Cherry Trees and Sleigh Bells
Dear Michael and Tara,
I feel the need to pause a bit on the early pages of Chapter 68, even before we are introduced to the Christian hangman, Mr. Weed. As you wrote, Michael, the Tavern at which the bus comes to a stop is the final destination for our three passengers, “even if it was not the one intended.” It seems that hell is a busy place, densely trafficked by both the seen and unseen. Vera acknowledges her mistake in coming to the Tavern:
“Oh, have you seen my love, Miss MacIntosh, my darling, her bald head upon the waves? I should have followed the shore lights. I should never have come to this deep country so far from any shoreline.”
Then, there is this memory of Vera’s that I find so poignant. One day she notices sleigh bells tied to the branches of a blooming cherry tree, placed there to keep the birds away. Vera is fascinated with this “music of winter in summer.” But not Miss MacIntosh! She puts her hands over Vera’s eyes. She does not want Vera “to carry away in my mind the memory of sleigh bells in a cherry tree. Such confusion, she said, was not the mirror of truth.”
We’ve written often about the co-existing dualities and circuities in this novel; how these thematic tools do not contradict but rather complement each other. When Miss MacIntosh says that sleigh bells in a cherry tree is a situation that is “not the mirror of truth,” does she mean that is not true, not real? Or instead, does she mean that it is not the mirror image, not the reflected reverse of truth, and thus, is indeed THE TRUTH? (Perhaps I am the one wracked with confusion here!) The music of wintertime in the midst of summer marks the duality—the two most extreme seasons--and also the circular nature of time: winter things become summer things, and then again, winter ones.
How then do we think about the Tavern? This dead end? This hell? Is there really no escape, no continuous circle of life and death for our beloved Vera, Catherine, Mr. Spitzer, and Miss MacIntosh? I’m eager to read the final two hundred and fifty pages of the novel in the hope of finding out. After more than one thousand pages with these characters, I shudder to think of them eternally locked in the Tavern with the Christian hangman and his perfect knot.
Walking through a field of sunflowers in full bloom during a blinding blizzard,
Lori
Lori: Pauses in other books might be digressions; in this they are right on topic. Vera wishing she was searching the shore singing “Oh, have you seen my love…” rather than being in this haunted hotel, activates the memory of alert readers, recalling, if only subliminally, the same words spoken by Cousin Hannah, searching for her own lost love : “Oh, have you seen my love, dead love? Did she lift her veil embroidered with the stars, and did you see her eyes shining through a cloud?” in Chapter 43 and again with slight variations in Chapters 44 and 45, and, most memorably in Chapter 46. If this be repetition, then, as Orsino says in 12th Night, “give me more of it.” No matter where you are in this Great Big Book, you’ve been there before, and we are continually reminded of that, sometimes loud and clear, and other times, subtly and tenderly. As for the poignant memory involving sleigh bells in a cherry tree, we are at the book’s center and of other poets’ search for the “deep heart’s core.” Beholding winter in the midst of summer is an insult to the compartmentalized mind, such as that of Miss MacIntosh and it is also a trope for poets such as T.S. Eliot who begins his last Quartet, “Little Gidding” with “Midwinter spring is its own season..” and goes on to confront the “confusions” which are a consequence of things refusing to stay in their own compartments. I imagine Miss MacIntosh to be speaking literally when she says she wears “blinders” to keep her from confusing summer with winter, just as I imagine that she quite literally wears a “harness” from Chapter Three to keep her in line. Significantly, Miss M says such confusion is “not the mirror of truth.” In a previous post we posited that great big books are never after truth but reality.Truth is one and can be got by belief; Reality is multiform and requires believing “beyond belief, without belief.” Reality, the genuine goal of Vera’s quest (despite her name), embraces all including both Miss M and Vera’s mother, all things, including the many legged and repellent, the mute, the deaf, the saint and the rapist, the sleigh bells in the cherry tree and the things that go bump in the night. ====Michael Sexson
I know!! Is she denying the Wheel of the Year? So many things left to ponder...