The winter solstice came and went night before last at 11:19 EST. It was the last (or next to last) winter solstice of our current decade. From now on the nights will get shorter and the days longer for a while as our planet continues its yearly dance with the sun. Some snow remains on the ground here from last week’s snowfall, but no new snowfall is forecast for the immediate future. Guess we’ll have to make do with sunshine for a while. As we drove home through the city streets yesterday evening after a party we noticed that snow had melted on streetsides that receive afternoon sun but not on the streetsides opposite them.
With the times as out of joint as they are, perhaps one might take uneven snow melt as a sign. In Christian mythology, the solstice occurs on Christmas eve. Not so this year, the event having preceded the final sunday of Advent. So was Advent IV marooned then, and will we spend Christmas suspended between What T. S. Eliot once called ‘the motion and the act’? Or might we understand this time as a fortunate addition to our time of waiting, a time perhaps to tune our hearts more acutely to to the songs of angels. I’ve written of such a time more than once, how at the end of it “thousand seraphim stride the night sky . . . , their huge pennons shedding dark love. Time [as I thought then] to plant bulbs, get a new jacket, watch movies I missed.”
May we still hope for peace on earth? I should like to think so. I should like, for instance, to take the story of the Magi as a prefiguring of the pluralist politics we shall need if our planet is to survive. I cannot imagine a human future in which present world politics collide with the looming climate catastrophe. Perhaps history is again challenging us humans to reinvent ourselves, we who are “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation.” The spokesman for Eliot’s Magi finds the place he and his fellows sought merely satisfactory, or perhaps he means to understate the case.
. . . . . . . . . There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
Perhaps all beauty is terrible. That’s the import of the Jeffers poem I have quoted here from time to time.
This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places: and
like the passionate spirit of humanity . . .
Whatever the beauty, whatever the tragedy, we are all part of it now, as we are part of a polyglot, multi-ethnic, multi-gendered world the like of which we have never known. History has thrown us together whereas before we were separate, divided by barriers of nationality, class, religion, language, gender. How to form a more perfect union in the face of dissolving difference and the fear that generates, how to do that as the enormous reality of climate change dawns on the world, as it will do, and the fear that generates. These will be the questions we humans face around the world as we reinvent ourselves.
Or not—
The Irish Terrible Beauty was wrought out of the deaths of patriots. Yeats’s great poem, “Easter 1916,” broods on the stories of some of them. I very much fear this advent IV that we humans face an even larger conflagration around the world than the rebellion in Ireland almost a century ago. The issue may well be the same: the inherited privilege of a few versus the needs and desires of the many. We hear tales of billionaire bunkers built as a hedge against uncertain future. We also hear of a billionaire Giving Pledge, though that has largely been a failure. Still, the coming catastrophe may have potential even to wipe out differences of wealth, as the systems of politics that sustain wealth and wealth production perish.
I don’t think this argues for the dawning of a Marxist future. Marx’s critique was far too tied to the particular historical circumstances in Britain at the time of its writing to be much use as prophecy. And neither Marx nor anyone else had ever (has ever) faced a catastrophe like the envoronmental catastrophe we face in post industrial times. Indeed this Advent !V I think I have to face the dawning conviction that human history from now on is pretty much up for grabs, and the more perfect union of my dreams seems less and less likely every day.
Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, this thought disturbs me less than it might. I’ve had a good run at life, and I’m now enjoying a more or less privileged old age. I’m not able to take my privilege for granted any longer, not just because of the circumstances I outline here, but also because my health is now precarious. Still, I find I love being alive, I continue to love the world, and I think these facts do not proceed from mere tenacity. I’ve always loved what Betty Adcock calls The Difficult Wheel. “What we do have is light,” she says, we poets who “have gone out looking for God again,/having no choice,”
. . . . . . . . . . See how they still are burning—
all those classical noses, Coyote’s laughing muzzle,
Shiva’s raised foot, Christ’s cheek, the dazzle
of leafy-armed women darkening, ashy turning.
Perhaps, as Jeffers says, there was heart-breaking beauty before there was ever a heart to break for it, whatever. I don’t need religion or history or poetry to tell me there is an illo tempore not of this world. Every solstice reminds me that my world is but a speck in the great heaven. As an Episcopalian, I’m half a Catholic I suppose. I don’t go to church much, but one of my Jesuit buddies brings me communion from time to time. I love him, and when I look into his eyes I see God.