January 24, 2025
As I write, enormous fires are raging in Los Angeles while here in Ohio, on the other side of the country, we are forecast to have a night in which the low will be -12 F. Talking about the weather used to be synonymous with boring, but no longer. I am reminded of Robert Frost’s famous poem “Fire and Ice,” which is short enough to quote in its entirety:
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.
I have always wondered what Frost meant by the world ending. After all, who says the world will end in ice? According to Wikipedia, it was the famous astronomer Harlow Shapley, who, on Frost’s inquiry, told him in 1919 that either the sun will someday explode or it will run down and we will freeze to death. When the poem was published in 1920, Shapley assumed he had inspired it.
A very different answer was given in 1999 by John Serio in The Explicator, who thinks the poem evokes Dante’s Inferno, even down to having Dante’s symbolic number of 9 lines and having a rhyme scheme suggestive of Dante’s terza rima. The Inferno makes a division between Upper Hell, in which the sins of incontinence, or lack of control, are being punished, and Lower Hell, which punishes the sins of deliberate malice. These correspond, Serio feels, to the fiery desire and icy hate in Frost, especially since Dante’s hell is unconventional in having the worst sinners, in the final circle, punished in ice rather than fire. But the Inferno is not about the end of the world. It makes sense to surmise that “Fire and Ice” is a do-it-yourself apocalypse, fusing an astronomical speculation about the natural order with the Inferno’s vision of a moral order. The world will end in one or the other natural catastrophe, yet what drives that destruction are the human impulses of desire and hate of which the fire and ice are symbols.
There is a reason for belaboring this: namely, that nature and human nature are inextricably interwoven, and not just on a level of creative fantasy. We like to think that, although we evolved out of nature, at some point we became entirely separate from it. We constructed a totally human world of civilization and culture whose very purpose is to make us independent of nature. We had to, because, unlike the animals, we are not adapted to live in nature: we do not have their fur, their claws, their instinctual knowledge. Still, for most of human prehistory and history, most people lived in close interaction with nature. That began to change with urbanization, and especially with the industrial and technological revolutions that more or less isolate us from any direct contact with nature. Most of us do not farm or hunt our own food, and our clothes are artificially manufactured. Our homes are heated and air conditioned, and we do not fear animal predators. And we like it that way, for the most part. We do not want to be subject to nature’s hardships and nature’s whims.
Thus we have developed another artifice to make us feel independent of nature, the psychological artifice of denial. We feel we are more or less masters of nature, and may do as we please without consequence. Even granted the relentless propaganda of the fossil fuel industries, there is a reason that climate denialism becomes so hysterical. Every time there are nightmarish fires or hurricanes or extreme temperatures, it’s adamantly declared to be just an accident, a normal fluctuation and not something caused or made worse by humans. We absolutely do not have to worry that our actions will cause catastrophes of fire and ice at some point in the future—that is just overreaction and liberal ideology. We are not at the mercy of nature. We will solve any problems—don’t be alarmed. There is, to be fair, also a left-wing denial that we are subject to the influence of nature. The doctrine—it amounts to that—of social construction says that we are as independent of internal as of external nature. In some post-structuralist and postmodernist ideologies, we are utterly artificial. There is no biological grounding of human nature: we are socially constructed, and any attempt to say otherwise is regarded as potentially reactionary “biological essentialism.” Nevertheless, Wallace Stevens says that the poet is “part of nature, part of us,” and that is true of us all: what is part of nature is part of us, in a complex, interactive way. That is definitely true about the weather: no poet in the history of poetry cared more about the weather than Wallace Stevens, one of whose famous poems is titled “The Poems of Our Climate.”
Actually, the denial of a relationship between nature and the imagination long preceded post-structuralism. In the Victorian era, the critic John Ruskin coined the phrase “the pathetic fallacy” for the attempt to identify natural images with human emotions, using as one example a line about the “cruel, crawling foam” of the sea. The sea isn’t cruel, and even “crawling” may be a bit of anthropomorphizing. However, the kind of objectivity which is a necessity in science is out of place in the creative arts. Imagination’s whole purpose is exactly to establish associations and identifications between the subject and the object. To insist that such associations and identifications are unreal and should be “demystified” is only another form of denial. Instead, their connections should be traced to see what thematic pattern they form.
Fire and ice, then, may refer to (1) human emotions, (2) certain hot or cold geographical regions, (3) certain natural phenomena such as fire or snow that may be typical of such regions, and (4) the seasons as they revolve from hot to cold to hot again. It’s funny how critical analysis has to get so complicated trying to be methodical about things we all know perfectly well—as we learn if we try to teach someone how to tie their shoes, for example. But the complexity teaches us something. One thing it teaches is that creative writers are connected by the use of the same images, whether borrowed or coincidental. George R.R. Martin has said that Frost’s little 9-line poem gave him the title for A Song of Ice and Fire, one of most enormous fantasy epics of all time, thousands of pages long and still unfinished. (Its TV version was A Game of Thrones, the title of its first volume). Martin’s epic concerns the dynastic conflict of two groups located on two continents, Westeros and Essos. Each of these has a fire-and-ice association. In the far north of Westeros is an 8000-year-old wall of ice, behind which dwell the Others or White Walkers, while Essos is associated with fire-breathing dragons. Martin has said that another influence on his fantasy was Shakespeare’s history plays, which chronicle a dynastic conflict lasting over two centuries. The first lines of the final play in his double tetralogy, Richard III, are. “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York.” The feud between Martin’s dynastic houses plays out over an even larger expanse of time, paralleled by seasons that last for centuries.
Martin's predecessor was a giant of British science fiction, Brian Aldiss, who created a world, Helliconia, with seasons that lasted even longer, a thousand years. Aldiss shares the pessimistic vision of human history that derives from H.G. Wells, especially from The Time Machine, combining it with the vision of history as an ironic cycle of the rise and fall of cultures in Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918), which also uses the imagery of the seasons. Spengler said that every culture goes through a cycle of about a thousand years, divided into four seasons of 250 years each. Helliconia, however, only has three seasons, as shown in the titles of the trilogy’s three volumes: Helliconia Spring (1982), Helliconia Summer (1983), and Helliconia Winter (1985). An Internet review claims that when asked by an interviewer why there was no autumn, his reply was, “I’m not Vivaldi,” which gives you the flavor of the man, known for his contrariness. The Great Year that these seasons comprise is 3000 years long. Aldiss has a lengthy discussion on his website about what went into the making of the trilogy, not just its scientific background but about what he wanted it to express, which was precisely the theme of humanity’s divorce from nature:
Even my earliest novels, such as Non-Stop, Hothouse, and the chronicle-novel (as its first publishers called it) Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, have reflected my concern for the paradox that mankind, a part of nature, has seen itself apart from nature, opposed to nature. It is a faulty perception which will lead to disaster, and has led to disaster. When I defined SF as `Hubris clobbered by Nemesis,’ I was thinking of this divorced element in the human psyche, which I have in the past defined in Toynbeean terms as the division between the head and heart.
This fatal divorce is something we suffer from as individuals, and not merely as a species. In the present day we seem to have, in general, lost an awareness of our closeness to the earth. Our perspectives have narrowed. Our reason has not helped us to see that we are sustained by a number of non rational sources such as our instincts, our sense of empathy with others, and all those pleasant promptings about life, birth, death, and the mythological level of life (in short, those numinous qualities which were once labelled `God,’ or something similar, in times when the heart had dominance over the head). The cities have spread the poison. We are flimsier creatures than we should be. We can’t see the stars for street lamps. We live in a world of fences. We build the fences, to hide our incompleteness.
On Helliconia, winter wipes out civilization around the time it reaches a level of culture comparable to the Renaissance. Apparently the spelling of “Helliconia” is deliberate (with one “l,” it is a tropical flower): Aldiss’s vision is Frost’s destruction by ice combined with Dante’s hell, in which some sinners are locked into a compulsive repetition of their sins. This is more than a guess, since the human space station monitoring Helliconia is named Avernus, a lake that in Virgil’s Aeneid is the entrance to the underworld.
Aldiss has a right to his own system, since demarcating the seasons here on earth turns out to be almost perversely inconsistent. We are all dimly aware that there are two main methods of designating them, and we shift between them without much thinking about it. There are what are called the meteorological seasons, each of three months, which, starting with winter, begin on December 1, March 1, June 1, and September 1. However, these are rather messily redacted with the astronomical seasons, marked by the solstices and equinoxes, so that the seasons begin December 21-22 (winter solstice), March 21-22 (vernal equinox), June 20-21 (summer solstice), and September 21-22 (autumnal equinox). If you are thinking in terms of hours of daylight, this makes sense; if you are thinking of the weather, it does not. The first three weeks of December are not “fall” according to Ohio weather, and the first three weeks of June are definitely summer. To make things even more complicated, there is a third, older method marking solar seasons, most familiar in the Celtic calendar, in which the seasons begin on the four Celtic agricultural festivals, later turned into Christian feasts. Winter began on November 1 (All Saints Day), Spring on February 1 (St. Bridgit’s Day), Summer on May 1 (May Day), and Fall on August 1. The equinoxes and solstices then mark the midpoints of the seasons—which is why Shakespeare’s play is titled A Midsummer Night’s Eve: by this Celtic reckoning (in a play about the fairies, who are Celtic) June 21, the solstice. Incidentally, Aldiss says that he went back to A Midsummer Night’s Dream to prepare for writing Heliconia Summer.
The seasonal cycle and its attendant weather affects our daily life, whether we want it to or not. It also informs the plots of literature, sometimes overtly, as in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar, which consists of 12 poems, one for each month of the year, but also on a deeper, thematic level. The seasons are a cycle of death and rebirth, and human lives are structured by that cycle. This is true individually, socially, and historically. On the individual level, the human life span is likened to the seasonal cycle, so that it is a common figure of speech, for example, to speak of someone as being in the autumn of their years. Shakespeare builds the whole of sonnet 73 upon it:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
On the opposite, largest end of the scale, we have noted the rise and fall of cultures as symbolized by the rhythm of the seasons, as in Spengler. The middle, social level provides many of the narrative patterns of myth and literature. In the Third Essay of Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye defines four mythoi, or generic plot patterns that inform four basic genres of literature. He aligns these with the four seasons because the cycle of the seasons is a pattern of death and rebirth in nature, and all of human life is a series of deaths and rebirths, literal and figurative. As we saw in the last newsletter, the patterns of the imagination are not fixed but metamorphic, and change according to the creative needs of the moment. For example, the most rudimentary way of considering the seasonal cycle is twofold, an alternation of life and death. We see this in the myth of Demeter and Persephone, who is abducted by Hades, the lord of the underworld. Persephone is a spirit of vegetation and growth, so when she is absent for six months of the year, living in the underworld, it is winter, the time of death. When she returns, it is spring, and everything is reborn. Shakespeare’s late romance, The Winter’s Tale, reverts to this most basic, primitive level. A newborn child, Perdita, whose name means “lost,” has to be spirited away from Sicily to save her from the hatred of her father. Between acts 2 and 3, there is a 16-year gap, and at the opening of Act 3, Perdita is a grown woman, in love, and queen of a spring festival.
But the commonest way of dividing the seasons in Europe and North America has usually, though not always, been fourfold, and the genres of literature tend to reflect that fourfold division not only in the shapes of their plots but in their imagery. Frye’s Anatomy associates spring with the generic plot of comedy, in which the good characters descend into a time of troubles, sometimes even into threatened death, but both love relationships and entire societies are figuratively reborn in the happy ending. A landmark book of criticism, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedies (1959), by C.L. Barber, showed how influenced Shakespeare was by the old seasonal imagery of death and rebirth, surviving in folklore and village festivals. The genre of romance is that of wish fulfilment and idealism, of wonders and marvels, and is therefore associated with the summer as the apex or zenith of the year, of a paradisal culmination. Wallace Stevens’s “Credences of Summer” begins, “Now in midsummer come…the mind lays by its trouble”:
Now the mind lays by its trouble and considers. The fidgets of remembrance come to this. This is the last day of a certain year Beyond which there is nothing left of time. It comes to this and the imagination’s life.
Autumn is inevitably the season of tragedy, of “fall” in all senses. And winter is the season of satire and irony, with their vision of the failure, even the death, of human desire and aspiration.
Even the few examples I have given show how the scheme is not just arbitrary but reflects the actual plots and imagery of myth and literature. Nonetheless, the conservative critic W.K. Wimsatt, determined to convict Frye of overly-clever intellectualism and irrationalist primitivism at the same time, attacked what he calls “the supposedly primordial and archetypal notion of the Spenglerian four-season cycle” (103):
For the truth is that man’s consciousness of seasonal change has varied much in various ages and climates. The ancient Greeks, as Sigmund Freud reminds us, generally distinguished only three seasons (spring, summer, and winter), the three Horai or daughters of Zeus and Themis. The variations of lunar, solar, and pluvial calendars in Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim cultures are too complicated for the present moment. (103)
It is sometimes true that wrongheaded attacks lead to deeper thinking. Or, as Blake said, “If a fool peristed in his folly he would be wise.” Wimsatt is being deliberately wrongheaded here, and his folly is the common one of thinking that “archetypal” means something fixed and changeless, like Platonic Forms. Whereas, to state the obvious once again, the basis of the imagination is metamorphosis, variations on a theme. First, Wimsatt is right to say that non-Western cultures have different seasonal patterns, largely because they have different weather. Frye’s scheme reflects the facts of Western literature, without really pretending to some overreaching universality. At the same time, Wimsatt does not go on to ask whether the non-Western schemes might not still reflect the underlying death-and-rebirth pattern with different imagery. Egyptian myth had three seasons, based on the annual flooding of the Nile, which was a renewal of fertility, contrasted with imagery of dryness and death. (Shakespeare actually picks this imagery up in Antony and Cleopatra, whose love “o’erflows the measure”). It is the death-and-renewal cycle that is important, whether twofold, threefold, or fourfold.
Moreover, Wimsatt performs the service of pointing us towards a wonderful essay by Freud about all the threefold patterns in myth, folktale, and literature. “The Theme of the Three Caskets” is Freud the humanist at work, as distinct from Freud the would-be scientific reductionist, and it is full of references to Shakespeare and many other works. The three caskets of the title, for instance, are those that Portia’s suitors have to chose among in The Merchant of Venice. However, it would seem that Freud does get one thing wrong, thus leading Wimsatt astray. Yes, the threefold Greek pattern is personified in the Horai, who are the daughters of Themis, the goddess of natural order and proper measure. The Horai are the hours, and thus time generally, but did come to be associated with the seasons. However, the third season was not winter but autumn, associated with the harvest. It was winter that was “missing”—conspicuous by its absence, the absence of Persephone gone to the underworld. What we see here, in other words, is a version of the hesitation waltz between the symbolic numbers 3 and 4 that appears everywhere in symbolism. Jung made a great deal of this “liminal” ambiguity, saying that threefold schemes are incomplete, and imply a shadowy fourth that is often repressed and has an ambiguous, paradoxical nature.
In addition to its temporal, cyclical pattern, the contrast of fire and ice, of hot and cold, has a spatial form, a contrast between two regions, usually north and south. I would tentatively trace this contrast back to our origins as a species. The human race began in Africa, so that our earliest environment was that of the mythologies that Joseph Campbell called the Way of the Seeded Earth. Eventually, it found its way north, into Europe, into a colder climate, and into the Ice Age. This meant that human beings were more or less forced to turn themselves into hunters in order to survive for the half of the year that plants were dead or buried in snow. Hence a new kind of mythology developed, which Campbell called The Way of the Animal Powers. Hunting involves killing, and killing entails the development of an emotional detachment, a repression of empathy. It also encourages the development of techniques of violence that are useful in war. In other words, moving to the harsh, cold north, with its ruthless demands for survival, may have been a kind of fall out of the Garden for our species.
This is speculative, not scientific, but still, millenia later, the warrior violence and tragic pessimism of early Scandanavian and Germanic mythology and literature, from the Voluspa to the Icelandic sagas to Beowulf, have seemed to many people conditioned by the harshness of the natural environment. The Mycenean Greeks of the Iliad were just as violent and pessimistic, but they were descended from those nomadic warriors, the Indo-Europeans, whose origin was apparently somewhere in the harsh area of the Caucasus mountains. Mind you, there is also a southern violence—not of the jungle or savannah but of the desert, again giving rise to a warrior culture. Even if the idea that “As your climate, so is your culture” is a fiction, the fiction has inspired various kinds of storytelling, not just in high but also in popular culture. Robert E. Howard’s pulp hero Conan the Barbarian is a Cimmerian. While the historical Cimmerians lived between the Black and Caspian Seas, I suspect Howard had in mind a cryptic reference to the Cimmerians in the Odyssey, where they lived in the far northwest, close to the entrance of the underworld. At any rate, Howard’s Cimmerians lived in the far northwest during the “Hyborian Age,” after the fall of Atlantis—in fact, according to an Internet-available map sketched by Howard himself, Cimmeria corresponds to what will later be the British Isles! The point is that Conan is a northern warrior, whose barbarism gives him an animal vitality that Howard liked to contrast with the decadent people of the southern lands.
In the Dune saga, the desert planet Arrakis has bred a warrrior-clan society resembling those of the Saharan and Middle Eastern deserts. Even in the absence of warrior culture, extreme hot and cold climates are settings for stories whose theme is survival in areas on the fringes of the narrow temperate band where humanity is able to live. As a science fiction writer, Ursula K. LeGuin likes to situate her characters in survival conditions. Most of the narrative of The Left Hand of Darkness (1968) is taken up with the arduous trek of two protagonists across a glacial ice sheet, and in The Dispossessed (1974), she locates her “heterotopia” on a desert planet. According to Margaret Atwood, the most pervasive theme of Canadian literature is that announced in the title of her well-known book: Survival (1971) in a vast country with a harsh northern climate.
A surprising amount of European literature turns on a contrast of cold and northern with warm and southern. As usual, the climatic contrast turns out to be also a contrast of human feelings, values, and lifestyle. The northern countries include England and Germany, the southern Greece and Italy. The people of the north are characterized as respectable and restrained, not to say repressed. The people of the south are supposedly more emotional and sensual. In religion, the contrast is between Christian and “pagan,” whatever that may mean—to a Protestant it often meant Catholic. The north was the locus of capitalism and, eventually, industrialism, hence more “progressive,” whereas the south was more agriculturally based, hence more “traditional.” The north was rational and realistic; in the south were the lands of art and love. Of course these are stereotypes—but they also have inspired a great deal of literature. Shakespeare drew on Italian novellas for a number of plays, including The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Cymbeline, because they were full of the decadent Italian sex, intrigue, violence, and soap opera melodrama that respectable bourgeois audiences in England loved. Shelley and Byron fled southward from conventional England, or were expelled, and lived in Greece and Italy, the lands of art and freedom, including the freedom to live a free-love lifestyle outside of the norms of middle-class prudery.
Rome and Venice in particular are “southern” cities in which love outside conventional boundaries is closely associated with disease and death. Not venereal disease, however much that may be implied, but plague of one sort or other. The title character of Henry James’s Daisy Miller (1878) is courted by a man named Winterbourne, who lives up to his name, but takes up instead with an Italian of questionable reputation, risks meeting him at night in the Colosseum, falls ill from it and dies of “Roman fever” or malaria. Winterbourne and fever: ice and fire. The title of Edith Wharton’s short story “Roman Fever” (1934, 1936) seems to suggest that it plays off of James’s story. It is a tale of two competing women, one of whom confesses years later to having written a fake letter, supposedly written by the man they both desire, luring her to the Colosseum where she might contract “Roman fever.” But it turns out the man does show up, so that the title refers not to physical illness but the fever of desire. Another famous story of someone lured to his death by desire is Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), in which the famous writer Aschenbach refuses to leave Venice despite warnings of the plague because of a Shakespearean-style “beautiful youth,” a teenage boy with whom he is obsessed from a distance. There is an autobiographical subtext, as Mann was gay and a famous writer. Death in Venice is sometimes paired with another semi-autobiographical story, “Tonio Kröger” (1901), whose title character, again an artist figure, feels torn by his north-south heritage: his father is a northern merchant and his mother, Consuelo, an emotional and artistically-sympathetic Italian. This matches Mann’s own parentage: his father was a northern German businessman, while his mother was, in his description, “Portuguese-Creole Brazilian.” When I learned from Joseph Campbell about this story and its north-south symbolism, I was in my early 20’s, coming of age, and trying to figure out my relationship to my own family. I too have a north-south double identity, except that the character traits are reversed. My father was an extraverted, hugely social, emotionally labile Italian. My mother was Polish, intensely introverted, artistic, and, in a sense, a visionary, except that her visions came tragically from paranoid schizophrenia. I have always identified with my mother, and yet the extraverted side comes out in the classroom, where I am loud and joking. People who know only that side of me are sometimes surprised when I call myself basically a reclusive introvert. I sometimes suspect that all of us are some combination of fire and ice, whether or not the geographical pattern exemplifies it.
Yet there is one way in which my identification with the maternal, northern half of my heritage does not work out. I hate winter. I hate cold, and have no ability to tolerate it whatsoever. It isn’t old age, because I have always been this way. I spend months of every year trying to keep warm. Winter weather is exhausting, something that has to be fought, to be counteracted. Oh, we all have a psychological defense mechanism: we develop a stoicism, a pride in not being affected, in not letting winter stop us. It’s a necessary defense: if you let winter stop you around here, you wouldn’t live for half the year. But there is still the battle. Travel becomes hazardous, and the reports of CEO’s demanding that employees stop working from home and return to the office infuriate me. The bosses are indifferent to the increased danger of commuting in bad weather, the hours spent tense on the road trying not to slide. Winter is the heyday of illness: flu, colds, Covid wake up and party. Winter dryness is the enemy of acoustic guitars, which can become unplayable as the wood bows, can even crack if conditions get bad enough. I spend tedious time hauling home dozens of gallons of distilled water, feeding humidifiers relentlessly like an engineer feeding wood to an old-fashioned train engine.
Beyond its various physical punishments, winter has always signified a condition of the soul. Death, yes, but something beyond even death, pinpointed by Wallace Stevens in his famous poem “The Snow Man.” It says that “One must have a mind of winter…/ And been cold a long time…/ not to think / Of any misery in the sound of the wind…” What does it mean to have a mind of winter? It means to be “the listener, who listens in the snow, / and, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Both subject and object, observer and observed, are nothing. This is why Dante chose ice instead of fire as the punishment of the lowest level of hell. In addition to the sheer discomfort of the cold, there is the immobility. If you are caught in the cold, you have to keep moving or you will freeze to death. But the damned of Dante’s 9th circle cannot move, and they are already dead. They must suffer something far worse than death. The lower the level, the more people are frozen into the ice: some to the waist, some to the head, and some frozen entirely in ice like flies in amber.
Hell is paralysis, and cold is cessation of energy, molecules moving slower and slower until finally stopping altogether at absolute zero, total cessation. Nothing. The blessed in heaven spend eternity contemplating God. What do the damned frozen in the ice contemplate? Nothing. It is a condition beyond nihilism, for “nihilism” implies some kind of furious rebellion against the good, like that of Milton’s Satan and therefore some kind of energy. Whereas Dante’s Satan is buried to the waist in ice, and does nothing but weep.
Some of the super-rich reportedly want to have themselves cryogenically preserved until such time as science discovers a cure for mortality, ironically desiring to put themselves in the position of Dante’s ultimate sinners, frozen, as he says, like straws in glass. Things have been preserved in the ice, including a 50,000-year-old mammoth, although of course they have not been brought back to life again. But the horror tradition counsels us that we may want to let frozen creatures lie. An Antarctic expedition in H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1931) discovers the remains of a pre-human civilization, but also monstrous beings called “shoggoths” created by those pre-humans. The Antarctic is no place to go blundering around: in John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There? (1938), made into a movie, The Thing (1982), by John Carpenter, another Antarctic expedition excavates an alien monster that can mimic anything, including human beings. Occasionally something good gets thawed out, such as a Neanderthal in Fred Schepisi’s film Iceman (1984) and, as superhero fans know, Captain America, the World War II super-soldier accidentally frozen in ice until thawed out in Avengers #4 in 1964. Captain America’s sidekick Bucky Barnes also survived until the present time, but as the Winter Soldier. The term “winter soldier” originated in 1971 hearings about American war crimes in Vietnam. The vets who participated in that conference, including later presidential candidate and Secretary of State John Kerry, called themselves winter soldiers, an ironic play on a remark by Tom Paine mocking “summer soldiers” who deserted during the winter ordeal of Valley Forge. Winter soldiers are those whose form of not deserting, of being faithful to their country, was to return and speak out about the war crimes they witnessed, war crimes they were sometimes ordered to commit. The contrast of fire and ice takes many forms, and some of them are all too real.
I don’t think I suffer from seasonal affective disorder, but I understand those who do. I have always been happy that my birthday, March 31, is in the spring, at the moment of rebirth. True, I have at times wondered whether I am not just prejudiced. I have lived in two cold and exceptionally snowy places all my life, Cleveland and Buffalo, but I have not lived where excess heat may perhaps be as punishing and exhausting to cope with as excess cold. I thought about this years ago after viewing Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), for which the right adjective is incendiary. Lee shows how a brutal heat wave, in a New York City neighborhood that mostly does not have air conditioning, wears tempers thin, and contributes to the mood that finally erupts into racial violence. Yet it is a complicated matter to judge. In Dante, wrath is one of the lesser sins of incontinence, different from the cold evil of the sins of malice. We speak of people having a hot temper or a short fuse. Shakespeare illustrates this in King Lear as the difference between the constantly exploding yet redeemable Lear and the cold, calm sadism of Goneril and Regan. There is of course a more nihilistic kind of fire imagery. The fires of LA are terrifying in their size and relentless destructiveness. There are the fires of the bombing raids in World War II, including the fire bombing of Dresden that inspired Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, and the fires of the Holocaust. As the film Oppenheimer reminded us, the world may yet end in another kind of holocaust, a nuclear one. The terrible thing, though, is that none of these, arguably, is a product of hot rage, but rather of the cold calculations of malice.
Of course, I am biased. There are people who love winter. I have friends who keep their houses at 65 F out of choice rather than energy-saving necessity, and who seem unbothered by the cold. I did so myself when Jimmy Carter admonished us to during the oil crisis of the 70’s, but I was miserable because of it. A good number of those who pray for winter and snow love skiing and skating, which leaves me out because I have no coordination. Kids love playing in the snow, building snowmen, having snowball fights. To them, snow means a possible snow day off of school, while their parents have to deal with shoveling, plowing, and getting to work.
Yet there is one thing that winter in the northern temperate zones provides, something that I have insisted is the very essence of the imagination: change. People used to move to states like California and Florida precisely because there is no winter, although wildfires, floods, and hurricanes are increasingly turning that into a problematic choice. They are seeking a climate that resembles the original climate of paradise. In Eden, if we had not fallen, there would have been no meteorologists, because the weather was always perfect—and yet perfectly changeless. Let me ask a question that is eccentric and yet I think thought-provoking. Could there be such a thing as a paradisal winter? A winter with all of the good features minus all the bad? There are moments when we think in such terms, as in the moment of beauty after the first snow, when the world is transformed into a “winter wonderland.” The phrase is a cliché, but the idea is not. Winter would be paradisal if, first of all, we could keep it outside while we remained warm and snug inside, as in the old pop song “Let It Snow”:
Oh, the weather outside is frightful But the fire is so delightful And since we've no place to go Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow It doesn't show signs of stopping And I brought some corn for popping The lights are turned way down low Let it snow, let it snow
A later verse says, “How I’ll hate going out in the storm,” but that is just a concession to old-time morality. God forbid there should be a suggestion that the lover should stay overnight. Actually, Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” dares to suggest exactly that. It’s a duet in which the man wants the woman to stay over and uses a storm as an excuse.
The point is that winter and its weather are attractive when kept in their place, outside, with no need to go out in them unless we choose to. A paradisal winter would also be tempered to avoid the extremes, which are what really wear us out. I myself could come to like winter if the temperature did not drop below, say, 25 F, snowfall was limited to 3-4 inches, and there were no howling blizzards. A tamed winter, a winter for wimps? Be it so: I am not self-proving. Let those who wish to cultivate their toughness live in the snow belt or join a polar bear club and jump into icy water.
A poem close in spirit to Stevens’s “The Snow Man” is Robert Frost’s “Desert Places.” Like Stevens, Frost speaks of winter as a spiritual condition, expressed in both cases by the word “nothing”:
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow With no expression, nothing to express. They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars—on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places.
Before being driven out of paradise into the wilderness, Adam is told in Milton’s Paradise Lost that, although he has lost Eden, he will have a “paradise within.” What Michael did not admit is that Adam would also carry the wilderness within, Frost’s desert places. In “Fire and Ice,” Frost says he holds with those who favor fire. So does Dante, who associates the ultimate evil with cold and ice. It is this that we wish to be saved from. There is a reason that Shakespeare turned in his final romances to such primitive sources as the old folk plays about the contest between winter and spring, created by people naïve enough to believe that spring always wins. Every year, my spring birthday brings me closer to the final desert place of death. Yet every year I agree with Dylan Thomas in the last of his birthday poems, “That the closer I move / To death, one man through his sundered hulks, / The louder the sun blooms.” And “the whole world then…Spins its morning of praise.” I am Aries, a fire sign, the sign the sun was in when the world was first created, and I have the intensity and hot Italian temper to go with it. The point is to put such energy to good use. I will be cremated, go up in phoenix fire, yet if I were to have a tombstone, I would have it inscribed with the motto “To Begin Again.” Which is, if nothing else, a way of explaining why each week there is yet another newsletter.
References
Freud, Sigmund. “The Three Caskets.” In Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers, volume 4. Authorized translation under the supervision of Joan Riviere. Basic Books, 1959. 244-56.
Wimsatt, W.K. “Northrop Frye: Criticism as Myth.” In Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism: Selected Papers from the English Institute. Edited by Murry Krieger. Columbia, 1966. 75-108.