"epilogue"

What is striking about the epilogue is the complete absence of any thoughts of Inman.  He has completely vanished; the only connection to him is "a tall slender girl of nine."

Otherwise, it's a scene of nature's abundance. It is an October tradition with Ada and Ruby to have "a last picnic there before cold weather set in." In contrast to Inman's dream of a home, this is a real home made by the women's combined efforts.  Ruby has married the boy from Georgia and they have three sons. Ruby's father is there with his fiddle, but he also performs the practical task of milking the cow.

I've said Inman is absent from this epilogue, but he is indirectly suggested in the world of art; first in the fiddle tune Strobrod plays and then in the story Ada reads about Baucis and Philemon. The tune is about Bonnie George Campbell who "rode out on a day" and contains the refrain, "home came his good horse but never came he."

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Baucis and Philemon are an old married couple, the only ones in their town to welcome the disguised gods Zeus and Hermes. The couple feed the gods generously, but when they realize they are in the presence of gods, Philemon "thought of catching and killing the goose that guarded their house and making it a meal for the guests." Zeus tells them they do not need to slay the goose, but they should climb the nearby mountain. When they reach the top, they turn around to see that their town has been flooded.

Coming back they see that their house has been turned into an ornate temple. The gods also grant them their wish to stay together forever and that when it came time for one of them to die, the other would die as well.  When they died, they were changed into an intertwining pair of trees as Frazier mentions. [All this is from Wikipedia; don't want you to think I actually knew it.]

Finally, there is the gospel tune, Angel Band, in which "the girl," Inman's daughter, joins in the chorus with Strobrod and sings "bear me away on your snowy wings."  The complete line is "bear me away on your snowy wings to my immortal home."

On that note, I leave you with a version sung by Joan Baez and Jeffrey Shurtleff.  You can listen to it as many times as you want -- as I'm sure many mountain people have.

Since my original video is no longer available, I've provided a new one. 

"spirits of crows, dancing"

In this last chapter, the narrator describes Ada and Inman as they "composed a plan for themselves," for what to do now they are reunited.  Notice the suggestion of music in the verb "composed."  I  don't say "what to do now that Inman is home," because the truth is Inman is not home, he is not back at Black Cove. He is in an abandoned Indian village near Cold Mountain.

The narrator says "there were but three courses to pick from":  Inman could 1) return to the army and hope for an early end to the war, 2) stay hidden in the mountains, or 3) cross the mountains north and put himself in the hands of the Federals, who "would make him sign his name to their oath of allegiance, but then he could wait out the fighting and come home."  These "bitter three," the narrator explains, "were all the choices the war allowed."

But there's a fourth choice --- Inman could die a "hero's death." And that's the death Frazier gives him. I would also argue that's the option Inman really wanted.  Let me quote for John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale":

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!

What strikes me about Frazier's treatment of Inman's death is how much he softens it.  When Inman is shot by the "boy," all the narrator says is "Inman suddenly lay on the ground."  Soon Ada is by Inman's side, and he drifts "in and out" of a "bright dream of a home." Not his home, but an idealized dream of a home. The dream is suffused with nature:

It [his dream home] had a cold water spring rising out of rock, black dirt fields, old trees. In his dream the year seemed to be happening all at one time, all seasons blending together. Apple trees hanging heavy with fruit but yet unaccountably blossoming, ice rimming the spring, okra plants blooming yellow and maroon, maple leaves red as October . . . Everything coming around at once. And there were white oaks, and great number of crows, or at least the spirit of crows, dancing and singing in the upper limbs. 

Frazier ends the description by saying "There was something he [Inman] wanted to say."  But we don't know what he wanted to say, or even if he was able to say it.  Instead, Frazier shifts the point of view to "an observer situated up on the brow of the ridge," a sudden shift from inside Inman's dreaming consciousness to a distance consciousness from the "outside" world. This is how we are encouraged to view Inman's death, as a "still, distant tableau in the winter woods."

A wooded glade, secluded from the generality of mankind. A pair of lovers. The man reclined with his head in the woman's lap. She, looking down into his eyes, smoothing back the hair from his brow. He, reaching an arm awkwardly around to hold her at the soft part of her lip. Both touching each other with great intimacy. A scene of such quiet and peace that the observer on the ridge could avouch to it later in such a way as might lead those with glad temperaments to imagine some conceivable history where long decades of happy union stretched before the two on the ground. 

It takes a lot of qualifications, romantic qualifications, to turn this into a happy scene.  The observer must be at some distance from the couple (on the ridge) and he or she must have a "glad" temperament.  Even then, the story of "long decades of happy union" is only a "conceivable history," not a real one.

This is exactly the opposite of what Frazier did in the previous chapter, when Ada and Inman were truly secure in the cabin, but the narrator draws back to remind us of what the original Indians had suffered.

A short epilogue is attached to the novel, and I've read it.  But I'll save my comments for later. We need to spend time at this "first" ending of the novel, Inman's ending, before we go on to Ada's ending.

"the far side of trouble"

In the second to last chapter, Inman allows himself to feel that he can be healed---both physically and, more importantly, spiritually.  Part of it comes from simply be able to talk with Ada.  At first she asks about the war and the "great celebrated warriors" he might have seen.  But he doesn't want to talk about it.

     ---Then tell me of your long journey home, Ada said.
     Inman thought about it, but then he let himself imagine he had at last come on the far side of trouble and had no wish to revisit it, so he told only how along the way he watched the nights of the moon and counted them out to twenty-eight and then started over. . . . But how on the best days of walking he achieved some success in matching his thoughts to the weather, dark or bright, so as to attune with what freak of God's mind sent cloud or shine. 

So in a way, he has become more "attuned" to Nature, just as Ada has. Though his is a darker vision as indicated by the phrase "freak of God's mind."  In war, what Inman has experienced is the arbitrariness of it all.

In his experience, great wounds sometimes healed, small sometimes festered. Any wound might heal on the skin side but keep on burrowing inward to a man's core until it ate him up. The why of it, like much in life, offered little access.

Ada's lessons, on the other hand, have been primarily positive ones.  When Inman says, "I'm ruined beyond repair, is what I fear," Ada provides him with her new insights, which are variation on Ruby's perspective.

What she [Ada] thought was that cures of all sorts exist in the natural world. . . . And there was spirit rising from within to knit sturdy scar over the backsides of wounds. Either way, though, you had to work at it, and they'd both fail you if doubted them too much. She had gathered that from Ruby, at least. 

This chapter is a leisurely one.  Basically, we have two wounded men being taken care of by strong women.  The strength of the bond between Ada and Ruby is also emphasized to the point of almost becoming a marriage.  When Ruby tells Ada that they don't need Inman, that "We're just starting. I've got a vision in my mind of how that cove needs to be," here's Ada response:

She took one of her rings and put in on Ruby's hand and tipped it down to the firelight to look at it . . . Ada made motions to leave the ring where she had put it, but Ruby took it off and twisted it roughly back on Ada's finger.

There is the healing consummation of sex too, but Frazier is discrete and tender with it.

      He [Inman] bowed his forehead to the soft of her stomach. Then he kissed her there and she smelled like hickory smoke. He pulled her against him and held her and held her. She put a hand on the back of his neck and pulled him harder, and then she pressed her white arm around him as if forever.
      With the snow piling up outside, the warm dry cabin hidden in its fold of the mountain felt like a safe haven indeed, though it had not been such for the people who had lived there. Soldiers had found them and made the cabin trailhead to a path of exile, loss, and death. But for a while that night, it was a place that held within its walls no pain nor even a vague memory collection of pain. 

At the point of intimacy, Frazier pulls back and gives us a larger view.  For Ada and Inman the cabin was a "safe haven," but the narrator knows it's only a temporary condition. The very cabin which is a save haven for Ada and Inman was a "trailhead to a path of exile, loss and death" for the Indians who had built it.

And for a moment, we hearken back to the story Inman told before he left, the story about the Indian tribe who had been granted a vision of wonderful valley but lost their chance to enter it because one man among them disobeyed the commands and as a result infected everyone else with fear. And that fear kept them from being able to enter their Eden.

"footsteps in the snow"

"The Hunters in the Snow" by Pieter Bruegel

In this chapter Ada and Inman finally meet, but it is not as the exhausted Inman had imagined it to be:

He would come walking up the road into Black Cove, and he would be weary looking. What he had been through would show in his face and his frame, but only so much as to suggest heroism. He would be bathed and in a clean suit. Ada . . . would be dressed in her fine clothes. She would see him and know him in every feature. . . . She would rush across the yard and through the gate in a flurry of petticoats, and before the gate had even clapped shut they would be holding each other in the roadway.

But they do not meet at the house.  When Inman gets there, he encounters the Georgia boy and finds out that Ada and a female companion have set out to bury Stobrod and Pangle.  He goes out in search of them. As he walks, "a dark voice" comes into his mind and says:

. . . no matter how much you might yearn for it [a happy marriage to Ada] and pray for it, you would never get it. You could be too far ruined. Fear and hate riddling our your core like heartworms. At such time, faith and hope were not to the point. You were ready for your hole in the ground.

Yet, despite the dark voice, he "knew too that there were footsteps in the snow and that if he awoke one more day he would follow them to wherever they led as long as he could put one foot in front of the other."

Midway through the chapter, the point of view shifts to Ada and we learn that she is going out in the woods near where they have camped with Stobrod to shoot turkeys for food.  It's the first time she's carried a gun with the intention of shooting a living thing.  But, Ruby assures her, "The worst you can do is fail to kill a turkey and there's not a hunter in the world hasn't done that."

Ada manages to shoot two of the turkeys, "a hen and a young cock."  Inman hears the shot and walks in that direction, "the main hammer of the LeMat's to full cock."  Befitting the novel's loose suggestion of The Odyssey, Inman recognizes her, immediately seeing "Ada's fine face atop some strange trousered figure, like a mannish boy," but Ada does not recognize him.  In fact, she sees him as "a beggar in cast-off clothes, rags thrown over a rood of sticks," just as the original Ulysses came "disguised" as a beggar to his home.

Even though Inman calls out her name, Ada "still did not know him. He seemed to her some madman awander in the snow."  Inman takes the rebuke to heart. "I'm no better than a rank stranger here," he thinks, "A wandering pilgrim in my own place."  He wants to leave, but "there was no trail to follow."  Instead he "turned back to her and held out his empty hands again and said, 'If I knew where to go I'd go there.'"

At that point Ada recognizes him.

Then Ada had only to look at his drawn face to see not a madman but Inman. He was blasted and ravaged, worn ragged and weary and thin, but he was nevertheless Inman. Hunger's seal was on his brow, like a shadow over him. Yearning for food, warmth, kindness. In the hollows of his eyes she could see that the depredations of the long war and the hard road home had left his mind scoured and his heart jailed within the bars of his ribs.

She tells him to come with her. As she turns to walk:

She paired the turkey's feet for handles and grabbed them up breast to breast, and when she did their wings opened and their heads flopped and their long necks twined as if in strange inverted love.

As they walk back to the camp, Ada talks soothingly to Inman and makes an analogy that he doesn't understand.  Of the scene in front of them, she says, "It lacks but fire on the ground and a few people to make it Hunters in the Snow."

She is remembering a painting she and her father saw on a trip to Europe.  Her father didn't like it, but Ada did.

He had disliked its every feature, finding it too plain, too muted in its colors, lacking any reference to a world other than this. . . . Ada, though, had been drawn to it and she had circled around it for a time but ultimately lacked courage to say how she felt, since her reasons for liking it were, point-for-point, identical to those Monroe used as support for his disapproval.

We suspect that Ada has more courage now.  Inman, exhausted, follows her voice and only has a sense that "some note in her voice said, Right this minute I know more than you do, and what I know is everything might well be fine."

"black bark in winter"

Snow is falling on Cold Mountain.  Pangle is dead -- Ada and Ruby bury him -- but Stobrod is miraculously alive, though unconscious, "huddled with his fiddle under a rock lip." The chapter title comes for Ada's gesture at Pangle's grave and her hope for him.  She plants a cross  of "black locust . . . together with hickory withes" and hopes a locust tree will grow and "tell in brief a tale like Persephone's. Black bark in winter, white blossoms in spring."

Ruby and Ada had been informed about "the shootout" by the Georgia boy who was hidden away in the bushes when the Guard shot the two musicians.  Ruby is determined to bury them near where they died.

The journey up to the spot is punctuated by Ada's meditations. At one point as they follow an icy creek, she remembers her father and thinks he "would have made a lesson of such a thing."

He would have said what the match of that creek's parts would be in a person's life, what God intended it to be the type of.  All God's works but elaborate analogy.  Every bright image in the visible world only a shadow of a divine thing, so that earth and heaven, low and high, strangely agreed in form and meaning because they were in fact congruent.

She remembers that he had a book "wherein you could look up the types, but with her new-found connection with life, she

. . . refused to believe that a book could say just how it [creek, or anything in life] should be construed or to what use it might be put. Whatever a book said would lack something essential and be as useless by itself as the gudgeon to a door hinge with no pintle.

(For anyone needing an visual, the "pintle" is the pin on the bottom and the "gudgeon" is what it slides into.)

In other words, the world of books lacks "something essential" and is "useless" without a true sense of the real world. The real world isn't a pale companion of the ideal world.  If anything, the reverse is true.

As she and Ruby camp under a rock formation for the night, Ada thinks, "This would do . . .Though others might view it as an utterly bare haven, it matched her needs so much that she could just move in and live there."

Ada also finds herself considering one of Stobrod's fiddle tunes.

She had noted it for the oddity of its lyric and for Stobrod's singing, which had been of an intensity that Ada could only assume represented deep personal expression. It took as subject the imagined behavior of its speaker, what he would do had he the power to become one of a variety of brute creature.

Earlier, as we know, Inman has imagined himself to be a crow.  But Ada focuses on Stobrod's image of a "mole in the ground --- root a mountain down."

The animals seemed wonderful and horrible in their desires, especially the mole, a little powerless hermit blind thing propelled by a lonesomeness and resentment to bring the world falling around him. More wonderful and horrible still was the human voice speaking the song's words, wishing away its humanity to ease the pain inflicted by lost love, love betrayed, love left unexpressed, wasted love.

When Ada asks Ruby about the song, if she "thought Stobrod had written the song," we get some of Ruby's mystical skepticism:

A song went round from fiddler to fiddler and each one added something and took something away so that in time the song became a different thing from what it had been, barely recognizable in either tune or lyric. But you could not say the song had been improved, for as was true of all human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained, so that over time we'd be lucky if we just broke even.  Anything otherwise was empty pride. 

You wonder if Ruby isn't speaking for Frazier himself in this passage.  As with songs, so with people. For all the life events that we go through, "something is added and something is taken away from" us.  All we can hope for, if we're lucky, is that the losing doesn't outstrip the gaining.

There is a famous T.S. Eliot phrase from his poem "The Dry Salvages" that I'll end this entry with because it expresses the connection between songs (music) and human beings. [The italics are mine.]

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

"naught and grief"

I'm half tempted to just play this video of a fiddler playing "Bonaparte's Retreat" and leave it at that.

This is a curious, short chapter that doesn't directly include either Ada, Ruby or Inman.  Instead its central characters are Stobrod and Pangle, his retarded companion who plays the banjo.  In fact, it is Pangle who mouths the words that contain the chapter's title.

A group of "The Guard" has caught Stobrod and Pangle asleep at a cross-trail around Cold Mountain. The men are "after a bunch of outliers said to live in a cave."  Stobrod lies and says he doesn't know anything, but Pangle naively tells them the truth. "Much obliged," says Teague, their leader and he invites the two to join his men in a meal. "And then in a little bit we'll hear you boys pick some. See if you're any account," Teague adds.

When Stobrod and Pangle start to play, Pangle starts on his own: "but when he got to where the tune was ready to come around again, the notes scrambled all together and he bogged down and halted."

---That'un's come to naught and grief, he said to Stobrod. If you was to pitch in we might get somewhere.

The suggestion, of course, is that two people (Stobrod and Pangle. Ada and Inman?) can succeed in getting "somewhere" (the life represented by Cold Mountain)  when one person has failed.

Stobrod is initially reluctant to play because  "he figured his audience had no thought of music, lacked entirely what was needed to love it." But he gets caught up in his playing and even sings.

When he was done singing, they played one more round and then stopped. They consulted and twisted pegs again to make the dead man's tuning, and they then set in playing a piece slightly reminiscent of Bonaparte's Retreat . . . This was softer, more meditative, yet nevertheless grim as death. . . . It was awful old music in one of the ancient modalities, music that sums up a culture and is the true expression of inner life." 

The men are apparently impressed -- one says, "Good God, these is holy men -- put that doesn't stop them from rather nonchalantly killing them.  The only thing that makes them hesitate is Pangle's foolish and persistent smile: "I can't shoot a man grinning at me, one of the men said."

The solution is to have Pangle cover his face with his hat (a hat again, not tossed this time, but held).

Pangle raised the hat and put it over his face, and when he did the Guard tripped the triggers and wood chips flew from the great poplar trunk where balls struck after passing through the meat of the two men.

By the way, standard tuning on a fiddle is GDAE.  You get "Dead man's tuning" by lowering the G string to D to give you "DDAD" which can be pronounced "Dee-Dad" or "dead."

"a vow to bear"

Let me get this out of the way because it's really (maybe) a distraction. Here's the sentence this chapter title is taken from:

Inman set the pistol down on his bedding for he had taken upon himself a vow to bear, never again to shoot  one, though he had killed many in his youth and knew that he had still in him a strong liking for the flavor of bear grease. [italics mine]

The editor in me wants to change that; it seems like a typo.  Didn't he mean "he had taken upon himself a vow never to again shoot a bear"?  Why the awkward construction? Why not "vow to a bear" or "vow to all bears"?

Methinks I detect a pun, something Elizabethans delighted in but not something I expected to stumble across in a contemporary story of Appalachia during the Civil War.  If you lift out just the phrase, it can be completed by adding "a vow to bear all the trouble he had seen and expected to see." Or there's a possible additional layer if you see "bear" as a variation on "bearings" and an indirect comment on Inman's having lost his true sense of direction, lost his bearings in other words.

See how it could be a distraction?  Enough side.

This chapter really emphasizes Inman's contradictions.  On the one hand, he's had dreams of being a bear and "there was something in [the?] bear that spoke to him of hope." (There's that construction again; maybe it's an Appalachian dialect thing.)  Yet, in his attempt not to harm the bear, it rushed past him and "plunged over the high ledge that she never saw in the gloom."  Now, Inman muses, "Even my best intentions come to naught, and hope itself is but an obstacle."

Then Inman kills the bear's cub and eats it, so "as not to waste the meat."  (We're reminded of how quickly Ruby dispatches a rooster and how the goatwoman dispenses with a goat.)

Pretty bleak.  Yet as Inman looks at the "scene . . . there was growing joy" in his heart.  He finally sees his home, even if it is at a distance:

It stood apart from the sky only as the stroke of a poorly inked pen, a line thin and quick and gestural. But the shape slowly grew plain and unmistakable. It was to Cold Mountain he looked. He had achieved a vista of what for him was homeland. 

But what kind of home is it going to be?  Inman sees it as a filled with people "he would not be called upon to hate or fear" and a place where "he would be hid and safe from the wolfish gaze of the world at large."

How will this vision of Cold Mountain sync up with Ada's growing vision of it?  Their emotions seem to be going in opposite directions: Ada is getting a positive sense of her strength, while Inman becomes increasingly negative.  When he eats the meat of the bear cub, "it tasted . . . like sin."

Again the theme of language comes back in the last sentence in the chapter: "He [Inman] tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret."

"a satisfied mind"

From the ritual slaughters of the previous chapter and its songs "burdened with themes of death and solitude" we come back to Ada and Ruby as they spend "much of the autumn working with apples" and listen to Stobrod play his fiddle, accompanied by a retarded man with an intuitive skill for playing the banjo.

Stobrod uses his fiddle tunes as "a sort of autobiography of his war years." Here's Ada's reaction, which reflects a change in attitude toward life and art.

Coarse as the song was, Ada found herself moved by it. More so, she believed, than at any opera she had attended from Dock Street to Milan because Stobrod delivered it with such utter faith in its substance, in its ability to lead one toward a better life, one in which a satisfied mind might one day be attainable. Ada wished there was a way to capture what she was hearing in the way of an ambrotype captures images, so it could be held in reserve for the benefit of a future whose residents might again need access to what it stood for. 

This is indirectly a statement of Frazier's approach to his novel.  Being a first novel it is naturally "coarse" and rough, but his "faith" in the "substance" of his story overcomes that. Frazier's novel is a form of "folk art," gathering together Appalachian and family stories in a quilt-work narrative.

Early in the chapter, Ada starts a letter to a friend in Charleston, which begins, "you would not know me; nor, upon seeing the current want of delicacy in my aspect and costume, would you much care to."  Ada goes on to explain how living in the mountains has changed her:

Working in the fields, there are brief times when I go totally without thought. Not one idea crosses my mind, though my senses are alert to all around me. Should a crow fly over, I mark it in all its details, but I do not seek analogy for its blackness. It know it is a type of nothing, not metaphoric. A thing unto itself without comparison. I believe those moments to be the root of my new mien. You would not know it on me for I suspect it is somehow akin to contentment. 

Despite the casual-seeming form of  a personal letter (both Ada and Inman have tried, unsuccessfully, to write letters to each other), this is a sophisticated meditation on the distinction between language and the "real" world that "words" attempt to represent.  The example of a "crow" is not a coincidence (is anything in "art" a coincidence?), not pure description.  In the debate between "description" and "analogy" as the heart of writing, Ada declares herself in the camp of those who trust to description.  This provides Frazier with his theoretical basis for the richness and craftsman-like detail of his descriptions.

Ada has been trying to read Adam Bede (by a Victorian woman writer of some note -- George Eliot), but it does not go well.  She gets even more abstract and "literary" in her thoughts:

She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being. 

Looking at the sun setting over the mountains, she states to herself one of the primary "life-lessons" Nature provides:

Over time, watching that happen again and again might make the years seem not such an awful linear progress but instead a looping and a return. Keeping track of such a thing would place a person, would be a way of saying, You are here, in this one station, now. It would be an answer to the question, Where am I?

"Where am I" is a variation on "who am I?" or what meaning am I supposed to derive from my life.  And the answer is: you are living in a place called "Cold Mountain," and your identity is defined by what you do in that place, the place that is yourself.

This might be the time to quote the full poem by the Chinese poet, Han-shan or "Cold Mountain"

Men ask the way to Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain: there's no through trail.
In summer, ice doesn't melt
The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.
How did I make it?
My heart's not the same as yours.
If your heart was like mine
You'd get it and be right here. 

To paraphrase: Ada's heart is not the same as Inman's.  No two people's hearts ever are.  The question we are reminded to ask as the novel gets toward the end of its "path" is: With such different hearts, will Ada and Inman make it?

Outside now, steady rain falls on the thick-leaved tulip trees close to the balcony at the back of my third-story apartment. I can see the rain, the trees, and the rough wooden balcony as I turn my eyes from what I'm writing. The day is heavy and overcast.  Inside, on the other side of the window, I am writing in the light of two halogen lamps and a computer screen. I am silent, but my mind is full of thoughts, only few of which make to the screen.

So what does the scene I've just described mean?  What would the mind make of it?  Do we need to make it "represent" something else, something inside us?  Or is the description enough?

"bride bed full of blood"

Before I make my comments about this chapter, I'd like to quote from Roberto Calasso on the elements of ritual sacrifice.  Here's the first quote:

Quechcotona, in Nahuatl, means both "to cut off someone's head" and "to pick an ear of grain with one's hand." The perception which lies at the heart of sacrifice is, in fact that every act of picking is also a killing --- that any uprooting, any detaching of something from what it is connected to (and if we go from one link to the next, this is nothing but the All), is a killing. But life, if it is to be perpetuated, demands that something be picked. [135]

And here is the second:

In surrendering part of the world to the divinity, the sacrificer wants the divinity to surrender the rest of the world to him, and to cease intervening in its arbitrary, uncontrollable way.  The sacrificer also wants the divinity's permission to use the world.  Thus, the first consequence of the eclipse of sacrifice will be that the world will be used without restraint, without limit, without any part being devoted to something else. [138]

I'd like to suggest that in this chapter there are two ritual sacrifices: first, of the three Federals who stole Sara's hog and some hens; and second, of the hog itself.  Calasso goes on to say that "the basis of sacrifice lies in the fact that each of us is two, not one. . . . Each of us consists of the two birds of the Upanishads, on the same branch of the cosmic tree: one eats, and the other watches the one that is eating." [134]

Inman is hyper-conscious of the Federals, watching what they do at Sara's cabin and later, after they have taken her hens and the hog, in the woods.  He is also hyper-conscious of his own actions in killing them: "Inman shot out the man's chest in such close range that the muzzle flash set his jacket breast afire." After the killings, Inman "found that the remaining hen had gotten free and had its head immersed in the broken open belly of his [one of the Federal's] exploded guts.

Inman, squatting on the ground and and smoking a cigarette, "watched the hen work."  He then begins to hum "a sacred song" and thinks about the words, which include the phrases, "When I die I'll live again. / My soul will rejoice by the crystal river."  He finishes the ritual by propping all the dead men up in a nearby cave and adding his markings to the wall:

Inman took a stick of charcoal from the old fire at the cave mouth and sketched on the cave depictions of Sara's quilt beasts that had pursued him through the dream world of the night before. In all their angularity they reminded him of how frail the human body is against all that is sharp and hard.

When he gets back to Sara's cabin with the hog, they perform the second sacrifice together.  The hog is "killed, scalded, and scraped of hair" and they spend the day preparing the hog "into two sides of meat, when he then further divided along the joints into the natural categories of pork."

When they are finished, Sara suggests Inman shave his beard: "I believe you'd look some better if you shaved down."  Then, as night engulfs them, Sara also sings a song. Though it isn't called a "sacred" song, she "sang as if shamed by her own sounds, by the way her life voice itself aloud."

The singing carried shrill into the twilight and its tones spoke of despair, resentment, an undertone of panic. Her singing against such resistance seemed to Inman about the bravest thing he had ever witnessed. It was like watching a bitter fight carried to a costly draw. 

Even though Sara sings to calm her baby, the "words to the song . . were no lullaby."  The song has to do with the killing at the heart of life, and it contains the words used in the title of the chapter:

I dreamed my bower was full of red swine,
And my bride bed full of blood. 

"freewill savages"

Another short chapter, and I didn't notice the title phrase in it anywhere.

The main focus is the re-introduction of Ruby's father, Stobrod, into the narrative and two key stories that he tells.  One is about how he created his fiddle with its unusual characteristics, and the other is about how he came to learn how to truly play the instrument.

The fiddle, Frazier writes, "was of novel design, for where the scroll would normally be was instead the whittled head of a great serpent curled back against the neck." The first tale is about how he came to put "the tailpiece to a rattlesnake inside the instrument," deciding that it would "work a vast improvement on the sound, would give it a sizz and knell like no other." The story is in the form of a mountain tall tale, and Stobrod believes that the "musical improvement he was seeking would come as likely from the mystic discipline of getting the rattles as from their actual function within the fiddle."

The second story is more realistic but still has elements of a folk tale.  It is about a young girl of fifteen who was dying from a severe burn to her face when a stove lid "had been blown with great force into her head, and the beam of fire that had come out of the opening had charred her flesh near to the bone." When she is asked what might "ease her passing," she answered that fiddle music would do fine."

Although at the time Stobord only knew six fiddles tunes, he is the only fiddler in the army camp.  When he runs out of tunes, the girl says, "Make me up a tune." Stobord is surprised at his ability to do it and becomes obsessed with music.

One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held more for him than just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and faded, said something comforting to him about the rule of creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just tangle and drift but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument against the notion that things just happen.

The "argument" that "things just happen" is the same one Inman is struggling with.

Having told his stories, Stobord plays his fiddle and is quite impressive.  Despite being impressed, however, "Ruby's face said it would take more than a tale and a fiddle tune to soften her heart toward him."  Ada, on the other hand, is more sympathetic and sees Stobord's new attachment to music "as proof positive that no matter what a waste one has made of one's life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial."

This just reinforces our sense that Inman's journey back to Ada and Cold Mountain is a "path to redemption" and the "shadow of the crow" is acknowledge by the qualifying phrase "however partial." Having done what he has done, seen what he has seen, is "full" redemption even possible for Inman?

"the doing of it"

In this chapter Inman is befriended by an unnamed old woman he calls the "goatwoman" because of all the goats that hang around her solitary camp, "a little rust-colored caravan standing in a clearing among the canted trees."  Frazier writes that Inman "saw it to be a construction that had evidently begun life nomadic but had taken root."

While the goatwoman feeds him (she would later treat Inman's wounds), she summarizes her life story.  She had been married young.

I was a little ignorant girl, and he was old. Three wives had died on him. . . . Killed them from work and babies and meanness. I woke up one night laying in bed next to him and knew that's all I was: fourth in a row of five headstones. I got right up and rode out before dawn on his best horse and traded it a week later for this cart and eight goats." 

Like Ruby, she's a skilled survivior in nature.  But she has one characteristic that sets her apart from Ruby and connects her with Ada and Inman. Here's the description of the inside of her hovel:

The table was piled high with paperwork, its surface a shamble of books, mostly flapped open and layer facedown one on the other, page edges foxy from the damp. Scattered about and pinned to the walls were spidery pen-and-ink sketches of plants and animals, some colored thin washes of mute tones, each with a great deal of tiny writing around the margins, as if stories of many particulars were required to explain the spare images.

The goatwoman lives in a world of nature and of books. When Inman asks what she does with the books, the goatwoman says, "I make a record" and goes on to explain:

I keep track of what everything's up to. It can take up all your time just marking down what happens. Miss a day and you get behind and might never catch up.

As for getting "lonesome," she says, "Now and again, maybe. But there's plenty of work, and the doing of it keeps me from worrying too much."

In a way, the goatwoman represent the solitary life of the dedicated artist.  Inman considers it as a possibility but dismisses it.

Inman tried to picture himself living similarly hermetic in just such a stark and lonesome refuge on Cold Mountain. . . . A life just as pure and apart as the goatwoman's seemed to be. It was a powerful vision, and yet in his mind he saw himself hating every minute of it, his days poisoned by lonesomeness and longing. 

At one point Inman finds himself telling the woman about his feelings for Ada, and his thoughts have a very abstract and bookish quality:

He described her character and her person item by item and said the verdict he had come to at the hospital was that he loved her and wished to marry her, though he realized marriage implied some faith in a theoretical future, a projection of paired lines running forward through time, drawing nearer and nearer to one another until they become one line. It was a doctrine he could not entirely credit.

When Inman leaves, the goatwoman gives him, as a parting gift, "a square of paper on which was drawn in great detail the globular blue-purple cluster of the carrion flower plant in autumn."

And we are reminded of Ada's desire to sketch the things around her.

"in place of the truth"

This chapter corrects my erroneous assumption that Ada and Inman were married before he went off to war.  When Ruby returns from Esco's with the cabbages and turnips she had traded for apples, she also brings back a letter from Inman.  Ada waits until she is alone to read it.

She had read the utterly vague announcement of his wound and his planned return five times that afternoon. She could make no more of it after the fifth reading than she had from the first, which was that Inman seemed to have reached some firm conclusion about the state of feeling existing between them, though Ada could not put a name to how she thought things stood. 

"State of feeling existing between them": they are not married, not even formally engaged.  Even the declaration of love seems to have been tentative.  The blurb on the back of the book describes Frazier's novel as "an authentic odyssey" and critics have compared Ada and Inman's travails to those of Ulysses and Penelope.  But Ada and Inman are, in important ways, not Ulysses and Penelope. The Greek couple were long married and had a grown son. Ulysses was coming back to reestablish his marriage.  Ada and Inman, a young couple who are still groping to define the "state of feeling" between them, haven't even experienced marriage.

As the chapter progresses, we get Ada's memory of Inman's departure. On the day before he leaves, Inman comes by the house to say goodbye. At one point he takes off his hat, "which Ada understood to be in preparation for a kiss."  But the mood is spoiled when Inman, in his embrace of her, "brushed an onyx-and-pearl brooch at her collar" which falls into the creek.  By the time he has retrieved the brooch, "the tender moment had been lost and he could find no way to bring it back."

"If I am shot to death," Inman tells her, "in five years you'll hardly remember my name."  The remark confuses Ada, who's not sure "if he was teasing or testing her or simply saying what he thought was the truth."  "You know its not that way," she says, but in "her heart" she wonders, "Is anything remembered forever?"

Inman then tells an Indian story about Cold Mountain, about a stranger coming to a village near Cold Mountain and inviting the inhabitants his "country" were there is no war or fear.  There are two conditions: "everyone must first go into the town house and fast seven days and never leave during that time and never raise the war cry."  The villages decide they want to go and everyone obeys the conditions except one man. When they arrive at the mountain, they have a vision:

. . . a cave opened like a door, and it ran to the heart of the mountain. But inside was light rather than dark. In the distance, inside the mountain, they could see an open country. A river. Rich bottomland. Broad fields of corn.  A valley town, the houses in long rows, a town house atop a pyramidal mount, people in the square-ground dancing.

There is thunder and the people "trembled, but only the man who had eaten deer meat lost his senses from fear." He shouts the war cry, and the opportunity is lost.

Ada senses that "the story evidently meant something to Inman." When she says, "But you don't take it for the truth?", he says: "I take it that she could have been living in a better world, but she [the Indian woman who first told him the story] ended up fugitive, hiding in the balsams."

After Inman has left, Ada is bothered by the awkwardness between them, feeling that "her performance had been glib. Or flinty or pinched. None of which she really wished to be." The next day she visits Inman in his "room" in town.

"We might never speak again," she says, "and I don't plan to leave that comment standing in place of the truth. You're not owning up to it, but you came with expectations and they were not realized. Largely because I behaved contrary to my heart. I'm sorry for that. And I would do it differently if given a chance to go back and revise [note, another book reference]." 

Then we have another gesture with Inman's hat -- he "took his hat off and spun it by the brim into the air. He caught it and flipped his wrist and sent it skimming through the door to land inside where it would" -- before "the kiss that had eluded them the day before."

Apropos Inman's relationship with Ada,  two scenes from Miller's Crossing come to mind.  Here they are.

Of course, Ada is much more of a lady than Verna.

"to live like a gamecock"

In this chapter, the world view represented by the "shadow of the crow" becomes overwhelming.

The title comes from Veasey's drunken ecstatic declaration -- "To live like a gamecock, that is my target." In the course of the chapter he is killed. His last statement is: "It is not too late to put away this meanness."  He is shot anyway, but his death saves Inman: "The ball that hit Inman had already passed through Veasey's shoulder and as a result did not strike with full briskness."

The situation is brutally simple: Inman and Veasey have been turned over to the Federal Guard and are being marched along with a whole group of men in chains for the reward.  In the course of the trek, the undisclosed leaders of the Guard decide the trouble of transporting the men is not worth the reward, so in the "deep of the night" the guards wake the men up and start killing them. They then "bury" them in a shoddy mass grave, "strewing the men in and covering them over with dirt about to the depth that one would plant potatoes."

When Inman regains consciousness -- to find himself "uprooted, staring eye to eye, forlorn and hostile and baffled, into the long face of a great tusked boar" -- he looks up at the night sky and finds "it did not look right."

There were stars in it, but he could not reason out even one known constellation in the moonless sky. It looked as if someone had taken a stick and stirred it up so that no sense remained, just a smattering of light cast patternless on the general dark.

He is still tied to Veasey and all the other dead around him, but he is numb to it:

He had grown so used to seeing death, walking among the dead, sleeping among them, numbering himself calmly as among the near-dead, that it seemed no longer dark and mysterious. He feared his heart had been touched by the fire so often he might never make a civilian again.

But there is still something left in Inman of the kinder side of humanity: "Inman wished to commit some kind gesture toward him, but lacking even a shovel for burial, all he could think to do was roll Veasey over, facedown."

But this small gesture is contrasted to Inman's killing, near the end of the chapter, of the man who turned  him over to the Federal Guard.

Inman stepped to Junior and struck him across the ear with the barrel of the LeMat's and then clubbed at him with the butt until he lay flat on his back. . . . He held the light to Junior's face. What lay before him was indeed a horrid thing, and yet Inman feared that the minds of all men share the same nature with little true variance.

As the chapter draws to its conclusion, a kindly slave shelters Inman and later gives him a map to "the mountains" where, the slave warns,  "they say it's cold and rough."

"That's where I'm from," Inman says.

At the end of the chapter, Inman is being kept company by a group of crows who "were harrying a rat snake they had discovered up in the tree."  Here is how the chapter ends:

The crows stayed on through much of the afternoon, celebrating their victory. Inman watched them anytime his eyes were open, observing closely their deportment and method of expression. And when his eyes were closed, he dreamed he lived in a kind of world where if a man wished it he could think himself  into crow form, so that, though filled with dark error, he still had power to either fly from enemies or laugh them away. Then, after awhile of passing time in such wise, Inman watched the night fall, and it seemed to him as if the crows had swelled out to blacken everything.

Veasey had imagined himself a fighting gamecock, "a big dominicker that lived for nothing but to fight and tread hens."  Inman wishes he were a crow with the "power to either fly from enemies or laugh them away." These seem to be the only options -- though both are incomplete and delusional, being products of the minds of men -- in a self-created world of war.

"source and root"

In the movie The Night of the Hunter, the evil preacher has "love" tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and "hate" on the other.  It's a prop he uses in his sermons about the struggle between good and evil.

In this chapter of Cold Mountain, we have two contrasting stories: one is a prisoner's story of his capture and the killing of his father and friends, the other is Monroe's story of how he came to marry Ada's mother.  You could say the prisoner's story is one of hate; and it's contrasted with Monroe's story of love.

The violence in the prisoner's story meets today's "entertainment" standards of brutal, graphic violence mixed with indifference, and the prisoner ends by declaring, "This world won't stand long, . . . God won't let it stand this way long."

Enough said.

There's a transition from the prisoner's story to Monroe's. It has to do with a fanciful tale Ruby's father frequently told her, saying it was what her mother had told him --- that he wasn't really Ruby's father, but that she had gotten pregnant by a blue heron.  The story, a variation on Leda and the Swan, confirms Ruby's status as a child of nature, but it also sets Ada thinking:

Ruby's fanciful heron story of source and root reminded Ada of a story Monroe had told not long before his death. It concerned the manner in which he had wooed her mother . . .

The story of Monroe's "wooing" is very simple in outline.  He falls in love with Ada's mother, Claire Dechutes, at first sight; but just as he is bringing her an engagment ring, he discovers her kissing another man.  Monroe rides away in no particular direction--- the "humiliationg role of the betrayed suiter was not one I relished playing," he says.  When he and his horse are totally exhausted, he reluctantly decides to "head home," considering the only alternative other than to "act fully the wildman and set a course west to lose myself in the trackless territories of Texas."  At this point he sees a fire in the distance, changes his mind and heads toward it, seeing it as "an interim direction."

The fire's source is a church burning.  He and a passing drunk make a feeble effort to keeping the church for burning down and fail, but Monroe has decided on a vocation.  He soon learns that Claire has married her Frenchman and moved to France.  In turn, Monroe goes into the ministry "with both resignation and glee."

Nineteen years pass. Claire returns from France, after the death of her husband, and Monroe courts her again.  This time he succeeds and learns that her first marriage was a bitter one.  Claire dies giving birth to Ada, and Monroe concludes by telling Ada, "When I rose again [from his grief], it was with the determination that my life was now at your service."

Ada is so taken aback she doesn't know what to say. Since her parents married so late in life, she had always assumed "it an alliance of calm friendship" and "herself to a product of some sad miscalculation."  Hearing her father's story of her "source and root," alters the way Ada sees herself.

"She could not at that moment easily frame herself anew, not as some staid erratum but as the product of passion extended against great odds." [italics are mine]

We are meant to be reminded of the window frames from the initial chapters and Ada's previous confusion in looking at herself in a hall of opposing mirrors.  I can also mention that in his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin, using a publishing metaphor (remember the world of books?), describes his major mistakes in life as "errata."

Once again we come back to perception: the way people perceive the world, and the way they preceive themselves.  On their walk home after hearing the prisoner's story, Ada and Ruby have a long conversation that Frazier sums up like this:

Ada wanted to cast it [the prisoner's story] as exaggeration, but Ruby's conclusion was that it ought to be viewed as truth since it sorted so well with the capabilities of men. They then argued generally for a mile or two as to whether the world might be better viewed as such a place of threat and fear that the only consonant attitude one could maintain was gloom, or whether one should strive for light and cheer even though a dark-fisted hand seemed poised ready to strike at any moment. 

One last comment before I stop.

Something else in this chapter harkens back to the image of Inman's thrown hat "at rest black as the shadow of a crow squatted on the ground."  Ruby talks about her "great respect for the reviled crow, finding much worthy of emulation in their outlook on life."

I'm sure I'll have more to say about crows and other birds later.

"exile and brute wandering"

In this chapter, Inman spends a rainy night in a "grim roadside inn and stable," where he and a fellow-traveler "drank through boom and flash, sprawled in the straw, telling tales of exile and brute wandering."

In terms of "exile and brute wandering," a contrast is set up between two men (and by implicit extension with Inman).  One is the preacher Inman had met earlier; his name is Soloman Veasey (rhymes with "greasy" I suspect).  When Veasey was discovered the next day with Inman's short explanation nailed to the tree, the community thorougly beat him and sent him out in exile.

The other man is named Odell, and he has condemned himself to wandering after falling in love with a slave woman named Lucinda. When Odell offers to buy the woman, his father crudely asks if he's buying her "for the fieldwork or the pussy."  At which point, Odell strikes his father and is promptly beaten by his younger brother and his father's foreman and "locked in a canning house." After keeping him there a few days, his father "spoke through a crack [in the canning house], saying, I've sold that bitch to Mississippi."

So both men, like Inman, are living "a traveling life."  Each has his reasons (including Inman), and the reasons reflect each's character.  Veasey and Odell, except for their inclination toward violence and involvement with women, could not be more different. Veasey was engaged to a proper woman, had a mistress and was willing to kill her in order not to be discovered and have his position as preacher ruined.

Odell was married to proper girl, yet after "the wedding . . . once he got the heaps of crinolines off her, there seemed to be just about nothing left. She was so slight and wispish. He found little there to keep his mind from wandering." He genuinely falls in love with Lucinda and leaves his "good life" to search for her, though he has little hope of finding her.

Veasey is cast out of the community for his obvious lack of human decency; Odell, trying to be decent (to the extent a slave culture allows it), casts himself out. Veasey is very quick to lust after a woman and is incapable of love. Odell, having been struck by love, refuses to make the "proper" sacrifices to come into his inheritance.  Veasey is on the road toward Texas to make his fortune; Odel is looking for this "lost love," though he's long given up any systematic search for her.

If we compare these men to Inman, what do we see.  Inman, like Veasey, is looking for a place to live his life successfully though he isn't crassly looking to make a fortune.  Like Odell, Inman is trying to be decent and seeking to reclaim his "lost love;" though, unlike Odell's Lucinda, Ada is Inman's lawful wife, a "proper" love match.

The question comes up: is it possible that the war has changed Inman so much that Ada will no longer love him?  By the same token, will Inman be able to love Ada in way she expects.  We've seen how "wounded" Inman is, not just physically, but emotionally.  His contempt for Veasey is obvious and he doesn't shun violence as needed.  We've seen the violent side of him already. How will Ada respond to that part of him?  Has she already seen it; or is this something that the war has done that she's not aware of?  How will she react?

One of Shakespeare's more famous sonnets (Sonnet 116) raises the question:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Notice that he refers to a "marriage of true minds."  He also admits to the possibility of error; perhaps love does alter.  But if that is the case, there is no point to either poetry or love.

Right now Ada (and Cold Mountain) are "the star" to Inman's "wandering bark." The question is: in his search for the ideal home and ideal love, how will the real Cold Mountain and Ada measure up? The same question can be asked from Ada's point of view. She is making a home for herself, but seems to remember Inman primarily from the "courting" stage.  Is her love strong enough, constant enough, to "bear" the "edge of doom" that Inman now carries within him?

Those, not the philosphical questions about perception, are the questions that keep you reading.

"ashes of roses"

At their picnic in the apple orchard, "as they sat on the blanket, drowsy and full from lunch, Ada told Ruby that she envied her knowledge of how the world runs" and asks her how "do you come to know such things?"  Ruby answers that a "lot of it was grandmother knowledge, got from wandering around the settlement talking to any old woman who would talk back, watching them work and asking questions." She sums up by saying it "was mostly a matter of being attentive."

The contrast between two different views of the world --- the practical and the imaginative, the materialistic and the idealistic --- go back at least as far as Aristotle and Plato. And there are infinite variations on the contrast, some comic, some tragic --- and some, surprisingly enough, a combination of the two. I'm thinking now of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.  Ada and Ruby are a lot like female versions of those two.  Don Quixote is too full of poetry and "high" moral ideals to be "attentive" to the ordinary world in front of him, and Sancho, who initially grumbles about Quixote's "foolish ideas" and often dangerous illusions (all acquired from his excessive reading of Arthurian romances) soon becomes caught up in and eventually even "needs" the poetic world Don Quixote tries to live in.

So it's all a matter of perception, and that can get very complicated, philosophically speaking.  By way of illustration, consider Ada's memory of the Charleston party that took place shortly before the war and the dress she wore that night.  It was "a dress of mauve silk, trimmed in lace dyed to match."  Monroe, her preacher, Emersonian romantic father, "had bought the entire bolt of cloth from which the dress was made so that no one else might wear that color."

She goes "out on the river" with a young man named Blount who talks to her about the coming war with the usual bravado but then breaks down and admits he is afraid. Ada can't make herself say the "proper thing . . . that duty and honor demanded brave action in defense of homeland" [there we have problems with language again], so she says "nothing and only continued to stroke the back of his hand" hoping he won't misunderstand her gesture.

They return to the party, and the following occurs:

. . . as she had walked through the house to go upstairs to her room, she had been struck by the figure of a woman's back in the mirror. She stopped and looked.  The dress the figure wore was the color called ashes of roses, and Ada stood, held in place by a sharp stitch of envy for the woman's dress and the fine shape of her back and her thick dark hair and the sense of assurance she seemed to evidence in her very posture. 

Then Ada took a step forward, and the other women did too, and Ada realized that it was herself she was admiring, the mirror having caught the reflection of an opposite mirror on the wall behind her. The light of the lamps and the tint of the mirrors had conspired to shift colors, bleaching mauve to rose. 

Talk about "subjectivity," how frequently and easily we are confused (even deceived) by appearances!  Ada doesn't even recognize herself in the mirror! It's not until she reclaims her identity (as the center of her world) that she correctly identifies the figure in the mirror and the "correct" color of her dress.  From mauve to ashes of roses -- a darkening of her perceptions.

Ruby, of course, being practical, dismisses the tale and "was not much impressed with Blount's efforts toward honor and could only marvel at lives so useless that they required missing sleep and paddling about on a river for pleasure."  Sancho Panza couldn't have said it better.

Ada continues her philosophical mediation on perception, more specifically the contrast between the mountains and Charleston.

This mountain country was so dark and inclined to the vertical compared with Charleston. Monroe had commented that, like all elements of nature, the features of this magnificent topography were simply tokens of some other world, some deeper life with a whole other existence toward which he ought to aim all our yearning.

But Ada is thinking more on her own now.

. . . she held the opinion that what she saw was no token but was all the life there is. It was a position in most ways contrary to Monroe's; nevertheless, it did not rule out its own denomination of sharp yearning, though Ada could not entirely set a name to its direction. 

When Ruby leaves to do "night work" (her term for sleep) and Ada goes out to bring in the cows, a great loneliness comes over her.  She remembers what her father had said, though she no longer completely takes his "word" for "truth."

. . . as with most things, Monroe had an explanation. He said that in their hearts people feel that long ago God was everywhere all the time; the sense of loneliness is what fills the vacuum when He pulls back one degree more remote.

There is a movie title, Places in the Heart, that suggests the connection between a person's emotional core and "place," where they are in the world, objectively and subjectively.  Cold Mountain is "home" for both Ada and Inman -- but in many ways they are both still struggling to reach their true "home" as were Odysseus and Penelope in the selections from Homer that Ada reads to Ruby.  Being practical, of course, "Ruby had grown impatient with Penelope, but she would sit for a long evening and laugh and laugh at the tribulations of Odysseus, all the stones the gods threw in his passway."

There is the long journey to get back "home." (Odysseus/Inman)  And the equally difficult struggle to make a particular place "home," to preserve it. (Penelope/Ada)

"like any other thing, a gift"

The chapter title refers to Inman's sense that "fighting had come easy to him," and "it was like any other thing, a gift." In other words, Inman has a natural flair for war.  But I'm not going to talk about that. Instead I want to touch on Frazier's mixture of language, God, and women.

In this chapter Inman encounters two women -- one a drugged victim of an errant preacher's lust, the other a "dark-haired" gypsy woman who grants Inman a "happy vision" of her riding a horse across the river.  The gypsy woman reminds Inman of Ada, and he remembers his encounter with Ada in the kitchen on the Christmas before the war, the same Ada had remembered when the piano was being moved.  The chapter ends with a dream of Ada mixed with the rhododendron-like shurbs Inman had been reading about in his Bartram's Travels just before going to sleep.

When Inman stops the preacher from through his drugged mistress into the river, the preacher says: "You're a message from God saying no."  Notice he doesn't say that Inman is bringing a message, but that Inman is the message.  While Inman takes the preacher and the unconscious woman back to town, he remembers a short conversation with a "Tennessee boy on the night after Fredericksburg." Since he knows the name of the brightest star in Orion, he points to it and says "the name he knew."  But the boy gives a curious response. Here's their exchange:

---How do you know its name is Rigel?
---I read it in a book, Inman said.
---Then that's just a name we give it, the boy said. It ain't God's name.
---How would you ever come to know God's name for that star? [Inman says]
---You wouldn't, He holds it close, the boy said. It's a thing you'll never know. It's a lesson that sometimes we're meant to settle for ignorance. Right there's [the boy points to the bodies strewn on the battlefield] what mostly comes of knowledge.

Later, when Inman returns the young woman to her bed, she momentarily wakes up.  "What's your name?" Inman asks. When she answers, he addresses her by her name and says, "Listen to me, Laura. . . That preacher does not speak for God. No man does. . . . He [the preacher] means you no good."

When Inman remembers the Christmas incident with Ada, he remembers how:

 ". . . he turned her hand over and smoothed back the fingers when she tried to draw them in and make a fist.   He put his lips to her wrist where the slate-blue veins twined. Ada slowly drew her hand away and then stood looking down absently at its palm.
---There's not tidings written on it. Not any we can read, Inman said.

In the "Language" section of his essay "Nature," Emerson says, "Nature is the vehicle of thought."  He later goes on to famously declare, "Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact."

One of the main purposes of language is to "name"[label] things accurately and clearly. But to whose purpose: Man's or God's?  What if man becomes corrupted? How do we know we are naming things according to God's all-encompassing vision and not our own limited human vision.

Here's what Emerson had to say:

A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth and his desire to communicate it without loss. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires --- the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise --- the power over nature as interpreter of the will is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not. . . . In due time . . . words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. 

When Inman leaves the "false" preacher tied to a tree, he writes "out the story in brief, putting little headwork and no fine touches to it, merely pressing down what he had learned of the near killing into a paragraph."

In other words, Inman wrote what he saw, based on "his love of truth and desire to communicate it without loss."  When Ada stares down at her palm, Inman honesty declares, "There's not tiding written on it. Not any we can read."

In the Beginning there was the Word.  It is up to us to learn how to read.

"verbs, all of them tiring"

This short chapter about Ada and Ruby settles into the simple joy of concrete description and story-telling. Without many generalizations to ponder, it's a chapter of practical action and life in the mountains during the Civil War, and Ruby is the main catalyst. Here's how Ada sums it up:

All Ruby's talk was of exertion. The work it would take to build a momentum of survival to carry them through winter. To Ada, Ruby's monologues seemed composed mainly of verbs, all of them tiring. Plow, plant, hoe, cut, can, feed, kill.

When, at Ruby's suggestion, Ada barters away her piano to a farmer, the list of what they get is long: "a pied brood sow and a shoat and a hundred pounds of corn grits . . . a few of the little mountain sheep, . . .  a wagonload of cabbages. And a ham and ten pounds of bacon from the first hog he killed in November."

As Ada watches the piano being carried away, we get a flashback to "a party Monroe had given four days before the Christmas in the last winter before the war." Ada gets a little "tipsy" on champagne and has a brief romantic encounter with Inman in the kitchen. She is "at once faint and giddy," and "by some mechanism she was unable to reconstruct later, she found herself in his lap."  It's only a moment between them, and for the rest of the party they shyly avoid each other, but Inman had made an impression for the brief time Ada rested in his lap:

"Ada remembers thinking that she never wished to leave this place but was not aware that she had said it aloud. What she did remember was that he had seemed as content as she was and had not pressed for more but only moved his hands out of the points of her shoulders and held her there."

A moment of security, rest, and contentment: perhaps its not too much to say that those things form Ada's initial "idea" of love.  Like all ideas, they will be altered perhaps by encounters with reality.

The chapter ends with a summary of Ruby's life growing up with an indifferent and unreliable father and a mother who vanished after Ruby's birth and isn't even remembered clearly by her father. Ruby's "brightest childhood memory" is of being stranded outside at night, "caught on a trailside blackthorn briar."  Ruby had always been taught to fear Nature after dark, but her experience of it is different.  She hears "a voice in the dark."

"Its talk seemed to arise from the rush and splatter of the river noise, but it was no cannibal demon. It seemed some tender force of landscape or sky, an animal spirit, a guardian that took her under its wing and concerned itself with her well-being from that moment on. . . . every word spoken directly to her deep core by the calm voice that took her in and comforted and protected her all through the night."

Two women: two different experiences of comfort and security.

"the color of despair"

The title for this chapter comes from the "To Destroy Life" spell Swimmer, Inman's Cherokee friend, taught him.  I won't quote the whole spell, just the beginning and the end.

Listen. Your path will stretch up toward the Nightland. You will be lonely. . . . Your soul will fade to blue, the color of despair. Your spirit will wane and dwindle away, never to reappear. Your path lies toward the Nightland. This is your path. There is no other.

It's meant to be a curse on any enemies Inman should encounter (he's already survived an attack by three "layabouts" from a town he passed through), but Inman suspects "the words were just flying back to strike him alone."

In this chapter we learn of Inman's first meeting with Ada. It's in front of the church after a sermon delivered by Ada's father, Monroe. Having gotten an introduction, Inman doesn't know what to say to Ada. Exasperated, she asks him about a phrase a local woman used earlier, "sheep-killing weather." "Did she mean weather appropriate for slaughtering sheep or weather foul enough to kill them itself without assistance?"  Inman's answer is, "The first."  At which point Ada says, "Well, then. I thank you. You've served a useful purpose." Then she turns and walks away to join her father.

It's interesting that their first conversation, however brief, should be about language. Although well educated, Ada doesn't understand some of the language used by the mountain folk.

The mountain folk also tend to misunderstand some of the words Ada's father uses. An example is the confusion over what Monroe meant when he said being an ordinary preacher who "condemned sinners and told Bible tales with entertaining zeal" was not his mission.  This insulted the community because they felt it "set the congregation in the position of benighted savages." Monroe later clarifies and explains that the "word meant no more nor less than a job of work."

The contrast between words -- either in books, sermons, or Cherokee Indian spells -- and reality is brought up again. The power of language compared to the power of nature.  The power of the ideas we carry around in our heads versus the power of the "real" world around us, the facts that we can't ignore.

In this chapter Inman is walking through a "foul region" of nature that wasn't worth fighting for. What keeps him going is "the thought of getting home and building him a cabin on Cold Mountain."  If he could do that, and "if Ada would go with him, there might be the hope. . . that in time his despair might be honed off to a point so fine and thin it would be nearly the same as vanishing."

As the chapter ends, Inman has these thoughts:

He floated along thinking he would like to love the world as it was, and he felt a great deal of accomplishment for the occasions when he did, since the other was so easy. Hate took no effort other than to look about. It was a weakness, he acknowledged, to be of such a mind  that all around him had to lie fair for him to call it satisfactory. But there were places he knew where such would generally be the case. Cold Mountain. Scapecat Branch." 

As the chapter ended I was more and more aware of the old-fashioned, rambling structure of Frazier's sentences.  They are not confused sentences, they are simply leisurely sentences used by people who had more time to form their thoughts. The world was slower then. Not less violent, just slower with more time to look around at the world -- in contrast to the present, when ideas about the world bombard us  every minute and we rarely have time to gaze out a window and contemplate a static-seeming landscape.

"the ground beneath her hands"

Setting aside a slight chronology puzzle  -- When exactly was Ada married to Inman? Before her father died and before she received the letter from her solicitor?   If so, why did she consider going back to Charleston as a spinster in search of a husband? -- I'll confine this entry to my thoughts on books and windows.

Since the window in this chapter is next to Ada's "reading spot," I'll start with this passage:

At first, all she liked about the reading spot was the comfortable chair and the good light, but over the months she came to appreciate that the window's view offered some relief against the strain of such bleak stories [she's been reading Hawthorne], for when she looked up from the page, her eyes swept across the fields and rose on waves of foggy ridges to the blue bulk of Cold Mountain. The prospect from the reading chair confronted her with all the major shapes and colors of her current position. . . . the words this canted landscape spoke were less hushed, harsher [than a comparable view of the city of Charleston].

Ada's view out this window begs to be compared to Inman's view from his hospital window.  The view from the hospital window incites Inman to "travel" back to his home, even though we suspect his journey will not be as pleasant as the one described in William Bartram's book.  The view from Ada's window doesn't suggest travel; instead it "confronts" her with her "current position."

What we have in the juxtaposition of Ada's reading spot and the view she has outside the nearby window is a contrast between a world of ideas and the world of nature, of reality.  When grieving over her father, Ada thinks that "nature has a preference for a particular order: parents die, then children die. But it was a harsh design . . ."

Later in the chapter Ada will fall asleep in "the upper pasture" of her land after reading a novel. This view of nature is different: "Ada thought it the most peaceful place she had ever known." She will spend the night there, unharmed, and return to her house, having decided what she will do.

From any direction she came at it, the only conclusion that left her any hope of self-content was this: what she could see around her was all that she could count on. The mountains and the desire to find if she could make a satisfactory life of common things here -- together they seemed to offer the promise of a more content and expansive life.

She then remembers one of her father's sayings: "the path to contentment was to abide by one's own nature." Yet there is a catch: "But even if one had not the slightest hint toward finding what one's nature was, then even stepping out on the path [as her husband had done in the first chapter] became a snaggy matter."

Now it's time to bring in the other, Chinese Cold Mountain, the poet Han -Shan. The quote at the beginning of Frazier's novel is:

Men ask the way to Cold Mountain / Cold Mountain: there's no through trail.

The translation is by Gary Snyder [as proof of its reality, here's an illustration of the cover of my copy]. In his introduction Snyder says, "When he [Han-shan] talks about Cold Mountain he means himself, his home, his state of mind."

We now have a frame of reference (a window frame, perhaps?).  When looking out their respective windows, both Ada and Inman are confronting themselves, their true home, their state of mind.

Oh, by the way, Frazier doesn't quote the whole poem. But I'll save that for another day.

"the shadow of a crow"

Only twenty-three pages, yet rich with incident, objects, and characters (all men, by the way): Balis translating Ancient Greek into "plain writing anyone could read;" the blind man selling peanuts and newspapers; Robert E. Lee and Longstreet overlooking a battlefield and "coining fine phrases like a pair of wags;" Inman's Cherokee friend Swimmer with his Indian stories; and Inman himself, whose "wounds gave him just reason to doubt that he would ever heal up and feel whole and of a piece again."

Whoa, that's a long sentence. Don't want to lose everyone right at the beginning. It's just that Frazier packs a lot into his first chapter, and it's hard to determine where to begin.

The easiest way might be to show where the chapter title comes from.  As the novel begins, Inman is recovering in a Confederate army hospital after having been seriously wounded in battle. He's got a lot of time for "brooding" and flashing back to his past. What prompts his reflections is looking out his hospital window.

One memory is of being in school and sitting in front of a similar window, which happens to have looked out on "a scene of pastures and low green ridges terracing up to the vast hump of Cold Mountain." Bored with his teacher's droning about the "grand wars fought in ancient England," Inman impulsively throws his hat (his own hat, not the teacher's) out the window. Here's the sentence with the title phrase:

It [Inman's hat] landed far out across the playground at the edge of the hayfield and rested there black as the shadow of a crow squatted on the ground. [my italics]

Late in the chapter, back in the present, Inman buys a new hat and throws his old hat "among the bean rows of somebody's garden" and thinks "They might find use for it as scarecrow attire."

Inman considers Cold Mountain a "healing realm" and "a place where all his scattered forces might gather." At the end of the chapter, he has "set his foot on the sill and stepped out the window." The window image is highly suggestive, but I'll explore that in a later blog.  At this point, the title of the chapter warns us that Inman's journey to Cold Mountain won't be like William Bartam's travels through "streams of fertility and pleasure" (Inman carries part of Bartram's book with him). We know there is a shadow over Inman's journey, the shadow of a crow.

As a parting image, click the video below to see how a hat is used at the beginning of the movie Miller's Crossing.

Introduction

Charles Frazier's novel, Cold Mountain, is roughly (or perhaps exactly) divided into twenty sections.  There are no chapter numbers or parts, but each section has a phrase as a title. In this blog I'll comment on each section individually, but I also reserve the right to digress.

There is an actual Cold Mountain in western North Carolina.  There is also a 9th century Chinese poet whose name, Hanshan, translates as "Cold Mountain." That Frazier is aware of this is indicated by one of the quotes following the title page.  The other quote is from Charles Darwin's journal.

DISCLAIMER: This blog is not a plot summary or a simple variation on SparksNotes. It is a personal reading of the novel as I read it.  How long it will take or what I'll say is anybody's guess (including mine).