Snow Drifts and Mind Drifts

I have left my Christmas lights up, especially the ones strung through the bushes that line my 90-foot driveway. I say I am celebrating winter, but I am really resisting winter, for the streetlight’s beams do not illuminate the upper-part of the driveway, the part I see from the three dining room windows when, in the morning, I descend the stairs and turn toward the kitchen to make the first of several pots of coffee. The darkness of that view, the deep, implacable blackness of it, has always torpedoed my spirit. And so, this year, I have left up the Christmas lights, an aorta of multicolored luminescence entering and infusing the frozen-chambered heart of an Iowan midwinter night.

I headed into that night at 6:00 am this past Wednesday morning, bundled and layered, snow shovel in hand. Those celebratory-resistant lights revealed that the aerodynamics of blizzard winds constrained by the right-angled geometry of the house and garage had sculpted several drifted waves of snow that would need to be removed had I any hope of meeting my 8:00 am freshman composition class.

Now, I do own a snowblower, a hulking, gas-powered, eight-geared Craftsman 24-inch Snow Thrower, a gift from my wife Kathy--an act of mercy, really, prompted by her concern about the toll last winter’s frequent and punishingly abundant snowfalls were taking on my aging body. But fingers that fumble buttoning shirt cuffs should not be fiddling with complicated machinery at 6:00 am in the dim light cast by a garage’s overhead bulb, and, in any event, I would not risk waking up my neighbors, human and otherwise. Besides, there is that Puritan residue in me, that somber, sober, styptic voice that says exertion is good, is physically strengthening, bracing, edifying—a bit of saving grace to redeem the body from the sedentary drift of contemporary life. Still, the thigh-high size of those drifts would, perhaps, have caused even the most ardent Calvinist’s faith to falter. I remembered that the lowest circle of Dante’s hell did not burn. It was frozen. No fire. Ice. Well, nothing to do but settle into the labor and attack the drifts in layers, scoopful after patient scoopful, thankful, but only in a small way, for the shovel’s ergonomic handle.

Shoveling snow is a mindless task, and the mind minds being mindless; it craves stimulation, so, as I shoveled my mind wandered into wondering. I wondered about the impossibly perky young woman I had seen the previous week on a morning show showcasing the latest devices, manual and powered, for lightening the snow shoveling burden, her warning about heart attacks, and her claim that after just two minutes of shoveling heavy snow the heart hammers at such a petal-to-the-metal pace that it is liable, at any moment, to be pulled over and placed under cardiac arrest. I wondered if Emerson, who delighted in “the frolic architecture of snow,” had shoveled any.

I wondered about a Sherman Alexie story in which a group of boys, wanting to play midwinter outdoor basketball, soak the snow covering the court with kerosene and set it ablaze. I had no kerosene, but I did have a nearly full two-and-a-half-gallon gas can; however, I remember the house next door had burned down 4 years ago, and I remember the tear-streaked face of the owner, each tear lit by the light of the fire consuming his home, the first that he had purchased, and I decided that, while it may have a certain flair in a work of fiction, in the real world the inferno option was best put aside.

I wondered about the grunt, primal and somehow viscerally satisfying, that accompanied each lifted shovelful of snow and its being flung off to the side. And that caused me to wonder if the discredited “heave-ho” theory of language origin might, in fact, have merit, that language emerged from the sounds involuntarily emitted by the push and shoveness, the lift and toteness, of strenuous physical labor—a language of the body transposed to the brain, localized and made neural in the Broca and Wernicke areas.

And as I tackled the much more compacted drift thrown up on the driveway’s apron by a city snow plow passing during the night, I wondered why, with just two or three shovelsful left, the snow plow came by again, reconstituting what I had so arduously removed. The driver did slow his speed slightly, proving, I suppose, that he had a heart, a soul, but the upsprayed snow toppled the trash receptacle, spilling its contents, and I wondered how so often we seem to be holding a chance card unaware that we have rolled the dice. How often we are forced to improvise. I wondered if that was a good thing. I thought it was.
I wondered what would happen if Jesus should suddenly appear. Would he tell me that if I had a muscular faith I could command the snow to rise and remove itself, much as he tells his disciples, “if you shall say to the mountain `Arise, and hurl thyself into the sea’ it shall be done?” Would he grab the spare shovel and help, serene and self-contained, whistling a show tune perhaps? Would he comment on the Vatican’s decision to provide the Discovery Channel access to its exorcism files, or the blessing the Pope conferred on Facebook? Would he watch for a while, smile, then walk off, atop the snow, into the early morning darkness? Would I, one of the fallen away, fall back?

And I wondered, seriously, sadly, if, as the years pass, our lives announce our increasing humiliation—the debilities of age and the subsequent cultural neglect, the mad rush of befuddling technological gadgetry, the condescension of youth. Do our lives wither down to the concentrated space of a shovel’s scoop? Do we measure them with droppers, with tumblers and teaballs? Do we write them in six-point agate typeface? Speak them in a grammar of diminishment?

But no, I would have none of that. I was out for doing and being, not having done and having been. I had a job to do, and I did it; despite hands and feet that throbbed with cold, despite arms and back that muttered an achy monologue, I did it. Some hot coffee and oatmeal, and I was off to my class, where the students, hoping for canceled classes, were less than exuberant at my arrival. I felt good, though, felt vital, felt, somehow, victorious.

Mysteries

I have long been attracted to lonely roads, the ones “less travelled by,” but I have not ventured down any. The attraction is enough. I have long been enticed by abandoned farm houses, but I have not entered any. The enticement is enough. I have long been beguiled by the nooks and cubbies in old Victorian homes, but I trust I am not a “nook dweller,” that term of contempt Nietzsche applied to “colorblind utility men.” Besides, it’s the being beguiled that is so beguiling. I am fascinated with string theory and quantum physics. But I am not consumed with knowing whether or not eleven dimensions exist, or whether particles can, as was reported of Moby Dick, be in more than one place at a time, or exactly how electrons vast distances apart manage to synchronize their spin rates. That string theory and quantum physics fascinate me is enough. I really don’t need to know if the Voynich Manuscript, a 16th century text written in an unknown language, is a medieval version of Web MD, or what actually happened in the ancient Athenian town of Eleusis during the annual rituals in which initiates were inducted into the worship of the grain goddess Demeter. That they beckon me, intrigue me, captivate me is enough.

All these things—the “less travelled by” roads, the derelict structures, the odd crannies and theories and manuscripts and ceremonies—are mysteries for which I do not wish a solution. It is enough for me simply to be a receptive subject of the experience of them as mysteries. Originally, the word “mystery, from the Greek mystes, described a person initiated into secret rites or doctrines. Its meaning was theological. Only in the 14th century did it take on the non-theological meaning of a hidden or secret thing. I like things whose origin or use is hidden or secreted. I do not wish to be an initiate; I do not wish to encounter the truth of these things; I do not wish to be, as Thomas Carlyle says, “one who goes through a wonderful world unwondering.” Initiation arrests conjecture, and, for me, conjecturing is the best kind of encountering.

I know most people who enjoy mysteries anticipate their resolution. There is pleasure in tension released, expectation fulfilled, vicissitudes overcome. Cognitive psychologists can no doubt demystify the mystery of this pleasure, in much the same way they would explain the mystery of my periodic jones for a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Certain neural circuitry in certain functionally specialized modules firing in certain sequences releasing certain opioids seeking certain receptor cells, a holdover naturally selected to solve problems that tasked our hunting and gathering Pleistocene forebears But the problem with mysteries solved, with wonder satisfied, is that we move on. We enjoy the break from the humdrum substrate of reality upon which our lives are built, but, then, you know, time to get back to work, to face facts, to deal with what is in front of us, to solve real problems, to get real. I prefer the state of wonder, the condition of mystery, to the satisfaction of it. I wonder about wonder. I’m out for, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti says, “the renaissance of wonder.” I’m out for the awe of it, the reverence of it, the humility of it. I’m out for the imagination in motion of it, the adventurous flight of fancy of it. That Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup is not more satisfying for my knowing the biology of it.

Those abandoned farm houses—who lived there, and where did they come from? Were they a happy family, was there rampant affection, or are the walls pitted with the acid spray of angry words? Are they collapsing inward from the resentments they harbored? That lonely road—who made it and for what purpose? Did some young boy walk that road, thinking about dinner or a best friend’s betrayal or the girl who sits behind him in school or a father’s hand tenderly resting on his shoulder or his mother’s small smile and brightening eyes every time he enters the house? Those nooks and cubbies—do they impugn our right-angledness, our geometrization? String theory and quantum physics—do they speak to our need to transcend three dimensionality? Is there a lesson in sociology to be learned from those recalcitrant particles that blithely stray beyond the jurisdiction of what the laws of physics say they can do, or a lesson in metaphysics in the search for the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle theorized to be the source of mass for all other particles? That Voynich Manuscript—could it be a guide to perfecting ourselves, to more fully experiencing our being? Those Eleusinian ceremonies—did the initiates confront a vertiginous realm of reaching expanse and pulsing intricacy beyond which thinking itself cannot go? Is it simply the case that they shared a psychedelic drink? I hope the latter is not the case. I want no Oedipus to arrive in the Theban precincts of these mysteries and solve their riddles. And we all know what happened to Oedipus.

I make a covenant with all things whose mystery summons me to them. If they give themselves to me, if they consent to enter me, I will use but not consume them, will not steal way the tonal core of their otherness, but will accommodate myself to their tenor and texture. I will embody them, but only for a while, carry them away, but only for a short distance, and, then, leave them as they are, unchanged, though they have caused great change in me. I like to believe it is a covenant that fosters an ecology of imagination.

Philosophers have debated, and, I suspect, always will debate, what is true. One favored theory of truth, the correspondence theory, tells us that what we see is what is really there. A direct correspondence exists between the seer and the seen, what Thomas Aquinas called “the equation of things and intellect.” If things conform to objective reality, they are true. Work in cognitive linguists and pyschology, however, tells us that the seen is always distilled through interpretation, shaped by specific historical, social, and cultural processes. We see not the thing itself, in itself, but a representation of it—not the what is but what we construct it to be. The thing itself, in itself, has always already stolen beyond our perceptual boundary. If that is indeed the case, I am heartened, for it means that everything is, finally, deliciously, a mystery.