Thursday, December 15, 2016

12/15: Snow--Nicole Walker


It used to be a thing.  In Utah, in the nineties, the license plates featured a skier between the letters and the numbers. “The Greatest Snow on Earth” was the slogan. Now, the license plates are muted orange signifying National Parks in the south. Now, there are more red rocks than snow. But once, there was an abundance of snow. An overabundance. A snowfall that became a watershed. In 1983, my grandmother and mom took me to the Capitol Theater where the Utah Ballet performed the Nutcracker. We had to walk through a blizzard to reach the stage. Inside, although it was warm I sat numb in my chair, dreading going out into the cold. That spring, it rained. It turned hot fast. The snow melted so hard, the Great Salt Lake overflowed. The snowmelt created rivers out of streets that ran right through downtown in front of the Capitol Theater.

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The Nobel Prize Winner, Orhan Pamuk’s, Snow doesn’t quit it with the snow. As the exiled poet, Ka, returns to Turkey, we see a country flattened by a religious zealots, crony politicians, and citizens frightened enough of each other to turn on them. This chapter title emblematizes Ka’s, attitude toward his old country. Did you Really Come Here to Report on the Election and the Suicides? Ka meets Ipek in the New Life Pastry Shop. “Why, despite the bad news he’d just received, was there a faint smile on Ka’s face as he walked through the snow from Faikbey Avenue to the New Life Pastry Shop? ” (33).  How fundamental to the poems Ka writes is the snow? How important is the accumulation of snow to the girls who vow to kill themselves if they are forbidden to wear their headscarves? How abundant did the snow need to be for the revolutionaries to stage their mise en abyme play?  Would Ka have been able to fall in the love with Ipek in the northern Turkey town of Kars if there had been less snow? When is snow ever anything but a barrier or a blockade?
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When I can’t sleep at night, I pretend I am cross-country skiing in the forest. I’m lost. It’s getting dark. Snow falls from the branches in great clumps, blocking my way. I ski over them and around them. Sometimes, I have a dog with me. Sometimes, I have a baby in a papoose. I crank through thick, sticky snow. I’m tired. So very tired. Finally, I see a cabin. The door to the cabin is locked but I know cabin people. They keep their keys hidden under rocks under porches. I find the key. I go in. I make a fire. I sit on a chair and watch as a new storm comes in, shaping the night with its falling night. “This horror will grow mild, this darkness light.” promised John Milton. Shape makes sense, when you’re indoors and protected from snow.
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It is snowing in Syria. The little girl from Aleppo tweets her account from inside her war-blown apartment building. Bana Al-abed tweets that she’s trying to read Harry Potter but the bombs keep getting in the way. Some say the girl is not really a girl but a forty-year old propagandist. Some say the mother writes the postings. The New York Times has verified that the tweets come from the place where Bana is known to live. Twitter has verified the account. She writes, “We have no home now. I got minor injury. I didn't sleep since yesterday, I am hungry. I want to live, I don't want to die. - Bana #Aleppo. She tweets as the snowflakes fall. She tweets every falling bomb. The bombs are verifiable even if the tweets she sends are not. When it snows, she sends messages too but those ones are met with silence. The drama of snow takes longer than a bomb.

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In the chapter A Godless Man in Kars: The Fear of Being Shot, Ka is trying to do two things. Stay out of the politics of Kars and get Ipek to fall in love with him. But to get Ipek to fall in love with him, he must fall into politics. “No sooner had Ka left the teahouse for the snow-covered pavement than he came face-to-face with Muhtar. Muhtar wore the absentminded look of a man on a mission; when he first saw Ka through the swarm of giant snowflakes he didn’t seem to recognize him, and for a moment Ka was tempted to run away” (317). Snow covers and veils. Snow gets between as well as on. Snow swarms like bees. Snow will send you running. Why doesn’t everyone move to California? Oh. That’s the problem. I think they shall.


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I send letters to Governor Ducey. I’ve written him over a hundred asking him to restore the funding cuts to Arizona Higher Education. He cut a hundred million dollars from the state budget for education. My letters are not worth a dollar each, let alone a million dollars each which is why I keep, even though he does not respond to this avalanche of letters, writing him.
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In Pamuk’s Snow, in the chapter A Great Day for Our Nation! While Ka Slept and When He Woke the Next Morning, Orhan Bey narrates, “Ka slept for exactly ten hours and twenty minutes without stirring once. In one of his dreams he watched the snow falling. Just before, through the gap in the half-drawn curtains, the snow had begun to fall again onto the white street below, and it looked exceptionally soft where the lamp lit the pink signpost of the Snow Palace Hotel; perhaps it was because this strange and magically soft snow absorbed the sound of gunfights all over Kars that night that Ka was able to sleep so soundly” (180). Snow muffles and absorbs. It covers all manner of sins: the brown dirt of the forest floor, the garbage heap, the dog shit on the sidewalk, the sound of gunfire. It is so cozy, in this house, as it snows, as I am away from snow. The poet believes, If I can just keep myself out of the cold, I will be able to sleep but in his sleep, the snow accumulates. It’s a covering as thick as a quilt. Is the poet required to shake off the covers, to go outside, to be, in fact, cold?

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The snow keeps falling. It seems inevitable. I have no control over its falling. In 2009, my first year at my job at NAU, one hundred and fifteen inches fell that winter. It was hard to leave the house. Hard to park the car. Hard to get to work and hard to get pizza. Everything was harder. Jan Brewer was the governor then. On April 1st, the local paper ran a story that, in order to ensure that Phoenix had enough water, the governor planned to seed clouds to make it snow one hundred and fifteen inches every year. I felt trapped. Oh, how I used to be afraid of snow.

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In Snow, the chapter called “Everyone Has His Own Snowflake: The Missing Greeen Notebook, Ka’s great poetic masterpiece comes from his ability to see each unique, individual snowflake. “After leaving Kars, Ka apparently read a number of books about snow, and on of his discoveries was this: Once a six-pronged snowflake crystalizes, it takes between eight and ten minutes for it to fall through the sky, lose its original shape, and vanish; when, with further inquiry, he discovered that the form of each snowflake is determined by the temperature, the direction and strength of the wind Perhaps, the altitude of the cloud, and any number of other mysterious forces, Ka decided that snowflakes have much in common with people.” (406). For each poem a person. For each person a snowflake. For each snowflake a poem. Getting the geometrics of the snow. Finding the human beneath her skin. One by one by one by one.
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In 2009, so much snow fell on the flat roofs of a local strip mall that the ceilings caved in. Books and CDs were covered in snow. My friend Jesse tells the story about how, because he ran a tow trucking company and knew a lot of people, the owner of the strip mall called him to gather up as many guys as he could to shovel the snow from the roofs that had not yet caved. He called up his guys then he drove around town collecting other guys. They had almost 100 guys up on that roof. Jesse had to use a twenty foot ladder to reach the roof as they began to shovel. When they finished, Jesse could walk right down the dispatched snow like he was walking down a mountain. Jesse’s a writer too. He tells this story better than I. But, snow. It accumulates.
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The final lines of W.S Merwin’s poem A Door

thin
snow falling
in an empty bell
lighting that chair

could I turn at all

now should I kneel

and no door anywhere


Note the added whitespace. Snow makes a shape. Shape has structure. Structure applies pressure. 


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At the end of Snow, actors stage a play where a real person kills herself on stage. People at home, staying out of the snow, watch the play on TV as if it’s a play and as if it’s news at the same time. The title of the chapter, The Main Reason Women Commit Suicide is to Save their Pride: The Final Act begins: “It was very late in the day when Sunay decided to change the title of the drama originally inspired by Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy but which in its final form showed many other influences: in fact, it was only during the last half hour of the relentless promotional campaign that the television announcers began to referring to the Tragedy in Kars. The revision came too late for those already in the theater. Many had been brought in my military bus; others had seen the play advertised and came to show their faith in a strong army; a fair number didn’t care how catastrophic the result, as long as they had the chance to see it with their own eyes” (424). When the car slides into the bank in a snowstorm, everyone slows down, not because they’re afraid of their own tires’ slippage but to look at the disaster. That’s why the world falls apart. Everyone loves a spectacle. Watch the streets turn to river. The land slide into the ocean. The EMT who covers the body with a sheet.
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Here we are. Caught in a play that might be really taking place. We would like to take shelter from the snow but it well may be snowing inside. It’s hard to get cozy when the roof has caved in. Perhaps the Capitol/Theater doesn’t seem like the right place to notice the six-pointedness of snowflakes. But perhaps it is the right place to notice the direction and strength of the wind. Perhaps by measuring each cloud with our measuring sticks and reporting on its altitude, well, we can do something with all this snow. Describe a snowflake, poet. Send it to the governor, writer. You have six to eight minutes to make your case and your case and your case. A collection of individual snowflakes, piled up against the Capitol/Theater doors, will, when spring comes, turn a blockade of snow into a river that flows right down the capitol/theater hallways. Water is a collection of melted snowflakes. Water cut out the Grand Canyon. Water pushed its way through the dam. Water is one of the strongest forces on the planet. Take your snowflake. Pile it on. Wait for it to melt.










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