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May 31, 2004
Memorial Day
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I’ve made no secret of my lack of enthusiasm for the soldiers’ holidays of Memorial and Veterans’ Day, the one for those that died in battle, the other for those fortunate enough to survive it. Either way, we privilege the place of war in our culture, while euphemizing it in terms of human valor and sacrifice. Even the language of the US Code obfuscates, invoking “prayer for permanent peace”, whereas the real tradition involves the decoration of graves, and was first formalized, in the pseudo-military form of a “General Order”, by the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans that wielded significant political power in it’s post-Civil War heyday. A century later, with the nation mired in a particularly ignoble war, the legislators who reformed the holiday schedule did not see fit to mention graves, and the corpses of Vietnam earned less honor than those of any former war.
That was not fair to the dead, for death remains death, whatever “value” we may put on it. All I remember from that time is Poppy Day, when, invoking the flowers of Flanders’ Field, the latter day descendants of the GAR made the rounds of grammar schools, and we uncomprehending children were all but obligated to offer up a quarter to purchase a wire and crepe-paper flower. Better they’d sliced the barren pod of a real Poppy, harvesting the opium ooze for easement of the eternal soldiers’ wounds… But now the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, as we are once again in the throes of conflict, searching for a way out, but not yet able to admit our error. In the course of excusing ourselves we insist on the virtue of every soldier, or at least the dead ones, the “worth” of whose extinction may be presumed to outweigh the embarrassment of any possible atrocities along the way. But war consists largely of atrocity, and whether we call it honorable or odious our main desire is to put it behind us, hidden like the rotting body lying beneath the flower-strewn turf of the grave.
Memory is the root of memorial, but I’ve been happy enough to forget, insisting instead on the populist rite of passage from Spring to Summer that underlies this date. I’m not alone in this, and, given the focus of this page, it was easy enough during its first two years to focus on the seasonal shift. Or rather it was hard for me to force myself to address the official narrative within the context of the immanent one. In 2000 I found the flowers of the Tuliptree to strew, but on behalf of all of us, as I would not give precedence to the warrior dead over noncombatants slain. Not while Life makes casualties of us all. In 2001 I traced a memory from past to future through the revival of the American Chestnut tree, continuing a theme that finally bore fruit last Thanksgiving. Things were different by the next year, and in 2002 I fell back on the ancient Triad form to insist that neither war not peace are properly the object of holidays. As such, I’ve remained reluctant to concentrate on our current state of war, which seems to be ongoing. So it was that last year, even at our supposed moment of victory, I found myself turning away from the nation’s wounds to address my own.
None of us have found healing yet, but we are working on the forgetting. That’s not as easy as it might seem: one does not simply forget and have done with it; you have to keep on forgetting, lest the untoward memory return. The forgetting is as ongoing as the fighting, but as long as war remains a hemisphere away it cannot eclipse the coming of Summer.
They say that vacation travel is returning to pre-9/11 levels, our debilitating fears forgotten, or at least repressed. So the Memorial Day weekend veers once more towards the uses of the living rather than memories of the dead, oscillating with our social weather. But Summer is ever the future of the Spring, and forgetfulness is a way of forcing some sort of future out of an unacceptable past. Maybe it were better to remember, in hopes that the censure of memory might help us to forge an acceptable future, but I fear our memories are no more reliable than our auguries. The future we predict never works out quite that way, and neither did the past that we remember. Self-justification flows in both directions, issuing from our current unease.
Recalled or forgotten, our soldiers remain but dead.
Honor or dishonor is ours to bestow, but never theirs to know.
We remember what we can, and forget what remembrance cannot bear.
Summer covers the graves with green and we can only wonder whether those who there repose would rather we drape them with a flag or a picnic blanket. What was it that they won for us? The pain of a memory premature, or the luxury of a season of forgetfulness?
May 9, 2004
Mother’s Day
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In the beginning, every parent thinks their child is the most perfect baby ever born. Alas, this evaluation is subject to change over the years, but even less reliable is the affection of the child, and most of us pass through (at least) a period of antipathy towards parental authority as such. Well, let me say that I have not suffered much, maybe too much largess if anything; but while I may have had my “awkward age”, and moments of embarrassment, I don’t believe that I have ever uttered that blasphemous shibboleth of childhood: “I hate my parents.”
The modern holidays honoring parents have no place in Tradition. Their institution may reflect a need accentuated by a lifestyle that takes us further away from our parents than was formerly the case in the days when most people lived and died in the same place where they were born, and many an aging parent lived with an adult child, exchanging in actuality what we now exchange in symbol. Certainly I do not take the cynical view that Mother’s and Father’s Day are essentially “commercial” holidays, marketing flowers, cards, and dinners out. They are worthy additions to the cannon, and if they recall but coarsely the old Commandment to “honor thy father and mother”, so our secular society must find its own way.
In celebrating parents on this page I have spoken more about my father than my mother. This is only partially due to my need to process the fact of his death in 2000, which took up several posts. One wants to believe in (and genetics teaches) a sexual equality of parenthood, but the fact of being borne within, and born from, the physical body of the mother lends her a certain preeminence, extending to our notions about the world at large. The Western tradition of patriarchy has succeeded not so much in dismissing the Goddess as in displacing Her, and Motherhood is now Her prime refuge, for which cause we find it all the more replete with metaphorical meaning, offering a greater range of reference than our Father, remote in heaven. So it was that I found mother birds to write about in 2000 and 2002, and Mother Earth in 2003. Only in 2001 did I express my regard for my own mother.
That seems like a long time ago, so let me take this opportunity to say that my mother is the best one in the world (though I won’t argue if you think the same of yours.) As a child, I thought she was the smartest person alive, but the years have only left me more impressed by the breadth of her learning; her endless curiosity and insight. Looking at old photographs, I see that she was always beautiful, but she has learned the art of living within one’s body, and bears her beauty more comfortably now, enriched with the wisdom of her years. And all this has been hard-won, in a life she had to make for herself, after she departed from marriage.
In my youth I often wished to hide the secrets of my inner life from her probing mind, but now I find that there is virtually nothing I cannot talk to her about, and it gratifies me to be able to share what many adult children still withhold. Having received from her the gift of Life, revealing such strands as I can of its reticulation is the best I can do by way of repayment.
We live at distance now, and I don’t see her as often as I’d wish, but she is ever in my thought, and remains a guiding voice. I measure the fitness of my every impulse by testing it against my image of her judgment, even though I know that she would forbear me much in the temperance of her love. And yet, I do not even speak to her as often as I should, but that is the way of the modern world, where families are far-flung, and too many are happier that way. But I will take up the duty (and the telephone) of this holiday, and call her on Mother’s Day, and talk around the bush of things trivial and things important; of my life, hers, and all the world’s; all as a prelude to the words that come just before the final click and silence on the line: “I love you, Mom.”
I truly do.
May 1, 2004
May Day
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O’, the first of May.
I call it a holiday, but it has no special place on our official calendars. The leftist usurpation of the date notwithstanding, the celebration of May Day at this point in history would seem to be largely a matter of nostalgia. Several posts from the first year of the Arboretum discussed the old English tradition of the Greenwood: that ever-vernal zone of mythic happenstance, told in song and story, and epitomized in the frolic of the May Games. Outside of the occasional children’s maypole, and the sometimes-questionable realm of neo-paganism, the date is little noted by our modern culture.
Well, I note it. In large part, my intent in these pages has been to revivify the Greenwood Tradition. I have always embraced nostalgia, which is the desire to return Home, and I see it not as an anachronistic longing, but as a basic component of the human psyche; part of a dialectic with our impulse towards the exotic, that being the complementary need to explore that which is not our home, but rather the dwelling place of the Other.
For us today, the nostalgic vector of this dialectic is frictional with our alienation from nature, and the more we despoil our environment, and embed ourselves in technology, the more energy this friction develops, until it catches fire, and throws off a great light, illuminating our deep-rooted need for a direct experience of nature as the life-giving Source. So it is that we have built the Park in the midst of the City; a greenwood set among towers of steel and concrete; not an answer to alienation, but a sort of song in the form of tree and brook, field and meadow, that has the power to express, and somewhat to assuage, our longing. Or so it is for me, at least in my better moods, and this I have hoped to communicate here within the confines of the virtual greenwood I call the Arboretum.
My mood is rarely so hopeful as on the first of May. But that’s what holidays are for: to force a necessary mood, even in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Begun in hope, the Arboretum project has become to some degree a chronicle of woes. Its first Fall was blighted by my father’s death, as traumatic an experience as I ever hope to go through, and before my twelve-month-and-a-day of mourning was finished, the national tragedy of 9/11 struck, inflicting trauma across the board. I began that day only a few blocks away from the scene, at a job which at least provided me an island in the storm, but the storm has blown that away too. Now war and woe the world over seem the order of the day, and if I greet another May in hope, it may be that I hope for too much.
But through it all, the Greenwood endures. Or at least I hear its music echoing in the memory of country-dance tunes, mingled among the bird songs and the voice of flowing waters issuing from the wooded shades of Central Park. Now, even as of yore, May Day marks the high point of the Springtide. The reality of reborn green transcends time, as pleasing to our modern senses as to our medieval forebears’. This is what I alluded to in 2000, when I plotted the course of the season through a triangulation of Spring holidays, ordered in the ancient Celtic form of the triad. A triad creates a relationship of three, in which the first two items set up the third as the real point of the poem. Thus I said that Spring has three faces: St. Patrick’s for the past, Easter for the future, but May Day for the moment: the only time we can actually inhabit.
In 2001 I gave myself over wholly, and didn’t even write the real post until afterwards, when I detailed the course of a day’s rambles through the Park. And in 2003 I sought to use the immediate as prophylactic against the overbearing symbolism of two vultures that shadowed a war-wracked Spring. That turned out to be a failed effort; more to the point was 2002’s poem, which introduced a theme that ran to the end of the year, linking the seasons through flower and fruit, by way of a riddle acknowledging that though these may be in a sense the same thing, it is transformed through time, and we cannot have both at once.
What we can have is the gift of Spring. Traditionally this takes the form of the Branch of May: the flowering bough collected before dawn for exchange between lovers. If the Greenwood is to persist, its rituals must of necessity change somewhat. As antidote to our carefree destructive ways of old we no longer need to break boughs or catch birds on limed twigs. The camera and the binocular will suffice, allowing us to possess these things without maiming or imprisoning them. Just to glut upon sensation is enough for May in the twenty-first century.
The value of this natural sensuality is no small thing. All the more so now, when our own sexuality is too often vulgarized and pornographic, lacking the perspective of nature’s context. For our ancestors, nature was the domain of a wildness that held a threat equal to its enticement, honing the piercing point of sensual ecstasy. The Puritans outlawed the May Games, and the walls of the City protected them from nature’s rank encroachment, but now all is turned inside out; it is we who wield the threat, and the wild things fly before our sprawl. Yet with care the Greenwood can grow inside our walls, be they walls of concrete or of mind. But the music of our Maying must be as a feigned birdcall, designed to draw the winged enchantments back within our view. There is an old song in which the catching of the flitting bird is equated with the fleeting pleasure of love, but for us, capture is now beside the point, for such birds as these will ever elude our snares. May we rejoice in the freedom of their being.