"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Daniel Morgan

God has built into the season the need to reflect. As the year takes its last pensive steps to the gallows, there is a sense of sorrow over what one has made of the waning year, looking out over the starry sky of cosmic history. At the refrain of cold, there is the need to huddle close for warmth, and we are somehow drawn together by the snowy clouds during the day and fire by night. In wintering together, oftentimes there comes a sickness in body or in spirit that casts our thoughts out into the deep. Ultimately, this reflection culminates in Christmas, in the hope of a new birth and a better life. As the carol says, “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight.”

The ancient Celts would extinguish all of their hearth fires and gather in the outer darkness around the bonfire of the village. From there they relit each home from the communal flame in the center of Ireland. But we have lost that tradition and our homes are colder with each passing year. The fires that sparkle among the trees are too weak to stay lit and fall to the ground, joining with the earth in mounds. Then children in their games stamp the last embers down. And the summer is not mourned, and the winter is not feared. Persephone waits without hope of any to quest after her.

Meanwhile, the hearth fire invites nostalgia to come and sit for a spell. Leave the stars for a while, take off your coat, and warm yourself with some wassail or mulled cider by the inglenook.

Though often I am like the star-crossed lover, “best in least of company,” tonight I’d welcome anyone just so I don’t have to tell stories to myself. I’ve heard them too many times to give even a courtesy laugh.

The fire begins to catch on the logs and circles of crimson show over the black den, and over the world. Now listen to the old stories while the wind is low on the air. The best tales are always told in winter.

*          *          *

My mind turns to New Englanders, eating their clam chowder, thinking up their great American novels that never came. There’s Melville, Hawthorne, and maybe even Frost out sailing in the dark Atlantic on a schooner or a clipper ship, I can never tell which. They’re fussing with each other over the duality of the universe, the light and dark forces that entrap us. Then Dickinson comes in and everyone becomes quiet. Who invited her? The men shuffle awkwardly across the deck and pass by Whitman, passed out in his cups. I try to say something witty to them, but I don’t think they can hear me, and soon they’re down the companionway, staring off the stern into the wake of nothingness.

But I do not find myself a companion to them. Most writers are too narcissistic to even distinguish them at times. Dickinson looks my way in a girlish little way, and I begin to feel claustrophobic beneath the pool above us. Fortunately, Poe enters with a brooding conscience, and they’re soon engaged with each other in an eerie silence.

*          *          *

I leave off, closing my books, to think on others nearer to me and closer to this evening dim. For one thing, the fire needs stirring. Looking out the window I see the swirls of snowflakes cleave the air. Another draw on the pipe, and I let the smell of vanilla and wood smoke linger some.

Then like a wraith, she’s here. There’s flowers scattered about her, rosemary for remembrance, and her hair mixes with the eldritch vanilla in sight and smell. There’s not a color of autumn that’s not matched in a woman’s hair. She is speaking so far off I cannot hear, but I know what she’s saying. She prating lines from somewhere in the past, a soliloquy about having used daggers, but spoke none. I remember the daggers of spite and duplicity I had spoken to her, the ones I had threatened but never used, and guess that somehow it proves her my other half, my doppelgänger. She deceived in silence as I loved in protest. Then she closed with a shrug, “I was the more deceived.” Then senseless scenes of madness come and go, and I remember the play, of course, and my good Ophelia again.

Then the months are changed, though it’s still winter. We’ve stayed up most of the night, barefoot in the living room, excited by editing each other’s term papers or something equally peculiar for us. The Cranberries are playing in the background and I decline to dance. I remember how drama used to be only a kind of choral dance. In fact, one word meant the other; a blend of the most primal of all human activity, the most alive and most like fire. Still I decline.

The night ended in a bloody mess. She grew more and more still. I took her hand. She cried out all the half-truths inside her. But that was okay. There were countless other nights before and after that kind. Dolores O’Riordan dirges over and over about her lover’s lies in the only way the Irish know how to sing, and we sit and listen to it all, looking at each other’s eyes. “The spirit that I have seen may be a devil, and the devil hath power t’ assume a pleasing shape.”

But that was long ago, and I can think of others, if more distant, at least more hospitable to visit.

*          *          *

The trees are all where I left them at my old college, except for a few saplings just planted and strung up with wires along the back of the Hinton academic center. I espy some old friends, living memories, and a few duller pains drifting inside. Most of them were at one time or another fellow actors in our humble company. With some of them, I’ve spent not a few of these sorts of winter. We laugh and joke, but mostly I listen in on their jokes. I’m the only one I think they’ve seen since the diaspora of graduation.

They’re doing other tragedies and comedies, histories and romances, now. It seems like overnight those three years of fellowship have become a Gethsemane for me where the hour scatters everyone. And all at once, I loathe the life I now have, where God now has me.

I say my goodbyes and we have our perfunctory promises to stay in touch. I don’t want to go back to my car just yet. I take a walk among the magnolias and red-brick. Half in shade stands the Atwood building where I took most of my English classes. It was around this time two years ago that she and I shared a senior seminar on the poetry of Yeats on Monday nights. By the time class was over, it was just after dark. The gloaming sky turned from rust to coal and the two mingled for a while, and we thought aloud of some lines from Yeats and the Celtic twilight he labored to build, but never quite completed. I wonder if he ever lit his hearth fire from the central flame at Usinach.

We walked hand in hand to the six o’clock drama rehearsal which always started closer to seven. Somehow people always go slower when they’re with others. Eventually, we crossed the campus, underneath the boughs, interrupted only by the occasional circles of lamplight and the perpetual fluorescence of the library. In the distance, all the lights and actors and strangers became snowflakes against the sky.

Once inside, our cheeks flushed with heat, and we doffed our coats and expressed our apologies for being tardy. No, individually we were tardy; together we were nearly absent. There were about eight of us who met in the old music theatre. It had the feeling of a room that used to hear the echo of Schumann or Brahms or, if you listen closely, I sometimes heard the delicate petals of Debussy. As a performance grew nearer, our belated Monday meetings turned to daily practices, and our director became more Teutonic in her agitated overlord-ship.

Suddenly, the months that led up to our unveiling were gone. Stage lights were blinding outside the thin curtains and backstage our fellowship huddled together in the cramped eaves. When one of us came back from his or her part, we encouraged the intrepid fellow, and wished luck to whichever poor soul waited for the cue to stride out next. Each mistake or soliloquy-to-applause was shared by us collectively. Like a company of eager angels, we peeked and listened in on the world of men.

Invariably, the next week was the worst. In the ensuing hush after our moment of grandeur, the absence of community, we drifted around campus, going to our separate classes, looking for any excuse to come back together again. But the year was always relentless and put more distance between us, and between her and me, an unfixable gulf. She was the best actress we had, so natural and unaffected. Her tergiversant eyes could fool anyone.

The sound of the Cranberries mixes with Debussy and I let the tune remind me of the circumstances when I had listened to them last, when we shared our balcony scenes, or when I saw her from afar that uncommonly gray Sunday afternoon and, without any angels to exhort me on, took the cue. That was when I first spoke the lines of my heart, and misread the silence.

*          *          *

Then came the relentless questions that should have come long before the performance began. God knows that is the worst of all times, and all those times always seem to come in winter. Like a strain of music almost caught, it teases in broken chords until at last you begin to forget what parts you knew. And we’re back where we began, before the dwindling fireside.

How healthy can it be for the spirit to brood and brood over such a dying fall? Does not nostalgia and regret bring dishonor to the God who sets our path? I read some Robert Frost again… slowly through “Revelation,” “Reluctance,” and “My November Guest,” before wincing at “The Impulse.” How could he ever have penned such words without evenings like this, without being immersed in a muggy cup of memories like every poet or actor before him?

Some words from the past, from another Proserpine play to be sure, return: “Moping is not mourning and cheerfulness is not the Cheshire cat.” And I think, how true. Then a verse comes to my mind then, “Godly sorrow leads to repentance, but worldly sorrow ends in death.” So it was with Hamlet and Ophelia, who were driven mad before they could find peace. “I must be cruel only to be kind.”

But I also know a man must have wounds to be counted amongst the courageous. Hamlet, for all his cerebral apoplexy, struck out and killed and achieved vengeance in tragedy. A man must have milestones to look back upon and say here was a great battle. Much blood was spilled, and I am better for it.

Ebenezer means “stone of remembrance.” It was the milestone that the children of Israel looked back upon and were ashamed, where the Ark was taken by the Philistines and the armies of Israel were defeated. But soon after, the Lord returned to smite the Philistines for good and Samuel honored the battleground with another Ebenezer. Out of evil was brought good. For all of the courage of Hamlet, and there was precious little of that, he never understood the lesson of the Ebenezer. He preferred in his solipsism to believe “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

These places and spots of time that are sacred to us poets and actors are blithely forgotten in the shopping sprees and Christmas stockings of other people. And yet, the only way to create sacred spaces and survive the winter is together in community. Shared, they become havens of peace and restoration. Isolation brings insanity. In a way, Hamlet went insane because he had to; the play was a tragedy. If believers in Christ, we know our play ends not in death, but in marriage; that is what bears remembrance. “Whosoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have life everlasting.”

Persephone or Proserpine, however one names her, personifies the season. In fact, the Latin-Etruscan root originally meant “the dead god(dess)” or quite simply “mask.” It is where we get the word “persona.” In a way, all of us are actors, puppets, and marionettes; Ophelia, Persephone, and Mary. In our lives, we reenact the dying god, who must be mourned for half the year before He is reborn. The black earth yields to white and then to green again and together with the red become the colors of Christmas. I know my books. The horned king of the harvest must die for there to be winter, but what if he should wake and not find his May Queen? If Christ finds not His church, ready and in white, how will spring return?

So there are the seasons in our lives that bear reflecting, but not for forever. Poetry comes only by knowing both the joys of winter and the blights of summer, the universal vision that regrounds our souls. That is the perspective to be reached, the clear horizon visible only among the winter-bare trees.

It is tempting to only view the immediate circumstance and say oh, how consummate is the temporal, how enduring are the hundred thousand sere leaves that mark our trails. But Christ saw past His death towards the third day. He swore not to taste of the vine again until His followers were all with Him in His Father’s new kingdom. He endured those three nights away in isolation from those dearest Him until He met them on the shores again. And a marriage feast still awaits us on that quickening Day.

I too thirst. But here, tonight, we hold a winter’s communion with Him and with a pull on the pipe and a breath of wood smoke, I kneel in the soft turf. At His feet, I smell the fragrant pleasure next to her who not long ago, just about three days past, poured an alabaster anointing for burial.