Impossible Owls: Essays

by Brian Phillips

That’s not an exaggeration: There’s disagreement over how long the Iditarod Trail really is, but the best estimates peg it at just about the distance from Carnegie Hall to Epcot.

Alaska itself, its sheer hugeness and emptiness—731,449 people spread out over 570,640 square miles, a territory larger than Spain, France, and Germany combined holding slightly fewer people than the metro area of Dayton, Ohio. The density stats are a joke. The U.S. average is 87.4 inhabitants per square mile. The forty-fifth-most-dense state, New Mexico, thins that down to 17. Alaska has 1.28.

fixates often on the idea that its author’s thoughts and stances are offending unspecified “wackos,” who wield unspecified powers and who deserve whatever offense they get. You know how some small-town guys like imagining that everything they say is driving people on the other side of the political spectrum, none of whom they personally know, crazy? Mitch scratched in 2011 after nearly severing his index finger with a knife at the Ophir checkpoint.

Flying through the pass was awesome. I mean in the sense of inspiring genuine awe. You are a dot moving among white clouds. White cliffs break through the clouds and you fly beside them. You’re not high up by mountain standards, twenty-five hundred feet, maybe a little more. But it feels like you’re in the sun’s own kingdom. For much of the crossing, the snow makes it impossible to tell where the ground is, and then when you spot it, it’s crazy, striations of ice and rock like the inside of a marble. It doesn’t seem to exist in any measurable relation to where you are. (Even crazier: the occasional glimpse of mushers and dog teams moving against this background, lowercase i’s crossing a sheet of crumpled paper.) Little canyon-like channels go wriggling off the main path. It’s like passing into another world.

Each year five out of every thousand Alaskans go missing. People vanish without a trace at twice the rate of Outside. Start reading about why the disappearances happen, Andri said, and you’ll encounter rumors of a dark or underground pyramid, a huge structure, bigger than the Great Pyramid at Giza, buried beneath the ice west of Denali.

The nine seconds of video I managed to shoot during the first pass we made over the bear shows a tiny lumbering ivory something, the size of a fly on a kitchen floor, galloping across the ice shelf under Nugget’s yellow right wingtip. We made a second pass and got close enough to see her haunches shuddering, but by that point I’d dropped the camera. Everybody pretty jaded here? Fantastic. I couldn’t feel my spine, she was so beautiful.

Who knew what would be there tomorrow? And it hit me that that was exactly the point of the Iditarod, why it was so important to Alaska. When everything can vanish, you make a sport out of not vanishing. You submit yourself to the forces that could erase you from the earth, and then you turn up at the end, not erased. I’d had it wrong before, when I’d seen the dog teams as saints on the cusp of a religious vision. It was the opposite. Visionaries are trying to escape into something larger. Mushers are heading into something larger that they have to escape. They’re going into the vision to show that they can come out of it again. The vision will be beautiful, and it will try to kill you. And (oh by the way) that doesn’t have to be the last word. That’s why you go to the end of the world—to lose yourself. And not to.

Hakuho is composing little poems of battle.

Hakuho, by contrast, is a single large stone, an owl quickly sketched by Miyazaki. His

but as much as I can.” “Okay,” she said. “Well! We’ve got you in a Nissan Sentra.” I declined insurance. She slid over the gargantuan clove of key fobs. “Hon, before you go. Can I ask … do you mind if I ask why you’re doing that?” *

On the plane, I’d been browsing through a book, a work of sensationalist mid-century journalism that played a role in charting the outlines of the narrative, pre–Close Encounters version. The book was called The Flying Saucers Are Real. Forgotten today outside hard-core UFO circles, but a mainstream bestseller in 1950. Its author, an ex-marine pilot and pulp fiction writer named Donald Keyhoe, had started with a series of articles for True magazine (True: The Man’s Magazine), then expanded them into the book. I’d dug up a PDF online. Keyhoe’s work is a fascinating tour through a bygone paranoia matrix. Its tone is hard-boiled, way more Smoking Man than Mulder; James M. Cain could have written it. We’re in that early Cold War moment when something sour starts creeping into the mood of national triumph. The war is over, blue skies ahead, and yet already many people sense that something is wrong, something hard to explain or define, a bad secret fizzing under the atmosphere. Waiting for a myth to inhabit. Keyhoe begins by collating data. A tower

The New Age dimension of alien contact hadn’t emerged yet, and neither had the idea of a government conspiracy whose depths made it functionally magical. What you have, instead, is the suppressed hysteria of a generation that had seen the atom split, had lived through the war’s devastation, had seen humanity’s idea of itself transfigured more than once, in a few short years, and in progressively more disturbing ways. By telling the story of the alien cover-up, Keyhoe is registering an early flutter of the needle in what became the slow collapse of democratic faith. But he’s also preserving the fantasy that the truth is still attainable, that a strong man’s moral outrage would be enough to tear down the lies and bring the people the facts. Nothing ever seems more naive, I thought, watching the faces flickering across the television, than the paranoia of the dead.

It’s fascinating, from this temporal distance, that the hypothesis Keyhoe offers to explain the alien presence actually coincides with what’s sociologically the likeliest reason for the atmospheric anxiety he detects. That is, he thinks the aliens are here because of the bomb.

Out of town now, driving through the desert, I found myself remembering Robert Goddard, the rocket scientist. Did you know he’d lived in Roswell? He did some of his important experiments there, the ones that paved the way for human spaceflight. Also for long-range missiles. He was there before the war, an intense, tubercular obsessive firing projectiles into the wasteland. Without him, there’d be no moon landing, no ICBMs, no Cold War as we know it. No rovers on Mars. Goddard thought we could use rockets to reach the far cosmos, spoke of sending messages to alien civilizations inscribed on metal plates. To me, the circularity felt eerie. This was where we’d started the trip to space, and it was where space, or the idea of space, came crashing back down to

us. * * *

bleeding away of the roadside culture that flourished along its edges, a weird medley of mid-century tourist kitsch and car worship (the first fast food was here, the first McDonald’s) and a very pure expression of the American genius for deranged carnivalesque.

As for our late-breaking U.S. culture itself, you sometimes have the sense that we’re rolling up the historical carpet behind us as we go, that when we finally vanish, we’ll leave behind nothing but garbage dumps and videos whose codecs won’t play. “Ruins” may not

jigsaw puzzle of the American West had had a piece pulled out, and the resulting blank space, a nowhere bounded within somewheres, became Area 51. What overwhelms is not the meaninglessness of the universe but the coexistence of an apparent meaninglessness with the astonishing interconnectedness of everything. The fascination Area 51 exerted, as the vanishing center of every rumored cover-up and labyrinthine conspiracy theory, was essentially the fascination of a vacancy.

Still, there’s a feeling of erasure here that’s different from

what you find in, say, Massachusetts. This may be because the landscape itself holds such emptiness. There are fewer protective layers between you and American history. That is: You know that a history of invasion, displacement, and (let’s use the word) genocide permeates almost every place you go in this country. But most of the time, you are encouraged toward distraction and repression by everything around you, all the noise and glitter of contemporary culture—here’s Dunkin’ Donuts; there’s the Guggenheim Museum; is that corgi in a muumuu? Here, none of that operates. On Route 66, you are even subtly coaxed into thinking about the destruction of ancient cultures, of culture itself, by the general Ozymandias fading away of the Americana through which you’re passing.

This started to affect the way I thought about the UFO phenomenon. I started to see it as less a problem of individual experie...

For a reference point here, think about the peculiar valence the word “alien” has in the Southwest—about what other group, besides extraplanetary visitors, it’s often applied to. Notice anything sinister there? Is it so crazy to imagine the UFO narrative as a kind of disguised psychic reckoning with the guilt-terror of white xenophobia? The kind of thing that you—millions of you; of us—can’t talk about, so you remake it as a myth? All those people, all those histories, erased; where do they go? What happens to your consciousness of them, when almost every feature of your lived reality tells you not to be conscious of them? Maybe, I t...

Stats are hard to come by for obvious reasons, but the number of people who say they’ve been abducted runs at least to many thousands. And yet no indisputable photographic evidence, in an era when nearly everyone carries a camera? No multiple-eyewitness accounts that aren’t at least somewhat slippery? Nothing undismissable picked up by, say, news satellites, by Google Earth? At a moment when it sometimes seems the planet is encased in a shell of surveillance? In a sense, the conspiracy-theory aspect of the UFO phenomenon, the but that’s just what they’d want you to think! side of it, was inevitable, because something had to reconcile the certainty of experiencers with the lack of ironclad evidence. The only way to do that was to suggest that the real evidence had been suppressed—that it was too important, too civilization upending, for the government not to hush it up. That way the lack of evidence could become its own kind of negative

Paranoia is skepticism taken to the point where it becomes faith. In the same way, the UFO narrative takes twentieth-century scientism to the point where it becomes mystical. I mean that in all transparency: It takes the aesthetic paraphernalia of mid-century science (advanced aircraft, faster-than-light travel, gleaming labs, silvery fabrics, shiny implements) and uses them to clothe a story whose whole underlying structure is religious (superior beings watching from above, secret truths revealed only to a few, problems of faith and proof, and so on). Which, again, says nothing about whether people have actually experienced it. Remember how I said that Area 51 was both there and not there at the same time? Spend enough time with these questions and you end up feeling like Augustine, who wrote of God and heavenly creatures that “they neither are nor are not in existence.”

In western New Mexico, on the edge of the Zuni Mountains, there’s a place called Inscription Rock. It’s a pale sandstone cliff rising out of the desert. Bleached-looking bluffs. A kind of rough-hewn natural fortress, towering two hundred feet over low tangles of juniper and ponderosa pine. The conquistadors called it El Morro: “the promontory.” (Or else: “the nose.”) Walk around the base and you find a fold in the cliff that makes a small, shaded grotto where rainwater gathers in a pool. Just

Just, one person did it, then the next person saw that inscription and copied it. Many of them wrote a little bit about their journeys. The first message from a European was carved in 1605. That’s fifteen years before the Mayflower landed.

There was a village here, established more than seven hundred years ago by Ancestral Puebloans. Most scholars no longer refer to them by the pejorative term the Navajo used, Anasazi, meaning “ancient enemies” or “ancient strangers.” Little is known about them. They were responsible for many of the petroglyphs; the Zuni who found the site much later called it Atsinna, “place of writings on the rock.” Little of the village remains: a small grid of recessed stone walls, a larger room that might have been used for religious ceremonies.

Since the oryx’s major predator is the lion, and since, as Lisa pointed out, “we don’t get too many lions in New Mexico,” the herd had thrived such that there was now a basically self-supporting population of wild African antelopes contained entirely within the largest missile-test zone of the American military apparatus. Just: right there. No distance at all from the place where the atomic age was born.

Snow on the Grass;

The awe he felt in those rooms! A cloak painted so that you could feel the pull of its rippling in the wind. A staff painted so that you saw clearly how its angle would change as the bearer put weight on it. This, he felt, was what art should be: not entertainment, not instruction, but something that spoke to the highest possibilities of the human spirit. People say that now, with Khrushchev having succeeded Stalin, Soviet artists are finally free to express themselves. But animation directors are so cautious! He yearns to create work worthy of Leonardo, of Goya,

magazine photo of a Brazilian soccer fan with her breasts spilling

Saturday callers flip through the racks of prints, she will sometimes

The trouble with Russia, he thinks, is that it’s so hard to trust anything. Many things seem real but aren’t; other things, like art, seem made-up but are in fact the only sources of truth. This morning, for instance.

here, already, he feels, is the Russian national disease, the flaw that has unspooled from serfdom on, the flaw communism was supposed to (but did not) correct: the obliteration of common human feeling by a morbid obsession with rank.

story has resonated in Russian culture. Its moral theme, the perversion of empathy by power, is a cry right from the heart of everyday Russian tragedy. He feels this with a passion he is barely able to contain. This is what art is for, this is what it can do: It can show people that fellow feeling runs deeper than the arbitrary distinctions that raise one person over another.

Akakievich, who responds, as he always does, by muttering, “Leave me alone, why do you have to torment me?” The clerk, who has been laughing, suddenly falls silent. And for a long time, Gogol says, those words will haunt the clerk, even in his happiest moments, because he hears the sound of others underneath them: “I am your brother.”

He thinks that he would like to make a film about a poet who is misunderstood. But he is also thinking about memory, about the way lives are built up from fragments gathered and mixed together. When you look back on your own life, you never see it as a straight line; it comes to you in a series of moments, loops that play out of order and blur together at the edges. He thinks: Perhaps I could capture the way that feels, that mingling. Perhaps the way to make animation into art is to animate the experience of time.

moments of rising tension, because a tiger’s presence changes the jungle around it, and those changes are easier to detect. Birdcalls darken. Small deer call softly to each other. Herds do not run but drift into shapes that suggest some emerging group consciousness of an escape route. A kind of shiver seems to run through everything, a low hum that sounds—literally, in the murmured Hindi conversation of the guides—like tiger, tiger, tiger. This zone of apprehension follows the tiger as it moves. Often, the best way to find a tiger is to switch off your engine and listen. You might then hear, from a distance, the subtle changes in pitch and cadence that indicate a boundary of the zone. But even then, it is impossible to predict where, or if, the tiger will appear.

The forest was loud with the alien-sonar sounds of jungle birdcalls.

We believed in cautious optimism but much

work left to do. This way of thinking, it seemed to me, quickly ran the risk of making the object of reference so abstract as to be unobservable even in its presence.

It had been Corbett’s devout loyalty to the empire that spurred him to go into the jungle after the man-eaters. It was his duty, he believed. Colonizers were supposed to improve the lives of the people they colonized; that was the justification for the whole imperial system. Of course it’s clear now that the justification was fraudulent, and it was clear to many people in the early twentieth century, but it wasn’t clear to Corbett. The irony in this case was that the empire had almost certainly been responsible for creating the man-eaters

in the first place; deforestation at lower altitudes had driven tigers into the hills, where game was scarce enough that weaker animals turned to hunting humans to survive. Corbett’s heroism spiraled helplessly into the logic of the crisis it was trying to avert: To uphold the empire meant hunting man-eaters, but upholding the empire also meant there would be more man-eaters to hunt. Critics of twenty-first-century

conservation movements have a term, “conservati...

to describe the way in which the overwhelmingly urban and international conservation paradigm, however well-meaning, unwittingly replicates...

The question was whether it would be terrible enough, and in the right way, for me to maybe enjoy it by accident. A lot of the time getting by in this world requires outmaneuvering your own intentions.

Wrath adheres to the timeless law of damage in action movies, which is also the idea the NFL dined out on for years—that slashing can wound you but concussive force can only move you around.

No deep-tissue bruising for Perseus after being swung

around like a private wrecking ball by the ogre that jumps him in the labyrinth of Tartarus, only a razor-thin...

Mnemosyne, for instance, is a Titan who I would think could dispense very terrifying wrath—she’s the mythological personification of memory. Kronos can lay waste to the desert (although why, it’s already a desert), but memory is what really kills you. Especially since Perseus’s whole motivating backstory has to do with anguish over his lost home, his dead wife and daughter. Imagine what Mnemosyne could spin that into, if they’d flown in, say, Cate Blanchett and given her some scenery to chew. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten already? she’d sing. “Should the pillars of memory / topple out of my reach, / I must remake the air,” Pablo Neruda wrote, which is an incredible action sequence if you’ve got the CGI budget for it.