Brash ice
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: How’s your pain? The whole series is here.
A day before the sudden deaths of my brother and nephew in May 2024, this newsletter talked about fractions:
In the yoga class I teach, I talk about using the practice of yoga to gather the pieces of ourselves that we’ve left behind—in arguments, in problems unsolved, in commitments to other people, in forgetfulness, in reverie—so that we can cohere again. This is not something you have to do on purpose if you practice yoga; it’s what the yoga does. …
We leave pieces around, but then sometimes later we find them, and realize that they still fit. That’s union; that’s integrity. Over time, maybe you figure out how to put yourself together.
That post took shape as I walked (and ran and swam) around in a wrist splint after surgery necessitated by a bad bike crash. I was gathering momentum out of one disaster, blind to the one about to hit. Just in terms of comparative impact, it was like breaking a water glass and sweeping and vacuuming up all the tiny shards and particles and then, right as you’re dumping it all in the garbage can, your cat decides to knock a priceless Ming vase off a high shelf. Except in this case the ceramic under the glaze on the vase is radioactive, once broken, and some of its fragments bounce onto a fan that sends them flying in every direction, too many of them toward too many places to track.
This week I took the train down along the Hudson River from James’s house. Much of the river up near Poughkeepsie was frozen solid except for channels being cut in it by Coast Guard ships. But as we moved cityward, nearing the tidal inlet of the Atlantic where the freezing point is lower, where the great river-spanning sheet can’t cohere anymore, the ice got choppier and then more intermittent. These smaller fragments are called “brash ice,” apparently, and they are both what make up the ice sheet, by layering and bonding, and what result when it is broken.
I’m writing about this today partly because of a very recent sense that some of the fragments formed in that impact in my life almost 21 months ago have just started, barely, to re-bond. They’re drifting and sticking into the starts of layers and sheets. This is true even as other aspects of life feel fragmented, adrift, and isolated. And it occurs to me that emotional thriving has something to do—not with achieving overall coherence again when you feel it’s been lost—but with being able to hold in yourself some places, at any given time, that are intact.
As the brash ice forms itself into bigger floes and sheets and then breaks back down, as the rest of life sends along its pulverizations, always inside us are a few zones of coherence: love, faith, purpose, anger, memory. Where parts of us face onto the caustic salinity and temperature and daylight beyond them, they’re still in relationship with those zones of insulation and stability. And the time will come when each of these aspects must become the other, when the stable becomes destabilized. What is rigid and strong in us now will be weak someday, and flexible, and then they will invert again. That is the rhythm of our renewal.
This week kept up the drumbeat of something we won’t be able to believe we let happen: the rise of synthetic intelligence at the instigation and command of a scrum of profiteers who never graduated from the emotional condition of puberty. It worries me more than I can put in words. But then I remember that what has characterized this era, so far as that issue goes, is weakness and flexibility on the part of the rest of us. It won’t always be so. The really big questions, probably the biggest ones ever, are when that dynamic will flip, and what happens then.
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