JohnLines

On snow being general.

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
~ James Joyce, “The Dead”

James Joyce is most remembered for his pyrotechnical technique — the word plays, the language creation, the ability to intricately plot the criss-crossing of three lives, Stephen, Molly, and Bloom, as they skip back and forth between myth and reality.

Long have I been an acolyte.  Many are the rites I have performed.  I climbed the Martello Tower at Sandymount, just outside Dublin, breathless not from the climb but from the view of the snotgreen scrotumtightening sea.  I found my way through a warren of streets to Sylvia Beach’s bookstore, Shakespeare and Company in Paris, where Ulysses was first published.  I made the pilgrimage to Fluntern cemetery in Zurich.
 
And yet, in the end, it is this passage from “The Dead” — poetic and not pyrotechnic — that is my most powerful Joycean memory.

I read it first almost forty years ago — tender and callow, then — and it seeped into my subconscious.  Each year, with the first snowfall, it comes back to me in a mood of melancholy.  And each year the resonances, like arcing spirals in a Bach solo cello suite, keep building on each other.

I used to wonder how Joyce wrote such a work in his late 20s.  I’ve given up trying to figure that out, chalking it up to genius.

This year, I see its intersection with the Nativity story.  Actually, it is the flip side.  Quietly, somewhere in the night, upon all of us, hope is falling gently. 

Do you see what I see?

Candles.

I drove home late last night, listening to the Patriots' game.  Maybe it’s just me, but is Gino Capelletti sounding like Yoda?  His words were almost-full thoughts that seemed to hold some inner knowledge.  But upon closer inspection, they just flitted away.  More troubling, Gino and Gil Santos seemed to be watching two different games.

Oh well.

As I pulled into our neighborhood, I clicked off the game.  The roar of the crowd, the tribal rhythms of football, the adrenalin flow of vicarious competition disappeared into the night.  All was calm, and all was bright.

Bright with Christmas lights that is, almost all of them white.  On our street, anyway, there are very few green-blue-red combinations.   Most are simple and include candles in the windows.  No style judgments here — just an observation.

I would be quite content with just candles in the window.  This is the season for candles, no?  Of course, we no longer need candles, not really.  Edison pretty much made them unnecessary.  But electricity and incandescence are no match for our primal urge for light, light in the form of fire.

A couple of weeks back, we lit the first Advent candle, the candle of hope.  I find this to be one of the holiest moments of the year.  All the candles are new, wicks white.  Once lit, the hope candle sends a little plume of smoke off into the air and burns brightly, even starkly, against the deep evergreen of the wreath.  For a moment, perhaps longer, hope hangs in the air. 

What better symbol for hope than a single flame?

The poet R. S. Thomas has a line somewhere about candle-lighting in church.  He describes it as our way of creating a “God trap,” as if God were a huge moth and by lighting enough candles we could seduce God, in a mighty flap of wings, into our sanctuaries.

This idea ran through my mind on Sunday night as we were watching a wonderful little movie with Michael Keaton and Kelly MacDonald, The Merry Gentleman.   The climactic scene, which is so quiet and so fragile that it appears it is going to break, takes place in a church.

It is a familiar trope:  the neighborhood Catholic church, the anguished characters alone in the sanctuary, the conversation across two pews that ultimately leads to the inevitable wrenching conclusion.  And — always — candles and shadows.  The whole scene is played out against candles and shadows.

It could easily have slipped into cliche.  But between the writing and the acting and the art direction, it didn't. 

It struck me that there might be a flip side R. S. Thomas' observation.  I was so drawn into this scene, as I was so drawn into the lonely little candle of hope, as I was so drawn into the candles in the windows on our street, I couldn't help but think:  Perhaps we light candles not just so God will show up. 

We light candles so that we will show up. 

advent moths

​

I’m sure there is a perfectly logical explanation: there always is.

But I say: never let science get in the way of a good metaphor, never let logic override the happily coincidental.

These moths started appearing, on windows and glass doors, sometime last week. Any place there was a source of light, they were there. Little wisemen following their star.

Where did they come from? Why now?

It has been unseasonably warm, no killing frost, and here we are already into December. The ground, perhaps, has issued them, birthed them, in this strange season. They come from a warm November: harbinger.

They come seeking light and, it would seem, warmth. They gather, like a congregation, on the glass, Wings spread, praying as angels must pray.

Terror and beauty. Revulsion is the first reaction when the lens exposes this presence. But then: amazement. These wings, veined instruments of flight. Light, weightless. Unmakeable. Only created. The billions of accidents and permutations that have led to this moment. This brief, brief moment.

Soon, the frost.

And death.

Only to rise, from the ground, next year.

Labels: advent