Our Memories of Snow

I remember running open-mouthed into my English school

playground in June, flakes of snow falling from a blue sky, our
lessons abandoned I remember being pulled to kindergarten on a
sledge, clambering off and finding my boot plucked away by a
stubborn snow-drift, a pink sock dangling at the bottom of my wet
jeans I remember being in a red Toyota Corolla heading north.
The car slipping and skidding through a snow-bound Scottish town.
My dad climbing out to push, my mum sliding into the drivers seat,
the windscreen wipers stopping and then a snow plough, lights on,
forcing a way through I remember hugging my granddad warm as
we watched my brother dance in the fresh white cold snow
outside ... I remember my dad, with his white coat and Turkish
bobble hat, laughing as I fell off the tea tray he was pulling behind
him. I cried when he brushed the snow from my face.
These are some memories. Some family memories. Some memories of
snow.
Snow exerts a particular pull on our memories, it squeezes and stretches
our recollections until they become larger, more durable, more resonant,
more present than those associated with other forms of weather. As such,
our memories of snow develop until they take on the status of the anthrocosmic - a term coined by the French poet-philosopher Gaston Bachelard.
The anthro-cosmic speaks of those phenomena that work to connect the
human to the magic that surrounds us, to the world of enchantment and
mystery.
In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard understands the anthro-cosmology of
snow as a kind of metaphysics of shelter. For him, winter is by far the
oldest of the seasons. Not only does it confer age upon our memories,
taking us back to a remote past but, on snowy days, the house too is old.
Drawing upon literary endeavours by the likes of De Quincey, Baudelaire
and Rimbaud, Bachelard sees snow, more than heat, rain or even storm,
as something that evokes the protection of home - the protection of roof,
walls and fire - while, simultaneously, evidencing the very perishability of
that protection and, by extension, of the human project itself. The house
derives reserves and refinements from winter; while in the outside world,
snow covers all tracks, blurs the road, muffles every sound, conceals all
colours. As a result of this universal whiteness, we feel a form of cosmic
negation in action.
Yet Bachelards house does not exhaust the possibilities of an anthrocosmology of snow. For those of us who inhabit temperate climates in
which the conditions required for snow are rarely, if ever, met, the arrival
of snow can speak of things other than the permanence or otherwise of
shelter. The sudden appearance of snow in an empty sky - especially that
snow so sparse and so diminutive that it has us looking at first for some
other source for these small and isolated flakes acts like a temporary
truce. Conversations are interrupted, faces turned upwards in an
innocence of looking, glances exchanged between strangers. The
difference between Bachelards snow of heart and hearth the snow of
home and this transient snow the kind that inspires the clichd

exclamation Look, snow!; that falls from nowhere and disappears just as
quickly can be marked in sound.
As Bachelard remarks, his snow muffles sound, slowing its movement
through air, blurring its distinctiveness. This snow keeps us distant from
the world separated by the window through which we observe it and
the sound associated with it echoes that separation, confirms the cosmic
negation in action. Concentrating on the aural effects of snow on the
environment reveals that the fleeting flurry of snow, on the other hand, is
accompanied by a different register of sound. Listening back, for example,
to an audio recording made on Londons Oxford Street recently, I can hear
an abrupt brightening of acoustic events. Aspects of the perceived
difference can be related to something as banal as the changing
composition of oxygen molecules in the air and the corresponding changes
in the propagation or movement of sound. Other explanations for the
change in sound can be located in the change of peoples behaviour, such
as the raising of voices and other evidence of excitement. Things seems to
speed up, to open up to the possibility of change. Elements of these
changes are present in the following, a quotation from Orhan Pamuks
magnificent autobiographical work, Istanbul: Memories of a City. It is
impossible for me to remember my childhood without this blanket of snow.
Some children cant wait for their summer holidays to begin, but I couldnt
wait for it to snow not because I would be going outside to play in it, but
because it made the city look new, not only by covering up the mud, filth,
the ruins and neglect, but by producing in every street and every view an
element of surprise, a delicious air of impending disaster What I loved
most about the snow was it power to force people outside of themselves
to act as one; cut off from the world, we were stranded together.
In another book by Pamuk, the novel Snow, we hear yet another intimation
of an anthro-cosmology, one that is neither Bachelards snow as ancient
memory of home and all that surrounds it nor snow as the fleeting sense
of excitation, of the unexpectedly new, whatever that new might be. This
anthro-cosmic snow is again announced by a specific sonic signature: The
silence of the snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If
this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called what he felt
inside him, the silence of the snow. This silence sounds very close to
what Ishmael, in Melvilles Moby Dick, spoke of as a dumb blankness, full
of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows a colourless, all-colour of
atheism from which we shrink. There is nothing about home in this silent
snow, nor anything that resonates with ideas about a world vulnerable to
sudden tilts of its axis.
Perhaps what we have in this silent snow is not a transient flurry in a city
street nor a blizzard knocking against home but something more
unsettling, initially at least. Melvilles evocation of the paradox of the
colourless but all-colour and the blank yet full gets at this unsettling
quality and Nicholas Hughes silent snowscapes, for me, share it. Viewing
these images for the second time at Londons Photographers Gallery, I
found myself casting around in vain for the best pithy description of them
until the term haunting crystallised in my head. Despite being something
of an over-used coin in the critical currency, haunting works because it
captures the beauty of these images (and thats as far as the typical
usage would go) but also recognises that there is something disconcerting

about them. As an active word, haunting also acknowledges the strategic

activity of the photographer, the effort and expertise required to arrive at
what we see before us and the intention that what we see stays with us
long afterwards. According to Hughes, his silent snow scenes reintroduce
us to a spiritual encounter with our life support system reacquaint us
with what weve lost the snow, a light dusting, reclaims the wild
temporarily, gives us a connection to a previous wilderness. If these
images offer a memory of snow, then, as images, the most they can offer
may be a surrogate memory. Yet, though vicarious, they still have
something of Bachelards anthro-cosmic to them, enough to intimate
another world to our own, one that may be wilder but is slower, quieter,
silent even.