Snowflake — a friend of mine (for convenience I’ll call him Harold) used this term in an e-mail awhile back, a few years ago, actually, and at first I didn’t realize he meant to be insulting me. Insulting in a friendly way — if that’s possible, and I think it is, although I don’t think he pulled it off.
Harold was born, raised and still lives in the deep South. He’s about my age, and we hold in common having grown up in small-town, rural America — more than a little to have in common. Our regional differences — me from central Pennsylvania, and him, as I said, the deep South — nevertheless seem to count for more than some of us might expect in 21st-century America.
I don’t remember what it was, exactly, that led Harold to call me a “snowflake” — and I admit, a little sheepishly, that at first I didn’t know what that was supposed to mean. I realize now that he’d been tuned-in to some media outlets, such as probably Rush Limbaugh, and others — Fox News — that I’m acquainted with enough to know I don’t care to be better acquainted.
So, thanks to my friend, I expanded my lexicon — “snowflake” in a derogatory sense. Let me emphasize, before going farther down this road, that Harold is still someone I count as a friend. In many ways, he’s a great guy. No doubt about it. Let me say also that he doesn’t lack for brains.
Consider this, for instance: I have in my condo, on a window-sill, the skull of a young black bear. It came from Vermont, which is one way I know it’s a black bear (Vermont has no brown bears). To explain: I have this skull because, about 20 years ago, I spent four weeks at an artist and writer’s retreat east of Burlington.
While I was there, I met an artist from upstate New York — I’ll call her Margaret — whose art involved building structures from readily available materials — e.g., using fallen tree branches and animal hides to build a wigwam and live in it. In part she did this to call attention to homelessness.
A broader point of Margaret’s aesthetic — not immediately obvious to me — was to avoid waste, to use resources as fully as possible. For her this recalled Native American culture, and for her constructions, through arangements she had somehow managed to work out with authorities (a large part of the “art” of her project), she used hide from deer killed on highways — carcasses that would otherwise be cremated, contributing to climate change (each one equivalent by some estimates to a 500-mile car trip).
Margaret’s installations, were — at least sometimes — mounted near expressway on-off ramps, with intent to call attention to sound ecological practice. On one occasion, she lived in her self-built wigwam for weeks — gaining media coverage. She cooked venison, ate and shared it with others. For many of us, conditioned by awareness of inexorable climate change, it’s not difficult to think that such kindred-ness with nature, drawn from pre-European Americans, may also be a version of the future.
At the artist retreat where I knew
Margaret, a local Vermont hunter lived next-door to her studio, and — as fate
would have it — he’d shot and killed a black bear, in season, and had the
carcass, still fresh, at his hunting lodge in the Green Mountains near there.
He had no plans to do anything with it, beyond letting it become what Whitman —
in one of his most magnificent poems, “This Compost” — called “leavings”:
It [Earth] distils such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks, its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.
Somehow Margaret learned about the bear carcass — probably from seeing a deer carcass hanging upside-down from a sturdy branch in the hunter’s backyard, ready to be skinned and carved for venison.
“Can I have it?” she asked — or words to that effect. It’s all yours, he said, but you have to bring it back. I don’t remember how she did that, but she did. I think it was at a meal conversation in the cafeteria at the retreat — great food, by the way — that someone mentioned the bear carcass, and Margaret invited me to her studio for the ritual carving of and feasting on bear meat.
Oh boy, I’m thinking now — this really happened. Somehow Margaret had managed to skin the bear, or maybe got the hunter to do that. Anyway, the bear didn’t skin her. She had meat, maybe from the rump or thigh, ready to be carved into edible portions, along with a scarily well-honed butcher’s knife for me to wield.
She also had a one-burner camp stove — one of those amazing Swedish backpacker stoves with a volatile light-up process — and a skillet with a pad of butter. We sizzled some bear chops. I’d eat it again — strong flavor, a little on the gamy side, musky, but tasty. Meat to get you through a Siberian winter, if you were sent to a labor camp — to imagine a worst-case scenario.
So — getting-on with this shaggy tale — Margaret gave me the bear’s head. It was strong medicine, she said. Having it would protect me from bad spirits. It was her gift to me for joining in the ritual of eating the bear. I wrapped it in a few layers of heavy plastic and kept it in a six-pack cooler in a restaurant-size refrigerator at the retreat.
For the drive home to Pittsburgh, I secured the wrapped-in-plastic head to the luggage rack of my Volvo wagon. It was February, and near-freezing or below temperatures were helpful, considering my cargo.
My wife, a writer and artist, was — only a little to my surprise — almost enthusiastically supportive of the bear-skull project. Although it was winter, I was able to dig enough of a hole in our suburban backyard to bury the head.
I left it a foot or so deep in the soil for a few months, maybe six. When I dug it up, it was all bone, but still with flecks of flesh and cartilage. Final step — soak it in a bucket of undiluted Clorox. After maybe a week, I washed it off and let it dry in the sun. Soon enough, I had a bone-white skull with fierce incisors that you can lift out of the jawbone like Lego pieces.
It sits on a windowsill in my loft. Harold, who owns and likes to fish from a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, holds a master’s degree in marine biology, but I didn’t expect him to know about bears. He was in Pittsburgh staying with me — years ago at this point. For kicks, I asked if he could identify the skull. He looked and with no hesitation said “young northern black bear.”
Impressed I was — to put it in Yoda syntax. And I still don’t feel at-ease with awareness that he has the know-how to look at a skull and know it’s a young black bear — and to be, at the same time, a right-wing Republican, one who calls me a snowflake. He infringes on my biases. To be politically conservative doesn’t mark someone as uneducated or unintelligent — intellectually I know this.
But still, why do I have this almost automatic bias? Maybe I should think more about this. Part of the answer is that many years ago I read John Stuart Mill’s pamphlet-length essay “On Liberty.”
I was in high school, in small-town, rural Pennsylvania. What led me to this heady task? “Great Books of the Western World” deserves a plug here. From a set of these tomes a door-to-door saleman had left on perusal, the title grabbed me. Mill’s ideas and prose drew me in, and I read carefully. He explained things I hadn’t thought about with clarity, and affirmed what is, probably, my almost instinctual impulse toward liberalism.
Extrapolating from Mill, to be liberal means, simply enough, to be open-minded. New ideas, fresh thought depend on this cultural attitude — this is one of Mill’s arguments. If we are to progress culturally, we need to be liberal, because otherwise where would innovation come from? The opposite of liberal, to hold to the status quo, by definition neuters the possibility of social progress.
I grant you this is an almost crass oversimplification of Mill’s thought (and his rich prose style), but it’s also a reasonably fair summation of one of his major themes. It made sense to me, and lit me with a feeling of affirmation, since I had — in a few situations — argued for liberalism, without knowing that a world-class thinker was backing me up.
On a personal basis, to be liberal — I remind myself not often enough — means to hold in mind that on any given topic my view of things might be off — i.e., wrong. The optimal attitude is open-mindedness. I may be insufficiently taking into account many things. To be folksy, it means there’s a reason I have two ears and only one mouth.
Strangely enough, I can think of no better example than my Dad. He was by no means a liberal — politically or by attitude. Nor was he — in an academic sense — highly educated. He was a hard man, a strict (and physical) disciplinarian as a father. Significantly in his makeup was that he’d been to war.
That came into play in the late 60s to early 70s, when we discussed a few times — earnestly, since I was a young and nothing-if-not-earnest fellow — the Vietnam War. He’d by then been elected commander of the local VFW and led a squad of uniformed men who ceremoniously fired rifles into the air at local veterans funerals.
By no means predisposed to oppose a war his country was fighting, he nevetheless took-in what I had to say — memorable since many people in those days had no ear for anti-war sentiment. He also argued back and was for a long time adamantly pro-war. But to my utter surprise one day he said — with finality — “Mike, you’re right.” Most of this time I was living in another state, but well remember, from one of my visits home, the two of us at the kitchen table having this father-son talk. “This war’s wrong.”
It wasn’t me alone, by any means, that turned his thought. He’d seen too many young men in body bags on TV and begun to doubt familiar tropes about “domino theory” and anti-communism. He’d also, no doubt, had a few conversations with VFW comrades. For me, nevertheless, it was a glorious moment, and I gloated not at all.
The terminology of liberal-conservative, I concede (to myself), can impose barriers to clear thought, but still, to be liberal means to be expansive and generous-minded, open to the possible, as opposed to holding on to pre-conceptions. One could say that it’s the difference between bounded and unbounded thought. OK, but this is almost pure abstraction, and means little more than to use different words for “conservative” and “liberal.” It means I’m thinking in circles.
Good thinking — I conclude — means getting beyond labels. It means being concrete, to argue and discuss in concrete terms. So what does it mean that Harold called me a “snowflake”? Clearly, he intended an insult. To answer I could call on Shakespearean invective (e.g., Prince Hal to Falstaff, Henry IV, Part 1, II, iv). I might, for instance, say: Thou cankerous tickle-brain, sallow-mouthed toadface.
I prefer to think a little beyond invective. Few of us are unaware that a snowflake is an unimaginably complex phenomenon, unfailingly six-sided, symmetrical and, at the same time, infinitely varied. If you could make lace collars from snowflakes (I’m remembering my grandmother’s living-room “doilies”), you could probably make a fortune — provided you could afford a marketing consultant with, say, a Stanford MBA.
A snowflake, absolutely, is a beautiful thing. Harold — although, a true Southerner, someone who recoils at the thought of snow or below-freezing temperature — might, if pressed, concede this. So, if you’re reading this, old pal, be aware that I’m taking it as a compliment that I remind you of something you’ve never seen — melting on a window, on your hand, or otherwise — an evanescent evocation of things that exist beyond our ability to express.
No doubt, if we were to have this conversation, Harold would find another way to state his disregard for — in an historical nutshell — Yankee liberal elites. Those of us, in other words, who read The New Yorker, enjoy the symphony and seldom eat chitlins and cheese grits. Or, for that matter, hushpuppies.
Harold, sometime you should try scrapple, aka panhaas. Or cutlets of young black bear — hard to find. Still without reserve I admit that I prefer your charcoal-grilled frutti de mare, fresh-catch grouper and red snapper — bellissimo. As for political discussion, it’s OK with me if we skip that. Thank you.
_____
Mike Schneider’s poems appear in journals, anthologies and three chapbooks. His full-length poetry collection Spring Mills is forthcoming.
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