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October 31, 2004
Halloween
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Halloween is one holiday I’ve never really addressed in a straightforward discursive manner. Usually I’ve written a poem, an oblique approach to an oblique occasion, but rhythm and rhyme may serve better than reason in accessing the spirit of a Day that probes the limits of identity and belief.
Or rather I should say, a Night.
Halloween is our darkest holiday, with one foot in the grave, but it’s not somber like the elegiac Memorial Day. The dead of Halloween offer the thrill of horror but do not inspire mourning, so my experience in 2000 was ironic, as the holiday was consumed by my father’s death. His story keeps surfacing in the old posts, echoing across the years, but that was his final night. He hovered through the midnight hour, then crossed another boundary, the last we’re sure of, in the early hours of November first, All Saints’ Day. That was only in keeping with his offbeat sense of timing. He was no saint, but he was a great soul.
All Souls are honored on November second, which is called the Day of the Dead in Latin America, where it’s celebrated with gusto. Halloween and el Dia de los Muertos are linked by their dates, and their Christian veneer, but appear to represent two independent yet parallel traditions. On both sides of the Atlantic it was understood by the natives that this is the time of year to get in touch with the dead. Christianity has its own investment in the Mystery that lies beyond our final boundary, but it could never fully reform the pagan spirit of its converts. In fact it was enriched thereby, and the many compromises and accommodations made between the Old Religion and the new were as much a matter of spiritual necessity as of political expedience.
Traditionally, this is the time when the barriers between our everyday world and the spiritual realm are at their most permeable. Spirits pass freely between worlds; the living, the dead, and a host of strange beings that have never lived, but do not die, meet among the shadows of the Night.
This meeting may be terrifying or orgiastic (or both.) As a matter of religious practicality, it offers a chance to propitiate the inhabitants of the Other World, but it’s most pious overseers are no longer conquering Christians, but New Age neo-pagans who have made of the holiday a major focus for the aspirations of alternative spirituality in the modern West. The altar is pretty much theirs: outside of a few zealous cranks, nobody in the Christian community takes Halloween’s dabbling in the dark too seriously anymore, and for America at large it’s all about fun; an occasion for indulgence without remorse. Children play questionable pranks and gorge on sweets; adults drink and flirt, and that party spirit, bereft of moralizing, makes Halloween one of our most popular and vital Holidays.
Halloween is a three billion dollar industry. In the ultimate measure of secular worth it is only surpassed by the big gift-giving holidays as an economic event. Its market is expansive because it caters to separate audiences of children and adults. Bridging the gap between generations is the constant of the costume. The dressing up is not so much a matter of disguise as it is a display of our secret egos, and if the young tend towards the terrible and the marvelous, adults are apt to engage the occasion as an opportunity to disinhibit their sexual self-images. Amid the post-modern flotsam of constructed identity, the holiday seems altogether up-to-date, and its popularity is only likely to increase.
Still, we should not ignore the nostalgic pagans in their sacred groves. Their spiritual aspirations may appear as a silly costume in today’s secular world, but the power that continues to animate Halloween, however mutated, is by no means disconnected from its ancient roots, and those draw nourishment from a level of being far deeper than any contemporary mainstream religion.
Neo-paganism locates the pre-Christian roots of Halloween in the old Celtic New Year holiday of Samhain. Samhain marked the end of the year’s harvest and the preparation for Winter. It was a fire festival, when the old year was reduced to ashes and fires were relit from a single ceremonial source. It’s strange to say, but today we are closer to the Celtic spirit world than we are to such basic seasonal observations. Ghosts and witches titillate our sophisticated modern belief system, but we are truly alienated from the actualities of the Earth and the harvest, going on unseen somewhere off on some huge, spiritless corporate farm whose acreage has displaced what we used to call “the countryside.”
By putting a face on the pumpkin, and filling it with fire, Halloween reminds us that the fruits of the Earth, and the Earth itself, are indeed living entities, and the spirit in the squash is of the same order as the one in us. Death is a necessary part of Nature’s cycle, but its darkness is full of illuminated souls. By recalling this ancient wisdom we propitiate their spirits, and learn to recognize ourselves among them, mingling freely and without fear.
October 11, 2004
Columbus Day
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Columbus Day is a holiday in trouble.
Of all the official national holidays it has the most mixed-up constituency, and the most freighted historical premise. My reading of it has always been skeptical, in essence arguing that historical revisionism is a necessity if the Holiday is to survive.
Survival is a strong word, and once something is written into law it’s not going to easily be gotten rid of, but a holiday that fails in its intended mission will morph into something else, something unintended. As I suggested back in January, what is critical for Columbus Day is that its transformation must be by way of a dialectical confrontation with its dark side, which may be effected through our recognition of a polarity between Columbus and Martin Luther King Day.
I stated the basic problems of the holiday in 2000: bad history and colonialist arrogance; Europeans as an invasive species. In 2001 I found in it a warning against making assumptions about any “new world,” in this case the one widely proclaimed a month earlier that year. 2002 found me extolling the virtues of the vacant lot, a space with all the potential that Europe found in America, and receiving a similar degree of respect. Last year I used Columbus the navigator as an excuse for presenting my map of the Park’s north end, but I couldn’t help pointing out that Columbus was a navigator who didn’t know where he was.
When I make recourse to MLK Day, it’s to argue that we do know where we are today, or at least we’re better oriented that our ancestors who took such pride in the subjugation of a continent, with so little introspection regarding the consequences. In offering up King’s holiday, we show that we’ve learned (at least symbolically) to honor the equality of the people we once felt justified in annihilating or enslaving. Columbus Day must be guided by King Day, as a ship on night waters is guided by the fog-piercing beam of a lighthouse. And even though that light be kindled more in the realm of the ideal than the actual, heading towards it will bring us to good harborage.
Otherwise, we leave the whole mess to the Italians.
Not that I have anything against Italy or its people. But as I explained in 2000, Columbus, the Spanish agent, who couldn’t even make a successful career as “discoverer of the New World,” is hardly an optimal choice as culture hero for the people who produced Rome and the Renaissance (Michelangelo Day, anyone?) More to the point, the language in the US Code only refers us to “the anniversary of the discovery of America,” nothing about Italian heritage. I’m in no position to criticize Italian-Americans for sailing in the wake of the occasion, but it remains a fact that no other ethnic holiday is coincident with a national holiday. People are free to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, or Steuben Day, or Pulaski Day, or any nationalist or ethnic holiday they wish, but they don’t get to have it tied to a governmentally endorsed day-off-with-pay. It doesn’t seem quite fair.
To a great degree, our ethnic holidays have been reduced to a series of cliché-ridden, corporate-sponsored parades. But when Central Park was young, a century and more ago, many of the celebrations took place within its confines. The only evidence remaining is in the statues the ethnic associations funded, scattering in bronze the culture heroes of many nations across the Park. Four hundred years after Columbus the tide of European immigration was peaking, and celebrating European entrée to the “Land of Opportunity” seemed like second nature. Today it’s worth noting that many of the most vital parading communities in town are of a decidedly “post-Columbian” sort: the Puerto Rican, Dominican and other Caribbean celebrations generally make the Old World affairs look stodgy, as the hybrid children of Columbus continue the immigrant trend, in the process transforming the very world their native ancestors saw transformed by the arrival of the Europeans. Not so much an irony as an historical dialectic at work in real time.
If Columbus Day can deal with such tricks of time and circumstance, then it has possibilities, even if they are forced upon us. The holiday will survive, I do not doubt. It already has a long memory, referencing the most distant event among all our national holidays, with the exception of Christmas. Christmas was once more of a spiritual holiday than an historical one, but we have remade it into a celebration of consumer culture. The source of Christmas is four times more distant than Columbus, and maybe so many centuries will always give way to mythology, but some would say our current Christmas is less than Christian. Columbus Day too is changing, but as Christmas shows, the course between transcendence and trivialization is not always clear. After all, trivialized or not, Christmas has become both our biggest holiday, and the one most representative of our character. Whether Columbus can come through the straits of history with as much potency remains unclear, but he will do well to navigate by the light of Dr. King’s day. In the new world opened by our youngest holiday we may yet find the redemption of our beginnings.