THE END OF DAYS
In the auction room – once a Methodist Chapel –
on the Holyhead Road to Llangollen,
above the gorge the River Dee cut
before the last ice age, Lot 59
is an Arctic Fox: in the catalogue:–
‘A good example of Victorian
taxidermy, with some discolouring
of the tail. Circa 1845’.
That year, Franklin’s expedition left the Thames
to chart the North West Passage: lead poisoning,
learning nothing from the Inuit, ice
killed them all. Now, as the fast ice retreats,
year by year, and the pack ice diminishes
new expeditions weigh anchor in the sounds.
The deniers are drilling for gas and oil.
The fox, immortalised in winter pelage,
is about to pounce – on some imagined
vole or lemming beneath the fictive snow.
By David Selzer
John Huddart
October 29, 2013Your usual grasp of time, with slips to prehistory and glimpses of the future, with a time travelling arctic fox continually pouncing. I love all art engaged in relative time frames, so am a sucker for this. It is exploring the idea that knowledge of the past should give us some control of the future. But the oil explorer and the hungry fox are equally incapable of doing anything but just surviving in the here and now.