Changing a Diaper in Snowy Woods

An introduction to this newsletter

Now we have to get back the cosmos, and it can’t be done by a trick.
—D H Lawrence, Apocalypse  

Þis kyng lay at Camylot vpon Krystmasse
With mony luflych lorde, ledez of þe best,
Rekenly of þe Rounde Table alle þo rich breþer,
With rych reuel oryȝt and rechles merþes.
—Gawain and the Green Knight

Today is Christmas. I woke up to the sound Having been awakened by my young children, the first sound I heard after that was gentle rain. It is a sweet sound, like the shouting of small children on Christmas morning. But unlike children’s excitement, rain on Christmas in Michigan bodes nothing good. I don’t insist on a white Christmas, but I would like the temperature to be right. It was almost sixty degrees when I woke this morning. I stood on my front porch in my pajamas for a few minutes before sunrise. But this is hardly unusual anymore at this time of year and throughout winter.

More on the weather later (I am more or less a Midwesterner, after all). Today is nevertheless a fitting day to begin these letters; and it’s good spiritual exercise for me to do so today. I’ve had a tendency in recent years to become somewhat cynical and dejected about Christmas. The spiritually vague cheer; the gross profusion of (at best) useless stuff which, if you have young children, no matter what you do threatens to inundate your house and suffocate your life like the marée de merde (tide of shit) that Flaubert complained of; the confusion of Christmastide with Advent resulting in what should feel like a mysterious beginning, full of excitement and boding, instead coming off as the exhausted and anticlimactic end of a debauched and pointless party…

But that’s enough humbug. Christmas isn’t a scam, after all: For the taking on of full bodily life by the transcendent ground of all being—that fabled apocalypse of the mundane and trivial as symbolic and otherworldly—that is archaic and primordial romance, ultimate desire actually achieved. Human order always seeks to mirror and recapitulate cosmic order. The man, the woman, the newborn child, the animals, the wandering strangers, the primitive half out-of-doors setting—it is a core image, something one instinctually perceives as resonant—at least I do, and I wasn’t raised with much in the way of religion, either from my Christian or my Jewish heritage.

Maybe the archetypal resonance of the core Christmas image is why Western literary traditions have always found something inspiring in Christmastime, something numinous and ominous, as if in this time it is easier to glimpse an otherworld or the heart of reality. Anyway, there is an abundance of tales—some of our stories that go deepest, both modern and ancient—set in this time of year. In my next post at Close Reading, the blog of Slant Books (who will be publishing my novel Absolute Music in 2022), I’ll be writing about the neglected nineteenth-century Austrian master Adalbert Stifter, who wrote one of the best stories set during Christmas, “Rock Crystal.” I think, too, of visionary stories by Dostoevsky, Gogol, Papadiamantis, Dylan Thomas, Jon Fosse (more about him to come in this space), and others—all tapping into an intense Christmastime energy.

Those are all relatively modern writers. The literary influence of Christmas goes back much further. For example, the second epigraph, above, is from the fourteenth-century English poem Gawain and the Green Knight. In the literature, Arthur, the king in question here, is often introduced at Christmas, and the adventures of his knights may begin then. Here are the lines in modern English (my adaptation):

This king held court at Camelot, come Christmastide,
with many a lovely lord and of ladies the best,
arranged by the round Table, all the rich brethren,
with mighty revels, as is right, and reckless mirth.

I daresay I’ve got the literal sense intact there, and much of the music, too, though you have to say it aloud in Middle English to get the adventurous joy shot through the whole poem. I should “translate” or adapt more Middle English, and I just may occasionally do so in these letters. Like J R R Tolkien, or the excellent poet Elizabeth Jennings, I love Middle English for the way it’s earthier yet more spiritual, and when it gets ribald and raucous, as it often does, there’s still somehow an innocence to it… Anyway, the quotation is the real beginning of Gawain and the Green Knight, situating us in seasonal time, a certain place in the flow of the year. We get these lines after the storyteller finishes his prologue and framing device, by means of which he plumbs the mythical origins of Britain and give us the usual disclaimer: I’m going to tell you this story the way I heard it, so if you think it’s incredible, don’t blame me. The truth of all fiction is to be found in that rhetorical move… but that’s a point for a later essay.

The point here is that this medieval tale, at once among the most typical and superb in the literary traditions of the British Isles, begins in Christmastime. Really it begins on New Year’s Day. But that falls well within Christmastime. This is something we have forgotten: the true span and scope of feasting and revelry. We have forgotten it because our sense of time has been blasted to smithereens. I mean that literally. We think down to the smallest countable increments of time, so as to be productive, and have lost the feeling for the two most vital aspects of time, duration and flow. We are as miserly with time as Scrooge is with light. There is a place in human experience for the moment—I will be telling the story of such a moment later in this letter—but even that has little to do with the feeling of clock time, which reduces Christmas (and everything else) to the smallest, most manageable increments possible.

For most of us these days, “the twelve days of Christmas” is an inscrutable old song that involves various birds, true love, and improbable combinations of people (how easy is it to round up eleven pipers?—I don’t think I know even one piper). But historically, Christmastime was a seriously huge party. A party like we don’t really know how to do anymore. Advent was a time of asceticism, renunciation and quiet expectation, building to the culmination of… a single moment, you could say, yes, but this was only another beginning. (And this is another part of the deep truth of fiction, that the end of every story is the beginning of another.) From Christmas Day a new, ebullient atmosphere persisted for almost two weeks until the Feast of the Epiphany. The “twelfth night” of Christmas, the eve of the Christian holiday of Epiphany, was a night of masquerading and revelry and, as it was called, the stylized misrule (chiefly this consisted in the swapping of social roles, a kind of wildness that is of course only possible for a culture with a strong sense of the value of role), which gave Shakespeare the title of one of his fantastic and romantic plays. New Year’s Day falls in this time of mirth and costumes and feats and tale-telling. So it was a perfect time for the anonymous poet of Gawain to begin the tale of a knight’s mysterious and errant quest to redeem and prove himself after an initially brazen and foolish act (the kind of thing you’d do in the midst of a wild party), the true and awful nature of which he failed to grasp at first. It is a time of enchantment, in the full and proper sense of the word, which betokens not only wonder and beauty but also mischief and peril.

Now that I put it that way, maybe this isn’t such a great moment to begin these letters. But that sort of enchantment is what I’m after here. And that is what this writing feels like to me: a possibly ill-advised yet necessary and no doubt errant quest to rediscover the joy and revelry of writing, and of reading and engaging with other arts, in a time when I and many others, though called to the intellectual and artistic way of joy, find it a hard way to follow.

These letters will be essays in the original sense of the word—a hazard, a search, a meander or a gamble—mixing personal experience and sensibility with what little expertise I’ve managed to pick up. But I like to think of them as letters. The form of Substack, which is technically a “newsletter,” encourages this. In any case, I find it more generative to write to a real audience of people who actually want to read my work than to write for the totally abstract notion of a book’s potential readership. The writing I do here is in fact part of my current book project, which may or may not end up being published under the title Romance and Apocalypse—a title which I hope will make more sense by the time you get to the end of this first letter.

But in this space I feel free to address a wider range of texts and topics than can be fit between the covers of a single book. It’s a project I’ve had difficulty narrowing down and focusing for several years now, and in a way if you read and respond—in agreement or otherwise!—to what I write here, then like my students, who are also on the receiving end of my inchoate thinking, you will help me hone my work and be in some measure responsible for my next book.

I won’t normally write at such length as I do in this letter (in fact, I will normally only write a third to half this much), and I won’t always be drawing as much on personal experience. But I thought I would give you first readers a little something more to hearten and regale you in what I hope is a relaxing and recreative (and enchanting… if not perilous) turning of the year. And I need to properly introduce myself as a writer. As I think of it, that means not only broaching some of the ideas and styles with which I will be working in this space, but also showing you something of where I am. Every artist makes art, and every thinker thinks, from somewhere. So let me take you on a ramble or two, and show you my place.

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A few days ago it was the winter solstice, and I had thought that would be the auspicious day to publish this first letter, but as it happened I was too busy with the semester’s last grading to do more than begin writing. But it was at least a fine and proper beginning to astronomical winter here in Ann Arbor. Dawn was clear, not a cloud in sight, and the sky quickly brightened to that blue that only comes in a northern winter. We should have a single word or short phrase for it. Icy blue is not quite right, it sounds too pale. I mean blue contrasted with the browns and golds and greys of the eastern North American hardwood forest (punctuated here and there by evergreen), when it is leaflorn but snowless and struck by the long slanting rays of light around the turning of the year. Things have seldom their own nature (that we can know), but find always some complement or pair, and the sky is no exception.

The windows of my home office look to the west. When I came in here on the morning of the solstice, the first thing I noticed looking outside was the buttery light of sunrise bathing a Cooper’s Hawk perched in my neighbor’s chamaecyparis. She looked a little cold, puffing and preening and moving from one foot to the other. I was glad it was seasonally cold for once, and maybe the hawk was too. When she (I think a she, for the bird seems rather large) at last shot off to some higher perch, I thought I’d do the same before I had to hunker down in front of the computer.

I walked up over the crest of the large hill on which my neighborhood sits, and made a circuit through a small woods where I often go when I don’t have time to walk farther. Already by the time I returned home a nacreous overcast was creeping in from the south and west. But for most of the walk the sun, though this was almost the very minute of the winter solstice, shone brilliant. I took this picture in the woods, which maybe shows what I mean about winter blue. As had been the case for some days, the ground was frozen hard and all low-lying things, like the fallen trunk of the cottonwood you can see here, were rimed in ice and hoarfrost.

That’s a good old word, rime. Unlike its more familiar homophone rhyme, which comes from Greek, rime comes down through the Germanic heritage of English. In Old English, hrima was simply frost, but if you trace the word back further earlier forms (or so we conjecture) mean to graze something, to just barely touch it, a glancing blow perhaps, or the merest brush or passing glance of an encounter. And yet, rime can encase solidly. Whenever I see the title of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I think not of poetry and song (the rhyme that is meant in this aural pun), but of the bow and rigging of a sailing ship encased in ice and frost, such as in fact happens to the ship in the poem. Coleridge was playing on the coincidence of sound between rime and rhyme, and on the accidents of the history of pronunciation and spelling, and on the mixed parentage of English. It is all coincidence, and yet isn’t it beautiful that the rhyme of a poem fits it much as rime coats a fallen tree? This is one of the kinds of delight that literary art aims to discover, a kind of playfulness or unmerited reward woven into language by what benefactor we cannot say.

It was even colder the day after the solstice, suitably cold. In the morning a few stray snowflakes fluttered down from a low, grey drifting sky. It was a blue-grey sky, and pale grey and golden grey in a kind of patchwork quilt. A common winter sky at this latitude. But the cold did not last, and that sky has now given way to an unseasonably mild murk. No season is changing as noticeably and as fast as winter. That truth, and everything that comes with it, is part of why I’m writing these letters. I want to find out what stories are worth telling, what songs worth singing, what art is worth crafting and beholding, when the nature of this world is shifting all around us like it has never done since human beings have been civilized.

Last winter (2020-2021), when the idea for this project first came to me, was also one of these new, wilder winters. Here in southeast Michigan we had only one month of true winter, by which I mean a frozen world where it snows and the snow does not melt. From late November 2020 until late January 2021 it would occasionally get cold and snow an inch or two—or something that looked like snow, a semi-gelid form of precipitation that often now falls when in the old climate it would have been snow. But always it would thaw, and often rain, right away afterwards. One sunny, mild day in the middle of January, what ought to have been the coldest time, I went for a ride—I’ve been a year-round cyclist since youth, so in itself this was not weird for me—my first ride since contracting Covid the previous November. Glad as I was for the excursion, more than the lingering effects of Covid made it strange, for if it hadn’t been for the low angle of light, you would have thought spring was around the corner. Yet at the same time it was a beautiful and exhilarating ride, in no way diminished by being out of place—or I should say, out of its right time. This is the kind of paradox to which I constantly return.

But finally, towards the end of last January, real cold set in and lasted a month. With it came a decent amount of genuine snow that did not melt even in the afternoons. One day during this belated heart of winter, I took my sons on one of the long walks that had become habitual for us during the pandemic on the days when my wife taught from home via Zoom. Our older son was almost four then, our younger son a few months past his second birthday. This walk involved pushing the boys in a double-stroller up and down through our quarter of the city about a mile to get to a large woods, called the Bluffs, that overhangs the Huron River. It was a radiant but not a clear afternoon: very cold and dry air pushing low white clouds that shaded to golden purple on their underbellies as the afternoon wore on.

We got to Bluffs, I parked the double-stroller, and we hiked into the woods. Our first stop in the woods was Tah the Rock. That is an approximate transliteration of the rock’s name. I’ve considered other possible spellings, including Thá and T’a, but as any fantasist will tell you, it’s best with invented language to keep things as simple and familiar as possible. My older son named the rock. We give names to many things that don’t normally bear names. Tah is a rounded chunk of granite about three feet high, covered in lichen, which my sons can climb on to get a better view, especially in winter, of the Huron below and the train tracks that bridge the river and run alongside it. We always greeted Tah when we went to Bluffs: and this is still our practice, though the freakish windstorm that tore through last August (actually a derecho, a wall of wind ripping across a huge swath of the country, much like the two such systems that have done the same this December) sent a young but already substantial oak down upon Tah, so that we cannot climb on him anymore.

The next stop, farther in, was the Meadow, where I always think of this poem by Robert Duncan… The Meadow may be, as Duncan writes, a place of first permission, / everlasting omen of what is. I find the Meadow especially beautiful in winter, with tall brown grass interspersed with snow and young cottonwoods evenly spaced, like the pillars of a hypethral temple (a temple with no roof, open to the seasons); when the springtime hinges into summer, the cottonwoods’ seed, from which they get their common name, drifts through the air and collects in clumps like snow. In spring and summer and early autumn it is a buzzing and trilling and bird-crying riot of wildflowers and prairie grasses reaching higher than my sons, the big bluestem reaching higher than me. But here was the meadow on that day last February:

We wound around the Meadow and then began to make our way back toward the stroller along a different path that meanders through the woods a little higher up. This path goes past the Hollow Tree, one of my favorite spots in the Bluffs. In addition to the Meadow spread out below us, in the winter from the Hollow Tree you can see across the valley of our little river to a ridge of high ground by a road called Pontiac Trail (named for an Indian chieftain about whom I may write more later in these letters). The Hollow Tree is a great oak, much like what I imagined (though not quite that big) when I read My Side of the Mountain as a child. We have glorious oaks here in Michigan. There is one down the street from me that must have been a mature tree when French voyageurs roamed these parts and Pontiac was a boy.

The Hollow Tree has two large gaps in the base of the trunk, spaced so that children might peer at each other through the dim cavern of ancient wood. My sons enjoy doing this—or they did before someone last summer filled the Hollow Tree with disgusting trash—and they did so on this walk, growing animated, their cheeks flushed beneath the long flaps of their large, heavy wool hats. And then my younger son’s face became suddenly grave and he froze, gripped the bark, and looked through the tree and past his brother, as it were to behold some otherworldly vision.

Oh. . . shit.

Time, or timing, is either everything or it is nothing. This is a fitting idea to bring up on Christmas. There are three important aspects of time: duration and flow, as mentioned above, and an aspect for which we lack a single word in English, but which is denoted by the Greek work kairos, meaning the right moment, the appropriateness of time. Kairos is related to the flow, or as I often think of it the tao, of time. Really, all three aspects work together, they are all of a piece, all faces of the most mysterious of creatures, Time. When events arise according to the tao of time, they come at the right time, and last the proper amount of time. The birth of the Christ-child, the Incarnation, is said to have happened at the right time, or to use a more beautiful English expression which calls to mind (at least for me) the image of a pregnant woman who is ready to be delivered of her child, in the fullness of time.

Well, the timing with my younger son in the woods did not seem exactly right, though the diaper was surely full. I was lucky to have packed a spare diaper and wipes, equipment I’d got in the habit of not bothering with since by that point my older son didn’t need it and my younger son needed few diapers in a day. But he needed a new one now. This was a little test of wherewithal, which I was determined we should pass. The ground by the Hollow Tree is not exactly even, and it is covered in underbrush and, on this occasion, in half a foot of snow. It was all of maybe twenty-five degrees out, and when the breeze blew it felt much colder. I could hardly remove my gloves to fiddle with my son’s clothes and clean him up without getting frostbit. I thought about trying to get back to the stroller to do it, maybe I could fold down one of the seats and do it on that quickly enough. But the stroller was pretty far off. I thought about the path, where the snow was packed down, but I was sure that as soon as I got into the thick of it some runner or skier or biker would come charging by. (That is exactly what happened: a man on a mountain bike with huge tires, like some Savage Knight out of medieval story, his face concealed not by a steel visor and helm but by a ski mask and goggles.) So I opted to change the diaper in the lee of the Hollow Tree, just off the path.

I spread my coat on the ground (my older son happily helped tamp down the snow for us), and it felt like the wind was picking up. I tried to execute this diaper change by removing only my son’s coat and pulling down his snow suit pants, and then pulling down his jeans, but leaving his boots on. I was also trying to keep him from rolling off my coat into the snow or getting poop everywhere. It was a moment of intense concentration combined with a sort of open, indirected awareness, an involuted time: everything else fell away, my past life, my future ambitions, every ill or misshapen feeling that had arisen since the beginning of the pandemic or before—all gone, replaced by pure sensation and motor coordination. And. . . we did it flawlessly, if I may say so myself. As I was getting my boy back into his clothes—he hardly whimpered once for the cold and discomfort—I looked up and beheld the Meadow and the little valley of the Huron.

There was something luminous about this moment, joyful and revelatory. I looked up, and everything was perfect. My mind returned to a state I associate with my boyhood and youth, a feeling that would come over me sometimes when I played games of fantasy, usually out of doors, or read fantasy fiction, which I also did out of doors as much as possible. It was not a feeling that had anything to do with the specific story I was playing or reading (though it may have had something to do with the kind of story—fantasy, questing). The best way I can think of describing the state of mind or feeling is to call it the contradiction of yearning and peace, some kind of tranquil desire. Desire for what? Desire to behold only what is truly present and to become what you behold. Isn’t this the desire to have and to be what you already have and are?

It is the feeling of a moment, I know that much, and it is not Wordsworth’s artful “emotion recollected in tranquility” in order to be set down in words, though of course you can do that—I’m trying to do it right now. When I was a boy, if one of these moments had been caused by reading some particular passage in a book while out of doors, it would be followed immediately by a strong feeling of my consciousness being booted out of the book and into the world. In any case it is a numinous experience of being truly present in the world, and that means feeling at home in existence, not just present but part of an ordered and symbolic world.

But always the moment, whatever it is, passes swiftly enough—this time at Bluffs was no exception—and I am returned to the story or to my regular role in life, as if nothing had happened, as if I had not just been snatched by some faerie into another version of reality. I can still recall the feeling of the sagging, heavy, warm diaper (I felt the warmth through my gloves) in one hand and holding my younger son’s hand with my other as we trudged out of Bluffs, up and down snow-slippery hills.

My mind wandered into darker territory as we walked. Why were we out on an unpleasantly cold day, and definitely not the best weather to work up a sweat in, as I did every time I had to push the double stroller any distance, and over snow and ice at that? Disposable diapers are ecologically repugnant, but I’d never considered using a more sustainable alternative. Like most everyone else, I want things to be as comfortable and easy as possible (except when for my own satisfaction I prefer things otherwise), and my desire to live that way, combined with the same desire in nearly everyone else, is destroying the biosphere. I began to think that looking up from the diaper it wasn’t perfection I had seen, but a dying world from which I was alienated in my heart, locked away in my little absurd bubble of comforts and petty wants and fears—absurd, as in surd, meaning deaf, mute, senseless, cut off in my senses, my whole bodily being—cut off from the cosmos, from the living Earth and her Firmament.

So much for the moment of interconnection in a sacred mysterious creation.

But this is the problem with being a modern person: you’re a cynic and ironist by default. It’s not that it’s inherently bad or false to seek some critical perspective on these moments when the world seems to step out from behind itself and wink at you or take you by the hand. What’s bad and, I think, false in the sense of betraying oneself, is privileging that critical, skeptical attitude over the initial experience of wonder. But this is what we are trained to do. And enormous sources of anxiety impinge upon us day and night, encouraging us to disregard that initial and, as it seems, initiative wonder. As my sons and I made our way out of the Bluffs that day last winter, I knew exactly what weighed on me more than anything else. And though I was surrounded by a frozen landscape and snow-heavy clouds, I could call to mind an image very like this one, a sort of emblem of what most troubled me (and still does):

In fact, I took that photo last July (i.e. 2021), but I had seen many such morning skies the previous September—that is, the end of the summer and the early autumn before the weird, revelatory afternoon at Bluffs. You shouldn’t be able to look directly at the sun through a film of red smog. Not in Michigan. Perhaps if you were standing near a large forest fire it would be reasonable to expect to see such a sun. But there were no forest fires in Michigan when I took that photo.

Last February when, with my little sons, I was exiting Bluffs in a confused state of mind, the worst wildfire season to date in the American West had only recently concluded. I had seen many such skies like the one in this photo, a red and baleful murk caused by smoke from fires burning in California and elsewhere lofted high in the atmosphere and blown across the continent. And I had seen footage shot from drones in San Francisco, where all day long for days on end the sky was much redder than in my photo. Someone set that footage to the music from the beginning of the dystopian and post-apocalyptic film Bladerunner, and that juxtaposition continues to haunt me. The inferno of 2020 was made all the eerier for me because here in Michigan, and all over the northeastern quadrant of North America, we had a halcyon autumn, a season of such rich and profuse color that I had hardly known was possible. All over Washtenaw County even the Norway Maples (not normally known for autumnal color more exciting than a sort of jaundiced brown) turned a molten, ebullient gold. That spring of 2020, when the pandemic was beginning, had been beautiful as well, a long cold spring leading into an old-fashioned northern summer, mild and fair. It had almost been as if the Earth were consoling us for the frightening and disturbing effects and social side-effects of the pandemic. But not so out West.

Of course I didn’t know, last February, what the next summer was to bring: scorching devastation in western North America to make the summer of 2020 seem mild in comparison. But I had a foreboding of it, for the weird thing about climate change is that it means the future is already to some extent decided: we have yet to feel the effects of all the greenhouse gas we have discharged, let alone what we inevitably will continue to discharge (or release from the oceans and the thawing permafrost, etc) for some time yet. To revert to and modify slightly the prophetic language of Robert Duncan’s poem, the everlasting omen of what already is had been broadcast from horizon to smoke-reddened horizon.

How do you deal with this as an artist? As a teacher? As a man of supposed religious faith and as a father traipsing with two small boys and a poopy diaper out of a woods where you’ve just experienced a moment of… what, exactly? The more I thought about it, the more it felt like a moment of profound faith or a moment of profound doubt. But faith and doubt in what? And could it have been both at once?

I didn’t really have an answer to these questions then, and I don’t really have one now. The questions are what lead me to write and to seek literature and other works of art that somehow answer to the moment I have been describing, and my immediate reaction to it. It seems to me that in writing and in searching the arts I am after two things primarily. One is a sense of rootedness—connection to the Earth beneath my feet and to the skies above me, the sense of myself as a being who in fact connects earth and sky. I turn these images to metaphor as well, and think of the connection between the created orders of being and the Creator. And the other is a sense of flow or energy, or what in other contexts I will call the tao. To some extent these senses or desires for rootedness and dynamism can be understood in combination, but at times one must also feel and live with—indeed, draw fuller life from—the tension between them. A further paradox: both the rootedness or connection, and the flowing energy, can be a revelation or epiphany, something very much given to us and in our possession whether we want it or not; and both can be the Grail, the elusive object of quest. We love both the revelation and the quest, the having and the yearning.

Or we ought to love both. Maybe the answer to my dire questions was to fall in love again, which is to say to return to one’s origins. Last night, just before I nodded off, I finished rereading a wonderful long poem by an author (and the kind of author) I’ll likely discuss more in these letters, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz. His Chant de Notre Rhône (Song of Our Rhone) ends with this declaration: Rien ne naît que d’amour, et rien ne se fait que d’amour; seulement il faut tâcher de connaître toutes les espèces d’mour.—Nothing is born but from love, and nothing is made but from love; it is necessary only to strive to know all the kinds of love. Ramuz was a fascinating writer. This prose-poetry, one of his masterpieces, could not have come from anything but his profound sense of place and rootedness, as well as his sense of all that flows—it is, after all, about the river whose upper reaches were the poet’s home country.

But what I want to say now is that it is maybe to fall in love again with both the revelation and the quest, as I know them in my life and in the literature and other arts I have devoted my life to studying, that I’m writing these letters. It does take effort, both attentiveness and intention. And love is too easily lost.

As I walked out of Bluffs, remembering smoke-reddened skies, I had lost the Grail. But for a moment back there, looking up from the diaper at a frozen world and the flowing snow-laden sky, I’d had it. The literature of the quest we call romance. That is the original meaning of the term: the story that goes here and there, searching and desiring. I will have something to say about romance in these letters. But for the literature of revelation or apocalypse—these are Latin and Greek words that both mean pulling back the veil—for the literature of pulling back the veil, I do not have a single apt word… unless it would be apocalyptic. Is that what I mean? We use the word to mean the end of the world, but we do not know what the end of the world means. Maybe apocalyptic art, so to call it, is not about the end of the world so much as being open to the world—as the place of truth, and yet also as unfathomable place. Here is a poem that was in my mind that day last February in Bluffs, Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man.” I think it is an apocalyptic poem:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

This is one of the most perfect and wisest poems I know in any language, and one example of the kind of thing I’m searching for in literature, the kind of thing that I think helps us along in the quest of this age, which is the quest to rediscover ourselves amidst a living cosmos. If the language of apocalypse is too dramatic, feels too much like the kind of rhetorical, self-deluding trick that D H Lawrence warns us against in the first epigraph to this letter (which, ironically, I quote from his last, posthumous book, one of his most impassioned and beautiful, which is a collection of writings on the biblical book Apocalypse)—if that language is too intense and disturbed, as it sometimes feels to me, or on the other hand hollowed out and cheapened, as it also sometimes feels, then I might, to describe a poem like “The Snow Man,” instead hit upon a word already mentioned in connection with the Meadow: hypaethral.

This ancient Greek word means beneath the sky, but the sense is that of a building—in other words, human artifice—a temple or shrine that is at least partly open to the sky, to all weathers and airs, all that comes from above—like the manger in Bethlehem two thousand years ago. Think of it, art that is truly open to the world, that is a kind of sacred building open to the world. What would that be? What kind of writing is hypaethral for you, meaning not only that it is open to the world but that it opens you to the world? Art that makes your mind porous like the walls of a gothic cathedral, welcoming sunlight through stained glass and within inviting candlelight to play shadowy fantasies upon stone wrought like the uncountable limbs of a forest.

Despite my quite respectable classical education (if I say so myself!), I somehow didn’t encounter the word hypaethral until I was a young graduate student reading the work of the great American agrarian writer Wendell Berry. In his book Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community he writes:

I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a "hypaethral book," such as Thoreau talked about - a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine - which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.

This passage was a turning point for me. It is about how to read in a hypaethral spirit, and it is itself hypaethral in spirit. I hope in my best moments in these letters I accomplish something similar, if not in what I write then in how I read what others have written and the traces others have left. Part of what this will involve is returning to some of my literary roots. One of those roots, and one I will turn to first, is Henry David Thoreau. Here is the passage from Thoreau’s journals that I think would have given Berry his idea of Thoreau as a self-described hypethral writer:

I thought that one peculiarity of my “Week” was its hypaethral character, to use an epithet applied to those Egyptian temples which are open to the heavens above, under the ether. I thought that it had little of the atmosphere of the house about it, but might wholly have been written, as in fact it was to a considerable extent, out-of-doors. It was only in a late period in writing it, as it happened, that I used any phrases implying that I lived in a house or lived a domestic life. I trust it does not smell [so much] of the study and library, even of the poet’s attic, as of the fields and woods; that it is a hypaethral or unroofed book, lying open under the ether and permeated by it, open to all weathers, not easy to be kept on a shelf.

When the pandemic began, I found myself suddenly teaching from home, and my wife found herself in the same situation, and we found ourselves without any sort of childcare. It was a tough spot. We were also somewhat afraid of Covid, but honestly it was the massive disruption to daily life that what was most disconcerting. Back then, my kids were still sleeping reliably until almost eight in the morning, so I was able to rise very early and have a good spell of quiet time in which to read, meditate, work, pray, or practice tai chi before the house stirred. It was interesting what I found myself turning to for reading material. As per my love of Middle English, I very slowly and carefully read through—almost prayed, you could say—the anonymous medieval text called The Cloud of Unknowing. I also read Rachel Carson’s first books (her ‘sea trilogy’ before the more famous Silent Spring), and remembered how exquisitely beautiful, but also sublimely ominous they are, especially the first of them. And perhaps because I knew that I was now going to have all the time I would have spent commuting to spend outdoors instead, I decided I was going to re-read all of Thoreau.

I began with his essays and parts of his journals. Then, after a hiatus, I read his first book, one of only two he published in his lifetime, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. It so happened I was reading R H Blyth’s Zen and Zen Classics at about the same time, and Blyth has a tendency to quote Thoreau a lot, especially from A Week. Blyth’s estimation of Thoreau’s first book corroborated my own. I will have more soon to say about Thoreau in these letters, but for the moment I want to pluck from his first book a passage which seems to state in theoretical form the sentiment he voices in his journals about what I think of—thanks to Thoreau and Wendell Berry—as hypethralism in literature and indeed all art (in music particularly Sibelius and Messiaen, about whom more down the road):

In the wildest nature, there is not only the material of the most cultivated life, and a sort of anticipation of the last result, but a greater refinement already than is ever attained by man…. Nature is prepared to welcome into her scenery the finest work of human art, for she is herself an art so cunning that the artist never appears in his work. // Art is not tame, and Nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense. A perfect work of man’s art wold also be wild or natural in a good sense. Man tames Nature only that he may at last make her more free even than he found her, though he may never yet have succeeded.

I shall close this main part of the inaugural letter—an epilogue of sorts and the conclusion to my idiosyncratic tour of Ann Arbor here follows—with an observation about the final sentence in this rich passage I can’t begin to do justice here (it appears in the “Thursday” chapter, for those of you following along at home). What i observe is that what Thoreau says about “taming” nature, using the best language available to him in his time, is what in certain Christian intellectual circles today is called Sophiology, or the study and discernment of the ways of Sophia, the Wisdom of God. The guiding idea behind Sophiology is that humankind, created male and female in the image and likeness of God, can learn to comport itself in all its aitivities (which includes all modes of art), and care for the minuscule yet immeasurable corner of creation in which we find our place, according to the Wisdom of God, which for lack of better phrase means how God sees and intends the cosmos.

To those of my readers for whom Sophia or Sophiology might be meaningful, I can say that as a writer in these letters, in the book which these letters gird, and truthfully in all my work as a writer and editor and teacher (though in teaching one has to be very subtle about this)—in all this work my aim is Sophia, the wisdom (and the hope, joy, and love that come with it) that is natural. In its root, the word natural means to be born—born into this world of flux and memory and what may seem random but always arises in the right time. In human-symbolical terms, nature means: to come from woman. It is especially fitting, then, to speak of nature on Christmas.

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As you exit Bluffs the way my sons and I usually do, and as we did that day last February, you go through a small field of wildflowers perched about halfway up the large area of uneven higher ground called Water Hill. You are looking downhill to the south, and to the east, across train tracks serving freight, you look toward the elevated region of Kerrytown and the middle of Ann Arbor. In winter, when the leaves and grasses and flowers are down, you can see from this entrance to Bluffs many edifices of the powerfullest, wealthiest, largest, and most ancient institutions of Western civilization: the Hospital, the University, and the Church.

The largest buildings visible from the edge of Bluffs belong to the University of Michigan hospital and related establishments, like the School of Medicine and the School of Nursing. The amount of money, technology, and scientific knowledge represented by the medical buildings I can see from Bluffs is staggering to contemplate, an awesome presence asserting itself as the raison-d’être of the whole town. During much of the pandemic lockdown, the Hospital’s helicopters were the only machines that flew in our skies.

But the tallest building you can see—though it is almost concealed by those others—is the Burton Memorial Tower, a bell tower built on the University campus in the 1930s. I like the Art Deco style, and this tower is especially impressive, containing a grand carillon (one of only a couple dozen in the world, I believe) with more than fifty bells. I love bell towers (and carillons in particular) because they present music as something to be enjoyed out of doors, as part of a landscape, bringing an entire community together—not in the self-selecting way of a modern outdoor concert, but purely according to the logic of place. Bells are fixed, not roving troubadours—though I say this as a great fan of roving troubadours of one kind or another. A bell tower is the local antennae for catching the music of the spheres; or it is the human landscape’s own voice for answering that music, or summoning it. In Walden, which I am now halfway through in my re-reading of Thoreau, I find this passage:

Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and as it were natural melody, worth importing to the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre… There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale.  

Bells call from an epoch when time was counted differently, the hours marking times of prayer, reorientation to the transcendent or to the world of boundless quest, all while sounding the geography. Once, when I was sixteen (this would have been 1998) I was cycling with my father in Normandy, and we stopped in some tiny spot near Lisieux, and while we ate bread and cheese and drank cidre by the fountain in front of the village church, we heard bells in some neighboring town—it may have been Lisieux (where one of the great saints lived, about whom I shall be writing here)—begin to chime the middle of day. And then the church in front of us rang its bell. And then I think we heard yet another place ring in the noon.

Perhaps my memory makes this more musical and orderly than it was in reality, and it was more than twenty years ago—I don’t know how many rural church bells still ring anywhere in Europe. But I do believe I have heard noon sweep over the land. And on that same cycling expedition with my father we went down a backroad where there was no one in sight, and it was getting into the evening and we were lost, and we heard a dog begin to bark viciously nearby. But then we heard bells announce the hour from some steeple hidden beyond the woods or hedge, the song of a cultural order (or you could say, symbolic order) embedded in or arising from the larger order of nature, and there was solace in that sound.

In Chicago, where my wife and I used to live, we would often go to the Botanic Gardens and sometimes catch a concert from the large carillon there, or just listen to it tell the hours. But it’s not quite the same as the pattern of bells spread over a landscape.

The grand carillon is not the only bell tower on the north face of central Ann Arbor that I can see and sometimes hear from the entrance to Bluffs. The city presents an escarpment of bells to the Huron and its valley, as if this alone were fitting salutation to the river. There are also the much more modest chimes of the Kerrytown market, which anyone may play, and sometimes you will hear a popular tune ring from them while you’re shopping at the farmer’s market there. (When Biden was declared the winner of the last presidential election it was a Saturday, a market day, and I rode up the market from my tai chi class. While I was there, someone played the triumphant theme from Return of the Jedi on the chimes.) Nearby is the great bell tower of Saint Andrew’s, an Episcopal church. Whenever I enter or walk by that imposing building with its very English feeling, I think of Dorothy Sayer’s mystery (which I’ve written about at Slant) centered on the unique English art of bell music, called change-ringing.

And then there is the bell tower, whose green copper roof is easily espied from Bluffs and other distant points, of Saint Thomas the Apostle, a Catholic church. Shortly after the day in Bluffs I’ve been writing about, I was walking by Saint Thomas and decided to go inside. It was a weekday in Lent and I’d missed Mass, but I ran into a young man who started telling me about the restoration of the murals that was underway. He described how the images, which I now see every time I go in, had been painted over in the late 1960s and the stained glass windows covered up or put in storage, during one of the Catholic Church’s weird periods of iconoclasm (the last one happened in the first millenium).

I’m glad for the imagery that is now back in Saint Thomas. I like its hypethral and cosmic quality. There is of course an indoor scene showing Thomas—Doubting Thomas, as he’s famously called—in disbelief (or finally in belief) touching the wounds of the risen Christ. But there is also, on the other side of the altar, an image of Longinus plunging his lance into Christ’s side while he was on the Cross (this is how he received the wound Thomas was to touch), and in this image, as well as in the large, panoramic depiction of Christ’s ascension which fills the space above the altar, the outdoor world, particularly the sky, is prominent. In the transept you can see the dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit, set not amidst the daytime sky but in the nighttime sky of the Firmament. There is something about the skies in these images that captures my heart and entices it to yearning at the same time that it fills me with peace, perhaps a little like the sky I saw when I looked up from changing the diaper in the snowy woods.

When I look at the Church this is the kind of thing I think of, the old cosmic symbolism wheeling through the skies and the seasons and linking them (there’s a possible root meaning of Latin religio) to natural cycles of fecundity and fertility, the good timing or rightful time of planting and harvest home, of pilgrimage and market, fasting and feasting and matchmaking and repentance—every basic human impulse and practice rooted to the world as well as to the heavens and fitted together.

R H Blyth, mentioned above, in the third volume of his Zen and Zen Classics wrote the following: “At first we think certain things or places or persons are holy. Then we understand that this is superstition, and know that they are not holy. Finally we realize that all things are holy, and some things especially.” Here is yet another expression of what I’m seeking through these letters. I am trying to hone my sense of place and my sense of the sacred. I am trying to see that everything is holy; but I am also trying to set down in words my own little understanding of those works of art, and activities, and places, which are especially holy.