The Wisdom of Winter Trees
By Jim Miller
Winter is a hard time for many of us. Whether you are religious or secular, the holidays always come with a patina of utopian hope, the promise that light and renewal are ahead even as we sink more deeply into the darkness. The days narrow, the sun retreats, but we are constantly reminded, sometimes painfully, that we should be sharing in the glow of the lights and the warm embrace of a beloved community, despite a growing epidemic of loneliness, alienation, and unfocused rage that permeates nearly every corner of American life.
This despair and discord at home is, at present, amplified by the horrors of war abroad and the looming threat of catastrophic climate change left largely unaddressed by our feckless leaders. Outside of the realm of politics, one is forced to look for solace in small things, something to fuel our fires so we can return to the fray with enough genuine humanity to do what we can to redeem the world in some small way.
We search for blooms in the barren winter landscape but sometimes, as the late Denise Levertov wrote in her decades-old poem “In California During the Gulf War,” they fail to transform our vision and we see them, “not as symbols of hope: they were flimsy/as our resistance to the crimes committed/--again, again—in our name; and yes, they/return/year after year, and yes, they briefly shone with serene joy/over against the dark glare/of evil days. They are and their presence/is quietness ineffable—and the bombings are,/were,/no doubt will be; that quiet, that huge cacophony . . . And when/it was claimed/the war ended, it had not ended.”
In the midst of constant war, deprivation, and mass extinction, perhaps it is folly to look for comfort in old traditions, and yet we do, nonetheless. Even T.S. Eliot, the great modernist master of the Wasteland found himself searching for angels in “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”:
There are several attitudes towards Christmas
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),
And the childish – which is not that of the child
For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel
Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.The child wonders at the Christmas Tree:
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder
At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext;
So that the glittering rapture, the amazement
Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree . . .So that the reverence and the gaiety
May not be forgotten in later experience,
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.
Thus, standing on the edge of the abyss, Eliot reaches for the spirt of wonder. Casey N. Cep, in her Paris Review tribute to the poem, observes that this orientation might be the best antidote against despair:
If our senescence is to be anything like our infancy, then it will require cultivating a sense of wonder. In appealing to first and lasts, Eliot is, as in the rest of his poetry, at the edge of despair; only in “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” he stands firmly on the side of joy. I love the poem because he invites us to join him, to look again for enchantment and wonder in our lives, to stare at Christmas trees until the electric lights twinkle like stars.
This year, I will be staring at the twinkling lights of my own pagan Christmas tree, after a year of more than a few close encounters with death where my own body and the external world seemed more than ready to murder hope. And yet I persist and am intent on remaining open to joy and the deep wisdom of the winter trees that, as William Carlos Williams wrote, are ever resilient in the face of coming storms, “Thus having their buds/against a sure winter/the wise trees/stand sleeping in the cold.”
Happy holidays, dear readers.
Note: I will be off over the next several weeks before returning to this space in early January.