Nothing, Sacred.
Functioning in contradiction once made you a first-rate mind. Now it's a day job.
Several years ago I was reporting on MTV’s efforts to bring rap videos to all of Africa. Gangsta was among the favored genres, enthused a British marketing guy I met in Johannesburg.
“Many people in our customer base are former child soldiers,“ he said. “They can relate to this music.”
Well, yes. And at the same time, Wow, no. With a little bit of “ugh,” followed by “sure, whatever.” If you linger close, maybe it’s tragic. From a bitter distance, it’s hysterical. Moments like that don’t easily settle down in your mind.
Operational capability in the modern world is only possible if one accepts its contradictions, paradoxes, and structural ironies. Too many things come at us too fast, in a hyper capitalist world where every possible angle is worked. Most of the time when we encounter a discontinuity we nod and move on, through an abundance that so often does not cohere. Maybe it never did, but digital modernity, with its constant explosion of available experiences and influences has made this dissonance manifest.
At the same time, some conflicts and incompatibilities should be stashed for future rumination, like my marketing guy’s line, long ago and far away in Joburg. Incoherence does not have to be resolved to be instructive. I suspect that years from now I will still be thinking about the early days of 2025, when the digital vizier of history’s most powerful nation, entrusted with remaking services delivered to millions, touted his ketamine use and publicly cheated at video games.
We should not be expected to unify these things, but we should still recall the complexity they gave reality, suggesting the rich coherence that was, and is, always just out of reach.
Which brings me to a memory of Teller, Alaska, a town of 250 people on the north side of Alaska’s Seward Peninsula. Teller’s fame rests on two things: It was the landing spot for the first zeppelin flight across the North Pole, 99 years ago, and it was near Teller that in 1892 the beginnings of what became the great American reindeer herd was introduced. Other than that, it's pretty quiet.
I was there for the reindeer story. These beasts came to thrive on the peninsula thanks to a classic American convergence of religion, business, bureaucracy, and meat lust. Years later the animals all but died out from a similar convergence.
In the late 19th century, missionaries wishing to transform the Inuit peoples from nomadic hunters to sedentary (and eventually, they hoped, Christian) farmers, brought over from Eurasia a great many reindeer. Reindeer are the domesticated cousins of caribou, which thrive in the North American Arctic. It was much easier to raise reindeer than it was to hunt caribou, particularly for the white ranchers who soon dominated the business, and within a couple of decades there were over 500,000 of the beasts wandering the great north. There are many exciting stories about them, all unessential to this memory.
When the Great Depression hit, cattle farmers nationwide got tired of the competition from this healthy, reasonably-priced alternative to beef. In a stroke of anti-competitive genius, they pressured the Interior Department to declare that, in the Alaska territory only, only native people might ranch the imported reindeer. Anywhere else it was okay for white people to ranch them, though reindeer ranching never caught on at scale in the contiguous states.
With the white reindeer ranchers gone from Alaska and the Inuit generally happy to continue their nomadic hunting of caribou, the wolves moved in with breathtaking ferocity. By the next census, the reindeer population was at four figures.
I was there in the mid-nineties, writing about a white entrepreneur in Anchorage who was trying to keep a small herd of reindeer for his Santa show. He was also probably trying to irritate the authorities by challenging what was clearly a weird law. But by this time the native peoples up north, or at least the dozen or so wealthy Alaskan natives who were making money on reindeer, had become fierce defenders of their right to ranch the beasts. In the preceding couple of decades, South Koreans had decided that reindeer antlers restored male virility. Ka-ching! So much so that the native Alaskans on Seward were able to afford reindeer-managing helicopters, heritage-defending lawyers, and lobbyists who argued in favor of giving the natives something of their own, since they’d been screwed in so many other ways. Hard to argue with that last point, even if this was really about a lot of money for a few people.
All in all, it was a good story, not least for the conflicts: Santa versus pseudo-Viagra, native rights for a non-native species, the special treatment of this foreign animal in just one of 50 states. I flew up to Anchorage to talk with the would-be Santa herder, then flew to Nome to try and talk with the Inuit virility barons. (As I’ve written elsewhere, reporting budgets used to be amazing.) I also knew about Teller, and managed to get an introduction to someone who lived up there, a onetime trainer of dogs for the big Iditarod sled race, who was then practicing authentic traditional ways, including the Inuit religion.
On the drive up to Teller time and space took on a different cast. An AM station had a community bulletin board, with a dozen hyper-personal messages like, “Tell Charles that George is camping near Mary’s Igloo (an abandoned town) and will be home in three or four days.” Driving alone in the great expanse, these lonely messages broadcast for anyone listening seemed to pass into the ether like apparitions. The sea stretched forever, flat and gray, with potential for both menace and plenty. The sky was an infinite, unchanging canopy that folded into the ocean’s horizon with only a slight shift of grey tone. I took a stroll past the edge of Teller, where the tundra gave way to a pebbly shore. A fox walked up to me in unguarded curiosity, as if I was the first reporter he’d ever seen.
The man I met was friendly and voluble. As a religiously enlightened person, he thought everything about this worldly argument over reindeer, sex, and money was crazy. But he welcomed me into his house, a simple place on the edge of this desolate and compelling landscape of elemental purity.
My host had built a sweat lodge next to his house, and after a while he invited me and a couple of neighbors in for some spiritual cleansing. As we sat naked in the heat, he explained his take on ancient Inuit ideas of the afterlife:
“You will be by yourself, and there is nothing,” he said.
“So, like, there is no afterlife?”
“No,” he said. “There is nothing, and you are aware of this.” Apparently the afterlife is also gray and unchanging, and lasts forever. There’s also probably a great awareness of the passage of infinite time, so you don't miss a second of this eternal nothing. We didn’t get too deep into the particulars, but it seemed that you retain some memory of life, so that the everlasting nothingness has the opposition necessary for its meaning.
I have learned about and esteemed many eschatologies in many places, but this one was unique. Not least in how devoutly I hoped it was wrong. But I sat respectfully with the idea, since it was powerful, and my host had internalized this conception after a long and difficult personal struggle. His vision was not something to be taken lightly, and it felt like an appropriate response to his timeless environment, his personal experience.
When our sweat and my education were complete, we returned to the house. We ate roasted reindeer, which is delicious, and boiled seal, which tested my capabilities as a guest. Thus fed and rested, we then gathered at the television and watched “The Breakfast Club,” picked up from a station in Chicago with my host’s satellite dish.
We may have recently dwelt on Nothing, but this jarring contradiction was certainly something, in its own way on a par with the idea of former child soldiers taking solace in American rap.
Another incoherence in an ever richer and more contradictory world. And at the same time, “Wow, what?” And, “Sure, whatever.” TV is gonna TV. Did I think people don’t watch it wherever they can? And finally, of course, “It’s cool, I don’t understand anything about the modern world anyway.”
We move on. While according to at least one man, there awaits a lurking supersized version of nothingness that supersedes all our complex reality, which the old dog sledder believes he’ll someday witness. For all I know, he’s doing so now, in an eternal unification of all contradictions, which converge into his Big Nothing. We the living still embrace the incoherence. It is our walking genuflection, our ignorant wisdom.
What a wonderful lead! I always envied the WSJ. SF buro it's expansive territory and ability to write aheds from Alaska and Hawaii. Jim Carlton is still upholding the tradition.