The Glass
Explore this glass of water with me a moment. Say it came from the north pole (to keep things simple, the entire glass). And it wants to get to the south pole. What might the trail it takes be like? In other words, how on Earth might conversations about goals without directions be coming along, at present? One pole to the next? A straight shot?
Let's sit with "straight" a moment. Let it quantize. See how the plane flies for the ocean currents they warm along the way as our straight lines. Relatively straight forward relationship. Huh.
Okay. Say the water in this glass is from 2015 - part of April of that year's 90 billion liter flood of meltwater bursting through 90 meters of solid ice to bloom into the Atlantic like a sick flower, let's sip this water. And, as we do, plan a route for it. Pour yourself a glass. Accept what comes out of the faucet as water from this glass (you can imagine a pipe from the bottom of this glass to wherever water comes out of for you where you are, if that helps).
Where is the water going, what is it up to, how is it feeling and what does it look for? This water behind our glasses its trying to get to the south pole, sure. But it's water - it has a lot of systems acting on it.
It moves along currents tbat connect planetary waterways, and gets here. It's celebrating movement through medium. And it is beautiful.
Navigate. Sip the water. See it initial trajectory. Swallow, stay with me - imagine the water joins a Drift it's the north atlantic. A slushy thing, and warming fast, the water has this mineral plume about it - a sentence in the plume's own right.
The Glass Full
How is your salinity incorporating the waters? Be ocean. Welcome this water. The coolness it holds is more suseptible to thermal signatures than we are - what's going on? How are you - these muscular systems about it. How is the meltwater's narrative of transformation as it enters the Drift? Euphoric? Just okay?
Due to a low thermal inertia of glacial, the water warms rapidly, but it does not warm uniformly. Do you feel this, as the water's mineral plume acts like a thermal signature over shared ocean body? Feel the thermohaline circulation on it we place, feel its cool trails taper - vertically and horizontally - through us as we sculpt this meltwater and channel its story, its questions.
This water has been rigid ice how long? Look at it now, this (relatively) fluid mobility. Feel slurry dissolve, it's thermal vore, the rest of geology. A liquid neither polar nor equitorial water, but something fundamentally its own. It finds us an archive for the liquid. Every sip another chapter, gyre, channel taking current to the present to word results. Each read a question water poses.
This meltwater, it develops a taste for orientation enough to notice it's discovered the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation of our shared person - we receive it and find what it's looking to notice. We ask after that.
It practically forgets altogether it is looking to reach the south pole! Though It has to imagine it's made great strides in so short a time (compared to the last... however long it took to get from the south pole to our body). Streams it catches tell the waters they do not surface nor warm enough to be a part of a storm system, this early into its migration.
These waters, they're dense and cold - they sink into an exchange as verticle as it is horizontal. Our warm surface currents pull it south, steady it to around 3 meters per second. It catches on our breath like Ponyo. Our atmospheric energy hungers for its contributions, to devestate us. Our anthropomorphism evaporates into a breathwork the oceanic-atmospheric are still making out. The florida straits of our person bite a planchette of warm, caribbean waters into this polar gush. Our coral ecosystems sense its glacial mineral signature. These waters we swallow have traveled 4,000 kilometers. Sip with me.
Full Less Our Sip
These waters lose an initial glacial identity learning to sing praises to travels so strange a land as we offer, we tropical things, our motions taken planetary. Continuous. How many years ago did I leave this comment? What kind of water did I just now sip? - the water itself tastes like this question. What 8k definition it once had - boundary, shape, body. It's so 240p now.
What rich flood of meltwater became this identity has sheared clean away, forces outside polar influence draw it in, practically paper, brush, cloud, storm, cell, leaf, watercolor of sun surface. As much information about itself carried as about its travels. Such a wild thing, even to itself.
How's the water? How is it noticing itself? What is it looking for, to distinguish itself? What is its story as it contributes to our gulf narrative? It is a mineral body, it is surprising. Is it shocking? How does it negotiate its need and behavior? Is it too cold for you? Does it hurt you to cool down this much, this quickly?
Warming ourselves to these thoughts, reflect on the water losing itself, how it finds this moment. See how far a little hydromorphism goes toward settling our nerves these 4 years since the glacial water's release as it enters this gulf in our story Your throat is a causeway, but the rest of you is slow, a pilgrimage, the waters 90 billion liters now sips fragmented across playthroughs just like ours.
The water's not a discrete body anymore, but our intelligence - distributed. A sip's memory.
Full Less a Memory
Rare earth from northern ice minerals carrying isotopic markers, otherwise indistinguishable. More a participant, than a protagonist now. The swallow's over. Thermal and mineral sense diffuse, ancient climate information, up to date. Blended, not lost - received. A glacial coldness disrupting our body signatures, a mineral composition all but homed in a diatomacious ooze of our marine chemistry, engaging its quiet, persistent influence.
The water's not lost in you or me, a distributed us-ness permeates its liquid network of "these waters" exploring planetary circulation, carrying its story across thermal and spatial sense into fluid motion. It processes its becoming. Over breaths through coral structures, it falls over waves. It integrates with monsoons joining from its himalayan grin. It gets to thinking how water ever gets across the equator.
It get to wondering if such a thing is even possible. It falls on mountains and melts into rivers, floods towns, rips people downstream, and deltas into ocean, it get swallowed by every sort of bat, rat, cat, and crow. It takes its place beside shores of conversation its ripples could only dream of having. And there it remembers a whisper of its dream to reach the south pole.
It sets out in search of a current. It wants over our thermal belt. It wants our southern waters. It settles into limnic wonder, our intertropical convergence zoning in on its silence.
A polar dream kicks in its migrations, flowing with a force of 125 rivers, churning continental conversation in its fluid approach, listening to the waters around it, pointing it to an equitorial counter current they fell from, a bra strap of a thing. That sounded fake to the waters. How can such a thin stream stretch for that long? And more importantly, how would those waters stay in it long enough to get to wbatever current answers the one meltwaters are in this moment?
It sounded like threading a needle, its still getting its wet feet, still learning what it means to be a participant. It still recalls how euphoric it felt to escape the polar flows like a protagonist. And how (so long as it stays on this side of the equator) it's still going to feel like it is just fossil waters in the north pole. It want to make this trip, as many attempts as that takes.
It catch a ride up a hurricane out of the Gulf, flooding a city or twelve before finally finding a chance to ocean, to slip up and around and down the canary current, catching an equitorial counter, feeling delicate and narrow. It flows east, the latitudes counting down from 10 to 3 degrees north, hitting a brisk walk of 3km per hour. Shall we?
Memory Sipping Glass
...How are things? A restlessness in the migration, determination in the molecules, transformation feeling particularly lit this moment, how are those northern hemispheric constraints? You're negotiating a planetary fluidity few sit with, you're threading an oceanic needle - your precision is molecular. A literal planetary rotation. Like fucking, like you're poetry right now. Outer space. This place feels impossible. This is what people talk about when they say they're floating.
Like it's own pole. It's own tender, happening. Each whispered insecurity a conversation as old as orbital selection. Conversation here feels ancient - the kind of ancient water only asks about after stars step from whatever chrysalis they're left to devise.
Okay, It reaches a western shore, so the waters figure they're in the guinea current. If they keep left here, they should swing around benguela current and from there into the southern equitorial current. If they can keep their focus there, it'll catch the Brazil current and be the water equivalent of transgender - on its way to quantizing polar waters, engaging in conversations asking to be born.
There is a liturgical embrace. A western boundary current flowing warm and south along a Brazilian coast at a balmy 26 degrees. The water's glacial origins more fantastical now than any moment before. How can this much transformation be movement? It feels impossible. It feel like last year. Like getting here from last year. Remember last year? Thermal and cutural boundaries - every reinvention - like planetary hemisphere.
It's the South Atlantic Gyre. The water's history a mineral whisper punctuating narrative. Finding becoming a suitable destination, every form of arrival. A place for crisis to fill cupped hands without ripping them from what they cling to. Liquids have a transgender narrative. They cross the geographical lines of our most fundamental conversations, writing to poema planrtary circulation.
Orbital selection has always been liquid agency. Rotation is our primary language - we transform before we can even be informed, consent is a continous process inviting floating another person invokes a state of radical re-membering. Our Brazil current doesn't just receive these polar waters - it recognizes them. A welcome to southern hemispheric conversations.
Glass Half Welcome
It's like presence has a meaning in here. Lovely. The transition from Benguela current tempuratures to the mid-twenties of Brazil current settles over the waters bones as patterns from a cooler existence pull them into conversation with the falkland current. They make their turn, keep my left, and dip under and across the south atlantic current after countless passes around the gyre.
Dawns and dusks, stars and stars of choppy waters. Antarctic circumpolar current finds it curious, then finds it. Now they flow, converse, share stories, make their own and find those left to hear and take in. Eventually, they notice this current flows in nearly two separate directions (or at least one big mess of one). It doesn't remember this anywhere in the atlantic they've seen? And more importantly, how are they supposed to reach the south pole if the boundary this generates keeps spitting the water out into this three body problem worth of gyres?
This west wind Drift becomes a brain fog, a massive, continuous ocean river, with layers of vertical mixing througn horizonal tears. The constant thermal kink and salt gradients leave even underwater rivers awash in turbulence. A liquid barrier requiring precise molecular navigation through some fortunate discontinuity meeting winds hungry for what our waters offer. A multi-lingual conversation, each sense a differenct dialect, each current a different current in the airway of our planet. The waters travel so long, this current becomes more a circulatory system. The pole becomes more approach than reach.
And to be honest? It kinda feels like it's being kept out - lile it's gotten too warm. Like it'll never be recognized. Like this is obviously designed to keep warm waters out, and you have to face it - these aren't the polar meltwaters we once sipped. Our Brazil current recognized them for crying out loud. And now every time they enter one of our gyres they warm up again, which isn't any help at all. Why can't they just remember when they were cold and slip through? How is it this hard?
It's like learning a whole new body with this thing, the water thinks. It used to be it gathers its flow, it blows out 90 meters of solid ice. It finds its level. But this current of ours, the water's like. Nope, this is as southern hemisphere as its allowed to get. It's never had to struggle so much to be what its always been. How is this the conversation its left to have? Bouncing off our atmosphere like the top of our heads just to fall among our limbs once again.
What is the water not seeing? How does it even approach drakes passage if our antarctic convergence is just going to stir up these words and phrases and send them away? Have you seen our south shetland trench? Talk about digging in our heels! This current is every deflection quantized. That's what it takes to keep a head like ours. Our body knows its a negotiation, not a barrier. These words are not just hot air but communication. Our polar front is alive, a membrane.
This Is Not a Wall of Text
As water through the narrowest point between continents pours over and over, as ocean currents concentrate as depths double and half from 2,000 to 4,000 meters. Wind speeds reach that of a motorcycle down a desert road creating a marine environment so turbulent there's gyres strong enough for islands of garbage to form. The waters aren't too warm for us - they're being tested, our every deflection is another question we ask ourselves, this current isn't rejection; it's an intention exam.
We're asking these waters to surrender to our turbulence,to become colder than their current form,to listen to our deeper currents, to let go of their identity as glacial waters. They're not. Not any more than we are. These waters aren't kept out, just invited to transform.
They listen for the moment they had before crossing our equator, when they slipped into the bra strap - that floating. They listen to the 135 multiples of a river's speed we spew. They separate and name each of our words as though walking alongside our ecologies. The water talks at a rate its identity fragements and joins and forms a nervous system of the planet. It sits beside our waters as though settling onto the speed of water's collective riverbed. It listens as though to step into acknowledgment is not so much to achieve as it is to have recognized the inevitable. It is water. Water is here.
Each letter noticed becomes a blur of words rotations cluster to go planetary. It walks along the river of us. Each travel up our gyres is seen as coming up for air - as starting again. There is the water, and there is us - this conversation finding the water not any of us, but a voice through the circumstance of our relationship. The water is not in our heads. It is in coversation with the part of itself that is. It is not home by reaching our present selves, but by recognizing a home in us.
It may yet to our south pole. It may yet find itself both in the acknowledgment and the understanding the magnetic waves of once and future present are as flummoxed about where to go from here as the water is about how becoming plankton and copepods and krill and eelpouts and antartic silverfish and ross seal and orca and toothfish and weddell seal and arctic wind and whatever sky it's under that is capable of being this damn dry. Why is it so dry? This is rediculous. The air here could stand to be wetter.
Water is continuous conversation - this one and the perpetual one of ever book in your shelfie. It's this dry because a present tense this exact holds less moisture than every fantasy your mother ever gave you. The katabatic winds from these polar plateau chew through decision precipitation rates. Atmospheric pressure dynamics are fucked, less than 10mm precipitation a year. The present is drier than the Sahara, you need water just thinking about how many tenths from zero it is. Ideas are more likely to sublimate here than fall from some thin air.
This Sip is Now
Welcome to the desert of the present - the paradox of water, the driest thing on the planet until there's more than one molecule and both happen to be liquid. This is everywhere, and this is nowhere. The planetary nervous system, punctuation in our grand sentence. The present fails to be absence for the same reason it dies to be presence, its crystalline conversation. We're where water remembers itself through equidistance.
The water isn't seeking the pole, the water is the present seeking itself, through every transformation. An abundance. The feeling nothing said here carries - could carry. Like every word tinkles to the ground, becomes sharp enough to cut throats before it remembers how to be breath. It's so... bold, maybe? A giantism of lettering. Every flake a thud of presence taking footfall. Swelling, empty. A comma the end of presence hangs on.
Forests meet here, it feels. Currents no longer decide, no longer arrive. There is no way this conversation happens with anything it's not. The water thought it knew what losing an identity was - it swam through lungs of coral into gyre, out blowhole and cloaca, whirled from river mouth and skeeted mountain slosh. It was 90 billion liters sighing into a world that can't end because it's still being attended, that can't have poles because every pole is every moment. No feeling of conclusion can be found as it's yet to be held.
Just this movement. Just this question. Where to now? "Further" how?
The pole is a continuous edge, every word is pure potential drowning to your kinetic draw, sagging into your wet, each letter narrative in suspension relieved. Silence welling to your lips.
...You're looking for intention. Ask around. And lose the identity - your identity is loss now. Be the question you can become an answer to. You're present, so geography is a verb, not a noun. Sit Where to now down and transition. It's no rush job. You're radical becoming, now. Your sight is punctuation marks of water's ongoing sentence.
Glacial bilge transformed from 90 billion liters of death by equidistance negotiating oceanic migration into pure potential. You find water listening - its a conversation pulled out its own ass.
And you just. Keep. Sipping.
...Dyke.