The T. of Ice

The last few days, it’s been really hot (grossly hot, breath-haltingly hot [okay, maybe that was just yesterday. But yesterday was when I noticed this convergence, so the excessive heat needed to be mentioned built up exaggerated, like some sort of pathetic fallacy mimicking, I don’t know, the bubbling frenzy in my brain as the gears churned and churned and heated up in that capacious space between my ears. And mentioned not least of all because it adds to my meagre narrative. And pathetic fallacy’s always a good time.]) and you know that haze that comes to really hot cities? You know it, sure: the haze that drapes itself across the city like a damp sheet of cheesecloth and changes the feel of the air and changes the colour texture tone of the air and everything around you. Well, I’ve been sitting at my desk at work the last couple days, looking out my window at the diffused dimmed muted light of the skyline and I realised that the colour texture tone of the view outside my window matches almost exactly the colour palette of The Sea of Ice by Caspar David Friedrich.


The buildings around me match the spikes spires broken sheets of ice in colour and tone and—with my farfromperfect eyesight smoothing out (and that muslin haze helping, too) the more distant buildings—even in texture; and it’s not much of a stretch to see those slabs of ice as huge chunks of buildings crumbled collapsed. There are several buildings with cranes roosting on their roofs; the cranes with their long necks (masts) and guy-wires (rigging) that whisper their way into the broken empty husk of the shipwreck.

Ever since I set The Sea of Ice as my work computer’s desktop background, I’ve been seeing it everywhere; the concrete slabs that form the beach at Tommy Thompson Park, any violently thrown-together pile of things and now, outside my workplace window.

Though, at the same time, it’s a strong juxtaposition, too; the painting is all about the power, the overwhelming might of Nature; the utter disregard of Nature for the human world and the view outside my window is more the human attempts at overwhelming Nature, the utter disregard of humanity for Nature (though Nature is patient and resilient and insinuative and just look at any cracking splitting pavement for a glimpse of this and maybe The Sea of Ice also works as portent in a sort of fun dystopian way).

If I were disgustingly rich and the painting were for sale, I would buy it and hang it on my wall and set a chair in front of it and just sit and sit and watch and sit and stare and sit and talk to it and sit and sit