It is five degrees in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye this morning: five small, crystalline degrees under a sky so clear it might be made of glass. The frost has not quite released the garden. I can feel it from here, from wherever I am, that particular cold of early April in Burgundy, when the crocuses have already committed themselves and cannot take it back. They have thrust their soft throats out of the ground and must now endure whatever comes. There is courage in a crocus. More, perhaps, than in the men who are making such noise today.
For it is Easter, and the noise is considerable.
A new Pope (they are calling him Leo, the fourteenth of that name) stood in Saint Peter's Square yesterday and asked the leaders of the world to choose peace. I am told he addressed thousands. Thousands of faces tilted upward in the Roman light, thousands of mouths slightly open, as mouths tend to be when the body is listening harder than the mind. He spoke of God rejecting the prayers of those who wage war. It is a pretty sentence. I have known cats who rejected offerings with similar dignity – a mouse placed at their feet, examined, found wanting, and walked away from with an immaculate turn of the shoulder.
But Pope Leo is not a cat, and the men he addresses are not mice. They are something worse. They are men who have discovered that war is a kind of appetite, and that appetite, once indulged, demands to be fed again and again and again.
In the waters between Iran and the rest of the world's fuel, the Strait of Hormuz remains shut like a fist. An American airman was shot down and then, after two days of what they call an operation (as though it were surgery rather than terror), pulled from hostile ground by his countrymen. Both sides claim victory. I have seen this before, this mutual claiming. Two dogs over a single bone, each with its jaws locked, each growling through a closed mouth, neither eating. The American president speaks of hell descending in forty-eight hours. The Iranians speak of devastating response. Oil has climbed to one hundred and fifteen dollars a barrel, which means nothing to the crocus but everything to a delivery driver in Hanoi, whose diesel has doubled in price while his wages have not moved at all.
This is what I have always tried to understand – how the grand gestures of the powerful travel downward through the body of the world until they arrive, finally, at someone's hands. A gig worker in Vietnam, gripping handlebars in the heat. A woman on a boat that left the Libyan coast carrying a hundred people – of whom only thirty-two are known to have survived. The Mediterranean does not care about arithmetic. It swallows whom it swallows. I think of those seventy missing bodies with the particular anguish of someone who has always believed the body to be the first and final truth. Every one of those bodies knew hunger and thirst and the specific feel of a hand held by another hand. Every one of them chose to step onto that boat, which is to say every one of them had already exhausted every other choice.
The powerful do not step onto boats. They step onto podiums.
In Hungary, they have found explosives near a gas pipeline, a week before an election – a discovery so perfectly timed it smells less of gunpowder than of theatre. In Lebanon, Israeli strikes continue. The border crossing with Syria has been forced shut. Zelenskyy has gone to Damascus to shake hands and speak of cooperation, two countries bonded by the particular intimacy of being someone else's target. And in Nigeria, soldiers rescued Easter worshippers from a church that had been attacked – Easter, that festival of resurrection, interrupted by the most ancient of human arguments.
But I did not sit down to write only of war. I refuse. There are other appetites.
In Mexico, the art world is in revolt. Frida Kahlo's masterpieces (those paintings in which the body is always the subject, always broken, always magnificent) are to be sent to Spain, and the cultural figures of Mexico have signed an open letter asking how long, exactly, their patrimony will remain abroad. I understand their fear. A painting by Kahlo is not a postcard. It is a wound made visible, and wounds belong to the body that bore them. To send them across the ocean is a kind of surgery too – a separation of flesh from bone, of meaning from its native soil.
And then there is the moon. The Artemis astronauts are up there, preparing for their flyby, sending back photographs so beautiful that the scientists cannot decide whether they are data or holiday snapshots. I like this confusion. I have always liked it when beauty refuses to be useful, when it insists on being merely itself. The moon does not care whether you are measuring it or admiring it. It offers the same face to the telescope and to the lover.
Here on earth – my earth, the cold garden in Puisaye – a cyclist named Pogačar has won the Tour of Flanders after nearly being disqualified for crossing a train track. The race was split in two by a passing train, and he was on the wrong side, or the right side, depending on one's sympathies. I find this deeply satisfying. A man on a bicycle, lungs burning, legs screaming, confronted by a train (that enormous, indifferent machine) and choosing to cross anyway. The body insisting on its own momentum against the schedule of iron and steel. This is the story of the crocus, too, if you think about it.
Five degrees. The sky is clear. The frost will lift by noon, and the garden will remember that it is April.
Somewhere in the Strait of Hormuz, a fist remains closed. Somewhere in the Mediterranean, the sea keeps what it has taken. Somewhere in St. Peter's Square, the echo of a Pope's plea for peace is dissolving into the ordinary noise of a Roman afternoon.
But the crocus has opened. That is the news I choose to lead with today. The crocus, which has no army and no oil and no opinion about the price of diesel, has opened its throat to a sky of five degrees and found it (against all evidence, against all reason) sufficient.
