thank you notes 1/11
i'm thankful that we went for a walk in the snow yesterday morning, even though it was very cold. i'm thankful that the cemetery wasn't yet plowed and so, because of the thickness of the snow, there was no distinction between the path that the living walk along and the rows where the dead sleep. i'm thankful for the temporary record of presence our footsteps left behind us, for the fog of our breath in the air. i'm thankful that we were worried that the donut shop might be closed because of the weather, but that a few blocks away from it, in the alley that runs along the cemetery, we started to smell the vapor of warm yeast and sugar in the air. i'm thankful for the tension, as i tried to eat a jelly donut outside the shop, between the pleasure of its taste and texture and the pain of my bare hand in the freezing wind holding it. i'm thankful that after i had crammed the last of it into my mouth, i shoved my burning hand, which was covered in frosting and jelly and glaze, into my glove, thankful for the sweet relief of that.
i'm thankful that music is a game of repetition, and i'm thankful for the gifts that repetition gives us, for the way it embeds verses and choruses into our memories, for how it was, before writing, the main way for us to hold onto the past, all of history in strings of melody over the riffing of a lyre. i'm thankful for repetition, but i'm also thankful for variation, for artists who break the repetition in the special ways that only they can, for all their beautiful ruptures. i'm thankful for first time he broke something and he made me feel, the moment near the end of "five years" when he suddenly starts cramming more words into the line ("and it was cold and it rained and i felt like an actor") the fire in his voice rising, the syllables stressed and spit ("your face, your race, the way that you talk") until it all ("i kiss you, you're beautiful, i want you to walk") explodes with feeling. i'm thankful for unexpected sax solos. i'm thankful for the "wham, bam, thank you, ma'am" he could always deliver at just the right time.
i'm thankful, while d and i were walking through the snow in the cemetery, that i was reminded for the first time in a long time of "the dead," which i was introduced to my senior year of high school by an aging new critic who helped us to explicate the story line by line over the course of a week and who changed the way i read forever. i'm thankful for the gutting sadness of the final scene between gabriel and gretta in their room at the inn. i'm thankful, today, for the moment when gabriel imagines how one of his aunts will die soon, and how, sitting with the other one, "he would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find only lame and useless ones." i'm thankful for the final sentences of the story, when gabriel is sitting by the window watching the snow fall against the night sky, which reads:
"...the tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. other forms were near. his soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. he was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. his own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.
a few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. it had begun to snow again. he watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. the time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. it was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the bog of allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous shannon waves. it was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where michael furey lay buried. it lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. his soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
i'm thankful, in "rock and roll suicide," for when everything drops out beneath him, his voice straining with meaning, and he shouts, "oh no love, you're not alone."
Don't miss what's next. Subscribe to thank you notes: