Forgive me. It’s one of those dark nights. Outside what little moon there is reflects off snow that has blanketed the state for weeks.
Time to play everybody’s favorite: Seasonal Affective Disorder, a clinical label for the blues in the bleak midwinter, night of waking dread.
Like an impatient taylor, I pull out all the stitches of my life, in fantasy, redo them all, perfect. It’s a surefire symptom of the blue bleak devil’s arrival.
Several readings that I turn to when the blue bleak winter settles in, suffocating, silent:
Habakkuk 3, that poem replete with strands of ancient Canaanite myth:
Although the fig tree shall not blossom,
neither shall fruit be in the vines;
the labour of the olive shall fail,
and the fields shall yield no meat;
the flock shall be cut off from the fold,
and there shall be no herd in the stalls:
Yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will joy in the God of my salvation.
The LORD God is my strength,
and he will make my feet like hinds’ feet,
and he will make me to walk upon mine high places.Hab 3:17-19 (KJV)
If you’ll allow another quote, also extended. The setting is the dark night before the battle of Agincourt. Shakespeare’s Henry V. Harry wanders from camp to camp, speaking with his men.
The poor condemned English,
Like sacrifices, by their watchful fires
Sit patiently and inly ruminate
The morning’s danger, and their gesture sad
Investing lank-lean; cheeks and war-worn coats
Presenteth them unto the gazing moon
So many horrid ghosts. O now, who will behold
The royal captain of this ruin’d band
Walking from watch to watch, from tent to tent,
Let him cry ‘Praise and glory on his head!’
For forth he goes and visits all his host.
Bids them good morrow with a modest smile
And calls them brothers, friends and countrymen.
Upon his royal face there is no note
How dread an army hath enrounded him;
Nor doth he dedicate one jot of colour
Unto the weary and all-watched night,
But freshly looks and over-bears attaint
With cheerful semblance and sweet majesty;
That every wretch, pining and pale before,
Beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks:
A largess universal like the sun
His liberal eye doth give to every one,
Thawing cold fear, that mean and gentle all,
Behold, as may unworthiness define,
A little touch of Harry in the night.
Henry V. Act IV. Prologue.
I don’t know if Shakespeare meant it so, or if it’s blasphemous to think it, but I see described in these lines our brother Christ, who shoulders our griefs and bears our sorrows.
Blue devils—so says Tennessee Williams, that most eloquent of depressives in Night of the Iguana—respect endurance.
“The one who endures to the end shall be saved.” Matthew 10:22.
A prayer of the faithful from as early as the third century CE:
Let it be. Whatever You are birthing, let it be.
Photo by Mary Fran