The Ice Age

Some months ago, I was sitting in an Alpine restaurant on Montague Street having lunch with a friend. We both had blankets draped over our laps—the dense, grey, woolen knits were provided by the restaurant, and, when they were first presented to us, I was skeptical. I had just witnessed the patrons at the table next to me dig into melted cheese in all its presentations: over soup, in sandwiches, stretching over bread. How many strings of cheese and their accompanying grease have laid their claim over these blankets? If I acquiesced, how quickly would my fingers run over sticky, oily patches that held the memory of the last diner, or the one before him? The waiter’s arm strained under the weight of each blanket. How often could the restaurant afford to wash such dense wool? Not very, I thought. But beyond the walls of this Swiss “chalet”, the air over New York City was arctic—again—and the winter’s tentacles wormed their way through glass and wood and brick. After ten minutes or so sitting down, the cold crept up through the floor and into the soles of my shoes. Grease stains be damned, I don’t like being cold.

It’s hard to imagine—remember?— the cold we lived through this past winter. Last night there was a magnificent thunderstorm, the first proper summer storm of the year, I’d say, and this morning the sun has climbed up a clear, almost indigo sky, pulling all remnants of moisture back up to its heavenly realms. There were weeks, only months ago, where the temperature never rose above zero, allowing the mountains of snow on the streets to keep growing as storm after storm rolled over the Northeastern coast of the United States. The trees—lush and fragrant as they are today—were barren and asleep less than three months ago. It’s, dare I say, magical how quickly our landscapes transform from season to season.

I think this past winter was the coldest I have ever lived through. It was certainly the most snowy. I enjoyed watching how we, relentless humans, dug trails through the snow after every storm, so we could march from place to place in our Canadian winter jackets, Irish wool sweaters, and layers of Japanese “heat tech” (whatever that means). From the comfort of summer, such insistence appears demented—the effort we go through to keep doing the work we promised someone we’d do. I suppose we persevere despite any conditions. For the next few months, we’ll don flowy linens and hang fans around our necks to stay comfortable in sweltering subway cars. And as soon as we tire of that, the snow will return, and we will once again cloak ourselves in layers. Anyway.

Hello hotties! I am back. Where have I gone? I don’t know. I woke up one day to a lot of snow on the ground, and now I wake up on another day, and the sun is drawing perspiration on my brow. I have been digging and digging, and I have finally found a path back to this newsletter. I write, frankly, to ask you all if you know what might have happened. Where have I been? What’s gone on? I suppose, for you to answer, I must catch you up.  

Last time I wrote, I had just become an American Citizen. On the 10th of this month, I turned one American year old. My second passport feels less foreign to me now. When I first received it, I kept seeing it in my drawer and thinking, oh no, someone must have accidentally left their passport with me when we last traveled. But, of course, I’d open the book and marvel to see myself looking back. A few months later, when I was visiting Mexico for the holidays, I wanted my parents to ask me about it. I wanted them to hold the little blue book in their hands, and see it represent me. (They didn’t ask, but I showed it to them anyway).

Recently, I flew to a third country for the first time, and I was not sure what the “rules” were. What passport should I show? I reached for the Mexican passport—I reasoned, perhaps illogically, that this was a country I had been to before, and it might be weird if I presented myself as something else when they must have me in their records as a Mexican. As if they were really keeping track. Most of all, though, I like being Mexican. I want others to see me that way. Anyway, I did present myself as Mexican, but for a moment, when I saw there was a shorter, separate line for Americans, I considered changing my morals. I continue to be surprised by how much this second citizenship has shaken my sense of self.

Citizenship hasn’t been the only thing destabilizing the center. Last year was a year of many new identities. At work, I switched roles and stepped into a new skin of authority, which I find at times exciting and at other times uncomfortable. I’ve been grappling with this writing business, as usual, and I even entertained going to an MFA. I’ve been settling into a new neighborhood, too, and at times, I hanker for the plethora of hardware stores that used to be available to me when I lived on the less aesthetic streets of Yorkville.

But most significant, I suspect, was how the shifts in my relationship status have altered my sense of self. As I shared in my last missive, I found myself, for the first time in a long time, not single for much of last year. In a relationship, that is. That, unfortunately, is no longer the case. What happened? Hm. Had I been writing just a few weeks ago, I don’t think I would have been able to legibly put it all into words—the story hasn’t felt stable. I would weave one version of the relationship together over a beer or a glass of wine with a friend and walk away, entirely convinced, that I was strong, responsible, and grounded, until, I don’t know, two hours, a train ride, a shower, and half an episode of Envidiosa later, and I’m soaked in another, completely different narrative where I’m less steady, more guilty, and full of doubt.

For a few weeks, I felt as if I was living inside the plot of Inside Out, where different feelings of Dominique take turns driving the ship. The issue, though, is that only the feeling-in-charge exists. When anger takes over, for example, she has no memory of sadness or guilt or love. I felt I was losing my mind. I am learning how to bring all these feelings into a big, sterile conference room and teach them how to hear one another. I’m not all the way there, but I think it’s a good sign I feel, at last, able to write.

When we were at the Alpine lodge, my friend shared that she had been studying the Ice Age. She does this: she steers her research into unlikely corners and then brings a treasure trove of delightful findings to our next dinner or walk. Over our own choice of melted cheese, after revealing her latest research fixation, she told me that sloths, during the ice age, used to be huge. Yes, huge. There were variations across the species, but the largest were as large as elephants. They prowled around the American continent until about 12,000 years ago, when they became extinct (likely the result of humans (hunting)). Radiocarbon dating suggests some fossils in Cuba belong to animals that lived until 1550 BCE, almost 6,000 years after their cousins on the mainland disappeared. They ate leaves off trees like giraffes.

I enjoy how quickly my life becomes minuscule when the scale of time turns planetary. Though there have been humans, genetically, on the planet, for about three hundred thousand years, the oldest civilization we have traces of is about five thousand years old. We have been in our current interglacial period—in between ice ages—called the Holocene for 11,700 years. Scientists predict that the next true glacial period will begin fifty thousand years from now.

Relationships, I have come to learn, are nothing short of miraculous. That anyone manages to get into them is wild; that anyone manages to make a relationship work for years, decades, is mystifying, extraordinary, awe-some. My parents celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary earlier this week by visiting the church where they were married, and tears welled up in my eyes when I saw pictures of them, all these years later, kneeling at the same altar where they took their first vows.

Back in my teenage years, I used to think (rather, I would just not think, and in that gap, some assumptions took over), that relationships were something that two people tumbled into. Before going to university, I “pinned” a quote from Fitzgerald on a moody Pinterest board titled “words” (in lowercase, of course): “They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.” When I first read the quote, I convinced myself I recognized it from my last reading of Gatsby and experienced a profound identification: not only were those words evocative of the early loves I had experienced, but they also symbolized the love that I wanted to find in my life. I printed the quote, embellished with a trendy background, and taped it to my bedroom wall, neatly placed between pictures of my friends and family and other similarly garish quotes.

If you had asked Dominique at that age what she hoped for in a relationship, she wouldn’t have known what to answer. I learned to be in relationships by watching the world around me—like many of us, I suppose. No one sat me down and explained to me how to form a bond with another human being, what was at stake when you decide to be vulnerable, feeling, and caring, and how to navigate the rich inner experience of falling in (and out of) love. I constructed strategies for how to conduct myself in relationships by spotting patterns in movies and books, and in what others around me said or did; as if I were trying to write, from the outside, a rulebook that everyone else but me had access to.

There were some things that I knew I enjoyed: I liked having someone to text all the time. I liked long phone calls where nothing much was said, but where I felt we were connecting. I liked watching movies with my boyfriends, be it at home or in the cinema. I liked cheesy handwritten letters. But when any of this felt strained or uncomfortable, when jealousy or infidelity appeared, when I felt insecure, I didn’t have the vocabulary or tools to see what was happening, let alone do something about it. And I also couldn’t ask for help because the space of a relationship felt sacred to me—I couldn’t fathom translating any experience, feeling, or words from the relationship to anyone outside of the dyad to see it through different eyes. I’d write in my journals, eagerly and enthusiastically, about all I felt and tried, but I never imagined sharing those words with anyone else (though sometimes I would share them with the lucky boyfriend).

When things felt hard, I relied on sheer, sharp logic to come up with ideas to work through the dynamic. One time, as resentment built with my most serious high school boyfriend, I suggested that he and I write letters to each other expressing everything we didn’t like about the other. I thought, perhaps, if we aired things, we’d be able to get on with it. That didn’t go particularly well, and he went on to date another woman named Dominique, which made me inordinately proud for many years.

The term “Ice Age” was first used in 1837 by German botanist Karl Friedrich Schimper. A few years earlier, while studying moss growing on boulders on the Alpine upland, he noticed that the boulders seemed out of place. Like a handful of other men of science before him, he began to wonder where these “erratic” boulders had come from: the rocks were much larger and heavier than others at that altitude on the mountain. German, Swiss, and Scottish scientists had, for some years, suggested that glacial movement was the only way to explain the migration of such large masses of stone. Building on these theories, Schimper concluded, as one does, that Earth must experience alternating periods of ice (his term was verödungszeiten, or “times of desertification or depopulation”) and warmth—it was during the periods of ice that large glaciers could carry boulders long distances.

In 1837, Schimper, along with Louis Agassiz, a fellow man of science and university friend who had accompanied Schimper on summer expeditions to the Alps, presented their hypotheses at a Swiss conference on climatic history. At the time, the prevailing theory about Earth’s climate pattern was that of eternal, progressive cooling: Earth began as a molten rock, and the planet would cool gradually until, one day, it would solidify. After Schiller and Agassiz presented, the experts at the climactic history conference were outraged—how could these men possibly suggest that Earth’s climate comes in waves of warmth and frost? It wasn’t until 1870, with James Croll’s book Climate and Time, in Their Geological Relations, which provided a more credible explanation for the Ice Age based on the variations of the Earth’s orbit, that the theory of the “Ice Age” became widely accepted.

One of my favorite things about growing up has been realizing that clichés are true. All my life, I heard people say, “relationships are complicated”, and I sort of believed it, but given my early lessons in the art of relationships and love, I only imagined soap opera intrigue and, when I was being generous, the unpredictable flow of life. I suspect this had more to do with the fact that I had never learned what it meant to truly be in relationship with someone—but perhaps I had learned, and, in the five or more years that had passed since the last time I talked about someone as a partner, I forgot.

A relationship is a complex ecosystem, which, I’ll argue, is composed of three bodies: two participants and the bond between them. Each body has wants and needs. Each body has access to different modes of communication to negotiate on behalf of their wants and needs, and those modes include language, of course, but also silence, movement, touch, energy, and emotion. And, as if that weren’t enough, each body carries their own dimension of time: the past, present, and future. All these things must not only be in alignment with each other while in movement, but also be consistently maintained and nurtured, which requires careful attention, sharp diagnosis, and caring intervention. Over the last year, I’ve learned—I hope for the better—how delicate a relationship can be.

It is new to me to consider “the bond” as a third, distinct entity in a relationship. Over the last year and a half, my therapist used the word from time to time—she’d say something to the effect of, well, despite the challenges in the relationship, you’re tending to the bond between you; you’re not acting in an attempt to sever it—but I didn’t know what she meant. I brushed it off. It was easier for me to believe that both parties just had to take care of and show love to one another, and that would be enough to carry the relationship forward.

Curiously, however, when I look back at how I conduct myself in relationships, I unconsciously tend to the bond. Even in those early, clumsy attempts at relationships, I’d always make an effort to reach into the space between us, and try to cultivate it by suggesting modes of connection or opening channels of vulnerability. Unaware of this “third body” in a relationship, though, I was acting on instinct. I couldn’t see the ways in which I over-functioned, and, despite my best intentions, contributed to imbalances in my past relationships. I didn’t know I was doing that work on my own. I didn’t know I wanted my partners to meet me in that shared space. I didn’t know we could work on the relationship together. I didn’t know that was something I could ask for. That was one of the things that didn’t work in this last attempt. One, of course, among others.

As I read about the “eternally cooling” climate theory of the 1830s, I couldn’t help but think about one of my favorite artists, Joseph Beuys. In 1977, Joseph Beuys found an unused wedge-shaped space between the pedestrian underpass to the Schlossplatz in Münster and the ramp leading to a university lecture hall. He was mesmerized by this inconspicuous but futile cavity in the city structure. Beuys had the space meticulously reconstructed and made a cast of it, using a mixture of 23 parts stearin, a hard, white, odorless waxy substance that constitutes most animal fats and vegetable oils, to 1 part beef tallow, also known as animal fat. He let the substance cool, and when it was solid enough, he had the almost 10-meter-long wedge cut into pieces, which were later presented in the atrium of the Landesmuseum in Zürich as a “social sculpture”. This piece is currently on display at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.

The resulting sculptures are weird, sure, but they’re also breathtaking. Exhibited in a downstairs room of the old train station turned museum in Berlin, the gargantuan blocks of animal fat remind me, of course, of Sloths during the ice age. You feel their organic presence as you walk between them, but their jagged edges feel unnerving, out of place. Some of the larger sculptures are splitting in half, and the torn structures are held together by metal belts. The largest sculpture in the group has wires digging into its core, and these wires are attached to a rudimentary mechanical box that reminds me of a VCR player. On closer inspection, it is easy to see this box is a thermometer.

Joseph Beuys famously created with eclectic materials: beeswax, felt, tallow, stone, wood, and copper. He attributed his choices to a phenomenal “founding” story. He was, allegedly, a pilot in the Second World War, when his plane crashed somewhere over Crimea. A group of Tartars found him, injured and freezing in an inhospitable landscape, took him in, and nursed him to life with the help of felt, wood, stone, and animal fat. These materials were waged symbolically in his later art.

The pieces that together compose Unschlitt/Tallow (Wärmeskulptur auf Zeit hin angelegt) [Heat Sculpture Designed for Long-term Use] were long thought to be eternally cooling. The tallow insulates its own center (maintaining a Hot core??) but, inevitably, eventually, the whole sculpture should become fully solid. Once it does, it will never be Hot again. If you’ll allow me, I’d like to quote from an article on the website Online Viewing Room about Unschlitt:

“The presentation insists that sculpture is not only what is seen but also what reverberates in the space it inhabits. Beuys’s immense blocks of tallow, cast in 1977, reshape the gallery into an environment of precarious permanence, amplifying the invisible forces that press upon both body and space. The exhibition is not partitioned into thematic rooms, but the open display allows viewers to confront the work as an environmental presence rather than an isolated object. […]

The massive wedge of tallow, randomly cut into six blocks, appears at first as inert matter. Yet its physical instability—the threat of melting under human warmth—makes it a living sculpture. Originally cast to fill a Münster underpass, the work critiques the emptiness of postwar urban space while reminding us that material itself carries societal histories of waste, consumption, and industry. The tactile aura is unavoidable: visitors sense the soft density of the fat, almost smelling its organic residue, as though the gallery itself sweats with the material. […]

Beuys declared that art must fuse with the person, dissolving the distance between object and subject. Unschlitt embodies this conviction: as heat threatens its form, the viewer’s very presence becomes part of its transformation. It stages a quiet drama of mutual absorption, in which sculpture is not static monument but porous membrane.”

Unschlitt challenges our usual experience of art. We can be lulled into believing that art lies inert, hanging on the white walls of museums, and transforms us. If done well, art sinks into our being, helps us see the world anew. But Beuys created something where the relationship is bidirectional: the grotesque sculptures of Unschlitt can also be transformed by every body that comes near them.

It was colder that day in February at the Alpine restaurant, my friend added in between French fries, than it had been in most regions during the Ice Age. As we ate our lunch, the temperature wobbled around minus 10 degrees centigrade and bravely climbed to the single digits below zero. It was hard to be outside, but also surprisingly, feasible.

After she finished sharing her research findings, I turned the topic over to my own studies. I shared with her how baffling I was finding being in a relationship, not because of the usual misgivings, but because I hadn’t realized how much I, as a self, had to grow to show up well. I wasn’t only my present self in this relationship; I was also every possible version of myself that has ever existed.

I recounted to her a moment from early in the relationship, from one of the first months: he had come over to work at my apartment because I had been feeling under the weather. After the first warm, caring hours passed, I began to feel agitated, uncomfortable. I fixated on how my apartment had exploded around me: his backpack and all its contents were strewn all over my carpet. Used napkins and tissues lay across my coffee table. A crowd of empty cans piled up next to the trash can. I was present and adult one moment, and the next, I was eighteen again, seething. Why wasn’t he cleaning up after both of us?! I wanted to throw him and all this stuff out of the window. It had been years since I had felt that way, that anger. I felt I had lost my mind. I had. This was the closest I had allowed anyone into my life in many years. Later, I realized I was stressed about what it meant to let someone else take care of me.

As I look back to moments like that, no wonder I was blind to the “third body” of a relationship. This relationship (any relationship?!) reflected and refracted me back to myself, forcing me to see things I couldn't see in the comfort of my Hot Girl Summer days alone. Romantic relationships, I’m understanding, are something like a Hall of Mirrors warping reality back at you, sometimes favorably, sometimes not. I feel proud of myself for trying to keep up with all these reflections—I wasn’t excellent, certainly, but I was honest with myself more often than not. I was honest with myself more often than I had ever been before.

At the start of this year, I re-opened my Pinterest account as an antidote to the ailments of social media. I wanted a space where I could see more art. A few weeks ago, I pinned a quote (on a new board called, of course, “words” in lowercase letters) that said something to the effect of: none of us out here on Earth are not, somehow, wounded. Under those conditions, where injuries lurk in every corner of our being, the Halls of Mirrors of relationships will, inevitably, expose, probably even augment, our sharpest wounds. I am beginning to see that as a blessing—how miraculous that one can be safe enough with someone else that we become willing to let our pain free. But for that to go well, I learned, the third body—the bond—becomes important. When both parties in the relationship inevitably falter back to our achey, breakey, sad or hurt selves, there needs to be something else to hold us back to each other. To keep the structure together.

Does water suffer when it freezes? What is it like to change your material state? For your molecules to bond with one another, and arrange themselves into neat, cage-like crystalline structures? What would it feel like, in turn, for these bonds to dissipate, and for the molecules, once attached, to slip and slide past each other? And then to do it over, and over again, move from ice to water, then later to gas, and then come back to water again?

When I first imagined writing this piece, I thought that my conclusion would be that I could don the term “Ice Age” over whatever happened over the last year and a half. It was funny, I thought, given how cold the winter was and how these United States were handling immigration. I thought it would be easy to describe the last year and a half—and especially the last winter—as a time of depopulation, of desertification, of hardening. But I’m surprised to write to you, on the other side, and say that I think it was actually a period of warmth, of melting. I let another body come near mine, and I let it affect my tallow despite its fragility, the instability, and, most of all, the risk of melting. I let this relationship change me, shape me, into something a little more organic, a little more seeing.

I’m still figuring out how to inhabit the world now, in this new structure. But it is summer again, and it is not just any summer. It is the first summer under our lord and savior, Zohran Mamdani, as mayor. It is a World Cup. And the Knicks… well, actually, I’m not going to say anything about the Knicks for fear of cosmic retribution.

Basically, the point is, I am back. And I’ll be here, again, making sense of it all. Stick around? And please share this with other people? I’d like to turn this project into something more than what it currently is (a book?!), and more Hotties affiliated with it will help on that path.

‘Til soon.