good morning Hank it's Tuesday there's a
kava Akbar poem that begins it's been
January for months in both directions
and it really has been for quite a while
here in Indianapolis the only answer to
why is the sky blue
has been that it isn't blue I keep
thinking about a line from a mountain
goat song the gray sky was vast and real
cryptic above me real cryptic indeed
there's a phrase in literary analysis
for our habit of ascribing human
emotions to the nonhuman the pathetic
fallacy which is often used to reflect
the inner life of characters through the
outer world as when Keats in ode to
melancholy writes of a weeping cloud or
Shakespeare in Julius Caesar refers to
threatening clouds in Emily Dickinson's
poetry sometimes the clouds are curious
other times mean and this literary
device often works because ultimately
whether a cloud weeps or threatens is
largely down to who's looking at it and
when so here in the American middle
there's a common weather phenomenon we
call wintry mix precipitation will shift
from sleet to snow to rain and then back
again sometimes we'll get these weird
snow pellets called graupel snow is
beautiful
almost ridiculously picturesque as it
wafts down from the sky and blankets the
ground wintry mix is radically
unromantic as nicely captured by the
word graupel it feels like the sky is
spitting on you for years now I've
wanted to review wintry mix for my
podcast the Anthropocene reviewed
because it is such a thoroughly
Midwestern form of precipitation
practical unlovely and unpretentious but
the problem with wintry mix is that
there's literally nothing interesting
about it snow is interesting like
consider for example the story of Wilson
Bentley the amateur photographer who
became the first person to take a
close-up photograph of a snowflake in
1885 and went on to photograph more than
5000 snowflakes which he called ice
flowers and tiny miracles of beauty
that's good stuff but wintery mix at
least so far as I'm aware has no such
tales to tell
that photographer Wilson Bentley once
said the farm folks up in the country
dread the winter
but I was supremely happy it's hard to
imagine even Wilson Bentley being
supremely happy about wintry mix but if
I can't write about it for the
anthropocene reviewed all write about it
here obviously I don't love being pelted
by tiny balls of freezing rain or having
sleet lash at me from seemingly
impossible angles as it blows across the
flat and unbroken misery of a grocery
store parking lot but I do kind of like
wintry mix it's one of the ways I know
that I'm home I love Indianapolis
precisely because it isn't easy to love
you have to stay here a while to know
it's beauty you have to learn to read
the clouds as something more than
threatening or dreary the words pathetic
fallacy sound derogatory and they were
originally intended as such but two
things make the pathetic fallacy work
first many of us really are affected by
the weather especially in the slimly lit
days of winter and so even if the
weather doesn't have human emotions it
does literally cause them and secondly
we can't help but see the world around
us in the context of ourselves
especially our emotional selves that's
not a bug of human consciousness but a
feature of it as Sarah and I drove
through Indianapolis last week on our
way to a poetry reading the weather
didn't feel angry or spiteful it felt
adventurous even hopeful on another
night of course the same weather would
have been threatening or menacing or
joyless what you're looking at matters
but not as much as how you're looking or
who you're looking with and that night I
was with just the right person in just
the right place and I'll be damned if
the weather wasn't beautiful Hank I'll
see you on Friday