I come back to so called life by degrees. It seems I’ve hit a chapter - less a chapter: an interlude, a week or so, a paragraph, a trail of thought - called Silence.
Yesterday morning I pulled on elasticized leggings and stood on the floorboards barefoot as I stripped off the woolen sweater, and then the long sleeved shirt, and then the tee-shirt to struggle into a sports-bra. Arms bound at the elbows and waving overhead, I thought about how ridiculous sports-bras are. Putting on a sports bra always makes me feel like a toddler in pitched battle with my own coat. A losing battle.
The floors are dirty. I didn’t sweep while I was sick. I could feel the dirt with the soles of my feet. I unrolled a yoga mat between the bookshelves. The sun wasn’t up yet, but the windows were paling to a fuzzy blue. I stood there for the first time in weeks: cold, barefoot, bare armed, half lit, a breath image holding herself at the ledge of daylight. Mummering.
I felt my way into movement timidly, like you’d walk into cold water. It was a relief: my eyes flooded and I felt all sorts of sappy emotions. But it was also a humbling, pathetic farce of what I’m normally capable of. My muscles felt dry, course like unspun cotton. My blood pressure blinded me several times, then feinted, leaving a thumping heartbeat behind in the dregs. And my chest, my lungs, were just so thick and sore. Altogether, my body seemed very noisy. The floorboards creaked as my body weight shifted from here to there. A sputum chunk flapped on my inner chest, blocking the inhaled breath. I sucked uselessly and then coughed. The chunk detached. I spit it out into the toilet. I sniffed snot back up my nose and moved on. Inhale, reach up. Exhale, fold and touch ground.
Outside, somewhere down the street, someone was trying to get a car to start. The engine whirred and faltered, gasped and then caught.
That was when I first noticed the Silence. My body is noisy only in relationship to the Silence. I noticed the creak of the floorboards and the rattle of the windowpane because they crack the quiet. I could hear the car because the world is empty.
The Silence is composite. It is multiple, fractal; crystalline like snow.
First, G is out of town. The dog and I are alone. I can hear her nails on the wooden floor, room after room. She looks around, confused. I scratch her ear. Eventually she retreats to the bedroom in protest. She will give me dirty looks throughout the day, and sigh enormously, and we will be like two old biddies who can read each other’s minds and chatter nonsense at each other for nearly a week. A dog can really be quite cruel. I forgive her because she is out of sorts.
Second, I realize that sickness was a kind of noise. I only notice this as the sickness recedes. I notice by what it leaves behind. Being unwell is a constancy, a fizzle that in retreating leaves a stark un noise, a clarity of mind awfully like a sky after storm. This mental clarity feels unique, distinct from ordinary awareness: the epiphany of resurrection, maybe, in which nothing is taken for granted. A scrim has been sloughed off.
Third, pre-dawn has it’s quietude, blessed among hours. It’s like the music of a cello.
And fourth, probably greatest, there is winter. We are in an actual snow emergency, a fairy tale hush that’s been falling for the last 18 hours and will continue for the foreseeable future. The windows radiate cold but there is no wind, no movement. It all just hangs there, suspended. The streets are empty. The forests have become huge. Landscapes disappear, even as each knuckled branch is sketched with a perfection and superabundance, an exaggeration, of white. We wake to a negative landscape, a strange new world. Everything looks virginal. This is a hard, brisk innocence.
I make an association between winter, darkness, and minds. I think this is a delicate association, not to be taken too seriously or too far. But I find it intriguing. I test it out.
Consider Emily Dickinson: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
This was in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1870.
I know what she means. I have a sort of muscle memory of my head blowing off: it’s exhilarating. There is something here of exposure, of an estrangement of the mind, that is both potentially dangerous and hugely creative. The breech of the absolutely wonderful. Cold just might be something to be sought out. It might be something to be learned from.
I might be thinking of Camus, with his “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer”. I might be toying with a question about suffering. How can we salvage this, I mean: how do we survive?
But I might also be wondering about that question, wondering if it isn’t a presumption. Is life so very bleak and cold? Is winter, after all, a hardness?
Or have I got it all wrong?
The Silence creates an interesting kind of self awareness. I am both strikingly self-conscious - this noisy body, the peppery quality of my mind - and able to forget myself in lovely, expansive ways. I’m a savage introvert; you would think I enjoy Silence. This is sort of true - I mean I think I was constitutionally better prepared for something like quarantine than other people because I don’t need the babble of company, for example - and completely off topic. My introversion tends to be loud. I love the anonymity of major cities, after all; I sleep like a baby in Manhattan. Alone isn’t an experience of quietude because the riot in my head is outrageous. It isn’t unpleasant: I enjoy my own company, and being in my own thoughts, and reading, and spending days alone in Manhattan. But it isn’t what I would call silence.
So that what I experience in a practice is often a facing of my own inquietude and a going through it until I reach something else. Silence is something else.
Ordinary understanding is so temperate, I think as I put back on the tee-shirt, the long-sleeves, and the wool sweater; but there’s more to life than comfort. I put on a hat and a scarf and the dog comes ripping down the stairs, banking her side off the wall. There is a smudge mark where she banks. I’ve told G I will paint over it in a darker color; the beige wall just shows it off. He’d said he’s kind of fond of it. It’s a smoke colored, vague oblong at knee height. It belies how much grease is in hair and skin.
“There’s more to life than comfort,” I told her as I bent to tie the knee high snow boots. I stand to zipper the knee length hooded coat. Finally, with her circling my knees and bouncing, I take her collar and leash from their hook in the hallway. We stepped out into it. There was a moment of feeling swept, of vacuum like suck, a whoa-like being physically moved. But this makes very little sense because there wasn’t a breath of wind, the snow fell in torrential, light, fairy, blindingly numberless pirouttes. If anything moved us, it was stillness. Or Silence. Or snow.
It was warm, relatively speaking; just below the freezing point. Snow is forecasted for several days, then the temperature will plummet for a week. As we plodded into the alleyway we tested out various moves: high stepping or shuffling; bounding (this was her) or plowing through with her chest. None of it felt terribly efficient. Within seconds, though, it was euphoric. She leapt and spun and grinned at me with her nose full of powder. I laughed and blinked into the snow, as if it were kissing me over and over again with soft tiny lips.
The science of cold has been limited to, and expanded by, our own physiology. The measuring of “cold” was originally relative to our homeostatic 98.6, ish. Mercury thermometers were invented by a man named Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, a German Pole who later moved to the intellectual hotspot of the Dutch Republic (see my earlier essay on Tulips, by the by). Fahrenheit putzed with his scale until it made a lovely 180 degree half circle, nodding to an age that believed nature expresses itself in aesthetically pleasing ways. Our own age has a nostalgia for this aesthetic, which makes us a little too prone to hear and believe what we want to believe.
Later came the utterly human and comprehensible scale of Celsius. Anders Celsius was a Swedish astronomer. In 1742 he set zero at water’s freezing point and 100 at water’s boiling point. This is also quite satisfying. He simply referred to it as a centigrade scale; later it was called Celsius in his honor.
Scientists couldn’t explore scales beyond the human measures until the plethora of 19th century inventions allowed us to peer into microscopes and rise into the earth’s atmosphere. Those first hot air balloon trips were not safe. Victorian scientists were daredevils. They earned frostbitten hands and suffered hypoxia. They temporarily lost their hearing or the use of a left leg. People died: a fist raised and the word “science!” still hot in their mouth.
Anyway: the Kelvin scale opened up the way to a pure physics and, eventually space exploration. Lord Kelvin, British mathematician, moved our understanding of cold away from the relative to human and towards a pure, absolute, zero. I suspect this defines us, too: the capacity to overcome ourselves. For better; for worse. Overcoming nature has tangled with ideas of dominating nature. With the Kelvin scale it became possible to think in terms of the sun’s core temperature, (5,778 Kelvin, or 27 million degrees Fahrenheit). With Kelvin, we can contemplate and observe the still, stunning cold of space itself. Space is many different temperatures at different places in the universe, but it averages 2.7 kelvins, or negative 454.81 degrees Fahrenheit.
Cold is not really a thing. Cold is the absence of a thing called heat. Heat is molecular movement. Heat is energy. Even more scientifically put: heat is the transfer of energy from one body of matter to another. Heat is a metabolism, a change of form of a basic thing that can neither be created nor destroyed. First law of thermodynamics. Absolute zero is the point at which molecular motion stops. All this dizzies the mind. This is an example of the relationship between cold and beauty.
Of course science takes our own body as a first measure, I think as the dog and I leave our neighborhood and enter the vast white slope of a parkway. The Silence doesn’t leave. It deepens. There isn’t any traffic. There is no evidence of people. There are no birds, no animal tracks, not a mark on the fresh snow. No one has been here. The world is muffled. We don’t see a single squirrel or crow or chickadee. We lurch on leaving a slightly crooked line behind us, like a thought. I look up into the sky, the torrent of snow, both sky and these little bits of sky the same color as the earth, and I know our tracks won’t last very long. I am panting. The dog is leaping and frolicking. Anticipating the coming cold and days of confinement, I want us to go on as long as we can. I want to wear her out.
We humans can’t, after all, survive even a few degrees of change. Our organs begin to fail when our core body temperature rises above 104. Hypothermia sets in when our core temperature slips below 95. It’s a narrow, homeostatic life. I am hot in my bundling layers and the rough effort of walking through knee high snow. I pull the hat off for a minute. I fall back, with a pffft, into the soft embrace of the snow. The dog pounces me and zips away. She circles back and looks down into my face with her tail wagging and her face covered with snowflakes. I make a snow angel and then roll, waddle myself back to standing. I know there is a line of spruce ahead, then a savannah of naked oak, and a street beyond that, but none of that can be seen. It’s all lost in the white space. Winter has something to do with distance and vision, I realize. The disappearance of certainty.
We are still only blocks away from our house but blocks can become dangerous at a certain temperature. The bank of spruces appear - like a fog, like ghosts - as we approach them. I think the plain white expanse of a snow day hints at both vastness and presence: it is an enormity of distance pressed uncomfortably close. I watch the dog carefully; she is a spoiled house dog and doesn’t have additional layers on like I do. She throws her face into a drift of snow after some rabbit or vole. I call to her and the sound is both over loud and quickly gone. The soft, mild snow absorbs sound: once the temperature falls it will crunch and squeak. My breath hangs in a cloud in front my face. We turn toward home.
Physics says that two materials of differing temperature will eventually come to be the same temperature. A mammal body and a cold landscape, for example. Or a dish of leftovers and refrigerated air. Second law of thermodynamics. However, our homeostatic capacity can and does override this law of the universe within certain perameters. We can live in Palm Springs, for example. People have lived in the Arctic for 8000 years. Our very humanity is defined by our capacity to self-regulate. And, by extension, our humanity is defined by limits. Pretty small limits, all things considered.
We track snow into the house and all over the dining room. The heat strikes me as a staleness after the wildness of the cold. I scramble eggs and I give her bits of bacon. She sits demonstrably well at my feet, drooling. I wash the dishes and gaze out the window - with no more bacon on offer, the dog again huffed off to the bedroom - and the still wheeling snow, the close gray sky. Light and dark reverse themselves: the sky is dull, but the ground is bright.
I’ll have to shovel the walk and driveway, but I decide to wait. The snow is coming so quickly, and will come for so long, that I’ll have to do it several times. This weather will not break for a while, and the city is closed, and there is nowhere I have to be. I might as well take my time. I turn on the kettle and open my book.
Gretel Ehrilich spent a decade living in and writing about the Arctic. Mostly Greenland. She was following a physical need in herself. Ehrlich was struck by lightening, and afterwards her heart developed a strange relationship with atmospheric pressure. She only found relief in altitude and she moved to the mountains. After a while she came to realize that there are extremes of latitude that create the same pressures - or absence of pressures - and she was drawn to the earth’s poles. Physical need forked into intellectual or spiritual curiosity. Her’s was an exploration of place that became an exploration of people. She was guided in all of this by a compendium of ten volumes of oral history gathered by a Danish Inuit man named Knud Rasmussen. Rasmussen was on a mission to transcribe the stories of the people he came from. A hundred years before Ehrlich first visited the ice cap and polar moraine, Rasmussen travelled it by dogsled for three and a half years. Ehrlich’s books quote Rasmussen’s books, which are in essence quotations of the people he met during his cold pilgrimage.
One such quotation is from a man named Blind Ambrosius. How an Inuit Lutheran pastor takes on the name of a Roman bishop is surely a story, but I haven’t found it yet. “Our country has wide borders,” he said; “there is no man born has traveled round it. And it bears secrets in its bosom of which no white man dreams. Up here we live two different lives; in the Summer, under the torch of the Warm Sun; in the Winter, under the lash of the North Wind. But it is the dark and cold that make us think most. And when the long Darkness spreads itself over the country, many hidden things are revealed, and man’s thoughts travel along devious paths.”
The ethnologist and filmmaker Hugh Brody also spent years living among the peoples of the Arctic. Brody describes a possible revelation into humanity, a bare naked re-visitation of what it means - and could mean - to be human. What if, he asks, it is the agriculturalists who are the true nomads, and the quote unquote hunter gatherer peoples who are truly settled? The agricultural revolution compelled us to lives of labor, birthing a dense population as a work force, and continual resource exploitation and exhaustion. All of that inevitably and perpetually leads to emigration, a seeking of frontiers, and colonization. Nomadic peoples, on the other hand, have a connection to land that is centuries if not millennia long. They can’t conceive of themselves as separate from the land. The people are the land; the land is the people.
We agriculturalists and urbanites are prone to flit about several times in a lifespan, always valuing career or profit over place. We are driven. I don’t think Brody meant any of us adopted this deeply unsettled psychology by choice; it’s just who we are. It is only the cultural understanding of life that we have.
Nomadic understanding is fundamentally different than our own, in ways that are untranslatable. Nomadic ways are probably unthinkable unless you have lived amongst them: our mind simply will not function to those paradigms.
Books help, though.
I spend the afternoon shoveling, then curling on the couch to read Rasmussen and Erhlich, then shoveling again. By two p.m., the light begins to drain. The temperature steadily drops. A blister pops out of my hand at the base of my ring finger.
I stomp snow off of my boots and draw a bath, the steam fogging the already darkening windows, and I remembered a girlfriend saying winter just makes everything harder. Like taking out the garbage. Like getting out of bed.
I know myself well enough to know that I am prone to what is called Seasonal Affective Disorder. Enthusiasm for life leeches away like sunlight out of the air. Mood tilts, like the axis of the earth. I’ve spent so much time working in close relationship with other people that I know it hits them too: we get a little fetid and sour in our own bodies. Even the things we love exhaust us. The grass is no longer green, the sky no longer blue. But of course; it just isn’t, betoweled and swiping condensation off the window: there is no grass.
I’ve also learned that if I move into winter in a certain way, it doesn’t eat me alive. I mean I read novels and don’t care that all I’m only reading novels. I roast chickens and then live off the broth all week long. Everything is roasted and stewed and slowed. I sleep later and later each morning and go to bed shortly after dinner.
I also know that I am lucky enough to change this way throughout the year: I don’t have kids who have to go to school, I don’t have a day job. I can, more or less, move my responsibilities around to accommodate the dark. I know that this day has felt so lovely and strange precisely because the city is closed, schools and businesses are closed, we’re only days before the holiday: there is nothing to do but be. Without the liberty to be this slow and lazy and isolated, winter would hurt and the mind would snap. I slide gingerly into the steaming bath and prop my feet up on the edge. I do not live in the Artic. This is no starvation winter. And yet I know that I am playing the edge of my mind. If I lay my head back on the porcelain, I can look at the flat black window. Slowly, the porcelain changes from cold to the temperature of the water. I close my eyes.
Depression (and alcoholism, the congregated host of dark angels) are disproportionally higher amongst peoples of the far north and arctic. This is a recent development. As people are pressed to work and schooling in a globalized way, they have an epidemic of seasonal depression.
Living with the seasons is the best medicine we have. We’ve always had it. Now we call it folk wisdom or indigenous ways. But it’s basically the way human beings lived before the industrial revolution and globalization. To call it seasonal affective disorder is almost a misnomer; that suggests the problem is the light, when in fact the suffering is the imposition of blue screens and poor public schooling and labor that is denatured, mechanical.
Again, this question: is there not perhaps a beauty in the winter?
I close my eyes and lay just where my chin and ears touch the surface of the bathwater and I stay there until I am pink. With my arm hanging off the side of the tub, I can feel the cold on the wall meeting the heat of the water: the bathroom is in the northern most corner of the house. I can hear the dog’s snores from the bedroom. I dry off roughly and put on pajamas. Downstairs, I stand at the sliding glass door. I am draped in a quilt. The dark is velvet. The mounded snow iridescent. There is something voluptuous to the empty winter night. I look at it for a very long time.
Finally got round to reading the whole of this, your latest. Thanks for sharing the Einaudi piece (*gasp*) and the Irish "Silent Night." I tend to think pronouncing Sanskrit comes a little easier if you've ever tried to learn Irish, which I did at various points in my 20s. All the consonants+h's. And just thanks for this really lovely reflection on all of it - season, cold, silence, snow. Did you ever read Barry Lopez's "Arctic Dreams?" I think I'm about half way through. It's dense, dense, careful, and lovely. If you ever heard him on Terry Gross it's nice to think of his voice reading his words. Be well! ;-)