THE READER
All night I sat reading a book,
Sat reading as if in a book
Of sombre pages.
It was autumn and falling stars
Covered the shrivelled forms
Crouched in the moonlight.
No lamp was burning as I read,
A voice was mumbling, “Everything
Falls back to coldness,
Even the musky muscadines,
The melons, the vermilion pears
Of the leafless garden.”
The sombre pages bore no print
Except the trace of burning stars
In the frosty heaven.
-Wallace Stevens
THE PLAIN SENSE OF THINGS
After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.
The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.
Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence
Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.
-Wallace Stevens
Last night, before the snow and piercing wind arrived, and after the children had gone to bed, the two men decided to take a walk, with the thermometer showing 3 degrees. They bundled up to the max, and set out with beers in hand, just for the fun of it. I turned in before they got back, but this morning they said it had been a fine outing.
I’ve arrived in Colorado at the home of my son “Soldier” and his family. Kate and her family are also here, which adds up to six grandchildren, four parents and one grandma. We knew it was going to get very cold, especially today, so we went on our outings the days before.
First a trip to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, where before we took in a planetarium show, we looked at statues of historic airplanes, and one uncle set the older boys to racing.
In the evening yesterday we all went caroling in the neighborhood. The thermometer was dropping fast toward zero, so we started out at dusk and sang at several houses in the neighborhood, where at least two people came out and stood to listen to us, in spite of the frosty air. Joy had baked sugar cookies, springerle and gingerbread men, and we had an all-family session decorating the sugar cookies, which she added to boxes for certain neighbors.
Kate’s and Soldier’s families haven’t ever lived close enough to each other for the cousins to know each other. The four-, five- and six-year-olds have especially enjoyed each other. All the kids received matching pajamas at their first bedtime together, which provided a lot of fun. They were all happy!
This morning when I woke it was -16. I understand that the middle regions of the nation generally are experiencing similarly extreme weather; many of you have your own stories to tell. In the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains where we are, it’s fairly dry at 7,300 ft elevation, but more snow did fall and added to what was lingering.
It’s really fun to participate in all the lively activities that I didn’t have to plan or prepare for, and even just to watch the other groupings playing chess, making decorations, building with magnatiles, assembling a jigsaw puzzle or practicing their drawing skills together. Of course we have been doing a lot of reading aloud, and all the children watched “The Snowman” video with Grandma.
Decades ago I helped my children to do a “baby-Jesus-in-walnut-shell” craft, and this week Joy had all the ingredients for a new and improved version, which all the children enjoyed immensely.
Soldier baked a new kind of cookie for Christmas this year, a flourless meringue with figs, orange zest and almond paste, which are fantastic. I’m planning to bake them myself and I will share the recipe.
Many more fun and Christmasy things are planned in the next few days, which I hope to tell about here, but I wanted to put up this post on the coldest day I’ve ever known.
INSIDE
I am my own
geology, strata on strata
of the imagination, tufa
dreams, the limestone mind
honeycombed by the running away
of too much thought. Examine
me, tap with your words’
hammer, awaken memories
of fire. It is so long
since I cooled. Inside me,
stalactite and stalagmite,
ideas have formed and become
rigid. To the crowd
I am all outside.
To the pot-holing few there is a way
in along passages that become
narrower and narrower,
that lead to the chamber
too low to stand up in,
where the breath condenses
to the cold and locationless
cloud we call truth. It
is where I think.
-R.S. Thomas
I began to read a biography of R.S. Thomas a while back. Its tone was unsympathetic, and as with many biographies of writers, it didn’t facilitate my relationship with the poet. With Thomas, if you want to be any kind of friend, you have to accept his particular “geology,” which is full of rocks and stones and cold clouds, all waiting for that day when the sun will shine fully on the landscape, burn off the fog, and never set again. I am content to wait with him, and not to try to “figure him out” in this life.
Where I grew up our winters frequently featured cold fog. Foggy days such as I actually enjoy on the beach nearest me, when the thermometer stays above 50, are way different from the 27-degree tule fog of my youth, which can hang on and chill the spirit all day.
Thomas seems to be saying that those few people who stumble into his inside, where he thinks, will not find a comfortable place to rest. It’s a place without location, somehow. Whatever can be felt with the senses, it’s cold and cramped. There is little solace in abstract truth.
Even the request, “Examine me… tap… awaken memories of fire” refers to something of the mind: memories. But if this is a prayer, the real God who is not a memory or an idea, but is the only one who has Being in Himself, might come and be present in the present. Not just to revive memories of past events, but to create actual warmth and spaciousness in the soul. He has been called a consuming fire, and the Sun of Righteousness. He is definitely what the wintry and frozen soul needs.
“But for you who revere my name,
the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings.
And you will go out and leap like calves
released from the stall.”
Malachi 4:2
Gladsome Lights 