in order to thrive — require their opposite.
How I was is the crux of how I am, and yet the person I was when you knew me must seem like an apparition now.
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At first, T.B. Hayward didn’t know how to capture what he saw there floating beside the fjord. Snap a photograph, obviously. But he also used his skills as a landscape artist, later putting paint upon the film, to accentuate the iceberg’s contours.
Sometimes you lie to be honest. The young mother of our lord, sole and silent passenger on the berg, calved free from a distant glacier.
Across that distance now, no bergs like the one in this photo. No glaciers.
We were heartbroken when the last large sheet, the size of Delaware, divided. You were just a kid, but we imagined some invisible statue was standing over both halves of the melting sheet like an unsteady colossus.
“There she is,” you said. “Daddy, you watch her and I’ll watch you watching her waving goodbye to us.”
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A photograph is just a matter of what light you will and won’t allow through the lens.
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In 1905, Thousands came to Signal Hill to see the iceberg. I’d say seeing was proof enough, but if not, they’d let you take chunks of ice home — like a melting relic — to remind yourself that you’d been some small part of it all.
If only a dozen or so icebergs remain in the North Atlantic today, like the last few pills in the bottle marked FEEL BETTER NOW, how long do we have until the whole of Florida is completely under water?
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In a way, Irretrievable beauty is the subject of any photo. “Remember, remember, this is how it was.”
Whenever you’ve seen a photo, whether you knew it or not, you’re remembering — in a way — a past that never happened. First you see the picture and it convinces you: “this is how it used to be.”
So it might come as a surprise later to realize there’s nothing honest about a photograph. You help it lie by constructing in your mind something new from what light was captured. A memory is not so different. Think of young Yeats and all he invented from a sudden memory of the Inisfree he’d once seen across the summer water as a boy.
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It was quicker than we’d estimated.
58% by 2060.
79% by 2080.
Early models hadn’t accounted for that rate of acceleration.
The past kept eating the present.
Doctor Tamir says humans have grown fat on hope.
He prescribes action.
Still, even now.
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In the summer of 1905, some Newfoundland fishermen, tired of the thankless work of fishing, would let you charter their boats for cheap and take you out to ride alongside the iceberg.
By then the sun had been shaking some chunks loose from her shoulders, and little rivers of melted water “spouted from the wound-like punctures in her body.”
I’m sure the fishermen were also happy to provide the buckets and bottles that could help you preserve the cold, holy water.
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It’s up to each person to determine which is the better way to memorialize a moment of true feeling: bottled magic? Doctored photograph? A poem?
(The Archbishop Michael Francis Howley wrote a sonnet about the iceberg called “Our Lady of the Fjords,” seeing how useful the symbol was for reinvigorating interest in the church.)
Is calling something a hoax easier than believing, or the other way around?
In online reproductions of the picture, the paint and film are forever fused — in fact, they’re changed to some third thing: pixels.
And thanks to a few early 21st-Century blog comments that took their authors just seconds to write, it’s difficult for me to wrap my head around whether or not the whole story, the photo, the firsthand accounts, the archbishop’s sonnet, are all part of some hoax within a hoax, done perhaps just for the laughs.
And the secret of any hoax that has little bearing on our actual lives is that it thrills us precisely because it doesn’t matter enough to research, so it will never really be disproven.
An atheist might say that’s nearly identical to faith. But I wouldn’t say that.
The photo is doctored because the moment can’t be restored.
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In 1905, torrential rain, summer heat, plus that flotilla of pilgrims had all taken their toll on the Crystal Virgin as she floated south and out to sea.
By 2049, both the ice in the Arctic and Antarctic had been reduced by more than half.
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Irretrievable beauty. Perhaps that’s the subject of living. But I’ll be damned if we acquiesce to that loss.
Remember America. Remember rainforests. Remember icebergs.
Something can always be done to — perhaps not reconstruct the past — but show what we think it was.
When I was real young, I knew nothing about saving what they then called “The Environment.” Who does at first?
The picture shows us what we’re losing, whether it was real or faked, miracle of faith or forgery. Again, the two were fused. Today that distinction doesn’t matter. We must be better than mere skeptics or zealots to save ourselves a place on this planet.
In 1905 some of the locals honestly thought that drinking water melted from the berg would keep them young and forever sickness-free. Some honestly thought that. Forever young!
And to achieve that they would have had to step into the frame, where time freezes.
Love, show us if the future can be different from what it used to be.
Always,
William
(Your Dad)
Lyrics
Our love got stretched so thin and wide
that it almost wasn't there,
but some things are best left untried.
If there's choice then there's choosing;
and either way we're lost
'cause all love's a kind of losing...
Irretrievable beauty,
remember me
how I was when you knew me at first —
how I used to be
so honest, young, and free.
Across that heartbroken divide,
you stand over there
and I'll watch you waving goodbye
to what you won't allow.
I'd let you take it all
if only to feel better now.
Irretrievable beauty,
remember me
how I was when you knew me at first —
how I used to be
so honest, young, and free.
So thank you for shaking me loose,
and I'm happy I could help you.
It's better to feel useful than used.
And thanks too for the laughs
and the secret little thrills
that nearly tore us both in half.
Irretrievable beauty,
remember me
how I was when you knew me at first —
how I used to be
so honest, young, and free.
So honest, young, and free.
How I used to be.
Credits
Arthur Parker - Keyboards
Daniel Adlaf - Synth Bass
John Stewart - Drums and Percussion
Chris Robley - Vocals and guitars
Jeff Stuart Saltzman - Engineering at Secret Society and mixing at Mysterious Beard (both in Portland, OR).
Adam Gonsalves - Mastering at Telegraph (in Portland, OR).