7.

When the projection was over we packed up and climbed back up the hill. The projection of my ego onto the glacier wouldn’t melt it. We went up to the main viewing platform, where I started to get the sense that this was end of my trip. I hit the mythical edge of the world, a wall that I could not cross physically, or conceptually. I did not understand its scale. I could not imagine a single thing for miles but this piece of ice. I decided to go to Chicago again. Get a job. Be like one of those other people.  

At the same time, the fog started clearing and some small openings in the clouds let the moonlight onto some distant tracts of the rugged ice. By the time I set up my camera, the beam had travelled towards us and new ones had come down behind it. When the light hit the face of the wall^lvii I realized how weak my projection was, and how much my eyes had adjusted… it was almost blinding. Slowly more and more pockets opened up, revealing the details of the glacier and making it seem even larger. With new shadows its plateau looked even more treacherous. At the line where the water's edge touched the glacier, the ice had melted back like a reveal in carpentry,^lviii making the massive body look like it was floating on the lake.^lix  

On the drive back Juan told me that scientists have discovered one life-form that can live on Perito Moreno, a single species of a single-celled organism.  

 

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ENDLESS SUM is the second installment in a collection of seven books that comprise La Anonima, first presented by Cayetano Ferrer as part of the Los Angeles Public Library's Works Sited exhibition program in April 2010. La Anonima, named after the Argentine supermarket chain mentioned in the story above, deftly manipulates the book into a platform for investagations of site, placelessness, passage, travel, landscape, and the frontier.

The print versions of Endless Sum and other books in the series are available through Ferrer's website, as well as through the library's permanent collection.