Not the Witch

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Hagazussa came to my attention from, I believe, the New York Times.  In the autumn normally staid news sources start suggesting horror films to watch.  Subtitled A Heathen’s Curse, this new Euro-horror (filmed in German) immediately reminded me of Robert Egger’s The Witch, but with a lot less plot.  It’s a moody and disturbing story of the life of an outcast young woman in the sixteenth century.  Raised by a poor, goat-herding mother, Albrun watches her mother die of the Black Death, when Albrun’s a tween.  She continues living in her childhood home, with a daughter whose origin, like that of Albrun, is never explained.  The locals shun her as a witch but a seemingly friendly villager befriends her before turning against her and betraying her.  After this neighbor, and then others, die, Albrun drowns her infant daughter after eating a toadstool in the woods.  She then bursts into flames atop a hill in the Alps.

As folk horror, the movie is more about the haunted landscape than about an intricately plotted story.  There’s nevertheless a great deal of symbolism used, including much regarding Eve—apples, serpents, and goddesses all play a part.  Locals fear pagans, and the church interior lined with bones reminded me strongly of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, where plague victims’ bones fill the underground vaults.  Seeing such a place reminds you forcefully of your insignificance.  Hagazussa is an art film as well as folk horror, and it appeals to gothic sensibilities.  There’s very little dialogue.  Indeed, the loneliness of Albrun is a major aspect of this moody, atmospheric work.  Such stories always remind me of how difficult life was for those who had to try to scratch a living from the land.  Existence was tenuous at best.  Especially for women alone, as determined by Christian society.

The movie left me reflective.  It also underscored how religion and horror tread the same paths repeatedly.  The village priest tells Albrun that sacrilege must be cleansed, even as he hands her her mother’s skull, polished and decorated.  He wearily admits that he struggles to led the community.  Indeed, Albrun’s new “friend” castigates Jews and heathens, even as she takes part in the robbing of Albrun’s livelihood.  Witches, as “monsters” were invented by the church as fears reached out to point to new sources.  Even if they had to be fabricated at the expense of innocent people.  Fear operates that way still, as anyone who watches political ads knows.  It’s easier to persecute than to educate, it seems.  In the end, Albrun burns up and we realize we’ve just watched a parable.

Dead Trilogy

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When we lived in New Jersey our internet wasn’t fast enough for streaming.  I’d watched George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, but I was never able to find a DVD of Day of the Dead.  Well, it finally came around to streaming (thanks, Freevee), so I was able to complete the trilogy.  It doesn’t get discussed as much as the previous two, and it’s clear that it doesn’t come up to their level.  Still, the discussions of larger issues—God, civilization, and military power—are worth pondering.  There are a few jump startles but less intensive gore than the previous two, until well into it.  So, here’s the story: a base of operations has been set up in Florida where the military is overseeing civilian scientific experiments on the animated dead.  The military guy in charge is a real jerk and threatens to shoot those who don’t comply.  Also, there’s just one woman among them (who made that decision?).

As might be expected, things go haywire.  The head scientist, “Frankenstein” to this crew, is trying to teach the dead not to eat the living—to coexist.  The living are hopelessly outnumbered, and despite the Jamaican civilian, John, suggesting they go to a deserted island and start all over, everyone seems content to hang out and fight each other.  In the end, military overreach leads to everyone being killed except John, Sarah (the woman scientist), and Bill, who seems to be Irish.  In the end the three of them fly to a deserted island and you kind of get the idea that this will be a bit more of an R-rated Gilligan situation.  The film is campy and there is a comic tone throughout despite the serious issues raised and the actual horror elements (blood and zombies lurching out of the dark).

It actually also attempts to explain how the dead continue to move and why they eat with no internal organs.  The brain, down to its reptilian base, retains the eating instinct.  Frankenstein, before being killed by the military, is training the promising dead, especially Bub.  In the end, Bub kills the military guy.  As far as the story goes, it seems to send mixed messages.  The good guys do prevail and the dead, at least Bub, is more righteous than the fascist military that holds sway via constant threat.  One does get the sense that Romero was having fun with his zombie movies and some of the special effects were quite good.  I’m glad to have finished the trilogy, but I don’t think I’ll bother watching the remake, which was, back in the day, fairly easy to find on DVD.  They’re never as good as the dead they try to reanimate.

Thankful Time

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Thanksgiving’s late this year, for which I’m thankful.  I must be nearing retirement age because I really could use a little more time off.  Of course, I’m a big fan of holidays and I wish our late capitalistic system might throw a few more bones to the dogs.  Autumn is always my favorite season.  In September I feel the migratory urge of the classroom, but that’s an unrealized desire now, so I set my eyes on Labor Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day.  Some of the more progressive employers give the latter off.  From there I can see Halloween, although it’s often a working day.  Still, it’s Halloween.  It’s yet a long stretch from there to Thanksgiving, but if I’m careful with my vacation days I can take a few long weekends as stepping stones to this four-day weekend.

I’m not being sarcastic or facetious at all.  I don’t believe I could survive the calendar year without the holidays and I am deeply, deeply grateful for them.  Capitalism seems to have a death grip on the idea of people as “assets”—a brand of thinking that should be buried with a stake through its heart.  People are people and we work for a living.  We don’t sell our souls for health care and a roof over our heads.  The internet has increased productivity immensely, but most companies are reluctant to consider the costs of overwork.  When you can check your work email from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., for those of you who can stay up late, don’t you think that a few more holidays might prevent burnout?  Do assets burn out?  Engine parts have to be replaced when they wear out.  Why are we so slow to learn the lesson?

Today we reflect on the things for which we are thankful.  Even in difficult times there are many.  I’m thankful to live in a world with books in it, for one.  On those rare days off I read, trying to catch up with an ever-growing stack of intellectual stimulation.  And I try my best to contribute to literary life, although my books appeal to few.  I’m thankful for hope.  Without it this last year would’ve been impossible.  And I’m thankful for family and friends, whether actual or virtual.  This is an interesting world that I’ve come to inhabit.  The more I learn the more there’s left still to learn.  And with Thanksgiving so late this year, Christmas is less than a month away.  I look ahead and I’m thankful.

Dark Academia

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Dark academia is the new gothic.  It’s all the rage on the internet, as I found out by releasing a YouTube video on the topic that quickly became my most popular.  Still, I was surprised and flattered when Rent. asked me my opinion on the dark academia aesthetic.  You should check out their article here.  What drew me to dark academia is having lived it.  Although the conservatism often rubbed me the wrong way, Nashotah House was a gothic institution with skeletons in closets and ghosts in the corridors.  Tales of hauntings were rife and something about living on a campus isolated from civilization lends itself to abuses.  An on-campus cemetery.  Even the focus on chapel and confession of sins implied much had to be forgiven.  The things we do to each other in the name of a “pure” theology.  Lives wrecked.  And then hidden.

I entered all of this naive and with the eagerness of a puppy.  I was Episcopalian and I had attended the pensive and powerful masses at the Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill in Boston.  I was open to the mystery and possibilities even as I could see the danger in the dogmatic stares of the trustees.  It was a wooded campus on the shores of a small lake.  A lake upon which, after I left, one of the professors drowned in a sudden windstorm.  I awoke during thunderstorms so fierce that I was certain the stone walls of the Fort would not hold up.  Disused chapels full of dead black flies.  Secret meetings to remove those who wouldn’t lock step.  This was the stuff of a P. D. James novel.  Students at the time even called it Hogwarts.  They decided I was the master of Ravenclaw.

Fourteen years of my life were spent there.  I worked away at research and writing in my book-lined study painted burgundy.  Is it any wonder that I find dark academia compelling?  I’ve often written, when discussing horror films on this blog, that gothic stories are my favorites.  Even the modern research university can participate.  Professors, isolated and often unaware of what’s happening outside their specializations, still prefer print books and a nice chair in which to read them.  And, of course, I’d read for my doctorate in Edinburgh, one of the gothic capitals of Europe.   Even Grove City College had its share of dark corners and well-kept secrets.  What goes on in that rarified atmosphere known as a college campus?  The possibilities are endless.  On a stormy night you can feel it in your very soul.

That article again: Dark Academia Room Decor: Aesthetic Secrets Revealed

More Time

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Speaking of time… Time is one of those things that flummoxes me.  A time change, crossing time zones, trying to figure things out on a base-6 system (metric time anyone?).  Confusing.  One thing about time is that we live in it, and so reflecting on it seems a reasonable thing to do.  Brett Bowden does just that in Now Is Not the Time: Inside Our Obsession with the Present.  As an historian, Bowden is experienced at looking back and this brief book is a reflection on why we’re so fixated on now being the most important time ever.  Given recent events, his seems to be a comforting message when looking at the long term of human history, and even longer term of our humble planet’s history.  The present is a blip and the future, at least as far as we know, hasn’t been decided yet.

One of the topics Bowden addresses here is the human propensity to claim and name.  We like to name things and when we do, it implies ownership.  Who but an owner gets to decide on a name?  This leads him to reflect on Eurocentrism, as in the naming of objects, such as Mount Everest, that are very far away and in somebody else’s territory.  We name craters on the moon (which we can’t really just pop over to) and even stars and galaxies.  We’re terribly acquisitive rascals, aren’t we?  We do the same with time—dividing it into eras.  Bowden’s discussion of the Anthropocene debate is quite interesting.  It seems we need a name for the time when people really began changing the planet on a global scale, but geological time ought to hush us up, if we stop and think about it.

As Bowden notes, psychologists and life coaches often encourage us to be in the present.  I think what they mean is that we shouldn’t worry unduly about the future.  That’s good advice.   Something Brett reminded me of is that some cultures, such as those of the Bible writers, view people as moving into the future backward.  It’s like riding on a train facing away from the direction of motion.  We can see the past and we can interpret it.  The future, however, we can’t perceive quite so clearly.  As someone who has studied the history of religions, I tend to agree that looking back is often a source of comfort.  It’s also a source of horror—many bad things have happened, many of them intentionally orchestrated by our species.  But it does serve to ground us in the now.  Even if it’s no more important than what went before or than whatever it may be that will come.

Hiding Kirk

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I recently saw—don’t ask where—a U.S. Space Force officer dressed in camouflage.  How fitting for a Trump-era agency.  I should think a Space Force uniform should be all black, maybe with little white dots on it.  Rather like my black lawn furniture that got in the way when I was cleaning my paint sprayer full of white paint.  I often wonder about our love affair with feeling safe.  Perhaps my own phobias have reached such a level that they’ve cancelled each other out.  If I was trying to hide in space, I think I’d try to look small, and dress in black.  Camouflage, which is based on colors found down here, probably wouldn’t do so well for the other planets of our solar system.  Or even the moon, for that matter.  And I personally think I might trust the aliens not to have earth-like issues.  After all, we think it’s okay to let machines think for us.

I grew up quite the sci-fi fan.  I read lots of books in that genre and enjoyed science fiction movies almost as much as my beloved monsters.  I used to watch that show, UFO in the 1970s.  The one with the interceptors with a huge missile on their noses.  I wasn’t really worried about aliens trying to invade.  Perhaps these days I think it might be better than the tedium of daily existence in the 9-2-5 world.  In any case, if we must have a Space Force, ought they not dress for the job?  I’m pretty sure I’ve got some tin foil in the kitchen with which to construct my hat.  Let’s look the part—that’s all I’m saying.

Photo credit: NASA

While all this is going on speculation has been growing about water on Mars.  There’s a good chance we may find it.  (We can always hope that if Elon Musk makes it to the red planet that he will take Donald Trump with him.)  If we are looking for invaders, though, we probably have to go further afield.  That’s alright, dynamic duo, we’ll get along without you.  Perhaps in the interim someone will realize that, dressed in earth green camouflage, our Space Force will surely stand out against the surface of Mars, or wherever they might go.   Unless it’s a planet very much like earth.  That houses intelligent life.  Maybe the beings there feel safe, knowing that their space force—for surely they will have one—is dressed in black.  Or at least, their life really is intelligent.

Locating Yourself

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How do you come to where you spend your life?  It could be where you’re born.  I was born in Franklin, Pennsylvania.  Neither of my parents were.  On my mother’s side we had a tradition of wandering.  We eventually moved to Rouseville, a refinery town not too many miles from where I grew up initially, but very different in character.  I knew I wanted to get away.  I lived in Grove City next, only as a student.  For a short while I resided with some friends in the South Hills of Pittsburgh before moving to Boston to attend seminary.  Like many who go to Boston for school, I wanted to settle there.  I did so for about a year after graduation, making a living, such as it was, selling cameras.  My next move was precipitated by love.  I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan to be with my fiancée, but I’d already been accepted to Edinburgh University, so an international move was imminent.

Roseville

Edinburgh, like Boston, is a spiderweb.  We would’ve stayed if we legally could have, but with a job market for academics already tanking, we headed back over the Atlantic.  My wife was a grad student at the University of Illinois, so we moved first to Tuscola (family there), then Savoy (on the outskirts of Champagne-Urbana).  Meanwhile I commuted to Delafield, Wisconsin, home of Nashotah House.  We eventually moved to Delafield and stayed until I was no longer wanted.  Our move to Oconomowoc was necessary to keep our daughter in the same school.  The possibility of full-time employment drew me to Somerville, New Jersey.  We would stay there until my daughter had a chance to graduate.  Depression convinced me that I’d run out the clock in that apartment, but a financial advisor suggested Pennsylvania, where I was born.  Thus we ended up in the Lehigh Valley.

I’ve liked every place I’ve lived.  If I had my druthers, however, I would’ve ended up teaching at a small college in Maine.  Several friends have moved to Maine as I’ve jealously watched.  The places we spend our lives, at least in my case, are determined by a measure of fate.  Nashotah House was the only job I was offered from Edinburgh.  Gorgias Press was the only job I was offered after the seminary.  Moving to my home state was volitional, of course.  As a couple we’d have been content in Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin, or New Jersey.  Economics, of course, has a heavy hand in all of this.  I sometimes think that, if I could ever retire, moving to Franklin again would be a way of coming full circle.  But then, life is change and we end up, it seems, where we’re meant to be.  Perhaps Canada?

Firebrands

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Although I’ve never lived there, I believe I have a fairly good idea of life in Ithaca, New York.  I’ve spent many, many days there over the past few years, often pondering how it is a city that would be an especially good fit for me, despite the fact I’m unhireable at Cornell and Ithaca College has never showed any interest.  It’s a liberal college town where even the street people appear to be educated.  The money of Ivy League students keeps it fresh and evolving.  And the shops in Ithaca Commons are set at eleven.  So it was that a headline in Publishers Weekly some months back caught my eye.  (I’m not behind only on movies, it seems.)  It showed a historical plaque for Firebrand Books, on the Commons.  The story stated that the plaque had to be placed on public land since the owner of the building where Firebrand started has a Christian prejudice against homosexuality.

I suppose I ought to take a step back and give a little history.  Firebrand was established as a feminist and lesbian publisher.  Its offices were on Ithaca Commons, but when the founder, Nancy K. Bereano, retired the press eventually found a buyer in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  (I have also lived in Ann Arbor, but for less than a year.  Likewise, it is the kind of place I felt instantly at home.)  Ithaca, meanwhile, wished to honor its contribution to literature and elected to put up a commemorative plaque.  The objection, however, was based on a particular reading of the Good Book.  (It must be stated that lesbianism is never explicitly forbidden in the Bible.)  To make a statement, the owner forced the plaque to the public domain.

We have a way of letting our prejudices become biblical.  I recently re-read 1 Corinthians—one of the infamous “clobber” texts for any number of people—and realized just how many of the words assumed to refer to “homosexuals” are words of uncertain Greek connotation.  King James, who seems to have preferred the company of gentlemen himself, was apparently not bothered by the text he had translated.  Of course, kings will be kings.  Our concern with sexual behavior is one of the hallmarks of our species.  We’re very concerned about how other people do it, even if it’s no business of ours.  And we consider it one of the highest moral concerns and a source of constant shame.  That was another thing that struck me while re-reading 1 Corinthians.  I wondered why Paul keeps coming back to it.  Maybe he was just being a firebrand.

Alien Invaders

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I’ve been pondering genre for some time now.  And since Stephen King assures me (not personally) that Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers is horror, I figured I’d give it a try.  In fact, given the various themes of the movie, I’m surprised I hadn’t seen it before.  The title pretty much gives it away—aliens try to take over Earth with a swarm of flying saucers.  Two scientists figure out how to make their saucers stall, and even though the aliens have a disintegration ray that pretty much destroys anything, the earthlings prevail.  Having summarized it all in less than a hundred words, is there really anything worth comment here?  I think so.

Like many older movies this one makes use of stock footage to fill in action sequences and to keep the budget reasonable.  So there are big guns going off and rockets being launched.  (This was a pre-Sputnik movie and it depicts America having eleven satellites in orbit.)  But the additional footage that stayed with me was a scene of two planes colliding and crashing.  It was clear these weren’t models and the footage was authentic, apart from the flying saucer shooting the planes.  It turns out that this scene was indeed real, and that the pilots of both planes died in the crash.  During an air show outside Spokane, Washington in July 1944 this collision was caught on film by a Paramount news crew and it was reused in this film.  This got me to thinking about war footage—something that really only became possible in the Second World War.  And what we now see today in real time on the internet because the world is wired.

It’s as if those who wage war are fine with it as long as people with a conscience don’t know what happens.  There’s even a phrase used to excuse unspeakable barbarism during combat: the haze of war.  This we know about our species—there’s a tipping point beyond which rationality shuts off and we’re no longer responsible for our behavior.  We also know that war puts people in that zone.  It was fine as long as only surviving warriors were left to tell the stories of their bravery.  Photographing, particularly in motion pictures, combat revealed a much darker truth.  Well, at least in Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers the enemies under attack were fictional.  Except.  Except, some of the casualties were real people whose final moments were caught on camera.  Be sure to get out and vote today, if you’re in the United States.  There’s a party even less understanding than aliens out there, desiring to take over.

A Second Post?

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A second post in one day?  Not really.  As much as I’d love to post more, work drains me.  But I also realize I post early and some people may miss my musings because they’re so early.

Enough prologue.  This is simply a public service announcement.  McFarland is offering 40% off when you order two horror books, through the end of October.  Now that Holy Horror’s price is reasonable, you can really make a killing.  To take advantage of this limited-time sale, use the code HALLOWEEN2024 at checkout.

McFarland prices their books reasonably for an academically inclined small press.  And they have a great selection of horror-themed titles.  Check it out!  Back to your regularly scheduled programming.  (I’ll post again in the early morning, as usual.)

Ichabod’s Body

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Maybe you’ve noticed this.  When Halloween comes around, the Headless Horseman and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow reemerge.  There’s a reason for that, and I discuss it quite a bit in Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.  Right now there seems to be quite an interest, or maybe I’m just noticing it more.  For example, a local theater where we saw a Poe performance last year is offering a Headless Horseman show this year.  Articles have recently been appearing on Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow movie, given that it was released 25 years ago—online discussion, however, is often eclipsed by the Fox television show by the same name.  And before it switched over to Christmas decorations, Michaels had its share of Sleepy Hollow merchandise.  Halloween and the Headless Horseman go together.  (Read the book to find out why!)

One of the tchotchkes I picked up at Michaels was Ichabod Crane’s tombstone.  In the many renditions of Washington Irving’s legend, Ichabod is treated as the protagonist of the story.  Although Tim Burton’s movie wasn’t the first to have Crane survive, besting the Horseman, the old wives’ tales, according to Irving, had him spirited away by the Horseman.  That’s why I found his gravestone so interesting.  The dates on it (1787–1857) indicate, at least according to this recension, that he died at seventy, surely not the victim of the attack that took place around the turn of the century.  If you’re not familiar with the original story, Irving set it “some thirty years since” the 1820 in which the tale was published, putting the events around 1790.  Burton shifted this to 1799, partially, I suspect, because that was two centuries before the release of his movie.

I do wonder where the maker of the Michaels tombstone got their information.  According to their reckoning, Crane would’ve been but three years old in 1790.  Of course, the story never tells us his age.  Since it is intimated that he relocated and became a judge after dabbling in politics, all of which would seem to indicate that he was a somewhat young man at the time of the tale.  To make Sleepy Hollow scary, though, having Crane cut off in his youth would seem to be more in keeping with the spirit of the season.  Of course, Sleepy Hollow is a legend that has become mythic through its many retellings.  Enough of them that someone could write a book about it all (ahem).  And this is the time of year to ponder it.  

National Nightmares

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Being drawn into the dream of a madman.  Trump’s dream.  It seems like fiction, doesn’t it?  But, as they say, reality is stranger than.  I didn’t come up with this observation of being drawn into a madman’s dream myself.  It comes from Harlan Ellison via Stephen King.  When asked why he writes what is commonly called horror, Ellison pointed to the things happening at the time: Jonestown, Ayatollah Khomeini, etc., and replied something like the world was being drawn into Khomeini’s dream.  So the United States is being drawn in to the mad dream of Donald Trump.  I believe it’s because many people lack imagination.  There’s a reason I write “horror” stories in my spare time.  I prefer not to live in a madman’s dream.  Even if my stories are read by the few who frequent the journals in which they’re published, they are an attempt at viewing the world through unclouded eyes.

Entirely too much of our collective lives have been eaten up by Trump’s antics.  I was looking for an image on this blog going back some eight years and found, you guessed it, posts about Trump.  And here we are on the precipice again, all to stoke one man’s vanity.  And people ask why some of us write or watch horror?  We tend to treat insanity as if it’s rare.  Any self-aware, reflective person, when alone and honest, will admit that some things we do simply aren’t rational.  We’re not, as Silicon Valley moguls like to think of themselves, Mr. Spock.  (And even he underwent pon farr.)  The evidence of Trump’s manipulations is all over the place, but that doesn’t stop yard signs from popping up like toadstools.

We are far from a “sane” species.  We may wonder why deer step out onto the road and stare blankly into headlights, but we do the exact same thing.  Horror writers tend to be pretty clear thinkers.  I suspect it’s because many of them spend time trying to get into the heads of their irrational characters.  They can recognize the madmen and the dangerous among us.  King’s Twitter posts make no bones about his seeing through Trump.  The latter’s public speeches clearly indicate that his mental capacity isn’t sufficient to be given nuclear codes, let alone the reins of the most powerful country on the planet.  He dreams of his own greatness.  His desires are entirely for his own glorification.  Anyone can see that.  But we are creatures who dream.  And it’s difficult to wake up from a dream, even if it’s a nightmare.

From God’s Mouth

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If book banners would actually read the book they claim to protect, the Bible, they would run across the account of Jehoiakim and Jeremiah.  It’s in Jeremiah 36, if you care to follow along.  Jeremiah was not a popular prophet.  In fact, he was often in trouble for speaking what God told him to say.  He wasn’t wearing a “Make Israel Great Again” cap.  In fact, his message was that the kingdom of Judah had to fall in order to be restored.  So in chapter 36 he dictates his message, straight from God, to Baruch, his secretary.  Baruch reads the words in the temple and this comes to the notice of the royal staff.  They arrange for a private reading and it scares them like a good horror novel.  One of them reads the scroll to the king, Jehoiakim, who cuts off a few columns at a time and burns them in the fire.

My favorite part of this story has always been the coda: “Then took Jeremiah another roll, and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah; who wrote therein from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire: and there were added besides unto them many like words.”  Many like words.  So we have book banners around the nation trying to stop children from reading.  The hope is they will become unreading adults because reading expands your mind.  Jehoiakim was a book banner—a book burner, in fact.  But the response from God himself is to write the whole thing over and add many similar words.  

The Bible has been, and still is, fairly constantly abused.  What it seems to be is unread, at least by those who use it to stop other books from being read.  I came to believe, while majoring in religion in a conservative college, that if literalism was truly from God there would be no way to stop it.  I took a route unlike my classmates, who tended to go to the most conservative seminary they could find to have their minds further closed.  I figured that if it was true then testing it by reason couldn’t hurt it.  It’s pretty obvious the way that turned out.  I don’t stand with book banners.  This is Banned Book Week.  Read a banned book.  Stand up to those who do the banning.  And if you need something to convince them that their tactics don’t meet with divine approval, point them to Jeremiah 36.

Liminal Time

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Considering the number of people who declare autumn their favorite season, the equinox receives pretty slim press.  This year it falls on the 22nd and, as always, it is one of the four quarter days of the pre-Christian European calendar.  Even among pagans it seems not to have had the same level of celebration as the other solstices and equinox.  I sometimes wonder if that’s because things are generally good already in September.  The intense heat of summer is over but the chill of October hasn’t yet arrived.  We stop using the air conditioning and don’t have to turn on the furnace.  It’s the Goldilocks month.  It’s part summer when living is easy, and part fall when the world is beautiful.  Like its fellow quarter days it is truly a liminal time.  

Liminal periods are always good for reflection.  No matter how much I want to savor this time of year, I have a feeling that it always catches me off guard.  There are changes afoot.  Starting Monday it will be dark more than it is light, and that will hold true until the sister equinox visits us in March.  These longer nights have traditionally made room for ghosts and goblins.  If we haven’t begun to store up supplies for winter, now is the time to start.  It’s the season when we all believe in magic, if just a little bit.  I’m one of those people who finds melancholy somewhat lovely.  It’s not depression (believe me, I know!), but a kind of happy sadness that the season itself is ephemeral.  Pretty soon people will be watching scary movies, but not quite yet.

Harvest is a joyful, spooky time.  Those trees that have been green since April now put on their colorful winter coats but soon will spend the colder months bravely naked.  Snow may come.  Fall is a prophetic season, warning us of what might come.  Monsters may be set free from their chains.  And yet there will be cozy indoor holidays when we can hunker down and recollect the year that has just been spent.  There’s a wisdom to seeing the quarter days as the spokes on the wheel of the year.  Like many wheels already rolling it’s futile to attempt to stop them.  They’re moving us to the next place that we’re meant to be.  It’s true that the autumnal equinox falls on a weekend this year, but it does seem to me a natural holiday.  And a time, like all holidays, for reflection.

Slow and Spry

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Businesses seem to want to move at light speed.  At least some do.  When I see that happening I think, “their strategy must be to make a fortune quickly so that when the unthought-through idea collapses they can move on to the next thing.  When I hear words like “agile” being tossed around I translate “reckless.”  Just over a century ago my ancestors were scraping out a living farming, and they got along okay.  Our acquisitiveness has outstripped our sense.  I read quite a bit about being satisfied with little.  Of course, I work in the “business world” where such ideas are anathema.  Even universities have decided to jump on the Titanic.  What could possibly go wrong?  My experience at Nashotah House was decidedly mixed.  One thing I always appreciated was the contemplative (i.e. slow) pace of things.  I may not be orthodox but I’m hardly reckless.

Perhaps buying the farm isn’t such a bad idea.  I’m afraid that I don’t have enough practical knowledge to raise my own food, even though I’m a vegan.  You see, for the things you can’t raise in the soil you need to sell surplus so that you can buy things.  Or rent movies.  And that takes business sense.  And businesses want to move at the speed of light.  I may be neurodiverse, but it takes me a while to process things.  I watch older movies.  I read slowly.  I think things through.  I do believe that businesses that last a long time have survived by moving a bit more slowly.  Like a tree.  By thinking things through.  The Vatican has been in business for a couple thousand years and they seem to be doing okay.  I could be Catholic were it not for doctrine.

I’m not the smartest guy around—not by a long shot—but I am a strategic thinker.  Strategic thought can be deep.  And counterintuitive.  And it doesn’t always lead to the desired results.  (I don’t even have a small college post, so that much is obvious.)  I’m content to let people pass me on the highway.  I don’t have to be first to market, as the saying goes.  I’m more in it for the long haul.  It hasn’t landed me wealth or fame, but I can spend a little time writing every day.  I get to watch movies that make me feel good.  I even get a book or two out the door.  Being agile is fine, but only, imho, if you think it through.