"Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail,A few verses later into the song, Dylan continues, "In the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales for the disrobed faceless forms of no position."
The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder."
- Bob Dylan, "Chimes of Freedom"
In song and in literature, weather - often unruly, robust and tempestuous weather - has long been used as a tool and a conceit. Storms parallel the trials and tribulations of people. Winter is a stand in for death. Spring, new life. Tempests portend. Shakespeare himself employed weather, as with many things, artfully: the stormy earth, shaking at its core, is feverish as Macbeth, fulfilling his prophesised rise to the throne, murders King Duncan.
But even though the storm creates and mirrors chaos, destruction and havoc, it also serves a cathartic role. Just as the forest fire is necessary for the reproduction of certain serotinous pine species - those which need heat for the pinecone to open and release the seed from its armored casing - the storm can also create anew.
In Dylan's - our - storm, hail and rain unfetter submerged narratives. Voices rise up. (Rise up singing, perhaps.) Chains are broken. Society is changed. As ham-fisted a phrase as "chimes of freedom" is, it is a startlingly powerful song. Even in 2007. (Especially in 2007?)
We get it. We know what it means.
The action in Stewart O'nan's recent novel Last Night at the Lobster takes place during an end-of-the fall mid-Connecticut snowstorm. All 146 pages chronicle the last day in the life of a stripmall Red Lobster before it shutters its doors, only to be replaced by another one in another location. The first sentence vividly sets the stage: "Mall traffic on a gray winter's day, stalled." Even the sentence is slow, its verb plunked at the end; the words crawl, slothlike, and upon reaching "stalled" - the action - don't move much more quickly. Langurous, the story is really the story of Manny, the longtime manager, a man in flux, seemingly floating in the spaces in-between: his girlfriend is pregnant, but he pines after a coworker who is a former lover. He is frequently lost in indecisive thought and regret and urgency, stalled as it is.
For a novel set in a restaurant, talk of food is unbelievably thin. And this, when we get the focus of the narrative, makes complete sense. It is a novel about work and living, and for anyone who's worked in a restaurant - corporate chain, high cuisine or other - its depiction of work and life in that setting is utterly believable. It is a workplace, and because people occupy space - some more than others - people become central.
While the storm knocks out the electricity for a while, it is not a tempest in the Shakespearean sense. It is big and heavy and constant though. "As [Manny] sweeps, he casually peers out over the mall lot, crawling with cars, their lights on to combat the gloom and the snow, falling steadily now, straight down," writes O'nan (22).
It's easy to feel there, heat on full blast, radio on but barely audible over the rush and gush of hot air, windshield wipers squeaking and dragging against the glass. Pavement and cars. And mounds of snow. And lights. Lots of them. Blinking traffic lights and signs, big, small and bright. Combating the gloom and snow.
There is no great transformation with this storm. It - and life - lingers. And lasts.
