Sometimes, there is no more than cold. Pervasive, all consuming, air turned instantly to frost.
This week, parts of the United States’ Midwest have been experiencing a ‘Polar Vortex’. You know. You’ve read the news. Apparently polar vortex is climatologist speak for damn. Damn cold. Fucking cold. Freeze your ass off. Witch’s tit. Build a fire freeze to death.
Perhaps Tom Waits said it best:
Diamonds on my windshield
Tears from heaven
Pullin’ in town on the Interstate
Pullin’ a steel train in the rain
Wind bites my cheek
Through the wing
Fast flyin’ freeway drive
It always makes me sing
Duster tryin’ to change my tune
Pullin’ up fast on the right
Rollin’ restlessly
Twenty-four hour moon
Wisconsin hiker with a cue-ball head
Wishin’ he’s home in a Wiscosin bed
Fifteen feet of snow in the East
Colder than a well digger’s ass
–Tom Waits, Diamonds on my Windshield
Oh, he gets it. Rolling restlessly, waves rolling over us as well. Tolls. Sand, frost, night, even our footing can grow cold. Crunchy dewdark. Sound of frogs gone silent. Roses faded to standing brown corpses, iced against a garden wall. Desperate clench in Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love. Others seem to be driving next to us, but really. Oh, really. We roll alone.
That cold wind can be anything. Loneliness. Lack of work. Lack of meaning. Hot breath on the back of our neck. Golden Horn Hooligan. Angelo de Ponciano said:
have you ever sat by the railroad track
and watched the empties coming back?
lumbering along with a groan and a whine,-
smoke strung out in a long gray line
belched from the panting engine’s stack
– just empties coming back.
i have – and to me the empties seem
like dreams i sometimes dream –
of a girl – or money – or maybe fame –
my dreams have all returned the same,
swinging along the homebound track
– just empties coming back.
Places ripe and ripe too. And rot and rot. And become unweeded gardens. Or just fall away. And whether it is us or place that falls away seems to make little difference.
Like spending years seeking work in oversaturated markets, detailed CV hit send and send and send. We wonder how we will survive in whatever happened to our home. Doesn’t matter in the end because unemployment remains ‘at an all time low’. Nations turning their backs on scholarship, drawn instead to vapid spectacle. Replacing being with glass, with plastic, with polluted air. Take away the mirrors. No cameras. I can be Dorian Gray alone in my room. Alone.
Trying to come ‘home’ after long elsewhere. Few talk about that change. Isolated aliens. Home gone. Life a constant ill fitting assault. Perched on a precipice, no real idea what to do. Where to go. How.
Isn’t working, this ‘reverse culture shock’. Just take some of these and the depression won’t seem so bad. Days into months and years of not finding our feet again. No real work. No one knowing us, streets filled up with fog. Growing cold.
Fifteen feet of snow in the East. Colder than a well digger’s ass.
Grave digger’s ass.
We write about emptinesses, polishing old, second hand trophies, then throwing them away. No room to keep those ancient dreams. No room to keep the ones we have. No room for us.
Graves yawn, and crossroads fill with traffic for the devil. The devil speaks and acts like a petty, child tempered mobster. Or fiddles in a stern sounding whine, rhetoric of intentions and referendum. Please just let me see him. Please just let me make a deal. Doesn’t matter what the cost. You see, she needs. He needs. I need. We need.
We all need some I scream.
Oh, it wouldn’t be for me. Please understand. My own tin lunch box is filled with tiny dancing skeletons. Tcheriapin in a pocket, a dangling toy forever. That violin, how I remember.
Sometimes we can’t pull out of a skid, pull the plane out of a dive. The forty fathom bank yields something else besides the fish. Hurlyburly’s never done. Battle lost and won.
Outside, thunder. Lightning. Rain perpetual. Infinities of sand before us. Empty of flowers. Sky purple with love in idleness comes to the western outskirts but brings forth no rain.
Will there be balloons at the party? The long table that had been laid with old scratched silverplate? Will anyone talk to us beyond “What is open at this hour?” “Can we get the cheaper whiskey? Only because I’m low on cash.” “Did you see her leave?’
Did anyone see anything? Do you remember? Were you there? The moon like a drooling idiot bleeding light into the almost frosted sky. We’ve had our night in Bangkok. We cannot walk with angels. Besides, most of them are lousy at chess.
Not that we’d want to play. Not anymore. “I will revenge my injuries: if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear”.* Our own beasts walk within us and we pour them out into the pool halls of our spirit, the empty causeways of our mind.
Only at the end of tide. The end of green fields, home, grass, and soft summer evenings. The end of smiles and bees, ashes, silver, rust. Only then might there be some tiny scrap of peace, and perhaps not even then.
I heard upon his dry dung-heap
That man cry out who cannot sleep:
“If God is God He is not good,
If God is good He is not God;
Take the even, take the odd,
I would not sleep here if I could
Except for the little green leaves in the wood
And the wind on the water.”
— Nickles, in J.B.: A Play in Verse by Archibald MacLeish [The Pulitzer Prize play, 1959] (New York: Samuel French, Inc., 1958), p. 18.
No. We can’t sleep. Not in this weather. We shouldn’t even try. **
*Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin). “Frankenstein.” Project Gutenberg Frankenstein. Accessed January 31, 2019. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm.
**Other unstated references include (but are not limited to), Francis Van Wyck Mason, Jack London, Grantland Rice, Nick Cave, Oscar Wilde, 杜甫, Todd Rundgren, Robert Johnson, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (the version my grandfather left me, with strapping tape on the spine and his notes in the margins), Sax Rohmer, Les Galloway (who is one of many terrific and mostly forgotten writers), the I Ching, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George C. Chesbro, G.K. Chesterton, Mammoths (out of the Living Review, vol. 280), Richard Nelson and Tim Rice, Joan Baez, Richard E. Grant, and all the lonely people. Where the hell do they all come from?
As for the rest of you, if you’re reading this, you know who you are. Much love. Stay warm out there. You are greatly missed. If you aren’t reading this, well, why not?
Please feel free to subscribe, follow, comment, deface, or walk away René Girard Depardieu Gistang Picard. It’s over. Go home. Or, listen to this song, dedicated to early career early modernists everywhere: