Death, Duende, and Jingle Bells

Tomorrow shall be my dancing day;
I would my true love did so chance
To see the legend of my play,
To call my true love to my dance;

Sing, oh! my love, oh! my love, my love, my love,
This have I done for my true love.

-----

I've never thought of real traditional Christmas stuff as being especially cheerful and G-rated. This subject, brought up initially by a friend of mine, made me think of this photo from a Christmas show I was in several years ago. The plot involved several deaths and the highlight of the show was the curtains behind the throne transforming into a Shadow Knight puppet three times the height of the puppeteer working it, which chased one of the actors through the audience and terrified people before disappearing out a back exit. This was followed by a funeral scene (modeled after real traditional ceremonies, the girl in the veil is the human sacrifice) and the dance with the skeleton – the Danse Macabre -- set in an otherworldly ruined castle overgrown with evergreens and dead branches. And did I mention the prophetic dwarves who foretold the King’s defeat by the Shadow Knight?

And when the door begins to crack
It's like a stick across your back,
And when your back begins to smart
It's like a penknife in your heart,
And when your heart begins to bleed
You're dead, and dead, and dead indeed.

And then of course there's the Abbots Bromley, which is haunting and subtly sexual in a very weird way, and a medieval ballad called "Man mei longe him lives wene," the lyrics of which translate as follows:

Man may expect long life, yet often, for him, there waits a trick. Fair weather often turns to rain, and sunshine is wondrously made. Therefore, man, bethink thyself – all thy green youth shall fade. Well-a-day! Neither King nor Queen shall escape the drinking of death’s draught. Man, ere thou fallest off thy bench, quench thy sin.

All of this, I think, is fitting -- Christmas is a celebration of a joyous event, but it's also a mark of the darkest, coldest, hardest part of the year which has been observed by cultures worldwide throughout history. Şeva Zistanê, Yule, Meán Geimhridh, Ziemassvētki, Dongzhi, Yalda, Soyalangwul, Wayeb, Saturnalia, the list goes on. It's a celebration of a birth, but also of death -- the death of the year, the child who must die, the death of light, the fires guttering against the wind, the wolves at the door, and the ghosts in the frost on the window. Jacob Marley's calling. St. George fights the dragon and loses, and somewhere in a manger is an infant whose ultimate purpose is to be unjustly tortured and killed by a corrupt tyrant.

Cheerful holiday, yes?

The joy of this time of year comes from the people who MAKE joy in defiance of the world turning away from us in its deep sleep and reducing mankind to a few little candles while kings and shepherds and the son of God huddle on the straw and the dirt with the livestock. Like them, in the end, we share the same feral fear of the dark and the butcher's block. Looking at other traditional winter celebrations, it seems that regardless of time, race, religion, or place, our collective human consciousness has always viewed the winter solstice as a time when walls between the mortal and immortal worlds crack and crumble, and as they become less distinct, so too do the boundaries between humanity and the beasts whose warmth and grain we share, or whose howls and roars we flee. The ghosts we dressed our children as not two months ago are just as present, and seem somehow more real now.

Now. Here, in this time and place, we have become very good at making joy and lighting the darkness. The radios play jingle bells, the streets are decked in ribbons and wreaths and fairy-lights, cartoon images of jolly old gentlemen and his chipper little helpers are plastered to every window and wall. Yet even there, the echoed symbols of mankind’s more visceral nature brought out by the dark and the cold can be seen. Somewhere long ago and buried deep, claymation Rudolph and the herd of flying caribou merge back into the same sexually driven rut-instinct and raw strength that inspired the Abbots Bromley dancers to don the antlers of the game they hunted; and the Keeblerized toybuilders revert to their untraceably old selves:

...they are commonly described as semi-divine beings associated with fertility and the cult of the ancestors and ancestor worship. The notion of elves thus appears similar to the animistic belief in spirits of nature and of the deceased, common to nearly all human religions; this is also true for the Old Norse belief in dísir, fylgjur and vörðar ("follower" and "warden" spirits, respectively). Like spirits, the elves were not bound by physical limitations and could pass through walls and doors in the manner of ghosts, which happens in Norna-Gests þáttr.

All of these are part of what we are, the very root of humanity, the memetic ancestry of our collective consciousness. We laugh, we carol, give gifts and feast, but at the deepest heart of Christmas, we realize that we are infinite, and we embrace our duende.

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us -- listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
~Susan Cooper

The elegant misinterpretation of Christianity, and why I'm wearing a cross

This is a reflection posted not long ago to my old journal. I thought it fitting to repost here as a first "real" entry. The lyrics quoted in the beginning and end are from the song "Illuminations" by Gogol Bordello. They didn't inspire the text set to them; it was a happy coincidence that I found the song around the time I was thinking of trying to collect this particular sentiment in text.
-----

Don't believe them for a moment,
For a second, do not believe, my friend
When you are down, them are not coming
With a helping hand.
Of course there is no us and them
But them, they do not think the same,
It's them who do not think.

They never step on spiritual path
They paint their faces so differently from ours
And if you listen closely
That war it never stops.

Be them new Romans,
Don't envy them my friend.
Be their lives longer,
Their longer lives are spent
Without a love or faithful friend
All those things they have to rent.

But we who see our destiny
In sound of this same old punk song
Let rest originality for sake of passing it around.
Illuminating realization number one:
You are the only light there is
For yourself, my friend.

So they tell you "Jesus saves." Who is Jesus? Go into any Church or a vast selection of hotel rooms worldwide and you'll find a book that has a great deal to say on the subject. In brief, Jesus is the son of God (which, by the way, so are you, according to said book) who was born in a stable and had many adventures before his death, resurrection, and ascension into Heaven to be seated at the right hand of the Lord. Good, you probably recognize this. The identity of the supposed Savior is told in parables and episodic chapters by four fellows he was tight with. Consider these.

Now consider this hypothetical situation:

Gather together a bunch of people. It doesn't matter how many. Five, fifty, five thousand. It doesn't matter what religion they are, what race, what nationality, what gender, or their age (so long as they are capable of rational communication).

Ask them:
Have you ever felt that you were born into the wrong place or time?
Have you ever felt that your parents or elders expected more of you than you should be expected to give?
Have you ever had someone try to convince you not to do the right thing because the alternative would be easier or more fun and the "right thing" isn't that important anyway?
Have you ever felt as if your real home is somewhere else, somewhere you've never seen?
Have you ever had the right answer to something, but been ignored or put down for unjust or mean or selfish reasons?
Have you ever been betrayed by someone you thought was your friend?
Have you been disappointed in people living down to your bad expectations of them?
Have you been proud of people living up to higher than your expectations of them?
Have you ever been punished for something someone else did?

...and if, by now, every single person in your hypothetical group has not answered "yes" to at least one question, there are many more you can ask.

All of these things are part of who Jesus was.

Think about that.

It's one of the most elegant metaphors ever constructed. Every human on this planet embodies at least one piece of all the elements that make up the identity of the Savior. Jesus is therefor universal human identity. And in this reinterpretation, you find that the ultimate key to wholeness, virtue, balance, and peace is not blind servitude to the demands of an ancient god-made-flesh, but self-empowerment through the realization of man's essential connection to mankind. Everyone is the savior. So long as you have the capacity for rational thought and self-awareness, you have the capacity to choose to become your own savior. You find your own peace. You fulfill your own prophesy. You walk in the footsteps of your gods until you realize they walk in yours.

So that is why I'm wearing a cross. It does not mean that I am a blind follower of outdated philosophies. It means I am a self-aware, self-empowered extension of the universal God embodied in humanity -- the God whose religion is life, whose church is this planet, and whose only commandment is "Be."

There'll be no saviors any soon coming down
And anyway illuminations
Never come from the crowned.
Illuminating realization number one:
You are the only light there is For yourself, my friend.

Welcome.

So here I am! Moving into my new home here at blogger.com. There won't be an overwhelming amount of personal information or idle commentary on irrelivancies from here on; but as this is my first post, I might as well use it to introduce my readers to yours truly, The Author, and, for the sake of historical record, make note of a few circumstantial irrelivancies (which may or may not prove relevant at a later time).

My name is Ven. That was not the name given to me at birth, but it is the name I was given at the point in my life when I became more or less who I am now, and formed the foundation of who I will be for the rest of it. I am 24 years old. I live at home with my parents and two younger siblings (when they came home), and two cats -- our own resident fluffball of 7 years, Bilbo Baggins, and Merlin, a communal cat who has adopted us and lives primarily at our house despite belonging to a neighbor. Also included in the group of people I consider immediate family are my soulmate-friend Tenne-Mouse and her daughter Sarah Rose.

I shall set the stage: It's winter here in Washington DC, much colder than it's been this time of year since I was a child. The air has ice-teeth and there's a wind that wants to devour you. I love it. If you were to look at myself and my siblings standing together, it would be clear which of us got one sid or the other of our ancestral blood more strongly. My sister was born Italian, after my mother -- she has darker skin than I, and fine, Roman features, green eyes and thin hair and that passion of soul that you so often find in Mediterranians. My brother, also, has more of the Italian blood than I, with his thick, dark curls, tall, thin stature, and a personality that calls out to people, to family -- he is loyal to a fault. I, however, am a child of my father's Russian gypsy blood -- hazel-eyed and introverted and intellectual with a solid frame and a fondness for occasionally drinking a bit more than I ought to, and oh, how I love the cold and the darkness of winter.

And what is going on in my life right now? I got my driver's license finally last week. I am learning to speak Russian with Rosetta Stone. I have a book of verse in progress, very close to a state I would feel confident in showing a publisher. I have a job working for my parents, though I have no intention of keeping it any longer than I have to. I'll be taking out a loan from them soon to help pay for a car so I can get to a job that suits me better.

And what kind of job? Well, I don't know just yet. I write poetry and prose, I have extensive experience and training in voice and stage performance, I served an apprenticeship for about a year with one of the last true classic art Masters in the world, I have certain business skills unavoidably acquired from my parents' business, I can cook, grow a garden... the world is my oyster.

And I have a lot to say. But that's what this blog is for.

Welcome, everyone.