Let Now the Chimneys Blaze

Now winter nights enlarge
The number of their hours
And clouds their storms discharge
Upon the airy towers.
-Thomas Campion

To us in the Upper Midwest, sunbelt snowbirds are clay pigeons. Almost every Chicagoan knows one of those uncles, or a cubicle-over coworker, who talks only of when he’ll retire, escape the everyday, move south, and spend mornings sweating through the pebbled pores of his droopy iguana skin. It’s disgusting, sure —the cocoanut oil slathered under Havana shirts, the asshole cigars, Jimmy Buffett– but winter in Chicago can be terrible. I spent a January weekend this year visiting family in Phoenix, and was able to hike in the mornings, bike to coffee and then read a paperback with the pleasant afternoon breeze seeping through a loose sweater. I found myself wondering why every November I again grew eager for the arrival of a bleak, brutal Chicago winter of long nights and sooty snow.

North America's first Social Club, the Order of Good Cheer-- founded as a way through the Canadian winter

I looked up the rest of poem the next morning, and found that this quatrain followed the first:

Let now the chimneys blaze
And cups o’erflow with wine,
Let well-tuned words amaze
With harmony divine.

Campion hints at an aspect of the winter season often overlooked by those Facebook posts from our gloating acquaintances in California and Florida. But how honest is he being with us, and are we being with ourselves? Does winter really come smiling with such a convivial face? On late afternoons in November, as I prepare to make my way from the office to the bus, we begin to marvel that the evening now ensues at such an early hour. As the sun begins to set behind a dirty cloth of cloud, I wonder if it had been really out at all, if the sky weren’t simply moving from pale grey to cobalt grey. The blackening trees remain staid throughout the afternoon and from my windows I join the leafless bowers in peering over the lonely, occasional pair of trousers that flap swiftly to the el, or bus, or car. It’s at times like these then that we ourselves feel becalmed and isolated, deserted by both our celestial deity and our companion city.

During these winter hours, when we pile things around us, our homes become both harbor from the darkness and somehow a deep surreal pool filled with water both magic and plain. Our hibernal homes, our December apartments, become as Neruda called them, our “cosmic head of dreams… when all was moon or stone or darkness, when light was still unborn.” Even the cynic Machiavelli noted, with a Campion-esque romanticism, the surreal space that exists in our hermits’ harbor-homes in the winter:

“When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mind, for which I was born. There I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives for their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the course of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexations, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass into their world.”

When the shoveled-up drifts that flank these days melt, when the grayscale sky is edited away, when that pattern of night, dun, night runs out, our panicked, lonely winter dreams will seem antirational. But when your only illumination is the dusty yellow light of kitchens that smell of twenty penned-in dinners, when the drippy, goofy drool-drivel of pissed-out tavern swivel-stool chatter is all the company you’ve got to sustain you for weeks on end, when the odd-heard songs played in dank basements set the melodrama for the unconscious, our dense dance rude inevitably ensues and can, within that reverie, be excused. Our waltz of curses, spit, rare randy moments, hopeless gestures, becomes comprehensible inside these illusions. And so our ridiculously exaggerated stage gestures seem to cohere entirely within winter’s dreamed drama.

For the most part our world in winter is one of grey starkness, harshly real. And we flee from it when we can– usually into our homes and ourselves. We stir. We dream. We drink. We argue over nothing. We brood. We wish it weren’t so cold, but mostly so dark. This is important. As Frank O’Hara said, “it’s true that fresh air is good for the body, but what about the soul, that grows in darkness.” In the deepening months at the start of the year, the sky gets greyer, the north wind grows brisker, the moon rises somewhere unseen behind the clouds.

And then, in a gasp, a snowstorm coats the world surrounding our surreal rooms and turns the outside into a sort of communal dream landscape. The streets themselves become surreal, full of absolute wonder, the landscape of our imaginations. Cars are buried in snow. Sidewalks become cragged terrain. Major thoroughfares morph into rugged tundra with snowshoers and skiers, pickups slow-rolling like a post-apocalyptic militia, and stumbling pedestrians on patrol. We leave our houses and find a city blown over with white swales and valleys. We trudge clumsily over the piled ice, shuffle down the middle of bluely lit streets, dragging our soles to keep our footing. We see this frozen, unearthly landscape– with all its perilous patches– and we’re forced to exercise awestruck caution, to take our time and recognize each other. We dig each other out, lift unknown toddlers over ice, allow old ladies to pass through narrowly shoveled paths. We can barely bend our scarved, hooded, hatted heads, so we listen through layers of cloth for cars flipping up frail plates of packed snow. They can but skid to a stop, and we can but skate out of the way.

These deep blizzards make our winter dreams communal, and thus humanize them. The sordid passages are deleted somehow and we are left only with wonder. Jerry Sullivan the wildlife columnist wrote in a 1984 issue of The Chicago Reader of the ice fishermen in Chicago’s harbors. Sullivan focused on the absurdity of the act: the harvested fish are tiny, and they are hibernating and so don’t fight much, and there is very little sport in awling out a hole at random to reach the unseen water. But ice fishing’s communal absurdity, Sullivan points out, it invites others into those dreams winter makes us harbor:

“So you don’t catch many fish. And those you get are very small. And even the occasional big one is too cold to fight. And the winds howl across the open ice. But the air is certainly fresh. You can kibitz with your friends or talk to your daughter with very few interruptions from hungry fish. Your ostensible occupation is respectable. If anyone asks, you can say you are fishing. You don’t have to admit that you are standing around in the subzero windchill just to be sociable.

“And you can stare at the skyline. If you are properly dressed, you can feel the cozy inexpressible joy of one who is warm in a cold place. And you can dream about how good it will be when the ice is gone.”

The unforgiving Midwestern winter doesn’t bestow us “character”, as so often suggested by transplants to the coasts and the south. In fact, winter’s magic is that it erodes our character, our sense of self. Winter incubates our dreams, allows us to indulge in fantasies that arise from our minds and this stark, unforgiving, snow blind world. “One must have a mind of winter,” Wallace Stevens said, to behold “the junipers rough in the distant glitter of the January sun… and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind… nothing himself, to behold the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

When you live here, when you are weaned on these winters, you don’t bemoan the despair of the winter, you find instead that communal dream– terrible and dark and fantastic. Snowbound, you revel in the dream; you allow your days to be written over by your lusting aspirations, your violent reverie, and your communal awe. With everyone, you are warmed by the distant glitter of the January sun, the glare of light off the downtown skyline. You can feel the cozy inexpressible joy of one who is warm in a cold place.