Eye-traps - the dash in Emily Dickenson

 

When I first started reading Emily Dickinson in high school in the 1970s, she seemed to be either a tame poet, good for holiday cards, or a morose poet of the kind satirized by Mark Twain in Huck Finn, Emmiline Grangerford, with her creepy sub-Poe fascination with funerals. She was the farthest thing from the wilder shore of Walt Whitman, I thought.

I read Dickinson as she was edited and domesticated, starting with her first posthumous editors, her brother’s lover, Mabel Loomis Todd, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. It was only in the 60s that the wilder shore of Dickinson’s poetry started to emerge, beginning with the complete edition of her poems edited by Thomas H. Johnson in 1960. Crucially, Johnson restored the dashes to the poems – which are to the poems what the axe was to Lizzie Borden. The dash, that punctuation interruptus, gave the poems back their sanguinary impulse. We could finally read Dickinson.

The chronology of literature can’t be specified by dates of publication, which is why it has a strange causal structure. For instance, where in that chronology would I place the great book by Susan Howe – My Emily Dickinson. Howe’s book is in that rare vein of poet’s books – Williams In the American Grain, Zukofsky’s Apollinaire, Olson’s Melville – that shifts your vision and shows that the order one assumed is not the true order at all, at all.  For Howe, Dickinson was the most radical poet of the 19th century.

 

To make a comparison she doesn’t make – just as Georg Buchner seemed to invent the theater of the 1920s in the plays he wrote in the 1830s, so, too, Dickinson seems to have invented the lyric difficulty we associate with the poets of the end of modernism – poets as different as John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich - around the time of the American civil war.

 

Howe adroitly inserts Jonathan Edwards into Dickinson’s intellectual background, and Emily Bronte as her true contemporary. One poet she doesn’t mention is Lord Byron.

Thomas Moore’s edition of Byron’s Letters and Journals was published in the U.S. in the 1840s. The letters were defanged, but the journals retained Byron’s characteristic skipping dash, for instance: “While you are under the influence of passions, you only feel, but cannot describe them, — any more than, when in action, you could turn round and tell the story to your next neighbour! When all is over, — all, all, and irrevocable, — trust to memory — she is then but too faithful.” Byron’s dashes, unlike Dickinson’s, have an aristocratic disdain for the mere plebe assemblies of rote classroom English. Dickinson, though, if she read Moore’s edition, would certainly have seen how they could work.

 

Jane Stabler, in an essay on Byron’s dashes, has noticed how they bothered his critics when he plied them in his poems. One of the critics used the term “eye-trap” for this use of dashes:

 

When the British Critic praised Byron for omitting the dashy “eye-traps” in Lara, the phrase “eye-trap” (from the 1750s, according to the OED) was used presumably as a variant of “clap-trap,” the extended pause that set apart moments of high emotion in theatrical performances, designed to attract the attention and applause of the audience.

 

On the page, Byron’s promiscuous “em” dashing resembles the visual appearance of the Shakespeare plays David Garrick prepared for the Drury Lane Threatre. Garrick used a dash to signal where an actor should pause for effect so that in his published adaptations, as Warren Oakley has shown, “[t]ypography indicates the location of each dramatic caesura, but is silent about the nature of the action filling the expressive pause … prompting the imagination of the reader”  

 

 

Of course, Dickinson was a pretty radical DIY type of poet, and may well have done without prompts. But I would love some genealogy of the dashes, on the lines of the way Guy Davenport, in his essay on Cummings in Every Force Evolves a Form, saw how Cummings saw the opportunity in the way Greek verses, as for instance Sapho’s, were published with scholarly apparatus in the Loeb Library editions.

 

"And when these early poems, none of which has survived entire but exist on torn, rotted, ratgnawn papyrus or parchment, are set in type for the modern student of Greek, such as Edward Estlin Cummings, Greek major at Harvard (1911-1916), the text is a frail scatter of lacunae, conjectures, brackets, and parentheses. They look, in fact, very like an E. E. Cummings poem. His eccentric margins, capricious word divisions, vagrant punctuation, tmeses, and promiscuously embracing parentheses, can be traced to the scholarly trappings which a Greek poem wears on a textbook page. Cummings' playfulness in writing a word like "l(oo)k"-a pair of eyes looking from inside the word – must have been generated by the way scholars restore missing letters in botched texts, a Greek l[oo]k, where the 1 and k are legible on a papyrus, there's space for two letters between them, and an editor has inserted a conjectural oo."

 

I think Dickinson unleashed is such a different spirit from Dickinson leashed that to read her poems in the normalized editions is not to have any true sense of her, if such a thing were possible.  Compare:

 

Wild nights – Wild nights!

Were I with thee

Wild nights should be

Our luxury!

 

Futile – the winds –

To a Heart in port –

Done with the Compass –

Done with the Chart!

 

Rowing in Eden –

Ah – the Sea!

Might I but moor – tonight –

In thee!

 

As compared to this:

 

Wild nights! Wild nights!

Were I with thee,

Wild nights should be

Our luxury!

Futile the winds

To a heart in port, —

Done with the compass,

Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!

Ah! the sea!

Might I but moor

To-night in thee!

 

This is of course one of the famous poems. The referential strangeness – rowing in Eden? – is subdued, I’d claim, in the second version, just as the Wild Nights, a repetition that is divided by a repelling dash to create a sort of negative identity, is annealed in the double exclamation marks of the more conventional, the more romantic exclamation of the second version (Ah! the Sea!) The placement of the exclamation marks in the second version – and the erasure of the exclamation marks in the second stanza, after “done with the Chart”  - seems, similarly, to take us to the stylistics of romantic poetry, rather than the asperities that Howe sees in the Puritan doctrine underneath the lines, asperities that tossing away the Chart makes more vivid.

 

 

the contemporary

 

It was the late nineteenth century social philosopher Gabriel Tarde who first suggested that the public and publics, which in earlier times were defined for the most part by their haptic proximity – all those salons and coffee houses – are formed, now, by the subordination of the haptic to another kind and degree of proximity, a social mode of temporality – simultaneity – that Tarde mentions in connection with the news.

News, in French, is actualité. Between the English and the French word, there is an important conceptual shift, in as much as news is connected, in English, to the new, whereas actuality is connected to a block of time we can call the “present”. Tarde speaks of the newspapers giving their readers a ‘sense of simultaneity,” but unfortunately he does not disinter the phenomenon of simultaneity in all its extension as a social form of time, instead  vaguely pressing on the idea of “at the same time”.

However, we know that  ordinary simultaneousness is transformed in the social mode of simultaneity. We speaking of catching up with, keeping up with, or following the news, or fashions, or tv, or books, or sports. There is a curious paradox in following “the-same-time” – it is rather like following oneself on a walk. Is your walk separable from the you that walked it?

Yet the social temporality of the simultaneous is defined by the way it keeps moving ahead of us even as we are part of it, like a front.

The anthropologist Johannes Fabian coined the term allochrony to speak of the peculiar way in which Europeans, starting in the seventeenth century, started to divide up the contemporary world into different cultural time zones. Europe, of course, appropriated the modern to itself. Other contemporary cultures were backward, savage, stone age, traditional – they were literally behind their own time. Modernity exists under this baptism and curse. Modernity is the era in which the modern is invented.

The philosopher Vincent Descombes, in “What is the contemporary?”, takes a shot at defining this form of social time. He divides its meaning into two grand and different semantic regions. The first is from the point of view of history: “The contemporary is an age. It comes in the programs of history which include, as their last part, the study of the modern and contemporary world: the contemporary world appears as the most advanced point of the modern world.”

The second is “furnished by reflection on time.” Descombes takes a strongly Aristotelian approach to time. “There where nothing changes, there is no temporality. In fact, the notion of change imposes conceiving something like a temporal distance or a difference of times between many states of the world. Time is the order in which changes are made, an order of what is before and of what is after.

If one asks a philosophy of time for a notion of the contemporary, one would conceive the contemporary as a competition between many actual changes. To be contemporary would mean sharing historical actuality.”

Descombes language is in the abstract philosophical line, so that “worlds” don’t refer specifically to the history that we know of this world, but simply to ontic ensembles. In this way, the contemporary is lifted from its material anchors and one can talk of a contemporaneity in any world. This is useful, anthropologically – it at least lays out the terms of an anthropological project. But to my mind, what is useful about the notion of the contemporary is that it gives us a “quasi-transcendent” which we can see emerge in what Lotman called the semiosphere – in media itself.

Lyric apocalypse

 

Poetry, sez those who refuse to include the whole universe of the blues, rock, punk, emo, rap, dap, and other music in the poetry genre, is no longer popular, or read, or used, or culturally central.

I’m doubtful of those claims. Poetry is, I’d contend, what happens when a person thinks – poetry first, logic afterwards.

However, it is true that the lyric – and of a particular type, with the shrinking of the poem to the poet, to the poet’s word, a shrinking from persona to personality – has triumphed over other forms. Pound’s Cantos, Olson’s Maximus poems have their draw and make their mark, but the great influences are confessional, personal rather than persona centered.

That form of lyric has its price: the toll of suicided American poets alone is impressive: Plath, Berryman, Sexton, Jarrell. A lyric apocalypse. Robert Lowell only succeeded in avoiding putting the knife to his own throat by sheer luck: the manias and cruelties of his life are well known.

What I’m getting at here is: a poetry that throws off the mask is, perhaps, a symptom of something going on within the poetic system. Hart Crane’s children, in a sense, lost contact with the endurance at the heart of Whitman and Dickinson, the founding poets. A poetry that measures how much you cannot endure – this is the siren of negation, tempting the sailor to jump.

In “The Rational of Verse”, Poe writes: “Verse originates in the human enjoyment of equality, fitness.” Poe is writing of the compensatory movement of sound in the rhythms of poetry.

I’d suggest that the birth of the lyric as confession originates in an infant trait studied in depth by the psychologist Katherine Nelson. Nelson was fascinated by the puzzle of infant amnesia – the fact that humans do not remember very much about their first years. In pursuing this puzzle, Nelson came across two academics whose child, Emily, showed great signs of precocity. The parents took to recording their girl’s monologues in the crib, before she went to bed, from the age of 22 months to the age of 37 months – something that would only occur to academic parents. Nelson was surprised to find that Emily’s “crib talk” – the monologue she repeated to herself as she went to sleep – was linguistically more sophisticated than most of her talk with her caregivers and other children. Nelson’s attributes this higher level of discursive quality to the fact that these monologues were not aimed at sleep so much as they were at understanding her “self” – what she had done, what she was going to do, what she felt, etc. As Nelson puts it, the themes of Emily’s monologues concern “what happened” (with its attendant linguistic markers of tense and temporal adjectives), “what is going to happen”, and “what should happen”. Into these person-centered themes she also introduces story themes from stories that are told or read to her.

Our little Emily is, as it were, giving birth to all the forms of poetry – the epic, the dramatic, the lyric – in her monologues. Out of crib talk, Berryman ‘s sonnets and Plath’s lyrics. Helen Vendler wrote that the “lyric is the genre of private life: it is what we say to ourselves when we are alone.”  Emily’s crib talk, in a sense, precedes the private life – an in this sense the lyric does not derive from what we say to ourselves when we are alone, but is how we begin to have a private life that consists of saying things to ourselves when we are alone. The pulse and the heart are coeterminus.

Which leaves the question: why is the poet’s crib talk so risky to the poet’s chances of survival?

Here’s Emily in Episode 1.4 – Nelson divided the monologues into episodes.

1.    Maybe the doctor,

2.    Took my jamas (very soft) I don’t know.

3.    Maybe, maybe we take my jamas off.

4.    But I leave my diaper

5.    Take my jamas off,

6.    And leave them off,

7.    At the doc-

8.    My have get my check up,

9.    So we take my jamas off.

10.  My don’t know this looking all better

11.  (??) doctor, doc,

12.  The boys take back home.

13.  The, and we maybe take my jamas off.

14.  I don’t know what we do with with my…

15.  Maybe the doctore take my jamas

16.  My jamas off cause my maybe get check up,

17.  Have to to take my jamas

 

Talking oneself past the disaster that threatens to swallow us and take our jamas off – that is obviously both one of the functions of the crib talk and of the lyric invocation of existential menace. But lyric understanding might set up that menace, those disasters, all too often to endure, without a countering experience – say, of returning with one’s jamas intact. The “I don’t know” balanced by the “Now I know”, the passage into experience. But if we insist on returning to the I don’t know, that moment full of self’s lack of control –  if such is the movement of the lyric – and if we insist on staying there, in the negative – we might lose our practical ability to get out of it. Or rather, forget our practical ability that has, in the past, gotten out of it.  We lose touch with experience itself.

Only one aspect, of course, of the lyric apocalypse. But one to consider in these dark days.

A Sinead O'Connor song that reminds us of what is happening in Gaza, God forgive us. All of us, just looking away.

And to the spiirits of the 1500 slaughtered by Hamas, all we can do is beg and beg forgiveness for the slaughter of 20,000. We apparently need to learn the elementary things, for instance, the prohibition on human sacrifice.

And to the 22,000 slaughtered, the 50,000 injured, the 7,000 missing - there is nothing to say. How can we, the abettors, say anything? But of course we will, we are all big talkers, me too. Talk talk talk. Blah blah blah.

plagiarism - from pickpocketing to cut and paste

 

Everything converges in plagiarism. At least in the recent news. Plagiarism, to my mind, always makes for comedy – in that respect, it is like marriage, which traditionally falls at the end of comedy.  But the unlike minds, or like minds, that are yoked together in plagiarism struggle with quotation marks and intellectual property and fail the test of divorce and separtion, making for a mirror image of the marriage comedy. Plus, to me, quotation marks and IP - two of the golden themes of Derridian deconstruction, as a matter of fact - what is not to like in these tales?

Shakespeare, of course, had no pickpocket anxieties on this point. He could take North’s translation of Plutarch’s Life of Anthony and see how the passages about Cleopatra were eminently boostable, and boost he did. This was the lay of the land for some time. No educated person in Shakespeare’s audience would be likely to miss the North reference, transformed and made more glorious by the sun of Shakespeare – to quote another Shakespeare character.

But textual institutions eventually were pulled by the notion of property. Adrian John’s go-to book, Piracy: the intellectual property wars from Gutenberg to Gates gives us a pretty lively history of the tangle between Protestantism, early liberalism, and property law that arose from one of those great opening moments: when, under William and Mary, and by the advise of John Locke, allowed the Press act, which required all written texts to be licenced by the Stationers, to lapse:

“It was not the first time this had happened, but the political circumstances were different now, and the law was destined never to be revived. John Locke, whose arguments played a major role in the Commons’ debates surrounding the act, repudiated it not only for imposing licensing—which he, like Milton, saw as a legacy of popery—but for fostering monopolies for both individual booksellers and the company at large. In rejecting the statute, Parliament therefore saw itself as upholding Protestant liberty and countering monopolies. But it made no alternative provision for the Stationers’ register itself. Suddenly the book trade found itself in a situation in which infringers of registered copies would face no legal sanction whatsoever. And at the same time it became legal to print and publish without being a member of the company at all. Internal regulation might have succeeded to keep booksellers and printers in line in the past, but now, in the speculative and entrepreneurial environment of 1690s London, it was never likely to prove sufficient. This was an environment in which new moral principles seemed to be advanced with every clutch of ambitious “projects”—and those projects soon pervaded the world of the book.”

These openings of the frontier – succeeded by rushes – are part and parcel of capitalism. And those who are most successful on exploiting this opening are likely to be the first to call for regulations, shaped to their own requirements.

For plagiarism to exist, one must have some standard idea of copying. Johns digs up the history of AI automata – which go back to the golden age of clockwork mechanisms. In particular, he describes one called the Microcosm – such a Silicon Valley-ish phrase! Yet this thing was built in the 17^th century by Harry Bridges. It was a complex of different machines:

“Built in the form of an ornate Roman Temple, in its fabric it contained musical automata, models of a carpenter’s workshop and landscapes with realistically moving figures, and accurate rotating mechanisms showing the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems. It also boasted an orrery for the moons of Jupiter. It played music specially composed for its internal organ—or spectators could ask it to play their own. In all, it combined in one mechanism the principles of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and astronomy.”

To these principles were soon joined writing. All of these arts were under the possible sway of IP law, of course. Just as with our current new toy, ChatGPT, observers found the Microcosm a bit disturbing:

“The question became not the nature of original authorship, but the nature of copying. A machine this complex posed the question of what, exactly, the act of copying—of pirating—actually was.”

Ah, behold what a glorious legal thing the quotation mark is – I apply them and presto chango, instead of plagiarism I advance, on the great legal boardgame of life, to “fair use”!

Quotation marks, as we all know, falleth as the dew from heaven – and sometimes in the process of re-write they melt away. For underneath the words themselves are, supposedly, the ideas. Which the law must pursue as well – ideas, too, can be copied. Or can be generated concurrently. We all know the fierce academic battles – often taking on the hues of other social battles – that can arise from the claim that an idea is copied. In fact, it is hard to see how an idea could not, on some level, be anything but copied, since ideas need to breathe the communism of all that is mental and social in order to be. Yet we have, still, an idea of the original spirit, of inspiration, of genius, of all the old haunts, for say what you will, human life is unimaginable without haunting. And with haunting, exorcism.

It is an interesting thing, from the French perspective, that the whole idea of the dictée has dropped out of the American educational system (I know too little about the British one to comment). It is a puzzle to the Protestantized Yankee mind, such as mine, that the French teacher is  content to read, say, a passage in a Voltaire that the students are required to copy – as if literature were, after all, music and you need to play the scales. I think this tradition is petering out – although Adam, my boy, still does some dictée in his French classes, according to what he just told me. But copying is the one frowned upon, awful sin in the American curriculum. There’s a wonderful bit, in The Squid and The Whale, Noah Baumbach’s bittersweetbitter comedy, where the troubled teen son listens to Pink Floyd’s Hey You, copies the word and the tune, then presents the song as his own to his parents and eventually to a talent show, where he wins a prize – and then has to give it back when someone presumably younger than the fifty-ish judges points out where the song comes from.

This leads to the son – Walt – being remanded to therapy, where the therapist asks why he did it. He responds: “I felt I could've written it.”

“Therapist: So the fact that it was already written was kind of a technicality. I see.”

Incidentally, to find that exchange, which I remembered from the movie, I went to google, found the script of The Squid and the Whale, and cut and pasted. We have the instruments to destroy our institutions of intellectual property at the heart of the machines that are ‘protected’ by our intellectual property laws. Walt not only copies the song and performs it, but he has recorded it on a tape recorder and learned it by stopping the tape, and rewinding it – copying a perhaps illegal copy.

Everything converges in plagiarism.

 

 

 

Autofiction: mothers and daughters

 

According to Philippe Gasparini, the term autofiction first popped up in 1977, used by Serge Doubrovsky to describe his novel, Fils:

« Autobiography ? No, that’s a privilege reserved for the world’s notables, in the evening of their lives, and in a pretty style. Fiction, events and facts strictly real : if you want, autofiction, to have confided the language of adventure to the adventure of language, outside of wisdom and the syntax of the novel, whether traditional or new.”

Doubrovsky’s view of autobiography is, of course, meant as a critique of the ever irritating bourgeoisie, but it folds pretty neatly into a bourgeois division between the notables and the rest – thus ignoring the celebrity, and its offspring – the influencer, the gossiped about, etc., etc. However, the term itself fell into all of our laps, and as we learned to take selfies and put up our marriage photographs on Facebook, we began to want a different type of fiction.

Yet how different is it? There’s an interesting relation, here, between two of the most famous French novelists – Colette and Annie Ernaux. Both present their own selves boldly in their novels. Both are rather obsessed with the mother-daughter relationship. Both are photogenic authors, both are able to straddle, as few can, the demands of a referentially high cultural strata and the relentless demands of fandom, self-help, music hall entertainer and activist.  The hierarchies, it must be said, in literature are a game of pick up sticks – high and low is always a rigged up and ephemeral structural principle that falls like a curse on those paper products – texts.

Colette wrote a piece for the October 30, 1937 Figaro entitled My Ideas about the Novel, which begins:

“I am sure that I have never written a novel, a real one, a work of pure imagination, free from all the sludge of memory and egotism, purified of myself, of my worst and my best, of, finally, resemblance. What I call real novels are those that I read, and not those that I write. The latter I write slowly, with care, as I can; the former I read with a passionate rapacity which neglects nothing, which forms itself as a kind of violence.”

Her notions of the novel are at once modernist and counter-modern. In 1937, surrealism was already, for a school, long in the tooth – and the surrealist assault on the novel had passed. But it passed by jimmying loose the subject in the novel. The surrealists, above all, doubted character. But Colette held to the long oral tradition of the hero, which surrounds the hero with a sort of magic – what I would call a soundtrack.

“I know all too well, from experience, that the heroes of novels, patiently and piece by piece accountered with the traits of character, from their faces, their crimes and virtues, only wait on the pleasure of the author, and her decisions, up to a certain point. Past this point, they are big enough to behave on their own. This is the revenge of the phantom on the free thinker, of the automaton on the imprudent magician.”

This I call the oral tradition – a tradition in which the speaker, telling the story, is well aware that it is formed between himself and the listener, or listeners. That moment of surrender is hard to face – one gives oneself away. Much of the Flaubertian theme in the novel is about distancing that apocalyptic embarrassment – the embarrassment of doing the thing at all. Colette, however, knowing all this, comes up with her own strategy of never quite writing the “true” novel. I absolutely believe her. What the author of the book thinks of his or her characters, curiously, can only be taken seriously to a certain point.

This is why male writers writing female characters, white writers writing black characters, straight writers writing gay characters, need the vice versa, the female, black, gay writers to free themselves – and vice versa then comes for the latter. Literature encodes the kind of game Roger Caillois calls ilinx – games of vertigo and disorientation, voices that possess the voice we mistakenly thought was our own, when it was just borrowed ad hoc from social and corporal circumstances. And will have to be given back in the end.

Literature will be revolutionary or it will not be at all.

wendell kees, phyllis diller and a very happy unhappy new year

 Weldon Kees, the great poet – one of the “minors” who Ashbery made, by a magisterially shy stroke, his predecessors – was an art critic for the Nation, succeeding the ever surly Clement Greenburg. He did his bit, and then left NYC, like many an other, in 1950. The New York City scene, he wrote, was trauma-torn, soot-ridden and neurosis-nagged.” To my mind, this is high praise – my retired boho heart leaks nostalgic gravy over those words! – but Kees, apparently, could only take so much of the atmosphere Gaddis chronicles in The Recognitions. Before the tribe of Kerouacs descended on San Francisco, Kees planted himself there. James Reidel, the Kees biographer (the biography had the spoilers title, Vanished Act) had the fun idea of tracing the poet’s peripeteia, which ended, as is well known, either in a leap from the Golden Gate bridge or a lifelong fugue to Mexico – depending on who you believe.

Here’s a fun fact for those who like the snake-eyes thrown up by the American dice: Weldon Kees played the piano and helped produce a cabaret-vaudeville-burlesque called "The Poets Follies," along with, among others, a guy named Lawrence Ferling, who poeticized his name to Ferlinghetti. They rented space at 1725 Washington Street in a “beautiful Maybeck building” and advertised for actors and actresses, attracting a Sausalito housewife who’d been bitten by the showbiz bug. Her name: Phyllis Diller. In my youth, Phyllis Diller was a complete cornball act on late night TV, a puzzle to me – why did adults find her funny? But life likes its little jokes, and Weldon Kees was instrumental in making that Sausalito housewife’s dream come true.

The American cross-grain. I love it.

One of the gags of the cabaret was a reading of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land – or on some tellings, one of the Four Quartets – by a stripper named Lyn Ayers. Ha ha, the boys all laughed. This was long before it was recognized that strippers are, on the whole, more erudite than your average Silicon Valley tech bro-gul. In any case, Kees and Lyn Ayers were photographed together for the poster advertising the place.

According to Reidel, Ayers didn’t like the gig, which she did gratis. Cheapskate poets, she said. She was even forced to buy a copy of Kees’s poetry book.

From whence this poem for the New Year.

THAT WINTER

Cold ground and colder stone

Unearthed in ruined passageways,

The parodies of buildings in the snow –

Snow tossed and raging through a world

It imitates, that drives forever north

To what is rumored to be Spring.

To see the faces you had thought were put away

Forever, swept like leaves among the crowd,

Is to be drawn like them, on winter afternoons,

To avenues you saw demolished years before.

The houses still remain like monuments,

Their windows cracked, For sale signs on the lawns.

Then grass upon those lawns again!-and dogs

In fashion twenty years ago, the streets mysterious

Through summer shade, the marvelous worlds

Within the world, each opening like a hand

And promising a constant course.-You see yourself,

A fool with smiles, one you thought dead.

And snow is raging, raging, in a darker world.