Still Early

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I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the history of horror movies of late.  Although they began being labelled “horror” in the early 1930s, the idea had been around for some time.  When I learned that the problematic director D. W. Griffith presented an early horror film based on Edgar Allan Poe in 1914, I had to see it.  Fortunately it’s easily found.  Long in the public domain, this silent film can be watched in its entirety on YouTube.  The Avenging Conscience is an adaptation of “The Tell-Tale Heart.”  The set-up is quite different, and it has a happy ending.  The characters aren’t named, apart from the sweetheart, who is called Annabel.  She’s taken from Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee,” which is also used in the film.  A young man owes his good fortune to his uncle, who raised him as an orphan.  When he falls in love with Annabel, the uncle objects.  The lad owes him loyalty.

The young couple decide to break up, so as not to upset the uncle.  The young man has been reading “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and thinks about killing his uncle.  He falls asleep in a chair and when he awakes decides to do the murder.  He is witnessed, however, by a passer-by.  He has to pay him off, but he is now free to pursue his love.  He walls the body up next to the fireplace.  A detective, alerted by the uncle’s friend, interviews the young man and the tapping of his pencil reminds the nephew of a beating heart.  He begins to see the ghost of his uncle.  His guilt eventually comes out and he begins a shoot-out with the detectives.  When he can’t win, he hangs himself, which causes Annabel to leap off a cliff in despair.  Then he wakes up.  The uncle is still alive, and has had a change of heart about the young lovers.  The couple marries and a weird coda involving Pan and some strangely dressed children, apparently a book the nephew wrote, winds things up.

The ghosts, insanity, and the murder mark this as early horror.  Although the actual deaths, except the uncle’s, take place off screen, they are still horror territory.  And, of course, horror properly didn’t quite exist.  Although The Avenging Conscience can’t really take credit as the first horror film, it is certainly an early one.  And it is based on Poe.  Silent, black-and-white, and not really scary at all, this movie has a place in the history of what we now recognize as horror. Watching it is to watch a bit of history.

New York Scent

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I recently had to go into New York City for work.  Now, I haven’t been to Manhattan for at least six years.  It’s like riding a bike, though.  For seven years I commuted there daily and I know my part of Midtown tolerably well.  There were a few things I noticed after my absence.  Despite the rumors that the pandemic had depopulated the City, it was plenty crowded on a Wednesday in May.  And I noticed how much had changed.  Manhattan is so large and complex that nobody can know it all.  Still, as I walked through parts of it I’d been through many times before I found no stores that I remembered.  I’m sure there are some that have remained unchanged, but New York is a city that is constantly reinventing itself.  Change may take place slowly, but six years accumulate small things.  Overall, however, the experience remains the same.

Like many visitors to the Big Apple, I sometimes think it might be fun to live there.  At least for a bit.  I’m not the biggest NYC fan, but once in a while it seems like it’s worth spending unrushed time in the City.  It’s iconic.  Being at work and seeing the Empire State Building, or the Chrysler Building, out the window has its distractions.  Walking down streets you’ve seen in many movies.  Encountering many thousands of people in the same day.  Heady stuff.  This time I took the train and I emerged into a Penn Station I didn’t recognize and in which I got lost.  It’d changed so much that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find my way back when it was time to go home.  The workings of New Jersey Transit were comforting in their familiarity.

The commuting life is something I never craved and which I don’t miss.  I can dedicate more time to my job as a remote worker.  I’m sure the culture of Manhattan has changed a bit in the years since it was a daily practice for me.  It’s a place that inspires stories, regardless.  On the way home, now beyond the end of the line, I did feel a little sad that I couldn’t spend a bit more time there.  New York is funny that way.  I arrived home in time for a late supper and bed, but I noticed that my clothes smelled like the Manhattan I remembered as I undressed.  It was a scent I’d almost forgotten.  Although much has changed since last I’d been there, it was pleasing to know that some things always stay the same in the midst of constant change.

Cool Summer

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Daily readers may recognize the cover of this book.  Some time back I posted on a misprinted book I’d received from Amazon.  It was the first time I had to return something to the retail giant in exchange for the book I’d actually ordered.  Although the volume itself  doesn’t say, I suspect William K. and Nicholas P. Klingaman, the authors, are kin.  (Some publishers make a big deal of such things.)  Regardless, I was reading for content.  It was strange reading this during a May when temperatures have generally been running about 1816-average levels below normal (mean temperatures can be deceiving).  It was also a good reminder how erratic weather can be and how dependent we are upon it.  So, basically, the volcano known as Tambora had a massive eruption—the largest during human recorded history—in 1815.  The ash in the atmosphere contributed to a year (1816) with cold temperatures that in many places devastated agriculture and led to widespread starvation.

The Year Without Summer is an interesting book, even if overwritten (which could be a function of having two authors, each with a lot to say.  One is a meteorologist and the other an historian.  And historians, especially, tend to write long.  That’s partially because so many interesting connections can be made.  Certain things happened because precipitating events owed their existence to a volcano.  There were several points, however, where I said to myself, wait, now, what does this have to do with the weather?  All authors (including yours truly) are selective and tend to focus on what they find interesting.  Detours are permitted.

The combination of meteorology and history was very interesting in its own right.  The weather is something we talk and perhaps think a lot about, but to which we tend not to ascribe too much ultimate importance.  The many, many pages of loss, despair, and death that make up this book should belie that understanding.  The weather is vitally important for our entire way of life.  We often take food for granted, but it’s anything but.  Many of those who starved to death in 1816 did so because they couldn’t afford food.  It was sometimes available, but at princely prices.  Many otherwise law-abiding citizens opted for riots and many governments didn’t see it as their responsibility to care for the people they governed (that still happens in capitalism).  This book, a bit overwritten, is nevertheless full of interesting information and creates some weighty thoughts.  If a Tambora-level eruption were to take place today, we’d see capitalism on display with all of its very ugly teeth.

Sleepy Thoughts

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It happens as you age.  Sleep patterns get disrupted.  This is normal and expected by all.  Except work.  That 9-2-5 has no sympathy for the sometimes days in a row when you awake looking forward only to going back to bed.  The day stretches out so long before you, many weary hours through which to slog, where younger employees wonder at your lack of energy.  A good night’s sleep is a gift.  One of the things I’ve observed about this is that poor sleep tends to occur in runs.  Overall, I don’t have much trouble sleeping.  I’m not in control of the quality of it, however.  And that’s what makes all the difference.  The mere handful of sick days won’t cover the inherent ageism of the few days off policy when poor sleep is the culprit.  In the non-profit world early retirement isn’t really an option, so lots of yawns it is.

It’s amazing how much we take youth for granted.  We could pull all-nighters in college and recover quickly.  Eight or nine hours hardly seemed like anything for work.  Then those hours begin to show their weight.  You have a vast gulf of meetings and self-starter projects stretching in front of you even until supper time, let alone the chance to redeem that previous night’s poor slumber.  I stopped caffeinating myself years ago.  I reasoned that I didn’t need chemical assistance to remain awake.  Was that self on coffee the same self as undrugged me?  And besides, you can save a lot of money by not buying coffee (which is now a luxury item).  So we pray to Morpheus and open our laptops.

The demand to be “on” for eight or nine hours a day, pretty much unbroken, for five successive days each week, wears a soul down.  And a body.  How I long to take a walk on a lovely spring day, only to be reminded that my lack of engagement online is noted.  I even receive work emails after 5 p.m. telling me something has to be done that night.  What I plan to do that night is sleep.  Make up for lost time.  Be human in an aging body.  The thirty-something that sent that email will understand.  Some day.  Age used to be equated with wisdom.  Now, it seems, it is considered lack of productivity.  It comes for everyone, if they survive that long.   No, I’m not ready for the ice floe just yet.  A good night’s sleep will set me straight.

Photo by No Revisions on Unsplash

Early Horror

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The origins of the horror film are hazy.  Although solidified as a genre name in the early 1930s, the ideas that eventually led to horror movies probably began with the 1896 George Méliès offering “The House of the Devil” (“Le Manoir du diable”).  This trick film features many of the macabre elements that would later become horror.  The Devil enters an old castle in the form of a bat.  We see him conjuring all kinds of magic—an Igor-like assistant, a cauldron, a skeleton, ghosts, and witches.  So much of what would feature as the genre developed is here already.  Others have pointed out that Méliès didn’t produce this film with the intention to scare.  It was a three-minute set of trick photography with typical exaggerated gestures and stage-magician tricks.  Still, there’s something there for horror fans.  Especially those of us pressed for time. 

Image credit: George Méliès, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The film itself is easily and freely found on the internet.  It is sometimes mistaken with “The Haunted Castle,” which was a remake lasting only 45 seconds, that came out the next year.  George Méliès was a visionary in many ways and his techniques in this film would pave the way for both independent producers and Hollywood studios as the early forms of the genre appeared.  “House of the Devil” also shows several tropes that will become standard vampire fare.  The Devil transforms from a bat,  he wears a cape, and is frightened off by a cross held aloft.  This was a year before Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published.  The idea of making films scary in their own right would be a later development, but these early pieces of cinema contain many of the elements we would later associate with horror.

It’s difficult to imagine these days, but in the 1920s the Disney short “Skeleton Dance” was considered too macabre for children.  (I discuss this in my book, Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.)  There was furor after the release of Dracula in 1931 with some critics finding no redeeming value in it.  Horror films had a difficult road to acceptance, which is still true today.  They weren’t regularly called horror films until the early thirties, although they existed before that.  Some are for lighter entertainment, like Méliès’ work.  Comedy horrors are a popular sub-genre.  Even today they continue to be made and are more funny than scary.  Think Scary Movie,  Shaun of the Dead, Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter.  And many, many others.  George Méliès showed what film could do.  And he inadvertently created the first horror movie.

In the Genes

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One of the easiest rabbit holes for me to trip into is genealogy.  Now, I know that other people’s ancestry quickly gets boring, so I’m not going to write about that.  But I will note some things that among the few real benefits of our electronic life—how the web has made the search much easier.  I have the advantage of having unusual ancestral names (back a few generations some Smiths enter in, but before that none of them are terribly common).  I first fell for genealogy in high school.  For a class project I had to sketch out a family tree, on paper.  I still prefer to look at them this way but you need a very large sheet.  The work was all done prior to computers (at least affordable ones).  My uncle had a copy of information my grandfather gathered and sent me a copy.  Then, when teaching full-time at Nashotah House, I’d occasionally make trips to Madison, Wisconsin to use the resources at the university library.  I wrote letters, met distant relatives, on paper.  Or microfiche.

About three years back, when my daughter was home for the holidays, we got to talking about family.  I’d searched for years for my maternal great-grandfather’s wife.  She died young and nobody in the family even knew her name.  While chatting, I logged in and was surprised to find that by using Find A Grave, I could quickly answer that question.  I’d been seeking that answer for decades, and there it was.  By that time I’d graduated to Reunion software.  The problem is, you have to keep rebuying it every time computer systems reach a certain upgrade-level.  We’ve purchased it at least three times, which seems predatory to me.  Time to put it all on paper again!  In any case, while reading about German immigration recently, I got curious.  I’d found that same great-grandfather’s parents’ names, but could go no further back without going to Germany.

I’m astonished at the work the Mormons have been doing behind the scenes for the past several years.  In seconds I was able, without paying, to get my ancestry back four generations further than ever before.  I know that Latter-day Saints have a theological motivation for what they do, but it is a real service for anyone interested in where they came from.  I’ve often heard that genealogy is a retiree’s habit.  I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to retire, but if I could, I could see how I would spend hours forgetting to eat or sleep, tracing roots, exploring rabbit holes.  I’ll need a very large sheet of paper, though.

Lights On

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Poltergeist horror movies are a touch difficult to make convincingly.  Part of that, I suppose, is because the actual phenomenon is already scary and dramatizing it often ameliorates rather than increases the fear factor.  When the Lights Went Out is a “based on a true story” movie about a poltergeist in Yorkshire in the 1970s.  One of the problems is that none of the adults are really sympathetic enough to care about, with the exceptions of Rita and Mr. Price, the teacher.  All of the other “grown ups” are so mired in their own problems that you just can’t empathize.  Part of that is probably an attempt to show the life of the poor—it isn’t easy, I know from experience—but there are a lot of good people of humble means.  Not all of them are mean, self-centered, and unsympathetic.

In any case, an elaborate backstory is built to set up the plot.  A monk, from before Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, rapes and nearly murders a young girl.  He cuts out her tongue so she can’t tell what he did.  She is educated enough to write, however, and the monastery collectively hangs the monk to preserve the honor of the church.  We’ve got religion and horror here, obviously, but a very poorly understood Catholicism.  In the nineteen-seventies the Maynards move into a council house haunted by both the girl and the monk.  The poltergeist activity begins but nobody will believe Sally, the young daughter.  Instead they blame her.  Until the activity happens to her parents as well.  They try to get a Catholic priest to help, but he’s too busy banging his cleaning woman (and besides, he needs the bishop’s permission for an exorcism).  The Maynards call in a medium who is, predictably, attacked.  The priest is blackmailed into an anticlimactic exorcism.

But the evil monk isn’t gone.  After life returns to normal, he attacks again but is driven off by the girl he murdered, or almost murdered.  In real life, apparently, the poltergeist was much more low key.  The dramatization makes it very much like other horror films we’ve all seen.  I do find the lack of research on how the church operates of interest.  Unfortunately, sexual abuse of the young is, and has been a problem with enforced celibacy from pretty much the beginning.  The priest from the seventies is much more concerned with his reputation than plight of the family.  The movie does do a good job of isolating poor Sally, and you can’t help but to feel sorry for her and her friend Lucy, who just don’t fit in.  That’s where the real horror lies.

Paper Writer Back

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We need to push back against the technocrats a bit more.  A story in Publishers Weekly recently affirmed what many of us know—people prefer books in print.  Ebooks have been shoved at us for years now and in academic publishing there’s been a trend away from print to electrons.  It was cheering to see in the same issue of PW that some British publishers are actually listening to readers and starting to release paperbacks first.  Imagine that.  People will read if they can afford to do so, and they do buy books.  And when I say books, I mean objects made of paper.  I don’t have a paper phobia.  I enjoy holding and reading books.  The only ebooks I’ve ever read were those I couldn’t access in print.  When I sit down to write a book, I have an image of a specific object in mind.

Technocrats are fond of telling us what we should prefer.  I wonder who died and made them king.  Or God.  If I recall correctly the latter preferred to write on stone.  That might create a few storage issues, but at least it was physical.  Consciousness, which we’re still a long, long way from adequately defining, can’t be captured in electronic form.  AI can pretend to be human, but it isn’t.  Nuance, subtlety, and embodiment are all missing.  We need to say that they need to stop telling us what to do.  Even as I was writing this post my laptop showed signed of requiring replacement.  To me, five years is a bit young to consider something old aged, but that’s what our tech masters tell us.  Thinking back over my laptop history, my previous computer lasted, let’s see, about five years.  It happens that this is a bad time for an expensive, unplanned purchase.  The tech lords have made the alternative unthinkable.

By my count, I’ve purchased six laptops over the course of my life, all primarily in the service of writing.  And they average out, it seems, on about five years.  This blog was started three laptops ago.  And the years seem to be going faster and faster.  I do most of my writing in a room filled with printed books.  I spend a lot of time in this room reading said books.  Tech has me caught between two worlds.  I’m trying to reconcile myself to spending a large amount of money after being scammed (by people using tech) last year.  If only I had a book to help me decide what to do.

Stay

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One of the string of low-budget, but well-made horror films of recent years, Good Boy is most memorable for the performance of Indy.  If you somehow missed the hype, Indy is a dog who can see ghosts while the humans around him (very few for most of the film) cannot.  Indy, by the way, has his own Wikipedia page as an actor—that’s how impressive his performance is.  No doubt, he is a photogenic dog.  Credit has to go to the photographers as well, for catching the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever displaying love, anger, sadness, concern, and, most impressively, fear.  The dog received a Best Performance in Horror award normally reserved for humans.  What makes this especially impressive is that, if you think about it, Indy wasn’t aware that he was acting.  He was being a dog and has no idea what human fiction is.  Impressive.

Spoilers follow.  The story itself is a little thin: Indy’s owner, Todd, has an incurable lung disease.  He decides to move to his grandfather’s house in the woods, alone with Indy.  His grandfather died in the house of a similar disease, living there alone with his dog.  Indy begins to sense the ghosts as they drive onto the property.  Todd, whose health is failing, doesn’t notice them and begins to start shoving Indy away, even chaining him outside in the rainy autumnal weather.  Indy, ever loyal, breaks free and returns after having close encounters with the ghost.  Todd is glad to see his pet but finds his own dead body in the bed before the ghost catches up with him.  Todd’s sister finally visits and finds her dead brother and the dog abandoned in the basement.  (Since I saw this on a streaming service that cuts off credits in its eagerness to get you to watch the next film, I missed the cheering scenes of Indy with his head out the window of the sister’s car.)

Throughout the movie the human actor’s faces are never shown clearly.  This keeps the focus squarely on Indy.  It’s astounding how the dog’s range of emotional expression is slotted into the story, which is probably one reason that it’s a little thin.  You can’t explain to the star, “Now you’re seeing a ghost that your owner can’t and react like this…”.  Like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, this low budget film performed well at the box office and has become a cultural touch stone among the horror community.  At least among those of us who can’t resist cute pets.

Thorough

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It was a warm summer’s day, sometime in the mid-eighties.  I was living in Boston and some friends asked if I’d like to go to Walden Pond, outside Concord.  I’d read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, so yes, please.  I knew Thoreau was an early Massachusetts Transcendentalist, mystic, and nature lover.  That particular day we were the only ones at the site where his cabin in the woods once stood.  I suspect that, being there with friends, it wasn’t as contemplative a trip as it would’ve been had I made it alone.  Still, here we were, nearing a century-and-a-half after his death, remembering him.  My wife and I recently watched the PBS three-part documentary on Thoreau, and I learned a lot about him.  He was admirable in a way that few public figures are today.  What’s more, it’s clear that he’s widely appreciated as a visionary and believer in freedom.

Image credit: Benjamin D. Maxham, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons)

Writing in the nineteenth century, it seems, got you noticed much more than it does now.  Thoreau had profound things to say.  He had strong convictions about abolition and being shuffled into an existence of work, forced from being free.  He was able to live the way he did largely because he didn’t need many things.  He also had famous friends, Ralph Waldo Emerson, for one, who gave him a place to stay when he had none of his own.  The documentary makes the point that, despite being a hero to many, we’ve gone ahead and built the world Thoreau most feared.  Few, or at least a few of us, find that work doesn’t define us.  Writing, it seems, still helps with that.  Those of us born to write do so, and long days “in the office” must be endured to come to life when writing is again possible.

If you think deeply about it you start to realize that we’ve allowed ourselves to be hoodwinked by economics.  If you have a mortgage you know this to be true.  Or if you have a medical condition—you can’t afford not to have a job without insurance.  Thoreau, it seems, lived with the tuberculosis that ultimately killed him pretty much all of his life.  And he died too young, we feel, because he had so much to say.  So much to say that was worth listening to.  Such writers are rare today because, like everything else, writing has become a business and some readers even prefer things “written” by AI.  And yet I remember that warm summer’s day and think of a placid time still earlier when one might’ve met Henry David Thoreau in the woods.

An Education

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The point of education is to improve life for people.  Reading and studying and listening, we learn.  Travel is often an educational experience.  We gain knowledge, but it does no good if we hoard it.  That’s why some become teachers.  In a society that undervalues education, a self-fulfilling prophecy sets in.  Just look around you.  The usual path into becoming a teacher is education in education.  You can major in it.  You don’t have to be wise necessarily, since, like all things capitalistic, choice of career is economic.  You pick something for which you feel suited.  If you’re lucky, you get a job doing it.  For “higher education” it’s a bit different.  First of all, you need not study education at all.  You choose a field in which to become a specialist and, if you’re lucky, get a job teaching it.  And those jobs are dependent on, of course, the dismal science.

This is one of the main reasons I write.  When your intention is to be a lifelong learner, you know that if you don’t share what you’ve picked up over the years, it will simply be lost.  As a society, we really don’t encourage sages.  The motivation is to make money, to look out for yourself.  Education becomes a means for self-promotion rather than for sharing what you’ve learned.  In my case, I sometimes feel guilty for writing about horror.  Is it really helping anyone?  I have to believe that it might be.  A certain segment of the population finds horror therapeutic.  Psychologists are starting to explore how it’s actually good for your mentality.  I can only hope that if it means something to me, it will mean something to some others.  And I want to share it.

Religion, at least among the non-cynical, is meant to improve people’s lives.  There is a reason that I wanted to be a religion professor, as I was for a few short years.  My circumstances steered me toward horror as a form of self-care, and I think there’s something much deeper here that has to be mined.  Writing the books I do is more like speculating or prospecting rather than staking a claim and digging tunnels.  If they were causing more harm than good I wouldn’t publish them (or try to).  Life is an educational opportunity.  And if we learn from those who care for other people we might have a chance of improving the lot of many.  Look around you.  Is that where we are today?

Walking Sleep

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It has been suggested to me that I might try screenwriting.  I’ve always resisted this, even though some of my fiction may be movie-worthy (one editor told me it was, but then I have a huge stack of rejections from others).  In any case, I had high hopes for Sleepwalkers.  I’d never heard of it before, but I saw that it was Stephen King’s screenwriting debut.  Not all novelists can, or should be screenwriters.  I like King’s novels.  The only one that really didn’t wow me was The Tommyknockers, and even it was well written.  This movie struggles.  Part of the reason is, undoubtedly, that directors depart from the script sometimes.  And the budget doesn’t seem to pay off its estimated 15 million.  For one thing, it’s set in Indiana but the scenery is clearly, clearly California.  They didn’t even try to make this look like the Midwest.  And the acting isn’t great.  The little jokes fall flat.  Something’s wrong in Kansas.

The story seems promising enough.  Sleepwalkers are shapeshifting cat people.  They’re also psychic vampires, drawing their energy from virginal girls.  So far so good.  Then it gets weird.  They transfer energy to each other through incest.  And they can turn invisible.  And turn cars invisible, even at a distance.  They’re super strong and can survive gunshots.  You can kill one by poking its eyes out, however.  And cats are their natural enemies, setting them on fire if they scratch them.  Slow down—there’s too much going on!  And there’s a quasi-comedic tone that prevents this movie from ever really feeling like a Stephen King novel.

A couple of things: those of us who write horror often find humor in our stories.  Sometimes we just can’t avoid it.  And the other thing is writers are often typecast.  For example, we think of Edgar Allan Poe as a horror writer because his best known stories are the scary ones.  Poe wrote funny, however.  And what we’d call, for lack of a better word, literary fiction.  Writers write.  Other people categorize.  In the case of Sleepwalkers, however, it does seem that it was intended as (it was certainly advertised as) horror.  And it has horror moments.  It also has quite a bit of sympathy for the monsters, which isn’t a bad thing.  Predators have to feed—that’s the way of nature.  The sleepwalkers are, to all outward appearances, human.  And they have human emotions.  Stephen King’s first screenplay wasn’t his best work, but we all have to start somewhere.

Blog Reading

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I’ve been at this blog for about seventeen years now.  During those years of daily posts, WordPress still has trouble recognizing me.  I try not to take this personally, but when people I know (and follow) post on WordPress I don’t always get notifications.  When I want to comment on said posts, I have to sign in.  Sometimes twice.  All of which is to say that a recent post on a friend’s blog made me thoughtful.  I met Jeff Hora through my wife, so I’ve known about him for going on forty years now.  We’ve become friends in our own right, mostly online.  I want to reflect on one of Jeff’s recent posts, “Solid Ambiguity.”  Before I do, however, a brief lament.  I used to read a number of blogs daily, including that of the recently mentioned Dan McClellan.  I had a whole set of blog buddies.  Then blogs began to decline in popularity and, more to the point, I took uber-capitalist jobs in New York City, robbing me of time.  Now I only read them when I get email notices.

Okay, so solid ambiguity.  The basic idea is that we like to grasp onto the things we can count on.  Things that don’t change.  That’s the “solid” part.  At the same time we need to be aware that change is endemic to life.  In fact, the post mentions Buddhism.  Like Shakers, Buddhists have been part (long past) of my religious training.  I specialized in “western religions,” but I’ve recently been reflecting quite a lot on the fact that in East Asian thought, especially, change is the only thing that’s permanent.  I know I’ve posted about this before, but that was probably years ago as well.  We know that things constantly change.  In the few brief minutes it would take you to read this post, you have changed.  So has the world around you.

We want solidity most of the time.  A house we can reliably come back to.  People we love to always be there.  Keep the possessions we worked so hard to earn.  None of this is permanent.  We know that at some level.  For many of us it’s deeply troubling.  I’m no expert in Buddhism, but I do know that one of its basic tenets is not being attached to things as they are.  Life is full of ambiguity.  We don’t tend to like it, really, as Jeff points out.  But we do need to learn to live with it.  One of the changes with which I have to cope is the loss of time for reading friends’ blogs.  It’s good to be reminded that it is a rewarding experience when I finally do it.  Now, if only I had more time…

Simple Gifts

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During my many years of studying religion I learned about the Shakers.  It was many years ago and my knowledge isn’t extensive.  I was caught off guard when my wife suggested we see The Testament of Ann Lee.  I hadn’t heard of it and knew nothing about it, but she had me at “Shakers.”  This is a most unusual and engaging movie.  I didn’t realize it was a musical until after it was over.  (It had been a long day and I did, a time or two, think, “hey, this is like a musical, the way characters break into song.”)  The thing is the songs are all diegetic; they fit into the plot and the Shakers were known for their music as well as for their furniture.  The movie follows, in broad outlines, the life of Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the sect.  It made me curious to learn more.  

The Shakers emerged during that period of intense religious foment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  They settled in upstate New York where numerous other sects came into the world, such as the Mormons and the Millerites.  The Shakers had their origins among the Quakers, but it is unclear if Ann Lee’s family were members of the latter denomination.  In the movie an encounter with George Whitefield awakens Lee’s spiritual curiosity.  Historically, Whitefield was one of the first trans-Atlantic superstars, drawing rock-concert-sized crowds to hear his outdoor preaching.  In my head much of this was muddled during the film—it had been a long and disappointing day and I was totally unprepared for it.  I’m glad to have watched it, however; it rekindled my interest in American sects.

I have on my shelf an unread history of the Shakers.  It has consequently been moved to my “to read” pile.  I read, a few years ago, a history of the Oneida community in Upstate, and also a biography of William Miller.  The Oneida community practiced open marriage and eventually became known as the producers of flatware—Oneida silverware is still easily found.  Shakers, on the other hand, believed in celibacy, meaning that they could only grow through conversion.  The many Shaker communities founded by Mother Ann Lee dwindled and now appear to be down to three members.  The movie, which is quite good, is unlikely to lead to a resurgence of celibacy and revival of the Shakers.  They did have an outsized influence, not only for their furniture (think Oneida) but also for their music.  Add to that now, a musical.

Equal Women

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It’s been so busy this year that Mother’s Day crept up on me.  We have a lot of spring birthdays in our extended family, and what with the weird weather this year and unexpected household expenses, it just kept slipping my mind.  I like to commemorate the day on this blog because I’ve considered myself a feminist for many years.  I’m very distraught that women still aren’t treated as equals to men.  This should’ve been a no-brainer over a century ago.  (Having an historian’s outlook, I realize that in the days when women tended to die young, in childbirth, it was difficult for many to rise to positions of social prominence.  Once we got to the stage that most women survived the experience, and then to the point that economics drove us to two-income families, the male-superiority charade should’ve been dropped.)  The fact is none of us would be here without our mothers.  Father’s day has never been a big deal for me, but Mother’s Day is important.

I did manage to remember to get my wife a card in advance, but this year the day itself kept slipping my mind.  Ironically, my wife and I had watched a biopic of Mother Ann Lee last night—I’ll post on that tomorrow—and it was only as I was preparing to write about it for today’s post that I thought, “Wait.  It’s Mother’s Day.”  (We do have plans for the day; I’m not a complete barbarian.)  My excuse is that we were set off yesterday by an early encounter with a brusque and condescending Verizon employee who would not help set up a new phone purchased elsewhere.  I hadn’t slept well the night before and it rained all day, none of which made for a productive Saturday.  The movie (tomorrow’s post) was longer than anticipated, keeping me up late.  Movies, strangely enough, are now starting to really influence my dreams.

My dream for today, however, is that women’s equality will become a reality rather than something we just keep talking about.  There can be little doubt that we’d be better off with a woman president than with the alternative.  A woman has traveled further from the earth than many billions of men have.  My doctor and dentist are both women.  They can do anything men in their professions can.  They are university presidents and CEOs.  Pilots, both civilian and military.  They are religious leaders.  And many of them do the job on top of being mothers.  I consider it a personal failing that it was only as I was about to post about Mother Ann Lee (tomorrow) that I finally realized today is a very important day.  Let’s make Mother’s Day count!