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DAYS OF THE DEAD (PAGE TWO) | |
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Indeed, for another Imaginarium speaker John Morehead (whose
blog you should
be reading), this year's special activities programming amounted to serious
field-work for his own ongoing studies. John sat wide-eyed in the back of
the tent watching our Dia de Los Muertos, taking notes and connecting
dots. In his seminar the next day, John was able to help us process the
experience. He both compared the Mexican Day of the Dead with Halloween, and
also sketched the landscape wherein such memorials of the dead have become so
problematic for certain people. One problem, he noted, is that Evangelicals
generally have neither the means to express symbolically their losses, nor
their grieving, nor their continued remembrances of those who have died.
Given the opportunity to thus express themselves, he observed, our crowd
seized it like hungry people offered food. In that sense, the food left on
the ofrenda really was a sort of spiritual food: food for us,
the living, creatures who are made to experience and process the world in
some symbolic fashion — and in large part have been deprived of this
essentially-human experience by modern scientific and/or religious cultures
that view such symbolic expression as a form of error or idolatry.
"There's a very different vibe this year: I like it," commented Sharon A.,
another Imaginarium stalwart, who with her husband and family are pillars in
our little community. Sharon was there in 1999 for
our now-legendary program
on the Grotesque, a program that has become the impossibly-high standard by
which we've all judged subsequent Imaginariums. We knew we'd done something
right with this Days of the Dead stuff when Sharon concluded at the end of
the fest that this program was, for her, second only to the year of the
Grotesque. If you knew what that meant, you'd know it meant a lot.
One more way we raised the bar this year was in having activities every
night. Usually we'll just end the fest with a dance or sing-along or
something, but this year, with our commitment to celebrating a different Day
of the Dead each night, we knew we'd let ourselves in for something rather
epic, and we also knew it could go either way — as in Hit or Miss.
Amazingly, I think we scored an impossible four hits. Vespers, Dia de Los
Muertos, Halloween, and our Irish Dance.
For our Halloween carnival, Dave found a band (called Hyperdrive-Go) who
covered the microphone with swamp fungus and dressed like mad scientists and
sang songs about monsters — perfect for the Imaginarium, but he found
them the very morning of the day we were having the dance: they happened to
be camped next to him. That just goes to show you how close to the bone
— no pun intended — we actually run this thing, and how much of our
brilliant program planning is actually truly and serendipidously magical!
Before the dance, Dave and wife Harmony led the kids (old and young) on a
trick-or-treating expedition around the grounds. Cornerstone is definitely a
place to turn heads, but you should have seen heads turn to watch fifty or
sixty costumed revelers moving across the ground from one previously-planned
treat stop to another. Dave would knock on the door of, say, the Speaker
Hospitality Trailer, and whoever opened the door was greeted by a thunderous
"TRICK-OR-TREAT!!" There are those who think Cornerstone Festival is
Halloween anyway, and we definitely had our share of walk-ins who seemed like
they were just wearing their usual fest gear — which would have been
Halloween costumes anywhere else. We also had cowboys, hula dancers, a
terrific Robin Hood, zombies, mummies, a swamp thing, Supergirl, a doctor.
Athena came as Joan of Arc (complete with amazing home-made chain mail). Some
joker had a complete White Sox uniform, but in the spirit of ecumenicity, I
let that one go. Some people came prepared especially for the Imaginarium
costume ball, others had to whip together their costume at the fest —
and some of these were truly amazing: toilet-paper mummies, cardboard
kitty-cat ears, one guy covered with garbage, another with CD disks, bloody
zombies, various duct-taped and cardboarded creatures. It was so cool to see
the level of participation this year: some of the same young kids who had
shared so poignantly about their favorite saints or lost loved ones were in
the thick of it tonight, trick-or-treating in goofy thrown-together costumes
and dancing a joyfully crowded Monster Mash back at the tent.
There are of course plenty of folks spooked by Halloween, or dancing, or
music, or blood, or life and death itself — it's hard to keep up with
the things that frighten people. But we were intent on reclaiming the
holiday — the holy-day: putting the Hallow back in Halloween. In
a certain sense, this was the paradigmatic program for the Imaginarium: if we
can redeem Halloween, then, in a way, our work is done. That was the aim of
putting Halloween in context with other similar celebrations, and also with
our seminars and films. In addition to John Morehead's discussion of symbols
and ceremonies, Gretchen Passantino-Coburn took on the urban myths about
Halloween in the Imaginarium's all-out effort to reclaim one of the
singlemost coolest nights of the year — not from the witches, but from
those who just don't get how cool it is to wrap toilet paper around your head
and shuffle across the floor moaning like the undead. As it was, the Day of
the Dead program in the Imaginarium actually made specific mention in a flyer
being handed out by some protestors outside the Cornerstone Festival gate
— so we must have definitely been on to something!
Of course, of all the movies we were showing that they could have mentioned
by name in their flyer, they picked The Body Snatcher, which may have
been the most benign choice they could have made. If I was making a flyer
denouncing evil-sounding movies I'd never seen, I think I'd have gone with
Curse of the Demon — though perhaps someone on their team had
seen that one and realized what a profoundly orthodox Christian film it
actually is!
(We did hear one strange rumor that during the time the kids were
trick-or-treating, some group of persons wearing festival security vests
allegedly toilet-papered the goth tent on the other side of the grounds.
While the Imaginarium can make no connection between our celebration of
Halloween and that unfortunate occurrence, it did give us some pause and made
us remember why some people are so concerned about what Halloween may drive
misguided souls to do.)
Our Halloween dance concluded with a tremendous Zombie crawl, in which
zombies literally crawled across the grassy Imaginarium floor to assault the
band. Miraculously, we were able to shift gears after this apocalyptic climax
into a more literary mode and reconvened in our seats to listen to Lint
Hatcher's poignant reminiscence and defense of All Things Spooky in his
classic essay "The Magic Eightball Test and Other Theories about Halloween"
(available from Hambangers Books via lulu.com).
Lint originally wrote his
essay for his own beloved Wonder magazine, whose demise we still
mourn, and from whose ashes the Imaginarium could in many ways be said to
have arose. When Lint heard we were doing Halloween at Imaginarium 2006, he
wrote and complained that he basically owned the copyright on
Halloween, and we couldn't dare do it without him. After re-reading Lint's
essay, I realized he was right and added Lint to the lineup to share his
long-lost classic with a live audience for the first time:
I can hear Halloween coming. I can sense the chalkboard clatter and skitter
of dry leaves against sidewalks from a hundred miles away. My skin sprouts
goosebumps at the slightest hint of autumnal chill in mid-August. My nose,
still surrounded by the smells of summer in Atlanta, can detect the faintest,
most infinitesimal aroma of burning leaves in upstate Vermont.... Just as
surely as "Low Rider" will set your feet to tapping, Halloween makes me grin,
makes my heart all giddy, makes me think with stunning rapidity, "What am I
gonna be this year?"
Lint also helped host Imaginarium 2006, which he did with his characteristic
Southern charm and grace. Lint also brought along his family, three more
kids being raised right, who knew just how to do Halloween. And during our
Dia de Los Muertos service, Lint's wife Susan eloquently remembered
our mutual friend Kurt, who left the conversation much too early, and whose
subscription to Lint's magazine brought in contact for the first time
Wonder and Cornerstone, a combination which has proven so
combustible for so many years since. Thank you, Kurt.
The connection between all these Days of the Dead and this year's ruins theme
may not have been readily apparent to some, but once they were combined, you
could immediately see they went together as perfectly as apple pie and
cheddar cheese. (Try it). It was an additional stretch to bring a seminar
on archaeology into the mix, but we at the Imaginarium have always labored
under the apprehension that science (which was supposed to destroy the idols
but in the process often became one) can indeed be a wonder-producing agent
and belongs in the Imaginarium with science fiction and myth. Bert de Vries
is a scientist, and he got the Imaginarium right away. Bert's a professor at
Calvin College but has spent a good deal of his career in the field in the
Middle East and lately in Central America. He's had some personal experience
of power grabs and the battle over interpretations, with different groups
vying to exploit artifacts in support of their own story, not least the
Biblical archaeology types, who may at times actually be less interested in
finding the truth than in finding an interpretation of the data supports
their existing narrative. Unlike, say, any of us, eh? For we've all got our
narratives, and our fears, and a persistent desire to bring everything under
our control — including God, and even death, which in our culture we'd almost
prefer to sweep under the rug and deny altogether than embrace a narrative
that finds a place for it.
In A Canticle for Leibowitz, the monks of the Abbey of St. Leibowitz
patiently preserve the textual remnants of the civilization lost in the Flame
Deluge — until a new generation of applied thinkers arrives to seize the
documents and initiate yet another round in the sad old story of humankind
reaching for absolute control. The outcome is all-too-predictable, the cycle
of rebuilding, destruction, rebuilding carries on endlessly through time.
Dr. de Vries prepared for the Imaginarium by reading A Canticle for
Leibowitz in advance (even though I didn't assign it to him!) and wove
the book into his own presentation. He also used the Imaginarium itself as
an object lesson, asking the attendees to imagine the Imaginarium tent in
ruins, leaving buried behind various shards and artifacts — some wooden
tent poles, various unidentifiable bits of metal and plastic and glass. But
all this would have to be reconciled, he said, with the written memoir left
behind by yours truly, in which I allegedly had spoken of "the many turreted
towers of the Imaginarium."
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