The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 122
Niflheim was the home of the dead. It was a place of bitterness, unending night, untellable cold. The Norse made only a slight distinction between the honorable dead and the wicked dead. The Norse said, “Dead is dead.” Niflheim was ruled by a pathetically hideous female, half black and half white, named Hel, daughter of treacherous Loki the Shape-Changer; she lived in a mansion, Eljundir, near the rock Drop to Destruction.
I repeat: I have paused to explain Norse cosmology because my knowledge of such has helped me to solve what I believe was the largest mystery of the camps: What was their place and meaning in the world? I am a poor thinker. I cannot sustain a philosophical discourse. I need pictures of the world to help me remember it. My intention here is to present a model that I can hold in my mind’s eye as to how all that existed in the Age of Exile came to act upon me and mine at Golgotha and afterward. I did not see it this way at the time. I was blinded by fear and vengeance. I see now it was how all that existed weighed upon me. This is Grim Fiddle’s cosmology of those days. And if I borrow too heavily, and distort too broadly, so be it. It feels natural for me to have come to think of Antarctica in terms of my Norse ways: The North interprets the South.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, all that existed still divided into three realms. The proportions had altered radically since first my Norse ancestors daydreamed beneath the grand ash tree of life, Yggdrasil. Asgard, still the home of the gods, had grown to encompass all the shimmering towers of Babel ruled by latter-day magic, called logical positivism. The gods had faces and voices: American, European, Asian, African, the masters and mistresses of a bountiful harvest. Their politics did not signify, capitalist to socialist to nihilism; their religion did not signify, humanism to mysticism to atheism. There was no single Odin, instead a thousand thousand of terrible ones, fickle, compassionless, one eye for more of the same. There was no single Frigg, instead millions of well-fed, well-loved, and enriched queens. Charity Bentham and Cleopatra had been such Friggs, as Cesare Furore had been such an Odin, and all three had descended from Asgard to tamper with and then destroy my family. This modern Asgard was not simpleminded, was, rather, boundlessly avaricious, profoundly charitable. Few died violently. Starvation and disease were obsolete. The gods followed the sun. It was the realm of the New Benthamites, measuring their pleasure and pain units to determine which hall of gods should be most pleased, where the feast should be held next. The halls were heaped with largesse, which the gods dispensed with sly intent. The hedonic calculus was cunning. Asgard practiced a benevolence that the New Benthamites called the Charity Factor. The scales were weighed meanly. In order to safeguard their feasts, the gods dispatched armies of charity to minister to those shunned from the hearth-table by birth, by chance, and by murder. It was at such a charitable moment that Asgard dispatched the Ice Cross, over the trembling roadway of the Atlantic. When Angel of Death crossed Bifrost, there was no returning.
Midgard, still the realm of mortal mankind, had shrunk to the fens and ditches and backwaters of desperation. There, clinging to rocks like South Georgia, mankind suffered and died, caught between the charitable whims of the gods and the violence of nature. And when man was backed up against the uncrossable barrier of the sea, he struck out ineptly against the sea monster Jormungand, now made of steel and spitting fire. The continent upon which the fen was located did not signify, a hovel is a hovel, whether Asian or African or American. The skin-colors and regrets did not signify, lost is lost. There were still monsters and giants. There were still dark elves and dwarfs cowering in the damp caves of places like the South Shetlands.
In this way the ice camps were the very edge of Midgard, the last chance of the last remnant. We were dark elves in the camps—our skins turned black from burning seal and whale oil; and it was generally so that only the smallest, most dwarflike, survived the conditions. Cast out of Asgard, or in flight from giants doing the bidding of the gods, or simply deprived of sense by accident, most of the wretches of Midgard were eaten by metallic Jormungand. The few who escaped were swept across, or sent across, the Southern Ocean to crash against the ice.
Israel always joked that the gods keep several sets of books. I understand the sharpness of his wit more completely here, because this must explain why it is impossible for me, without resources, to provide details of how many wretches arrived in the camps each week, how many died each day, how much was required to feed them, or starve them. I suppose, though, that it is probably impossible for anyone, even back in Asgard, to reconstruct a wholly accurate scheme of the camps. I have mentioned some of the Ice Cross’s patrons. I caution that the variety of the camps could be misleading. They tended to be either those administered directly by the Ice Cross or those administered by religious societies, such as Golgotha. Because the Ice Cross was international, there were European camps, five huge camps run by South Americans, at least one run by South Africans, perhaps a half dozen overlorded by North Americans. Also, there