I used to want to be impervious, cold, ruthless. I used to describe myself as resilient and I would no longer do so. Today I am at the halfway mark of my thirties, and it’s almost the end of the year, and it no longer feels like to be cold is the answer, to pull away from what needs to be held close, and I keep returning to the poem Color, by Tina Chang:
Up ahead it’s white. Snow animal,
I’m running at your back. I’ve failed to tell you
I’ve been hungry all this time, to tell you
I’ve been searching for you, like meat,
like water. All my life, I’ve distanced
myself. As if to know you was to drown.
As if to find you I’d usher myself further
from what is real. I’ve been adrift along
the threads of white leading me out
beyond an imagined frame. I’ve untied myself,
uncuffed the arms and neck. I didn’t know
I was hurt like that. I didn’t know
there was a force pulling me downward
toward a bedrock, lulling me to sleep.
You are the one escaping, you are the one
breaking free. I understand your astonishing
dash to freedom, done with the estranged wind,
done with frost and storm, orchids curling
outward beyond grief. The road widens
to glory. The road disappears.
I often visualise feeling as terrain, as structure. Something you can be lost in or something you can explore, feel out the edges of. What if you could come to the end of this landscape; what could be beyond?
Years ago, during a traumatic few months where my former partner was very ill and in hospital, I temporarily lost the ability to cry. I cry a lot now. Hysterically, abundantly. A few months ago I was crying so intensely that when I closed my eyes I saw a dark ravine, like I had cried myself into another world, or cried something away from this one, some kind of surface rinsed away. It sounds deeply melodramatic but I can still see it, in my head. A sheer rock-face and steep drop and beyond it only pitch black. Now the dam of the crying has been broken, but I can still feel how it felt to be unable to cry, right in my throat. A solid feeling, bladed, latent with energy underneath numbness. Because of this, I don’t want to rebuild the dam.
In Anna Kavan’s Ice there is a single-minded pursuing of a woman who slips into the spaces in an apocalyptic landscape of looming, frozen mountains and seas, a landscape shifting and advancing. Here the coldness is inexorable, beautiful and terrifying.
As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of the world.
And I think about snow animal, what it means to be running through the ice looking for someone or for something, that pinpoint moment of terrible clarity, the blundering pursuit of it. Loosened from how I thought some parts of my life would go I worry it is too late for me, but here I am, moving, the looming ice seeming closer some days, further some. Here I am, I say to the snow animal, don’t leave me here, and I am changed, I see this now going through the cold, my hands outstretched. Looking for the parts in which it thins towards fruitfulness, the green wilderness beyond this barren stretch of unknowing, no tracks. Beyond all this. Trying to see what the soil could hold should the surface, inhospitable, finally melt.
Reading this, I was reminded of John Burnside's narrative poem 'The Fair Chase' – read it if you can, it has interesting resonances with Tina Chang's poem. You can find it in Burnside's collection 'Black Cat Bone', which is one of my favourite poetry collections and well-worth reading from start to finish.