Sinter is coming to you (and me) via Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s new book Theory of Water. In her blurb for the book, Christina Sharpe says that ‘Sintering should be in all our vocabularies for how to see and imagine ours and each other’s linked presences in the world.’ 

A former competitive skier as well as a lifelong liver-with-snow, Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, musician and artist Betasamosake Simpson is out on a snowmobile, grooming ski trails, observing the snowpack.

I discovered that the nearly every day the snow was slightly different along the trail at Jackson Creek. I became fascinated by sintering. When a snowflake falls from the sky and lands on the earth, it immediately begins, or perhaps, continues, a transformation as it forms bonds at temperatures below zero (this is not a melting process) with its neighbouring snowflakes or crystals to create the fabric of a snowpack.

Sintering is a joining. It is a communal transformation that creates a fabric of former snowflakes bonded to each other… the first thing a snowflake does when it lands from the skyworld is to join bonds, actual physical bonds, with its neighbours… And these coalitions mean that packed sinter snow on the trail has staying power, that it remains long after spring has melted the snow around it.

Sintering is part of Betasamosake Simpson’s theory of water, of interrelation and coalition, sharing and attending to. 

For me, it also describes reading, writing, listening and thinking at their beset, or specifically the bit that is about how ideas come together in my precipitative process, becoming ‘denser, more, compact linked formation… stronger and soggier under the influence of gravity’, as Betasamosake Simpson describes the sintered snowpack. (The letter for the letter h is on its way, as I am sintering with a friend on the word ‘honey’ and, like honey, it is taking a while to find its form and sweetness – partially because of the sintering act of bringing together our  (s)internal worlds). 

Meanwhile, in my strange (s)interior, I have simultaneously been noticing snow, which is maybe the opposite-and-equal of honey: symbols of summer abundance and winter clarity, but both of a honeycomb that holds a liquefaction. Everything is melting in catastrophic temperatures. Reading about snow and water feels urgent as much as it is cooling, a call to work for water protection, to stop (where I am) building-high reservoirs that will evaporate more than they retain, while providing capital to private investors who have already wrecked the south-east’s water provision and natural water. 

Everything is connected, and that makes writing (clearly) difficult, or clearly makes writing difficult. It gets soggy with its accumulation of ideas. Yet I remain fascinated by the way that things sinter: books and sentences that connect across distances, seeming to mirror each other in what they say about connection. Reading Theory of Water has left me noticing snow, so that when I re-read Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, all I could see was a book about sintering. Kang’s descriptions of snowflakes’ radial symmetry, their formation around a core, and their passage to earth resonate with Betasamosake Simpson’s, and they share a theory of water: that it has a memory, as does land, as do trees. 

Kang’s novel is an encounter with a massacre on Jeju Island, known as the 4/3 Massacre in South Korea for its date in 1948. Kyungha, her protagonist, slowly unfolds her colleague Inseon’s research into the massacre, in which government soldiers and police under orders from the U.S. military murdered thousands after islanders had protested for their right to participate in free and fair elections, something the U.S. characterised as Communist. Inseon’s parents both lost family members in the massacre, and – having made documentaries about violence in Viet Nam and Manchuria – she brings her work and skills home, interviewing her elderly mother. Although Kyungha is a writer who has reported on other massacres in post-war Korea (as Kang did in her novel Human Acts, translated by Deborah Smith), she says that she had looked away from Jeju Island, even as she became friends with Inseon.

It is snow that brings her into contact with the history of Jeju and of Inseon’s family. During unseasonably heavy snow, Inseon is brought to hospital in Seoul, having seriously injured her fingers while woodworking on a memorial project inspired by Kyungha’s dream of trees that are people. She calls Kyungha and asks her to travel to the island, to save the life of her canary Ama, her only companion after her mother’s death. Kyungha, who is grieving her parents and has cut herself off from many of her connections, undertakes Inseon’s charge, even though she left her apartment in sneakers. She catches the last plane and the last bus, then walks through a snowstorm at night to reach Inseon’s isolated house. Snow keeps falling, and inside its simultaneous insulation and isolation, Kyung-ha is confronted with Inseon’s research and recounting and memorialising.

White snow and tree trunks stained black: the artwork Inseon is making to respond to Kyungha’s dream is like a page of writing. Inseon’s room is stacked with neat boxes filled with printed and written documents: newspaper articles, photographs, diary entries, letters, reports and minutes. Wood is present here too, as paper pulp, crushed and dense with ink. This archive is at once physical and fragile, palpable and distant. It is as dense as snow around Kyungha, details sintering from page to remembered conversation to photograph.

*

Sinter and inter are not related. Inter- is a Latin prefix that means between, amid, among, within, during: something either spatially or temporally inside. It is not the same word as the verb inter, from in + terra, to place something in the earth, as Kyungha does with Ama’s fragile corpse, one of the many buried bodies that We Do Not Part grieves and brings to light. Inter- as a prefix puts verbs and adjective in the middle of something, which casts an inter-esting (inter + esse: to be between, to be of concern to) light on intelligence, which is really inter-legence, inter + legere, the verb that means to read, because it means to select or to gather. 

Knowing is thus a shared gathering, as Inseon’s mum helps her neighbours harvest mandarins. Like sintering, intelligence, in its buried roots, suggests that what matters is what is held between us, that we can only know anything through connection and sharing, through gathering and working together.

This is what genAI wants to destroy, and why the I is so offensive. It wants to erase that which is within us – within each of us as individuals, and within us as a collective, and what connects both and makes them possible, which is sintering.

Inseon’s paper archives, including print-outs of webpages, matter. The smell of old books does not yet have the equivalent name to petrichor (stone after rain), but Matija Strlič, who is researching it notes that “smells carry information about the chemical composition and the condition of an object.” Paper releases volatile organic compounds because it is decomposing wood: it is alive and dead at once, a memory of the tree and its memorial. When we smell what I am going to call papichor, we take the molecules that were once tree into our bodies.

*

I was going to write this essay earlier this week, but got stuck. I found that I just wanted to transcribe the whole of Theory of Water and the whole of We Do Not Part, separately and together, like two streams coming together to make a river. I was still sintering with them and being sintered by them. And also I needed to take the time to go and hear xwélmexw scholar and artist Dylan Robinson (Stó:lō/Skwah) talk at CRiSAP about his current project about multisensory encounters with public art. It’s work-in-progress so it’s not for me to quote too much here (I highly recommend Robinson’s first book Hungry Listening in the meantime), but the talk primarily focused on nationalist, regionalist or corporate public art and how it elicits us as subjects.

It left open the possibility of other forms of emplaced public art, like the works by Rebecca Belmore that Simpson discusses: her large travelling installation work from 1991, Ayum-ee-aawach Oomamammowan (translated into English as Speaking to Their Mother), a work of art made to be heard within and against the blocky/plonky silences of nationalist public art commissions, and how it was revisited and reversed in her series Wave Sound, installed in national parks and on reserves in 2017, on the shores of lakes and other bodies of water. 

Thinking about Belmore’s works, as described by Simpson, made stark the contrast with those discussed by Robinson, who focused on works that elicit an emotional response through their sentimental evocation of trees, while often being placed where trees were clearcut, made me think of course of Joni Mitchell’s “tree museum.” Then it made me think of Kyungha’s ambivalence about Inseon’s art project, which she had at first requested and then come to feel was the wrong direction. Her encounter with the tree trunks in Inseon’s woodshop, where the blood from her injury is still on the floor. Kang’s novel is woven through with the (s)interrelation of trees and humans, their uncanny similarities to each other in darkness and their vital connections to each other, their ability of one to express the loss and absence of the other, and to stand guard as well as stand in. 

*

A luminous white stage and a cast all (except Cush Jumbo’s Lady Macbeth) dressed in black: Max Webster’s production of Macbeth, filmed at the Donmar Warehouse, ends with a vitrine full of green trees, Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane as the last act of the play’s climate chaos. The three witches’ famous ‘thunder, lightning, or… rain’ roils through the play as a sign of bad leadership and crimes against humanity: the morning after Macbeth murders Duncan, there is a short scene in which an Old Man and Ross read to each other the signs of disordered nature: a falcon killed by an owl, Duncan’s horses eating each other, monstrous occurrences that tell the people in the world of the play that things are badly wrong, holding an ethical imperative to put them right. At the end, a forest marches. Trees walk.

Macbeth is a play about climate chaos and colonialism, an uncanny prefiguration of the Highland Clearances that will follow from the Act of Union that subjected Scotland to English rule. Green trees grow back what was destroyed, a promise that a forest will return, will walk again against those who murder and destroy.

*

Betasamosake Simpson told David Naimon on Between the Covers:

I started to think about [sintering] in terms of communities and relationships and solidarity and about how this bonding to each other was a very important step, I think, in Indigenous resistance in the past. When I think of kind of my ancestors in the 1700s and the early 1800s, when they were engaging in organizing politically, they walked around and visited with other camps and other communities, often like a very far distance, they shared food, they got to know each other, they developed these bonds of trust. I think that that’s what those snowflakes were reminding me and were teaching me. So I started to think of this scientific process, Western scientific process of sintering in a different way. It spoke to me sort of in that moment that being attentive to our relationships in political contexts, when we’re organizing, when we’re thinking about things like solidarity, are a way of strengthening movements and strengthening our forms of resistance.

*

We Do Not Part: the title, which is the prospective title of Inseon’s installation, names a bond of friendship between Inseon and Kyungha, a passionate artistic friendship that is entangled with Inseon’s mother, father, cousin-aunt, and her wider community on Jeju, some of whom speak in the documents, and some of whom will only ‘speak’ as tree trunks stained with ink, heaped with snow. The book is made of enfolded, impossible conversations that blur past and present, waking and sleeping, living and ghosts, as traumatic memories will do. It is about how an intense, intimate and surprising bodily connection with another person – on their first job together, Kyungha gets very sick and Inseon calmly looks after her – is the space where those memories can emerge in their unpredictable, chaotic, non-linear, necessary way.

There are the archives of papers, with their clips and notes and dates. And there are the feelings that sinter them together, which are gathered between in the closest, darkest nights. Inside the house inside the blizzard inside the night, Kyungha compares the hush and compression to being in the hadal zone, describing footage from an autonomous underwater vehicle descending: flares of bioluminescence that ‘grew increasingly short’ then 

what looked like a heavy snowstorm. This white sediment was the skeletal remains of marine organisms, falling as ocean ooze. The light on the vehicle fizzled out from the water pressure. It was unclear whether the black of the last scene was in fact the abyss or simply a failed image transmission. 

*

I didn’t really know my mum as it turns out, Inseon says as she gets to her feet and heads over to the dark bookcase. And all the while I’d thought I knew her too well.

Her shadow lengthens past the ceiling, making her willowy body look even taller. She stands on tiptoe and reaches for a box on a higher shelf… 

*

Inseon sets the box down next to the map and rolls her sleeves a little higher before opening its lid. What could warrant such care?(translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris)

*

The strange thing about sinter is that it is a word that comes back into the natural world via industrial processes: sinter appears in English first as a term in geology, for hard incrustations of minerals formed on rocks by precipitation from mineral waters: it is this quality of forming bonds without the application of heat that gives rise to its use for snowflakes. 

But first, sinter comes to refers to a kind of coal that is formed in a similar way, and to iron ore sintered from powder, with coal. Coal is where sinter begins, in the German word that is equivalent to the English cinder, which going back to Old English has the specific meaning of oxides thrown off as dross in the furnace. It’s used in this technical sense well into the Industrial Revolution, although by the mid-sixteenth century it had come to mean any residue of a combustible substance, cinders being the distinguishable bits that remain harder and more distinct than ashes. The OED notes that ‘The word has no etymological connection with French cendre, Latin cinerem ashes, although the notion that it has, has both given rise to the current spelling cinder, and influenced the later sense’. 

So sinter means something cast off, or cast down, but also something made by compression and accretion. Snow sinters because of gravity, becoming denser as more settles. It is a formation that happens under pressure, and the pressure makes the bonds stronger. I feel like this is what happens to language as well: a word means the remains of an industrial process, then hard leftovers, then how snowflakes bond. We find words where we need them, and find the meaning at their centre.

As Kang writes, a snowflake forms around a speck of dust or grit (a cinder, perhaps) at its nucleus, from which the arms radiate, like tree branches or hands reaching out to offer us assistance.

Cendrillon (Acshenputtel in German) becomes Cinderella, sintering together two distinct words for what remains in the grate that has to be swept out for the fire to be rekindled; for what remains, in the fairy tale, of family relations; what remains is Cinderella’s wish to be seen for herself and her history, and the fact there is someone – a fairy godmother – who listens.

*

The sediment that Kyungha describes seeing on the video is sometimes known as marine snow (that’s what David Attenborough calls it). Marine snow is why life can survive in the abyssal zone, which covers 60% of Earth’s surface, never getting warmer than 3*C, under a water pressure of up to 76 megapascals, nearly twice the compressive strength of the concrete used to build dams or bridges. Marine snow is made of death and excretions: waste, cast-off, debris. 

Like the sintering of snow emerging from the destructive furnaces of the Industrial Revolution to become a term Simpson can use for kin connections, life in the deepest parts of the sea lives on this falling death that is now failing. Plankton have been described as a sentinel species of climate change, and their populations have shrunk by a quarter since the the 1960s and that they are migrating towards the poles because of heating oceans. Plankton migration and decimation heats the oceans further, as they sequester carbon by using it to form their shells.

It is their empty shells that fall to the ocean floor: feeding jellyfish and oarfish and other organisms of the deep, and making up the seabed, that pressured, precious place that bears us up and holds the memory of the surface. 

Marine snow, like the wet kind that falls from clouds, is a reminder that everything is connected, and that it’s possible to think those connections. Possible, necessary, and actually how we think. We think together, where together refers to joining up concepts and joining with each other. We gather knowledge between and among us, during our time together, over time. We have to give each other time to reach the abyssal zone of memory, where it feels like we have fallen and the transmission is failing.

What could warrant such care? Sintering.