On Thursday the wind chill in Ithaca got down to -10°F. Today's high was 64°. I broke from my reading to run a bunch of errands and it was almost spooky. The leafless trees and 4-foot mound of blackened snow on the corner said winter, but everything else screamed...well, that's just it. I don't know what to compare it to. Not spring. Spring offers up bits of color even before temperatures begin to rise. This was just dormancy and heat and raging water. That campus is largely deserted for winter break only added to the strangeness. Like the day after the Night of the Comet.
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My only thought on the current presidental race is that I don't have enough faith in any of the candidates to do more than vote when the time comes. I watched the first couple Democratic debates, but tuned out as soon as the mud started to fly. Belligerence and war being the defining characteristics of the current administration, I wanted to see a candidate who believed he or she could effect a desireable outcome (i.e. win) without having to annihilate the competition. What I actually saw was the power elite's version of professional wresting: part soap opera, part sporting event, all scripted. The sad part is that it matters.
I've posted this poem at least once or twice before. It expresses something I feel and would rather not, which must be why I return to it so often.
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I go where I love and where I am loved
into the snow,
I go to the things I love
with no thought of duty or pity,
I go where I belong, inexorably,
as the rain that has lain long
in the furrow. I have given
or would have given
life to the grain
but if it will not grow or ripen
with the rain of beauty,
the rain will return to the cloud.
The harvester sharpens his steel on the stone,
but this is not our field,
we have not sown this,
pitiless, pitiless, let us leave
the place-of-a-skull
to those who fashioned it.
(H.D., from The Flowering of the Rod)
