Brrrrrrrr

I have all my life occupied myself in a part of the world where one can talk about seasonal change only in couplets consisting of extremes: freeze and fry; storm and calm; flood and drought. Seasons in East Texas either last for days or for half-year stretches. Summer for us begins in May and ends in October. Winter is usually over by the first week in March. The weather round here is nothing to me but obvious, and, although I react to it, I refuse to pay it any mind. So many tongues here wag a babble of questions and complaints and cheer about the weather, as if it had wisdom away from which it could will. We all have lightning strike stories, hail stories, tornado stories, ice storm stories -- a sheet of it 6 inches thick on everything in February of 2003; with the sky blanked by stratospheric and motionless cold, life in Dallas that week was slow passage through a hollowed-out bone. Eventually, some event related to the climate reminds me that winter always penetrates the protection I've layered around myself and touches me. It finds a protuberance of soft tissue on which it can seize, locates a joint whose tightness it can worry, or reveals exposure where the viscera are most folded in upon themselves. On a truly frigid day, I may rinse out the same coffee cup 5 or 6 times. Trillian, my IM [Instant Messenger] software, softly gurgles when a "buddy" logs on or changes his / her status (i.e., is there but not available, or not speaking; at the other end of... so not there insofar as "there" is anything immediate); a single sound, but each action the sound describes is potentially different. A dumb sound, actually, and all it can mean (by not saying anything substantive) is "attention", but I pause differently each time and, and, in doing so, if I happen to look out the office window and see steam rising from the basement vents blotching translucent gray against the deeper drabness of a December afternoon, I might, with a sense of expectancy even I don't fathom, compare the chime to that of a freshet breaking through the crust of what's not yet thawed. There is a fat patch of scaly skin on my left fore-finger. Once it was a callus, one put there by morning after morning of helping my father tighten the laces on the Buster Browns that were bolted to his braces... think of how cold those must have felt before sun-up in February... he wanted those shoes to be closed like vises around his feet. It took elbow grease to snug them. Before work, before coffee, wiping the grit of sleep out of my eyes, I would tug, take up slack, tug again. I knew when he no longer complained that I wasn't "doing it right" that my father was seriously ill. No need to put on your prostheses if you are going to spend your day prone. Eventually, he would only allow my mother to assist him. Still, the callus never "healed", and, the past two or three winters, that spot on my hand has whitened and cracked well before my lips have ever chapped. One of my co-workers confesses to me that, in winter, taking the 4 to 6 shift (the last afternoon shift before the evening shifts begin) makes her feel as if her soul were being crushed. By 5: 30, the sun has set, and she leaves work as she arrived at work, in darkness, a darkness moonless and starless and swarming with headlights and taillights and porch-lights and lighted shopping centers. Has she logged so many hours at work that she missed any glimpse of the sun? Chinks of warmth falling through her Venetian blinds do not count. Photosynthesis cannot happen in her corner cubicle. While she was approving purchase orders, shuffling old email messages into specially designated folders, and scooping cinnamon disks out of her candy dish until she reached the last one, sticky through even the cellophane wrapping, did Texas stealthily shift away from the equator and wander into the Arctic Circle? Or is she the one who took a wrong turn out of the building, through a basement door that does not lead outside but deposits her on the edge of some subterranean metropolis? Is it dusk or is she going blind? The winter 9 to 6: is this what dying is like? She is jolted out of the void, participates in a chaotic revisitation of some well-worn personal experience, is bathed for a long time in a light that only too late she understands to be a beacon, and, straining for the apex of the cone, the source of the illumination, finds herself utterly outside it, stranded, terribly awake. (But how we shun the day in August.) November, and Halloween calico is put away and now scarves -- stale, smelling of the scalp's oil -- need airing. Sleeves are tugged down and balled in fists for comfort, but feet are left chilly by the inefficiency of central heating. Attic furnaces warm upper volumes of air that, true to convection, won't fall. And coats rise from the backs of closets like cuddly ghosts. At the coffee shop that suddenly packs full after 2 AM, last call in the city's limits, a young woman leans on my table and tells me she's like to borrow my Goodwill-salvaged, $25 Woolrich (Est. 1830) peacoat so she can go have a smoke outside. As Dallas city ordinance requires. Thin, tall, kinky hair, freckles, diastema; nearly curveless, gangly even, but not lacking some suavity, and some allure (though its mostly the memories of another brown-skinned woman I superimpose on her). And hung loosely in a dress not made for this evening. This is two nights after Thanksgiving, and the stripped trees are inky with the rain that fell this morning. I'm congealed in some incipiency. Maybe the beginning of the next sentence in whatever novel with which I'm scourging myself, maybe a draft of this very paragraph, perhaps some talk I just overheard and think could be recast as dialogue in a story yet to be written -- the later "-ber" months are often unfriendly to new projects. Or it could be that the fluorescent desolation of the cafe is about to exist, about to blink into a new shade of glare, or I am waiting for the leading whirl of iridescence in my second-to-last cup of House Blend to stray into view. Contemplation becomes hesitation, and into this he she inserts that she is an artist, she announces she is. Actress, painter, mother, administrator, mentor, alive. "I noticed you and your friends, all into each other. Into your own little crises. So serious." (So my friends have left... that is why there a quarters and crumpled bills on the table.) She continues. Whatever it is I have to write, I need to write, but I should not act as my own editor. Huh? Did she really say that? There is Scotch on her breath, acridly warm, hickory, a less than unpleasant vapor. How slow must I be moving for her to have gleaned all this from the few, calculated gestures of my earlier observing of this place, the people in it? I've placed the coat in her hands, but I'm keeping the rest of her Marlboro Reds as an insurance policy. (If there's one thing a smoker can't do without, it is their smokes, especially if they are their brand.) It is not as if I mind if the garment being returned smelling of parking lot and second-hand smoke. A winter coat requires a winter smell. Nor do I really fear she'll steal it; even if her companions seem to be ignoring her all of a sudden, she is not here by herself. But she has to smoke alone, one arm wrapped around her waist holding the coat closed as if to button it would be a waste of energy, the other arm straight against her chest and cantered palm-up so that all she has to do it flick her wrist to get a puff. She bobs from leg to leg, 1-3-2-3-1-2-2-3-1-3, occasionally raising her foot completely off the ground and flexing at the knee like a sprinter absenting her mind before the starting pistol. Never once does she smile her gapped smile back at me through the broad, smudged (finger and tired heads leave skidmarks, too) coffee-shop window, nor does she offer any further insight or advice when she brings my coat back to me -- though she does remove it in front of me. Damn, she looked good in it. If only there were some stillness to her. Either she is as ablaze as she wishes to be, or the edges of all the shapes in this instant's world are crackling with interference introduced by my own exhaustion. I notice then that there is shadow (rose) over her right eye only. Never applied or...? For a split-second, I'm torn between lusting after commiseration and being revolted at the very idea of what it would entail. I cease speculating. I don't want this electric woman coming on to me. It is one thing to walk briskly through the cold, to endure it on your way to a destination, to crane your head into the cruel whistling of the north wind and mutter chattering curses under your breath, even as you try to force the heat of those dire exhalations down the front of your sweater. But it is another matter altogether to stand in the cold, miserable but not quick about it, to tolerate the grip of the cold because you cannot bear to break the embrace of your excesses. My M-F, 6 AM jog at the University: they've resurfaced the all 8 lanes of the this quarter-mile of track, but no paver -- or engineer for that matter -- can alter the actual lay of the land, or the cardinal orientation of the brick-red loop itself, and it is still a carousel for the wind. Occasionally a stream of Gulf air (not the Gulf Stream) prevails from the south and it runs smack and countervailing into your face against you for the first half-lap. And just as often the wind blasts in from the prairie-d north and blows like another laboring and inconsiderate runner at your back as you round into the initial half-lap. Or this is all spun and no schedule declaring that on even days we run clockwise, on odd counter-clockwise can make you run into the wind. On the clear Tuesday morning before Thanksgiving, the bitterness came in from the N-NE. My navy blue sweatshirt kept my chest warm, but my sweatpants (gray) were oddly of no help, much less comfort. My legs, especially my thighs, felt weighted down by the flesh that had become more numb than my nose or ears -- both of which are just cartilage (like sharks). Legs so dead I was aware of my skeleton and the load it bears. Dead so much so that I almost felt I had an excuse to slow my pace. Nature knows how to torment. Even to torture. Nature is as if it knows it can exact a change of my mind by inflicting prolonged agonies on my body. When I get to thinking this way, I read temperature as a gauge just how alien the world around me is. That it is the inhospitable which has subdued the earth. Why break the seal? Why venture out into it? Why not goggle at it from afar, i.e., from a place that is well beyond the range of touch? I fling my thoughts northward, toward the upper Midwest and Canada, where the thermometer often reads 0 or below for weeks and months at a time. Where this is "normal". Those expanses are to someone of my upbringing as warranting of long-distance surveying as the giant planets at the outer rim of our solar system, where clouds are tuberous columns of gaseous ice, nitrogen is slush and hydrogen metallic, and layers of latent solar fuel are torn by storms in which drops of precipitation are icicle daggers thrown from a blizzard. Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune; their atmospheres aren't transparent, thin shells but very thick outlines of cosmic volatility. Bright orange or sullen yellow or cerulean, the underside of which is the darkest brown, there's no surface there, only gelid sulfur and methane and ammonia that lap pulverization over you like the tides of an insane (thus sentient) ocean. The cold those millions of miles away would turn your body to crystal, you would be a mummy for an instant, then the finest powder -- maybe your atomic colors would streak the troposphere, but so momentarily and so minutely that perhaps an unblinking spectroscope would record it, but certainly no eyesore astronomer, even that one dedicated soul working well past midnight wrapped in blankets and sipping hot tea with honey and lemon, could witness it. Easy to exaggerate fancifully when you live in a metropolitan area whose population density is due to the inventions of gas jets and refrigerated air. Blame nature, would I? A good and since-lost high school friend told me this story in the first months of 1988. Temporarily evicted after an ugly disagreement with his mother, he slept in his car where it was parked on the street in front of the house. The next morning he awoke cramped and dazed, in a great blur of fogged glass and some quickly billowing white. First he feared that he had wrecked, spun out into a swamp whose mists were seeping in all around him, then that the gray concentrations of noxiousness -- now he could smell gasoline -- were evidence of something burning nearby, or even within. But finally he noticed the cars and trucks all around him, and the panic he experienced was that of the exhausted driver who wakes to the sight of the steering wheel turning back and forth all on its own. Except where had everyone gone? These cars and trucks were running, but driverless. And then he understood that he was still "home", and, all up and down his block, the running vehicles were as motionless as he was. He cranked down his window -- a slow whirr and the protests of frigid rubber bands -- and heard the staggered rhythms of engine idles overlapping, and like a whine or smug high-pitched hum above that the sound of car stereos behind other windows blaring morning talk, news, antics, accident reports, Top 40, some so loud that the entire automobile acted as a kind of amplifier, resonating with guttural frequencies, ringing like the exposed steel frame of an unfinished piece of architecture when a hard wind blares through and drops the temperature all around those interlocking girders. (Even a tower in which the bells are cracked can still make a sound.) He was relieved. See, those Volvos and Datsuns and Fords were being "warmed up" and meanwhile their owners had scurried back inside to shake off the initial shock of the weather, to clap their hands back to life, to strike sparks of ruddiness in the palms, to rub their seats to the kindling point and I suppose in all this agitation to surround themselves with a halo of heat that would not diffuse on the trip back to the curb or as soon as they buckled themselves into the cabs that had to have been left out overnight. Even though he had not woken in mid-commute, the fact that so many of his neighbors had to be somewhere by a common certain time, the fact that they had all decided they could beat the rush by rising a bit earlier and making the proper preparations, my classmate was still stuck in traffic. He was not about to budge; he needed a shower, breakfast, a change of clothes. And, above that, there was something beautiful in his confusion. The clouded, coarse-crystalled pollution was a shimmer in which the light had been extinguished, and it hung over the scene like anything that has had it ordinariness transmuted into mysteriousness by the circumstances of surprise. It was ghostly, he said. Ghostly: that is, vacated but not peaceful, just as Dallas' Lower Greenville Avenue is soon after sunrise on a Saturday morning: empty bottles standing on every street-corner, dim storefront windows through which you can see the chairs standing on the tables, valet stands chained back along the alley walls. And, in winter, thick drapes of tropically translucent plastic, poked with grommets like giant shower curtains, over restaurant patios.

Autumn and winter... seasons that ask for retreat to the kitchen. During the day, it is the hottest room in the house. At least in the afternoon and early evening. Red spatters from the tomato "gravy" (my mother's designation) simmering in the Dutch oven dot the yellow range-top. The dry aroma of bread baking. Caramelizing vegetables. A pot of black coffee left on the burner and turning ever more black as the day grows weaker. The kettle whistle. But the cold and dark scurry into the kitchen late at night. When I was in college, I did much of my jazz listening as I washed the previous day's dishes just before starting that night's dinner. Our house, never a terribly private place, all to myself. Orangish, ripe, low-falling light -- of course, there was a window just over the sink, facing West, towards a full block's worth of backyard trees, high fences, and sunset -- and the never-to-be-duplicated, muffled resounding of my favorite cold weather records playing loud in the living room. Farmer and Gryce, Muhal and Malachi on Sightsong, solo Monk, Curtis Fuller on Savoy, Mingus' "Self-Portrait In Three Colors" and "Song With Orange" (the Tentet arrangement from Mingus Dynasty), Sun Ra's Jazz In Silhouette, the Verve Bley / Giuffre / Swallow trios, Booker Little's Time date, Kenny Dorham's Cafe Bohemia recordings, Andrew Hill's live date from Montreux 1975, Herbie Nichols' "Spinning Song"; the music made its way around overstuffed furniture, through open doorways flanked by tall stacks of books, and down the long hardwood-floored hallway already crowded with the slow undulations of warmed air vented from gas space heaters (living room, master bedroom, both bathrooms), and I could listen to those gold sounds over the splash and rattle of dishes being scrubbed, rinsed, and put away. Accompanied by deep blue hard bop ballad playing, like on Jackie McLean's Prestige quartets with Mal Waldron, or Horace Silver's "Sweet Stuff", all of Tina Brooks' True Blue (especially "Theme For Doris", my God...), the first three piano-less tracks and the title performance from Coltrane's Lush Life, the Davis Quintet's "Fall", a cigarette smoldering after the strange consummation that is "Nefertiti". Solstitial. Mingus in the 50's especially makes me think of December PM, music heavy in the bass clef, as if its been spiked with cough syrup... think of those recordings with trombonist Eddie Bert and tenor saxophonist George Barrow. The Elmo Hope trio record originally released on Hi-Fi Jazz, with Jimmy Bond and the tragic Frank Butler, a record whose aim it seems is to extend the night, stretch it until the stars fall out like rhinestones from rent fabric, yet in "Barfly" and "Ee-jah" features two of the most effective early morning ballad-tempo pieces in all of hard bop. When I remind myself of these records, or handle them again, I can't help but recall those autumns past. Jazz then was for me a domestic music, not clubby, not about the street. Interior, but in the manner that a fjord is somehow interior. A studying fool was I, and for me jazz sounded best echoing in the ravine made by a book cracked open to a high-lighted passage. Long private nights from my college years, in the days before computers that could sit on your lap like a slumbering cat (itself but a fur-lined and sweetly rumbling incarnation of separation anxiety). How did this happen, this Proustian operation? What forged the links, or fused them in this frozen mixture? My twenties, of course, a decade -- give or take -- I thought some lesson, and months with no company but the CD player. The ambivalence I have about solitude is tied up in the associations I have with this music. (All the things that were done for you as a child you no longer understand, and despite the fact that you can now do them for yourself.) Once the moon comes up: no baying, a good bit of head-scratching, a little typing at the Brother. The outside experienced only by the noises it made, sounds that no pair of headphones could keep from flicking a tingle at the back of my ears. The pattern of creak made by the turban fan turning against its own rustiness in a sudden high wind. Wind chimes driven crazy. The tremolo of the wind itself. Grackles bickering early in the morning. Wind warbling over the mouth of open utility piping, white PVC bound to a telephone pole her by this stoplight on a morning drive, raising a lonesome, faint flute sound that I can hear even though my defrosted windows are sealed tight. Muffled night club music; doors aren't open to the street on nights like this. The whistling made by the Nerf football, pocked and flaking bright paint and tiny sponges of inner foam, as it sails out my younger brother's expert, fingers-athwart-the-fake laces grip and towards my nose. The black V ("vuh"? "vee"? a loud pursing of the lips? a long rolling of the tongue, as around Iberian "r"'s, only with a different result?) of birds flying in a long, thin huddle of instinct. The formation swells and breaks along its point, some birds surge forward, others fall back, the whole shape shears to the south, swells and breaks. The sky is so blue it turns white. The voices of the waking world heard through the layers of duvee and blankets. The seen breath of one alternateen, wearing an overcoat over her fatigue green hoodie talking, with another at the bus stop. They are visibly laughing, but there is some thing in the exchange that calls to my mind the slow, steady hush of hibernation.

There is a place on the other side of all the old jazz and related discographical data I injected into my personality in the hope that it would give me a new life. That's where I began to discover other winter records. Beck's Mutations, maybe only because the first words on the album are "cold brains", Beck-ese for Wallace Stevens' "mind of winter", and, lyrically, the whole thing is obsessed with decay and death, with the interstellar distances separating people, one from one, one from many, many from many. Beck's person throughout: the bard whose language has the boiling energy of anger, but whose delivery is that of the sadsack. The two "blue" Echo and The Bunnymen albums, Heaven Up Here and Ocean Rain (not Porcupines, snow-encrusted cover art aside; its obvious there's copious steam heat lurking beneath all the blankness), the former especially all imploringly reverberating like a dead-end tenant in an empty, unheated flat. And pre-Woodstock Dylan, the Dylan of the Suze years, the Dylan with the buttoned-up overcoat and pink cheeks who somehow resembles Barbara Streisand on the jacket of his very first LP. But Dylan not so much when he is ranting in meter about the wages of sin ("With God On Our Side"), rather when he is singing about the declining fortunes of Hibbing or, more indirectly, about how speed made him such a verbally gifted asshole, which would be all of Blonde On Blonde, especially, "4th Time Around". "And I, I never took much / I never asked for your crutch / Now don't ask for mine." The first two Soft Machine records, especially 2, the reels of which sound as if they had been buried under some really dirty slush. Tangerine Dream. Permafrost grooves, you know?

It is mere days before Christmas 2004 and I am laying nearly on my back in a planetarium in Fort Worth. The program? What was the star of Bethlehem, really? ("Blue as a welder's torch" in a song lyric devised by Grant Lee Phillips, Copperopolis.) Maybe this is an unwanted but unavoidable meaning of "music of the spheres": music whose elements are so rare, tones so pure, logic tight, speed frictionless and inertial, the music threatens to asphyxiates us. Yet the music came from earth.... Why want to key your moods to the feeling of that you are keeping at bay? You wall off the cold and damp and dark, the 5 o'clock sunsets and steaming storm drains and trembling stiffness in the fingers, and then you surround yourself with music that you think captures the essence somehow of those things. What is this endeavor that feels as if it is leisure? Is it a form of complaint, one that tries to escape being obvious? Are we trying to convince ourselves of something? Commiseration? Correspond. Are we out to remake the world as it feels to us? Yes, we do it to ourselves. A form of intimate theater? If we use ourselves this way, is it any wonder we will use others? If so, acknowledge that this remaking involves only a little in the way of actual creation.. I think maybe it has to do with a strange ability human beings have to turn impotence into power. This experience, this alteration, is elective. It comes and goes as I please, I indulge it, I ennoble it, I decorate it. I want to make the outside come inside and cancel out -- like detests like -- the winter in my soul. To stay up late into the frigid night, until the quiet conquers you. Beyond sad. When we are sad, we often want music that makes us more sad. But when we are cold, do we really want to be more cold? Hardly, I think. This question of how music is stored up and digested -- it goes beyond belonging. Beyond depression. Beyond affect, I think, though somehow the center of it is still affect and it is not affectlessness. "Music" and "soundtrack" are not synonyms -- I don't want to grace a moment, a time, a circumstance, with more than it deserves by assigning some music to it. I just want to feel comfortable in the knowledge that the music will help me retrieve the experience and perhaps even realize that, yes, there was something more momentous about it than I first thought. But the integrity of the music, too... is it displaced by this act? If so, it is displaced over and over again, to an extent that suggests it has no integrity.

When Stevens does write in The Snowman that "one must have a mind of winter," how much stress does "must" receive? One should, one is required to? Or is it an "if... then". If one does not "think /... of any misery in the sound of the wind" then one's mind is allied with, unified with winter's? Thus dead? Selfless? Nothingness simultaneously is and isn't. A paradox created, nurtured by recognition.

Commuters are those who cannot live near their work, they enact imbalance. The landscape reflects their lifestyle: poles apart, filled with treeless and zip-in, zip-out convenience. The country recedes from the city, downtowns and outlying areas; to keep these things apart we will destroy each equally in making this no man's land. Desert. What we perceive and feel as "the environment" is chiefly some replaying of our own actions. What we can do so quickly and without much consideration it might take nature a long, long time to undo. We are our own natural order. The predator that threatens our survival is consequence, good and bad, predicted and unforeseen. But we cannot despair over this connection. A. R. Ammons, both Wordsworthian and anti-Wordsworthian, from Tape For The Turn Of The Year that poem he wrought / journal he kept from 6 December 1963 to 10 January 1964, writes on the day before New Year's Eve that

soilage spreads
&
nature is trying to get
everything back
into the mill:
we exist because we're
afire (& burning out):

This sounds a little like Dante's hell, infinitely distant from the warmth the God's love, Satan's wings fanning not flames but flapping out winds that freeze, thus only sink him more securely in his excrescent ice, and as labors towards self-sovereignty are worse than ineffectual. This is innate justice of even the most seemingly venial evil. The old proverb about consumption says one thing but warns of another. You may be what you eat, OK, but, more to the point, what you breathe is you. Are you something you can convert as easily as you can convert other people into utilities, succor, knowledge, respect, love? We afflict ourselves or we disappear, colonists become refugees. Think of the spots where our atmosphere has thinned and worn through. Human beings may not have created these extremes, but they have helped shape and spread them. However much we civilize ourselves and thus engage in a huge and hugely wasteful project of contradistinction, we remain natural beings, we are part of the wilderness over whose decline we so often mourn.

Ammons, again, on New Year's Eve:

if we looked only by
what we know,
we couldn't turn our
heads:
if we were at the
mercy of what
we understand,
our eyes couldn't see:
discovery is
praise &
understanding is
celebration:
but understanding
is to see itself
fallen short.

Jazz still infects my imagination. In my mind, it is always winter in Central Park where Horace Silver is reading his morning paper, Bennie Green can never get a cab, and the marquee, partially obscured by feeding pigeons behind Thad Jones, will forever read "Show Boat". Dizzy Reece's Soundin' Off, if I mention it I prove so much, so few having heard it. Anyway, on the cover the Jamaica-born trumpeter stands pensive, sweater-vested, poised with his horn against the black of never tendered / burned out coal. In reality, the encompassing bleak is only a warm, dimmed studio, and the trick is all in the cropping. (Likewise, cool jazz to me is warmth pretending contempt for heat. A guy who goes to the beach and refuses to put on any sunscreen. A shady spot on the sand, tussocks of pale grass, a salt breeze. The clouds interfere for a moment with the sun, or it falls through screens.)

The world of this snowblind imagination, tired, rueful, fixated on an assumed future, its a snow globe in which the actual is miniaturized and subject to storms that always settle no matter how agitated each is at its outset.

~ Joe Milazzo