Category Archives: Anthropomorphism

Healing

24 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Agriculture, Anthropomorphism, Autumn, Change, Fall, Healing, History, Home, Nature, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Weather, Winter

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I was rolling the trash can up our long gravel drive to the spot by the side of the winding two-lane road where the trash hauler will empty it. I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, it was sunny and warm and it felt like spring had come.

I have moved a number of times in my life. I have lived in places which felt like home, and I have lived in places where I never found a sense of place or comfort. But what I believe is that you don’t feel like you are inhabiting a place until you pass from one season to the next there. Seasons can do that; as they change, we change, or we find our permanence now embedded in one place despite the change. That place, we hope, is home. But there is often something more important that we need, something that the seasons may be inadequate to deal with, and maybe this is what makes one place feel like home when others do not.

We moved here in November, and though it was unusually warm for that month, it was autumn; gray skies, bare trees, brown grass. The move was hard. We hired a moving company for one morning to handle large furniture items, but for the most part we packed our cars and made the twenty-five minute drive from Oakville to High Ridge many, many times over the next few weeks. We kidded ourselves that this saved money, despite the high cost of gasoline.

At the same time, at work, I was managing the move of the library from the temporary facility we set up a few years ago back to our renovated and expanded library building. It was a huge job, including the complete shutdown and cleaning of that temporary library. Both of these jobs happening in the same few weeks in November, after months and months spent anticipating and planning them, was as much my fault as anyone’s, I guess, though I still can’t see how it could have been avoided.

As soon as we opened the new library, I was beset by a series of complaints from an attorney who claimed to be a specialist in the ADA. She showered me on an almost daily basis with e-mails detailing the failures of our new building to meet specific rigorous requirements, and missed no opportunity to tell me in plain terms exactly how incompetent, or dim, or uncaring I was. Though I eventually contacted a local ADA consultant to advise me, and she found our building to be compliant with the law in most every aspect, I am still receiving these complaints, though at a diminished frequency.

In short, I have found that there are situations in which anyone can be worn down. No amount of energy, of optimism, of healthy eating and exercise and reciting self-help mantras can sustain your spirit through some trials. You can be broken, and the ways in which your spirit manifests itself can be silenced. For me, that is my ability–what I suppose is my ability–to express myself in writing. For anyone who has followed this blog for a while it is no secret that my posts have slowed down, and that what I have posted lately has been uninspired. I haven’t had an original thought, or at least been able to express one, in a long time.

Our seasons are typically, and perhaps too dogmatically defined. Spring is the season of rebirth, summer of growth, autumn of harvest and gathering in, winter of, if not death, then at least of rest. These are all functions of the natural year and of its technical descendant, the agricultural year. At one time most of humanity participated in farming, but in modern society few of us do: most of our activities can take place at almost any season, and we do little more than make costume changes from one season to the next. And yet we translate the changes in the natural cycle into human terms, as if we were all living in direct communion with nature. But what if our innermost need is not rebirth, growth, gathering in, or rest? What if what we really need is healing? Which season is for that?

In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald noted that spring and autumn are ‘the two times of year when change seems possible.’ I have asked hundreds of people what is their favorite season, and it is usually spring or autumn–with the definite advantage going to autumn. If pressed for why they like autumn, most people cite something like the feeling of change, of starting over, of renewal. This is a little strange, since it’s spring when things in nature renew their cycles of growth. Spring is the time of rebirth, and it has come at last, but I feel like I am only being reborn in the same damaged vessel. Reborn is not necessarily repaired, and change, though possible, is not necessarily inevitable.

And so the anthropomorphism of the seasons breaks down: human life, in the end, is more complicated than the natural cycle. We may want our lives to follow this simple cycle of growth and harvest and rebirth, but we have added layers of complexity that the wisdom of nature does not encompass or comprehend. It offers us rebirth when we need healing; it offers us a shining season into which we carry our darkness. We know our lives are in balance when we can once again internalize the natural changes; but those changes can do little to provide that balance.

I deposited the trash can by the road, looked around at the shrubs and trees that line the roadside, all of them beginning to green and flower. I turned back and made my way down the gravel drive to my new home. One more week of leaving the trash behind me and moving hopefully towards something new. I appreciate that at least the weather is nicer, though I am ambivalent about what difference it makes.

The Winter that Won’t Go Away?

28 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by in Anthropomorphism, Autumn, Christmas, climate, Easter, Fall, Halloween, History, Mythology, Nature, Ovid, Puritans, Religion, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Weather, Winter

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Late March and we are still buried in snow here. A March snowfall is not unusual in the American Midwest, but it is usually an unexpected freak of a thing, coming after some lovely springlike days, covering banks of yellow and purple crocus and stands of glowing daffodils. This year we have had none of that. Rather we have had unrelenting cold and gray days and now two major snowfalls in March, this last setting the record for a one-day event.

All of which has led to many references by newscasters and local weather personalities to ‘the winter that just won’t quit’ or ‘the winter that won’t go away.’ It seems a fitting appellation, but I wonder if we know how much cultural perception there is in the idea of winter ‘going away?’ When the seasons change, does one season go away, to be replaced by the next? Actually, seasonal change is mostly incremental. Some people who study this say that it is all a continuum. Scientists, for instance, usually only speak of the extremes, winter and summer, cold and hot, with everything else just a passage between them. But as humans we have a need to segment large swaths of reality to make it more manageable to our limited and easily fooled powers of perception. Landscape, which is also a continuum, becomes forest and field, valley and hill, river and bank, and we are more comfortable seeing things that way.

One of the earliest trends in human culture was to not only strictly segment the seasons, but to personify, even deify them. An example of this comes in the Metamorphoses of the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC–AD 17/18).  In the story of Phaeton and his quest to prove that he is the child of the sun god Phoebus, Phaeton seeks out his father’s palace. There he sees many wonders, such as the Day, Month and Year all personified. And–

There, flower-crowned,

Stood Spring; and naked Summer, wreathed with stalks

of grain; and Autumn, stained with trodden grapes;

and glacial Winter, with his stiff white locks.

For a long time in the history of Western Civilization–particularly European history–the seasons were portrayed either as deities or as persons. Summer tended to be a married couple either tilling their fields or raising children. Autumn was almost always people involved in the harvest, usually of grain or grapes. In paintings, in home decor, on calendars, in poetry, and even in music, when artists and artisans wanted to show the seasons they were usually represented by these standard, anthropomorphic motifs.

This all changed in the New World, particularly in the United States, though nobody is sure why. Some think it’s because of our more intense natural seasons: winter is colder, summer is hotter, spring more gloriously beautiful, and autumn!–well, autumn in America is so thrilling in its multicolored glory that we had to have a second name for it: fall, which is a shortening of the archaic term ‘fall of the leaf.’ So our representations of the seasons have tended to depict natural scenes, not abstract deities or persons. But of course most of Europe is covered in deciduous trees which change color in autumn, and people from Greece to England see the natural changes in their own homelands as stark and varied. Another theory is that our Puritan forebears found the need to purge our national ethos of these vestiges of pagan religion. This goal has been less than successful, given Christmas and Easter observances that are imbued with multiple pagan symbols, and a Halloween which is little more than a pagan Celtic harvest celebration. But at least we have cleared the ancient deities out of our seasonal art and mythology.

This is kind of a shame. When we talk about a winter that won’t go away, it might be helpful for it to have a face, a stubborn old man with ‘stiff white locks’ who refuses to leave and make way for flower-crowned spring. If there’s anyone from that ancient pantheon who deserves the heave-ho right about now, it’s that guy.

A Horse in Winter

06 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by in Anthropomorphism, Evolution, Horses, Ice Age, Science, Seasons, Thoroughbreds, Weather

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One December day a few years ago, a blistering cold day just after Christmas, I took my daughter to the stable to clean her horse’s stall. I thought it a terrible time to be there, doing that. For whatever reason, the inside of an unheated barn always feels ten degrees colder than it is outside–even outside in a strong wind. But when we got to the stable we found that Rachel, who owns the stables, was there with a woman we had not met before. She was a new boarder, bringing in three horses, here on this day in December.

It drove home to me a fact that of course I knew, though the instance was instructive: having horses is a lifestyle, not a hobby. When you are taking care of large animals, you can’t choose to take a few days off here and there; you don’t put them away for a while. They are, if not part of your family, at least a part of your life. Horse people worry more about the horses than themselves. They brave all kinds of elements to make sure their horses aren’t having to brave the elements–wrapping them in blankets, holding long debates with themselves about whether the horse needs one or two blankets tonight, or maybe just his light flysheet. Seriously, many of these horses have more and more varied foul weather gear than I have.

And here’s the irony of the whole thing: horses like cold weather. Horses are one of the last of the large Ice Age mammals, a species that would have courted extinction long ago except that for the past several thousand years, humans have found them useful. Horses thrive on open, frozen, windswept plains. They are one of the only grazing animals that will dig through snow to find the sparse grass beneath and continue grazing–other animals will stand there dumbly wondering where the grass went until starvation overtakes them. Horses are uniquely and excellently adapted to cold weather.

What horses don’t like is hot weather: summer’s heat, which brings flies, the bane of any horse’s life, and of the people who choose to be around them. A horse ridden for an hour in summer needs to be walked about for a bit to cool down, then bathed in cool water before going back to a shady stall to rest.

Horses evolved to live on the breezy savannahs and the icy plains of Ice Age Eurasia. But humans found them useful, and took them into every environment where human habitations developed. They bred different kinds of horses for different environments–the hardy Fjord and Icelandic breeds for way up north, the Arabian and Andalusian breeds with large nostrils and capacious lungs for hot desert environments. It’s these latter breeds which, due to their ability to breathe so well, were the basic stock for the racing Thoroughbred. So a horse type which was bred for the Arabian Peninsula was brought to England and Kentucky, USA, where their thin legs and short coats are not well-suited to damp, cold weather.

Like horses, humans evolved largely on the plains and river valleys of Ice Age Eurasia. Horses have been our companions and stock animals for so long that we think of them as being like ourselves, and thus we do things like decking them out in blankets when the weather gets a little nippy. It’s very likely that if asked, a horse would prefer to feel the cold weather. But I have never known a horse that seemed to mind the blanket. As long as there’s a salt lick, a pail of water and a heap of straw, a horse is happy, no matter the season.