THANKSGIVING, SUBLIME AND RIDICULOUS

For Thanksgiving, I went up with some friends to my mother’s place in rural Connecticut, She lives in a modest, artfully appointed house in a charmed, "pinch-me-I’m dreaming" setting. Not only is it a lakefront home on a secluded backwoods country road, but it abuts a 2000 acre property, owned and vigilantly protected by a wealthy conservationist neighbor. (They are like the luckiest serfs on the lord’s manner.) A morning snow had covered the ground, outlined the trees and lent the already breathtaking vista a hushed magnificence. Before the other guests arrived for the feast, my friends and I took a long walk along the unpeopled road, As we got to the top of a gently ascending bend, we stopped and looked back at what appeared to be a dreamscape. In front of us: A huge field of white, peppered with patches of spring green grass. To our left, a tree-lined lake, smooth as glass. And beyond it, snow-covered hills as far as the eye could see. As we turned, in the complete absence of human sound, to contemplated the wonder of the mute world and the evidence of our smallness in the order of things, our minds were attuned to a single shared thought, ultimately given voice by my friend Loren: “I wonder who’s winning the Detroit-Atlanta game.”

Actually, (half-truths exploited for comedic effect notwithstanding), the scene also brought to mind (despite the absence of wind) the early Wallace Stevens poem "The Snow Man", which I will quote here in its brief entirety, as an attempt to balance the forces of the ridiculous with those of the sublime:

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine trees crusted with snow

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listner, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

---

And to complete our round trip to Sublime City:

I just read that Michael Brown, ex FEMA head, is starting a disaster planning consulting firm. Proof that there is no shame. And proof that it is impossible to fail in the Bush Administration. Egregiously flawed performance gets you promoted and decorated. Or, in this instance, allows you to move on to greater gain and glory in the private sector. The asleep at the wheel guy is reinvented as the foresight guy; the napping captain as the visionary at the helm. As with most things in this administration, it contains (and hence defies) its own parody.

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Posted on 11/25/2005 ( Permanent Link )
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