Speaking of Snow...

Man is a snow that cracks 

the trees’ red resinous arches

and winters the cabined heart

till the chilled nail shrinks in the wall

and pistols the brittle air

till frost like ferns of the world that is lost

unfurls on the darkening window. 

(from "Man is a Snow,  Earle Birney)

I'm in Florida at the moment, having left on the threshold of a snowstorm that never materialized. It's a very strange Winter this year in Ontario, with hardly any snow and many, many mild days. I love snow, but this has been exceedingly convenient for a city dweller having to move about without a transit pass.

Shovelling Snow

Twilight has set out,

Laying frigidity from the east;

Over the pine tops;

Soldiered, looming trees,

Forever emerald. Though

Night wraps up colour

In halved secrets-

All but white,

White.

See, the wind too exhales in white.

And breathes it on the windows,

Down buttoned, winter coats;

Carried,

Scattered,

Like the seed of eldered dandelion. 

It kisses the face

That warms it to a sting,

Planting no life.

Here silence and the cold are a single thing.

I yield a praying, whitened sigh

While through the air they constrict the chest.

The valley, hallowed out of sound

In quiet, wintered death

Seems permanent below with a graveyard peace

While the things of summer have their rest. 

jordan dejonge

Introduction

When I was just a few weeks shy of my departure for a semester of study in Germany, I visited my undergraduate advisor, whom I had never met yet in person. A professor of Islamic studies, I quickly encountered the eccentricity that so wonderfully characterized the faculty at my school.

"Jordan," she said, "Jordan" (like she'd just had four espressos)  "you're going on a journey, you have- you have a question for yourself, a question. And what's the root of 'question'? "

My mind was ambushed, it was fumbling back to Latin class, trying to remember the verb- quae something- so that I could make a properly scholarly sounding answer..."Um" - I took too long.

- "QUEST!" She interjected. 

I had hoped the connection was going to be more profound. But before I could say more, she sat me down on the couch, handed me a cup of tea and said she would be back in 10 minutes.  I just had to do one thing, read this: and she handed me the Four Quartets of T.S Eliot. 

When she came back I'd had, unfortunately, no epiphanies. So she gave me a task. She said, "Jordan, before you come back from Europe, I want you to email me a single word. Whatever word. Just one." 

It ended up being spinat auflauf (mit schlaf's kase); thoroughly mundane and unpoetic. But I don't think that really was the word I had set out to look for.  Despite all the camp, this is a fond memory. Discoveries and epiphanies do not require grand overseas journeys. Sorting out the questions of life can be as ordinary as casserole, I suppose. I am still looking for "a word". Or, rather, I am looking for all places that this Word might be and how it might be, and how it connects all things, and how it hides. 

This blog is therefore just my thoughts and experiences. It is dedicated to the days of longing that film, art, poetry and religion help us along with, and is here for anyone who feels like they are a companion or a "comrade" on this kind of journey. 

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime of burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under the starlight,
A time for the evening under the lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning. 

T.S. Eliot