The Brooklyn Rail

Winter enters us into liminal spaces. Between solstices, from midsummer to Yuletide, light is siphoned from day, more than eight hours of it in the Northern Hemisphere, until reaching peak darkness, arresting the sun’s movement in an illusion of breathless stillness, a figurative death and rebirth, before its slow celestial ascent enables a gradual accumulation of light. This in-between season, though long marked by ancient celebrations and stone sites across every continent, remains interminable in its enduring dark and cold, wresting at what is most primal and uncertain in us, while simultaneously offering an invitation to draw inwards. Navigating this liminal space in a narrative capacity entertains a certain surrealist rhetoric, one allowing for a transcendent experience indicative of this transitional period, as André Breton expounds on in his Second Manifesto of Surrealism, one is transformed, led toward a “total recovery of our psychic force” through a “dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory.”

Such is the journey that lives at the heart of Nina MacLaughlin’s mesmerizing new book of lyrical nonfiction, Winter Solstice. From its first breath, the narrative is a visceral movement through the hiemal season, imbricating what is familiar and comforting “to honor the dark with festivals of light,” with an ominous, collective disquiet, as boys string garlands of bulbs on the houses of neighbors for pocket money, children skate and sled across frozen landscapes full of hidden treacheries, candlelight burns in frosted windows, and a fireplace roars with erotic charge. Hot simmering soups fill kitchens with “amber warmth,” as the air outside turns frigid, and seems to arise “from darker lungs, and the leaves are at their loudest, last rattle before long quiet,” turning rivers “black … bristl[ing] against this wind, white fur rising on the backs of fast black animals.”

Like her previous books, the memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter, which follows MacLaughlin’s journey from writer to the aforementioned trade, and Wake, Siren: Ovid Restrung, a breathtaking, gynocentric reimagining of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the subject of transformation, be it in the personal or mythic sphere, remains the focal point of her prose. Winter Solstice, her most recent, following its companion of a similar meditation, Summer Solstice, first appeared as installments in a regular column for The Paris Review. The narrative achieves a deeply cohesive, riveting quality, that at times directly engages the reader in collaboration and intrigue, recalling the stylistic tendencies of Ruth Ozeki and Italo Calvino. At one point the narrative asks:

Did you skate as a child, on rivers or ponds? Did you sled? Do you remember the last time you skated? The last time you rode a sled? … Winter invites a turning in, a quieting, an upped interiority. It’s dark in there … Will you be able to find your way out?

MacLaughlin shares her own sense of vulnerability as she navigates the complexity over such ruminations, revealing how each light-hearted winter pleasure draws its own shadow. In one instance she reveals how “the sledding hill in the town I grew up in was on the grounds of an institution for the criminally insane … At the top, asylum to our backs, we took our running starts,” while on some nights one could “hear the sound of the alarm when someone escaped from the hospital … a soul-stilling moan, as though the bulkhead door to the basement of Hell was being pried open again and again.”

Winter Solstice isn’t a mere homage to the pleasures, be they rustic or sybaritic, emblematic of the season. Here instead is a vivid and propulsive narrative built on associations that traverse between manifest exhibitions of wintertime and its mainstream traditions, and beyond the familiar, plumbing what Breton called those hidden “latencies” within, illuminating ghostlike impressions of ancient voices and practices unearthed from a collective unconscious that points to that which is most primal and soul-sustaining, and what seeks to transform us. At certain points, the narrative layers tradition together with folklore and myth, be that the march of Krampusnacht on the hunt for the bones of naughty children, or the decadent Roman festivals of Saturnalia, honoring Saturn, ruler of Capricorn, the solstice tropic. Traditions as comforting and familiar as the glow of Christmas lights strung on bushes and trees have their roots in the ancient Viking ritual of burning the Yule log on solstice night. MacLaughlin reveals how “something of these ancient fires lives in them, too. The ancient cults cast shadows in our minds, shift and flicker, their fears are still our fears, down in the darkest places of ourselves.”

The narrative further elucidates this point through various underworld journeys, such as a visitation to pre-Christian sites like Newgrange in Ireland, a Neolithic tomb built to capture the first of the winter solstice light, directing sunshine into the ancient passageways of its chamber. MacLaughlin invites us to feel with her “the ancient charge of the chamber … the souls who touched with their human hands the stones we stood below…witnessing the silent coupling of sun god and earth goddess.”

MacLaughlin’s far-reaching consciousness, seemingly tempered by an anthropologist’s gaze, is built to provoke a sense of “boundary-dissolving extendo-fest… to dissolve and pass formless through the membrane into a shimmering of raw perception, into union with the All.” Voices, so often poetic luminaries like Mary Ruefle and Emily Dickinson, appear like shepherds to further a more nuanced understanding of what can be experienced; as she quotes Octavio Paz, we engage with the opportunity to “throw down our burdens of time and reason” in order to engage with that “formless unfamiliar, the shadow that lives below the shadow … where real terror lives.”

In this sense, the narrative suggests, the reader enters a transcendence through a collective “grief [that] itself has become a thin layer of the atmosphere,” mingled with a fear that “is spreading because it sells and … gets at what is animal in us.” The winter dark, reminding us of our mortality, seems to magnify these fears and the stark reality of how “so much magic is axed out of us, by the accumulating hurts of adulthood, our imaginations muffled by fear and loss … that separate us from the type of light and darkness that lives within us and outside us.” Yet by the final movement of Winter Solstice, in its affecting afterword, the narrative reminds us of what endures, “a faith in something powerful that’s communicated across time and space, the strands of light lit up between us.”