costume parties

Costume Parties

In the cosmology I adhere to Halloween is the beginning of three significant days. On Halloween the souls of all the dead who were sinners, and not saints that’s the next day,, are released by a guy who I’ll explain below, to scurry all over the earth to search for their graves. If they call on you, you must feed them.

The next significant day is Christmas. That is when the souls and separate memories of dead family return home invisibly, or partially visibly, in various sizes, and moods. They don’t come back the way you remember them. They come back home literally. That is partially what was going on in Bethlehem.

In my area, a quite parochial one, you laid stones from where the dead were buried to your door. They are supposed to rest on the stones as they come slowly painfully to your house. But some say it is because there memories of the way are so different.

The dead participate in the holiday feasts, the ones held to give a positive characterisation to what is really going on, and even tell jokes or alternatively break up relationships , cause fights and settle scores by introducing deadly gossip.. You must feed them.

Those who rise and see no stones can go anywhere. Those who were murdered and buried, perhaps secretly, may lay their own stones to their killer’s door. Rejected lovers can do a similar thing with splintered bone.

If you can’t lay stones, say your dead are in another country you put out a candle and hope for the best.

The final day is Valentines Day. That is when the souls go back to their other place. Between Christmas and Valentines Day they all have been doing as they wish. Some observe wars; some go back to school, some hold hands with others and whip up winds. Some cause diseases.
Anyway that is the cosmology.

A lot of the very important memory objects I have are associated with Halloween. It is when things happen. I have been in an intense struggle with my memory lately. One reason is that I have reached a point where I am remembering more than I am forgetting. This is very uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable because the other thing is that like most people I believe my memory more than any so-called truth presented by academic quacks or loo narratives. Like most people I regard myself entirely spiritually, no matter how I see others and how hard I pretend not to. Everyone secretly believes they live an entirely spiritual life and they justify their actions in that context. Their memory is a record of that in images. In that respect it is a form of poetry. It can be a kind of writing too where the inner integrity is to record the actuality of the images and their relationships, and not mess that up with an imposed external narrative structure or sets of associations.

So at this time of year I regularly revise my obituary in anticipation of Halloween. It is a kind of retrospective New Year’s resolution. I recommend this exercise to everyone. The one I chose last year was Beshkati in style. It said: 'He struggled all his live with immortality and lost gloriously. He struggled with infallibility and lost consistently. Let him be forgotten and rest in peace.” I’ll say that when they come knocking with their infernal jokes wearing their funny guises.

2.
In this context it is appropriate to enter once again into the eternal question ‘who is dat guy anywho?

I will start with the Tar Baby. For those of you who don’t know the Tar Baby it don’t matter. The only necessary context is that I am talking about a fundamental B’rer Rabbit apocrypha.
B’rer rabbit is an avatar of dat guy. He represents the other, and in some instances precisely the other, to dominant narratives. But it is deeper than that.

B’rer rabbit pleads with his enemies every time they catch him not to throw him into the briar patch. He describes the briar patch as a place of great horror. A place of darkness and doom. He is so oppositional to them they always do throw him there.

That is where he lives.

B’rer rabbit made the Tar Baby. The Tar Baby is just that kind of fat black squirming baby that you want to touch. But B’rer Rabbit pleads with you not to. So you do and you get stuck there with your senses tarred over sucked in with the struggling lumps of the other fools.

B’rer Rabbit can be Friar Tuck, the apocrypha Friar Tuck who waits by the stream like a Templar to offer to carry poor sinners across. Then on the other side he hits you with a stick and makes you carry him back as the stream widens and widens.

Or that scorpion. You know the scorpion who swears to the crocodile that he will not hurt him but rather help him if only the crocodile carries him over that same stream. At the other side, to the protest of the dying, stung, crocodile the scorpion says ‘what did you expect I meant anyway, I am only a scorpion.’

But he is Loki, the joking, pesky, nearly fallible, almost evil human, truth telling uberdivinity called ‘the liar’ by all the Goddesses and Gods. Dat is the one who was so precise in imagery and characterisation of everyone in Valhalla that Odin sewed up his moth with catgut. But the words still came.

And there is the one called Satan in that complete fantasy of Christianity deranged Victorian banalogues. I mean though the real guy who met the real Jesus at the edge of the wilderness just after Jesus had been there meditating, perhaps on his obituary, maybe on taking up a career as a performance poet, for forty days.

I know exactly the spot. Others do as well as there were witnesses at the time and the whole thing was recorded. The spot is on the top of a cut in the canyon wall of the desert plateau overlooking Assuit. Near there are caves in which various mystics, including the poor guy proscribed by Emperor Theodosius, and whose followers were massacred like the Cathars were later, caves where those mystics through the centuries thought about the encounter, remembered it, recalled it and some wrote about it, or even re-enacted it in the realm of imagination and memory. There are some there now.

Jesus had gone back to Assuit inspired by some nostalgia when, seeming to all as a basically unemployed carpenter and mason; he had reached a career crisis. Assuit was where he and his mom and dad lived after fleeing from Bethlehem, having not been registered in Herod’s fatal death cult tax net. In Assuit, Jesus had learned his P’s and Q’s from Philo, the Jewish neo-Platonist travelling tutor and carpentry and masonry from his dad. Jesus went there to hang out for awhile in the old hometown and visit the desert as you do when you are in Assuit. He wanted to chill.

But dat guy, Satan, Loki, B’rer Rabbit, whoever , met him at the desert edge and pointing down to Assuit in the Nile Valley, its only three miles wide there, and said first how is it going guy? Got your gig figured out? Know what 'cher gonna do?

Then he said ‘how would you like all the kingdoms of the world, you can have them, the whole lot if you just forget your origins a little. Let go fellow, live a little.’

The last bit was just a diversion. What few realise, but the witnesses do, are that, let us call him Satan, and did not himself (or herself) want the bloody kingdoms of the world. And isn’t interesting that he was in charge of them then? All the kingdoms of the world run by that guy. He was the boss.

But Dat guy didn’t want the job. He wanted Jesus’ life. He wanted it then and the gig to be. He wanted the rep. He wanted to wander around in the desert and meditate. He wanted to ride on asses backs, he wanted to have a virgin mom, he wanted to curse God on the cross and rise from the dead, and he wanted to be a rung in the great trialectics of life. He wanted to be the magi. He wanted in fact to trick ol’ Jesus into taking a load off his back. He wanted to trick him into touching the Tar Baby. Into seeing what that kind of shit was really like. He wanted him to be the real son of God to take off the mask and put on the costume.

So what really happened next? Do you think back home in the briar patch on the other side of the stream he will start to talk straight?