Boreas - The Oh Hellos
On this longest night of the year, it seems right to send out the title track from a concept album based around the northern, wintry wind. Its lyrics focus more on fire than ice, which also feels appropriate for the day; I always watch something burn on the winter solstice.
For around two decades, I’ve spent the solstice at the Festival of Lights parade through my childhood neighbourhood. The parade route ends at a baseball diamond, where a paper sculpture towers over the pitcher’s mound. A samba band plays, clowns give speeches, and dancing fire-breathers ignite the sculpture. If your feet are getting cold, you shuffle closer until you can start to feel the warmth.
This year, the neighbourhood streets were empty. We burned a papier mache coronavirus in my mum’s backyard firepit. Burning something destroys it. Sometimes that’s what you’re hoping for.
The burning in this song is not terribly hopeful:
I'm one spoon away from setting the ends of my hair on fire
If I'm kindling for a little while
At least I'd feel of use
But I know, sometimes, when I have felt that I take so much from the world, and do not offer anything commensurate in return, it has been helpful to focus on the soft animal of my body, to imagine myself as part of the family of living things, and that’s what I hear in the next stanza:
Maybe then my breath could embody
A wildfire starting
I'd sweep up the forest floor
And my body would breathe life into the corners
Be a darker soil
Maybe, if nothing else, I can imagine my body or breath helping something else to be more alive. According to the abstract of a recent Nature paper, 2020 is the year that human-made mass started to outweigh all living biomass on the earth. I haven’t read the paper, and I don’t know against which ledger our bodies were counted, but I was moved recently by Ross Gay’s poem Burial, a recounting of pouring some of his father’s ashes into the roots of two new plum trees, and the growth that followed.