This is the clip that inspired the beginning of my essay, “Ablation,” which was just published yesterday by Nixes Mate, an unbearably cool literary journal, in their special issue on climate change. No matter how many times I’ve watched this clip, I still find it incredible. In the essay, I talk about icebergs, breasts, and my mother. Here are the first two paragraphs, but you can read the rest of it here:
There’s a scene in the opening episode of Our Planet in which David Attenborough narrates a calving iceberg. It is so awesome, so hard to grasp, that the only way to understand it is through simile: ice collapses into itself like a skyscraper demolished by dynamite; ice vapor rises up like an atomic cloud; the ice rocks like a grieving body. Sea birds wing away from the calving and they’re small specks, the only living things to put the destruction into perspective. This iceberg is, in fact, larger than a skyscraper, and over the course of twenty minutes 75 million tons of ice break into the sea. Frame upon frame of this beautiful destruction, while Attenborough lets us understand both the enormity of what we’re witnessing through pixels on a screen – this glacier rises 100 meters over the sea and continues 400 meters beneath the surface – and the enormity of what we’ve collectively done to cause this – glaciers are melting twice as fast as they were just ten years ago. The elegiac violins begin before the closing credits.
*
The word ablation has two meanings – the surgical removal of body tissue and the erosion of glaciers or icebergs. The first meaning used to be the most common, but the latter is starting to surpass it as the arctic melts and icebergs calve at an alarming rate. While mammoplasty reductions like mine are not considered ablation (ablation is, specifically, the removal of abnormal tissue, like a cancer), they share the same idea of cutting away something of the physical self. That physical loss is there in the planet’s ice, which drops large slices of itself into the rising ocean. And although icebergs calving into a roiling ocean is incredibly sudden in terms of geological time, it is still considered part of the erosive processes of ablation that include wind erosion, melt, and evaporation. The word ablation holds a fascinating idea: a connection between the planet and human anatomy, both bodies, both having pieces of themselves cleaved away and lost forever.
I’d been wanting to have a Notions & Notes episode on the theme of breaking and fragmentation and had already gathered the other pieces, so the formal release of this essay into the world felt like the right time.
This poem is essentially a list of the pieces of self that have been lost since once being loved completely. It’s such an incredible way to say how loving makes our flawed selves whole.
And what would an issue about the beauty of breakings be without a few great break-up songs.
The first time I saw these proto-surrealist landscapes on Public Domain Review, I thought they were such a bizarre aesthetic, oddly modern, but not really like any era of art I’ve ever seen. They’re actually woodcuts made by a nearly-forgotten German artist, Loernz Stoer, reportedly a student of Dürer’s (who introduced the ideas of linear perspective). To appreciate the genius of these prints, think about their context: this horrendous painting was in vogue, the Mughal empire was still pretty new, Martin Luther was still alive and pissing off the most powerful institution in the world, and half the native population of Honduras was dying from the measles brought by Europeans. As a species, we still had a lot to figure out, but these artists were figuring out philosophy, science, and geometry behind perspective. Heck, we STILL have a lot to figure out about the neuroscience of perception (seriously, go read that article about optical illusions and then you’ll think these disturbing landscapes are a good metaphor for reality being a construct). The prints are published in the nearly wordless book, Geometria et Perspectiva and are intended to be instructive of linear perspective for artists and artisans. Look closely: even his signature is in linear perspective.
What I love about these landscapes is how Stoer weaves in natural forms and trees to highlight the precision of the geometry. The space made by the plantlife makes it seem as if nature is reclaiming the space, the architecture falling apart into its elements.
So while these woodblock prints celebrate man-made forms, they also meditate on their temporality.
It has been an unexpected joy to hear from subscribers of this newsletter about what they’ve enjoyed, what’s resonated, what connections they’ve found, and because Stoer’s woodblock prints remind me of how buildings break down, I want to share something from a reader who responded when I wrote about my love of abandoned buildings. He shared the photographs of Debe Hale from a project to restore and preserve a mill in North Carolina. I particularly love her images of doorways opening into multiple rooms, how the color and light are broken up by these different frames.
There’s also a treasure trove of documents and images from the mill. These fragments of the past are fascinating—they provide glimpses, filled with gaps, into the era when these rooms were filled with ordinary lives. I particularly love the samples of the fabrics they produced in the mill and find an interesting resonance between the plaids and the shapes and colors of Hale’s photos of the rooms.
Motoi Yamamoto is a Japanese artist who creates intricate, large-scale installations out of salt. His installations are wrapped up in the deaths of his sister and his wife. Yamamoto says of his work, “By sitting on the floor and spending long hours drawing, perhaps I am trying to retain memories that fade with time. I create works to ward against the self-defense instinct of oblivion, looking for a convincing form of acceptance to come to terms with the parting of ways.”
About the above piece, Yamamoto has said, “This installation takes small memories and trivial events tucked away in the drawers of the heart and imagines them as cells, connecting them together to create a display. A nonchalant day-to-day life shared with a loved one – it could be said that this work encourages one to think about at those times.”
Although I couldn’t find anywhere where Yamamoto draws a connection between his own work at the traditional Japanese art of kintsugi, I’m curious about how the two forms find beauty in breaking. In kinstugi, when a piece of ceramic broke through some natural accident, it was repaired with resin mixed with gold, highlighting the life and story of the object. Both Yamamoto’s art and kinstugi find beauty and repair through celebrating the breaking.
At the end of every exhibition, Yamamoto invites people to scoop up handfuls of the salt and take it back to the sea, returning it to where it came from. The whole artistic process has helped heal his grief he says, explaining: “It’s a rebirth. It’s about connecting the people and the ocean and continuing the process of healing.”
Yamamoto’s works are unquestionably beautiful and breathtaking, but in the return to the sea, the salt transforms from a deeply personal and individual meditation on the ordinary moments with lost loved ones into a communal experience of release, a return in the cycle of life. It’s this particular moment the art transcends itself: when the salt composing the greater whole is broken back into its elemental grains, when it becomes the stuff of life itself.
Thanks for reading! As always, let me know if anything resonates or connects for you. In the spirit of kintsugi, please share this with someone you miss.