Mr. Wilson's Arboretum

December 31, 2002

Christmas?

So I sit here on Christmas morning, trying to understand what it’s like to have been born, and I listen to Christmas music, because this is its season, and you really can’t listen to it any other time of the year. Many of the Christmas songs are folk songs, such as I’ve talked about recently. This year I keep coming back to the Cherry Tree Carol. It’s based on apocryphal tradition, and certainly doesn’t match any Biblical accounts, but it concerns the Virgin’s pregnancy, and it’s popularly sung as a Christmas carol.

It must be the cherries; the blood red fruit.
Or maybe it’s all this talk and song of being born, but I can’t help thinking back to Spring, and that Riddle Song, the one with the cherry without any stone.
And I’m thinking there might be another answer to that riddle.

A Riddle is a little model we make of the Mystery.
Just as Mystery is inexhaustible, a Riddle may have more than one correct answer.
Just as thinking back to Spring is now thinking forward to Spring.
But right now it’s Christmas, and I present you with a Holiday Triad of Riddles:

Who is as a Cherry without any Stone?
Who is Child and Parent at once?
Who is Born with the Reborn Sun?

December 24, 2002

Descended From a Miracle

It happens that Christmas Eve is my birthday. People often assume that’s a problem, that my “special day” gets lost in the seasonal surge. On the contrary, I’ve always enjoyed the association. It seems to me I get more attention, rather than less, owing to the general concentration of celebration.

Anyone’s birthday is a special day, at least to them. Mine is caught up in our biggest Holiday, replete with images and evocations of nativity. Christmas is a heady occasion, no doubt, but I’ve come to realize that I can’t really separate it from my own birthday. I suppose that some part of what I understand as the “Holiday Spirit” is actually what other people feel on their birthdays, whenever they occur. Allowing us to identify with divinity is a proper function of Christmas, but for most of the year we are merely born, in the conventional manner.
Such as that may be.

We know our parents, and who their parents were, but beyond that it’s hearsay fading to ignorance. Surely the line had a beginning? There was a time before there were people, and a time before there was life. Perhaps there was a time before there was anything, if you can call that time. Even the most mundane explanation of how it is that we are here now passes for miraculous. Somewhere in our ancestry we require that there be something out of nothing.

Something out of nothing is a Mystery.
Hence Christmas, with it’s unaccountable Birth.
But mine, and yours, are no less miraculous.
And that, too, is the lesson of Christmas.
It’s everybody’s Birthday.

December 21, 2002

Solstice is here...

December 16, 2002

Bellwether

Who has not had a song in their head?
Often in my wanderings, hectic thought subsides and music fills my mind's ear. A popular tune of the day, perhaps, or even some commercial jingle, finding a subconscious route to taunt me. But mostly I hear the old songs, the so-called folk songs, into which our ancestors once poured their wisdom.

I have at times had recourse to these songs here on this page.
They are useful in making certain points, for they contain the very power of Tradition. Their power is accessed through intimacy, through memorization and recitation, be it aloud or in the silent realms of the mind. Some we sing during the Christmas season, of which there will be more to say, but today the song that haunts me will return us to the events of late October, and the rally held in the Park which I mentioned back on Veteran's Day.

What alerted me to the anti-war protest of that day was an unexpected echo of song, not in my head, but drifting across the meadows and up to the Great Hill. Only noise I heard at first, the clamor of a crowd, but then something familiar, not fully intelligible, yet fitting into a well-worn psychic pathway leading to recognition. It was The False Knight on the Road, or so I thought; Child Ballad number three. In fact, it was a modern rewrite, but the pattern and the chorus were the same, and it was the chorus that I finally recognized:

And he stood, and he stood
It was well that he stood...

The song tells of a schoolboy confronting a mysterious "False Knight", who bars the child's path. The knight asks a series of taunting questions, but the steadfast boy has a riposte for each, standing firm, until the Knight is finally dismissed to hell.

To stand firm, to stand against.
A picture of resistance, drawn in song.
I suspect it's through this image that the song appeals to the war resistors, but it's not so much the standing against that interests me as it is the going through.

The False Knight is a very old song, and it's been rewritten before now, but it was once a magical song of initiation. It has been Christianized, and marked by Authority, which perhaps makes it a problematic candidate for a protest song.

It still bears the basic form of the Initiate facing the Guardian, who must be properly addressed before granting access to the Mysteries. This model of spiritual development has not yet been superseded, but in the song the seeker has been reduced to a child, in need of schooling, that is to say, codified learning, rather than the ecstatic understanding of the Mysteries. The Knight is often identified with the Devil. Rather than guarding a spiritual threshold, he tries to keep the boy from getting to school. The school bell that banishes the Knight was once a church bell. They ring with the same Authority, but the imagery has been diminished.

Even so, there is some magic left. The boy vanquishes the Knight by topping every question with a clever answer. The verbal fencing seems rather mild by satanic standards, but that's because originally the Guardian was not truly evil, but rather a manifestation of the resistance which all Life must pass through. The topping contest exists in many cultures, often as a child's game, but it's also closely related to the riddle sequences I alluded to last Spring. The False Knight lacks the wit of Captain Wedderburn's Courtship, or the poetry of Scarborough Fair, but what it really lacks is Love. In those songs the proper answer to the riddle dissipates resistance, winning the acquiescence of the beloved. In The False Knight, the reward for defeating the Devil is to submit to the teachings of books, and the authority of the bell.
Which perhaps makes it a suitable platform for the political after all.

The real lesson is in the riddling and the ripostes, the verbal inversions of expectation, which cause the mind to gape and rhyme, and open itself to possibilities that are not taught in school. It may come as a question; it may come as an answer; it may be a playground comebacker, but the logic is ecstatic, and it teaches us to overcome our own resistance. This we can only do by passing through, not by standing against.

Knowledge thus won is true Gnosis. It marks the point on our road where self-knowledge meets knowledge of the World at large. That meeting is ever humbling, but if it teaches us to move beyond self-righteousness it will be a worthwhile lesson, not least in the worldly realm of the political. If we can get past our habit of seeing the Devil in all those who disagree with us, if we can admit that we are not so innocent as children, then we will have cause to ring the bells of celebration.

November 28, 2002

Happy Thanksgiving (from Austria)...

November 11, 2002

Inveterate

After the terrorist attack on lower Manhattan, I think it's fair to say that all of us New Yorkers are veterans of a sort. I might have said as much beforehand, and without limitation, as we are all surely veterans of Life, and it galls me to grant privileged status to war and its wagers. Still, we have been touched more deeply hereabouts, and people who would never wield a weapon have been battered as much as any combatants. Even those who seek sanctuary in the Park bear reminders of our recent unnatural history.

The horror of war is one thing, ("honoring" veterans is, in part, a way of dispensing with our complicity in that horror,) and maybe those of us who did not lose life or limb shouldn't presume to claim any measure of equivalence. I certainly wouldn't for myself, but I can't help but contemplate the psychic fallout that must have hit another birder I encounter with some regularity in the Park. Rebekah Creshkoff has gone beyond birdwatching as a sport. She’s deeply involved with the plight of our native species, to the point of becoming an activist on their behalf. One of her main concerns has been the problem of tower kills, where huge numbers of migrating birds die colliding with tall buildings or communications towers, usually in bad weather. It was her practice to arrive early at the World Trade Center and collect the victims on such occasions, nursing the few survivors, cataloging the rest, and sending their corpses off for the consideration of scientists. That those towers should be the scene of human carnage on a comparable scale, even as the hazard they represented became a casualty of the same event, beggars my powers of comprehension and emotional response.
But that’s what war does to people.

So Rebekah is certainly a veteran, and I’m happy to honor her, but I think even she was a little surprised at my failure to endorse another sort of slaughter, that of the Brown-headed Cowbird. Well-meaning conservationists are waging war against the Cowbird. It's a native bird, not an invasive, but it has the unpleasant habit of laying its eggs in other species' nests, earning it the rank of parasite. The host birds raise the Cowbird chicks, to the detriment of their own, and the Cowbird is considered an important factor in the decline of many songbird species. In Michigan, where the endangered Kirtland's Warbler has its limited nesting range, Cowbird control programs are part of the strategy for saving the species. Of course, "control" means "killing". I'm always suspicious of euphemisms, just as I'm suspicious of any solution which involves defining some group as the enemy, with the suggestion that if we just kill the bad guys everything will be all right. It seems to me that this is how war and terror typically proceed.

I don't pretend to have the answers, for birds or for people, but I do have misgivings about institutionalized killing, even when it may be justifiable. I suppose that it is a sort of natural law that when someone tries to kill you, you are thereby justified in killing them, but the purported Christian heritage of the West once taught something different. "Turn the other cheek" and "love thy enemy" were revolutionary ideas in their time, but they derived from the faith, hope, and love of the powerless. Once Christianity ascended to power such ideals were jettisoned in a betrayal of faith and tradition which continues to this day, at least insofar as our culture claims to represent Christian values.

That being the case, I went down to Washington, trying to stop the impending war.
I am not much given to such activism, being essentially apolitical. My position is the ascetic one of the observer; the outsider. It's hardly tenable, but it's where I have been forced. An outsider I was, on the day in October when an anti-war rally was mounted in Central Park. Traversing the Great Hill, I began to hear distant sounds from a crowd on the East Meadow, but it took a while to realize what was going on, and I didn't know until later that friends of mine had been there. It was those friends that made the difference to me between action and inaction. I found myself feeling bad, not for my own lack of commitment, but because I wanted to join in their commitment; my pain was that of exclusion, rather than moral failure. Yet that is the way of any mass-effort: many are enlisted more by the momentum than the meaning.

We learn from our friends, and sometimes peer pressure can lead us where we need to go, but it's also a microcosm of mob psychology. Writ large, the like-minded assembly comes to resemble the very thing we would oppose: an army focused on a foe. It's to the credit of my associates that they recognized this, and out of their struggle with the means and aims of protestation came the notion of a high-spirited contingent, more like a rock band than a band of soldiers, libidinous and ecstatic, defying the dogma of politics. The amount of effort and planning it took to manifest such a group, and get them to DC, may have belied the image we created, but it was worthwhile, I think, even to march in a circle around the disinterested seat of power. At least the warmongers must make the effort to ignore us.

I have some memory of the Vietnam era protests; I even participated in a couple, in the company of my parents. They were hardly radicals, but resistance then was more advanced than today. For my part, I was a would-be hippie, making an adolescent gesture towards something larger than my understanding. In my mind hippies, radicals, and anti-establishment types of all stripes were conflated in their common rejection of mainstream politics. Being against the war was “cool”, even to a twelve year old, but it took years, and thousands of dead to make it so.

I hope we don’t have to go through that again, but war is always about repeating a mistake, and the years bring as much forgetfulness as learning. We have forgotten much of what we learned in the 60’s, leaving us to grapple with many of the same issues. I now have a better understanding of the gap between the true hippies, who were quasi-spiritual dropouts, and the radical activists, who were political strategists seeking allies. They shared a disgust with the war, but the hippies weren’t much for the party discipline of the organized activists. They were for the other kind of party, and they brought a subversive theatricality to the act of protest, threatening not only to the establishment, but to that form of resistance which only mirrors the object of its enmity. If the last quarter of a century has not done much to advance the dialogue, we will just have to take it up again. At least that’s my understanding of how I ended up a middle aged protester. “Make love, not war” is no more ridiculous than “love thy enemy”. And if war seems sensible to people, then we’re much in need of a dose of the ridiculous. What we don’t need is more veterans.

older posts...

The Seventh Day of Christmas

The Sixth Day of Christmas

The Fifth Day of Christmas

The Fourth Day of Christmas