Cached Sunday, June 13, 2010, from
http://davidlavery.net/writings/delicious_progress.pdf
"The Delicious
Progress'': Whiteness as An Atavism
In Conrad Aiken's "Silent
Snow, Secret Snow"
by David Lavery
The world was warm and white when I was horn:*
Beyond the windowpane the world was white,
A glaring whiteness in a leaded frame,
Yet warm as in the hearth and heart of light,
Although the whiteness was almost** and was bone
In midnight's still paralysis, nevertheless
The world was warm and hope was infinite,
All things would come, fulfilled, all things would be known
All things would be enjoyed, fulfilled, and come to be my own.
Delmore Schwartz
* Should be "born."
** Should be "almond."
Image of the full poem--
The German philosopher Heidegger, thinking of the immense human
endeavor in which
we construct and maintain a consistent world of existing, revealed
things out of the pure
potential of Being, once remarked that the act of waking from sleep
must surely
constitute the single greatest miracle of human life; for within a
fraction of a second after
our being "dead to the world," that world reassembles itself before our
eyes and senses
in its familiar form and retains its customary regularity. Inspired by
an understanding of
the phenomenological import of awakening similar to Heidegger’s, the
French critic
Georges Poulet (Miller, 1983) has sought to explore the world's
literature in search of
passages describing moments of awakening, hoping to gain thereby an
understanding of
the "interior distance" of those writers who created such passages.
Conrad Aiken's famous short story "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" is, of
course, such a tale
of awakening. Even the story's autobiographical source, Aiken has
explained, lay in his
own memories of childhood experiences of awakening (Martin, 1962). The
"Snow" of the
story’s title, the all-encompassing whiteness into which Paul Hasleman
descends
completely at the close, first presents itself to him in al) its
"beauty ,.. beyond speech ...
beyond thought" (221) one morning just after awakening when he realizes
within his own
tacit awareness of his world that the approaching steps of the mailman
cannot be heard
as far away as normally.
He cannot be heard, Paul begins to think, because snow has fallen,
without his realizing
it, during the night, thereby muffling the mailman's footsteps until he
is already) close
by. But leaving his bed to look out his window, Paul finds that no snow
has actually
fallen. The steps of the mailman are obscured rather, as Paul soon
recognizes, by the
"delicious progress" of an inner snowfall that marks Paul's
submergence into
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schizophrenic
withdrawal from the familiar, public world of school,
neighborhood, and
parents by which he feels himself besieged.
"This is your house," Aiken explains in one of his poems; "On one side
there is darkness,
on one side there is light," and he is clearly thinking of the human
skull. In "Silent Snow,
Secret Snow," Paul Hasleman moves back and forth between these two
realms, but his
movement is no "delicious progress." For although Paul finds his secret
whiteness a kind
of miraculous gift, it is in reality a regress--the penetration and
permeation of that light
which lies ordinarily without the skull into the inner darkness of his
consciousness until it
engulfs it. The snow, the whiteness of Paul's madness is, in fact, an
atavism.
The first time we see light, the French philosopher Condillac once
noted, "we are it rather
than see it" (Zuckerkandl, 1956, 342). The results of the first
successful cataract
operation performed in this century confirm Condillac's observation.
Men and women,
blind since birth, after their operations were able to look out upon
the world for the first
time, and although they were primarily adults, with years of nonvisual
experience already
behind them, few were able to recognize anything familiar; most were
unable to
distinguish objects, or even to see space at all. Some believed a house
a mile away to be
close by. like a child who reaches for the moon he takes to be within
his reach. One girl
could see only "a lot of different kinds of brightness," most were
unable to see anything
but a "confusion of forms and colors." A young man claimed that he
witnessed only an
"extensive field of light, in which everything appeared dull, confused,
and in motion."
Marius von Senden (1932), who collected the accounts of these cases of
new vision in his
book Space and Sight, observed that the perceptions of these
individuals were not,
however, really atypical, strange as they may seem, for each went
through only "the
experience that we all go through and forget, the moment we are born."
In "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," Paul returns to that "extensive field of
light" into which he
and all seers have been born in order to escape the double bind of his
environing world.
His regression is--as is typical in schizophrenia-a retreat along the
line of development
that brought him to his current impasse, but Paul, unlike most, goes
all the way back,
entirely deconstructing his experience. Schizophrenia, R. D. Laing has
explained, is "a
special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable
situation" (126). It is
a response to being "checkmated" by the circumstances of one's life
that inaugurates a
kind of journey "back through one's personal life, in and back and
through and beyond
into the experience of all mankind, of the primal man, of Adam and
perhaps even further
into the beings of animals, vegetables and minerals" (Laing 126). All
those embarking on
such a voyage are bound to feel immense confusion, but it is essential
for them to
remember, Laing notes, "that they have been there before.'' Paul, too,
has "been there
before." He is a "flower becoming a seed" (Aiken 235), regressing into
an atavistic state.
Initially, Paul's perception is acute; he is highly observant and shows
fine visual
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discrimination. He notices, for example, the minute features of small
freckles on the neck
of the girl who sits in front of him in school even after the first
onslaught of the snow,
and even later, on his walk home from school, he sees everything in
great detail, from
the texture of the garden wall he passes, to the shapes of small twigs,
to the tracks of a
dog still visible in a sidewalk. But he witnesses these things, these
"items of mere
externality," with indifference and a "merely tolerant eye" (223-225).
For the whiteness
of the coming snow calls him away from these things; it is a temptation
impossible to
resist, It teases "at the corners of his eyes" (at the periphery of his
vision, where
memory and rationality--the powers that daily resurrect the familiar
world of objects from
oblivion--cannot make themselves as readily available as in focal
perception) and makes
even the sunlight "snow-laden" (226).
Paul's mother, ironically enough, wonders if Paul's increasing
absent-mindedness is due
to eyestrain and, in a sense, it is. But Paul's preference for
whiteness does not
necessarily stem from weakness. Paul delights in the snow's coming
precisely because of
its capacity for "hiding the ugly" (220) and because in it he finds
beauty and mystery far
surpassing the "arranged light" of his home environment. In his The
World Through
Blunted Sight, the opthalmologist Patrick Trevor-Roper tells the story
of a man named
Sidney Bradford, who, after gaining his sight for the first time at the
age of 52, became
despondent over the ugliness of the world (the sight of flaking paint
could send him into
deep depressions) and died in misery. And many of the cataract
patients von Senden
studied found ordinary vision similarly depressing. One even threatened
to tear out his
eyes if' lie wasn't sent back to the asylum. Most felt deeply "the
rapid and complete loss
of that striking and wonderful serenity which is characteristic only of
those who have
never yet seen." Paul Hasleman, however, has "seen" all his life, and
the darkness that
he seeks, when it finally overwhelms him, comes in "long white waves"
(234). In his
Politics of Experience, R. D. Laing has noted that today, immediate
experience of, in
contrast to belief or faith in, a spiritual realm of demons, spirits,
Powers, Dominions,
Principalities, Seraphim and Cherubim, the Light, is even more remote.
As domains of
experience become more alien to us, we need greater and greater
open-mindedness
even to conceive of their existence.
Paul knows that no one in his immediate world possesses such
open-mindedness and
that only he can appreciate the delicacy of his secret. He thinks it
outrageous to even
share it with those uncomprehending and immune-to-mystery adults who
surround him,
checkmating his wonder. But what Paul sees, it should be remembered,
although it
seems like madness to the modern mind, was once a sought after vision;
a large
percentage of the world's famed mystics has, at one time or another,
experienced a
vision of whiteness as a revelation of God’s glory.
In the lore of Hasidic Judaism, for example, Martin Buber tells us, can
be found mention of
a phenomenon known as the "first light" which is the true source of all
wisdom;
Before the soul enters the air of this world, it is conducted
through all the worlds. Last of all, it is shown the first light which
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once--when the world was
created-illuminated all things, and
which God removed when mankind grew corrupt. Why is the soul
shown this light? So that, from that hour on, it may yearn to
attain the light, and approach it rung by rung in its life on earth.
And those who reach it, the zaddikim, into them the light enters,
and out of them it shines into the world again. That is the reason
why it was hidden. (38)
Paul Hasleman is best understood, it seems to me, as a failed zaddikim: [sic] the "first light"
does not so much enter him as he enters it, and he does not attain it
"rung by rung" but
only through a backward leap. He stands in relation to it as a kind of
black hole; the light
remains within him and does not shine out again into the outer world to
become a
common possession. But his death is, in a sense, heroic. He seeks it;
he even feels every
step of its "delicious progress" and consciously prefers it to the
death-in-life he sees
around him. And in an age in which--as Ivan Illich in his Medical
Nemesis has predicted--
obituaries will soon be written in the passive voice, to do that is a kind of
heroism.
REFERENCES
Aiken, C. (1960). The Collected Short
Stories of Conrad Aiken.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Buber, M. (1947). The Ten Rungs:
Hasidic Sayings.
New York: Schocken
Books: 38.
Laing, R. D. (1967). The Politics of
Experience.
New York; Ballantine
Books: 126.
Martin, J. ( 1962) Conrad
Aiken; A Life of His Art.
Princeton: Princeton
University Press: 83.
Miller, J. Hillis (1963). "The Literary Criticism of Georges Poulet."
Modern Language Notes: 77: 477.
Trevor-Roper (1970). The World Through
Blunted Sight.
Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill: 162.
Von Senden, M. (1932). Space and Sight.
Originally published, 1932.
New
York: The Free Press, 1960.
Zuckerkandl V. (1956). Sound and
Symbol: Music and the External World.
Trans. W. Trask.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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