The Man Who Invented Christmas

Posted on by

Scrooge and the Ghost of Marley

It is actually hard to imagine what Christmas would be like today in England and the United States if Charles Dickens had never written A Christmas Carol. There have been countless film versions of the story; and, today, virtually everyone over the age of twelve knows the story.

In this age of Trump, there have even been stories justifying Ebenezer Scrooge’s meanness as being somehow praiseworthy. Go figure!

The message of benevolence toward the poor and general loving kindness is something new in literature. While being guided by the Ghost of Christmas Present, Scrooge sees two gaunt children clinging to him:

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

“Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.

“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye!
Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”

“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.

“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”

This little scene casts a long shadow into our own time.

I have read Dickens’s novella perhaps a dozen times, always around Christmas time. The last reading was completed not an hour ago.

Zoophilomania

Posted on by

I have been reading Norman Douglas’s travel classic Old Calabria, which was written in 1915. Here he talks about the Southern Italians’ attitude toward pets. I include the footnote, which discusses how the ancient Greeks treated their animals.

To say that our English zoophilomania—our cult of lap-dogs—smacks of degeneracy does not mean that I sympathize with the ill-treatment of beasts which annoys many visitors to these parts and has been attributed to “Saracenic” influences. Wrongly, of course; one might as well attribute it to the old Greeks.‡ Poor Saracens! They are a sort of whipping-boy, all over the country. The chief sinner in this respect is the Vatican, which has authorized cruelty to animals by its official teaching. When Lord Odo Russell enquired of the Pope regarding the foundation of a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals in Italy, the papal answer was: “Such an association could not be sanctioned by the Holy See, being founded on a theological error, to wit, that Christians owed any duties to animals.” This language has the inestimable and rather unusual merit of being perspicuous. Nevertheless, Ouida’s flaming letters to “The Times” inaugurated an era of truer humanity. . . .

Here follows the footnote:

‡Whose attitude towards animals, by the way, was as far removed from callousness as from sentimentalism. We know how those Hellenic oxen fared who had laboured to draw up heavy blocks for the building of a temple—how, on the completion of their task, they were led into green fields, there to pasture unmolested for the rest of their lives. We know that the Greeks were appreciative of the graces and virtues of canine nature—is not the Homeric Argo still the finest dog-type in literature? Yet to them the dog, even he of the tender Anthology, remained what he is: a tamed beast. The Greeks, sitting at dinner, resented the insolence of a creature that, watching every morsel as it disappeared into the mouth of its master, plainly discovered by its physiognomy the desire, the presumed right, to devour what he considered fit only for himself. Whence that profound word [Greek: kunopes]—dog-eyed, shameless. In contrast to this sanity, observe what an Englishman can read into a dog’s eye:

                That liquid, melancholy eye,
                From whose pathetic, soul-fed springs
                Seemed surging the Virgilian cry—
                The sense of tears in mortal things. . . .

That is how Matthew Arnold interprets the feelings of Fido, watching his master at work upon a tender beefsteak.

Norman Douglas’s work contains surprises on virtually every page. If I have time, I will quote him about the flying monk, Saint Nicholas of Cosentino.

“Winter: A Dirge”

Posted on by

Scottish Poet Robert Burns (1759-1796)

His poems are written in a difficult-to-read Scottish Lowland dialect, but somehow the intensity shines through. Here the poet expresses his disdain for the horrors of a Scottish winter, ending with a comic proposal to the deity.

Winter: A Dirge

The wintry west extends his blast,
And hail and rain does blaw;
Or, the stormy north sends driving forth
The blinding sleet and snaw:
While tumbling brown, the burn comes down,
And roars frae bank to brae;
And bird and beast in covert rest,
And pass the heartless day.

The sweeping blast, the sky o’ercast,
The joyless winter-day,
Let others fear, to me more dear
Than all the pride of May:
The tempest’s howl, it soothes my soul,
My griefs it seems to join;
The leafless trees my fancy please,
Their fate resembles mine!

Thou Pow’r Supreme, whose mighty scheme
These woes of mine fulfil,
Here, firm, I rest, they must be best,
Because they are Thy will!
Then all I want (O, do Thou grant
This one request of mine!)
Since to enjoy Thou dost deny,
Assist me to resign.

Walking in Beauty

Posted on by

Ship Rock Near Farmington, New Mexico

In the spirit of the Christmas season, I am posting a Navajo Blessing Ceremony prayer called “Walking in Beauty.” I have always found it to be beautiful and inspiring.

In beauty I walk
 With beauty before me I walk
 With beauty behind me I walk
 With beauty above me I walk
 With beauty around me I walk
 It has become beauty again


 Hózhóogo naasháa dooShitsijí’ hózhóogo naasháa dooShikéédéé hózhóogo naasháa dooShideigi hózhóogo naasháa dooT’áá altso shinaagóó hózhóogo naasháa dooHózhó náhásdlíí’Hózhó náhásdlíí’Hózhó náhásdlíí’Hózhó náhásdlíí’


 Today I will walk out, today everything negative will leave me
 I will be as I was before, I will have a cool breeze over my body.
 I will have a light body, I will be happy forever, nothing will hinder me.
 I walk with beauty before me. I walk with beauty behind me.
 I walk with beauty below me. I walk with beauty above me.
 I walk with beauty around me. My words will be beautiful.


 In beauty all day long may I walk.

Through the returning seasons, may I walk.
 On the trail marked with pollen may I walk.
 With dew about my feet, may I walk.
 With beauty before me may I walk.
 With beauty behind me may I walk.
 With beauty below me may I walk.
 With beauty above me may I walk.
 With beauty all around me may I walk.
 In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk.
 In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk.
 My words will be beautiful…

Reindeer Games

Posted on by

Christmas Display at the Grier-Musser Museum

Just what are the reindeer games that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was prevented from participating in? I strongly suspect that it involved buying into the whole michegaas connected with the holiday. Sometimes it seems to me, too, like a weird cult similar to the celebration of potlatch by the Indians of the Northwestern U.S.

Now that I’ve utterly confused you by introducing two unfamiliar terms in the opening paragraph of this post, I will admit to being of two minds about the season. On one hand, it is totally stress-inducing, with endless traditions and practices to make one feel guilty through their non-observance. On the other, it has the potential of bringing happiness to children and even to adults who don’t expect too much out of life.

If you take a close look at Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, you can see it espouses some truly admirable virtues. And, really, it was this novelette by Charles Dickens that was responsible for much of what Christmas has become.

If you expect too much of Christmas, it will disappoint. But if you go for “Christmas Lite,” picking and choosing carefully how deep you step into the morass, you can actually have a pretty good time.

Martine and I are celebrating the holiday simply. Last Saturday, we saw Laurel and Hardy in March of the Wooden Soldiers at the Old Town Music Hall in El Segundo. I ordered a box of Royal Riviera Pears for her from Harry & David. Next Tuesday, I’ll cook up a big pot of beef stew from the New York Times recipe and serve it with Martine’s favorite Hungarian wine: Bull’s Blood of Eger (Egri Bikavér).

Then, of course we’ll look for some of our favorite Christmas films on TV, such as A Christmas Story, the Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Bishop’s Wife, and Miracle on 34th Street.

We don’t have a Christmas tree (no room for one), but we did send out a handful of greeting cards to our closest friends.

Ghost Town

Posted on by

Decaying Buildings in Ghost Town of Bodie, California

I have visited several ghost towns in California and Nevada, but by far the most impressive is Bodie in Mono County, California. Here you will find no Disney-esque reconstructions: The town is as it was in 1915, when most of its inhabitants decided to relocate elsewhere. And when they left, they left most of their goods behind, where they still are today.

And why shouldn’t they? The town sits at an altitude of 8,379 feet (2,554 meters). To reach its, one takes a washboarded gravel road thirteen miles (21 km) from the end of pavement roughly midway between Mono Lake and the town of Bridgeport. During the winter it is bitterly cold. In fact, the town’s founder, variously called William S. Bodey and Waterman S. Bodey, froze to death in an 1860 blizzard while riding to pick up supplies.

Tomb of the Founder of Bodie, in the Ghost Town’s Cemetery

Bodie was a gold mining town. At its outskirts are the ruins of a large stamping mill which is off limits to tourists because of exposed mine shafts and rusting equipment. For a while around 1880, Bodie had a population of 7,000-10,000 people and was one of the largest cities in the State of California. Over the years, the mines there produced some $34 million in gold and silver (in 1986 dollars).

But like most boom towns, Bodie went bust. Today, the Bodie Historical District is a national and California historical landmark. The state had decided to let Bodie remain as it was when it took over in 1962. No attempt will be made to prop up falling buildings, of which there are many.

Buildings Are Allowed to Collapse

When you visit Bodie, you will see a real ghost town. There are no gunfight re-enactments. In fact there are no services, no cafés, no gift shops. There is a rest room in the parking lot, but little else.

Edward & Henry

Posted on by

Writer and Naturalist Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

I’ve always loved Henry David Thoreau, and I’ve always loved Edward Abbey. Today I came across a longish essay by Abbey on Thoreau that was by far and away the best thing I ever read about the man from Concord. The first essay in his collection Down the River is entitled “Down the River with Henry Thoreau.” It is at the same time a love letter and a critique.

Writing his thoughts on Thoreau while rafting down the Green River in Utah to where it joins the Colorado, Abbey recognizes the greatness of Thoreau—as well as the fact that he is something of a stick-in-the-mud. Always sociable, he had few real friends other than Ralph Waldo Emerson; Nathaniel Hawthorne thought he was something of a bore. And although he proposed to two local women, he was rejected by both, and very likely died a virgin.

Abbey writes:

Poor Thoreau. But he could also write, in the late essay “Walking,” “The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.” Ferity—now there’s a word. What could it have meant to Thoreau? Our greatest nature lover did not have a loving nature. A woman acquaintance of Henry’s said she’d sooner take the arm of an elm tree than that of Thoreau.

It is possible that we might not have a good time if we encountered Thoreau in the flesh. But then, I wonder if I would like hanging with Honoré de Balzac or Marcel Proust, hoisting a brewski with Charles Bukowski, drinking tea with Emily Dickinson, or chatting with G. K. Chesterton. What each of this figures created was an edifice more than a personality. One honors the edifice while acknowledging that we might think the personality to be a bit yucky, perhaps even slightly repellent.

“Man Hands On Misery to Man”

Posted on by

British Poet Philip Larkin (1922-1986)

It is appropriate to post this poem after learning of the death of Rob Reiner and his wife at the hands of their son Nicholas. You might say it’s about the flip side of a happy family:

This Be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   
    They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
Who half the time were soppy-stern
    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
    It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
    And don’t have any kids yourself.

“A Vast Field in Perpetual Turmoil”

Posted on by

Paris’s Boulevard du Temple in 1837 or 1838

The above photograph is the first one to show a human being. There he is, in the lower left, having his shoes shined. All the pedestrians and carts and carriages have disappeared because this was an eight-hour exposure, ensuring only that static subjects could be recorded. Below is a description of Paris by Honoré de Balzac at the beginning of The Girl with the Golden Eyes (1835) that is anything but static:

One of those sights in which most horror is to be encountered is, surely, the general aspect of the Parisian populace—a people fearful to behold, gaunt, yellow, tawny. Is not Paris a vast field in perpetual turmoil from a storm of interests beneath which are whirled along a crop of human beings, who are, more often than not, reaped by death, only to be born again as pinched as ever, men whose twisted and contorted faces give out at every pore the instinct, the desire, the poisons with which their brains are pregnant; not faces so much as masks; masks of weakness, masks of strength, masks of misery, masks of joy, masks of hypocrisy; all alike worn and stamped with the indelible signs of a panting cupidity? What is it they want? Gold or pleasure? A few observations upon the soul of Paris may explain the causes of its cadaverous physiognomy, which has but two ages—youth and decay: youth, wan and colorless; decay, painted to seem young. In looking at this excavated people, foreigners, who are not prone to reflection, experience at first a movement of disgust towards the capital, that vast workshop of delights, from which, in a short time, they cannot even extricate themselves, and where they stay willingly to be corrupted. A few words will suffice to justify physiologically the almost infernal hue of Parisian faces, for it is not in mere sport that Paris has been called a hell. Take the phrase for truth. There all is smoke and fire, everything gleams, crackles, flames, evaporates, dies out, then lights up again, with shooting sparks, and is consumed. In no other country has life ever been more ardent or acute. The social nature, even in fusion, seems to say after each completed work: “Pass on to another!” just as Nature says herself. Like Nature herself, this social nature is busied with insects and flowers of a day—ephemeral trifles; and so, too, it throws up fire and flame from its eternal crater. Perhaps, before analyzing the causes which lend a special physiognomy to each tribe of this intelligent and mobile nation, the general cause should be pointed out which bleaches and discolors, tints with blue or brown individuals in more or less degree.

By dint of taking interest in everything, the Parisian ends by being interested in nothing. No emotion dominating his face, which friction has rubbed away, it turns gray like the faces of those houses upon which all kinds of dust and smoke have blown. In effect, the Parisian, with his indifference on the day for what the morrow will bring forth, lives like a child, whatever may be his age. He grumbles at everything, consoles himself for everything, jests at everything, forgets, desires, and tastes everything, seizes all with passion, quits all with indifference—his kings, his conquests, his glory, his idols of bronze or glass—as he throws away his stockings, his hats, and his fortune. In Paris no sentiment can withstand the drift of things, and their current compels a struggle in which the passions are relaxed: there love is a desire, and hatred a whim; there’s no true kinsman but the thousand-franc note, no better friend than the pawnbroker. This universal toleration bears its fruits, and in the salon, as in the street, there is no one de trop, there is no one absolutely useful, or absolutely harmful—knaves or fools, men of wit or integrity. There everything is tolerated: the government and the guillotine, religion and the cholera. You are always acceptable to this world, you will never be missed by it. What, then, is the dominating impulse in this country without morals, without faith, without any sentiment, wherein, however, every sentiment, belief, and moral has its origin and end? It is gold and pleasure. Take those two words for a lantern, and explore that great stucco cage, that hive with its black gutters, and follow the windings of that thought which agitates, sustains, and occupies it! Consider! And, in the first place, examine the world which possesses nothing.

Remember

Posted on by

Former Poet Laureate of the United States Joy Harjo

This is the ninth time in the last five years that I have posted a poem by Joy Harjo, a Muscogee Creek Indian poet who was once Poet Laureate of the U.S. According to Joy’s notes regarding the poem:

I hadn’t been writing long when I wrote this poem. I believe I was still a student at the University of New Mexico. My first few poems were published in the Thunderbird, the student literary magazine. My voice found itself, then rooted itself in the Sandia Mountains, the Rio Grande River, in the sunrises and sunsets of the Southwest. My voice found a place to eat and drink after traveling through worlds and walking through time, a place to replicate the sense of those worlds in words. That’s when I began writing poetry, real poetry, after those first few published poems. Those first attempts were my calling out for poetry to find me.

Remember

Remember the sky you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.