The Unsettled Feeling of Spring

Feb 27 2018

As darkness descends

it feels like a thick cloak, enclosing me,

a velvet hood

muffling my head.

When my field of vision constricts

and along with it, the world;

so life seems so much simpler

and under control.

Perhaps this explains

the unsettled feeling of spring,

the drastically lengthening days

the sun's implacable light.

As opposed to winter's fastness,

when the duration of day seems stable

and night's embrace persists.

The glow of the hearth

the roof buried in snow.

The smudged bulwark of trees,

and cold dry air

sitting heavily on earth.

When all the dirt and rust and discarded stuff

are subsumed in a mantle of white,

and the steady accumulation of snow

is oddly comforting.

Although there was that hard season

when the snow seemed continuous,

and the compressed lower layers
were like the building blocks of glaciers.
As if a new ice age

had surreptitiously crept-up,

and we would all soon be submerged

beneath a thousand frozen feet.

Like Atlantis, or Pompeii, but under the ice;

an ancient civilization

that would some day be revealed

as ice relents
and water recedes,

the tips of towers, masts, and minarets

in pools of glacial melt.

I know how spring should feel,

the welcome sun, the easy heat

the season of rebirth.

But I find it all too fast.

Not a constant rate, but exponential.

Not an orderly succession, but somehow unsettling.

Like chaos theory,

the tiny disturbance

that triggers an unpredictable chain of events;

so unstoppable,

so out of proportion

to what set it off.

I hear the eaves drip, rivulets gurgle

warm breezes caress the earth.

And my mind leapfrogs

to the hot indolence of summer,

when the length of day

will be settled again,

and soft lingering light

will comfort, not blind.

When our blood will be thin

and the living easy

and the world at peace.

When we will be done

with the mad courtship of spring;

the buds unfurled

the trees full.

I've acknowledged before my fondness for night, my nocturnal habit, my affinity for winter. Allusions have appeared in numerous poems. So I was reluctant to plow this furrow again. But there are only so many poems and so many themes, and the joy of writing is much more the how than the what. So I gave myself permission to have a go at this one more time. Perhaps to bring it all together, and perhaps to state it with self-confidence and simplicity. By this I mean an easy conversational tone; something I almost always aspire to. Which may not be so evident, since I probably almost always fail as well. I hope I did better here. If I have, it may be because this poem was written almost without pause, as if taking dictation; and because I tried to be more confessional than premeditated, more stream-of-conscious than artful. And yes, it does feel confessional, because who wants to admit to feeling unsettled by spring, the season of rebirth and renewal? Or to own such an aversion to change? And confessional because night, of course, is not only dangerous, but the terrain of debauchery and secrecy; while daylight implies safety, health, and transparency.

The poem brackets this unsettled sense with stanzas that reinforce the constancy of winter and summer. There are key words like stable, settled, fastness (one of those odd English words that can have opposite meanings, depending on its context), persists, indolence, and lingering. There is the cold air, sitting heavily, and the steady accumulation of snow. There is the hearth, with its connotation of permanence and home, and which sits cozily beneath a roof heavy with snow. And set against these are words like chaos, drastically, fast, implacable, and exponential. Which is how day length looks, if you graph it over a year: it forms a sine wave, where spring and fall are the inflection points where the rate of change changes, followed by the steeply sloped plunge or ascent; while winter and summer are the relative flat turns at the bottom and top.

Common sense would have it that far more people dislike winter than spring. On the other hand, I believe statistics reveal that spring is the high season for suicide. So maybe spring is more commonly the low point, after all. Or at least among people at the extremes. Of course, there are other reasons to dislike spring, aside from the runaway train of day-length and the feeling of being pushed out of my comfort zone. Taxes come due. The dogs are a mess, and they track it all inside. And for me, it's mostly the driving. My country lane can turn into a quagmire for a couple of weeks, and driving becomes a real challenge. A toss-up, I suppose, between being snow-stayed and mud-stayed.

The Best We Can Hope For

Feb 25 2018

So far, it's been a dry winter.

Although memory, as usual, is unreliable.

The way time softens the past,

so its sharpened elbows, and well-aimed knees

spiky hair, and defiant stare

become respectable, soon enough.

And embellishes, as well,

honing its edges, heightening its peaks.

So in retrospect

a minor scuffle

becomes a death-match,

a heavy snowfall

the blizzard from hell.

Nevertheless, this is no false memory;

because the snowbanks are unseasonably low

this late in winter,

the surface crusted, and pitted

and grey with grime.

And how little time there was

before that first step

marred its perfect whiteness,

before the freeze-and-thaw

left it granular, and hard.

So it's with relief

I hear they're calling for snow

after such a long barren lull.

And feel certain, somehow

that in the end

nature will correct herself;

that wet snow

will blanket March,

and water will be ankle-deep

in another lush and fertile spring.

Which is the best we can hope for,

that things will even-out, regress to the mean.

That the jagged edges

will be smoothed away,

our sense of constancy

restored.

Just as I'd like to believe

in the triumph of fairness, and just reward;

even as the good suffer, the bad succeed

the well-intentioned waver.

But do things really work that way?

In the fullness of time

does the universe even-out?

As snow begins to fall

and the world quickly fills.

A fresh dump, as predicted,

coming in in blinding gusts, and heavy bursts

and swirling curtains of white.

Camouflaging

the dregs of winter

in a smooth wind-swept quilt;

softening its edges,

forgiving its weary flaws.

Shovelling can be a bother, driving even more so. But this heavy snowfall is more than welcome as we approach the end of what has so far been an unusually dry winter. I suppose my feeling that things will ultimately even-out can be seen two ways. First, there's the familiar refrain that “we'll eventually pay for this”: the usual pessimistic fatalism that things inevitably regress to the mean, and so there's no way we're getting away with such an easy winter. And second, there's the reassuring feeling that there is an essential constancy to the world; so that in the end, it all comes out as it's always done, and as it should.

It started off looking as if this was going to be another “weather” poem: the usual lyrical piece that was grounded in nature, but that I've written too many times before; and something with a few nice descriptive sentences, but too impersonal and unemotional and detached to make worthwhile poetry.

So I hope I rescued the piece with my philosophical musings, using the late season snowfall as a metaphor for this idea of regression to the mean, and then for the deeper idea of justice and fairness and just reward. ...A hopeful thought, even if not one to which this cynical writer truly subscribes.

There were a couple of other titles I toyed with, but ultimately rejected: The Dregs of Winter, which probably appealed because – I must confess – I was unduly pleased with the word dregs(!); and The World Fills, which I think has a nicely tempting imprecision about it. I ultimately went with The Best We Can Hope For because it fits the poem's tone so well, with its implicit sigh of hopeful acceptance and guarded optimism. I also like this title's conversational tone: since I'm usually very pedantic about ending a line or a sentence with a preposition, the final For gives it an invitingly casual quality. At least for me it does; even if no one else would even notice!

Pulling the Pump

Feb 18 2018

It took 3 strong men

to haul up the pump

from its cold dank well.

The dead weight

of a hundred feet of water

in stiff black pipe.

The seized device,

a dense stainless-steel torpedo

trailing rust, and dark mineral water

as it emerged from its hole.

A deep freeze

in late January

when the new year

seemed already old.

Could there be a worse time

for the taps to run dry   –

    –   a belch of air

a slow trickle

a final drip?

So they dug through 4 feet of frozen snow

to get at the well,

icy clouds of breath

hanging heavily

before dry winter air consumed them,

faces red

beards white with frost,

big calloused hands

exposed to the elements.

The thick hands

of men who work in the cold.

Were they born that way,

manly men

who self-select

for hard physical labour?

Or would my hands be as strong

if I felled trees

or raised food

or broke through frozen ground?

My grandfather

had the muscle memory of his trade

and the big hands

of manual labour.

To a little boy

they were magnificent,

enveloping him

in thick powerful warmth.

He was born in the 19^th century

and here I am in the 21^st

with my soft skin

and thin hands,

good for ballpoint pens

and tapping on a keyboard.

I watched how they worked,

oblivious

to penetrating cold,

joking

and cursing

and sure of themselves.

Three strong men

with big competent hands

inured to the elements,

answering the call

to replenish the water

on which all life depends.

I was tempted to mock myself by calling my hands “girly”. But, of course, in the early 21^st century this would be – quite correctly – unacceptably sexist. “Manly men”, OK; but not “girly”!

And on top of being a relatively small person with citified hands, I suffer from Reynaud's syndrome: the small arterioles in my hands (and feet) are hair-trigger even when it's above freezing, constricting down so that my extremities quickly turn blue (or white or both) and painfully cold, and then stubbornly stay that way. So I watch these guys work with incredulity, then envy. This happened years ago. Actually, a couple of times. One was just the pump. The other time, the well went dry, and had to be hydro-fracted. Not an easy thing to get done, in the middle of winter. Was there a third time? Anyway, I certainly recall them digging down into frozen clay-like soil to replace part of the housing as well.

More and more of us become less and less competent at the basic necessities of daily life. We don't make things, fix things, or work with tools. We're useless at taking care of ourselves when thing go wrong. Or worlds are increasingly virtual, not real. I'm impressed by the thick padded hands of working men (and wonder how they got that way!). But I'm even more impressed by their competence and self-sufficiency. Because when you're out of water, you're perilously out of luck!

Everything Happens For a Reason

Feb 13 2018

Everything happens for a reason, we are reassured.

As if a well-ordered universe

and our place in it

were preordained;

justice prevailing,

benevolent fate

unfolding according to plan.

Except when I think of central planning

the workers' paradise comes to mind,

the proletariat rewarded

with purges 
and bread-lines

and death camps.

In other words, be careful what you wish for.

Perhaps this belief begins

with accepting our current state

as the natural order of things,

a variation on the human conceit

we occupy the centre

and our lives have consequence.

And then continues

with making sense of ourselves

by constructing a narrative

from back to front.

Which is both our blessing and our curse,

that we are born story-tellers

who can't help but connect the dots,

as if the forks in the road

we somehow chose

were meant to take us

exactly here.

Because otherwise

a cold indifferent universe

would seem unbearable,

spending every second

at the mercy of dumb luck;

neither masters of our own fate

nor beneficiaries of providence.

But this, too, is in our nature;

the end of the line

of millions of years

of unlikely survivors,

all fiercely willed

to carry on.

So we persevere, regardless,

seeking the solace of faith

a personal God.

Even when we feel abandoned.

Even when the universe

is so large

we feel as close to guess-work

as sub-atomic particles

     . . . and just as hard to fathom.

Even when the good suffer

and the bad prosper

and dishonour too often prevails.

When posterity forgets

and meaning ultimately fails.

When the mystery of death

unsettles our need to know,

spinning our fabulous tales

and never relinquishing hope.

As you can clearly tell from this rather bleak poem, I'm a nihilist, a devout atheist, and a determined rationalist.

I'm terribly leery of philosophical poems like this. But sometimes, it feels satisfying just to get it down: that is, writing more for myself than any hypothetical reader.

This poem began as I was listening to Terry Gross interview Kate Bowler on NPR's Fresh Air. Here, from the transcript, is her introduction:

Here's a few of the things my guest Kate Bowler doesn't want to hear about living with her incurable cancer: everything happens for a reason ...God is writing a better story ...Heaven is your true home ...God needs another angel. It's not that she's lacking in faith. She just wants to avoid trite life lessons. Bowler is an associate professor of the history of Christianity in North America at Duke Divinity School. Her new memoir, Everything Happens For A Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved, is about how her faith has affected the way she deals with cancer and how her cancer has affected her faith.

I am impressed that even though she became more cynical about such simplistic formulations as “everything happens for a reason”, she still sustained her faith. Despite contracting incurable cancer (I originally wrote “terminal”, but then thought better of it, since we're all technically “terminal”) at the cruel age of 35. Despite what would appear to be betrayal by her God. And despite the apparent randomness and unfairness of her fate. I neither begrudge nor judge her faith: life is hard; whatever gets you through is fine with me. That is, as long as religion remains a personal matter. Private belief is one thing; theocracy another.

The rationalization that “everything happens for a reason” has always driven me crazy. Its essential solipsism, for one: that is, the vanity of an ordered universe with us at the centre; its imagining of a personal God who, while keeping the vastness of creation on track, micromanages and monitors our every thought and action. How ironic this is, when most religions preach the virtue of humility.

A corollary of “everything happens for a reason” is the delusion that prayers are answered: the survivor who attributes his good fortune to prayer, forgetting that the dead – who are no longer here to remind us -- also prayed; the survivor who credits his faith and God's mercy, while forgetting the disturbing implication that those who died must have therefore been insufficiently devout or somehow unworthy.

In my kind of theology, prayer wouldn't be about supplication, anyway; it would be about praise and gratitude.

Yes, even an atheist is grateful. And because he acknowledges the mystery without concocting easy answers, perhaps his gratitude is that much more profound: instead of positing a soul, he is awed by the vast improbability of consciousness; instead of a magic wand waving creation into being, he is challenged to contemplate the complexity and wonder of nature.

And because he needs neither the fear of God nor the reward of heaven to choose to lead a moral life, his morality seems somehow more pure. So good behaviour is not motivated by punishment or some quid pro quo. Rather, it's a matter of personal righteousness; of understanding the obligations of community and interdependence; and of being the kind of person who lives with that sort of integrity, whether anyone – either mortal or divine – is looking on or not. (I'll leave for another time the argument that, if seen through the lens of evolutionary biology, free will may in fact have very little to do with either ethical behaviour or our understanding of morality.)

OK, that's quite enough ranting about religion and defending atheism. Not that I wouldn't love the solace of belief. Nihilism can be freeing; but also demoralizing. And atheism can be lonely, and offers no consolation when you struggle. It would be nice not to see the universe as cold and indifferent, and ourselves as insignificant. It would be nice to imagine that there is some kind of enduring meaning, and a purpose to things. It would be nice to believe that a personal god accompanied me through life. But in the interest of intellectual rigour – something that for me is of the highest value – I cannot submit to a belief simply on faith, or simply because it feels good. So I will continue to reject the notion that “everything happens for a reason”. And while Kate Bowler and I both now agree about this, I guess we'll continue to respectfully disagree about the rest.

Perfect Stillness

Feb 6 2018

The subtraction of heat;

degree by degree

all the way down

to absolute zero.

So cold is defined by absence;

the default state

of a dark universe

where energy wanes, and motion slows,

like struggling through

a viscous liquid

thickening as it cools.

Until all movement is stilled

and the last vibration stops.

We are warm objects

who feel the rate of cooling

more than the cold;

the layer of heat

that thinly clings to skin,

a cutting wind

strips quickly away;

the body heat

that radiates off

into wide open sky

and the deep black of night.

But I can feel the weight

of frozen air

pouring over the sill,

pooling out

and piling higher.

The substance of cold

that seems much more than absence.

The window, open a crack

in the arctic high

like an act of purification;

the cooking odours

and garbage bins

and animal scents,

the sweat, and sex, and bodily stench

overheated, and unrefreshed

we've been re-breathing, again and again,

replaced

by clean astringent air.

The field of vision shrinks

the light fades

the world settles.

Like the frigid layer of air

that sits against the floor

with its compact weight.

Like the constituents of matter, that concentrate

as they slow and slow

and shed their latent heat.

A portent

of the fullness of time,

when the universe is at its lowest state

of perfectly realized stillness.

So in the grip of winter

breathe deeply, think slowly

and ground yourself.

When, like absolute zero,

life is simplified

to its elemental needs.

When, like the flawless lens

of that wide open sky,

knife-edge survival

concentrates the mind

and clarifies meaning.

When, like the cooling molecules

whose dampened vibrations

no longer push them apart,

we huddle closer, in cold;

the force of repulsion softening

the fear of “the other” constrained.

What I'm trying to capture her is the sense of stillness of winter, when the world seems to move more slowly, and when the cold conveys a feeling of permanence, contraction, and weight. It's as if we're a few degrees closer to the end of time, when the universe will wind down toward absolute zero, and when the law of entropy decrees that everything will flatten down into a cold, dense, uniform state of stillness.

So there are the physics of cooling rates, the condensation of matter, and that there is no such thing as “cold”, but rather the absence of heat.

And there is also the distillation of things down to the essentials, when we are so much more aware of survival and contingency and elemental forces.

These ideas come together in the final stanza, where we become cooling molecules whose weakening force of repulsion is a metaphor for the necessity of interdependence and community in a challenging environment.