If The History of Spring...

“But time is tied to the wrist

or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.”

—from “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” by Craig Raine, 1979

The crocuses push their purple heads up at the end of March in the entryway to my apartment building, purple or violet and riven with purple veins. They’re early, I think. Every year spring is early, I think spring is early, I hear spring is early. Never have I been ready to hear the trumpets of the daffodils by the time they’re done singing, so out of place they appear in the course of my long defrost, shedding the numbness I wore for surviving winter. The magnolias finish tearing out their hair and the cherry blossoms half-quit their lingerie before I realize it is spring. I understand that even I was born in February. And that day how grateful am I for this private festival to mark out the sameness of winter days? The only holiday native to my birth culture stands at the other side, the start of winter: Black Friday. This dreadful binge is a monument to the obstinance of human culture after ten generations of oblivion. I mean we have a feeling emerge from the blank numeral progression of days that we should be surrounded by abundance, from the slowest place of memory, the fear and anticipation of bringing in the harvest, with doorbuster deals and plastic crap delivered to our building lobbies. Who dares discount this green inherence, this expectation of gourds that persists through the slaughters, through air conditioning and football? I think it means there is hope for time.

Frankenstein’s creature is given life in November and when we hear his recounting of his lonely adolescence, after he has been made a second time, made a monster by his treatment by man, two years have passed. Most touching is this: he first experiences spring as an event in history, a moment he has chanced to live through where the woods of twigs and dust, the sheers and plain, are given green and pink, trees bear leaves and decorate themselves with birds and the air is sweet and warm, thick with pollen. What horror to discover that this was not the most beautiful afternoon in the universe, where life increased by a permanent lurch like that electric miracle that had made the creature himself, that instead he had joined life alongside its wide rotations and would live miserably to witness autumns. Mary Shelley wrote the novel under the shadow of ash clouds from Mount Tambora, erupted in 1815 on Sumbawa Island in what is now Indonesia. 1816 was named, in New England, “The Year Without Summer” so wide did the plume of that ash unfurl. 1817 was named, in Germany, “The Year of the Beggar.” Crops failed as the growing season never came across the hemisphere, a drop of six or seven degrees; and the dim sun through the soot insufficiently provoked the mnemonic of germination in wheat, rye, amaranth, corn. In southwest China farmers tried to live by sucking white clay, starving from three years of rice harvests failing by flood and frost. Afterwards, the farmers of Yunnan turned to a more reliable cash crop that could be integrated into the global supply chain: opium, which in twenty years spread to what is now Burma and Laos and inaugurated its period of wholesale production and world trade. In Maine and Vermont, porcupine was eaten en masse for the first time and when the porcupines were nearly decimated, nettles were pulled up and boiled and when the nettles were gone people starved. In June a foot of snow fell on Albany. Outside of Paris, the starving poor were seen grazing grass in fields bereft of long slaughtered livestock, wandered out of their barren quartiers. The first large-scale production of the modern bicycle began that year in Germany to replace the tens of thousands of dead horses, let out of their stables to die on the roadside or slaughtered for food. At the site of the eruption, around the Sanggar Peninsula, a dozen villages dedicated to chopping sandalwood to build merchant vessels to fill the trade lanes of the Dutch East Indies were obliterated in minutes, incinerated, buried under ash or left with an atmosphere nearly void of oxygen for a time far beyond the limits of mammalian respiration. Molten rock rapidly filled the sea, the displaced water receded and crashed again against the archipelago, went out again and rushed into the Bay of Bengal. These conditions led to new strain of cholera developing in the bay’s warm waters, which spread through the subcontinent during the drought and famine that followed as the sulphur released interrupted the formation of the monsoon the next two years; what rain did come was acidic, killing what meager harvest remained. Cholera spread through Asia within three years, was carried in the ballast of British ships to England and Europe, killed tens of millions worldwide. The modern institutions of public medicine originate in the Victorian reaction to cholera; and the social control and terror of the unhygienic, infectious poor.

From the window of her rented villa outside Geneva, Mary Shelley could see trudging in the distant alpine roads a continuous stream of migrants crossing by the thousands from northern Europe southwards fleeing crop failure, spoiled growing seasons, starvation; or expelled by force, falling under murderous vagrancy statutes. Percy Shelley, with whom the nineteen year old Mary had eloped, and Lord Byron, their host who was in the process of inventing himself as the first modern celebrity by conducting affairs so salacious and stunts so brave that the tabloids were called into being; witnessed on their trips to nearby villages the streams of starving beggars driven out as winter and darkness followed them not only southwards but into summer, deformed by hunger. In July of 1816, Byron would write of them, “Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld / Each other’s aspects—saw, and shriek’d, and died— / Even of their mutual hideousness they died, / Unknowing who he was upon whose brow / Famine had written Fiend.” Geneva was spared a catastrophic subsistence crisis by a last minute shipment of grain arrived from Odessa. But the hungry turned away at each threshold, who had been made monstrous by misery, made stranger to humanity by displacement, are perhaps remembered by the creature, who learns his monstrosity from the cruel lessons of other people’s faces, who is rootless to the extreme of being born both without the successive navelcords of human generation and the common ancestorship of ancient microbes. The freak absence of a season in the years of Frankenstein’s composition echo in that individual creation: and the creature learns his freakishness, too, from the cyclicality of the seasons, knowing he stands outside their vital rotations. All his superhuman strength and cosmic erudition will register less on life than even any hill’s long memory of daffodils. What he can never know is the weak maternity he is afforded by his story’s evergreen transmission, as that is outside Frankenstein’s conceit.

On 68th Street I passed milk crates of petunias shipped from Pennsylvania and Argentina stacked beside freshly mulched tree boxes as I headed to Hunter to teach the novel. Spring was coming to the Upper East Side, replacing winter’s ornamental cabbage and holdover holiday holly. No one can read Frankenstein for the first time. Sitting down to read Frankenstein is already to remember its rumor. This is what is meant by a classic. Really, it has entered mythology, something beyond the fraught category of canonicity, projected there like a constellation to its stars by countless retellings and adaptations, especially the 1931 Hollywood film—which produced the indelible image of the bolt-headed slurring beast and confessed something of the biological menace of its era by having the creature’s subsequent rampage be the result of the doctor’s selection of a “criminal’s brain” to furnish his amalgam’s skull. And so the story is millennially reproduced, surviving among aped contemporary TV and movie IPs as a staple of Halloween, where obsessions and neuroses are worn for one night like the daemons and ancestors of old. Indeed, these things move us in mysterious ways. If we believe psychoanalysis, there is no better way to shape a culture than to enter the common repertoire of what haunts the nightmares of children.

I was alarmed that about half my class didn’t even have this stupid degraded image for me to crash the book against and laugh at together. Much is made of this soft takeoff from history, really from historicity, what represses any genealogy but the immediate one of novelty; not novelty even, which would require history, but mere contemporaneity. It is reflected in the diminishing stature of the units of culture: certainly not what used to be called “schools,” no longer movements, but trends. Amidst the general catastrophe of politics (outside the bounds of this brief essay about spring), the politics that is most popularly staged and articulated is the relations between generations—smaller and smaller units of temporality into which humanity is grouped. Gen Z, Gen X, Millennials, even “late Millennials.” It is often explained that the rapid pace of technological innovation is altering the object world so quickly that every decade or so an unrecognizable sensorium greets the new births and molds them according to its distensions, imperatives and peculiarities. Like the cultivars of Brassica oleracea they are unrecognizable to their species mates that have been bred to emphasize, say, their flower or their buds alternately. But even this organic metaphor is inaccurate: it would be as if the difference between a brussel sprout and a cauliflower were determined by the atmosphere it entered upon leaving the brown home of its ground; by the human heliotropism towards brighter and brighter screens. We have even forgotten about the original formulation of this phenomenon, the Postmodern, which was obliterated by the mechanism its theory describes. So perhaps I will be corrected: I am not speaking of history but really history’s creature.

There is something sinister in this generational politics, revealed in the oxymoronic character of the phrase itself. It describes a condition of such immobility that the only theater for change is biological, the dull progression of litters into a future whose only difference is superficial, and whose ubiquity really represents the universalization of marketing demographics into human self-identification. We glimpse here the other menace of the seasons, beside their freakish puncturing or devastating absence: the realization that cyclicality is simply stasis on another scale, as in the trends or fashions that constitute the generations. It is described stunningly by the narrator of Marcel Proust’s great novel, who feels the ominousness of repetition as his adolescent time by the beachside comes to an end, despite the pubescent spurts achieved there, in the sweaty springtime of the body. His maid comes in to open the window of the hotel room in which he’s spent the season.

“And for months on end, in this Balbec to which I had so looked forward because I imagined it only as battered by storms and buried in the mist, the weather had been so dazzling and so unchanging that when she came to open the window I could always, without once being wrong, expect to see the same patch of sunlight folded in the corner of the outer wall, of an unalterable colour which was less moving as a sign of summer than depressing as the colour of a lifeless and factitious enamel. And when Françoise removed the pins from the top of the window-frame, took down the cloths, and drew back the curtains, the summer day which she disclosed seemed as dead, as immemorial, as a sumptuous millenary mummy from which our old servant had done no more than cautiously unwind the linen wrappings before displaying it, embalmed in its vesture of gold.”

Here I can ask my question: if spring has a history? How, if the seasons are literally “immemorial” and history is memory made real? What washes over Marcel in those days is empty, homogeneous time, the time normally trapped in clocks or numerically adduced, the abstract time that seems to be antithetical to the seasons themselves, the time of hours worked (which otherwise is completely alien to Proust) or the incoherent time present in our casual utterances like “five billions years till the sun’s death and implosion”, the time we bandy about flippantly, adding and subtracting, sentence people to prison in—here by the glowing and undulant beachside which he had depended on to be empty time’s refutation. What Proust is trying to grasp is the other side of eternity: not the bare infinity that awaits our existence in time but the pregnant eternity that precedes us, precedes every present moment of contemplation or reflex. What happens in history happens forever. That is only to say something very simple: what has happened will have happened forever. So when Proust takes on the task of narrating his life, which is so tentative and frail that on the first pages, before his project has begun, it dissipates every evening in the face of sleep or by the force of the past tense that overwhelms him upon opening any book or encountering any piece of furniture, he does so to lend his life the only proper unit of temporality: this eternal past of the has-been. He discovers that his life will only have happened if it has happened, not in the abstract articulation of his thirty nine years or the same number of each season or its equivalent in hours or days—but in the time of narration, a very very long novel, which lends eternity its opera boxes and emotions, its jealousies and disappointments. When we say history repeats itself what we really mean is history is only history if we repeat it. Not in its telling but in its perpetual retelling does it register on the ledger of things past. The reflexive grammatical construction of “history repeats itself” must be taken seriously: it is the record of those brave or violent events that have forced themselves into repetition against the stubborn amnesia and comfortable oblivion of human life, the great forgetting of winters. Primary historical phenomena even take the brute repetitive form, to ensure their historicity: the mass, pledges of allegiance, hieratic rituals and sacraments, the formulas of prayer or contract, and the law itself which gains its force by repetition’s proper legal name, precedent. The desperation of this insistence, the violence of repetition’s imposition, are signs of fragility. That even eternity can pass away is the lesson, gift and danger of a true historical consciousness. Every day we come across, and have to live with, indeed find ourselves ruled by, not merely notions from the past but old eternities: G-d, Family, Nature or Progress. Who can survive the temporal vertigo caused thereby undamaged, drifting forward into yesterday’s eternity? Proust realizes this wound on the level of his singular lifetime: his life was never lived until it was narrated. And yet in the act of retelling he finds himself touching over and over the hollow foundation of anything that could be called a self, which has long pomped under the privileged eternity of the soul. I mean he is constantly made aware of the miraculous power of his prose, that it exceeds any expectations he dared hold—and instead of finding his life, his writing constituted it. And who better than a writer knows just how conditional, just how trivial and frail is narration? The mask went in search of the face: it was too good a mask. The cage gave up its search for a bird when the cage began to sing.

And so those shipped in petunias on 68th Street, the tulips flown in their bulb from faraway frosted warehouses to form battalions on Park Avenue’s median: they are not really spring but the story of spring. It is a beautiful story. Something from that other history, of things, let’s say climate change or the metropolis, made local germination obsolete, and the folk sayings, clichés and lyrics that articulate spring’s promise have to be fulfilled by other means. The sky is not blue, it is beige and peach. Instead March showers bring, instead, April flowers. In Biblical and Medieval traditions of Apocalypse, imagery is drawn from the shutting down of cyclical time, the unseasonable apparitions of cherries, the abrupt inversions of tides, the premature birth of livestock, the early slaughter of December hogs, the errant absence of frost or rain, the ceasing of day and night’s regular alternation. Soothsaying is forbidden in the Abrahamic religions because one should not trespass on the mind of G-d, and most prophecy, though ostensibly a revelation from the future is actually news of the End of Time, not a vision of events occurring in history but the premonition of a time where the future (and the past and the present) is abolished; so time contracts in anticipation. And they all mark spring: Ramadan is the name of the ninth month and it is the month of revelation; not only was the Quran revealed to Muhammad then but, it is believed, the Gospel, the Torah and the Psalms. Green leaves came cupped then opened. Easter’s miracle could be deduced from the observation of a hyacinth. And it’s no coincidence that these holy times move, not just against the Julian calendar but in finding Sunday, or glimpsing the crescent moon in the sky. Passover occurs in spring and its ritual requires parsley. Here, it is commanded that even the wisest sages must tell again the story of Exodus. No other holiday is more suspicious of the unreliability of tradition or acknowledges so nakedly that tradition is only the appearance of continuity with some mythic past, whose pantomime it prescribes. Or rather, we should say that wherever tradition appears continuous, it is only its appearance that is continuous, and to falter in the line of utterance is to cancel all that came before. And so we think of history as the pyramids, which indeed it is, self-fulfilling records of a deranged desire for immortality; but it depends, too, on the senility of sages. Of Moses, Kafka writes this in his diaries:

“He is on the track of Canaan all his life; it is incredible that he should see the land only when on the verge of death. The dying vision of it can only be intended to illustrate how incomplete a moment is human life, incomplete because a life like this could last forever and still be nothing but a moment. Moses fails to enter Canaan not because his life is too short but because it is a human life.”

To be human is to submit to the obligation of duration. But what, you may ask, about writing; whose miracle I was just celebrating to the point of anxiety, or any other medium of record-keeping, tabulation and story? I mean any other record of persistence, in which we could only a little coyly include the pyramids? Walking past the Strand this week, I was delighted to have the opportunity to browse books without exiting the exterior of springtime, on their streetside shelves. These two dollar books, even some from only ten years ago, I pick them up: and they are unreadable. This is not a judgement of taste. I mean Windows XP for Dummies; or from just a couple of decades earlier the whole genre of Kremlinology, discourses on the “Soviet Mind”, shelves of paraspiritualism, physical treatises on the ether, Satanic Panic historiographies in hysterical hardcovers, dissertations on the great heresies of Christianity, Docetism, Pelagianism, Sabellianism, pamphlets whose polemic it was once believed could change the world, novelizations of primetime serials that even the most dedicated scholar could not make cohere, books whose turning pages waft air from another planet we can no longer breath. This heap outnumbers the living. And how vanishing is that minuscule live green tip growing at the edge of the dump, from the ashen, silent mass; the select few fronted new releases, classics? I say nothing of the dead languages, or those destructions so complete or sudden that they cannot even write their names on anything that could stand for a tombstone, lost in the oblivion of oblivions. It is the wrong question, to ask what is history. On 13th and Broadway I ask, instead, how history is possible at all, having glimpsed the tendency of these shelves. And who, telling the story year after year, could not secretly hope to forget that once, we were slaves in Egypt? By which I mean: hope to lay down alongside the namelessness of slaves.

My alarm clock is set to call me awake with bird sounds and the LED simulation of the sunrise. In this season of sleeping at last with the window open, I heard April’s dawn chorus an hour or so premature to its programmed apparition. A panic alighted in me, as I jerked roughly into time; and later hearing the mourning dove’s pitiful coo, the cardinal’s soprano flight, the Robin’s “tootle-oo, how are you?” and the asthmatic laugh of the Nuthatch—it dawned on me, with horror, that I understood birdsong. They all sang the same song: that the hour of obligation had come. It was as if this music had the character now of a clock’s ticks, was only another member in the armory of implements designed to mark the ceaseless regularity of passing away. I have seen how deep runs the reflex for a watch, the automatic consultation of the digits displayed on the front of a phone. When an ambulance siren echoed in the canyon of 34th Street, I plugged my ears and noted the brute ignorance and accommodation with which me and my fellow pedestrians received this alarm. Who could bear interpreting this song, with each urban hour’s distant ring? That someone is dying. And so we are stuck: between attending the story of the dead without submitting to the deathly character of all stories, even the birds’.

The tulips on Park Avenue (it took me a month, precisely, to write this) are decapitated already. The cherry blossoms conceded to the sober practicality of leaves. Stories are how we give each other time. And if I, dear reader, have turned to literature, blushing, to understand spring, it is only because I cannot adequately express the facticity of pink; and vanity, hope or compulsion called me to tell.