One of the gifts of nature to those living in the temperate zones of the world are four seasons that are distinct and different. Or maybe not so much a gift but more like a mixed blessing. You already know this. Those happiest in such regions love the many varieties of temperature and light and the weather that literally come with the territory; the rest suffer with various levels of what the shrinks call seasonal affective disorder, so common that it’s listed as one of the flavors of depression in the DSM, psychiatry’s official catalogue of mental health maladies.
The thing to know about SAD is that it’s really mostly about winter (and to a much lesser degree summer for an unlucky few, but never mind about that). Demographic trends suggest that winter is the big loser in this popularity contest: just look at the swelling numbers of people in the so-called Sun Belt, where many a case of SAD has been permanently cured by a move to Florida or Arizona. Just leave that Prozac or Celexa behind in Massachusetts or Illinois or wherever, and good riddance! Just hope that depression isn’t sneaking up on you from another direction, which it almost always is, such is the human condition.
SAD is never about spring or fall, says the DSM (which doesn’t always get it right, believe me) and even those who know that every season has its charms – a key attitude for the committed and sane temperate-zoner to maintain – the “charms” of winter and summer can wear a bit thin at times or all too often. Any honest person living in New England will readily admit this.
Go down on ice once or twice or sweat through a spell of serious heat and humidity and you’ll start to dream about living in Hawaii. In the end it will just amount to a pleasant moment of reverie, nothing more. And living in Hawaii is damned expensive, for one thing, unless you’re a beach bum and we know they all have trust funds. Gauguin made it to Tahiti, apparently without a trust fund, but you ain’t Gauguin and neither am I and times have changed. Start a hedge fund and buy that island, if you can, and good luck to you!
Many New Englanders will tell you fall is their favorite season, and they have their reasons, but for sheer joy the fall season can’t beat spring. Or rather: spring! Time of rebirth and new growth! Light and warmth! When the world is all mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful! as the poet says. And as the local creatures that spend the winter outdoors would tell you if they could: no joy can surpass that which arises from the realization that you’ve survived another winter!
Vague memories of the arrival of spring in the midwest also suggest to me that there’s something to the old saw or truism or bit of folk wisdom (or maybe it was Kierkegaard or Nietzsche) that “true joy can only arise to the level that one has suffered” or however that goes. Folks in Chicago truly went a bit nuts on those first warm days in a way New Englanders wouldn’t understand.
But about that poet and his poem: it’s one of several listed by the Poetry Foundation in the “joy” category of their Poems About Spring. There are also predictable sections on “flowers” and “in love” as well as “spiritual”and “youth”. There is also another category: “melancholy”.
What’s that? Spring can inspire melancholy? The distinguished authors of the DSM say nothing about this, and those guys know their psychology, at least of the pathological kind. They literally wrote the book on the subject. Hey, the human mind is complicated, okay?
Sometimes art can be a bit more perceptive than science, and being art, can also say it better, as in one of my very favorite songs from the world of jazz : Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most. Sources claim the 1955 song (lyrics by Fran Landesman, music by Tommy Wolf, after they met by chance in a bar in St Louis) was inspired by Tom Eliot’s famous line: “April is the cruelest month”, the beginning of what Wikipedia bills as one of the most important poems of the 20th century, The Waste Land, from 1922.
Take on the 434-line Waste Land at your peril, unless of course you love complex modernist poetry and might get the references to the Holy Grail and the Fisher King, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare and Buddhism and the Upanishads and no doubt much more than all that. Go for it!
Other than a few references to Lilacs and spring rain early on, The Waste Land demands a lot of erudition in short order, and maybe it’s enough to know that the themes are disillusionment and despair, much of it a reflection on the traumatic effects generated by the first World War.
If you’d prefer a more current take on this kind of thing, you might try Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row, which actually has a line about Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot “fighting in the captain’s tower”. The Waste Land is in fact dedicated to Ezra Pound, and whether Bob went on to read the whole poem is anybody’s guess. You might also find Bob and his song as much of a heavy lift as Tom, slouching towards meaning-rich obscurity in his own way. Hey, they both won Nobel Prizes! They are studied in college lit classes! At least you can hum Bob. Or settle for the jazz song, which operates on a much more emotional than intellectual level. As does spring, wouldn’t you say?
Compared to Desolation Row SCRHYUTM is also much more tuneful and slow and contemplative and barely jazzy, more like what you’d hear in a Broadway-musical, which is where it ended up. It’s about unrequited love, which for the singer comes around every spring, as in “spring fling”, specifically the kind that never leads anywhere. This finally leads to the singer preferring winter (!) in a kind of betrayal, if only sort of.
Many jazz singers, almost all female, have taken on the meandering melody line and surprising changes of key of the song, which present quite a challenge to the average jazz diva. There are at least 143 interpretations available for your listening pleasure, with icons like Ella Fitzgerald and Betty Carter and Cassandra Wilson at the jazz end, and more Broadway/pop stars like Bette Midler and Barbra Streisand and Jane Monheit going the other way. If you want to get more radical, you can try Rickie Lee Jones or Holly Cole and so many more. Diana Krall is conspicuously absent, but then my list might be incomplete. If it all wears you out, I suggest sticking with the original recording by Jackie and Ray from 1955, which plays it totally straight with no clever stylings or embellishments, as the tune itself might be clever enough already.
So what about spring? Aside from the heavy freight of meaning presented to us by the Nobel poets – for whom nature and the vagaries of the weather might be of minimal interest (did Tom ever leave his study? does Bob ever spend any time outdoors, other than those moments on stage at mega concert venues? does he ever play Frisbee with any of his many children?) – maybe it all comes down to failed expectations and little else, whether you’re talking about the human race and its destiny or true love that never works out or even shows up in the first place. As the song tells us: “Spring came along a season of sun/Full of sweet promise but something went wrong”.
The singer so far has never found true love. Is it spring’s fault? It pays to be wary of expectations, especially the more specific they are. In the case of spring, winter is over, but despite the hopes of many, this is nature, who takes her time about everything, especially the changes of the seasons. The darkness fades steadily but everything else happens by fits and starts, the cold and the wet constantly trades with the sunny and the warm. And with the loopy jet stream with which global warming has now blessed us, these fits and starts might just get a bit more extreme. You don’t like it? Get over it. Or move far away from it. Or learn to love it, with all its changes and the emotional roller coaster it might trigger sometimes. It might sound strange, but you can love all your emotions, so long as none get out of hand. They are all part of the richness of who you are.
As a visual exercise, I give you before and after pics from the past month, late March into early April. The ever-changing floral parade that is the visual spectacle of New England spring moves from snowdrops to crocuses to daffodils and then magnolias. Or something like that. Most of this flora is pretty durable as regards snowfalls and temperature drops, but those early maggies need to watch out, so to speak.
These glorious trees got it wrong, as temps dipped to the high teens for a few days, and the results were quite dramatic.
Do the “before” images bring you joy? As in, winter’s over and it’s all mud-luscious and godawful wonderful and nature is awakening after a long cold slumber? Do the “afters” bring you down? Like beauty and hope have been snuffed out and will this dreariness go on forever and how will I survive, or at least get through the next few months to come? Come to think of it, frost burned flowers are indeed kind of sad-looking, but why does your brain tell you “sad” and leave it at that? It’s merely what happened. And there are tons more flowers on the way, and you know it.
Winter is over, in the way that nature closes out any season, which is to say here and there, a little bit at a time. And just maybe, in some ways, you’re gonna miss winter, which had its charms. The sound of the first loud motorcycle of spring always depresses me, for example; the quiet of winter was a joy. Or maybe for you it really is time to move to Phoenix, where mega-decibel Harleys thump out their racket year around and you just might get one and make your own cacophony every month of year Hey, the rest of us will miss you! And maybe we’ll visit – but only in January or February. Gotta get back to New England for March, and especially April, which can be cruel but never all the time. I for one wouldn’t have it any other way.
