"You'll Shoot Your Eye Out"

      Christie, in a comment to another entry on this blog, observed what I'm sure most of of you've observed: I am not in the 'spirit' of Christmas, or, rather, I'm not on quite the same train of optimistic thinking that everyone else in the Western World tends to ride. I'm not Scrooge, really, because I don't think there's anyone who knows me who'd say I'm ingenerous, or who'd say I believe in nothing. (I may invoke Scrooge and his words, but that should be expected: almost everything from me has a viscous layer of irony to it, and sometimes the matters of such irony are matters of degree rather than kind.) But I cannot deny it: I loathe the Christmas season. I can't remember a truly good Christmas, and don't honestly think I've ever had one. Oh, sure, I've been given gifts and had the odd good feeling, but THE DAY itself has not, at least in the length of my post-childhood memory (and I remember next to nothing of my childhood-- very, very little indeed prior to the age of ten), I can recall nothing that might redeem the holiday. The holiday, that is, with which I associate little more than tolerant suffering and financial waste. Such things happen when the day is always associated with putting up with people that think they know you asking entirely wrong questions about you (e.g., 'Are you still studying computers?' Er-- I never studied computers. Ever. And, by the way, we got in this bog of misconception same time, same bat-channel last year) and spending reams of cash on gifts that go unused, unappreciated, and which are as ceremonial as the Queen of England is to Canada. It's patience (i.e., patientia, meaning both 'to wait' and 'to suffer,' whence 'being patient' and 'the Doctor will finally fucking see yoou know') tested to its most logical extreme. It's also suppressing my basic desires, my natural instincts, to rip through the facetiousness of false and formal pretentions. There's a good reason that, as much as I possibly can, I spend Christmas day with the children and the animals (to the point I'm often assigned the day-long task of taking care of one or the other, to the point of being the free babysitter), who know very little of the world of masks and facades, and who still look at a crowd of people as something in which to rejoice. I both admire and adore their innocence. I wish I still had mine, or more of it than I do.

      Christmas, like my birthday, is something I dread. It's about necessary appearances, about formal exchanges, about appeasement: it's joyless. And, more often than not, it's wasteful. It's spending money on people that wouldn't say 'hi' to you on the street if they saw you. In short, it is, in my experience, more pretense (this blog apologizes in advance if that word, or cognates of it, occur like heathers upon a Scottish landscape) than anything. It's swallowing one's pride and one's identity and subsuming it to a cheap, super-commercialized project such that one can begin to feel dishonest. It's agonizing over gifts that you know full well will never be good enough, and will never find themselves a use. It's a fundamentally loveless experience. Or atleast it is for me, and, I know, for many others. How, I wonder, did the birth of a supposed saviour (depending on your religious stripe) become something so crass and ingenuine? How did we lose sight of the morality and the ethicality we really ought to observe on such a day become so practically corrupt? As if a gift, a token object bought because you were on someone's list, redeems absence and/or pretense. Regardless of your religious beliefs, the figure of Christ, the subject we supposedly commemorate, is supposed to be a figure of sincerity. I value sincerity intensely. I prize it, almost Diogenically, and yet we issue ourselves through insincerity on what should (at least for believers) be a truly thoughtful day. It's the excruciating fallacy, perhaps, of the intentionalist: I feel the same rancidity of spirit when I watch a PoCo version of The Tempest-- the issues of intent and context become moot points in the servitude of another programme. And the whole thing seems to me vile. (You'll be excuse if you posit, contrarily, Albany's words, that wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile.)

      The act of gift-giving at Christmas, beyond other issues (influenced by translating to then-Pagan cultures with their own concepts of the act of gift-giving) is supposed to be based on reverence (e.g., the gifts of the Magi) and adoration. It's also supposed to be about the inspiration of love and hope. And, gee, watching the endless CNN-like nauseum of Yuletide repetitions encourages me to profound considerations of these matters. *Rolls eyes* It's also supposed to be about epiphany and realization (check out, by the way, the origins of the word 'apocalypse'). It's A Wonderful Life is not a Christmas movie because it's set at Christmastime. It's a Christmas movie because it's about personal spiritual revelation, because it's about the discovery of the lives one touches and the ways one, indeed, makes a difference. And it's about the preciousness of those things. Somehow, they defeat all cynicism. (Factoid: It's A Wonderful Life was a bomb when it was released. Time made it a classic. Why? Because it spoke to larger issues. It wasn't about whether or not Jimmy Stewart committed suicide. It was potently and poignantly about the recovery of the human soul from despair, much like the supposed Jesus' life: in situation with death, with the fear of being forsaken, and maintaining and recovering belief for oneself and for the world.) And, yes, the holiday is about giving, not materially but substantially. The myths of Santa Claus (corporate as it is)/Saint Nicklaus/Sinter Klaus/etc. are resonant not so much for the visions of gifts under a tree and dreams of sugar-plum fairies, but because they're about giving with no real reason, with no pragmatic reason to gain. It is also about the spontaneous sensibility of enjoying the act, and the idea, of generousity, of a joyful paternal figure surprising us in the night and delighting us in the recovery of the day. It is also about believing in myths and ideas that our more realistic selves would qualify or rationalize or demystify. Christmas is supposed to be about the gleam in a child's eye on discovering the possibility of the impossible, and about the parent's fulfillment in knowing it weaved a little everyday magic. Where I just wrote "child," though feel free to read in otherwise: loved one, friend, whatever, and situate the other side of the ratio accordingly.

      Yes, perhaps I'm grossly idealistic and yet still grossly cynical. I'll not pretend otherwise. So, I hope everyone will understand my distaste for the saccharine callings of 'the season.' I'll go through the motions, and I'll do what I have to do with as much sincerity as I can muster-- and, to be frank, please understand that I'm pretty disillusioned by the occasion and by its perversion. I try, as much as I can to invest my own feelings in what I do at Christmas, but that becomes very hard to do when working on a commercially-hyped and historically-determined deadline. I try to give my best during the entire year, aspartane-free, as I can, and I try to show such matters of concern and appreciation and generousity and so forth when I'm most in the moment of actually feeling them, but because they're unoccasioned, they may seem less-ceremonial. But I guess, in the end, I detest 'the holiday' and its miserable infractions and insistences. And I more than certainly detest the vexatious mock-ritualism of Christmas shopping, the parodically-baroque dimensions of artificiality which are really pleas for approval and appeasement. I detest too the cloyingly sweet (and false) gesturism of the holidays. (Not to mention the previously mentioned hatred of shopping swarms and cultural agony-aunting.) Sorry if this sounds faux-Shakespearean, but I really do wonder what Falstaff would say about our current idea of Christmas. In some ways, he'd be very pleased, but in others, he'd I'm sure be shaking his head in bewilderment. He'd see pretense everywhere, and in part enjoy the lavishness of it all; the other part of him would recognize such things as scutcheonly abnegations of the obvious.

      We lose life as we gain it, and, hopefully, what we lose is less than what we gain. And yet we should give as we gain, a kind of spiritually symbiotic economy. I wish I didn't feel the way I do, that I didn't carry on my back like Egyptian sacks of sand for the pyramids the notion of the bilious concept of being marshalled (or martialed?) into a larger thick. The great trick is getting past the loss-gain metaphor, that we're not simply playing morality as a kind of credit card, something we charge in the moment for payment later, to which we otherwise consign ourselves, lemming-like in our obedience to instinctual-stricture and general expectation. I'm not saying we all should, like Othello, wear our hearts upon our sleeves. But nor should we confuse an apparent (and temporary) atmosphere for ideal breathing space (from which, of course, we eventually seek resperiatory asylum; "to every heart / a love must come / but like a refugee," Mr. Cohen sagely reminds me).

      Christmas, or the idea of Christmas, is something that should be more than serving the familopolitical. It should, as I see it, enjoin us to our better selves, and not merely to our servient, and cash-plying, selves. The capacities to give, to love, to share, to wonder, to recover, to resee the world in sharpened hues, ought to be constant discoveries and rediscoveries of ourselves, and not merely patterned and dictated observances choreographed to a date. Let us rejoice in the beautiful and the entirely unnecessary. Let us rejoice in the victories of our better selves, and the pleasure and valour of the company of others. Let us appreciate them when we can and when we perceive them. And let us scuttle the vapidities of pretense and expectation. Let us love when we love, and not when we're supposed to heave falsely our hearts into our throats. Let us remember Cordelia's perfect words: "No cause, no cause." Let us possess the mania to sing in ideals and loves when we have nothing to gain. Let us sing all our devotions in darkness against the moonlight, proudly. Let us love that we do so.

      And bugger the rest.

      Sincerely: Merry Christmas, everyone. May your holidays, whatever your thelogical condition, be everything you hope them to be, and, genuinely, more. And I write this catechism, the last part anyway, for once, entirely irony-free, even if I may have just shot my eye out for such words. Perhaps this blog indeed is just a Red Rider BB Gun.

^~~ And keep me young / As I grow old....^~~ (Van Morrison)

      And, of course, two last words, hopefully now reunderstood: "Bah, Humbug." :-) And this blog promises that, aside from relevant funny article thereto related, this blog will make no future reference to, or comment upon, the ominously looming reality of holidays. My gift to all of you patient enough to read me here.