In the Welsh hills where I live, years can pass without the waters freezing, but this one and last were both skating winters—a few precious days of frost and rapture. If joie de vivre could be distilled to one image alone, it would be a skating party sliding down the hill to wake the lake. Last year on a clear night, I skated with friends by moon- and starlight, lanterns scattered around the edge of the lake like fireflies, and we wore full evening dress plundered from charity shops: feathers, fascinators, and fake furs. Wrapped up and amazed, the wrigglers and rugglers (small children and puppies) stayed at the edge, near the soup and the wood fire on the lakeshore. Though the “ecstasy”—in its root “standing apart from”—comes from skating out to the lake’s center and farther to its far and silent shores, across the Zuiderzee.
This kind of joy is superfluous and therefore absolutely necessary. It is the deep meaning of revelry and play, as the historian Johan Huizinga wrote in his masterpiece Homo Ludens. Culture itself “arises in the form of play.” “Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.” Flemish paintings of ice merriment depict lovers and children and horse-drawn sleighs; the Dutch still hold carnivals on ice. In homage to Homo Ludens, we skated in the time between Christmas and New Year, honoring the play ethic rather than the work, the ludic revolution rather than the industrial, racing one another and improvising a new form of hockey with a skinny, squeaking rubber chicken. A local farmer came on skis, someone else tried to fly a kite, puppies slipped comically on the ice, and children slid and pushed each other over.
Skating oscillates between the twin arts of conviviality and of solitude: you can join up with the carnivaliers for hot chocolate laced with brandy, then swing away on a trajectory of glorious freedom, a world apart (“All, alone, together,” wrote E. E. Cummings in his poem “skating”). One skating day this past year, I was circling the center of a lake and found my movement mirrored in the sky, as a bird of prey, similarly alone, was curious and circling overhead.
Wild skating, as opposed to rink skating, always suggests this twofoldness: the water which freezes and thaws, the crisp breath in and the steamy breath out, life above in the air and death below the ice. You swing a long arc out to the left and a curve back to the center; a long arc out to the right and a curve back to the center, each skate leaving slender S’s, cut into the ice like cold calligraphy. The twofoldness is an image of balance, a balance which, skaters know, comes best from movement.
Skating, diving, and dreaming are all forms of flying. “When to his feet the skater binds his wings …” wrote the aptly named poet Robert Snow, who is not to be confused with Robert Frost (“Style is the mind skating circles round itself as it moves”) or indeed with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“The Frost performs its secret ministry,/Unhelped by any wind.”) The god Mercury was, according to Coleridge, the first maker of skates, and every skater has wings at their feet. The flight is compelling to watch: huge numbers of spectators turn out for ice races in Holland, and millions of people around the world watch figure-skating championships in the Winter Olympics—perhaps not so much for the element of competition but for the momentary quality of flight, of sheer grace. While out wild skating, the birds (accustomed to watching us trudge) hover and gaze at skaters as we humans become occasional flyers on the evanescent ice.
In the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap, the sense of swift movement in the skaters is such that, about 450 years later, they look as if they’re moving. The eye jumps from figure to figure, each caught in a slightly different pose, the effect like the early animation “thumb cinema,” flip books which rely on the eye’s persistence of vision to give the impression of speed. “Peasant Bruegel,” as he has become known, paints the equality of ice games. This is an open carnival of the commons where even poverty cannot stifle the zest of play which steams through the boisterous carnivaliers with such immediacy you can almost hear them laughing.
People have been skating for thousands of years. Skates fashioned from the shank or rib bones of animals have been found throughout Scandinavia and Russia, including some thought to date back to 3000 bc. Similar finds have been made in Britain, where the first written record of skating occurs in a work by the twelfth-century monk, William Fitzstephen. Writing about the children of London attaching bones to their ankles, he observed, “They fly across the ice like birds … then attack each other until one falls down.” Some things never change.
by Jay Griffiths, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: Dutch skater Jaap Eden, c. 1890.
