Snowflakes, and the Arms of God

“You are a light on a hill, o people, light for the City of God, shine so holy and bright o people, shine for the City of God…” got the hymn fragment stuck in my head, but really what is running through my mind is the image, not of cities on hills, but of cities on hills with – yes, you’ve heard this before – rivers running through them. All started when I saw the word Brazos recently, printed on the buttons of Robin’s flannel shirt. How did they know, I wondered, that we live in Brazos County, in the Brazos Valley, on the Brazos de Dios River? Then I got to wondering what it would be like to have a city on the Brazos River, I mean right astride it, and I realized it just couldn’t happen, at least not this far downstream or, contrariwise, not this far upstream. Closer to the coast, and the thing would be deeper and more navigable, closer to its source, and it would be shallower and more manageable. But here, it runs between high, wild, clay banks, in a bed full of snags. Just now, it is nearly bank-full with all the rains (at last!) and looking to flood, and when it floods, the Brazos Bottoms fill up with silt again.

“Wide as the arms of God” was how it was described by the Spanish, somewhere at its mouth, but when the Brazos is in flood, hereabouts, the whole Bottom floods, and that looks wide enough for God’s arms to us folks. Out on the Bottom land, the cotton fields, corn fields, sorghum and watermelon patches stretch out flat and wide, nearly as far as the eye can see, and they say that the first crop of cotton that was taken off the Brazos Bottoms was six feet high. Cotton is a great depleter of soils, however, so we are down to the usual two feet, nowadays. Cotton was king in Texas, until the Civil War, and practically all the slaves raised out in Virginia, were sent out here to work it in the killing Texas heat. It is still a yearly question of whether the rains will come at the right time for the cotton, and whether the gins will be full of bales in the fall, and there are still slave quarters to be seen, taken off the plantation lands and perched on small land-holdings, all over the county: little wooden double-cabins with steep-pitched roofs and a porch, fading away in the sun and harsh winter weather.

We had snow, yesterday, and it is colder here than all the other places Robin keeps on his desktop: Berkeley, Paris, and Sendai. When the jet stream loops south, there is no mountain range to keep Canada out of Texas: it just invades as it likes, only meeting resistence from the onshore breezes of the Gulf. When the wind starts to blow from the north, the Blue Northers come in and kill our pot-plants before we can hustle them indoors, but then when it comes again (as usual) from the south, then we are freed from frost, and the frost mostly doesn’t get to Brazos County; generally stalls out in Waco. Things happen fast, and big here, weather-wise, and we have learned to snatch our opportunities when they blow through, however briefly they come: our young folk run out into the parks and golf courses and dance in the rain, when it comes down in buckets as it surely can, and when we get the rare snow, all classes must stop and the people rush out into it.

Like yesterday: the super-big, Texas-sized snowflakes were falling thick and fast, all over the place, like a slow-motion summer downpour. We were on campus for early voting and by the time we got back to the car, my wool coat wast spangled all over with big white flakes, and the students were going nutty. Two giggling anthropology coeds were making a snowman on the hood of a car parked outside the Wooden Ships Lab, and other wild-eyed women were lying in wait with snowballs for the Corps cadets, who were stumping along in their camos as if they were practicing up for Afghanistan – as they well may be, bless their hearts! – but the girls didn’t have the heart to actually throw the things at the guys; rather they threw them up into the air. (Men, take note: rare snows drive women wild; one suspects the mood is on them for any sort of madness!) Snowmen were up in a jiffy, however, and “WHOOP!” quickly spelled out with footprints on the “grassy knoll” in front of the Architecture building, from the roof of which snowballs were being lobbed randomly on passers-by. A woman asked us, at the voting: “Is this snow or ice or something? I’ve never seen snow falling, before!” Now, folks, snow does fall here, every seven years or so, so she must never have run outside before, to catch it, but to fall so thickly and for so long is a very rare thing here in the Brazos Valley.

Cities on rivers are common enough, where we’ve been and where we’re going: Paris started on an island in the Seine, Sendai has the beautiful Hirose-gawa winding like three rivers through its heart, Berkeley has its creeks, running off the hills into the Bay… Rome has its island in the Tiber… but it also has its seven hills: there also needs to be rock under there, somewhere, hills to put the houses on when the river is minded to flood. The Brazos stays out of College Station: we have several ridges between us and the Bottomlands to keep us dry, unless Wolf Pen Creek or Carter Creek run through our backyards. But here, there is no rock to climb up to, along the Brazos, not around here: all clay, clay, clay, and either slippery or hard as rock, and no way down to the water, save by slipping. So here you will find no City on a River. Just a city charmed by snow, for one brief moment, and always ready, for the briefest of moments, to find joy.

Warmed by Foreign Wool

Enough of bitter blogging: let us celebrate the baggage we collect in life, that keeps us warm. This is a night-time blog, which may make it just a hair dark, don't you know. The rest have all been things of the morning. I am just in from walking the dog, under the starry sky: Orion is heading west, standing upright on the treetops, and the moon is a Cheshire cat in the upper branches. This morning, out walking at about the hour the schoolbusses come around, the birds were shouting happily from those same trees, even though the hawk was up and looking for his breakfast, and even though the day before a great owl had been silhouetted against the sky on that tree there, just as clear as clear. Valentine's is past, they've chosen their mates, and they're busy at the business of life.

It was cold out – it does get pretty cold, here in Texas; all depends on which direction the wind is from, and now it is in the north – and so I bundled up with the works, because the dog walks veeeery slowly, these days: wool socks, long-johns under the jeans, a long-sleeved t-shirt under the sweater, then the satin-lined wool coat, the blue-silk scarf, the blue-wool-felt beret, and the blue-knit-wool gloves. And I think to myself: these gloves I bought, one desperate night on the Rue Daguerre (or actually Robin bought them for me), to replace the brown ones, completely worn through at the finger tips, which Robin bought me, one desperate night on Ichiban-cho in Sendai, four years back, to replace ones lost, stolen or strayed, all the way back to the butter-soft leather gloves stolen from my pocket on a bus in Rome, just a couple of weeks after I got them for my 37th birthday, January 29, 1993, from the guanti shop on Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, just between Largo Argentina and Piazza del Gesu – the little one that used to be run by the little couple… At the same shop on the same day, Robin bought me my foulard, literally “all wool and a yard wide,” and now I see why the lads from the Great War used that expression to commend a mate who was trusty to the end: it is absolute proof against cold, especially when it is clean and cleverly knotted so that the triangle is in the front. I liked the black-and-white arabesque pattern as being writer-like in its inkiness. The beret that covered my ears tonight is a new addition, from a stationery shop in Aigues-Mortes, bought on another occasion when I had left home ill-equipped. My blue-silk scarf was a gift from Thailand, the purple scarf, tie-dyed with geckos was a gift from my brother, the spiderweb-of-rainbow-threads scarf is from the Tibetan shop on Solano Avenue, Berkeley (the one closer to the hill, not the one closer to the Safeway), meant for my mother but then I realized that in the nursing home, she will not be needing scarves any more, or shoes, or jackets, or jewelry, or much else. She is in her own Wood Between the Worlds, and she is beginning not to want to stay there much longer. She doesn’t eat much; she doesn’t drink much.

Do we care where that wool comes from? Certainly, as consumers, we might like to know that the people who made what we wear were happy to do so, that they were paid well, that they could chat with friends while they worked, that the wool came from sheep who roamed hillsides we might like to roam, that the dying works and spinning mills were clean, bright places that didn’t foul the streams around them. We like to think that the people who sold those things to us or to the people we love to give to us like to work in that little shop, or at that counter in the big department store, and that it pleased them to think that someone would be warmer because of them. The fact that we can often believe none of what I have just said in this paragraph to be true goes a long way to explain why we are such a sad race of humans, these days. But most of all, we like to remember how we came to be wearing the things at all: again, from whom they came, from which street, at which moment of our lives.

So how does all this fit together? In this wise: I am warmed by woolens that were gifts from those I love or who love me, gifts that came when they were needed, and came from all over creation, and half the warmth in them is in the knowing where they came from, from whom, and how, or at least the smile that comes along with the warmth comes from there. And other things warm us, likewise. The smile in the branches of the tree is a gift from knowing Alice in Wonderland, thanks to my mother, and the gift of knowing Orion from someone’s pointing it out, long years ago: my mother again. And my mother: my mother no longer remembers who gave her what, from minute to minute and from day to day; she had a great epiphany at Christmas, when we stood in her room and she beamed at us, but life from day to day is a sad mystery: how did I come to this room with that TV in it and who are these people and what are they to me? Why don’t they let me get at this dratted scab on my forehead? I’ll scratch it if it’s the last thing I do! Sometimes I think my son comes to see me, but then he goes away again, and that old man who says he’s my husband Howard, but how can that be? When we don’t know where the wool we are wearing comes from any more, it may be time to stop eating much or drinking much. Stands to reason.

Lock Up Your Valuables, Sort Of

If you like this blog, are you paying a red cent for it? Ah, the beauty of modern life, when the artists starve. But, but, but, you say, go get yourself an advertiser! Go get one yourself, say I, what I do is write. Get an agent! you say. Already written to and been turned down by 30 agents, say I, what I do is write. Oh, you have to schmooze, go to writer’s conferences to get an agent! I don’t schmooze, say I, what I do is write. It takes me all day to write; I have to concentrate on it to do it properly. I do a blog because what I write is good, but no-one will publish it because it’s not Dan Brown or J.K. Rawlings, which will surely bring in the big bucks, and they were never turned down by anyone, you know. Right.

Am I implying that people nowadays have no vision or judgement? Bingo! But does anyone play Bingo any more? After all, it requires everyone to be on the honor system, and what is that, anyway? Can’t we all just say that we hate big CEO salaries one month and then knuckle under and get one from a lobbyist, a few months later?

And independent films are never any good, and even if they were, distributors would always make sure the finest of those films would get wide distribution, wouldn’t they? In a pig’s eye! And I sold more than 93 copies of a book for children about saints last year, in a world that could sure use them, but who reads or buys books or cares about saints any more? Or children, for that matter. Oooh, am I being bitter and cynical? Bitter, yes, cynical, no. I speak the God’s truth, no more, no less. But then so did the original cynic, so, yes, I am a cynic, living like a dog in the marketplace, saying (as I’m sure Diogenes would have, if he’d had the chance) “The Emperor has no clothes on!”

But in order for you to believe it is the truth, I will have to lock it up from you and charge you for it. Honestly, I wish I could charge you for it, because until Utopia arrives and we don’t need money to buy groceries, pay is a good thing. And until it doesn’t take all day to write something worth reading, so that one can’t do it in the spare time carved from around another job, writers worth their salt (that’s pay, by the way) will need to find a way to make a living off their craft. Yet I maintain that we can’t get by without beauty; I see in the paper where a person can die of boredom. But we pay good money for our boredom!

Antoine-Auguste Parmentier understood that if you want people to value a thing, you don’t give it away free. He was the great French promoter of the potato, and has as a result many potato dishes named for him, a nice tomb in Pere Lachaise, a Boulevard and a Metro stop named after him. What Frederick the Great did in Prussia by force, Parmentier did through cleverness, and with a little help from two or three stiff sieges and famines. According to that well-supported-by-advertising free online information service known as Wikipedia, Parmentier was up against a scientific community that firmly believed the New World import known as the potato would give you leprosy (meanwhile, the Prussians were happily eating theirs without apparent ill effects), and he literally couldn’t give them away, so…

He locked up a whole warehouse of seed-potatoes and I suppose plants, and put an armed guard on it by day, with strict orders to allow people to help themselves once they had bribed the guards and strict orders not to guard the warehouse by night. And don't you know that those clever farmers got all sorts of potatoes and felt very pleased with themselves? What a genius the man was! He deserves two Metro stops, as far as I’m concerned…

Speaking of which, yesterday’s sunrise here in Bryan/College Station should have been locked up in a very exclusive room at the Louvre, or perhaps had a best-seller written about it, and then tickets sold to the first 1000 lucky winners of something or other, because anyone not looking at the sky between the hour of 7:00 and about 7:15 missed out on a unique moment in meteorlogical history – oh, wait, most days are unique… (ouch!). Seriously, many cloudy-blah mornings may come and go, each unique in some obscure way, but this was overwhelmingly and absolutely unique.

It began with the fact that the sunrise was clearly going to be a purply-pink color, with rays of gold-tipped magenta, and moved on quickly to the fact that the clouds seemed to be observing a strict adherence to patterns of parallel bands, at all scales of existence, so that tiny shimmers like the patterns of owl-feathers could be seen in the finest edges of things, as well as great waves precisely like the patterns on the sand of a placid beach, and frankly Marcelled clouds of in-between size were to be seen, all over the sky, from the wispiest edges of things to the thickness of a good blanket of stratus, with a taste and complexity that makes me think Someone read my blog about Lombardy Poplars, and how they seem like man-made down-beats in the landscape.

You can forget the “man-made,” because I have been reminded that repeating patterns are part of the toolbox of God, and that music began, after all, in the throat of some nightingale and the chatter of some brook, and we are just imitators of the great Original.

Now, I will lock that up so that someone thinks it’s important, but I will tell the guards to take bribes, and give it all away.

The Wood Between the Worlds

Yes, yes, no blog in more than a week, but here we are, back in Texas, reflecting. Much doing of the writing sort has happened in the past week, siphoning off blog juices I suppose, and much of just living, which takes up time and thought. Also, one was in Cambridge for a couple of days, without computer access. But here in the Wood Between the Worlds, there is time to reflect on all that.

You are all familiar with The Magician’s Nephew, are you not – the Narnia book I like to read to students first, before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? And with the place neither here nor there, the place rich with possibility and change, but changeless itself, full of portals to other worlds: the Wood Between the Worlds? We are now home, in the Wood, for a full month before putting on our “away” rings again, and stepping into a different pond from last time, the pond that will take us to Japan. There is plenty of time to wander about the Wood in a dreamy sort of way, and try to understand where we’ve been.

Our first night back in Texas, I woke up to the scent of old wood. Our whole house is made of wood, of course, and it was built in 1940, so it is I suppose old. Houses in Paris, as in Rome and most other places with more stone than standing lumber, are made of stone, brick, plaster and concrete, not wood, so home always smells woody, by comparison. Like C.S. Lewis’ Wood, it is a bit of an in-between place, College Station, as the name implies: a train station between Hither and Yon, a place on Highway Six, which, as one is frequently reminded “runs both ways” (in other words: you came here by it, and by golly, you can leave by it again too, if you don't like it here!). It is a place full of potential, a gateway to other places, but not much of a place in itself. Young faculty come here, raise their small children, make their mark, and move on to more famous pastures: it is a seedbed, if you like, full of rich promise, but never seeing it come to full flower. Things grown here are generally transplanted to deeper soil. We’re still here, of course, so we much go out to see grown-up things, elsewhere.

There is a ring of graceful little oaks, around the park across the street, but the soil here is not very good for tall trees: before it had houses put on it, this was Prairie, with a bit of Post Oak Savannah, thrown in: clay soil, heavy and dense. Around here, the tall trees only thrive in the river-bottoms; I long to live in a river-bottom like that, and have tall trees arching high overhead but river-bottoms are always flooding, hereabouts. Dangerous.

Perhaps that is what makes places like France so exciting: they are all one big floodplain, full of tall trees, very dangerous, very exciting: things really happen, there. Oh, yes, they certainly do happen: the last survivors of the 1871 Paris Commune are put up against a cemetery wall (having already shot their own hostages and having spent the night in a shootout among the graves of Pere Lachaise Cemetery), all 150-ish of them, shot, and buried where they fall. Convenient, having a shootout in a cemetery! And so the story goes, all over Paris: what a blood-spattered city! 2000 guillotined in the Place di la Concorde, alone! Yessir, things really happen, in France. No wonder the cathedrals there are as tall as a grove of sequoias!

Speaking of floodplains, I have to report officially that France’s countryside is more beautiful than England’s: I have seen them side by side in one day and can certify it as a fact. On the train from Cambridge to London, and London to Dover-ish (wherever it is that the Chunnel goes under) – admittedly not the best landscape the UK has to offer – we see similar plains and low hills, similar lines of bare trees punctuated by small hamlets, but the hamlets of that part of England are entirely Semi-Detatched Villas of extreme mundanitude… whereas, after your 20 minutes under the English Channel (or La Manche, as they call it in France, “the Sleeve,” as they are loath to let the English have it) – twenty minutes!!! do you have any idea how long it takes by ferry, and how much more seasickness is involved?? – you are among the equally hilly areas alternating with equally flat landscapes, but the French villages cluster like – oh, dear, I’ve been in France too long, I was going to say like aureoles around a nipple, but with the little, single, squat-towered churches and the beauty of them and all, standing among the swelling fields, it’s an embarrassingly apt comparison – and then, the alleés of typical Lombardy poplars or plane-trees, along the roads, man-made though they are, add an irresistable touch of grace, wherever they’re put, like downbeats in a dance. The houses of the villages stand “detatched” and homey-looking, each with its shutters and its yard and its tree. And the persistent overcast of England has risen and is blowing away: real, fleecy high clouds appear, and there is a glimpse of blue lit by sunset. France is beautiful: she is la belle France. Bloody, but beautiful; like civilization itself, I suppose.

Here, we live in a dream of that sort of beauty, and of that sort of danger, of a place where Catholics can rise up and kill 3000 Protestants in a day, where even the smallest town in southern France can even today have its government taken over by a coup d’ètat. But also a place where one of the stations available on cable is the Couture channel, with models marching down runways every day, where couples kiss as they part to take different subway lines, where accordionists make a good living busking on the subway trains themselves, and where small, unescorted dogs sit politely in the doorway of the charcuterie, hoping for mercy.

Here in College Station, last week, a man was held up in broad daylight by another man with a gun: I’m sorry, but we aren’t allowed to have the danger without the beauty! That’s not civilization, that’s just caveman stuff. Wait: those caves were pretty gorgeous, too. Alas!