Narrow Road to the Deep North

Or: Into the Northwest Passage

We finish our coffee and head down the arcade past the book shop. Out front there are three trestle tables covered in books. I like to stop and look at the books. I like how they are different every time and how, when you come by after dark and the arcade is closed, the books are covered with a green sheet, tucked in cosily by some loving caretaker.

Unlike the books inside, the ones on the tables aren’t second-hand. They’re all brand new heavily discounted hardbacks: glossy 268 page coffee table books entitled simply MOUNTAIN or GARDEN, marked down from $69.95 to $14.99; collections of essays by Susan Sontag or David Sedaris; sometimes a philosophical exposition by an adjunct professor from a European University I’ve never heard of.

We stop for a look and as usual, it’s a delicious smorgasbord of stranegeness. History of Art and Thought in the Cold War; Railways And Australian Identity - who reads this stuff? Then a book catches my eye: Languages of Truth by Salman Rushdie. It’s a small book, maybe A5, smooth, matte dust jacket.

I’m familiar with Rushdie. Actually we go way back. I was still going to uni in Sydney when I first picked up one of his books, The Satanic Verses, around 20 years ago. I was studying literature, and Rushdie seemed like someone I should read, so I did. About eight pages, before gently closing it and placing it carefully on the bookshelf between Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish and Tolstoy’s War and Peace, for future reference. I’ve moved many times since then, from Glebe to Marrickville, Hobart, Melbourne and about five different towns in the Blue Mountains before landing in Blackheath. All this time The Satanic Verses travelled with me, boxed up with the books I’ve loved or should, until at some point I gave it away. I don’t remember doing this, but I know for sure I don’t have it anymore.

I pick up the Rushdie and start leafing through, at least I try, but the pages are stiff and way its bound makes it fall open to the same over and over. The essay is called ‘Proteus’ and it starts like this:

NOW THAT I’M GETTING ON a bit, I occasionally feel like the Japanese poet- philosopher Bashō, who, after many years spent traveling in search of wisdom along the Narrow Road to the Deep North in Edward Bond’s play of that name, is asked what he has learned, and replies, “I learned that there is nothing to learn in the Deep North.” Nothing to learn on the journey is the wisdom of the journey, wisdom itself being the grand illusion. - Salman Rushdie.

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A few weeks before the moment I described above I had returned from a two month contract in the deep north. I was employed as a guide, firearms handler and historian on a tourism ship travelling from Kangerlussuaq to Nome. The journey from Greenland to Alaska took 28 days. We travelled north along the west coast of Greenland, west across Baffin Bay and into the Lancaster Sound, weaving through Inuit Nunangat via the waterways known to many today as the Northwest Passage. For most of this voyage we were far north of the Arctic Circle, where the narrowing of the planet elongates summer days so they stretch through southern weeks, collapsing on themselves as winter pours in.

In the second part of the voyage we ran a haiku competition for guests, inviting them to reflect on their experiences and express them, if they would like, in the traditional Japanese form: 5 - 7 - 5, a poem without rhyme, a reference to the fleeting, or perhaps the fleet-footed - a fox, an impression, a shadow.

In progress . . .