Symbol of the Snow Man

December 28, 2008

Christmas is quite the time for symbols of belief. Between Santa Claus, Baby Jesus, and America there's a lot of demand for personal belief. There's really no way to be a principled objector to Christmas: that's known as being a Scrooge. So I muddle along through the holidays skeptical, but unwilling to step off the prescribed path.

All the snow here in Appleton this December (record breaking!) reminded me of "Snow Man" by Wallace Stevens:

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

That idea of a "mind of winter" seems like the perfect antidote to Christmas and its multiple claims for belief. And I note that Stevens places us in "January".. not December. But even in his holiday-less winter cold there is still the temptation to impart meaning and symbolic value to the bareness of the world. The stirring of the leaves and the wind in the trees calls up a sense of human misery and grief.. but really it is just wind.. just a nothing that we impart with meaning.

The poem is called "The Snow Man".. which given its theme would seem to imply a certain ironic imaginative ideal: to be unmoved by what is not there. Stevens works through this interaction of the imagination and the world many times and in many ways, but by the end of his career he is sounding a lot like a Snow Man:

...We seek

The poem of pure reality, untouched
By trope or deviation, straight to the word,
Straight to the transfixing object, to the object

At the exactest point at which it is itself,
Transfixing by being purely what it is,
A view of New Haven, say, through the certain eye,

The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight
Of simple seeing, without reflection. We seek
Nothing beyond reality....

["An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" IX]

The human hubbub of a city like New Haven has become an object of a pure perception.. a thing in itself.

The Snow Man may be an ideal for Stevens, but it is notable how the snow man lives and breathes in our American imaginations as Frosty the Snowman. At the mere mention of the name the holiday song undoubtedly enters your consciousness. But that is exactly what Stevens is trying to push away.. and the reason why it takes being a snow man to exist imaginatively in this world. There is a necessary imaginative effort to break through the symbols of belief that have invaded even the body of the snow man. In the vein of Stevens: one must be a snow man to think of a snow man and not imagine Frosty the Snow Man.