Friday Frivolity no. 16: My Ideal Hibernation, or Life as a Bear
Exploring my desire to hibernate
This is an installment in the section Friday Frivolity. Every Friday, you'll get a little micro-essay, plus a moodboard, 3 things I'm currently in love with, words of wisdom from what I've been reading lately, a shimmer of poetry, a "beauty tip," and a question to spark your thought.
Last Saturday, to my very pleasant surprise, I saw that my latest Friday post had been featured by
in one of their Weekender posts! I’m so grateful for the feature, and I’m so grateful for the influx of new readers I’ve gotten since then. I would just like to say welcome to all of you, and it’s a pleasure to have you here at Soul-Making!—
My Ideal Hibernation, or Life as a Bear
The clocks, which sprung forward in the spring, have fallen back just as the leaves of our little maple, first ripening to a deep red, then withering to a crisp, detaching themselves, seemingly all at once, to land in a rust-colored heap, also fell. Now darkness begins at 4 in the afternoon and continues almost interminably. Cold will come, possibly snow, and something subtler, that darkening of the windows inside oneself, that muting of mood, that strange listless feeling, tinged with melancholy, when one feels the bareness of one’s own branches and a coldness at the root of oneself, which manifests in a peculiar restlessness or the urge to slink back, in the middle of the day, under the covers and do nothing.
There is a Curious George episode in which George is told about the hibernation of bears. Bears eat a lot, and then they go into their nice, dark caves, where, warm, cozy, surfeited, they sleep the whole winter through. This sounds like a wonderful idea, George thinks, and so he decides to eat every comestible in the house, paint a picture of the night sky to aid in the onset of months-long slumber, decorate his room with toy bats and real rocks to better feign a cave environment, draw all the curtains so not a wink of sunlight can intrude upon this homemade cavern, and tape a blanket over his windows to keep out the braying of cattle and the clucking of chickens. But George is a monkey, and he can’t do everything a bear can do. He wakes up, goes downstairs, and encounters the Man with the Yellow Hat. “How did you sleep last night?” the Man asks. Last night? George, understandably, is put out. Then he sees skis and sleds, and his disappointment turns into excitement at the prospect of doing all the things bears can’t do while doing, well, nothing.
I can relate to George—in an ideal world, when winter comes, I would eat to an astounding and perhaps improbable fullness, then dream the world away, in a cave filled not with bats and rocks but with fairy lights and candles that would never go out or set anything on fire, plush carpets, gauzy curtains, bedding soft as an angel’s kiss. But like George, I am sure my slumber would only last a single night, especially considering that I am a terrible sleeper, and I would wake up with only a terrible stomachache.
My ideal hibernation, then, would be a hibernation less involved with deep slumber but no less involved with dreaming the world away. It would be prefaced by an overeating more spiritual and intellectual in nature; having quit all commitments and obligations, I would surround my bed not with rocks but with books, and then, after consuming them, satisfying the appetite of brain more than body, overstuffing the imagination, gorging the soul, feasting on words and ideas, I would digest and gestate, brood and mull, reflect and refract, forming the invisible webs, the million linkages of thought that constitute, if not genius, at least wisdom. Come springtime, I would emerge into the world transformed, metamorphosed, ravished, a better, brighter self. But now that I look at the case from this vantage point, I see perhaps that I am thinking more of the butterfly than the bear, and what I long to be cocooned in is less cave than chrysalis. A bear, after all, is a heavy creature, when one wants flight.
Mood Board of the Week
(left to right, top to bottom)
Habiballah of Sava, detail from "The Concourse of the Birds", Folio 11r from a Mantiq al-Tayr (Language of the Birds), ca. 1600: The Language of the Birds is a 12th-century poem written by Iranian poet Farid ud-Din Attar. In the poem, the birds of the world hold a conference to determine who among them should be their leader. The hoopoe, the wisest among them, suggests they search for the simurgh, a mythological, phoenix-like bird who has endless benevolence, possesses all of the world’s knowledge, and serves as a mediator between heaven and earth. In order to find it, the birds must cross seven valleys. The journey is arduous, and only thirty make it. When they arrive, the thirty birds realize that they themselves are the simurgh—in Persian, “si” means thirty and “murgh” birds. In this miniature, we see the other birds gathered around the hoopoe, who speaks to them from his perch on a rock.
details from Habiballah of Sava's illustrations from "The Concourse of the Birds," The Met ‘Lucina’ dress by Clio Peppiatt: Ever since I first came across this dress on Tumblr ages ago, I’ve been in love with it for how dreamy and whimsical and fun and beautiful it is. I’m always a sucker for embroidery and intricate beading, and seeing as clothes are something we wear everyday, why not make them imaginative while we’re at it? In the years since releasing ‘Lucina,’ Cleo Peppiatt has come out with a whole host of beautiful beaded designs, as well as three other variations on ‘Lucina.’ Of these, my favorite is ‘Lucina at Dusk,’ which swaps blush-pink and orange for lilac and light blue.
details from Clio Peppiatt's 'Lucina at Dusk' dress Cherchez la Femme, Eva Herzigova by Walter Pfeiffer for Vogue France, May 2009: I too should be wearing a long, flowy, goddess-y, girdled gown, eating a pastry, licking frosting off my finger, while someone takes a glamorous picture of me.
Louise Bourgeois, What Is the Shape of This Problem? (1999): Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) was a French-American artist best known for her large-scale sculptures of spiders and installation art, but she was also an avid writer and printmaker, experimenting with a variety of printmaking techniques throughout her career, especially in the last 20 years, when she made prints on a daily basis. Her art practices often excavated her own psychology, her creative process, her vulnerability, her sexuality, and her childhood. In What Is the Shape of This Problem? she presents nine diptychs that pair an image with a phrase; one of these is perhaps her most famous quotation, “Art is a guaranty of sanity.” However, to me the hidden gems are “I pick on everyone, dead or alive” and “To unravel a torment you must begin somewhere.” What is art, after all, but picking on the dead and the living, unravelling one’s torments?
Louise Bourgeois, What Is the Shape of This Problem? (1999) Juan Gris, Le Violon (1916): Juan Gris (1887–1927) was a Spanish painter who spent most of his career in France. Though he studied engineering at the Madrid School of Arts and Sciences, he submitted drawings to local journals, selling his possessions in 1906 to move to Paris, where he befriended well-known poets and artists and published satirical illustrations. In 1911, he took up painting seriously, influenced by the burgeoning Cubism of artists like Pablo Picasso, Jean Metzinger, and Georges Braque, drawing on his mathematics background to bring a sense of order and geometry to his work. Many of his paintings are still lifes, arrangements of everyday objects such as fruit dishes, newspapers, checkerboards, and musical instruments. To these ordinary things, he brings rhythm, movement, and a new way of looking.
Juan Gris, Newspaper and Fruit Dish (1916) and The Guitar (1918), via Wikimedia Commons Knabstrupper by rodeocowgirl2809: I was a Horse Girl when I was a child. My best friend and I used to sit astride the large tires, planted vertically in the ground, that were at the back of our school’s playground, pretending we were riding ponies together. When we were not doing that, we had our matching miniature My Little Ponies (Pinkie Pie, I think), whose hair we used to brush with minuscule lavender combs. The horse pictured here, a Knabstrupper, with its magnificently spotted coat, looks so graceful and free jumping through this plethora of purple flowers. If I could come before God as a naked soul and ask to be repackaged into a different body, I’d ask to be a horse.
Illustration by Kato Masao (1897-1977): Kato Masao was a Japanese poet and illustrator who published collections of poems, nursery rhymes, novels, and short stories. He studied English literature at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, and Western influences can be seen in his art, which centered around romantic subjects like fairies, children, and flowers. The little flower child shown here is so adorable and reminds me almost of the flower fairies of Cicely Mary Barker.
Bottle design for the fragrance Annam by Tan Giudicelli: The bottle design for Annam, launched in the early 2000s, won the 2001 FiFi Award for Women’s Packaging of the Year. It has a simple shell-like shape, the lid of it made of frosted glass, the body clear and limpid as the liquid it holds, the whole design emanating serenity, ease, and peace. The scent itself is described as milky, sweet, slightly floral, with a touch of spice, like the payasam my mom makes, rice pudding flavored with saffron and cardamom.
Yuanyang rice terraces in Yunnan, China: I recently mentioned the Yunnan province of China in my post about tea and its history—Yunnan is known as the birthplace of tea, but with its combination of snowy mountains and fertile tropics, the Tibetan Plateau acting to keep out monsoon winds and trap moisture, it supports an unusual lushness and biodiversity that includes far more than tea. In southern Yunnan, across an area of over 16,000 hectares, spreads the Honghe Hani Rice Terraces. These terraces, home to the Hani people, were first cultivated about 1,300 years ago, sloping in their distinctive steps and lines from the Ailao Mountains to the Hong River below. Over those years, the Hani developed a complex system of water channels that support the production of red rice. Who knew that man and nature working in complete harmony could produce such beauty?
Yuanyang rice terraces by Francoise Gaujour on Flickr
3 Things I’m in Love With This Week
Rewatching Gilmore Girls: There are very few TV shows I can claim to have watched all the way through—in fact, there are only two: The Hour, the 2011 British series about a news program set in the 1950s, which has only two seasons (how else do you think I would’ve finished it?), and Gilmore Girls, a show I have not only watched all seven seasons of plus the revival but continue to rewatch every once in a few months, skipping around the episodes because once you’ve seen it all, watching it in sequence doesn’t really matter. However, I must admit that in the past week, my obsession has for some reason intensified, and I’ve taken to getting distracted by random clips on YouTube.
Lauren Graham as Lorelai Gilmore and Alexis Bledel as Rory Gilmore in Gilmore Girls (2000-2007) Something about this show is particularly suited to autumn—just look at the title sequence, with its sepia tones and small-town New England imagery and fall foliage. But what is the source of its peculiar magic, which still holds two decades later? The snappy, sharp-witted dialogue? The minutely realized characters? The accuracy of the depictions of the pains and pleasures of mother-daughter relationships? Rory’s romances? Lorelai’s love life? The Dickensianly quirky figures who haunt the quaint little town of Stars Hollow? Stars Hollow itself? The fact that it takes place in, to quote Amy Lowell, “this my New England”? Yes, all of the above, but most of all something I can only describe as coziness, that peculiar intimate quality in a book or movie or TV show that draws you into its world and gives you a place to live that is our world but warmer, our world but softer, our world but more vivid, populated by personages we grow to love merely through familiarity with their oddities and idiosyncrasies, their mannerisms and their habits, their concerns that make us, for a moment, blessedly lay aside our own.
The Golden Bowl by Henry James: Gore Vidal relays an old joke about Henry James, in which his three styles, corresponding to three phases of his career, are referred to as “James the First, James the Second, and the Old Pretender.” The Golden Bowl, published in 1904, straddling the gap between 19th-century realism and 1920s modernism, is certainly a product of late James, but I see no pretending here; rather, what we have is an author in complete possession of all the skills and techniques and instincts and lessons a master novelist must have gleaned over the course of three decades of novel-writing, deployed with deadly precision.
Kate Beckinsale as Maggie Verver and Jeremy Northam as Prince Amerigo in The Golden Bowl (2000) The plot is simple enough: an Italian nobleman, rich in aristocratic background and what we now call “cultural capital” but poor with respect to what actually counts when it comes to delineations of rich and poor—that is to say, money—marries the only child of a disgustingly wealthy American robber baron. However, on the eve of the wedding, he encounters an old flame, his wife-to-be’s best friend, with whom, unbeknownst to his wife, he once had a love affair. He and she did not marry because she, too, alas, was poor. The wedding goes through, the daughter feels for her widowed father’s newfound loneliness, and contrives to get her best friend married to her father. The former lovers—now technically mother-in-law and son-in-law—and their spouses are thrown into a complicated quadrangle. The claustrophobia of the situation makes itself increasingly and horrifyingly apparent in equivocations, prevarications, evasions, and omissions. Dialogue is hard to write, but silence is harder.
Happy Together (1997): Director Wong Kar-Wai and cinematographer Christopher Doyle always make magic on the screen in these tales of loneliness and yearning and cities and time. In Happy Together, he swaps his native Hong Kong for Buenos Aires, where Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung) and his boyfriend Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) have flown in order to make a fresh start of their relationship. They fight, go their separate ways, and then decide to start all over again, rarely happy together, except in those few moments, dancing in the kitchen, holding each other close, swaying to the music of their heartbeats, that make it all worth it.
Happy Together (1997)
Words of Wisdom
Listening is the religious gesture par excellence.
— Byung Chul-Han, Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld
Poetry Corner
Who Has Seen the Wind?
Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you: But when the leaves hang trembling, The wind is passing through. Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I: But when the trees bow down their heads, The wind is passing by.
—Christina Rossetti
Beauty Tip
Out of the blue, compliment a loved one on a quality of theirs you admire. Try to dig for something they may not see in themselves or which may not be immediately obvious to others.
Lingering Question
What’s an area of your life in which you might benefit more by listening than by holding forth and declaiming your own perspective?
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Dear Readers, I hope you enjoyed this one! Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment below—what would your ideal hibernation look like? And if you enjoyed, like this post and subscribe to Soul-Making for more! I hope you all have a lovely weekend.
I wish I could hibernate through the winter! My version would probably look a lot like yours.
What a lovely break from the terrible news that made this week so bad.
Thank you for lighting up my day.