Arctic Play – Mita Mahato

[The 3rd Thing; 2024]

I live where the Colorado desert meets the Mojave, on a slope overlooking an olive ranch, which sits across the wash from me. To the south, the rocky terrain of the national park goes indigo at dusk. Looking west in the spring and early summer, I can see snow peaks—a totally other climate, distant but visible. In mid-summer, watching thunderstorms travel from east to west, hovering over my house and wetting down the creosote, I have been thinking about how an individual apprehends a landscape. Or how perception reduces a landscape to its parts—weather, vegetation, animal sounds—and reconstitutes it around these minor impressions. This is how Mita Mahato’s attention moves in Arctic Play, an illustrated, genre-bending book: Grammar gathers around sensory witness in ways that are first simple and then complex, and full of color.

Arctic Play is primarily concerned with two things: the relationship between self and other, and the implications of climate precarity, landscape, and the interactions and exchanges between human, animal, and object (such as plant, planet, mineral, weather). Across three acts, Mahato experiments with genre and with narrative, placing characters in dialogue with each other and with the landscape via dramatic scene, lyric poem, and illustration. Like any play, Arctic Play has a cast list, but Mahato’s cast list combines character and medium:

This relationship of character and medium begs the question of the reproducibility of a play—that a play is meant to be reproduced, but every performance will be distinct because of how the cast interacts with each other and with the audience. This tension translates easily to the page, because watching a play is like reading a book in that the act of reading is always influenced by the present and that combination of circumstances will always be singular. This is also true about travel and spending time with an unfamiliar landscape, which makes sense: Arctic Play is a project that arose out of Mahato’s time at an artist’s residency in the Norwegian Arctic. It enacts and cultivates a sense of what it is to inhabit a landscape with competing concepts of transitoriness and permanence. The book says: The landscape is impermanent and I am impermanent within it. Still, there is a sense of finding an ephemeral but real sense of presence in a community. In Arctic Play, “the 30 passengers are / short / tall / an organism,” alive and evolving.

Early in Act 1, Mahato writes, “A play is happening / every day at every moment,” and the speaker orients herself as one first-person voice within a chorus: “I write in my journal: Sitting on the shore, facing a glacier. . . . I find shapes in the rocks around me. . . . The familiar imposed upon the strange.” Throughout the book, the interaction of word and image creates mutual meaning, and the quality of this meaning shifts as the illustration shifts from geometric patterning to figural illustration.

Each of Arctic Play’s three acts has a different sense of genre. Act 1 begins with the cast list and sets the scene with description, Act 2 performs three scenes, and Act 3 is an illustrated sonnet. All three acts have the sensibility of a lyric poem in that they produce in the reader an attention to a small moment and the expansiveness of its resonance. This kind of poetic attention is particular in how it attends to objects as they appear—and then how they rub up against their implications. Mahato’s poetic attention interacts with ideas and observations about community and climate, and the spaces in her language are literally filled in with color. The grammar of Act 1 is gestural, not rigid, and play is both a genre and a verb, syntax reduced to its elements and then expanded outward. Each page begins with a noun (the sea, the boat, the sun, the rocks), and then a series of adjectives follow:

The sea is

                        wet

                                    deep

            blue

Like a sort of meter, this descriptive rhythm got stuck in my head. It made consider my own space, a room in a particular moment: the sky is, the ceiling fan is, the blanket is, the dog is, the coffee is iced and sweating. This is my scenic now, one in a procession of nows.

This sort of lyric cataloguing continues in simple syntax: lists of adjectives and present participles, prepositional phrases, verbs with multiple objects. An oddity of this sequence is the play between passive and active voice, depending on the characterization of the grammatical subject: The polar bear looks at the ship, but the jellyfish is poked with a stick. Though this grammar suggests a sort of animal hierarchy, a sense of egalitarianism pervades the play, in part because the scaffolding grammar suggests a sort of simultaneousness of impressions instead of narrative, a relationship of exchange between apprehender and apprehension that happens at once:

I hear the sound of a helicopter. It        

                                    comes into view.

In Act 2, a few passengers encounter objects in three stylistically distinct scenes. These objects—glaciers, kelp, a moraine—are collaged in plastic, handmade paper, and newsprint. Like flash fictions, these scenes are stripped to image and dialogue without lengthy description—just the witnessing, recording, and conversation about what’s witnessed, which occurs in simile. For example, a section of land recently made accessible by a calving glacier is covered in rocks that look like but are not filets of raw meat. In this way, Mahato pulls what is strange into a familiarity.

Mahato applies the simile as something rich and strange—a sense-making syntactic construction. But she challenges this sense by ending on a self-erasure, recalling other moments of disclosure and discovery. The grammar of the simile degrades in Act 3:

sky light as day

light as daylight

as

This grammatical dissolution occurs in the context of a formal poem, a sonnet about a polar bear. The poem is illustrated with paper cutouts, including newsprint cut to form words, in contrast with hand-lettered lines on the facing page. As the syntax becomes more complicated, less bound to diagram and simile, the visual elements of the book become more interested in icon and figure. Where the illustration in Act 1 was a series of colorful patterns, in Act 3 we see the actual, though angular and simple, figure of a polar bear:

Elsewhere in Act 3, the speaker appeals to the bear: “turn me into this susurrus.” The precision of this literary word feels significant—susurration, suggesting a river without actually revealing one, is always already a metaphor, but it is the most precise word for the sonic movement, the murmur, of a river, imbued with the implication of elegy.

In this way, through slow accumulation and shifts in approach, Arctic Play’s sense of reality is both basically real and hyper-lyric, or hyper-literary. Still accessible and deeply moving, Mahato’s play between language and image makes the landscape legible. This intersection between the book’s mediums and its concerns feels like a good example of The 3rd Thing’s editorial ethos: necessary alternatives, interdisciplinary practice, intersectional priorities. Mahato suggests and then pressurizes what’s possible to disclose directly, leaning into what the lyric mode could make more legible and how disparate mediums hang together as a coherent book object.

Arctic Play closes with a constellation of influences within which Mahato has woven her work, which includes other nonfiction writers who deal with the relationship of human and environment: Barry Lopez, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Anna Tsing. Mahato’s bibliography also features poets, color theorists, and Shaun Tan’s graphic novel. Mahato writes, “Arctic Play is about being indelibly woven and I have been woven with many in its making.” This collective is evident in the book’s sense of genre: It calls itself a play and has a play’s basic elements—acts, scenes, a cast of characters—but it is also a series of sentences and lyric moments cut apart and woven on the page, collaged and crosshatched in color.

In the prologue to Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez writes, “The Arctic, overall, has the classic lines of a desert landscape: spare, balanced, extended, and quiet.” These lines lend themselves to a lyric sense of time and space, an apparent simultaneity of nearness and distance. This interaction of word, image, and the mutual influence of a literary community is indicative of how Mahato interacts with landscape: a sense of things heightened by shared experience, the simultaneity of disparate impressions, language made tactile. Mahato breaks her own apprehension down to its constituent parts, then collages and recontextualizes her impressions with image.

Aside from its spareness, something else the arctic shares with the desert is its intensity. Spending time with an extreme climate forces an experience of weather that has shifted how I think about ecological precarity in the face of climate change. But how can I accurately describe this quietude, the light, what 115 degrees feels like? When I moved to the desert, I didn’t feel that I had the right vocabulary for the movement of the dusk on the mountains and, like Mahato, I looked to color theorists and visual artists for guidance. Mahato’s approach to the arctic is a good example of how to say it better with obliqueness and not rigidity, with a blurred but inclusive vision that is tender and precise in its tone. The interaction of word and image is a site of possibility: Language might reproduce a sense of real presence with and around art, with a little movement in it.

Anna Zumbahlen is a poet living in Joshua Tree, California. Find recent work at www.annazum.com.