The German Professor

I. Winter Prologue

A patina of golden sunlight on the white, barren field. The coyotes sang their misery last night, They, too, felt the cold. Minus twenty-five degrees with the wind. Snow crackling and squeaking under foot. The damper fan of the outdoor wood furnace was frozen and yielded grudgingly to the tapping of my rubber mallet. Finally, the coals glowed and flames took to the icy logs. And we were warm inside.

It was Holderlin who wrote, Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutunglos. I am a ghost in my own life. That is not what he meant. But, I am sure he felt the same way. To outlive the object of one's love, or to discover it never existed, kills and enriches. In the same way that melancholy produces profound insight, a bit of death produces - well, a glimpse beyond the veil.

My fingers are still cold and stiff from chopping enough of the cord wood to refill the firebox of the furnace. I miscalculated in the fall, or perhaps it is just that this winter is harder than the last one.  It doesn't matter. The cold makes it easier to split the wood, as long as I can manage it without becoming frozen myself.  It feels good to perform that kind of labour at my age. To know the body is still strong enough to swing the axe well and carry the split logs and stack them. My joints sometimes complain, though. Especially my left knee that does not bear weight very well when I am climbing the stairs, and so I am forced to use the railing like an old man. Like the old man I am quickly becoming. These are mere inconveniences now, and not yet disabilities. But, also reminders that tempus fugit and old knees get worn out eventually. 

I remember my mother, who thought that at eighty-two she could hop over a stack of magazines she had carefully assembled near her side door for recycling, and breaking her leg and her wrist in the process of proving otherwise. Achieving a better understanding of her limitations? I am not sure about that. She was unrepentant and quite proud of herself when the radiologist told her how remarkably sound her bones looked. She healed fast, too. Sometimes, a determination to hold onto the corporeal self is insufficient and it fails us. But, the effort and what is at stake...it is part of the battle, spurred on by genuine fear that the body is ceasing, gradually at first, then more plainly and more quickly, to serve our will and our needs, even failing to produce the sensations that we still crave. The ones we used to enjoy. Instead, the body becomes a vessel of pains and frustrations, and then a trap, and finally the thing cast into the fire or into the ground or the sea and thus dissolved into pieces and rotting fragments and particles, molecules and atoms, and never seen again. And besides which, perhaps, there is nothing but a repetitious, dismal, reverse alchemy that always produces shit out of gold.

Well, I shall outlast these traceries of frost on the window - what artistry nature can create in a moment, unconscious of the beauty and the intricate symmetry of its work! Fractal lines and feathered curves in the profusion and depth of a Pollock, produced for no-one but me, because very soon when the sunlight heats the glass, it will be gone. Unless I have the foresight and the audacity to take a photograph, and I keep it. Together, frost, you and I shall have our moment that only I shall remember. There must be millions upon millions of such complex things, crystalline structures or mere globs of matter, which exist across the universe, with no-one to see how beautiful they are, and that no-one created. 

Shall I describe her now? The girl, I mean.