And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
T.S Eliot
It's not snowing yet, and it's only a week since we had gorgeous weather, with people lying in the meadows, with bare arms. Still, those days have passed,a final air kiss blown to us from the hand of summer,an adieu, a bientot, I will see you next year Darling.
Yet already I am dreaming of snow. Last year it started snowing in late November. A friend and I got cheap tickets to The Marriage of Figaro for under 26-year-olds, on a freezing cold day, when we came out of the Festival theatre the ground was covered in a gentle dusting of snow, reflected by the lamps. It didn't stop snowing until January, by which time everyone was thoroughly sick of it, and the sludge had none of the romance of early winter, yet still I cannot hate snow when it is an abstract concept. I still associate it with childhood, with christmas markets, sledging, thick gloves, cocoa, the diamond panes of the windows in the cottage where I grew up catching the fine white dust.
I also think of Raymond Briggs snowman, which I had from early childhood, of the old collie dog we had who used to love chasing snowballs only to bite into them and find them crumble, icy in her mouth.
Yet I also always find myself thinking of 'The Snow-Queen' a fairytale I remember for it's icy magic, as opposed to the finer details of the plot, so much so that I had to wikipedia it for this article, but as I read the entry the story came back to me. You can read it by clicking above, but the one thing which surprised me was that in the story Kai gets a shard of glass in the eye, as opposed to a shard of ice in the heart, which I had always believed, perhaps due to my Mother always telling me that to be objective a writer had to 'keep a shard of ice in their heart at all times'
I think I was always enchanted by the frozen beauty of snowqueens, from the original one in the Hans Christian Anderson story to the terrifying opponent of Aslan in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. I always longed to be somehow similar to these women, with their coolth and ability to make people follow, and wished that I could somehow mould my puppyish please-like-me nature into pure Ice.
Yet as I grew up I learned from films that Ice queens are not always evil, not always cruel, but that they are beautiful women dressed perfectly for cold weather, battling the elements bravely and somehow managing not to get pink faced from the cold.
Iciness is all very well, but the counteracting force to this is warmth, so now I think of snowqueens as women of great warmth, beauty, tenderness and perhaps a single invisible shard of ice in their heart, because afterall, a girl needs to protect herself somehow.
I can really understand that idea of liking the abstract concept of snow! Although, however much I may complain about having to wade through piles of grey slush - I do like the idea of being cold, and having to wrap up, and make warm drinks...
ReplyDeleteI think that is my favourite part of The Wasteland, although I do like the 'Who is the third who always walks beside you' bit.
Thanks Becca, it always gives me a bit of a boost, makes me want to write more when someone says something lovely about my writing, and it makes me want to work on my play as well.
ReplyDeleteI adore The Wasteland, Eliot has something magical about him I think. I rember visitng a museum in Munich with the most elaborately gorgeous Sleds with golds and reds, which would have been drawn by deer. I think they were bought from Russia and they seemed to have an aura of sinister fairytale magic about them, I could imagine them being drawn across long snowy plains with people in furs drinking hot toddy from flasks.x
I always thought that the idea of Kai having the shard of glass in his eye was a good metaphor for the way that people sometimes see the world as a skewed version of itself - 'through a glass, darkly'. That moment when you get something in your eye and it becomes all you can think about, until it is washed out by tears.
ReplyDeleteAwwww, yeah I see what you mean though, although I sort of think of the shard of glass in the heart as something necessary, protective even.
ReplyDelete