DAYS OF THE DEAD (PAGE THREE)
Of course, if I were to leave behind a memoir, my own personal narrative about the Imaginarium, I might have to include the seminar I gave this year on the last morning of the fest. I've tried to sum up what it is we're doing there before, a futile quest, but like always, this time felt sure I'd hit upon the "E equals mc squared" of the Imaginarium. The topic — after a certain amount of putzing around with subtopics that included memory, mortality, and Medieval Carnival — had to do with the ancient conflict between Apollo and Dionysus: abstract rationality versus concrete existence, mind versus body, head versus heart, control versus self-abandonment. Our inbuilding of activities and symbolic expressions into the program this year has everything to do with my own unresolved tension between head and heart, and one place I seek healing is in "hands-on" involvement in the Imaginarium. This year, we spent the month in advance of the fest elbow deep in papier-mâché, making skulls and bones for the tent decorations. Thankfully, our constituency is also very "hands-on," as volunteers helped hang the bones before the fest. Indeed, we'd not be able to do this venue if our audience were content to just sit back and consume: more than once, somebody in the audience had to jump up to adjust the abandoned sound board, or even introduce a speaker. Somebody mentioned that it seemed like we were short of staff, but that's how we like it: the inmates running the asylum. I was out trying to be ubiquitous on Saturday night and thus missed the Irish dance instruction, and so returned to find the dance had started without me. I stood up front by the Celtic band, leaning against the podium watching in awe, as more than a hundred people jigged their way in most-admirable form around the tent. I just remember writing, back in February, the words "Irish Jig" on a piece of paper. Who could have ever foreseen what those two words meant, incarnate in flesh, and who will believe it as I write those two words again here. No, the Imaginarium does not reduce to formula, not even to the sum of its parts. You'd a had to have been there. Or there and simultaneously in Flickerings, where I ducked back just in time to catch the last third of Roberto Rossellini's Voyage to Italy. That film features an uptight Northern European — a gringo by any other name — played convincingly by Ingrid Bergman, whose outlook is transformed by her experience in Italy. There's something about the special magic of that country which seems to involve a reconnection to life and to death, to the earth, and to the body. The film features a series of sightseeing jaunts by the Bergman character, including stops at a museum, a catacombs church filled with bones (very like our Imaginarium décor!), with a climax in the haunted ruins of Pompeii. If there was ever an unanswerable defense for Rossellini's crazy scriptless style of filmmaking it is the dénouement of this film, where the director manages to improvise a scene at an actual archaeological dig at the very moment when the vanished forms of a pair of lovers — caught in a final embrace — are unearthed from the volcanic ash of the buried Roman city. In our discussion, after the film ended, we reflected on how the actors, now themselves gone to dust, are likewise preserved in a celluloid casting — and, to take it one more layer back, how we the audience, might be captured (perhaps in these very words) as yet another poignant memento mori. After the Irish dance was over, and a movie about an Irish dance, I bid an early good-night and good-bye to this year's Imaginarium crowd — and was met with some good-natured booing, since, technically, we still had one movie to go (that very edifying film Curse of the Demon). We all do so love the annual Hello part of Cornerstone Festival and the Imaginarium. It's the subsequent and inevitable Goodbye part that's so unbearable. It can be even harder when you have a clear picture of what happens the next few days, after the crowds are gone, the Imaginarium tent is emptied, and we are left with a ruin very much like our archaeologist friend had described... Over the years, I've tried to convey to people what its like to watch the grounds go from the people and noise of a Cornerstone Festival to an eerie, deserted ruin within hours of the mass exodus. Some of us feel truly Left Behind. Inevitably, I find my feet taking me to the empty Imaginarium tent on the evening after the event is over and everybody's gone, right about sunset, when the first movie should be starting. This year was no exception, and I felt like Charlton Heston in the "Forbidden Zone" once again, alone in the rubble. No doubt these experiences over the years have played their own role in generating our ruins theme — my yearly confrontation with this lifeless corpse of something that had been laughing and dancing only hours before — the grinning skull of the Imaginarium. I snapped a picture of the empty tent with my digital camera, then found myself scrolling backwards through the other pictures on the camera to relive the entire festival in reverse: the Irish jig, the Halloween Party, the Dia de Los Muertos, the seminars, the movies, the popcorn, the prizes, the displays, the decorations, the faces, the friends, the ideas, the insights, the questions. All the while, that haunting Irish jig music was playing in my head, as I looked for the ghosts of the dancers in the rubble at my feet. I thought of the words of our new patron saint, Francis: All praise be Yours, My Lord, Through Sister Bodily Death, From whose embrace, no mortal can escape... and Happy are those she finds doing Your will. Who could know what had ever taken place on this little piece of real estate during this or any other year, I wondered, looking over the scraps and broken shards of yet another Imaginarium. What profoundly joyous, serious, silly and meaningful experiences our little culture has experienced here together! Not even everybody who has access to much more data than just this rubble can really make sense of it all. And perhaps trying to understand, or trying to make everybody understand, can be just one more way of trying to hold onto something that slips through our fingers even as we clap to the music. Let the naysayers say what they will. Our Divine Comedy is that somehow, by looking monsters in the face, we find peace and joy and wholeness in the most unlikely of places, not least this papier-mâché -decorated tent. Future archaeologists might not find much to argue about if they should ever dig here. But those of us who were there — incarnate and embodied — will never forget the many turreted towers of the Imaginarium. Page 1 | 2 | 3
* For more post-fest coverage, see Flickerings 2006 report