Street Art

The other day I was walking down Harvard Street toward Quinpool, on my way to buy some of the fancy cat food Buster likes, and noticed that someone had attached a tall blackboard to the front of their house. It was full of chalk handwriting. I stopped to look at it, and this is what I saw:

Lines for Winter

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

- Mark Strand

It was quite cold and grey out, as in the poem, and I was feeling particularly miserable that day. So I was touched that someone had gone to so much trouble to inject a little bit of hope into the bleakness that is Halifax in February. "There is an infinite core to you," the poet seemed to be saying, "and it is lovable, so just remember that, no matter what else is going on in your life, and everything will be fine." Very nice.

Except that something rang false about the whole thing for me. For instance, what if I don't want to hear the same tune no matter where I find myself? What's so comforting about that? Sounds kind of like a nightmare. And why should I have to "tell myself" these things, if they're true? Shouldn't I just be able to perceive them somehow? Am I supposed to lie to myself as a small consolation while I keep trudging along pointlessly, pretending that I know about some deeper meaning that in actual fact eludes me completely? I decided that this poet, and by extension the owner of the house, was well-intentioned but ultimately misguided.

I started walking again and tried to think of another poem about winter that would be a quick and devastating rebuttal to this one. I had the idea that I would write it on a piece of paper and attach it to the blackboard the next time I walked by it. Something about how winter is gloomy and discouraging, but you might as well just face it, because it's going to kill you in the end anyway. (I told you I was in a miserable mood.)

Well, I never did come up with just the right poem, but something interesting happened when I looked up the Mark Strand one in order to write this post. On reading it a few more times, I began to think that my reaction to it was not actually an argument against it, but the one intended by the poet.

Check it out: "Tell yourself" is a very interesting way to begin an instruction. It brings to mind well-meaning friends and self-help books, but does also suggest that what follows is not necessarily the truth. Since it's repeated twice more, the author must mean for us to consider such possibilities. Right?

And then there's that "same tune" that you'll keep hearing as you continue on. Later on, the tune turns out to be what your bones play, which is all that you know, which is... nothing! Definitely some irony involved in comforting yourself with that bit of permanence, then. And when you realize that, you get to stop your forward striving in order to lie in the snow and enjoy the warmth of the stars, i.e. no warmth whatsoever.

So now I see the whole thing as a kind of sarcastic argument against will and self-deception as antidotes for suffering and death. In other words, the poem is the perfect refutation of itself I was looking for! Except that there's still some hope at the end, because if life beats all the delusion out of you until at death's door you realize that you are nothing, then you can tell yourself — not through an act of will this time, but through pure experiencing of the "flow of cold through your limbs" — that you love that nothing. And really mean it. Pretty neat trick!

So thanks very much, anonymous Harvard Street resident, for introducing me to what may now become one of my favourite poems.