Discomancia no. 48 Ice and Life

Im back in Amsterdam. Somehow it feels gloomier than before... Have you ever been here? The winter is way much colder than in your country. After the really frosty days, the snow slowly becomes the epidermis of every single sidewalk of the city. Well, you probably know this process way much better than i do but yeah, the snow becomes ice which eventually turns into a temporary membrane on which you can leave all kinds of traces... like skin. I like traces (and your skin as well).

For me cycling has been the main highlight of the city, while i discover different roads to the same places i develop cognitive mappings that allow me to locate myself in this world, and perhaps locate you?

However, the solid/fragile sheet of ice that has a root-like structure, like the veins of a tree though which the liquid slowly seeps, contains people from riding their bikes or at least clumsy foreigners like me who are not used to ice-cycling. The city feels dead to me.

I live in a container in the west harbor of the city, right next to the water where the ice-building process is much more accentuated: the icy temporary membrane is kneaded together into porridge ice which gradually forms free-floating plates, pancake ice which one cold afternoon freezes into a single solid sheet. Sailors say that "the colder it gets, the more the frost gains its momentum"... they probably mean that the colder it gets, the crystals in the water form stronger bridges and enclose tighter and tighter the salt water pockets until there is no space for anything but blocks of frozen water, blocks of ages, blocks of epochs, blocks of sexes, blocks of sound, blocks of becoming....