Your Own Personal Larry

"Out comes the sun

Never had no chance

Nowhere to run"

 

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Spitting Off the Edge of the World

__________________________________________

"Ahem. Happy Christmas, Yuletide, Chanaka, Ramadan, Kwanza, winter solstice, ho ho ho and have a merry Y2K. Did I forget anyone?"

"What about the atheists?"

"Oh? Have a nice day."

 

a '99 iteration of a popular holiday joke

__________________________________________ 

"When things are loved, they become more than just an object."

"Right, like anyone is going to be emotionally attached to a pair of socks."

Immaterial page 67

(oooh, so, so close to a "things are loved" page number pun) 

__________________________________________

 

 

I spent a rather contemplative winter solstice. Maybe I should've installed a new RPG and made myself a druid character as symbol of rebirth, make that into a yearly tradition. Instead, as I've done increasingly often the past years, I woke while it was still dark this Sun-day, Ishtar gleaming bravely opposite a hint of dawn as I walked to my car, and drove out to a small nearby forest for a walk among nature at a time of renewal in the cycle. And if the calories I burned tromping about and scaring Bambi and Thumper at -8 centigrade aren't a good enough offering for old Cernunnos, well, he can go suck a wagon wheel or whatever. That's as much winter ritual as I'm willing to observe. I suppose I could also dangle some glass balls off this thing:

This dragon plant, though it may not look it, has been with me for most of my life, about thirty years now. It was originally bought when my parents moved us across the ocean, along with a pothos and dieffenbachia as standard low-maintenance urban greenery. When we moved after a couple of years, it did not fit among the rest of the cargo, so while throwing it out we snipped off its top. Maybe if we replant it, it'll live. It did. Then a couple years after that we moved again. Repeat. Then again. Then... I forget how many times total. Some years ago when my mother was about to throw it out for good, I took the traditional cutting for myself. But I made the mistake of letting it get too tall as a single stem, so now it'll be getting bonsaied again... maybe from about a third of the way up if it can still split that low? And the tip will take over my cactus' old pot.

 

Is this a tradition? A personal or a family tradition? Should I build it a little shrine? Maybe I could have one of these made out of glass.

I snapped a few shots of this at Herculaneum. You can find it referenced easily enough as one of two such shrines in the skeleton's house. Lararia were apparently expected in respectable Roman houses, shrines to the family's ancestors as guardian spirit(s)(?), though I'm not sure how seriously you can take a "lar" as supernatural benefactor. "Larry" sounds like a wacky '80s sitcom character, ALF's uncle with a bad hip or the Great Gazoo's pot-smoking cousin that's somehow even more annoying. I liked the mosaics on this one in particular for some reason.

The sea theme with waves, swells, foam gets complemented with actual seashells.

Most of these would appear to have fallen prey to octopus or snail drilling? Never mind, beside the point. It would've made a nice, cozy abode for the family's lares. 

These would've been represented by statuettes sitting in that niche. The custom was ubiquitous, but the individual lares and lararia each look slightly different to me around the central themes of bounty, offerings, luck, etc. More figurative, more geometric, carrying slightly different symbols, bigger spaces, bigger statues, more paint, more mosaic, whatever. Of course the Orient has always had its own multitudinous versions of house shrines, whether it's to kami or some variation on Shiva or everything in between. Even Catholic/Orthodox home altars and icons, albeit far more sparse and stilted, will often display some feature of the owner's taste.

 

So can I stick my dragon plant on one of those altars? It means a lot to me. It's been with me through ages of family life and solitude, failure and recovery. If I claim to be an animist can I pass off a few dead Dracaena leaves as holy relics? Me and mine have rebirthed the damn thing enough times to make Osiris jealous. Is this a spiritual connection? If you tore it to splinters in front of me, would I be at pains to maintain my stoic composure like that chick from Dogville? And what would I claim of yours in retribution for your sacrilege? Where exactly is the all-important dividing line between scripture and script, between sermons and life lessons, cult and culture?

 

Being a '90s teen myself I was thoroughly amused by Shaenon Garrity's comedic summaries of X-Files episodes, Monster of the Week, and am quite disappointed to see she's already taken them offline. The one for Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, unusually philosophical for an X-File, stood out for dropping much of the humor in favor of Garrity's admiration for the episode's writer, Darin Morgan. In fact, though she sold original MotW prints, the listing below this merely read "Unless you’re Darin Morgan, this strip is not for sale." I don't mind admitting it warmed my heart to see a second line appended when I re-read the strips a year or two later, reading merely "Sold." The anecdote made it into a conversation with my family last year. Though not fans of either The X-Files or webcomics, my parents had booked a trip to Belgium, including the museum where hangs the painting by (maybe) Pieter Bruegel the Elder referenced in the poem by W.H. Auden which I had read in passing in one of my high school literature textbooks, referenced by Garrity in satirizing a TV series about alien abductions and also the occasional vampire.

 

Anyway, ho, ho, ho, merrrrry something.

 

Here in the States, one of our fondest Christmas traditions is listening to hicks complain about a "war on Christmas" to the great confusion of everyone hearing the word shouted at us from every corner of both media and society, having to wade through tinsel knee-deep everywhere we go and hearing nothing but the same idiotic jingles piped through every single speaker in existence to the point even Big Brother would be jealous. Every single year since Y2K, for a quarter century now, they've foamed at the mouth playing the martyr for somehow being prevented from celebrating. Christmas is dead, it's been murdered, it's been violated, Santa's been sodomized with reindeer horns! And everyone else shrugs and asks "wutchoo talkin' 'bout Clevon" as every TV network fills with movies and very special episodes about Christmas like they've always done and the superstitious then all go on to have all their church services just as they always have and even online games shoehorn in Santa's village as a playable location and the U.S. government ignores its own separation of church and state to massage their egos with tax-funded religious babble, until next year when all the fundies yet again and again rave and rant about how Christmas is dead-dead-DEAD!!!1 repeating the whole insane dog-and-pony show over and over and over again.

 

Admittedly, I'm little more fond of those nouveau-Bolsheviks who try to force the issue by artificially policing language, rattling off the whole litany of winter holidays in every office memo on the off-chance there may be a Zoroastrian hiding behind the geraniums, and who force terms like "before current era" instead of "before Christ" in measuring history. I don't think I'm fighting a war on them either by insisting on calling this Nivose a December*. Trying to unmoor society from its historical ontogeny is itself a form of brainwashing, if not quite on the scale of religion. Like it or not unless you can change the calendar to commemorate some other event or figure, you are counting your years from the (supposed) birth of Rabbi Yeshua he of the vertical lounge chair, and the reason you have these specific days off work is because of Christians' clout in demanding celebrations for their particular deity, so frikkin' admit it, deal with it and shut up already. I bothered myself for a symbolic communion with nature on the solstice for its more universal meaning, which was indeed at the core of most of these winter celebrations including the invented birth-date of Jesus which was just stapled onto those older traditions. I'll be raising a glass with my family tomorrow evening over vid chat and telling them "Merry Christmas" even though they know very well I don't believe a word of those two words, especially the merriness. I won't do it for you but I'll do it for them. And I ain't doin' jack shit today for Festivus.

 

Historical reality is one thing. Superstitious pretense is another. All of the above discussions can be carried out in the real world. There can be reverence in the appreciation of a painting, of a poem, of an unusually good TV script, of an apt homage; the symbolism thus invoked can memetically link a cartoonist, a lycanthrope and his retiree parents. One's ancestors may be acknowledged whether sitting in a shell-encrusted alcove in Herculaneum or invoked by the same carols they used to sing a century ago. Maybe Santa Claus really will be abandoned someday, as have innumerable other lars and other spirits of good fortune inhabiting mantels or chimneys. Not outlawed. Abandoned, willingly, by a population which has outgrown them. One can only hope against all evidence.

 

The real point of course is that traditions reflect in-group cohesion, and every holier-than-thou caveman desperately needs to make a display of fervor in complacency to outdo one's neighbours, must be more like the herd than the rest of the herd. We are told that society would fall apart without such obeisance, that our psychology absolutely requires the sense of continuity and community it provides. No different altars for every family's ancestors, just a single mass-produced Jesus by decree. But does it really have to be the same continuity for everyone? I've killed a lot fewer people with W.H. Auden and a dragon plant than your average Abrahamic fanboy has with his prayer mats and funny caps or whatever. Conformity is not religion's benefit to society; religion is just one tool of conformity beneath tyrants. We could rehash historical examples, but one need only look to the current Christian Nationalist takeover of the U.S. government.

 

After a year of sending masked thugs to toss children into the backs of vans, imprisoning its own citizens without trial on suspicion of owning a foreign electrical adapter, refusing the foreign aid which had once bought them so much goodwill so cheap, the Republican Party has dropped deeper and deeper into farce with the pettiness of its gratuitous impositions, like bitching out fat generals or renaming the Gulf of Mexico. More recently, and who could've seen this absurdity coming, a war on fonts, not for causing harm but merely for fear it may cause good. This is the same crowd wailing about a war on Christmas, not because they are prevented from celebrating but merely for the existence of others who do not bend knee to their psychoses. It's always petty, and cruel, and pointless, and meant only to inflate their own self-importance. They're not opposed to political correctness. The church ladies have just been at the same game longer. The real tradition they're defending is tyranny, and any Santa, any personal Jesus, any font and any market fad will do as pretext.

 

 

 

 

_____________________________________

 

 

* And I damn well will fight them on calling women "people who menstruate"