The Anonymity of Snow

The weather has taken a turn for the worst. Thick snow has formed a restrictive boundary, stifling movement. Beyond the snow, ice has transpired, precluding all but the slowest of walks. And the outside is coming in, too. In the early hours, some of the colossal ice formations began to thaw, causing massive chunks of decomposed material to fall to the earth. Flashlights lit the white night. A strange, eerie thudding sound. But there was nothing, only a few parched sections of snow where the ice must have hit. Later that morning, the sounds reappeared, this time with greater intensity, as though the ice was emitting a death rattle.

In this geography of frost and ice, Bachelard finds warmth and tenderness. “We feel warm because it is cold out-of-doors,” he writes in The Poetics of Space. For him, the very condition of warmth is predicated on contradiction. For this reason, home—homecoming—is best suited to the winter months: “Winter is by far the oldest of seasons. Not only does it confer age upon our memories, taking us back to a remote past, but on snowy days, the house too is old” (41). Each December, I contend with Bachelard’s contradiction in a different way. Memory, time, place are all consumed in this dynamic aesthetic, each enriched by being in contact with their anonymous counterpart.


Outside, human life has adapted well to this white terrain. With cautious movements and contrived happiness, the falling snow dissolves boundaries between different lifeworlds. Human life regresses: the haggard smiles of adult faces exceed their allotted dosage, now resembling a musty shadow of a primitive childhood state. Over the grey and white blocks of sedimented materiality, cracks form and the soft skin surrounding the eyes of adult faces begin to sag against the white flesh of the world.


But all this is quite remote from Bachelard. True, we know from him that snow is constitutive of an immemorial memory, conferring a depth of presence upon the world. Snow is the centre, and the house is the axis through which the universe is channelled. Yet owing to Bachelard’s agoraphobic relation to the outside, for him, snow is only conceived as a thing pressing down and reinforcing the fortitude of the house. Never does he encounter the house as yielding to its own otherness: that is, as viewed from the outside. Indeed, at times he will go so far as to say that winter is a “simplified cosmos,” marking a “non-house,” which ultimately entails a “cosmic negation” (40-41).


What did Bachelard omit in this refusal to move beyond the inside? The same question can be asked by way of Bachelard’s cellar. Before it is “rationalised,” the cellar embodies the “dark entity” of the house, “the one that partakes of subterranean forces” (18). Unlike the attic, the cellar cannot be tamed nor mastered: “Darkness prevails both day and night.” Of the cellar’s relationship to the house up above, Bachelard says very little. The reason for this can be deduced from the cellar’s resistance to human desire: it is, after all, a place with a personality of its own, as evidenced by Bachelard’s claim that “even when we are carrying a lighted candle, we see shadows dancing on the walls.” From a human eye, however, this “buried madness” is only seen as an object of fear. In truth, however, what is “dark” about the houses is not its malign spirit but its anonymity—in Merleau-Ponty’s words, “no longer an interlocutor, but a resolutely silent Other.”


Given its tremendous power to create place, the question of what lies beneath snow has an irresistible pull to it. Lurking deep within the text, a tension is detectable in the sanguine prose Bachelard presents the reader with. On the one hand, all that is homely to the evocation of the snow scene depends on the cosmos being levelled down to a blank space for the dreams and memoires of the home to come alive. While the house is empowered by this transformation of the world to an empty tabula rasa, in the outside world, “snow covers all tracks, blurs the road, muffles every sound, conceals every colour” (40).

On the other hand, this dialectic has an uncanniness to it which Bachelard does not acknowledge. At first, the house in the winter is taken to be an ontological centre of intimacy. Yet this centre is not autonomous, but depends upon Bachelard’s contradictory union of warmth and coldness. As such, at the heart of the centre is an identity formed by its own immanent negation: gaining a “refinement of intimacy,” the house assimilates the “cosmic negation” of the “non-house” into its hearth. With this, Bachelard plants the seeds of home’s coldness and unfamiliarity in the midst of its apparent warmth and familiarity. But Bachelard’s attempt to curtail the outside from the inside with thick curtains is a short-term solution. As the “felicitous” orientation of Bachelard’s thought reaches it limit, this enclosure will expose itself to the horror, not of a house that no longer reciprocates the gaze of the dweller—but of a house that reciprocates the gaze of the dweller with different eyes. Out of this abject gaze, an aesthetic of the uncanny is founded, where the character of the house is proven to be fundamentally anonymous: an impersonal creaking in the middle of the night before subduing at the first sight of a white dawn.

Hume's Melancholy

The mythology of the “I”: David Hume turns inwards, only to find “some particular perception or other…I never can catch myself at any time without a perception” (300). You are melancholy, and your sorrow is held together not by followers, but by the blind distance that links all points to an indivisible whole. Yet the whole is vulnerable, and your “self” is forever at odds with the apparent density of the world. “The mind is a kind of theatre,” you say, “where several perceptions successively make their appearance.” Failing to find a common impression in this bundle of appearances, you are forced to concede that only an “unknown and mysterious” force would be equivalent to a “self” (302).

Your face is pressed to the window, your own face reflected in the darkness of night. The curtains are open, but the windows are shut. Muffled light seeps through the glass, your skin is cold but the frost has yet to settle. Condensation forms. “A ship, of which a considerable part has been changed by frequent reparations, is still considered as the same; nor does the difference of the materials hinder us from ascribing an identity to it” (305). You expose the palm of your hand: the flesh moves; the anonymous shiver of its being extends through your whole body. There is no continuity in this place, you say to yourself; the crumbling fragments of the wall are coming to the foreground of your perception.


Your shadow falls over time, marking the places and times that have been affected by your presence. How to account for these anonymous blocks of experience you’ve been accruing? You are alive—you fended off the void radiating in the spaces between sensations. Through your own work and effort, you managed to sculpt your life into a totality, the parts of which sufficiently resemble one another so at to give the impression that their agency is orientated toward a common goal: “Suppose we could see clearly into the breast of another, and observe that succession of perceptions…’tis evident that could more contribute to the bestowing a relation on this succession amidst all its variations” (308).


You are old and the different places in your memory float freely through the atmosphere. Of your actions on 11th of March 1719, you remember very little, only a generalised aura that permeated the year as a whole. What of the year today? From the air, it falls to the earth, receding deep into your body along the way. Soon, you will have visitors to your grave in the Calton Old Burial Ground, though your body will long be gone. Your melancholy is felt in far afield places. In 1997, a statue will be erected in your honour and people will have their photo taken alongside yourself as a Clashach sandstone still-life.

Homesickness

“The knowing animals are aware that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.” (Rilke).

I am touching the house in which I was born, but my hand passes through the place, leaving a residue of fog where the house was. This is the place where I was born. A certain longing was conceived here. Muffled and croaking, it finds its expression in the body of the nostalgic. I am here, and my hand passed through the white wall, reaching into a lacuna in space, but comprised from the boundary of my hand. It is as though something outside of this place exceeds the material presence I face, as though this place resists the very act of being touched.

The phobia creeps through the hedges, lurks within the gardens, affecting a cold indifference on the world. I am home, but the home remains simultaneously absent. Homesickness: that which renders all memories of place derealized; a disease, but one that is cast in neither the body nor the mind, but in the spirit roaming between each place—.

I create a boundary. I summon a memory to ward off the anonymity of the lifeworld. I am human. My ideal remains incompatible with this white wall, which presses down on my flesh. It is time to leave, to remould my ideal from the wreckage of the materiality of things. This is the pathology of a prosaic homesickness: it localises itself in the body, rather than dispersing itself in the world of human affairs. And there is no return. Everything outside this imagined realm suffers from its own reality. The time of homesickness: without a future, without a past. An impasse with no resolution, a homecoming with no movement.