Sherry Chandler

Brooks Carver writes:

Cantonville is the winner! Yes, we now hold a record for the biggest snowfall in the state for December 1st. SEVENTEEN INCHES!!! I, with my fathful companion snow blower, had a ball yesterday. I started clearing my neighbor’s driveways and pretty soon I had a little army of men with shovels going all up and down the street doing good works. We must have cleaned about six or seven drives, some of them fairly long. I had lots of hot chocolete and a few beers besides. Nothing runs like a Deere. I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a deeper snow. Perhaps in Mpls., but it was long, long ago.

Nine above zero this morning.

This is a contest I’ll gladly let Brooks win. But I will stop complaining because wind was gusting so strong in Lexington yesterday that it blew my earmuffs off my head. First time I’ve ever had that happen.

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By coincidence, I ran across this Emerson poem today:

The Snowstorm

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hill and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north wind’s masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hiddden thorn;
Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer’s sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Text from the American Transcendalism Web

The Sedlec Ossuary is a small Christian chapel decorated with human bones. It’s located in Sedlec, a suburb of the Czech town Kutna Hora.

In 1278, the Cistercian abbot of Sedlec made a pilgrimage to Palestine and brought back a bit of soil from Golgotha, a typical tourist impulse. By sprinkling this soil around, he transformed the local graveyard into a bit of the Holy Land and, coincidentally, into prime real estate for dying Europeans. During the 14th century especially, and the years of The Black Death, the terminally ill flocked to Sedlac for burial and brought their dead relations with them.

After a while, as often happens in old European cemeteries, it became necessary to dig up the old corpses to make room for the new. Thus the ossuary, built in about 1511.

But it was left to a 19th century woodcarver (ahem) named Frantisek Rindt to turn 40,000 sets of human bones into a macabre sort of architectural ornamentation. Decorating with bones does seem such a 19th century sort of thing.

A man named Frisco Ramirez has gifted us with a gallery of photographs of what I can only call bone bas-relief in this chapel. I am not going to reproduce one here because they are proprietary (and for sale) but I do recommend that you click through on the banner above and take a look. The image I’ve included here is from Wikipedia. Click the thumbnail to see it full sized.

It will cause you to contemplate your mortality here in the closing days of the year, now that we have reached “meteorological winter.”

Or perhaps odd ways to find immortality through art.

As usual, a hat tip to Donna Marder, my guide to art on the web.

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Ossuary, a short black & white film by the Czech animator Jan Svankmajer takes a tour of Sedlec, using the Jacques Prévert poem “How to Make the Likeness of a Bird” as soundtrack.

How to make the likeness of a bird…
how to make a likeness
First draw a cage
with an open door…