March Snow

 

March snow is the surest sign that winter hasn’t lost its grip on us. The whole village is under the thin translucent layer of white snow as the east wind roars from the ocean. Snow keeps on falling and deadening the sound of living at the same time.

 

 

 

The roads are too treacherous to go out and frost grips the ground as the temperature drops below the freezing point. The yellow primroses, the false assurances of the spring, are now embalmed under the blanket of snow while they drift into their sleep. The taste of the snow is salty and the fields look as through they had been sprinkled with sugar icing.

 

 

There seems no escape from this what one villager called ‘Siberian weather’. But he told me that he thanked god for the ‘dry snow’. Although I feel genuinely sorry for those who are trapped on the roads, in the traffic jams and the elderly residents who could not go out to shops for their food or travel to the hospital for their medication, I have a revelatory ecstasy and wonderment at the mystery of nature.

When the whole landscape is painted white, the signals for the presence of beauty are only visible to those who are acute observers. Lace-like frost clinging to twigs and teasels covering with white snow like a giant ice lolly and the sea, the natural mirror in the landscape, is now opaque as if it had put on a bridal veil.

 

 

Deer foraging for food as snow falls...

 

Bird bath in my garden covered with snow...the supply of food and water is essential in this harsh weather for the birds.

 

In Dante’s Divine Comedy, I remember the name of two rivers where one has to wash before entering into the paradise. One river is called Eunoe (derived from Greek "eu-," meaning "good" and "noe," meaning "mind.") and the other river is called Lethe where the poet Dante was dipped into the water by the angel Matilda so that he may wipe out all memory of sin.

Snow is similar to River Lethe because it is a great erasure of things. Its whiteness and purity can transform the whole surrounding into a silent space of nothingness – a temporary nirvana - a moment of spiritual epiphany.

Matilda washing the poet Dante in River Lethe (lethe means "oblivion", "forgetfulness", or "concealment") so that he may wipe out all memory of sin before entering into the paradise. Snow like River Lethe is a great erasure of things because of its whiteness. It has an allure like white pages to start again from the beginning. Image credit: Gustave Doré's Dramatic Illustrations of Dante's Divine Comedy

The whole world is in a state of silence and somnolence after the storm.

 


 

 

Primroses are the false assurances of the Spring

 

Language cannot measure the excitement of the children when they see and hear the word, snow. For them, it means the closure of schools, freedom, making and throwing snowballs, sledging and building snowman. But there is another type of child that wants the snow in order to retreat from the mundane realities of the familiar world. It is Paul Hasleman, the child character in Conrad Aiken’s famous short story, Silent Snow, Secret Snow (1934), with whom I identified myself when I read the story the first time.

 

Conrad Aiken's short story, Silent Snow, Secret Snow in an anthology titled The World Within, Fiction Illuminating Neuroses of Our Time (1947) published after the Second World War. It contains tales of longing, loss, disillusionment and the exploration of what the writer, Walker Percy (1916 – 1990) called 'the dislocation of man in the modern age.'

 

I first came across with the story in the anthology edition of the short stories titled The World Within: Fiction Illuminating Neuroses of Our Time, with an Introduction and Analyses by Frederic Wertham, edited by Mary Louise Aswell and published after the Second World War in 1947. The stories in this anthology chime with the ethos of the post-war society with its exploration of what the writer, Walker Percy called 'the dislocation of man in the modern age'.

Ever since I read every book by Aiken that I could put my hands on and watched the definitive Gene Kearney's film version in black and white when I was a student,  Conrad Aiken became one of my all time favourite American writers and poets. I find his writings absolutely captivating because of his deep psychological insights into his characters who are tender, witty, poetic and almost always doomed. Most of his books are sadly out of print which seems like a crime to me.

Silent Snow, Secret Snow was first published in 1934. It was the time when many were reflecting their loss of innocence in the recently ended First World War. At the same time, there was a fear that a new world war was inevitable under the rising totalitarian powers. Image credit: A definitive film adaptation of the story in black and white (1966) by Gene Kearney. It's 15 minutes long and available online on here

 

Silent Snow, Secret Snow story reminds me of Walter de la Mare’s supernatural writings in which the author takes side on the child character no matter how implausible he is. I think that this is possibly because in order to create, one needs the presence of 'inner child' if one is an artist/writer. Picasso once said: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

 

I could summarise Conrad Aiken's characters in these four words. His stream of consciousness which lurks beneath the delicate texture and lyrical strains of his poetic and evocative prose is a joy to read.

Aiken too saw the world through the vision of a child who suffers from a nervous condition, which causes him to experience a sudden burst of surreal dreams and visions. 

Aiken had a traumatic childhood; his father, a brain surgeon, experienced a seizure of insanity, murdered his mother, and then shot himself. The tragic loss of his parents overshadowed his life and writings. Aiken was a great admirer of Freud’s psychoanalytic thoughts. There is a speculation that Freud kept a copy of Aiken’s autobiographical novel, Blue Voyage (1927) on his desk but the two men never met while they were both alive. Aiken did write to Freud once but the latter did not reply. 

 

Silent Snow, Secret Snow (1934) is Conrad Aiken's best-known short story. It appeared in in The Collected Stories of Conrad Aiken published by Heinemann (1966). A lot of Aiken's books are out of print which seems like a crime to me.  

Conrad Aiken (1889 – 1973) is one of my all time favourite American writers. In 1930 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Selected Poems.

This short story has been examined in various ways – some say that it is a story of autistic child and others interpret it as Aiken's fear of madness and of course, its mysteriousness is partly what makes it so compelling.

 

The withdrawal into an interior world and the all-consuming obsession with an unusual special interest, which ‘no one else knew about it, not even his mother and father’, make me think of the difference between the interior, represented by the innocent childhood, and the exterior world, represented by the grown ups; the authoritarian teachers and parents.

 

For Paul, the interior world, a symbol of childhood, was ‘the profounder and more wonderful of the two. It was irresistible. It was miraculous. Its beauty was simply beyond anything – beyond speech as beyond thought – utterly incommunicable.’

 

Listen to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert's Erlkönig, D. 328 on youtube here 

This concept makes me think of William Blake’s poetry as well as the father and the child of Goethe’s ballad Der Erlkönig, the Erl King, the mythical king of the elves - according to legend, whoever is touched by him must die. Schubert put into music in 1815.

The Erl King, like the snow in Aiken’s story, who exists only in the child's imagination, ‘speaks’ privately to the child and hear his enticements, which the father dismisses as feverish delusion.   

 

If ‘Byzantium,’ wrote Yeats, ‘is no country for old men’, the land of snow - white, pure and magical - belongs to Elysium, the innocent world of childhood from which each one of us is exiled. A place, Aiken wrote ‘no one will ever again be able to enter.’    

The newspapers are calling this storm as 'The Beast from the East'. They are probably right about its beastly destruction as it can be seen in one of the neighbour's door which got broken during the storm.  

"Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit; Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed; In a tumultuous privacy of storm." Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hypnotised by the sound of crackling fire and watching the flickering light, I withdraw myself into the inner world of dreams and imagination - like the child character, Paul in Conrad Aiken's story after leaving the cruel world behind.   

Philomena in her contentment with the warmth from the fire

I bought this musical snow globe many years ago. If you wind it up, it plays the music, "Lara's Theme" from the film Doctor Zhivago (1965). It transports me to the magical land of a bygone era.



From outside the white
face of the land stared in
with all the hunger of nature
in it for what it could not digest.

RS Thomas (1913-2000)