The Anthropocene Reviewed(58)
Snow is beautiful, almost ridiculously picturesque as it wafts down and blankets the ground, bringing with it a beatific quiet. Wintry mix is radically unromantic, as nicely captured by the word graupel. Wintry mix is a thoroughly Midwestern form of precipitation: practical, unlovely, and unpretentious.
* * *
As I pile withered bean bushes into the wheelbarrow, I feel like the sky is spitting on me. I think of Wilson Bentley, the amateur photographer from Vermont who became the first person to take a close-up photograph of a snowflake in 1885. Bentley went on to photograph more than five thousand snowflakes, which he called “ice flowers” and “tiny miracles of beauty.”
Nobody ever called graupel a tiny miracle of beauty, and obviously, I don’t love being pelted by tiny balls of freezing rain or having sleet lash at me from seemingly impossible angles as it blows across the flat and unbroken misery of an Indiana field. And yet . . . I do kind of like wintry mix. It’s one of the ways I know that I’m home.
* * *
I love Indianapolis precisely because it isn’t easy to love. You have to stay here a while to know its beauty. You have to learn to read the clouds as something more than threatening or dreary. The words “pathetic fallacy” sound derogatory, and the phrase was originally intended as such when coined by the critic John Ruskin. Of Romantic poets like Scott and Wordsworth, Ruskin wrote, “The love of nature is more or less associated with their weakness.” He would go on to claim that endowing nature with emotion “is always the sign of a morbid state of mind, and comparatively a weak one.”*
Maybe it’s owing to my comparatively weak and morbid state of mind, but the pathetic fallacy often works for me. I like it when Wordsworth wanders lonely as a cloud, or when Scott writes of nature having a “genial glow.” Many of us really are affected by the weather, especially in the slimly lit days of winter. The weather may not have human emotions, but it does cause them. Also, we can’t help but see the world around us in the context of ourselves, especially our emotional selves. That’s not a bug of human consciousness, but a feature of it.
And so, yes, of course precipitation is utterly indifferent to us. As e. e. cummings put it, “the snow doesn’t give a soft white / damn Whom it touches.” And yes, how grateful we are to the modernists for knocking down our doors to inform us that clouds do not threaten or weep, that the only verb a cloud ever verbed was to be. But we give a soft white damn whom snow touches.
* * *
Walking the wheelbarrow full of dead, uprooted plants toward our compost pile, I remember a snippet of an Anne Carson poem. “The first snows of winter / floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced / all trace of the world.” But there is no silence here in the land of wintry mix, only the cacophonous tit-a-tat white noise of graupel bombarding the ground.
The groundhog sleeps through it all. When she gets going in late March, she’ll feel the same, and I will feel different. The month the groundhog wakes up, Sarah’s book tour will be canceled. Our kids’ schools will close. We will be separated from friends and family for what, at first, we think might be four weeks, or even eight.
I will suddenly become far more interested in the garden than I’ve ever been, and that spring I will learn of a solution to the great groundhog war from watching, of all things, a YouTube video. It turns out that I am not the only person to be locked in conflict with a groundhog, and another gardener suggests a radical solution that works perfectly. I till a patch of soil by the shed, and when I am done planting soybean seeds in my garden, I plant some in the groundhog’s garden. The same with the peppers and the beans.
* * *
Beginning that March, I will be outside all the time, every day, ravenous for the normalcy that I can only feel outdoors, where nature proceeds apace. I will begin to understand for the first time in my life that I am not just made for Earth, but also of it.
But we are not there yet. The menacing Spring has not yet sprouted. I dump the dead plants into a compost pile, and return the wheelbarrow to the shed. That night, Sarah and I will listen to the poet Paige Lewis read. I love Lewis’s book Space Struck for many reasons, but especially because the poems give voice and form to the anxiety that dominates so much of my life, the panic of threatening clouds and scornful groundhogs. In one poem, Lewis writes of a narrator who feels
as if I’m on the moon listening to the air hiss
out of my spacesuit, and I can’t find the hole. I’m
the vice president of panic, and the president is
missing.
* * *
In March of 1965, the cosmonaut Alexei Leonov exited the Mir space capsule and became the first human being to float freely* in space. At the end of this first spacewalk, Leonov discovered that his space suit had expanded in the vacuum of space, and he could not squeeze back into the capsule. His only choice was to open a valve in the space suit and let the air within seep into space, which shrank the suit enough that he could squeeze back into his spaceship just before his oxygen ran out. Nature is indifferent to us, but surely it did not feel that way to Alexei Leonov as he felt the air leak out and the void rush in.
I don’t believe we have a choice when it comes to whether we endow the world with meaning. We are all little fairies, sprinkling meaning dust everywhere we go. This mountain will mean God, and that precipitation will mean trouble. The vacuum of space will mean emptiness, and the groundhog will mean nature’s scorn for human absurdity. We will build meaning wherever we go, with whatever we come across. But to me, while making meaning isn’t a choice, the kind of meaning can be.