Within the Cold in Winter

Robert Bly began his book “Silence in the Snowy Fields” with a quote from Jacob Boehme: “We are all asleep in the outward man.” Indeed, and what makes me think my own intelligence isn’t the most artificial of all, talking of influences and other outward things?

I was reading a blog post this morning that begins with, “Winter is my favorite season.” It’s true that once the snow begins to fall and cover all with its soft warm blanket (for snow protects the rose bush in severe cold by insulating it against the east winds and super freezing temperatures), I too succumb to the inward.

But in winter I often regret nostalgically our move north to the rain and cold, the damp and wet. Not that I mind the water, but it’s not salty or warm here, and the ocean is far away, and the water seeps up as the table rises and floods fill the news. But I just checked the ten day forecast and there’s not a freezing temperature on the horizon. Still, I’m reminded of Camus’s “The Sea Close By”:

“I grew up with the sea and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable” (172).

Bly turns away from cultural surface noise. He understands what’s biological and what’s merely cultural, and he cuts through cultural, social identities to uncover the cold of the soul.

Bly’s book is divided into three parts: “Eleven Poems of Solitude,” “Awakening,” and “Silence on the Roads.” But the book begins with a poem about driving through snowy fields, what seems an unlikely beginning for a book about inward being:

“It is a pleasure, also, to be driving
Toward Chicago, near dark,
And to see the lights in the barns.”

from “Three Kinds of Pleasures” (11)

Maybe that’s what I should do today, drive out through the Gorge and into the east wind, a risk of icy roads and freezing blows, the river fat and runny, a long train every now and then, to or from Chicago, and big trucks rumbling and rattling by with giant tire chains wrapped around metal hooks and racks on the tractor frame.

But no, I’ll stay in here where it’s warm under my laptop and write this post which a few readers might like and might even get a comment from someone down south in a beach chair camping out at Refugio.