The snow invites depiction.
Not the new snow, a starlet among vistas, its serene suavity almost a cliché. Anyone with a camera snaps a photo of new snow – and everyone these days has a camera, enclosed in their inevitable phone. New snow has been “done,” for my money, no less than autumn foliage, annunciatory daffodils, and hummingbirds arrested midair.
The snow inviting me this dawn is the one out our kitchen window – beaten up, mid-career, crisscrossed, smeared, marred, neither virginal nor terminal, evoking no obvious sentiment, intoning no predictable theme. It was lovely once – now a week ago. Its continuance mildly surprises – most snows vanish quickly hereabouts. How vividly in its heyday it framed taupe Henry zigzagging ecstatically while his bundled keepers looked on lovingly. We too were pretty once. But age does wither us, even Cleopatra, our pristine promise nicked and scuffed by facts. Last week, crustaceous with winter dryness, I visited the dermatologist for my biannual check. When the svelte doc, years my daughter’s junior, assured me perkily my lumps and itches were nothing special, “just age.” I tried not to wince.
This morning’s snow is not lovely in the usual sense. It shows wear and tear. Dog, deer, squirrel, and tractor tire have slashed and smudged it, unconcerned with its loveliness. In Japan’s Zen gardens, if I remember right, they protect the snow from human mutilation. There’s a word in Japanese – yohaku-no-bi – roughly, “the beauty of blank space” – not only untranslatable but inconceivable in American.
Is the snow sad? The question, at one level, is silly: what gooey sentimentality to ascribe feelings to inanimate nature! Next thing you know we’ll be hearing sighs from our hamburgers and groans from the trees we burn. Delve deeper and one uncovers the marvel of human vanity. Because humans won the contest for dominance, we assume the inferiority of the subdued – as if superior strength proved superior worth. What blind, blundering, bludgeoning asses we are, as Henry frequently reminds me with his dog-sigh.
The snow is not sad but jut-jawed, resigned, impatient with sympathy, unfazed by hindsight. Ou sont les neiges d’antan? – bullshit! What is is, no use mewling and puling, pining for times past or to come. Purpose, meaning, better or worse are human confusions. Here we are – now – and our moment tingles with interest. This present is our present, our great gift, if we wake to its largesse. Wherever we stand we have a world to see – and feel – and learn from. Capitalism tempts us with novelties, so we’ll part with cash. Why not spend our wherewithal on verities, which cost less and return more.
The snowfield, as I gaze, with its darks and lights, its vectors and complexities, its blobs and spikes worthy of Abstract Expressionists, brings history to mind. History, from close in, is too messy to make out. Are we living in the end of times, as it sometimes feels, or an Elysium our progeny will pine for? I augur grimly but what do I know? Only time will tell – and until it tells, we have no idea.
The soil beneath this snowfield has been here – corroding, compacting, petrifying – since before mankind – and will outlive our ludicrous exertions. Study any scene long enough and littleness must be your conclusion. We scuffle and scar the snow’s purity, carve our names on trees, prance and preen, and Nature rolls its eyes. Those who find this conclusion grim aren’t thinking right. What liberation not to matter! What relief! We are all scratched and scraped by the traffic of our moment. We all melt invisibly. Relax. Be glad. Be good.