"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).