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November 25, 2004
Thanksgiving
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Thanking is where practicality and spirituality meet.
“Thank you” is part of a utilitarian social etiquette, lubricating our necessary interactions, but it is also the most basic form of prayer, one step up from the utter prostration of sheer worship and awe; “thank you” is the voice of the Ego in the face of the Mystery. The functionality of the “real world” thank you is a reflection of its appropriateness as an existential attitude. At least I argued this line in 2001 by way of a birdwatching story, and the follow-up validation provided the next year represents exactly the sort of on-going dialogue of discovery that I hoped to cultivate in the Arboretum. Not so much proof of the ineffable as a day list of its observable consequences.
The face is off the pumpkin now, and Autumn orange and red and brown are the colors of the day, conjuring their mundane magic. Warm earth-tones, even as the Earth grows cold, remind us that when the sun sinks south we must kindle our own warmth, drawing on last season’s stores. The colors also offer the last great seasonal display before the whiteness of Winter writes us a new page. So naturally Thanksgiving has provided the platform for Fall photo essays, as in 2000, even though that year’s entry, and the one for 2002, were posted from abroad, as part of DMTree’s ongoing (if occasional) effort to spend this New World holiday in the Old.
Last year I offered thanks for the first-ever harvest of the Chestnut renewal program in the Park, but one thing I’ve never really done here is to give a specific round of thanks for the Arboretum itself, its inspirations and its support structure. It may read more like an Oscar acceptance speech than a prayer, but I’m not expecting any awards and who’s to say that either form is inherently insincere? I just thought that after five years the occasion has earned something more than philosophizing. And here no one can hurry me off stage.
Now if you’re going to go thanking people, you must start with your parents. I’ve always posted on the parental holidays, and I’ve mentioned my esteem for my mother, but I’ve said much more about my father, as the act of writing about the events surrounding his death in 2000 transformed my understanding of how the weblog space would work for me. That passage past, I remain eternally thankful to both of my parents for their nurturing of me. They opened me to the beauties of art and nature, to the pleasure of learning, and to the duty of intellectual honesty. If I’ve accomplished anything in the Arboretum, it flows from there.
But I can’t even talk about the Arboretum without thanking the one person most responsible for empowering the project. Jim Bassett provides the server space and the programming expertise behind the digitalmediatree site and its roster of blogs. He also provides a positive vision of the possibilities of computer technology and culture, and makes DMTree a great place to be on the web. The vision will, by its nature, always outstrip the reality, but Jim has realized a significant degree of his vision, and sustained it for five years, which is a long time in cyberspace. This has made for a special time in my life as well, and I thank Jim for his generosity in creating this unique community.
And DMTree is nothing if not a community. I’m thankful to everyone who reads my page, or any of the pages on the site. Mostly I’m talking about my good friends, but the tree has grown to encompass a broader audience than that, and it’s been gratifying to establish new relationships or receive the occasional nod from a passing stranger. But in the end it pretty much comes down to my friends, the new ones, and all those good folks who have put up with, and even encouraged me, for years. All I can say is “thanks.”
Of course there’s Central Park itself, for which I’m thankful. But I’m really thanking people, and I’d be remiss to neglect the people of the Park. They’re not usually the focus of the Arboretum, but I regularly intersect with a number of people, mostly birdwatchers, who have enriched my experience of the place. Mention must be made of Tom Fiore, birder deluxe, and Mike Freeman, proprietor of my “other” website, the NYC Bird Report.
As far as the content of the Arboretum goes, it grew out of my increasing involvement in Central Park, played out against my understanding of what I think of as Traditional spirituality. To the extent that I have any understanding, it’s rooted in experience. What I’ve written is an attempt to express what I’ve felt, from listening to folk music as a child, to trying to paint landscapes as a student, to involvement in actual ecstatic ritual practice. Or just walking in the Park. But experience benefits from guidance, and there are a few guides I’ve been overlong in acknowledging here; people who have influenced the posture I’ve taken in the Arboretum and the practice I’ve followed.
The late Terence McKenna was a great inspiration, and is sorely missed. He had a talent for making outlandish thinking credible. He didn’t just talk to plants; he listened to them, and related their vegetable wisdom back to the rest of us. His psychedelic dialectic linked techno-futurism to ancient shamanic mysticism in what he termed the Archaic Revival; an evolving consciousness to which I like to think this page contributes.
McKenna was a true visionary, an eschatological prophet even. But I’m also beholden to a somewhat more conservative group of traditionalists from the British Isles. John and Caitlin Matthews, as expositors of the Western Mystery Tradition, have been helpful to me, in particular with regard to the uses of the holidays as doorways to the Mysteries. I’d also like to note R. J. Stewart’s recovery of initiatory practice through the deconstruction of folk ballads, and Adam McLean’s insight into alchemical imagery.
All of these authors are marketed as “New Age,” often in a “how-to” format offering practical exercises in what amounts to magic. This is not exactly the most intellectually respectable genre, but these folks represent the best face of a movement that shouldn’t be trivialized, despite its excesses. Beyond the nonsense and the frauds, there is a genuine spiritual desire being addressed here. These writers ply the contradiction of a rational approach to the Spirit: that to fairly apply the rigorous standards of rationality to first hand experience, such a study must of necessity cross the border into a world beyond rationality. I’m thankful for these voices that report back on the Mystery in terms that resonate with, and expand, my own understanding.
I’ve only tried to do the same thing in my own way. I’m thankful if anything I’ve written has struck a chord out there. I’m not without some confirmation to that effect, which is always gratifying, but even to the extent that I’ve failed to communicate, I’m thankful for the chance to try. We call that chance Life, but in my life I have a special venue in this Arboretum, and for that, and to all who have contributed to it, in whatever way, I give my heartfelt Thanks. Let that sentiment initiate once more the Holiday Season.
November 11, 2004
Veterans Day
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I can’t help seeing Veterans Day as a pendant to Memorial Day. It seems a lesser, or at least a less serious holiday, insofar as death is the most “serious” thing we know, and survival (one might think) should warrant a more joyous celebration. But it’s just the opposite: Memorial Day has become a big happy summer holiday while Veterans Day has shrunk like an old soldier, into a gray November day of not altogether brave remembrance. Memorial Day’s dead may have made the greater sacrifice, but it’s only the living who actively remember, and the real bitterness of war is best recalled by those who have actually seen it, and lived to tell the rest of us.
The dead tell us nothing, though as with scripture we may draw whatever inference from them we wish; dutiful soldiers, they will defend any position. Our living veterans are more contentious, and their stories are not cloaked in false glory. In my experience, they are not given to the kind of party line patriotic pabulum we too often hear in martial matters. Being in the military can have many effects on a person, but the ability to see through bullshit is notable among them. In this culture, that gift may be a curse, and while all vets are marked by their experience, it must be admitted that a significant number are damaged by it.
Others are ennobled. I mean that sincerely, though not without irony. The taste for war is deep in us, and we put so much of our cultural identity into it that something of what’s good in us must come out there. I’ve not been immune to battle’s charms: from Greek heroes to medieval knights to space-spanning comic book warriors of the future, I’ve patronized the shrine of many a god of war. But only in my imagination.
My mythic imagination.
I knew pretty early on that while I might like to play army, I didn’t really want to grow up to be in a war. The Park-focused lens of the Arboretum is my current charm against the power of the War God, but I do retain some sympathy for his worshipers, and I’m not above honoring our fighting men and women.
I’m thinking of the rank and file mainly; Veterans Day seems to me an enlisted man’s holiday, though I suppose officers and commanders are to be included. But while our foot soldiers may be seduced by myths of honor and duty, those who send them to the field have a greater responsibility, and have too often passed the poison of war down the chain of command. Witness our current adventure in Iraq, where top brass have blamed our prison atrocities on a few rogue soldiers, rather than on the very institution of War itself, which our administration has so heartily embraced, as if its inherent horrors could be dismissed as unintended side effects. Instead of accepting responsibility our leaders have blamed their own followers, and in so doing they dishonor this Day in practice, even as they pay endless lip service to “supporting the troops” while unilaterally extending tours of duty.
If our veterans are bitter in the face of such hypocrisy it’s an old story. War may fire our imaginations, but the story most often turns to tragedy, or the kind of comedy that forces a laugh in the face of tragedy. Tales of untarnished triumph are best suited to indoctrinating children and cowing trepidatious voters. That being done, the carnage can be blamed on its victims.
We are all War’s victims, and as I suggested in 2002, we are all veterans of a sort. That was specifically a post-9/11 sentiment, and meant as no slight to soldiers, but my refusal to privilege war is part of an effort to understand our innate equality, and all false promises of “security” aside, Life is always at risk.
I learned as much in 2000, when the trauma of attending on my father’s “peaceful” death distracted me from this holiday, the only time I’ve failed to come up with a post for an official occasion. Since then the holiday has gained moment, with war coming closer than we had been accustomed to. In 2001, a mere month after an act of war I stood within a few blocks of, the best I could do was to mount a montage reflecting my sense of the impending mobilization and its uncertain prospects. By 2003 uncertainty had coalesced into the current mess, and I documented a symbolic distress signal from the Park. A year later it’s a disappointment to have the current course endorsed by the electorate. The country is deeply divided, and much of the support is, I think, provisional, but America remains in thrall to martial mythology, at the expense of the human reality of veterans.
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.