Fires4

geographic features "palimpsests," as though the
craters were trying to tell us something. One impact
basin called Val Halla appears to be an enormous
exception in size, with concentric rings emanating
outward more than a thousand miles. But it too is
webbed with smaller craters and has no ring mountains
like those on the Moon.
The cliffs and small mountains of Callisto are older
than Ganymede's and more motionless than Europa's
ice. They loom like the monstrous shadows of frost.
They seem to be the cold itself, frozen into shapes
whose presence intensifies the absence. Apart from its
inert, perpetual orbit of Jupiter, nothing is happening
on Callisto. The meteorites that billions of years ago
blasted out the craters lie in pieces the same as the
night they hit. These are hell places. Whatever
consciousness can survive here consists in isolated
hills and shadows, and the disturbing fantasy that even
Jupiter, which at some remote time might itself have
shone like a star a thousandth as bright as the Sun, has
ceased to pay attention. Its glimmering night-light
passively reflects from Callisto's dirty, snowy surface.
The dark mountain points and frozen impact
escarpments form the shadows of abandonment. Even
the Sun is too distant to move anything here.
Those frozen mountains are horrible. They are what
you would see if you could somehow see nothing.
Europa in its smoothness is in a sense invisible,
rejecting everything, every attempt to locate anything.
It throws all activity of heat or mind directly into
empty space. Callisto outlines what a hole must be,
sunken deep toward absolute zero. Except for its rock
and ice, it does not, for all intents and purposes, exist.
* * *
Space contains our parallel worlds.
A winter night in Maine, like Callisto-night, seems
eternal. The jagged spruce-tops in the woods beside
the frozen lake point toward burning white crystals,
like the mountaintops of Callisto. As I looked up that
January night, the darkness seemed like an envelope
sealed for good. Daylight would never arrive, warmth
would never return. The entire universe for a few
moments in the cold was eternally absent.
Winter is night and cold dissolved together. It is the
living figure of all absence, and it brings all conditions
of absence with it. It came to me that the Abenakis
and the red paint people, natives of Maine centuries
and millennia before us Europeans, must have
understood winter in ways impossible for me. They
didn't think of bald Europas or Callistos, but instead
moved with the season, entered it, maybe. When the
cold had halted everything serviceable to life, the
Abenakis looked into the same sky as I do and called
the bright full wafer there "Starvation Moon." The
clams and mussels that were dried during summer

had been eaten, and the deer and moose had all but
disappeared. The bears slept, and nothing grew or
even moved except in creaking wind and snow.
Hunger, they knew from first-hand information, is a
condition of nature. It is the living experience of
nothing. It could not be defeated because it does not
explicitly even exist, except in a figure of the
changeable Moon. It could, given the right reserves of
caloric and psychic energy, be waited out, the way the
drowsiness before oblivion can be blunted.
I, on the other hand, shivering in the snow, knew the
wood stove was warming the house. We have ways of
preserving bodily heat during winter. But even
nowadays in Maine, "cabin fever" is not an altogether
figurative expression. Some people fail in winter. The
cold grinds everything to a white smoothness. It slows
the elbow joints and knees, and seems to freeze the
afternoon itself, and evening, to a standstill. The Sun
is absent fifteen hours a day here in the dead of winter,
the Earth tipped over on its axis out of heat and light.
Night enfolds the world by four o'clock. Feeling sealed
off, like having claustrophobia in the darkness, people
fray, their normal reserve and tolerance evaporate. A
winter nervousness sets in that sometimes ends up
bad, in fits of rage, or brawls, or worse, for all the
world like psychic shivering. In winter we sleep at the
edge of oblivion. The place of hell itself. The tops of
spruce against the sky become ancient, inert
mountaintops.
In times before the Abenakis inhabited the Eastern
Subarctic, a seed philosopher for modern Europe,
Parmenides, pictured two ways of understanding the
universe. One way was to think or realize that things
actually do exist. To imagine for example Callisto and
the Moon out there, with frost mountains. And
millennia later to imagine, on one at least, latticed
footprints undisturbed for the last 26 years and for
26,000 more. The other way was to study or assume
their emptiness. If we rationalize intently about
Europa and Callisto for a time, we infer and - right on
the edge of possibility, or its failure - almost perceive
that they are essentially nothing, essentially void.
But no real information comes back from this way.
Focus your mind on absence and things begin to freeze
together and become indistinguishable. Pieces of facts,
like inert meteor debris strewn around an ancient
crater, can be heaped together, but the reality of
Callisto or Europa, from this view, is their essential
vacancy. You end up chattering about nothing. It's like
shouting into an empty chasm and wishing for a rock
slide. It's a wish for annihilation, like surrendering to
the cold for a quick rest, and sleeping. An Abenaki
under the Starvation Moon did not rationalize the
absence of meat or the emptiness of her belly. To
visualize absence as though it were present reveals
eventually the absence of absence, things exactly as
they're not. Thoughts of what is not are thoughts of
annihilation. Thoughts of annihilation are thoughts of
hell.
The problem of winter is to generate activity, to
excite molecules to warmth. The cold wants motion,
existence of some kind, even a dream. Warmth is
generated not by, but among the bare black crater-rims

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