Snow

Today the snow made another sortie against the world. The sky poured out all it had, hæmorrhaging fat white belly feather flakes in hypnotic pirouettes towards the stolid ground. We should have drowned. Should have felt it pile up around feet trapped in allied ice and then inch upward, unstoppably, beyond knees, thighs, crotch, waist, breasts, shoulders - towards chin, before filling up mouth nose eyes ears hair and carrying on piling onto the tops of our heads, pushing down upon us. Should have been paralysed with the weight and the cold of it, as it locked us into blue-white stasis - limbo and death, diamond hard.

But we weren't. The covering on the ground never got deeper, unable to reach beyond a 3 inch barrier, no matter how determined the blizzard. The wily ground drew the snow to itself, and it was water, and the snow could not defeat it.

We are not unscathed. The snow that there was still covered the paths and the roads and the plants and the houses. The ice tomorrow will be thick and dangerous, and the world will still be snow-blind. But it will_________eventually_________melt.

Notes on snow.

"I stand on Kite Hill, looking across the London panorama below and remember the ending of Joyce's The Dead. "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." My soul was swooning (there, I admit it) yesterday as I stood and saw the snow falling, not on Joyce's Ireland, but on dirty old London, reborn as a thing of beauty. It was snowing from Epping Forest to Heathrow, Upminster to Uxbridge, on duke and dustman in a way that it hasn't for ages and probably won't for a good while. Savour it, I told myself."

Stuart Jefferies, Guardian, Tuesday 3rd February 2009

But that story of Joyce's is not comforting, in any way. The snow universalises, yes, but it has a horror about it that I was in part trying to get to yesterday - snow as numbing, cleansing, rotting death. The article is in general lovely, and littered with literary references ('measured out our lives in coffee spoons' - why miss a chance to link to that poem?), but I think he misses the reference in the Joyce. Either he's showing off and getting it wrong, or is plain wrong. It's disappointing. I must re-read 'The Dead'.

Snow

Watching it come down yesterday, I felt the snow smothering my living. It cut me off in my empty dead house, wrapping me about in an ice straitjacket, mewing me up in the lurid dimness of rooms lit by the reflection of sick pollution. Falling like feathers plucked from the skin of the sky; the waste product of slaughter come to drown us in blue-white death and purity - the two things the same. Stepping out in it this morning, pushing feet down into the numbing tactile blanket, I felt it suck at my shoes vampire-like, drawing at my heat and my soul. It left me marked, sticking to me with a sweetness like candy floss, spreading white patches of mould across me. I am not dead and pure; I am living, in dark relief against the brightness, staining a world trying to cleanse itself.

And the day moved on, and the people pushed at the blankness, and left trails across the snow. It recorded and registered their movements like a wax tablet, watching, knowing, for reference - later. And then there came the slush; the snow receded with the day to show the world as it was. Everything grey filth. The people and the cars spattered with it. It clings to shoes like the snow did, but leaves behind more than water. We are marked again, with ash not aqua. And though the streets will dry and regain their appearance of cleanish greenish aliveness, the stains on shoes will take longer, and the stains on souls do not go. They show both our distance from purity and from death - the two things the same.

Tomorrow, though, the slurry will freeze, and the world will be coated in a varnish of its own muck - shined and polished in grime. And we will not damage it, will not stand upon it except with great care. It will buff up our danger and our fragility. And we will carry on, our minds not thinking, the snow moving then to smother the stream of consciousness in the way it blankets the ice-hard streams of the physical city.