To describe the experience of cold is oddly difficult. Cold is subjective. If I’d never felt cold before, how would it feel? A tingling sensation, a little nerve-wracking. A biting brightness under skin, a gradual burning. Something that makes you want to move.
I am a cold person, cold inside, a person of the cold. The thought of being outdoors, night descending, and I need to pull on a jacket, is a moment I find quite pleasant to imagine. I’ve always liked cold weather, an open window, snow and ice. When I was little, I hated wearing a jacket, I was always so hot. I like winter landscapes, northern cities at midday in January, cold-water swimming, cold showers. Coldness brings a gravity. It lingers on the floor. I know my cold, my sense of cold, is probably different, perhaps odd, I don’t mean to suggest I like shivering, or don’t find cold uncomfortable and painful, don’t appreciate that many people (most?) find being cold rotten. And obviously it all can be much worse. We had a neighbor in Maine named Rat who was found dead under his front porch. He went out drunk one night in mid-winter, looking for something – firewood, more liquor – and didn’t come back.
I thought about the cold this week because the novel I’m working on is going slowly. I’m thirty-thousand words in, and it’s a closed, lifeless thing. It’s not a nice coldness. I sit, open the file, return to my imagination, seal myself off in this little world, then instantly I struggle to remember where I am or why I’m there. This often happens early in a fiction project. I run hot for a second, lose myself in a character for a couple hours or days, then go back to read what I’ve written and realize it’s flimflam, pretty words with zero insides, no ideas, no feeling (and sometimes the words aren’t even pretty). It’s not for nothing, I need the bad days to reach the good days, but it’s not for fun.
I wonder about the usefulness of the stories we tell ourselves; how do we live truthfully in a world that doesn’t require us to be? I’ve long associated the cold with a sense of truth, the hard-won, and also something innate in me, who I know myself to be. But that’s silly. Cold is cold. Our minds change all the time. Still, it’s hard to argue with temperature. When a room warms up, I’m instantly uncomfortable, slightly irritable. The body feels before the mind thinks, or so it seems.
Book sidebar: Last week of holiday shopping! And thanks to everyone who’s ordered. Basically, I’m signing and shipping copies of the new book, and if you and/or your beloved so desire, for $30/book (postage included), I’ll inscribe and mail wherever.
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From tomorrow’s “Sunday Supplement,” with three things I appreciate (and you might, too). This week about things I’ve recently seen and read.
There are certain movies out now I want to see, or I definitely don’t want to see, based on keywords. “Weird Los Angeles,” “coming-of-age story,” “Sean Penn on a motorcycle” – Licorice Pizza, fabulous, want to see it. “Torture nightmares,” “extreme horror,” “Vin Diesel on acid” – Titane, please no, don’t want to see it. (But: respect.)
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What the what? “Meditations in an Emergency” is a weekly email published Saturdays by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin about things he finds beautiful. “The Sunday Supplement” is a recommendation bulletin for paying subscribers.
Rosecrans’s new book, Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, is available from Bookshop, Amazon, or your local store. Any other books mentioned in this newsletter are featured on a Bookshop list.