epiphany strip

Y'all, I just couldn't figure out a way to make a video of a cold shower without getting sued. So here's a photo of my last polar bear plunge. Ever!

Jane Kenyon, “Taking Down the Tree”​

“Give me some light!” cries Hamlet’s
uncle midway through the murder
of Gonzago. “Light! Light!” cry scattering
courtesans. Here, as in Denmark,
it’s dark at four, and even the moon
shines with only half a heart.
 
The ornaments go down into the box:
the silver spaniel, My Darling
on its collar, from Mother’s childhood
in Illinois; the balsa jumping jack
my brother and I fought over,
pulling limb from limb. Mother
drew it together again with thread
while I watched, feeling depraved
at the age of ten.
 
With something more than caution
I handle them, and the lights, with their
tin star-shaped reflectors, brought along
from house to house, their pasteboard
toy suitcases increasingly flimsy.
Tick, tick, the desiccated needles drop.
 
By suppertime all that remains is the scent
of balsam fir. If it’s darkness
we’re having, let it be extravagant. 
“Taking Down the Tree” by Jane Kenyon from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by the Estate of Jane Kenyon. Reprinted with permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. 
 
 
Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man”

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.

Source: Poetry magazine (1921). This poem is in the public domain.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            Christmas wraps up somewhere between January 6th and 19th, depending on where you are. Some places celebrate Three Kings Day, marking the visitation of the Magi; others focus on Jesus’ baptism. Even though most Americans don’t observe Epiphany, in the second week of January any small American town will be littered with mangy discarded trees by the side of the road: not-so-evergreen needles, residual tinsel or none. Something about this speaks to the psychological moment of the season. Earnest New Year resolutions clash against the holiday hangover. We dip into the leftover spice cake, reencountering the annual defeat of sudden transformations based on a randomly designated date on the calendar. After and in spite of all the shiny wrapping paper and blinky lights, we are faced with stark, barren reality: cold, darkness, solitude, and nature’s death. Acknowledging these winter realities requires a different spiritual skill set. For some of us, it feels like permission to release. We can let go of the ruse, among other things, and quiet the clamor toward something that is simply not there—at least not right now, in the dead of winter.
            Hamlet’s Denmark offers an apt psychological setting for early January. Jane Kenyon nails it. “Taking Down the Tree” takes us down into the Shakespearean closed world: maddening mental solitude, excruciating bereavement, cold betrayal, loss after loss, and a darkness where “even the moon / shines with only half a heart.” We are, for sure, taken down. The “closed world” is the term my father coined for the tragic corollary to Northrop Frye’s “green world.” These two paradigms are so user-friendly as to have been employed to describe contemporary phenomena as diverse as Cold War political discourse (in Paul Edwards’ book The Closed World) and digital bot taxonomies (in Mark Sample’s blog, samplereality). What’s recognizable, aside from any religious framework, is the closed world’s inward spiral imploding toward oblivion, a nightmarish perversion of cozy winter hygge. The movement of Kenyon’s poem from a desperation for light to the delicious ending—having extravagant darkness for dinner—is like the release of the insistent, exhausting cultural expectation for an optimistic holiday disposition. Slowly, piece by piece, like the “tick tick tick” soundscape of needles falling off the tree, we let our need for light fall off our shoulders and fingers and feet. I like to reverse the syllables of the word, and think of needles backward, as “less-need.” Dropping my need. To do, to change, to strive, to shine.
            At the same time, Jane Kenyon’s whole poetic oeuvre is a fight for optimism. Kenyon’s brand of depression is a furious, doomed hunt for light, especially in her late poems, which scour reality for any tiny quotidian detail with the potential to fend off despair. In “Notes from the Other Side,” she describes God as “mercy clothed in light.” “In the Grove: The Poet at 10” depicts a kid so worked up by the battle between the sun and a cloud as to feel a violent joy “hard to distinguish from pain.” That’s a pretty good description of the feeling state of Kenyon’s poetry. In a section of “Having it Out with Melancholy” entitled “Once There was Light,” Kenyon visualizes herself as part of the human family in the form of a “speck of light in the great / river of light that undulates through time.” But melancholy descends on her and yanks her out of the “glowing stream.” After this, she weeps for days. Sometimes divine light only appears in Kenyon’s poem as some kind of joke, as in “Dutch Interiors,” where the Holy Ghost only appears on gleaming cutlery or pewter beakers of beer, leading the poet to decide sourly that “Christ has been done to death / in the cold reaches of northern Europe.”
            And so we return to the frozen north of “Taking Down the Tree.” Our own desperation for light and change in midwinter is as fragile as the flimsy pasteboard case that holds the Christmas ornaments. And yet, in spite of their delicacy, the tin-reflected lights and ornaments reappear each year: the spaniel marked “My Darling,” older than its owner, and the jumping jack that survived dismemberment. They are testimonies to the durability of the memories we move “from house to house.” We handle them “with something more than caution”—perhaps we could call it reverence—then tuck them safely away again till next December. The tin-reflected lights and idiosyncratic, storied hanging objects are just markers—symbols of our stubborn, renewable hope. Christmas is made of our longing, and the echo of it remains like the residual scent of balsam fir, the actual earthy substance from which the little jumping jack was made.
            The ornament never falls far from the tree. I inherited from my mother a worldview I find in Kenyon’s poetry, characterized by a simple and definitional state of yearning. Some might call it depressive, particularly if they were fond of Melanie Klein. The first real theological battle with my father, at the dining room table when I was a tween, was about Milton. Not yet thirteen, just tasting the fruits of independent thinking, I wanted to defend the choice to pick the fruit. I argued that humanity only fully became human when we acquired separation from the divine. At thirteen, I probably didn’t reference Michael’s promise of a “paradise within thee, happier far” in Book 12 (12.587), but I think of it now. I still think that longing for contact with the divine creates the internal ethical and spiritual compass that defines our humanity. The human condition is literally woven out of yearning, a truth I could feel in my bones, even (and especially?) at that age. My dad countered with some very Christian interpretation and stormed away, which was anathema to his so-very-sanguine character. 
         But what’s remarkable to me is that the next day my father, knowing that his green world was not mine, gave me Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West.” I can’t afford to reprint this poem, but man oh man, the extravagance of its theology! It’s not an existential declaration about human potential in a godless world. It’s not about humanity bowing to a higher power, be it God or Nature, or reflecting its power through art. The “plungings of water” are meaningless in and of themselves, Stevens tells us, and the “high horizons” with their mountainous distances are merely theatrical. The poem’s scope is wider, encompassing a merging and a transcendence “beyond the genius of the sea,” beyond “the outer voice of sky and cloud,” beyond “the heaving speech of air.” It’s about the alchemy of longing, the melding of “the ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea” with the person singing to it, creating a sublime universe larger than both. The (feminine, my father would point out) mortal not only expresses but creates a whole world out of longing, spoken in “the dark voice of the sea.” The poem not only asks, but self-referentially remarks on its repeated asking, “Whose spirit is this?” The woman singing fuses with the originary Word of creation, as the chaos of ocean and deepening night organize themselves to become “the self that was her song.” I remember how my father would watch my mom saunter off alone to walk by the sea. He wasn’t part of it, this union, and he watched from the beach with a version of Stevens’ reverential wonder: “As we beheld her striding there alone, / Knew that there never was a world for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made.”
            Stevens’ complement to this seascape of a woman entering the heart of longing is “The Snow Man,” a man entering the emptiness of cold. This poem is a celebration of “a mind of winter,” a perfect illustration of Stevens’trademark stance on the role of art (“Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself”). Instead of superimposing human notions of misery onto the cold or the sound of wind, we are encouraged to practice being “the listener who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and nothing that is.” This decimation of the self, of imagination, and of our personification of nature relates to Stevens’ negation of transcendence in “Sunday Morning,” which places Jesus within “the heavenly fellowship / of men that perish.” There is no beyond. Stevens’ winter mind finds expression this second week of January, exploring the porous line between pain and violent joy: in the cold reaches of Hamlet’s Northern Europe, folk celebrate Epiphany with ice swimming.
            Wim Hoff, known as “The Ice Man,” used cold exposure as a remedy for grief as his wife spiraled deeper into depression. As the darkness permeated her psyche, he says in his book, he moved his four children closer to her family to get parenting support. He was leading a trip in the canyons when she threw herself from the eighth story—freeing her from her demons, he writes. Hoff is not sure whether he was healed by his children or by the cold water that led his mind to stillness and functioned as a mirror to face himself. Anyway, that’s the context in which Wim Hoff’s school of cold exposure was born.
            I was born into a family whose genetics are riddled with depression and whose New Year tradition is ice swimming. Each January my daughters and I choose whether to join the ice swimming contingency. I’ve always felt torn. As someone who finds a way into spirit via the senses, I want to celebrate this gritty and stoical approach to pain and mortality. I do think, as Hoff claims, that the experience helps us enter deep parts of the mind. The cleansing rush, the feeling of total renewal, the symbolism of starting fresh in a culture sorely lacking in rituals with a physiological component—how can one resist? And it does seem logical that sensory extremes train us to withstand suffering. But might they teach us, instead, to transcend it? Is this alleged entry into the belly of what-it-is-to-be-mortal just one more version of spiritual escapism?
          As my teenage daughters wrestle with the epigenetic demons I gave them, it seems more courageous to prioritize quieter, humbler holiday traditions. We find new lights at CVS to replace the broken ones, then we pull from the flimsy cardboard the three matching red balls with our names written in gold glitter script, knowing that the fourth is hanging at their dad’s house. The glitter catches the light from the replacement strand, and inevitably I cry, and nowadays they know I’m crying. There is sorrow in the hanging of stockings, and we hold each other through it. This is grit.
 

PRACTICE
            Maybe we should just end with the fact of the sun’s return. We could simply remind ourselves that the light is increasing, a few minutes a day. Maybe what’s required to keep falling in love with life is out there. And for those we love, for the world that’s such a mess, we have to keep looking for it. What brightens us from the inside so that we might better help each other through the dark? I want to make an argument for a cold shower. Don’t close the book—just hear me out! I’m not asking you to Wim Hoff your way up Mount Everest in your small clothes. But the benefits of graduated cold exposure are not just scientifically proven, they are palpable with just one taste. If, part way through your next shower, you turn the water cold for just a few moments and then try it again after just a couple minutes, the second time feels so much easier. Compare this to most meditation strategies, which are for many people torturous for a significant period of time before sitting begins to actually feel good. Or the excruciating time it takes for foam rolling and massage ball mushing and Bengay burning to create any change at all. But in just one shower you can feel the changes in physiological processes like circulation and cortisol level. There is a palpable letting go, which seems to be the theme of January. Google the benefits of a cold shower, and just consider it, okay?