Today, as I shoveled snow while all my neighbors also shoveled snow or pulled sleds down the street to the school where there’s a little hill, I was reminded of a poem I wrote a few years ago about this post-snowstorm feeling. I don’t have any particular plans for publishing it, so here it is, just for you.
I’d like to be the city
after a snowstorm:
waking to a shock
of such clean newness,
people walking my streets
just to see how everything
can be astonishing, each
emerging for a collective
digging out, removing
what has fallen in me,
all strangers to each other
together in this difficult work,
this sudden ability
for breathlessness.
(I love snow, even shoveling it. Here’s a bonus shoveling-snow poem.)
I’m including some photographs by Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley, who was a turn-of-the-century Vermont farmer and photographer who carefully documented thousands of snow crystals (not to be confused with snowflakes, which are an amalgamation of multiple ice crystals). He spent a lifetime studying and puzzling over snow. Here’s a quote from Bently from a 1970 biography (read it, it’s delightful and honestly one of the best pieces of writing I’ve found lately):
A careful study of this internal structure not only reveals new and far greater elegance of form than the simple outlines exhibit, but by means of these wonderfully delicate and exquisite figures much may be learned of the history of each crystal, and the changes through which it has passed in its journey through cloud-land. Was ever life history written in more dainty hieroglyphics!
Snow crystals are an apt image for this Notions & Notes in which I want to explore the particular feeling of being alone together. (I write about it a lot). It’s the feeling when strangers share an experience—finding syncopation of emotion maybe on public transportation, or at concerts, or coming through catastrophe. Snow crystals are small pieces of a greater whole: they combine to make flakes, which fall on the city in such numbers that truly extend beyond the human capacity for comprehension, and each snowfall some small awe. Each is unique (yes, Bently is credited with the famous line about no two being alike), but always part of a snowfall that changes our world for a little while.
I first discovered this poem during the pandemic and something about the shared breath of it made me yearn for such intimacy among strangers. Of all the many losses since March 2020, I hope this untroubled and passing connection with others is not lost to us forever.
Transitory Mitzvah
Sarah Matthes
In the subway car, a mystery of proximity: a yawn
passing from mouth to mouth
across a line of seated strangers
in perfect order. I watched it moving
like a secret through a row of children,
washing toward me as each person opened
their lips to swallow it up
and then, in unbroken revolution,
give it away.
I thought this must be G-d: air
moving through human bodies
like a soft needle picking up stitches along pale cloth.
And I felt my neighbor expand
in her crest of breath, hand
floating to her mouth
like wood rising in water,
and I prepared myself for the gift—
But the yawn turned across the aisle.
I saw it grow inside a child and then drift
into his mother, as it passed again
and again away from me.
What would you unsee
so you could be inside of it?
Could it ever be enough just to say:
it happened, nothing opened
or closed around me, air moved
and was wind, air moved and was
breath, air moved and was death,
my life, it did not change—
Susan Vega’s famous song is another example of those incidental shared moments among strangers that I miss so very much. I know you’ve heard the song before, but listen closer to how strange and beautiful the lyrics are—nothing happens, and yet everything happens.
A while back I read “Out of Breath,” an essay by Tishani Doshi, and stashed it away for the right time to share it with you. An essay like this—one that bridges poetry and prose—invokes writer envy for me. It braids together the idea of breath and breathlessness, language, and atrocity.
Here is a piece I found particularly beautiful:
“In Tamil, there is a word—uyir, which means “breath, aliveness.” David Shulman’s masterful biography, Tamil, describes it as the innermost core of a Tamil person, the thing that connects the inside to the outside, individual to cosmos. The equivalent Sanskrit word might be prana. Yogis will be familiar with pranayama breath-controlling techniques. Like prana, uyir is not mere respiration, but life force. It’s what sets in motion the need to speak or sing, the cornerstone for language, existence, divinity. Most important, it has to do with the truth. Shulman writes that the notion of truthfulness is culturally determined—for the Greeks it was aletheia, “non-forgetting, unveiling, something no longer hidden.” For Tamils, truthfulness is linked to the spoken word, which, once uttered, must live out its life in the world.
I read Shulman’s book in the hills of Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu, 115 kilometers from Madurai, the epicenter of the Pandya dynasty, where, over a thousand years ago, the Sangam poets sung lines that are still echoing across to us today:
If one can tell morning
from noon from listless evening,
the night of sleeping towns from dawn
then one’s love
is a lie . . .”(Allur Nanmullaiyar translated by A. K. Ramanujan, Kuruntokai)
Love can take your breath away too. Hearts can skip beats. The idea of uyir might sound like spiritual mumbo jumbo with its notions of harmony and the breathing world, but we know that our bodies are dead stars, don’t we? We know that, every time we breathe, we are inhaling molecules that were previously exhaled from every other human who has ever lived. That we are interconnected across breath and time and space, which is why, even though our lives may be historically short, we are still part of eternity. We know that the hardest part of the contagion this past year has been that we are vulnerable because of the very thing that connects us: our breath.
While Doshi’s essay looks unflinchingly at the harm we’re capable of doing to each other when we don’t share, I recently learned about an art piece that mends historic hurt through collective action. In 981, nearly all 1,000 residents of an isolated Sardinian village, tied their town to a mountain with nearly 17 miles of blue denim ribbon.
The event combined elements of land art, performance, and installation. But the ribbon also forged a symbolic and physical coming together in a place where family feuds and even violence had spanned generations. Behind everything was Maria Lai, a post-war Italian artist born in 1919 and raised in Ulassai. Her goal for the project? “Art should … make us feel more united,” she reflected in 2009, five years before she passed. “Otherwise we’re not human beings.”
In an essay included in Legarsi alla Montagna (Binding to the Mountain, which was just released to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Ulassai art event, Elena Pontiggia writes, “What Lai really held dear was art’s ability, by including ordinary people in its creation, to encourage them to think about its power to heal, about the central importance of human relations, and the need to live in harmony with nature.”
I think the blue ribbon tying the villagers to the mountain is an incredible image of collective action, of the potential of art to reconfigure how we see our world, of community. It’s this sense of community, connectedness for better or worse, responsibility toward others, that the pandemic illuminated for me in many small ways, from the growth of local mutual aid networks to the national work of masking and getting vaccinated for others’ safety as much as our own. I wish I didn’t see masks littered on the ground everywhere, but they’re our blue ribbon.
I’ve heard the smell of fresh-baked cookies triggers a feeling of comfort and home in our brains and that real estate agents often bake or bring cookies to encourage a subconscious connection. I don’t know if it’s true, but these cookies I recently made from a New York Times recipe were so simple and cinnamony and comforting. I shared them with friends who were strangers before the pandemic—people I’ve grown close to from the shared experience of watching our dogs play together. I hope you make them and share them with others—I can’t think of a better way to show care to another person than with a plate of cookies.
INGREDIENTS
1 cup/95 grams old-fashioned rolled oats
1 cup/128 grams all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
½ cup/100 grams granulated sugar
¼ packed cup/55 grams light brown sugar
1 large egg, at room temperature
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon or pumpkin pie spice
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
½ teaspoon baking soda
4 tablespoons/57 grams unsalted butter, melted
¾ cup/92 grams confectioners’ sugar
5 teaspoons whole or oat milk, plus more as needed
PREPARATION
Heat the oven to 350 degrees and line a large cookie sheet with parchment.
In a bowl, combine the oats, flour and salt. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, beat both sugars with the egg, cinnamon, vanilla and baking soda on high speed, scraping the bowl as needed, until glossy, pale and thick, a full 2 minutes. Reduce the speed to medium. Very slowly drizzle in the melted butter and whisk until thoroughly incorporated. Add the oat mixture and gently fold by hand using a wooden spoon or rubber spatula just until incorporated, being careful not to overmix.
Using a small cookie scoop or two spoons, drop 15 golf ball-size mounds of dough onto the sheet pan, spacing them at least 2 inches apart. Bake until the edges and surface are set and lightly golden brown, but the center is still gooey, 12 to 14 minutes. Remove from the oven and immediately rap the cookie sheet on the counter or stovetop a couple of times to help the cookies flatten a little more, and cool on the sheet for 5 minutes.
In a small bowl, mix the confectioners’ sugar and milk using a fork until the icing is completely smooth and very thick but still moves if you tilt the bowl. Add more milk in small increments as needed. Dip only the very tops of the cookies into the bowl of icing, leaving the deeper cracks in the cookies uncoated and allowing any excess icing to drip back into the bowl. Flip the cookies over and return them to the cookie sheet to allow the icing to harden, 10 to 15 minutes. The iced cookies will keep in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 1 week.
Did I just recently share a Jane Hirshfield poem? It’s time for another because it is a perfect note to end on. Be good to each other.
FOR WHAT BINDS US
by Jane Hirshfield
There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they’ve been set down —
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There’s a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest —
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.