Love Is Not All

AN ENCHANTED GARDEN
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

APPLE BLOSSOMS ~ JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS

"WE . . . HAVE BECOME EXTRAORDINARY: WE ARE NOT SIMPLY EATING; WE ARE PAUSING IN THE MARCH TO PERFORM AN ACT TOGETHER; WE ARE IN LOVE AND THE MEAL OFFERED AND RECEIVED IS A SACRAMENT WHICH SAYS: I KNOW YOU WILL DIE; I AM SHARING FOOD WITH YOU; IT IS ALL I CAN DO, AND IT IS EVERYTHING."

~ ANDRE DUBUS ~

The Enchanted Garden *". . . a rose can only smell so achingly sweet
to those who know that someday they will die to that smell,
to it and to every other joy and sorrow." ~ Kathryn Harrison
My last post, "Love You Can't Imagine" ~ in celebration of Valentine's Day (click or scroll down) ~ drew to a close before I was able to incorporate all of the great selections that I was hoping to connect. So I have assembled today's post out of that remaindered material, including a couple of somber sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a few sobering thoughts from Anne Lamott. As my father used to say when we had inadvertently left something behind -- a garment for dry cleaning, an overdue library book, a stack of newspapers on trash day -- "Well it's alright to save some over for seed." Over for seed. We weren't even farmers, but how I grew to love my dad's rustic way of saying, "I meant to do that!"

Another little intentional error ~ as in, "I meant to do that" ~ was saving this post, scheduled for the 28th, until today, Wednesday, February 29th! Since the opportunities for celebrating Leap Day are relatively rare and complicated, it would be a shame to let the chance pass by unobserved. Many of the customs and traditions of this every - four - yearly occasion are romantic in nature, providing a most fitting coda to Valentine's Day.

You might recall that, previously, I included Kathryn Harrison's observation, from her article "Connubial Abyss", that love must necessarily acknowledge the reality of death and loss: "Marriage is made, from the start, between two people who are willing to contemplate death together -- to have and to hold, until death do them part. Such contemplation is possible only for those who understand and embrace the boundaries of a life, both temporal and existential."

In her book Grace Eventually, Anne Lamott writes of her struggle to embrace these same boundaries, to come to grips with the sad inevitability "that every person you've loved will die -- many badly, and too young . . . the unbearable truth that all the people you love most will die, maybe in painful circumstances." Thinking of her son, she is filled with anguish but also acceptance: "I knew deep down that life can be a wretched business, and no one, not even Sam, gets out alive" (59, 162, 193).

A Tale from the Decameron ** painting here & above by English Pre-Raphaelite,
John William Waterhouse (1849 - 1917)
[See also: "To See A Fine Picture"]
Like Harrison and Lamott, Edna St. Vincent Millay blends romance and cynicism. She knows what love is and what it isn't. "It is not meat nor drink," but it is enough to hold death at arm's length. It is the memory of sharing with another, a memory worth more to the poet than food or peace:

Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by pain and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.
~ from Fatal Interview

Detail from Primavera by Sandro Botticelli, 1445 - 1510
As in Botticelli's allegory of spring, Love is often painted blind. In the following sonnet, however, it is the lover deprived of love who travels blindly. Rather than a plump little blind - folded cupid, Love is described by Millay as "the eyes of day," "charity," "a lamp," a candle with a wick. The narrator testifies that she would never be the one to put out the eyes of Love or abandon him along the roadside. She is too well aware that human endeavor is dependent upon the light of love, that even "the torn ray / Of the least kind" is better than no love at all.

The poet is the champion of love, "however brief," however distressed, ill - timed, or "ill - trimmed." Without the light of love, it is the Poet, not Love, who is rendered blind, scuffling "in utter dark" tapping the way before her . . .

When did I ever deny, though this was fleeting,
That this was love? When did I ever, I say,
With iron thumb put out the eyes of day
In this cold world where charity lies bleating
Under a thorn, and none to give him greeting,
And all that lights endeavor on its way
Is the teased lamp of loving, the torn ray
Of the least kind, the most clandestine meeting?

As God's my judge, I do cry holy, holy,
Upon the name of love however brief,
For want of whose ill-trimmed, aspiring wick
More days than one I have gone forward slowly
In utter dark, scuffling the drifted leaf,
Tapping the road before me with a stick.
~ from Huntsman, What Quarry?

Cupid & Psycheby Antonio Canova, 1757 - 1822

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind."
~A Midsummer Night's Dream~
Act I, scene i
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Wednesday, March 14th {or thereabouts}

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

"Love You Can't Imagine"

WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUSSurreal Valentine by William Rowe

“To love is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."
~ Emily Dickinson ~

*******************
The following long beautiful passage has already appeared on both my book blog and my daily blog, yet it's only right that I include it again, here and now ~ on Valentine's Day! ~ since the title of this post is borrowed from Henley's short story: "Love You Can't Imagine." Even if you have read it before, it is well worth reading one more time:

"Sandra's love for Kelly is not the sort you hear about in songs on the jukebox. It's not desperate or crazy. They met three years ago and it was one year before they made love. Kelly said he wanted to get to know her first and Sandra thought that was a novel idea. When she remembers that year going by, she imagines ranging in the high country on a long hike, when it's tough-going at first and you don't know what to expect. Maybe you slip and fall when the trail crosses a creek bed, maybe the first lake is small, disappointing, but you push yourself, you glory in the little things along the way, the shooting stars and glacier lilies, the marmot whistling, and before long, just as you are simply traveling, putting one boot in front of the other, for the bliss of it, you come upon grand peaks and a string of alpine lakes so rare and peaceful that you imagine no one else has ever been there before you. It's where you belong. That's what being with Kelly is like. Easy, once you reach cruising altitude. Paradise, kind of. And ordinary. Common pleasures renew them. Razzing one another; watching a video in their bathrobes; dividing a foxglove in the fall; lying awake in one another's arms at midnight, waiting for Desiree [Sandra's teenage daughter] to come in from some breakneck double date. Love you can't imagine when you're young, when you think that love is you winning him over, a treadmill of pursuit and chicanery."

from the story "Love You Can't Imagine"
in Worship of the Common Heart: New and Selected Stories
by Patricia Henley
Twenty years have passed since my first reading of "Love You Can't Imagine," and in that time I have collected a number of poems and passages that capture for me the concept of a "love you can't imagine."

First of all, these quaint lines from Doctor Zhivago describe a simple quest for companionship and sustenance, no frills, no chicanery:

Now my ideal is the housewife
My greatest wish, a quiet life
And a big bowl of cabbage soup

by Boris Pasternak
Incredibly straightforward, yet undeniably romantic, that "big bowl of cabbage soup," no matter how homely, is the perfect metaphor for "love you can't imagine." The same metaphor appears in this next tenderly crafted poem about making soup as an act of love. Like Sandra and Kelly, this couple is renewed by the ordinary, common pleasures -- "day after day." Their love is deep, soft, and wise, despite the somewhat incongruous reference to "decay." Like William Blake's contraries of Innocence and Experience or Heaven and Hell, Baker gives us decay and wisdom; weeping and song:

The Couple
Day after day their deep love softly decays.
This makes them wise. It makes them want to sing.
Sometimes, over cups in the kitchen or stirring
a warm soup in the dark, they feel such tenderness
as to turn quietly weeping for each other's arms.
Weeping. Song. They are so much alike after all.

in After the Reunion: Poems
by David Baker
Reading Couple by Renoir
Novelist Kathryn Harrison explores in more detail the sacred connection between decay and a love that is strong enough to "contemplate death":

" . . . the point Shakespeare makes in one after another love sonnet is that a rose can only smell so achingly sweet to those who know that someday they will die to that smell, to it and to every other joy and sorrow. . . . Marriage is made, from the start, between two people who are willing to contemplate death together--to have and to hold, until death do them part. Such contemplation is possible only for those who understand and embrace the boundaries of a life, both temporal and existential."
from the article "Connubial Abyss"
by Kathryn Harrrison
Andre Dubus explores the idea of this connection even further in this long and sadly tender passage about sacraments and sustenance:

" . . . one of my favorite scenes in the movie [Bergman's The Seventh Seal] is the knight sitting on the earth with the young couple and their child, and the woman offers him a bowl of berries; he reaches out with both hands and receives the bowl from her, and eats; and the scene is invested with his awareness that his time is confused and lonely and fearful and short, but for these moments, with these people, with this gift of food, he has been given an eternal touch: eternal because, although death will destroy him, it cannot obliterate the act between him and the woman. She has given him the food. He has taken it. In the face of time, the act is completed. Death cannot touch it now, can only finally stop the hearts that were united in it.

Apple Blossoms by John Everett Millais
"Yet still I believe in love's possibility, in its presence on the earth; as I believe I can approach the altar on any morning of any day which may be the last and receive the touch that does not, for me, say: There is no death; but does say: In this instant I recognize, with you, that you must die. And I believe I can do this in an ordinary kitchen with an ordinary woman and five eggs. The woman sets the table. She watches me beat the eggs. . . . I take our plates; spoon eggs on them, we sit and eat. She and I and the kitchen have become extraordinary: we are not simply eating; we are pausing in the march to perform an act together; we are in love and the meal offered and received is a sacrament which says: I know you will die; I am sharing food with you; it is all I can do, and it is everything.

"As lovers we must have these sacraments, these actions which restore our focus, and therefore ourselves. For our lives are hurried and much too distracted . . . We can bring our human, distracted love into focus with an act that doesn't need words, and act which dramatizes for us what we are together. The act itself can be anything: five beaten and scrambled eggs, two glasses of wine, running beside each other in rhythm with the pace and breath of the beloved. They are all parts of that loveliest of all sacraments between man and woman, that passionate harmony of flesh whose breath and dance and murmur says: we are, we are, we are . . . "

from the essay "On Charon's Wharf," in Broken Vessels
by Andre Dubus
Girl Reading by Picasso
And finally, from Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, the endearing image of reading in bed. What better way to end the day, after preparing and sharing a big bowl of cabbage soup:

"Tomorrow, Reader and Other Reader, if you are together, if you lie down in the same bed like a settled couple, each will turn on the lamp at the side of the bed and sink into his or her book; two parallel readings will accompany the approach of sleep; first you, then you will turn out the light; returning from separated universes, you will find each other fleetingly in the darkness, where all separations are erased, before divergent dreams draw you again, one to one side, and one to the other. But do not wax ironic on this prospect of conjugal harmony: what happier image of a couple could you set against it?"
[See my book blog for more Calvino]

~ HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY! ~
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Say Moon

BROADWAY: WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUSIncludes: "Lullaby of Broadway" (from 42nd Street)
"Never - Never Land" (from Peter Pan)
"Jenny Rebecca" (by Carol Hall)
"Blueberry Eyes" (from Gone With the Wind)
"Castle on a Cloud" (from Les Miserables)
"Not While I'm Around" (from Sweeney Todd)
"My Broth of a Boy" (by Cole Porter)
"Edelweiss" (from The Sound of Music)
"New Words" (by Maury Yeston)
"Count Your Blessings" (from White Christmas)
Lullabies of Broadway by Mimi Bessette was one of our family's earliest lullaby purchases, so early, in fact, that we owned the old technology cassette tape version (1990), ordered from one of our all-time favorite catalogues: Music for Little People. I upgraded a few years ago to CD, because I just can't live without this beautiful, lyrical collection of tunes for night - night and early morning ("Manhatten babies don't sleep tight until the dawn"). I first bought it for my kids, of course, and then for friends of ours as their children came along, but it turns out that I'm the one who has remained in love with every song, every word.

One of my favorites is "New Words," a song about discovery, connection, the magic of language, and the gift of naming. I couldn't find it on youtube, but listen ~ here ~ for a short, sweet snippet.

And the rest:

New Words
[published by Yeston Music Ltd.]

Look up there
High above us
In a sky of blackest silk
See how round
Like a cookie
See how white, as white as milk
Call it the "moon" my son
Say "moon"
Sounds like your spoon, my son
Can you say it?
New word today, say "moon"

Near the the moon
Brightly turning
Are a thousand sparks of light
Each one new
Each one burning
Through the darkness of the night
We call them "stars," my son, say "stars"
That one is "Mars," my son
Can you say it?
New word today, say "stars"

As they blink all around us
Playing starry-eyed games
Who would think it astounds us
Simply naming their names

Turn your eyes
From the skies now
Turn around and look at me
There's a light
In my eyes now
And a word for what you see
We call it "love," my son
Say "love"
So hard to say, my son
It gets harder
New words today
We'll learn to say
Learn "moon," learn "stars"
Learn "love"

Music & lyrics
by Maury Yeston

I like the way the opening stanza moves so swiftly from one simile to the next, as the moon becomes first cookie, then milk, then spoon. And a few lines down, the verb astounds is so astounding, isn't it? Not necessarily a word you expect to come across in a lullaby, yet so apt -- because it does indeed "astound us, simply naming their names": Aldebaran . . . Andromeda . . . Cassiopeia . . . I am reminded of a conversation I was having just recently with my mother - in - law Rosanne. She said that it is so entrancing each month to watch the moon get full, you'd think it had never happened before. I had to agree!

This lullaby of amazement is perfect for the night of the full moon, such as February's Full Snow Moon, coming soon, or last month's most unusual Halo Moon, as photographed by my son Ben:


After one of last winter's full moons my friend Cheryl wrote to say that she had been up at 4:00 that morning and seen the full moon "shining across the new snowfall. It was breathtaking, but I couldn't get my camera to capture it very well." A few months of following this blog, and you will notice, if you haven't already, that, like Cheryl, I have a weakness for running outside and trying to photograph the full moon whenever it presents itself. Without any special National Geographic equipment, it's hard to get an excellent shot, but every now and then, with the help of my little zoom lens, I get one that turns out right.

On this occasion, I wrote back to share with Cheryl that, no matter how our photos had turned out, I knew just what she meant about the moonlight on the snow -- it's like that line from The Night Before Christmas: "The moon on the breast of the newfallen snow gave a lustre of mid-day to objects below." When I was little, I had no idea what that meant, but now I get it! [Also, see my post Blue Moon.]

And in closing, how about these inspiring words from my insightful friend and fellow blogger ~ Almost 60? Really? ~ Paula Lee Bright. [Also, see my post Green Stamps]:

When I was a kid I didn't know what it meant either, but it's funny: when presented with something like that a kid's brain still attempts to make sense of it. And in a way, I did! Keywords moon, snow, and mid-day DID kind of sink into our consciousness, and the other words were stored away with a tiny bit of info attached to them. How they were used, with other words. And so we began to understand. Isn't the way kids learn vocabulary and imagery and yes, even art such as poetry ~ isn't it fascinating? Dang, I loved teaching!

Like you, I am in love with language. Nothing else in the world is as all-encompassing and exciting (other than the coolness of TEACHING language to exciting kids!).

Yes, indeed ~ thanks Paula! As Mimi Bessette sings so poignantly:

New words today
We'll learn to say
Learn "moon," learn "stars"
Learn "love"
One further connection:
Mimi Bessette has also performed in the musical Opal, written by my cousin Robert Nassif Lindsey. How I would love to have seen that production live!

More on Opal:
Fortnightly: "In Love With the World"
On Kitti's Book List: About Opal Whiteley
Click to watch on youtube

The Full Wolf Moon
January 2012
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

My Favorite Result: November 2010
Comprehensive List of Full Moon NamesGutsy Lantern
[see first comment below, from Eileen S. H.]

This Year's Words

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"WE WILL SAY THIS POEM AGAIN AND AGAIN . . .
THERE IS NO END TO ANYTHING ROUND."
~ RUMI ~

*************************

"Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers."
from The Wasteland
by T. S. Eliot
A new year full of new words!

Some of the best New Year's words I know come from T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets":

Quartet No. 1: Burnt Norton
Quartet No. 2: East Coker
Quartet No. 3: The Dry Salvages
Quartet No. 4: Little Gidding.

These are perfect poems for the re-beginning cycle, dealing as they do with the human experience of past, present, and future and our place within time.

In the first quartet, Eliot imagines the simultaneous existence of past, present, and future:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
"Burnt Norton" (from section I)

In the fourth quartet, some things, like "last year's words" can be left in the past, while "next year's words" remain in the future. In my post last month, I quoted Salman Rushdie as saying that "the home we make . . . is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place from which we began." Eliot, however, brings us back around:

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice . . .
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from . . .
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.*
"Little Gidding" (from sections II & V)

*These great lines from Eliot have already
appeared a couple of times previously on this blog:
see ~ "Three Passions"
and ~ "Parallax"
On the topic of wintry words, you may remember this one from
last January, but here it is again, always a favorite:

"Antiphanes said merrily,
that in a certain city the cold was so intense
that words were congealed as soon as spoken,
but that after some time
they thawed and became audible;
so that the words spoken in winter
were articulated next summer."
Plutarch, (46 - 120)
1st Century Biographer
born Greek but later became a Roman citizen
A Little Window on Winter
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Saturday, 28 January 2012

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Snow at last!
Time to winterize your croquet set!

Divine Homesickness: If Only In My Dreams

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED CEREMONIOUS

"THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME, THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME"

********************
"When we are constantly focused on externals,
we are not centered, that is, we are not aligned
internally -- body, mind and soul.
Without that alignment,
we have a case of Divine Homesickness.
We feel empty and lost, always trying
to find our way Home . . . always
looking for something 'out there' to fill us up.
And nothing out there can."

from
The Little Book of Peace of Mind
by Susan Jeffers
Similarly, Anne Lamott writes that "all of the interesting characters I've ever worked with -- including myself -- have had at their center a feeling of otherness, of homesickness" (Bird By Bird, 200). From Jeffers, Lamott, and the following two passages, by Buechner and Rushdie, we can construct a poetics of divine homesickness, one that resonates strongly with me because I am from Missouri, I am from Kansas, not just metaphorically but actually.

The Child In Us
We weren't born yesterday. We are from Missouri. But we are also from somewhere else. We are from Oz, from Looking-Glass Land, from Narnia, and from Middle Earth. If with part of ourselves we are men and women of the world and share the sad unbeliefs of the world, with a deeper part still, the part where our best dreams come from, it is as if we were indeed born yesterday, or almost yesterday, because we are also all of us children still.

No matter how forgotten and neglected, there is a child in all of us who is not just willing to believe in the possibility that maybe fairy tales are true after all but who is to some degree in touch with that truth. You pull the shade on the snow falling, white on white, and the child comes to life for a moment. There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody's voice in the hall, that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears.

Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die? The child in us lives in a world where nothing is too familiar or unpromising to open up into a world where a path unwinds before our feet into a deep wood, and when that happens, neither the world we live in nor the world that lives in us can ever entirely be home again, any more than it was home for Dorothy in the end either, because in the Oz books that follow The Wizard she keeps coming back again and again to Oz because Oz, not Kansas, is where her heart is, and the wizard turns out to be not a humbug, but the greatest of all wizards after all.
from Listening to Your Life,"The Child in Us * May 6"
by Frederick Buechner
Buechner analyzes the myth of Oz more thoroughly in Chapter 4 of his book, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. Likewise, author, Salman Rushdie employs the Oz metaphor when describing the impossibility of a backward quest for childhood innocence.

Out of Kansas
"So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make up our lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that 'there's no place like home', but rather that there is no longer any such place as home: except, of course, for the home we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz: which is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place from which we began" (see more).
from Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002,
Essay #1: "Out of Kansas"
by Salman Rushdie
I still love to hear Karen Carpenter sing "I'll Be Home For Christmas, If Only In My Dreams," but I feel differently about this song than I used to. I used to think it was about people who weren't able to travel "home for the holidays" to be with everyone else. Now I'm more inclined to think it's about people who have to travel or have traveled, when all they really want is the privacy of their own home. There they are surrounded by all their loved ones, but what they crave is to be home alone -- if only in their dreams.

Not to be all bah - humbug about it, but now whenever I hear lyrics like "I'll Be Home for Christmas" or "There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays" or "There's No Christmas Like Home Christmas," my response is Precisely! Home. H - O - M - E. Not someone else's home. Not someplace that used to be home. Your own home. Where your heart is. As John Denver sings:

"Home is where the heart is,
and Christmas lives there too."SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Saturday, 14 January 2012

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Outside Looking In

The Hap, Hap, Happiest Holidays

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"THE NOWHERENESS OF THE TIME OF THE YEAR"

*******************
"HOPE IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS"
One of my favorite anonymous essays, "The Bad and Worse Sides of Thanksgiving," appeared in The New Yorker, twenty - some years ago. I wish I knew who wrote it, but so far Google has not been able to help me track down this information. The unnamed satirist declares that "At last it is time to speak the truth about Thanksgiving. The truth is this: it is not a really great holiday. Consider the imagery. . . . Consider the participants. . . . Consider also the nowhereness of the time of the year. . . . Consider for a moment the Thanksgiving meal itself. . . . What of the good side to Thanksgiving, you ask. There is always a good side to everything. Not to Thanksgiving. There is only a bad side and then a worse side."

Maybe, out of context, these words sound cynical, but no -- you must believe me -- reading this essay always lifts my spirits! Let's backtrack to the second consideration:

" . . . the participants, the merrymakers. Men and women (also children) who have survived passably well through the years, mainly as a result of living at considerable distances from their dear parents and beloved siblings, who on the feast of feasts must apparently forgather . . . usually by circuitous routes, through heavy traffic, at a common meeting pace, where the very moods, distempers, and obtrusive personal habits that have kept them happily apart since adulthood are encouraged to slowly ferment beneath the cornhusks, and gradually rise with the aid of the terrible wine, and finally burst forth out of control under the stimulus of the cranberry jelly!" ("Notes and Comments" section of The New Yorker, November 1978; reprinted in the 8th edition of Assignments in Exposition, 201 - 02)

A humorously tender and well - acted version of this exact scenario plays itself out in my family's favorite Thanksgiving movie, Home for the Holidays (1995). The wacky, loving, conflicted and gratifyingly realistic clan (living in a gratifyingly realistic house) is so perfectly cast that I have to list almost everybody: Anne Bancroft, Geraldine Chaplin, Claire Danes, Robert Downey, Jr., Charles Durning, Steve Guttenburg, Holly Hunter, Dylan McDermott. When they "forgather" and drink the terrible wine and eat the terrible jelly, the result is precisely as described above, right down to the disastrous carving of the turkey and the final confrontation between the two feuding sisters: "Well, we don't have to like each other, Jo. We're family."

Garrison Keillor captures this same tension of home as where you live vs home as where you're from, in his sketch "Nine Lessons and Carols" (A Prairie Home Christmas). The "carols" are what you would expect: "I'll Be Home For Christmas," "No Christmas Like a Home Christmas," "There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays," and so forth. The "lessons" are about an extended family planning their annual get - together. Despite all the well - intentioned over - organizing, the center does not hold. As all the old conflicts re-surface, the "sensitive" youngest sister Jessica exclaims woefully, "I want to go home!" And stressed - out, edgy older sister Janice reminds her curtly, "Oh, you are home. Just make the best of it!"

Another holiday favorite, filled with a litany of family - centered wisdom, is Chevy Chase's Christmas Vacation. Yes, we know it's ridiculous, but it's a keeper! The mom, Ellen (Beverly D'Angelo) provides a role - model for how to live peaceably amidst a houseful of relatives: "I don't know what to say, except it's Christmas and we're all in misery" (i.e, "You are home, so make the best of it!").

The best lines come along when the holiday is crumbling apart, and the long - distance relatives decide to make an early departure. Clark / Chevy bars the way:

"Where do you think you're going? Nobody's leaving. Nobody's walking out on this fun, old-fashioned family Christmas. No, no. We're all in this together. This is a full-blown, four-alarm holiday emergency here. We're gonna press on, and we're gonna have the hap, hap, happiest Christmas since Bing Crosby tap-danced with Danny f-----g Kaye. . . . Hallelujah! Holy shit! Where's the Tylenol?"

When Ben and Sam were little, I had a moment of misgiving about letting them hear Clark's use of the "f" word; but, otherwise, it was so much fun to watch this movie with them, I just crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. As they got older, I admitted my shame to them, but they were quick to reassure me that, having never been exposed to such diction before, they didn't even know that they'd just heard a bad word: "We just thought it was Danny Kaye's middle name!" (Yes, they also knew who Danny Kaye was thanks to numerous viewings of White Christmas."
In all of these narratives, the "worse side" is the family "melt - down." The "better side" is the hope of detente, if not resolution. Even the anonymous "Bad and Worse Sides of Thanksgiving," after the downward spiral, ends hopefully:

" . . . the gods are merciful . . . there is a grandeur to the feelings of finality and doom which usually settle on a house after the Thanksgiving celebration is over, for with the completion of Thanksgiving Day the year itself has been properly terminated . . . But then, overnight life once again begins to stir, emerging, even by the next morning, in the form of . . . window displays and . . . Christmas lighting . . . Thus, a new year dawns . . . the phoenix of Christmas can be observed as it slowly rises, beating its drumsticks, once again goggle-eyed with hope and unrealistic expectations."

I guess that explains why so many families have turkey for Christmas dinner, so soon after having it for Thanksgiving -- that roasted fowl piece de resistance is a symbolic Phoenix of Hope!

The Phoenix
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Wednesday, 28 December 2011

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