Something you don’t see in a Christmas pageant: the slaughter of the innocents. But there it is, in the middle of Matthew’s account.
When Bethlehem’s young children were slain, Jesus was in Egypt. Joseph had been warned in a dream.
But Moses was already in Egypt. As an infant, he escaped by water, the means by which his pursuers were to perish.
Matthew’s baby Jesus is peripatetic, dodging bullets & fulfilling scripture. “Out of Egypt have I called my son.” “He shall be called a Nazarene.”
Luke: baby Jesus with the lambs. Matthew: baby Jesus on the lam.
White Christmas
Nothing is more innocent than snow.
It says: I am not of your world.
We wonder: What child is this,
what wool, what milk?
Then we look back & see our footprints
multiplying behind us.
Maybe this is nothing but a white flag.
But whose turn is it to surrender?
New snow falls & fills the footprints in.
We feel we are being measured for immaculate shoes.
Seahenge
tree upended
made to flower downward
into the dark sky of the dead
who feed & return
who stand in circles
& spring after spring resprout
leaves of malachite
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Wikipedia: “Theories about the site have focused on the idea of inversion, as represented by the upside-down central tree stump and the single post turned 180 degrees from the others within the circle itself. The theme of inversion has been noticed in some Early Bronze Age burials.”
The end of the world as they knew it
Before this farce of an apocalypse spiritual awakening passes from memory, I’d like to take a little more time to think about what the end of the world means for a civilization. One of the odd things about the New Age obsession with misinterpreted Mayan “prophecies” is the unwillingness to actually learn from the Maya themselves, who are not only still with us but who have managed to preserve an impressive amount of their traditional knowledge, and have not been especially shy about sharing it with curious anthropologists. New Agers like to see themselves as freed from the shackles of Judeo-Christian thinking, and love to pay lip service to indigenous wisdom. But reading books like Time and the Highland Maya, by an anthropologist who apprenticed herself to K’iche’ Maya priests, or the Popol Vuh, translated by her husband with the same priests as consultants, might challenge one’s preconceptions, and definitely requires sustained grappling with a very different worldview.
This unwillingness to learn from other cultures is deeply rooted in Western Christian culture. There’s a good Christian/Greek word for that sort of willfully ignorant pride: hubris. And for at least one outpost of Western civilization, such hubris — along with rigid conservatism, extreme religiosity, environmental degradation and a changing climate — brought about the end of the world as they knew it. I’m talking about the Norse settlements on Greenland.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb95CWvo3z0
If you’ve read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (which I don’t necessarily recommend — it’s full of facile argumentation and poor scholarship), you already know the outlines of this story. But this documentary, produced for the PBS series Secrets of the Dead back in the millennial year, does an excellent job telling the story in the words of the scientists who finally pieced it together. And it was great to hear from the Greenland Inuit, who arrived a little later than the Norse but survived the Little Ice Age just fine. “Apocalypse? What apocalypse?” Which, come to think of it, is probably also what the Mayan peasants were saying when their parasitic city-states were collapsing 1000 years ago.
(By the way, if you’re interested in documentaries about the vikings, there are a number of other good ones collected on the new sagalicious page over at Twisted Rib.)
Sacrifiction
Somewhere between gratitude & reciprocity, things started to go wrong.
Because we were given time, we invented drumming.
Because we were given trees, we invented floor-length dresses.
And because we were given crops, we invented sacrifice.
When God sent a messenger to the sacred table & said Stop burning my meat — give it to the needy instead, we invented elaborate rules for hospitality that involved frequent bathing & fine clothes.
But because the needy were still exceedingly numerous, we went over God’s head & invented games of chance.
This invention was the mother of Necessity, otherwise known as That’s Just The Way Things Are.
And we took our chances and groveled in the dirt.
The Viking Buddha
Four hammers of Thor,
nested just so, form
a Buddhist swastika with feet.
Steering by the sun,
we run in circles.
A gaze trained to focus
on a pitching horizon
turns to an inward shore.
Breathe like a rower,
in time with the waves.
Legs fold into a knot:
braided serpents.
The fierce brow unknits.
Only the scowl still hints
at the strength of his vow.
The truest viking leaves
everything behind.
Image from Saamiblog, via the Wikipedia Commons. Cf. the Helgö Buddha.
Pilgrimage
for Yahia Lababidi
A star turns cold in an effort to cast a shadow. Or so they say.
A mayfly fresh out of the water, finding itself without functional mouthparts, molts one more time just to make sure.
The Chinese inventors of the compass weren’t travelers trying to make their way through the world, but gardeners & home decorators trying to make their world through the Way.
Her obsessive pursuit of stillness gives the dancer no rest.
While the others were saluting the flag, I saluted the wind.
Yawning in the womb
Fetuses yawn repeatedly in the womb, a new study finds. The reasons are as yet unknown. Are they losing sleep? Are they stressed or overworked? Do they find their limited entertainment options insufficiently stimulating? The researchers suggest that the yawning is linked to brain development, but also admit it’s still a mystery why anyone yawns, before or after birth. It’s safe to say, however, that contagious yawning — something humans share with dogs and chimpanzees — is not a factor in the womb.
Almost all vertebrates yawn, including fish. If the James–Lange theory of emotion is to be credited, yawning reinforces bodily consciousness. Or so suggests the author of a 2006 article in the journal Medical Hypotheses.
Yawning can be seen as a proprioceptive performance awareness which inwardly provides a pre-reflective sense of one’s body and a reappraisal of the body schema. The behavioral consequences of adopting specific regulatory strategies and the neural systems involved act upon attention and cognitive changes. Thus, it is proposed that yawning is a part of interoceptiveness by its capacity to increase arousal and self-awareness.
I like the idea that nascent self-awareness finds expression in yawning. “I yawn, therefore I am”?
Cargo Culture
I used to think that doors were failed windows. Now I see that windows are aborted doors.
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Were the Melanesian cargo cults ever true religious movements, or were they just short-lived cons perpetrated on the unwary? No one seems to know for sure. Some may wonder if there’s any difference, but to me, it’s clear: the founder of a true religion must first successfully con him- or herself.
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Whenever I encounter an uprooted tree and realize how farcical its feet were, I get a little vertigo.
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Let’s spell it farcicle and try to imagine how, or whether, it would differ in taste from a popsicle’s sweet, colored ice.
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A henge resembles an inside-out fortification: the ditch is on the inside of the wall. Henges must, therefore, have been like zoos for the always-dangerous ancestors.
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I will be disappointed if Banksy turns out to be anyone other than a man with the head of a rat. A reporter who met him years ago said he was the grimiest person she’d ever seen.
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It may well be that the majority of planets in the universe are small and orphaned: unattached to any star, just drifting through space. Hearing this, for the very first time in my life I feel a keen interest in space travel. Imagine standing on such a world — bleak, cold, lifeless, and utterly free.
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Maybe a henge was a replica of the heavens, designed as a form of sympathetic magic to make sure the sun and moon didn’t wander off, and kept circling back each year with their cargo of stars.
Iconoclasm
We took the book at its word: idols were bad. Down came the asherim with all their blank leaves marked up by larvae. Then the high places had to be brought low & paved over, & the flesh had to be mortified with whips & hairshirts. We found we still itched in unaccountable ways, but the book couldn’t be wrong — everyone knows that worship & degradation are poles apart. Desperate now, we tore pages from the book & chewed them into a paste which we applied as an unguent to all the burning places. Such cooling relief! The book emptied like a chrysalis until nothing was left but the cow hide. When the wind caught it at just the right angle, you could hear it moan.