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WHY SHOULD THE DEVIL HAVE ALL THE GOOD BACCHANALS?
(This Is Not a Tame Seminar) | |
| by Mike Hertenstein |
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As I put the final touches on the 2006
Imaginarium schedule before handing it in to the Cornerstone Festival art
department for layout in the official program, I found I was left with an
extra seminar hour to fill. In fact, I'd been having trouble filling that
hour for awhile. So at that last possible moment, I impulsively
decided it would be simple to come up with an hour's worth of seminar myself.
I scribbled down a title and a description that seemed reasonable and handed
it in. Three months later I sat down to prepare the seminar and realized
immediately that I would need multiple sessions for my topic. But I only had
the one slot available. And I needed to cut that one short because of a
near-simultaneous commitment elsewhere on the grounds. The upshot was that I
had to speed through the seminar in order to finish on time, which has
happened before. The seminar as presented was also considerably different
than as advertised — which has also happened before. One thing always
leads to another when it comes to the Imaginarium, and another, and... It's
caused me no end of troubles. But it has also led me — and those of us
following the trail — on some marvelous adventures…
MEMENTO MORI
This seminar was originally supposed to be on memory and mortality, the
original title being "Memento Mori," which means "Remember you will die." It
was inspired by our series of films and activities connected with our program on "the
Days of the Dead." It was also inspired by our meditation on ruins, and the
witness and
wisdom of the saints — especially concerning the saints' repeated
warning to us to number our days. Researching St. Francis, I was struck by
the fact that so many of his portraits over time include a prominently-placed
skull. In fact, on one of the few actual samples we have of Francis's
writing, he signs his name and includes a little drawing of a skull. I'm
told that St. Ignatius actually recommends employing a skull in his spiritual
exercises. And St. Benedict's sobering charge is to "Keep death ever before
you." In a short story by St. James (that is, James Joyce), "The Dead," the
author describes a monastery where the monks sleep in their own coffins: a
unavoidable daily memento mori. Other monasteries are famous as
repositories of the bones of former residents, and entire churches have built
of bones, with an effect very like the house of bones that is this year's
Imaginarium décor. Usually such places feature a sign with the famous adage,
"I was once like you. You will someday be like me."
Cheery stuff.
CARNIVAL & THE GROTESQUE
So then I decided to talk about carnival, which seemed an
even better way for me to accomplish my goal for this seminar — which
had to do with bringing together all of our Imaginarium 2006 program themes.
I became interested in celebrations that affirmed life by transfiguring
death, and also the chronic opposition to such affirmations. In certain
cases, this opposition seemed to me to be at least partially motivated by a
desire not to think about death — a deliberate resistance to memento
mori, a persistent denial of death.
"Carnival" was a subtheme of our 1999 Imaginarium
program, wherein we explored together the idea "the Grotesque." To
put it in a rather inadequate nutshell, the Grotesque has to do with the
suspension of everyday norms, and the senses of vertigo, danger and
liberation that this suspension provokes. It calls into question our solid,
familiar world and raises the disturbing possibility that what we call
"normal" may, in fact, be a fabrication — and that the fullness of
reality is beyond our ability to ever completely contain it.
"Does the gargoyle belong on the cathedral?" was the question we asked —
and the answer we gave was "Yes: because if the gargoyle doesn't belong, then
some of us are in big trouble!" After gargoyles, carnival is probably
the most characteristic manifestation of the grotesque. In carnival, the
ordinary is suspended, and the world turns upside-down: fools are king, and
freaks are the norm. The participants in carnival wallow joyfully in chaos,
contradiction and paradox. They embrace, in the words of one commentator, "the
irreducible doubleness of life," the half-man, half-animal juxtaposition that
is the human condition. Carnival is impolite and earthy: at the far end of
the spectrum carnival can be crude and sexual in its celebration of the body,
mocking and ironic in its acknowledgement of death. Carnival tends to be
democratizing, with class distinctions obliterated and conventional
hierarchies dissolved. Carnival is a tantalizing, liberating glimpse of
wholeness, of oneness, of the mystery and ambiguity that our everyday order
can never contain, of all the loose ends of life that we ordinarily deny and
try to sweep under the rug.
Cornerstone Festival,
obviously, in some sense, is carnival. Certainly at Cornerstone, our
everyday reality is at least in part put on hold, status distinctions mean
nothing, we live close together, close to nature. Most of the usual polite
social fictions become temporarily useless. At Cornerstone we are faced with
the fact that cleanliness is actually relative
— and that what may be classified as "dirt" in anyone's particular
symbol system is more likely anything that doesn't belong in their neat,
familiar world. Cornerstone is other, and learning to make room in
your personal symbol system for people who are other than you. And of
course, it goes without saying that rock-n-roll is nothing if not carnival:
the sex and violence may be sublimated a bit at Cornerstone, but the music
still isn't precisely housebroken — hopefully. The good stuff remains
somewhat outside the mainstream, a bit daring and even dangerous, just like
we were always warned. Cornerstone haircuts and costumes are our versions of
the carnival mask, a merry negation of the Official Story, the one imposed
upon us by the everyday world: to defy that story is to make room for, maybe
even get a glimpse of, a bigger story beyond — the one that we knew was
always there anyway.
The Imaginarium program at Cornerstone Festival is most definitely carnival
— even when the Grotesque isn't the official theme. Long before we
became a house of bones, we were a house of rubber chickens. In fact, in the
1999 program, we (humbly) offered our revolutionary Theology of the Rubber
Chicken, proof in its very silliness of the absurd incongruity of our
juxtaposed human condition: our poor featherless friend reminds us of the
embarrassing, vulnerable, ridiculousness of our own situation, being
half-animal, half-god. The Whoopie Cushion — and the Porta-Potty —
explode (excuse me) the great cultural lie and set our learning experiences
at Cornerstone and the Imaginarium powerfully in unvarnished and unabashed
human reality.
Some may wonder, then — and most reasonably so — just what the
heck Francis of Assisi is doing in such a vulgar place, namely on
the program of the Imaginarium.
Well, for one thing, it is true that the feast days of the saints were always
occasion for carnival. But the connection goes much deeper then that. Saint
Francis called himself "the Jester of God" — the Holy Fool. There was a
mad, topsy-turvyness to Francis. His insistance that Perfect Joy might be
found in the midst of trial and suffering. His unreasonable love for all
creatures of our God and King. His rags. His lepers. (And if it helps,
think of Cornerstone as one big leper for Francis to embrace!) His merry
troubadours singing the praises of Lady Poverty. The antics of Franciscan
preachers whose foolishness was often calculated to draw a crowd. No wonder
Francis's vision has been described as a "carnivalized" Christianity.
Yet surely that description is redundant. Surely Christianity itself is
carnival — or perhaps some of us have just forgotten. For you can't get
much more paradoxical and earthy and upsetting than the Gospel. Consider the
upsidedowness of the picture of the Creator of the Universe being born in a
stable, the grotesque juxtaposition of a God-Man who dies to give life, who
gives to receive. Stand on your head and watch the first become last, the
meek inherit the earth, the rich sent away empty, while the wise man is
confounded. Shake your comfortably proper head as the secrets of the Kingdom
are given to children and fools. Consider this: the root word of carnival,
carne means "flesh." And the center of Christianity involves the
eternal Word becoming flesh — the very fleshiness, and bodiliness
of the Christian assertion that has always been a scandal to the world.
And sometimes even to the church. Did I say "sometimes?" I meant
often. Actually, constantly.
From the moment Jesus ascended into Heaven until this very morning, the
church has been haunted by the heresy of Gnosticism, a hatred of the body and
preference for abstract ideals that seems so spiritual, so reasonable
— and also happens to a complete betrayal of the most fundamental
precept of our faith: the bodily, fleshly, sensual, cultural, Incarnation of
God Himself.
THE WAR BETWEEN CARNIVAL AND LENT
But the juxtaposition, the roller-coaster ride of the Christian vision,
doesn't stop there. Just when you think you're getting a fix on things,
double-vision sets in again. For in yet another mad Christian juxtaposition,
Carnival ends — with Lent. That is to say, the excesses and indulgences
of Medieval Carnival were always followed on the liturgical calendar by a
forty-day period of fasting, prayer and penance that preceded Easter. Now,
it is true that maybe everyone needed those forty days to repent for all the
sins committed during carnival! But I suspect there's a deeper principle at
work here, that both "Carnival" and "Lent" stand for larger opposing
principles. Medieval painter Peter Bruegel's work "The Battle Between
Carnival and Lent" suggests an ongoing, never-resolved struggle in human
nature, and possibly the Christian faith itself. For even though Francis of
Assisi embraced Creation with open arms, like so many of the saints he also
relentlessly, even shockingly, turned his back on his flesh. The most
whiplash-inducing of Christian paradoxes may be that it is a faith which
includes both Carnival and Lent, feasting and fasting, Easter and Good
Friday, Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday. The tug-of-war between Carnival and
Lent is certainly an endless quarrel of church history. There are outrageous
excesses at both extremes, with notable and notorious victories and defeats
by either side — a continual pulling one way in the direction of
carne and in the other toward an austere denial of the flesh.
The Puritans, for example, banned Christmas and Easter outright — like
so many black-hatted Grinches. Endless waves of Reformers and Prohibitionists
started by abolishing the feast days of the saints and moved on to smashing
stained glass, ripping down paintings, covering over frescoes, breaking
statues, burning musical instruments, and banning the theater, along with
novels, card-playing, folk-dances, folk-tales, folk-songs, comic books,
movies, and rock-n-roll. And if you think you detected a pattern in there it
may be because there is one. The first Puritan, it has been said, was Plato,
who banned poets from his ordered Republic for fear they might stir up the
lower classes. Of course, reforming impulses in all ages have
unquestionably found plenty of worthy targets. But such impulses almost
always manage to become tangled with motivations very questionable: among
these one can find class interest, a bourgeois desire to maintain order,
a fear of change, a fear of difference, a hatred of anything out of
place in some personal symbol-system — of "dirt", which anthropologist
Mary Douglas notes tends to remind people of their most profound fear, of
the precariousness of their place in the universe: of death. Memento
Mori becomes a bit more strained when all the efforts of "polite
society" are aimed at avoiding just that.
Now, don't get me wrong. I understand that people of all classes are easily
stirred up, and prone to all sorts of wicked excess. But since this
includes an excess of legalism, along with an excess of judgment and
excessive desire to control their environment, then it seems to me that
arriving at some objective balance between Carnival and Lent becomes a very
tricky problem indeed.
So tricky, in fact, that when the seminar threatened to bog down at this
point, the narrator was suddenly inspired to skip ahead and talk about what
he really wanted to talk about all along…
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