Brother in Ice

by Alicia Kopf

  The next day I send him a friend request and he accepts immediately. Since I took the first step, I wait for some sign of connection, some gesture of support, or a like on something I’ve posted. After a while, and since we have some shared literary predilections, I give him a like. The stone doesn’t even graze the window. It’s followed by various posts with good news about my stuff. Nothing. Followed by various bits of good news about his stuff. Me: like. Him: zip. Me: 0, Him: 1. I always come out losing with numbers. Iceberg rarely gives a like to any of our mutual friends. It must be because he’s stingy and egocentric. Or because he goes into Facebook to post about his things but doesn’t pay attention to the rest, which probably corroborates my first supposition. As for me, after a few months it’s clear that he doesn’t even have any interest in maintaining a cordial relationship. My category in his value scale is follower.

  My father sometimes compares people to cars or shoes. And his advice is in step: “They shouldn’t hurt when you walk.” The metaphor of friction when walking is pretty graphic, but the comparison person/product, particularly with a shoe, is denigrating. As I think about it more, I realize that I’ve had shoes that hurt at first but later were my most comfortable pair. When I could still talk to him about these things, and I mentioned something about it, he said Iceberg seemed like the Ferrari type. The person/car comparison seems a bit less humiliating than the shoe one but this time blatantly classist. His tone when he says “a Ferrari” is: too-dear-for-you. I mutate from young woman to utilitarian car, from utilitarian car to house slipper. I can’t come up with any consoling or dignifying referent for that situation. The first image that comes to my mind is male, and it’s that cinematic losers—to avoid beating a dead (female) horse—have always been men. I could be a charming loser like Jack Lemmon in The Apartment.

  Letter from an Unknown Woman is the only literary work about unrequited female love that I can think of right now. The problem is that, as often happens in novels of that period, she has to die in the end, and I’d like to reserve the right to a less dramatic ending, or—if I can dream—a triumphant one. The character is a servant who sends flowers every year to a young, talented writer, who has no idea who is sending them. “I speak only to you; for the first time I will tell you everything, the whole story of my life, a life that has always been yours although you never knew it. But you shall know my secret only once I am dead, when you no longer have to answer me, when whatever is now sending hot and cold shudders through me really is the end.”8 I read Zweig’s original in German class. Trying to sum up the book, while searching for justifications for both characters’ behavior—for her obsession, for his cluelessness—another student was more concise: He’s an imbecile. Moral interpretations are always reassuring. The fundamental question is as simple as a song by Beyoncé: Why don’t you love me?

  8 Translation by Anthea Bell.

  The internet and our own marketing of our personalities, all of us converted into followers and followed (lovers and beloveds), stars and stalkers at the same time.

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  ‌The Coldest Place

  December 10, 2013

  The white continent has broken the absolute record of lowest recorded temperature: -93.2°C, on August 10, 2010. This is the result of the analysis of the most detailed temperature maps of the Earth to date and based on 32 years’ worth of data taken by satellites.9

  9 http://sociedad.elpais.com/sociedad/2013/12/10/actualidad/1386692048_411194.html.

  The Antarctic image, with its cold blue stripe in the center, reminds me of a heart:

  -93.2°C

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  ‌In Front of You

  Writing is not inside you, it’s in front of you, says Casanova in Story of My Death, the film by Albert Serra. A statement that can lead us in two directions: writing as a dialogue with the world rather than a tool for introspection, or in a second sense, which doesn’t contradict the first, writing as pure form materialized in the text, mere language. As if that Casanova, collector of intimacies, were reminding us that there is nothing intimate about writing. In the film, one character turns shit into gold, another worships his shit. And that suggests an underlying truth: we are alchemists; like worms, we secrete silk. Our presence in crumbling urban areas gives them new prestige, we convert thwarted loves into songs, artistic installations denouncing the evictions caused by the recession will end up being bought for the collection of a multinational investment bank. Sublimators, now instrumentalized, workers at the symbolic sewage treatment plant.

  While transforming happiness, beauty, and seduction into gold doesn’t cost much (the alchemical process is equivalent to a simple change of mold), converting shit into gold is a costly process both for the organism who undertakes it and, indirectly, for its environment. In many cases it can cost years of solitude and/or accusations of egotism from their family. On top of facing the incomprehension caused when someone chooses periods of solitary work, even though they are already carrying out a productive task that satisfies their material needs, there is the anxiety generated by that very job, which is often just something to put food on the table and in no way a realization of their calling. This feeling that ranges from anxiety to slight unease can, at the same time, feed the alchemical process, which is carried out in parallel, discreetly when not furtively, because even if the Author—from this point on: the worm—wanted to reveal the inner processes that are consuming him or her, no one could fully understand them. Taken to an extreme, this compulsion and need for isolation can generate accusations that lead to expulsion from the family. Once, even, due to an insatiable writing compulsion, a worm turned into a beetle. As for this author, the process can be intermittently accompanied by an absorbing monologue that only finds its way out in front of a keyboard; the monologue could last days, or months, or years, with varying degrees of intensity, until the resolution or exhaustion of the conflict that gave rise to it (vulgarly and not coincidentally called shit). Often it is fueled by a glimpse of a way out in real life, which will have to be resolved in life and not through the digestive process, yet that process will be part and parcel of the conflict’s resolution.

  The period of time needed to transfigure shit into gold, a process that can only be done by a certain species of worm, depends on the obligations and material needs that worm has, just like most other larvae and insects. The time varies according to the responsibilities that force it to postpone its digestive processes for months. During that time the worm can maintain contact with what is cooking inside it through maintaining enough reading and quick note-taking to keep the process latent. In more intensive work periods, necessary for the deep elaboration and final expulsion of that which must come out, this worm will notice the progressive shrinking of the diameter of its hair, which will thin out as the months pass until a long period of calm, of no digestion, re-establishes its normal thickness. In intensive phases when the worm is elaborating some sort of transformation of grief, the trash bin will daily ingest chunks of hair as big as fists, that appear in the comb of this vertebrate worm. As time passes, new hair will slowly appear on its scalp, sometimes changing its hair type; from wavy to straight, or from straight to wavy, so slowly that no one else will notice it. The effects of the transformation are similar to those of a hormonal change. In parallel the worm could lose—has lost—between five and ten kilos of body mass: the sublimation process involved in converting shit into gold is not free; it is a dangerous and expensive process for the small larval organism, which could collapse if what it tries to digest is too large for its digestive track. There are remains, shit, conflicts that are too severe to process; a large amount of human evil is indigestible for this worm, who is aware that they would saturate the defenses of its small organism, capable only of digesting conflicts on a local scale. The worm, whose process you can witness on these pages, hopes in the future to secrete lighter constructions. For the time being, its trail, the trail of its costly headway, is in front of you.

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  ‌The Basement

  Sick and tired of acting out a dialogue with myself, I decide to seek out an interlocutor. A friend recommends one. His office is uptown, in a discreet location. A silver plaque states his name beneath the intercom “TD, Psychologist – Psychoanalyst.” I see a tall man arrive, wearing a motorcycle helmet and with a briefcase in one hand. I imagine that it’s him. After a little while, I ring the bell again. This time I’m buzzed in. The office is in the basement of an old, well-maintained building. I go down the dim stairs to the office. I’m received by a man younger than I was expecting, dark with fine features, his head completely shaved in a way that underscored, rather than hid, his premature balding. I can’t place his accent, which is from somewhere in South America, but not Argentina, which is what you’d expect according to cliché. The basement is an apartment with modern detailing. There are African masks on the wall. There is a loft space with a large library filled with wooden shelves curving under the weight of the books. The windows touch the ceiling, little light comes in. We shake hands and he asks me to take a seat.

  “Very well. What brings you here?”

  “…”

  “How could you tell that that bothered your father’s family, how could they see in you the chance to unload?”

  “…”

  “Somehow, not saying anything, has to do with accepting it. You can realize that in the face of an attack, not only would your father not be on your side, but you’d be subject to a new attack … How vulnerable might you feel at that moment?”

  “…”

  (I grab the first tissue.)

  “So in order for one to be part of the family, acceptance is necessary.”

  “…”

  “Regrettably, they aren’t here. We are going to focus on you, on what position you can occupy.”

  “?”

  “One that concerns the answer.”

  “…”

  “But why represent that position of inevitable family friction? That position seems key.”

  “…”

  “Perhaps before you weren’t in the situation, now you are. And in any case, that position isn’t an inevitable place. One can choose the responsibilities one wants to take on.”

  “…”

  “That position isn’t coincidental. From it we can identify it, no, shift it, or question these perspectives.”

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  ‌Polar Vortex

  Tuesday, January 7, 2013

  New York freezes, recording the lowest temperature in 118 years.

  All eyes are on the thermometer. The states of Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey are between -15 and -18°C; -22°C in the city of Chicago (Illinois) and -16°C in the capital, Washington D.C. The wave of polar cold affecting half of the United States has broken temperature records in numerous regions, even hitting southern cities such as Atlanta (Georgia) and Birmingham (Alabama) where -6°C is expected. Americans have become familiar with the meteorological term “polar vortex,” which is the name for the cyclone that has come down from the pole to freeze a swath of the country from the Rocky Mountains all the way to the East Coast. At Dulles International Airport, in Washington D.C., temperatures have dipped lower than the 1996 record of -13°C, before causing the gauges to fail, according to a report from the National Weather Service.10

  10 http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2014/01/07/actualidad/1389114377_203636.html.

  New York frozen, Niagara Falls frozen.

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  ‌Stagnation, Freezing, Rupture

  After a few apathetic weekends, E and I decide to end our relationship. I’m scared to give up the emotional stability, affection, and companionship, but I can’t be with someone while I’m thinking about someone else, even someone fictional. Maybe I’ve invented him in order to write this book.

  I work long hours on freelance jobs in addition to teaching, and I look for an apartment.

  I lose a few kilos. It’s February and a cold wind is blowing.

  February

  During my move out of the apartment I’ve shared for the last three years, I find a newspaper clipping that a friend—who knows about my Arctic obsessions—left on the desk in my studio. The feature story on some photographs from Shackleton’s expedition recently found under the ice is a couple of pages long and dated January 5, my birthday.

  The recent finding of twenty-two negatives in a small box in the darkroom at the cabin in Cape Evans, which was the main base for Scott’s 1911 expedition, allows us another look at the heroic period of polar exploration and invites us to reflect on the important role of photography in those episodes of grand characters, feats and disasters. […] Two of the photos rescued and painstakingly restored by the Antarctic Heritage Trust, the New Zealand organization charged with conserving various historic places in the Ross Sea region, show Alexander Stevens, a member of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914–1917), the famous voyage led by Ernest Shackleton with the aim of crossing the continent. Its failure gave rise to what is considered one of the most extraordinary adventures of endurance, courage, and leadership in the history of exploration.11

  11 http://sociedad.elpais.com/sociedad/2014/01/04/actualidad/1388867097_208652.html.

  In the article, the author uses the find to review the most emblematic photographs in the history of Antarctica, mentioning their creators: heroic Frank Hurley for the photos of Shackleton’s expedition, Herbert Ponting, who documented Scott’s expedition. He also mentions the famous photograph—the one I find the most unsettling and evocative—of the conquest of the South Pole by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen. The photo was taken by Olav Bjaaland and shows Amundsen and his three companions with their heads bare (at -23°C) looking at the small tent they’ve put up, crowned with their country’s flag. Around them, there is nothing.

  How does anyone portray for posterity the conquest of a place that is an absolutely empty geographic abstraction? 2,594 km and 99 days of expedition require having some idea about how to tackle the visual documentation of the feat. “Back at home everyone was waiting to see the photo of the South Pole, the great trophy, but [italics mine] how does anyone make the invisible visible? There was nothing there to show,” declares the scholar of the history of the explorations Harald Østgaard Lund, the curator of a large photographic exhibit on the Norwegian polar heroes in Oslo. “They finally managed to create that photo that is etched into the Norwegian collective memory. Converting the South Pole into a real place. Basically, all the explorers used the same idea of a mound, a tent, and a flag.”

  How to make the invisible visible is a rare question for explorers, and a very common one for artists. An entire nation asking itself this question is a landmark in art. The extremes under which that image was created—the extremes of land, effort, climate, and of all that is (in)visible, white—underscore the profoundly fictitious nature of the document: the gesture and the landscape are pure staging. They could have been found in the snowy garden of someone’s house. And therein lies the fascination I feel for that image. It documents pure abstraction, a place triply invisible—an extreme geographic point based on a calculation; and something else that doesn’t exist: the conquest of a shifting point; and all this on a white backdrop, invisible from the photographic perspective. The ability to synthesize these various layers of abstraction on a single level is the essence of making the invisible visible. Isn’t that conquest? Isn’t that Art? Three friends playing in the snowy garden.

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  ‌April

  It’s spring and this year I have money. I have a new apartment, unfurnished, just for me. A renovated apartment, with appliances and a parquet floor. Working more has its rewards, even though now I don’t have time for my polar obsessions. During Easter Week most of my friends are traveling with their significant others. I don’t want to spend the week alone and shuttered up in the house; I download an application and after a couple of days of chatting, I meet up with some guy, B, at the bar where my neighbor F is D
Jing. He’s late. In the meantime F introduces me to R, another friend of hers. B arrives an hour later and R has already asked for my number. B notices something odd about the situation. For a moment, they wait, one in front of the other—they both are about the same height, around six foot one, brown hair, beards. Somewhat disconcerted, they switch stools; R gives up his, which is closer to me, and leaves perplexed. The conversation with B bores me. Two days later, I delete my profile.

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  ‌R

  Dark. Prominent nose with soft angles. Wide forehead with slightly receding hairline. Trim, well-shaped beard. Small, penetrating, dark eyes, prone to laughter. A small mouth with thick lips, regular teeth, with particularly pointy canines. A taller and somewhat wider body than average. It’s hard to tell whether he’s the wolf or the woodcutter. The day after his crestfallen departure from the bar, I send him a friend request on Facebook. The following day he suggests we go to a jazz concert and dinner. At the concert, his physical presence surrounds me in a special way. During dinner he tells me about his parents’ divorce. It seems a little early for such subjects but I don’t overthink it. He walks me to my old scooter. One of the last gifts from my father during a period of ceasefire, that my students often make fun of. He says goodbye with a quick hug, one of those hugs that lack both the formality of a kiss on each cheek and the warmth of a real hug, and he leaves.