The Ice-Breakers

The Ice-Breakers

At the end of winter, there is much this city teaches me about how civilization conquers nature, or rather how it acts out its conquest.

This weekend I helped my girlfriend Tess break up ice in her back yard to prevent her basement from flooding when the big melt came. Ice breaking is a primally satisfying activity. You find a chunk of ice that is looking defiant and you approach it with authority and a steel shovel. When the weather is just right your victory is assured. The first blow of the shovel blade announces your presence. The second and third cut a thin groove in the ice, a target for further blows. After an hour of self-taught shovel technique, I realize that the secret of shoveling is much like the secret of chopping wood: let the axe (or in this case the shovel blade) do the work.  I lift the shovel loosely let it dangle in the air for a moment (while for some inexplicable reason the words "I sacrifice you in the name of Quetzalcoatl" run through my mind) and bring it down with a relaxed stroke on target. After a few strokes comes the payoff. The crystal lattice of the ice gives way and a chunk breaks off with a resigned sigh. I break off one piece of ice so large it would make a very satisfactory front desk at an ice hotel. This is the beauty of ice. It resists, but when it breaks, it does so with a delightful suddenness. Remember the crumbling glaciers in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

As the weather warms up and I find new and better excuses for going out to walk around the neighbourhood (I need a hamburger, I'm out of absinthe, I really should try soy-milk, perhaps I do need more candles in my apartment) I notice that my newfound love of icebreaking is not an individual eccentricity.

The first sign of our natural love of ice-breaking came in early February. Tess and I were walking to Atwater market and we passed by a row of large icicles dangling from the roof of -- not ironically -- an ice company warehouse. Tess is an instigator, so she challenged the 12 year old boy in me to knock an icicle down with a snowball. After a few "practice shots" I hit one and it fell, shattering very satisfyingly into baseball sized shards that could then be used to knock down other icicles. Once I started, it was hard to stop.

Last week I walked past a neighbor of mine attacking -- and I really do mean attacking -- a six foot high cube of snow that persisted on his lawn after the sidewalk had been free of snow for days. He had already cleared a quarter of the snow away, as was attested by the giant gash in the face of the cube. His own face showed a mix of determination, rage, joy, and something like insanity, for insanity it truly was. He came at the snow cube like a man protecting his family from wolves.

Even today I noticed, piled around several trees on rue St. Hubert, large chunks of ice, obvious victims of recent violence. We have gone collectively mad. We have taken to the streets with our pitchforks to oust winter from our city.  And we have piled the corpses of defeated ice blocks like warriors displaying the heads of our vanquished enemies.

What strikes me as strange in our behavior, however, is this: winter is on the way out. The streets are unfrozen. Even one more storm will be gone in a day. We have won. The sun is on our side again and the final melt is inevitable. So why do we take to the final vestiges of ice as if they were the cause of all our woes? Why do we, in effect, kick winter when it is down? Yes, I know there are practical reasons. We shovel to prevent basements from flooding and to free our flowerbeds from the grip of ice so that their tender shoots can find the sun. Maybe. But the look on my neighbour's face as he drove his shovel into the body of the snowpile with the fury of a berserker, as well as my own happy slaughter of the ice, tells me another story, and it may be the strange an contradictory story of civilization.

We give the final push to winter only after nature has done the real work. We clear off the last piles of snow, break the last sheets of ice as if it were the final mop up of a process that we ourselves had begun in January (rather than sitting indoors with the heat turned up and The Bachelor on television) This work of ours is a kind of shared delusion, a miming of real power, a kind of public theatre of power, a power-play. It is the unchivalrous pursuit of an enemy already in rout. But this power-play may hold the key to how we manage to survive nature at all.

The theory of psychoanalysis offers us a counterintuitive answer to the question of what lies below the surface of our identity. Conventional wisdom tells us that the deeper we dig into ourselves, the more layers we strip away, the more we can approach the truth of our being, the truth that lies at our core. Lacanian theory offers another possibility. What lies deepest in us is not the truth, but the lie upon which our being is built, the delusion that holds us together. If we undo the delusion, we undo ourselves, our very consistency as human beings. So the lie at the core of our soul is not something to be fought, something to be washed away by the truth. It is rather the false beginning of all other truths.

And as true as this is for individuals, it is so much truer for civilizations. What we cannot bear -- what any civilization cannot bear -- is that we are at the mercy of nature. We indulge in disaster films that show us being swept away by tsunamis, tornadoes, planet-killing meteors, even trees that turn on us and drive us to suicide. These fantasies -- like all fantasies -- are an image of the real workings of our relationship to our environment. And isn't the environmental crisis itself an image of this fantasy? We can be swept away by an imbalance in nature, by one of those sudden upheavals in which a seemingly slow-moving ecosystem suddenly explodes. But rather than surrender to this overwhelming power of nature we hack furiously at its edges. We build levees against floods that can top and smash them. We lay down roads and rail lines that can be rendered useless by a blizzard. We make plans for natural disasters, plans that will only be effective so long as the disasters are not too disastrous. All we can do is tinker with the edges of nature and hope for the best because ultimately -- and despite those who want us to become one with nature -- we define ourselves against nature. We emerge at the moments that we resist nature. Our medicine defies the inevitable decay of our bodies. Our Cathedrals and fighter jets fly in the face of gravity. Our morality flouts the selfishness of genetic imperatives.

The paradox in which we as humans ground our being is that we have nowhere from which to emerge but nature itself, yet we emerge from it as the very undoing of what, up until our arrival on the scene, have been natural processes. It is as if nature could not think of any other way to proceed but to throw a monkey wrench into its own workings. Nature, perhaps, grew tired of its own cyclicality, the never-ending round and round of an ultimately deadlocked process. So, like many of us who trip ourselves up for our own good, who get sick just at the moment when we need to stop doing what we are doing, nature creates a symptom of its own deadlock: us. And we function, for nature and in nature, as the perfect symptom.

As Freud knew, every symptom is a sign, a communication. Symptoms call attention to themselves. They announce their presence. So intimate is the relationship between communication (language) and symptom that they sometimes seem indistinguishable. It is as if the very act of communicating is, at its deepest level, symptomatic. We speak because something has gone awry, has gone off the tracks. And if we, as humans, are a symptom of the self-undoing of nature, then it seems possible that what is most definitive of our humanness is the monism of communicating and acting, of saying and being. Our very being is a statement. As speaking beings, our very speaking is being. It is for this reason that we can be both deeply delusional and deeply natural.

As beings who speak of ourselves, we are always delusional. We speak only a little truth of ourselves, and that truth is built on wish, fantasy, myth, lie. We convince ourselves that we have power over nature, that with the right planning, work and ingenuity, we can hold its power at bay. We look forward to the day when death itself will be nothing but an exotic option for the thrill seeker.

But as beings who are the symptoms of nature itself, the communicating symptom of nature's own deadlock, our delusional assertions of power are the voice of a nature that has found some way of turning against itself, some way of shaking itself out of torpor by negating itself (and this negating is, we can say, the real definition of the Freudian Death Drive). Nature emits a symptom, a word that is us, the being of words. In acting, we both declare and are declared. Nature says "No more of this!" and we emerge. We look at nature and say "No more of this," and culture emerges. The statement -- the "no more of this"-- can only find its place by facing, on one side, the real, and on the other, delusion.

Our attack on the ice is our statement that the very arrival of spring depends upon our work. And in holding this belief, we are profoundly unnatural. As unnatural as nature itself.