(no subject)

Just archiving for my own purposes. Move along, not much to see here. :D

( Lisey's Story, Devil in the White City, Heat, Geneva, De Profundis, Selling Hitler )

A Modest Proposal

I've been thinking a lot about Christmas, since it happened, aided and abetted no doubt by the fact that I still have all the "christmas" episodes of all the TV shows I watch on my hard drive.

I'm not speaking of the religious Christmas. To devout Christians, and rightly so, Christmas is a time of celebration, a re-witnessing of the birth of Christ and the miracle of the star. Even if they are scholars, and they know that Christ probably wasn't born in December and that many Christian events are syncretic, they comprehend that it is a time to celebrate. The date, compared with the memory of the event, is relatively unimportant. What matters is the welcoming of the son of God.

For the rest of us, however -- at least the rest of us in the Western world -- Christmas is a secular event. If we celebrate it at all, it reminds us of the importance of family, gives us an excuse to share our good fortune, and more than occasionally drives us towards complete insanity.

What I've found interesting is that the Secular -- perhaps I should say "Popular" -- conception of Christmas is very much rooted in fear. That's not really wholly unexpected. In many areas of the northern hemisphere the deep winter months were a time of darkness, the dimming of the light. The midwinter festivals were festivals of fire that drove back the encroaching twilight which came a little earlier each evening. Why shouldn't Christmas be a time of fear, for those who experience it as a secular holiday?

The stories associated with the Secular Christmas experience are not precisely reassuring. They are ghost stories, stories of spirits that haunt an old miser, that show a young banker a dim grey view of life without him, that put a religious man through a crisis of faith and his wife through a crisis of fidelity. White Christmas, which was written for Holiday Inn, is sung by a heartbroken man on a California sound stage. Even the shepherds, watching their flocks by night, were terrified by the Angel of the Lord. Nobody let Rudolph play in the reindeer games, you guys.

While Ebeneezer Scrooge might come to celebrate Christmas with all his heart and mind, that revelation is finally achieved through fear of death. It is brought up to that point by an appeal to his feelings, but when he falls to his knees it's not in front of his nephew or Bob Cratchit. It's in front of his own tombstone. George Bailey's entire experience with the angel Clarence is one of undiluted terror at a familiar world suddenly given a three-quarters twist. He, too, finally crumbles in front of a tombstone, that of his brother (representing the men who died in war because his brother wasn't there to save them). In The Bishop's Wife, the angel suffers, having fallen in love with a mortal woman whom he'll never see again -- and who will forget him when he leaves. Even our urban myths claim that suicide rates leap around Christmas (untrue -- there's actually a slight drop).

I don't object to any of this air of fear and grief that surrounds what is supposedly a cheery happy holiday. Why should I? This is the drift of the human impulse in the winter, and if I learned anything in my years as a pagan it was that you have to fit yourself into the universe, not the other way around. You have to adapt your senses when you make a new discovery.

I therefore propose that the secular Christmas experience embrace this time of fear and cold and darkness, especially as an escape from the madness of the season. Why not spend the nights telling ghost stories and going on long dark snipe hunts in the woods? Why not go to the mall and add a few plastic spiders to the decorations within reach, or dress up in skull masks to go caroling? Why not bump a little paradigm shift into the holidays? If Tim Burton and Terry Pratchett could do it, so can we.

I say, next year, let's make it a Christmas to dismember.

REVIEW: Four Short Stories by Julio Cortazar

Someone recommended "Cronopios and Famas" to me ages ago and I finally found a copy; although I wasn't aware, when I checked it out of the library, that it was actually four of Cortazar's works bound up in one slim volume. The book contained:

The Instruction Manual
Unusual Occupations
Unstable Stuff
Cronopios and Famas

So I ended up reading Cronopios and Famas last, ironically.

Cortazar's style is very similar to that of "Trout Fishing In America" by Richard Brautigan. He's very nearly a drabble-ist; within each short work he writes even shorter chapters, often only vaguely related to each other through some theme or focus. All of the stories in Cronopios and Famas, for example, concern three races known as the Cronopios, the Famas, and the Esperanzas. Within that, however, they don't seem to link up particularly closely, and certainly there's no sequence of time or continuity of location.

( Four Short Stories by Julio Cortazar, Translated by Paul Blackburn )