First novel of 2024. (Okay, I started it in 2023.) Sweeping. Intertextual. Multiple POVs with distinct voices, cleverly interwoven. Feels like it’s in conversation with Matt Bell’s Appleseed. Favorite quote: “. . . she has found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.” https://www.danielmasonbooks.com/
I love a good paradox and liminal spaces and thresholds. So I’m intrigued by a new old way to think about the transition between calendar years called the Rauhnächte, a way to actually find a minute to take in the moment. I really do want to stop and think about last year and look forward to the next. I’m an introvert, after all. But I don’t want to sacrifice the time it takes to prepare for the holidays or the conversations shared with family and friends between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day. The time is too precious; the years are passing. Turns out, there have been “extra days” waiting for just this purpose all along. It’s all in how you frame it, a bit like finding a week of February 29ths in plain sight.
Not all that long ago, the winter solstice would have been encountered as downright existential. And darker than dark. No wonder there were structured ways, the Sperrnächte and Rauhnächte, for thinking about this thin veil between worlds and years. Unlike our ancestors, who might have lived in mountain climes, winds howling and driving snow sideways while families huddled before a fire in the same room with their goats, we’re not wearing dirty clothes for fear the ghosts will snag themselves on laundry hung to dry. (In contrast, we just had the furnace replaced in a matter of hours, and it’s not even that cold here.) The appeal of these Germanic traditions that bookend the holidays is still compelling, if stemming from a different but related impulse. Now, we are trying to slow time down enough to be aware of time’s passing, to clean out our physical, mental, and spiritual rooms. Then, human beings just wanted to live through the long nights and winters and to quiet fears of unwanted spirits, to nurture faith in the return of the light and spring. It had never occurred to me that the twelve-day difference between the lunar and solar calendars after the hustle of the winter holiday season could provide a respite, just as dark turns to light, to get right with yourself for the coming year.
Modern German Rauhnächte seem to cull a range of old European customs and adapt them. Those I’ve been reading about were originally largely Germanic, but there must be others from all over the world that are equally intriguing. The explanations I’ve seen look something like this, give or take a day or two in each instance:
December 8th—December 20th: the Sperrnächte (once time to repair and store farming and hunting equipment/time to organize and clean and reflect on the past year)
December 21st—22nd: Winter Equinox
December 21st—January 1st (after Christianity took root, December 25th—January 5th) : the Rau[c]hnächte (time to use smoke to smudge or cleanse/time to ponder the year to come)
This year, before a friend told me about these old and revived traditions, I had already missed the Sperrnaechte, and to be honest, who has time to reflect on the past while getting ready for the holidays? Seems rather aspirational. However, maybe it’s more feasible to snatch a few days after the celebrations (I’m thinking from January 2nd to the 5th) to at least then, if not before, think on the year that was and make room for what you want to welcome into your life, even as we get back into the swing of routines.
As a kid, going back to school after the holidays was always a bit sad, and this often meant returning just before my birthday. This felt wrong—not only for the obvious reasons—but because I experienced that shift as jarring, like artificially jumping instead of smoothly stepping over a threshold. Even before I was helping shape the holidays for others, I always wanted to steal a little more time to attune to the season. In honor of that childhood instinct, I appreciate this new way to frame the liminal, especially the 12 days after Christmas, the period between the 354 day lunar calendar and the 365 day solar calendar, these “smokey” nights, or Rauhnächte.
Below are some links about the origins of these traditions and their modern iterations. I’m less interested in the particulars of which rituals we might choose on these days—I think we are capable of shaping that for ourselves—than I am in the permission to take the time, even in early January, to still be in transition, to cross over the threshold into the new year in peace with intentionality. And it doesn’t have to be all serious, but it can be if you want it to be. I’ll journal, work in my planner, meditate, hopefully work on a collage or paint, then get to work on the writing goals I’ve set for this year. Plus, this new perspective of time passing adds an element to look forward to next year—both the communal celebrations and the inward-looking Rauhnächte. Now to come up with a decent English translation for these smoking/hairy nights . . .
Wishing you, then, a smooth slide (einen guten Rutsch!) into the new year, especially, if like me, you take a little longer to land, ideally with grace but however you get there, into the rhythm of the new year.
A Few Resources
• Rauhnächte—In Germany It’s the Time Between the Years https://germangirlinamerica.com/what-is-rauhnacht/
• 5 Rituals with which you can manifest your wishes for 2023 https://www.brigitte.de/leben/rauhnaechte-ab-21-12—5-rituale–mit-denen-du-deine-wuensche-fuer-2024-manifestierst-13443696.html
• How the Sperrnächte help us to say goodbye to the old year with gratitude. https://www.brigitte.de/horoskop/sperrnaechte-ab-8-12—so-koennen-wir-sie-nutzen-13730256.html
• What is the Difference Between the Lunar Calendar and the Solar Calendar? https://sciencing.com/difference-between-lunar-calendar-solar-calendar-22648.html
• Raunächte: Magische Zeit zwischen den Jahren by Vanessa Nawka Leschke.
The mattress guy told me, You need to get your process straight. And who doesn’t love shopping for a mattress and simultaneously being criticized? At least when bathing-suit shopping (an equally onerous task), the customer isn’t usually judged while considering the options. I’ve never been in sales (unless you count two months working at Wilsons Leather in the 90s), but I’m pretty sure insulting the potential buyer’s thought process is not the move. For the record, I had a pretty well-defined process going in, as this was my second visit to the mattress store, sorting between categories (traditional, hybrid, or foam mattress) and qualities; firmness, motion transfer, cooling, and durability.
Fortuitously, I had been planning to write a post about process, albeit creative process. So thanks for the nudge, mattress guy. Because (I like to think) logical process is generally not my weakness but creative process might be, I’ve been experimenting with my creative process and begun a creative notebook modeled on an online class taught by Karishma Chugani with all these writers and more in mind.
What happens if I work more with mixed media while finishing the first draft of my novel? Will this bring witches and an alternate 19th century Pittsburgh together as I sew up the spine of the draft? My character is embarking on a journey, just as Hermann Hesse’s narrator in Wanderung (Wandering) documents his leave-taking from Germany to Italy/Switzerland. Each chapter is accompanied by Hesse’s own watercolors.
It is impossible in this moment to read this first page, as the wanderer considers the arbitrary and senseless nature of borders, and not think of Ukraine, Gaza, and Israel.
As Hesse’s narrator leaves German landscape and language behind, the text in picture and word becomes a questioning of what it is to be home (zu Hause), versus to have a homeland (Heimat). I am also reminded of recent interviews with Jhumpa Lahiri, who now writes in Italian and says she feels at home in Italian. Isn’t that partly why we create, to feel ourselves at home in a language?
A creative notebook is permission to play with mixed media in service of drafting a novel. Let’s see which problems might be overcome, which new directions might arise, new ways of being in picture and word. (These have started popping up already!) Hesse is a kind of homecoming for me, a reminder of why (an affinity for yearning) I fled to literature when I left the science-lab amoeba behind and defected permanently to the humanities in college. Thanks to Sebastian Matthews in Asheville for an inspiring class on visual art and text, as I try to get my process straight. Mattress decision to be continued. . .
*Es gibt nichts Gehässigeres als Grenzen, nichts Stupideres als Grenzen. Sie sind wie Kanonen, wie Generäle: so lange Vernunft, Menschlichkeit und Friede herrscht, spürt man nichts von ihnen and lächelt über sie,–sobald aber Krieg und Wahnsinn ausbricht, werden sie wichtig und heilig. –Hermann Hesse, Wanderung
For years, like so many raising kids and working, where I might want to go and what I might want to see didn’t even cross my mind (see the photo above). But—How do you want to explore?—this seems to be asking a next level question, both exacting and pressing.
This past weekend I went home to Lit Youngstown’s Fall Literary Festival featuring Ross Gay. I confess to being late to the Ross Gay train, having just read The Book of Delights before the conference, laughing my way through it, parceling out the essays over the course of a week in order to really see what he reveals in layers of detail. His speaking voice shares the same gentle ripples his written words engender, like low-tide waves of wisdom and generous spirit. Gay engages all our senses, his writing practice consisting of noticing and fostering delight as a kind of world-building (his word) that reinforces a delight-filled existence that might-could perpetuate itself. He sees himself as neither an optimist nor pessimist but certainly exudes a quiet charisma and an unassuming groundedness. He still has an aunt (a great aunt?) in Youngstown and visited with her each day. He laughs readily, contagiously, and doesn’t dress up for the occasion, which is more than okay with the crowd.
My own speaking voice has sounded muted, trapped in my head, indistinct and losing, just a bit, its accuracy and tool-like agility off and on since 2017. Sharing my voice has been an effort of late. I have wondered about stress factors, hereditary hearing loss, and entering the second half of adult life, which seems to demand a different kind of utterance. How do you explore when the senses have maybe begun to diminish? Or is that even what’s happening?
Ross requested “no photographs/selfies before or after the reading, please,” which is certainly fair enough, but left me wondering when, if ever, it was okay to photograph him, especially since the auditorium forbade photographs during an event. I had just driven from Cleveland to Youngstown through Amish country, where it is also rude to gawk and photograph, thus no photos in this post of Ross Gay nor the Amish, alway industrious and therefore often out and about.
On the drive, I noticed for the umpteenth time that my home state of Ohio is a state of dichotomies comfortable with its dichotomous state, where in thirty minutes time you can drive from this kind of industrious,
then past the positively pastoral homesteads of the Amish, line-drying their clothes and ploughing with horses fields lined with orange and golden trees.
This is the same place where in the airport a thirty-three-year-old Cleveland guy in sales finds it perfectly normal to spend an hour talking quarterback character, T.J. Watt, and Taylor Swift with a middle-aged, female Steeler fan. Here, a working-class Midwesterner/northern Appalachian generally won’t hold your education against you but will applaud you for it. And in front of the Butler Museum of Art in Youngstown, the blue-green copper patina statue of a Native American shares a lawn with the neon sign advertising the showing of Paul Stanley’s paintings (think KISS), although the Plains Indian in full headdress does seem to be peering in the opposite direction while shielding his eyes.
*
Ross Gay is very good at thinking out loud and has long, elegant fingers he uses to speak. I’m certain he can palm the nubbed surface of a basketball and probably writes about that somewhere. Even for the sake of hitting all the senses, I won’t scrounge up, additionally, examples of taste and smell, although there were many, mostly positive. A Google search suggests seven senses, not five, adding two “vestibular senses,” movement and balance, which bring me back to the question, How do you want to explore? To which I might respond, less so with a backpack and hostel stay, like in the student days, but certainly with movement and balance that permit and promote noticing.
Turns out the strangeness of my own voice and the electric thumping noises at night just might be due to a general state of depletion caused by under-hydration and a lack of certain nourishing vitamins (maybe minerals, too?) brought on by a vegetarian diet. Perhaps. If I had jumped on the advice of the audiologist and the ENT without also getting guidance from a writing friend who practices TCM, I would never have noticed that the hearing issues are but the canary in the coal mine.
I would like to explore by going home and going afar. I would like to explore by noticing. We writers are striving to notice what matters. The conference (specifically, Jill Christman, author and editor of River Teeth) reminded me that writing is more about what we discover than what we know, which sure takes the pressure off demonstrating how knowledgeable we are. Both Gay and Alison Stine said revision is a revealing, another kind of noticing, and perhaps, as Christman implied, a movement toward the strange. Workshopping a la Gay is about supporting the wilderness in others, not taming it. And since Gay talks a lot about love, which is what we are all working towards, it is perfectly permissible and apt to quote Rilke: “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” Love is the ultimate noticing.
I went back to where I’m from and was reminded that there is no better way to be in the world than by noticing. I stuck my tongue out at a friend and her husband, and they used their TCM expertise to observe my depletion. Sometimes, as in the festival panel on Domestic Fabulism with four poets, we unlock—through attentiveness to the everyday—the next level, a transformation, even a healing.
P.S. Ohio strange/Victorian normal—President Garfield’s tomb in Cleveland Heights has gargoyles!
foot×note
(https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/footnote)
1Before you start a blog, you ought to ask yourself why. Does the world really need another blog? Wouldn’t a podcast be better? And if you do decide there’s no way around it—you must try a blog—then shouldn’t the blog at least fill a niche? Something like The Folded Camellia: a blog for origami of the American south? But I have a website, I’m a writer, and it feels like the website needs a blog. Most of all, it feels like I need a regular writing practice. I considered calling the blog Practice. Because yoga is a practice, writing is a practice, and life is a practice.
While not particularly inventive, Practice: a blog would also seem to promise wisdom, if understated. And while I’d like to think I experience flashes of insight, wisdom is a high bar. I think of Gail Gilliland’s humbly entitled Being a Minor Writer, which has always made me feel a little bad for minor writers in general, which is, of course, not her intent all. The book is rather a defense of the many reasons one writes, regardless of attention or lack thereof. Her 1994 discussion stuck with me largely because in its middle, she tells the story of watching a young mother leave the McDonald’s on Bahnofstrasse in Mainz, Germany. I knew the very one and taught at the Johannes-Gutenberg University, too. And I wanted to be a writer of fiction, even then.
So, I need a modest way into a practice as we head into shorter, inward-looking days, and I think Footnotes (a blog) will serve. As noted above, unless you are John Scalzi, it is considered best practice to have a topic for your blog. But as I am at best a minor writer who needs to write more, how can a more general try be harmful? At least Footnotes implies short entries (keep reader expectations low and preempt boredom). A weekly “footnote” could touch on anything one might want to comment on, digress about, or scrawl in the margins. Perhaps paired with visuals from time to time. Sentence fragments allowed. Topics abound; what I’m reading, what I’m writing, what I’m noticing.
The rules are: 1) Keep it short. 2) Perfectionism is out. 3) Keep going as long as the blog supports the writing life and the writing.
*To be clear, I’m a fan of origami and still have a tiny, pink dragon made for me by a talented, super smart student in 2001. And yes, I remember his name! The student’s, that is.