[Image found accompanying the “Christmas Snow” (December 25, 2010) post at John Bedell’s bensozia blog]
From whiskey river:
Snow
Walking through a field with my little brother Seth
I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.
For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.He asked who had shot them and I said a farmer.
Then we were on the roof of the lake.
The ice looked like a photograph of water.Why he asked. Why did he shoot them.
I didn’t know where I was going with this.
They were on his property, I said.
When it’s snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.
Today I traded hellos with my neighbor.
Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.
A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.We returned to our shoveling, working side by side in silence.
But why were they on his property, he asked.
(David Berman [source])
…and:
For the Children
The rising hills, the slopes
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:stay together
learn the flowers
go light
(Gary Snyder [source])
…and (highlighted portion):
In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it Christmas and went to church; the Jews called it Hanukkah and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say “Merry Christmas!” or “Happy Hanukkah!” or (to the atheists) “Look out for the wall!”
…Some of you may be unhappy with this dereligionizing of the Holiday Season, and you may have decided that, this year, you’re going to celebrate it the old-fashioned way, with your family sitting around stringing cranberries and exchanging humble, handmade gifts, like on The Waltons. Well, you can forget it. If everybody pulled that kind of subversive stunt, the economy would collapse overnight. The government would have to intervene: It would form a cabinet-level Department of Holiday Gift-Giving, which would spend billions and billions of tax dollars to buy Barbie dolls and electronic games, which it would drop on the populace from Air Force jets, killing and maiming thousands. So, for the good of the nation, you should go along with the Holiday Program. This means you should get a large sum of money and go to a mall.
(Dave Barry [source])
Not from whiskey river:
December
A little girl is singing for the faithful to come ye
Joyful and triumphant, a song she loves,
And also the partridge in a pear tree
And the golden rings and the turtle doves.
In the dark streets, red lights and green and blue
Where the faithful live, some joyful, some troubled,
Enduring the cold and also the flu,
Taking the garbage out and keeping the sidewalk shoveled.
Not much triumph going on here — and yet
There is much we do not understand.
And my hopes and fears are met
In this small singer holding onto my hand.
Onward we go, faithfully, into the dark
And are there angels hovering overhead? Hark.
(Gary Johnson [source])
…and:
I walk through the Christmas city lights, not a taxi in sight and the town going crazy all around me, and I think how kissing is such an extravagance of nature. Like birdsong; heartfelt and lovely beyond any possible usefulness.
(Anne Enright [source])
Finally, a little offbeat but — oh, yes — a great deal relevant to seasonal prospects: the deleted first scene from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian [more or less accurate transcript here]:
Nance says
“When it’s snowing, the outdoors seem like a room…A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.”
I’ve never understood why I felt safer in Alaska, the most treacherous place for humans I’ve ever lived, than anywhere else I can think of. Suddenly, I understand it. It was cozy. The mountains snuggled up to me, the falling snow provided exquisite boundaries. My driveway, with it’s 8-ft snow berms thrown up on either side by the snow blower, felt safer than the one I drive on daily now in this flat coastal plain; even when I opened the garage door to find a moose in my rear-view mirror, I was more charmed than afraid. I conclude I am a low-ceiling sort of gal.
Enjoy your time off. Look out for the walls.
John says
Leave it to you to notice that “walls” common thread in today’s selections. Good catch!
The Missus and I tell people that we honeymooned “in Alaska.” Actually, it was more like “alongside Alaska,” being a seven-day Holland America cruise along the coast, out of Vancouver. So we didn’t get to see much of anything there besides the coastal towns — Juneau, Ketchikan, Skagway… But we did go on a couple of brief excursions a little ways inland, with no salt water in sight. When you got off the tour bus and walked to the edge of the road, looking out over the biggest damn panorama you’d ever seen in your life, laid out underneath the bluest and most cloudless sky imaginable, if you turned down your hearing aids (so you couldn’t hear the chatter) and held your hands up to the sides of your face (so you couldn’t see your fellow passengers) — well, it could suck the air right out of you. Suddenly you marveled both that anyone in their right mind ever walked or rode a horse to this place, of their own volition… and that anyone in their right mind, now, would ever turn down a chance to see this for themselves, and to likewise be momentarily clobbered senseless by the simple act of opening their eyelids.
I don’t think I’d ever read David Berman’s “Snow” poem before this week. Having looked around the Interwebs for the closest thing I could find to a canonical, online-linkable source, I have to say that it seems to speak to a lot of people, across generations and mindsets. Maybe we’re all a little more of the low-ceiling sort than we’d have noticed (or admitted).
Looking forward to hearing of your 2011 Christmas experience, Nance. Have a happy one!
[P.S. my reCaptcha word-verification offering of the moment: Isolving all. Yeah, right.]
jules says
Okay, that Gary Snyder poem just knocked me over.
marta says
I want to know what reason was given for angels being on the farmer’s property.
And I always look out for walls…it’s just that sometimes it doesn’t help.
s.o.m.e. one's brudder says
Sublime (Gary Snyder) AND ridiculous (Python) in the same posting. Nicely done!
I don’t remember the actual beginning to “Life of Brian” but certainly this should have been a part of it.
s.o.m.e. one's brudder says
btw: technical note: the box for the Python text has no scroll bar, so seeing the entire transcript seems not possible from my perspective. Even with a 24″+ screen, I can’t see the bottom of the expanded box.
John says
Good catch — thanks. Try it now if you have a chance. I had no idea that little routine wasn’t working properly. (You would’ve had much the same problem viewing nearly any song lyrics here posted since the site redesign a few months ago.)
(It’s SUCH a pain having to code and/or test differently for different browsers and operating systems…)
Jayne says
I never did like the Holiday Program. Those are walls in which no angels wander–and a place in which I wish not to shop.
(Incidentally, my holidaze often commence with walking into walls.)
Wishing you and yours, for the New Year, the same as Gary Snyder did the children. :)
John says
The Holiday Program: for several years, one of my sisters ran an annual workshop called “Unplug the Christmas Machine” — how to avoid stepping on the ever-faster treadmill. It was sort of cool. Tellingly, though, I think she found that her holidays were just too crazy trying to fit that program in every year!
Do have a great New Year, Jayne. Do NOT spend it working on a Project, ha.