A Much of a Which of a Wind

A norther roared in early Sunday morning.  It hollered down from the Arctic and slammed us with screaming winds.  When I awoke for worship I set aside my set Scripture reading and turned instead to Herman Melville. 

It was a queer sort of place - a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul’s tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. “In judging of that tempestuous wind called Euroclydon,” says an old writer - of whose works I possess the only copy extant - “it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier.” True enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind - old black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn’t stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it’s too late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would not keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his red silken wrapper - (he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals. - Moby Dick, Chapter 2, “The Carpetbag”

I had arisen early, Dives-like to enjoy the blow, but Melville stole much of my pleasure.  I went next to the penultimate section of Job, where young Elihu hectors teh venerable patriarch.  In the midst of a really fine speech the upstart catches the glare of oncoming headlights as the highbeams of God’s storm chariot flick across his vision.  “He causeth it to come,” the upstart decides as he faces down God’s whirlwind, “whether for correction, or for his land, or for mercy.” 

The middle term of that sequence is easy enough to grasp.  Salniity levels in Corpus Christi Bay threaten sea life.  We need an infusion of fresh water.  But this simple centerpiece serves as the fulcrum for a very strange teeter-totter.  My books tell me that correction here is the Hebrew word for “rod,” an instrument of punishment suitable for whacking a recalcitrant servant (Exodus 21.20), an ignorant know-it-all (Proverbs 10.13), or a teenager who clearly has it coming(Proverbs 13.24).  Mercy, on the other hand, is the Hebrew chesed, the covenant-based, contract-protected love of God which remains eternally unshaken by the various vagaries of the sinful people with whom the Lord has made his bad bargain. 

Of course, a God like ours is sufficiently dextrous to set two mutually exclusive purposes dancing on the pinhead of a single storm.  Still, it strikes me as strange that the blow can be both his kick and his kiss.  And then I found it:  Israel’s sweet singer, that anointed king and pop culture icon David, once got off a line so good it resonates to this day even among the irreligious and anti-religious:  “Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”  A herdsman might use such a club to whack an errant ruminant, driving her back to the fold, or protect her from a predator (Micah 7.14), or to make sure she’s accounted for at the end of the day as the flock enters the safety of the pen (Ezekiel 20.37).  The rod, like God, is always the same; I experience it differently depending on my relationship to the Shepherd.

That sent me to yet a second slice of secular literature, e. e. cummings’ “what if a much of a which of a wind.”

what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer’s lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?
Blow king to beggar and queen to seem
(blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)
-when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,
the single secret will still be man

what if a keen of a lean wind flays
screaming hills with sleet and snow:
strangles valleys by ropes of thing
and stifles forests in white ago?
Blow hope to terror; blow seeing to blind
(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)
-whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,
it’s they shall cry hello to the spring

what if a dawn of a doom of a dream
bites this universe in two,
peels forever out of his grave
and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?
Blow soon to never and never to twice
(blow life to isn’t; blow death to was)
-all nothing’s only our hugest home;
the most who die, the more we live

The same wind corrects by killing illusion and shows mercy revealing reality.  What am I under all the leafy froth of religious rhetoric?  Crowned kings only seem better than beggars; Dives’ edge on Lazarus is more apparent than real.  The rich man’s salvation might have come in the form of a wind strong enough to blow a cold blast up his ermine-lined skirt.  The grass gets watered one way or another, but what about my relationship to this storm:  correction or mercy?

I went once more to literature, this time to Shakespeare’s King Lear standing naked in a storm for the first time in his privileged life.

 Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.
(Act 3/Scene 4)

“Oh I have ta’en too little care of this” - correction.  “Take physic, pomp” - mercy.  Am I making my own summer with my own coals, or stoking the flames of my own Hell with the selfishness of my accidental wealth?  All in all, it was more than I bargained for when I got up early to enjoy the sound of the storm.

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