Just now, with thin innocuous drifts.

I’ll watch the show from a bedroom whose sliding doors give me all I’d like of the white as it falls on the forest.

UD‘s been down with bronchitis for a couple of weeks anyway, so settling in’s no big deal. She’s in a warm bed with tightly layered blankets and a heating pad and her dog Emilia. Three eucalyptus soy candles rest on a small Tunisian plate in front of the window. Eucalyptus is good for the lungs.

My soundtrack: The mad madrigals of the mad Gesualdo (“the highest expression of pain in music”). Eerie chords for eerie snow.

*********************

It’s sticking to the holly leaves and coming down more thickly. They tell me this snowfall’s in it for the long haul. Okay.

Although we worry about outages and treefalls, we’re basically calm. And why not? The setting is sedate to the point of morbid. Our lives are calm, settled lives. Settled far away from peril. The inside/outside contrast puts this protection in high relief.

There’s a poem for that, by Hayden Carruth. Read it here. Read my commentary below.

The Curtain

[The poem will compare the curtain of snow now obscuring and now revealing the reality of the world to the poet’s troubled conscience as he lives his comfortable life, fitfully aware of a world of atrocities.]

Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and rearing.
We can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-renewing sump of corpse-flesh.

[From their easeful bed, the poet and his lover can figuratively hear – cannot intellectually escape – the perennial actuality of human suffering.]

But in this valley the snow falls silently all day, and out our window
We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in our little house,
We see earth smoothened and beautified, made like a fantasy, the snow-clad trees
So graceful.

[Suffering is way up over the hill; in their snug valley the lovers now experience the smoothing and silencing of even the sound of suffering by the blanketing snow, which makes the world a beautiful fantasy.]

In our new bed, which is big enough to seem like the north pasture almost
With our two cats, Cooker and Smudgins, lying undisturbed in the southeastern and southwestern corners,
We lie loving and warm, looking out from time to time.

[The camera gradually moves in more intimately on the lovers, placid, with cutely-named cats, on their massive “undisturbed” bed. They watch the snow.]

“Snowbound,” we say. We speak of the poet
Who lived with his young housekeeper long ago in the mountains of the western province, the kingdom
Of cruelty, where heads fell like wilted flowers and snow fell for many months
Across the pass and drifted deep in the vale.

[Maybe a reference to John Greenleaf Whittier, author of “Snowbound,” which narrates a snowbound family passing the time telling each other stories. The lines perhaps also allude to Whittier’s many anti-slavery poems; that is, Whittier was the sort of poet Carruth would like to be – someone whose writing might have some impact on human suffering. “We felt that if we could get enough people to read T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens and e. e. cummings and William Carlos Williams and other great poets of that period, then something good would happen in American civilization. We felt a genuine vocation, a calling, to try and make this happen. And we succeeded. Today thousands of people are going to colleges and attending workshops and taking courses in twentieth-century literature. Eliot and Stevens are very well known, very well read; and American civilization has sunk steadily, progressively, further and further down until most of the sensible people are in a state of despair. It’s pretty obvious that good writing doesn’t really have very much impact on social events …”]

In our kitchen the maple-fire murmurs
In our stove. We eat cheese and new-made bread and jumbo Spanish olives
Which have been steeped in our special brine of jalapeños and garlic and dill and thyme.
We have a nip or two from the small inexpensive cognac that makes us smile and sigh.

[They can stay warm amid the cold; their cozy woodburning stove is softly, aromatically doing its thing. Plenty of food, too, and all their exotic spicy (hot: another form of heat) favorites. Alcohol too of course will warm them, calm them.

This evocation of the delightful private small habits of their private life reminds UD of this passage, from Paul Monette’s essay collection, Last Watch of the Night:

In the moving premonitory memoir of his approaching death from cancer, Donald Hall discovers that what he will miss the most are the dailiest of things. Padding out onto his porch to retrieve the morning’s Globe; a quiet cup of coffee as he peruses the headlines; the dozen small nesting motions that bring him at last to his desk. Finally the picking up of his pen to start afresh. The things of life are so ordinary, the habits so engrained, that it’s stupefying to think of them taken away. One wonders that the universe would bother to kill off such a modestly focused life, circumscribed by hours of quiet on every side.]

For a while we close the immense index of images that is our lives — for instance,
The child on the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico sitting naked in 1966 outside his family’s hut,
Covered with sores, unable to speak.

[The deeply interior, deeply comfortable scene, the doubly deep warmth inside all that cold, temporarily suspends their awareness – via indexed image rather than personal experience – of the suffering over the horizon.]

But of course we see the child every day,
We hold out our hands, we touch him shyly, we make offerings to his implacability.
No, the index cannot close.

[The poem is an offering to the implacability of suffering; the poem is written out of the poet’s inability to close the index.]

And how shall we survive? We don’t and cannot and will never
Know. Beyond the horizon a great unceasing noise is undeniable. The machine,
Like an immense clanking vibrating shuddering unnameable contraption as big as a house, as big as the whole town,
May break through and lurch into our valley at any moment, at any moment.

[Why don’t we die of our anguish at what human beings do to one another? Not only don’t we die; we live for the most part quite comfortable lives. We survive our knowledge of the suffering of others quite nicely. Maybe someday suffering will spread to the point where it has no other place to go but our own quiet little valley.]

Cheers, baby. Here’s to us. See how the curtain of snow wavers and then falls back.

The genial – even self-celebratory – self-absorption of private life prevails. The snowy curtain that had been drawn aside to give the poet a glimpse of how stark things really are has fallen back, leaving him comfortably numb, with cognac.