Melting ice

In 1815, Tambora erupted, dust filled the skies, the temperature of the earth dropped 2 degrees. Percy Shelley to satiate his thirst for radiant frost travelled to the Savoy glaciers. He wrote ‘Darkness’:

The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the star
Did wander darkling in the eternal space
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air


Amsterdam Feb 2021
There are no glaciers here to scratch at the mountain. Lowlands, altitudinally-challenged, have no site to stage such a geological ritual. The water is trickling on the canals; the mallards are confused. The timid sun thaws the snow and ice, mixing with the grime whipped up by the tyres of passing vehicles. Salt is sprinkled, burning it down to a treacherous syrup. Noses of statues in the Rijks are dripping aquiline snots, a nude flautist, a rolling discus, heaving a boulder uphill. The ponds reflect the skeleton trees, a diaphanous slush. Rubble of thaw piles up at the roadside, like tectonic plates snarling upwards, entrenched, clashing at glacial pace.

I pass a statue of Descartes clutching a book. In 1635, the philosopher analysed the morphologies of snow crystals and flakes:

Little plates of ice, polished, transparent, thick as a sheet, hexagons, six sides so straight, six angles so equal, impossible for men to make anything so exact.

With a curious grin and a haircut like a sack of apples, the 10ft statue seems pleased to see all the floating flakes, angular and unique. A snowman melts in a doorway opposite, a crown of tagliatelle, carrots for limbs, mud for teeth, a cyclops with a blueberry eye.

In life, Descartes observed melting candles, as the wax dripped down, he pondered existence and the meaning of it all. In Meditations he noted, ‘the wax can be extended in ways I cannot accurately fathom.’

In death, immortalised in statue form, Descartes watches a snowman melt with time.

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If Shelley had the chance to observe this pantomime of sluggish disappearance, he may have written this:

The stubborn snowman, tears sloe extinguish’d,
The carrots lie morbid in filth, a shallow pool
A coiled crown, a withering iris,
Thawing with the passing star