Jeanne Koré Salvato

ne thing about winter, it seems to me, is that the forward motion we normally so enjoy is not really what we experience during this time. It occurs to me that winter is a time of patterns, the way the brush repeats itself along the road, on the hillside, in the parks where we hike.  Just like we have the slow food movement, we could, in honor of winter, inaugurate the slow blog movement. 

Keuka Outlet Trail (Salvato)

SLOW BLOG MOVEMENT
What would this look like?

For this winter post, I would like to embed the page of the blog that has the overview of the entire project. That way, we could scroll through idly, enjoying the featured images, returning to a post or discovering it for the first time.  Perhaps we could trace patterns in the blog itself. Here’s that link. 

SNOW
What is winter without snow?  Here’s a clip that celebrates something of winter.  You could also say the clip celebrates the nothing that winter seems to be. It takes place at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where you can see snow, on a stick, on a pond, on rushing waters.  This is where I first saw the play Waiting for Godot, not out there on Beebe Lake but inside the theatre.  What a weird and wonderful play. Right?  Samuel Beckett would not be happy to hear me talk about being instead of doing, but that is what this clip seems to suggest.  Waiting as watching, or basically, doing nothing.

NOTHING
Speaking of winter and of nothing, here’s a Wallace Stevens’ poem called, “The Snow Man.”

The Snow Man   
Wallace Stevens – 1879-1955

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

****

WAITING AS, WELL, WAITING
What is winter, if not a time of waiting?  Right, Godot? Especially in the colder climes, we’ve got the waiting for summer—hey, I’ll take spring— waiting game going on. 

Lilac Tree: Home Sweet Home, Rochester (Salvato)

Pick something, anything you’re waiting for and enjoy a similar, “Wait for it,” moment from the Broadway play Hamilton, when Arron Bur, Hamilton’s rival, contrasts all of Hamilton’s doing with his own waiting.  (How could any play be so good?)

Here’s the song, “Wait for It.” 

https://youtu.be/XSwF-iwrT2k

PARIS MEETS ROCHESTER
Or, Godot in Winter

When I saw the street signs unreadable in the snow, I thought, no wonder I like the play, Waiting for Godot so much.  I mean, waiting for a sign?  In all senses of the word, including the absurd! What do you do when a sign can’t be read?  Nothing to be done, is the answer, which is the way the play Waiting for Godot begins.

Come join me in Rochester, where in the winter you can’t get where you’re going, but it won’t matter.  We’ll just go have a coffee.

Share This