Some Versions of the Ice by Adam Tipps Weinstein (review)

Of destinations for exile, why does Frankenstein’s monster flee to the Arctic ice?

At once authorized and undermined by the skittish rhetoric of non-fiction, the nine essays in Adam Tipps Weinstein’s inventive, sophisticated, and uncomfortably spiritual Some Versions of the Ice (Les Figues Press, winner of the 2014 NOS Book Contest) suggest provisional, if apocalyptic answers. Through reading the literal, symbolic, and metaphoric valences of ghostly objects such as “graveyard shoes” and “small fingers,” we can glimpse the sacred, which flickers in and out of the gaps between systems and what these systems cannot contain.

The blurring of genre is the most obvious formal enactment of the book’s slippage amongst taxonomies. As a kind of object-oriented-ontology-meta-non-fiction, Weinstein’s essays spark connections to Anne Carson and Jorge Luis Borges, as Paisley Rekdal has noted; the language games of Ben Marcus; the process-based consideration of a single concept, as with Maggie Nelson’s Bluets; the collapsing of binary oppositions found in writings by Georges Bataille; and the secret cultural codes unearthed in Roland Barthes’s Mythologies. In “Slicing Nails,” while we learn that the nail has a Shore Edge and a Moon Edge, we never quite learn exactly what the nail is. Is it fictitious? Is it an oxymoron—a nail that divides instead of joins? An animal or human nail or a nail for a hammer? Taking its epigraph from Plato’s Phaedo, the essay instructs us how, in “bent houses—houses that have transitioned into non-referential space—a Slicing Nail becomes lodged in a kitchen drawer.” This moment in the daily life of discarded objects isn’t trivial. The sudden permeability of referential spaces can be dangerous, and improper removal of the nail may lead to the house leaking out, or bursting into flames; it can shred the fabric between boundaries.

The slicing nail occupies a space between spaces, in a book which other books have leaked into. “The essay is born of books,” writes Weinstein in the afterword, quoting William Gass. Each essay contains a literary or historical epigraph, and is woven through with block quotes that are, at times, conspicuously recontextualized, such as the one attributed to “An Innocent Lady Dancer.”

As the quotations build meaning without guaranteeing ethos, the ruminative and philosophical non-fiction voice, with its pretense to objectivity, also undermines itself via shifts in the essays’ tonal end-game towards humor, exaggeration, or absurdity. In “Some Remarks About Teeth,” the reading of tooth shape, lines, and mounds can reveal the “goblin hoard of the psyche”. At the end, however, the narrator naively imagines an Eden in which humans have evolved beyond the need for teeth and “speak with the voice of all human beings,” rendering the deciphering of desire unnecessary.

In his review for The Collagist, Forrest Roth suggests that the fluidity of language and genre parodies grand narratives to knowledge. The book, according to Roth, plays and replays a desperate academic ploy, manufacturing fictitious novelty because the terrain of non-fiction has been so crushingly and thoroughly mined. By pigeonholing the book as an ironic lark, as an exercise in the endless deferral of the signifier, Roth asserts the book’s limited social and political scope.

Instead, I’d argue that the multiform decentering of genre and taxonomy in Some Versions of the Ice reveals its stakes as the fleeting revelation of the holy, buried in and possessed by (narratives of) these unworldly objects. As with “graveyard shoes,” which come out “after heavy rainfall, deluge, land swells” and can be pressed into a refreshing drink, uncanny objects peek out from the upside-down. These objects suggest a delicate network which links creation, death, and silence, a dialectic movement between the mundane of the system and the sacred which lives outside it.

We can only glimpse versions of these otherworldly vectors, Weinstein’s book intimates, through recognizing the limits of written language or circumventing it altogether. We read, yes, but we read teeth and shoes...