By Geri Lipschultz
In my Critical Theory class at Ohio University where I had gone to pursue my doctorate, we were knee deep in the construct of the carnivalesque as identified by the Russian theorist and philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin. We?d read chapters of his book on Rabelais where Bakhtin examines and explicates the phenomenon of carnival. It is an ancient rite that springs up among all peoples, functions as a catalyst for renewal?at a grand scale. The laughter itself is regenerative, like a medicine?warm and erotic like a connective tissue. It runs through bodies like a river, like urine, like desire, like all bodily enterprises. Like life, like death, like childbirth, like aggression, like love. The principles of the carnivalesque are bodily knowledge, so it is best to undergo the experience, to render oneself vulnerable?to let the body be the informant, to allow the body to be a part of other bodies, of the earth-body, of the cosmos of which human beings are a part. Bakhtin says only with our bodies can we be part of Nature.
To that end, I suppose, our professor required us to attend the annual celebration of Halloween as played out in Athens, Ohio, the small Midwestern town around which the college situates itself, its dormitories, its fraternities, its off-campus housing?all of it intertwined among the old Victorian houses that were once inhabited largely by those who made their living on coal.
It is not any kind of overstatement to say that Ohio University, which scores high in both its creative writing department and its propensity for partying, is known for its Halloween festivities. The city of Athens goes to great lengths?in terms of parking, street-clearing, policing the street, even the positioning of numerous port-o-potties?to prepare itself for the onslaught of ten- or twenty-thousand people; the atmosphere is one bordering on primordial. Normally, I?d be among those politely harbored in a kitchen or study, preferring solitude to the magnitude of mayhem and disaster that characterizes such an event. It was my second year?I knew what to expect.
On this particular day, you could see transformation in evidence well before the sun headed west for the night. The houses were caves, and the caves were canvases. The moon almost full, would offer its light, reflected, ancient, and those who were out in it, wanted to be out, would have already prepared themselves.
Those who did not want to partake kept themselves hidden behind closed doors, but they could hear the billingsgate, just as I had heard it before I emerged into the air, with my blonde wig, the wig I had bought for my eleven-year old whose misfortune it was to be sick for the week preceding Halloween. Nevertheless, she helped me prepare, even as she derided me. At first, I thought I?d simply dress as a college kid, but she vetoed that. I had a hat, a witch?s hat. She didn?t think I should be blonde. It did not go with my coloring. It was inappropriate for me to look sexy. Still, I tried for sexy, kept the blonde and walked out in this, my grotesque self hidden without a mask, knowing with that blonde wig no one would know me.
I found myself behaving slightly differently, letting go of some acquired selves, letting go of anxieties. The anxiety of a mother with a sick child I placed on the proverbial back burner. That self was folded up neatly like a bat in a pocket closet. The other self, the subversive one, found herself driving up and around sharp curves going the wrong way. That self drove more quickly, taking in the lawlessness she felt in the air. She also allowed herself to be witchy, to feel the witch in herself, to appropriate the platinum, the Marilyn Monroe, the Cinderella whose time out of time resembled sand dropping by grains in an hourglass, an hourglass with just a little more than two hours worth of sand. The air was palpably different. The ritual itself prepares you to shut down almost entirely the part of yourself that responds to the demands of human civilization?of everything you have been taught. As if it were transgressive for adults to ?play.?
Hence, the disguise?the mask or wig, the clothing?to conceal our ordinary selves, meant to suggest something extraordinary, something fantastic or grotesque or lewd and vulgar, or frightening or clever or sexy. Our disguises would become us. We would become other, something we were not, and with that other self, we paraded about meeting others. We prepared for something to happen but we could not say what.
I say ?we? here, but for a while, it was ?they.? It was ?they? when we drove around town earlier, my daughter and I, in the pre-Halloween moments in pure daylight, when we spied, along with the appearance of the port-o-potties, some hefty boys, fully muscled and big bellied, in women?s bikinis, with balloons or large balls for breasts, and my daughter thought this was ?sick.? I remembered when my son dressed up to be a cheerleader for his high school homecoming, with those same balloons. Somewhere five-hundred miles east of Athens, Ohio, this same son was going to participate in NYC?s Greenwich Village Halloween parade. The holiday is old, based, some say, as an end of harvest celebration, as a way of feeding the hungry, as a way of marking the moment when the season of winter begins. This is part of the liminal nature, the in-between-ness of the festival. Between light and dark, between the growing and dying time of the year, and it heralds the time between life and death itself, when the dead will speak to the living, when the ghosts, the invisibles themselves parade.
We had planned to gather early. After my manic driving to pick up a flapper, joined by a farmer, we presented ourselves. We entered the cave, where feasting was, where drinks were, and where the talk swirled like snakes, rather than the talk concretized around the tables of our seminar, that you must, nevertheless, understand was still cozy. Our mistress-of-ceremonies, she whose cave it was, my dear friend, as much feline as human fem. In attendance were that flapper, a gold-braided soldier, a cape-covered character from the film Vendetta, a pop singer, our host (the glittery masked catlike siren), a shades and hatted man?our professor now among us?a farm girl, the farm fellow, and yes, the aging blonde witch, the grotesque Cinderella crone. There were some half or fully dead characters from Lost, a dingbat, and a pimp.
Enter Bakhtin, then, the ghost of carnivalesque, with the stage thus set. As the sand dropped noiselessly down the contours of the hourglass, I looked about, grabbed a flask, poured liquid and drank. Rabelais ends his book, Bakhtin notes, saying ?Let us drink.?? The drink invites giddiness, as it releases us from the last vestiges of a world left behind. And I will say I was giddy, even though my child was not well, and when the phone rang, I stopped being giddy, and I looked down and froze for a moment, as I heard her gasping for breath. She was seized by the cough, the beginning of the end of the virus, and she could barely speak. ?Please let me speak to ?(the babysitter),? I said, now fully outside of the liminal space. Before long, however, the modicum of safety established, I returned, the worrisome motherly self folded again in my pocket.
Thereafter, I watched the minutes parading on my cell phone, robbing me of the imagined prance into the melee of Court Street. We walked on the stone ground listening to each others? stories, secrets aired in the shadow of the carnivalesque. In this way, through the disguises, we became more real, our bodies softer and fuller, as we moved.? We had done a little dancing in my friend?s kitchen, but I wondered how I would have danced at Court Street. After all, it was a ball, and Cinderella I was, walking in the half light of the subliminal moment of All Hallows Eve. I picked up the phone again, and while assuring the one on the other end I would be home quite soon, I heard some fellow reveler speak, and he looked at me, said something about my being ?sexy,? someone who couldn?t have been more than the age of my son, less than half my age. Grotesque, yes?but glorious!
And now, looking back with gratitude, the reminiscence itself restorative. I remember a feeling sprang up that hadn?t been there before. You enter the precarious world on a dark night. There are creatures, and you are one of the creatures. You are not the fifty-eight-year-old graduate student who tore her eleven-year-old child away from her father and brother so you could lift yourself up. You are not teacher, student, mother, sister, aunt, child, wife, lover, but you are not exactly not that, either. When the phone had rung and it was your daughter who could barely speak for the choking, you were back in time, in place, in agony, but once released, you return to the earth that calls you to itself, to its chaos, and, there you are.
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Any hallowed or harrowing Halloween reminiscences in your bag of tricks?
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Source: http://wewantedtobewriters.com/2012/10/musing-on-halloween/
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