1.
Christmas is a message transmitted from the past. The signal originates in an ancient world mostly unimaginable to us. It’s the broadcast from neo-Platonic, gnostic Jews, a pulse out of the “fabulous, formless darkness,” as Yeats wrote, describing the dismay with which the Romans beheld Christianity’s eruption into their world. Today, the signal is much attenuated, befogged by time, a faint tremor. We’re poised on the brink, it seems, of something equally formless because unknown and fabulous because beyond our imagining.
2.
Christmas is the cruelest day in the cruelest season. Memories swarm around us in the icy darkness. The dead are unquiet and whisper. This year, my wife, Julie, lost her sister and her mother. On Christmas Eve, Julie remembered traveling with her parents to the village of Pine Island to celebrate the holiday with her grandparents. I suppose the kids were a little impatient and, probably, resentful about being hauled away from home to the old house where the old people lived. There, the rooms were full of artifacts from the time before my wife was born, exotic images and things from the past that, for a seven-year old, might as well be Egyptian or Babylonian. We don’t know what we have until we lose it. Julie began to sob, remembering her grandparents who can no longer be visited, her parents who are now both dead, her sister who died this Autumn. What would she give to see these people one more time?
I would guess that after the excitement of opening gifts and the rich, narcotic food, the children fell asleep in the car as it coursed through the cold and dark night returning home.
3.
Half the world was covered in hideous cold. At the ends of the streets in Austin where I live, walls of blowing snow blotted out horizons, fields, structures trembling under the onslaught of the wind. Vortices of ice crystals spun over drifts in the driveways. The wind-chill was forty-below. It was the coldest Christmas in living memory, stalked by blizzards and calamity on the icy roads. When I took my old dog outside, she shuddered and gingerly moved her paws through the snow as if they were scalded. In the naked, quivering trees, a few crows were gathered, the living embodiment of the blizzard.
4.
My daughter’s friend, Keisha, spent Christmas Eve with us. She works at a residential home for troubled adolescents. Keisha said that one of the girls had made a shank from a peppermint stick licked to a point and taped onto a plastic spoon.
5.
The box was marked with yellow tape, like a police cordon, but labeled “fragile.” The package was exceedingly heavy and hard to disassemble. Inside, there was slab of terra-cotta sculpted as a facsimile of a Maya stela. The carvings on the slab show a man sprawled under an ornate tree-like emblem. The man’s eyes are closed and his noble beak-like nose is turned upward and he wears elaborate regalia, a feathered headdress and jaguar-skin leggings. He rests unsteadily on a sort of altar punctuated with little staring eyes. As is the case with classic Maya art, the carving is unfathomably intricate with borders decorated with rows of glyphs and the tree crowned with strips of talon and tail-feather.
6.
At night, during the days before Christmas, I sit in the living room watching music on You-Tube: Patti Smith with hip-length braids of white hair, whinnying and spitting, as she sings “Horses! Horses! Horses! Coming in from all directions”, Neil Young performing at Willie Nelson’s Farm-aid, J. Geils Band “Angel in Blue”, Joni Mitchell with Bob Dylan (both of them young and beautiful), Bruce Springsteen, arias from Mozart, a cantata by Bach. Some of these performers are dead now, others are still alive. But time is passing and the signals are growing fainter, even though preserved for the time being on You-Tube, but soon enough these artist will all be as dead as Frank Sinatra or (as Alan Ginsberg wrote) “Emily Bronte and Hitler.” You-Tube is the place where dead voices gather.
7.
I went outside to walk in the cold. The sidewalks were drifted over and the wind howled lethal threats through the barren trees. Walking in snow is tiring, particularly these drifts encased in shells of icy crystal – your foot pierces the snow’s surface and, then, flounders. I was breathing heavily and the mucous in my nose was freezing. When I went to the doctor the day before, the physician’s assistant told me that my heart was beating abnormally – there was a little stutter to its pulse. “It’s ectopic,” the PA told me. Walking in the calf-deep snow, I felt the exertion and I wondered if I would suddenly topple over. I recalled a photograph in a book that I once perused about the German author, Robert Walser. He was confined in an insane asylum in the Alps but allowed to hike the hills overlooking the sanitarium. A picture, documenting his death, shows a trail of footprints leading to where Walser has fallen, his body a black blot under dark hat and coat against the white of the snowy meadow. I trudged through the snow, keeping my head down because of the terrible wind.
8.
My neighbor keeps five rabbits in his front yard behind a wire fence. There is a tent a bit like those canopies set up grave-side at funerals. The rabbits live in hutches in the canvas tent.
I was surprised to see three of the rabbits out in the cold, backs turned to the wind, round balls of fur huddled against the fence-line. In the dark, the rabbits were featureless, formless except for the liquid mirrors of their eyes that caught and reflected the faint ray of a streetlight down the avenue.
9.
One of my daughters is imprisoned in the women’s correctional facility in western North Dakota. The penitentiary is where the high plains begin to break up into raw and seething badlands, veins of lignite and orange terra-cotta scoria produced when burning coal scorched clay in the guts of the earth. My daughter sent me a form that I could complete so that candies and cookies could be mailed to her for Christmas. Earlier I had told me ex-wife that I would send her money to put in my daughter’s prison account – she makes $1.33 per day when she works. I didn’t want to wire the money to the account myself. I said: “I don’t want to have a relationship with the North Dakota correctional facilities.” But I swallowed my pride and provided credit card information so that the candy and cookies would be sent to the penitentiary. I wonder if she received the basket of treats. A few weeks after she was first incarcerated, I sent her a package of books ordered through Barnes & Noble and delivered, according to correctional department protocol, to the penitentiary. The staff took the books and, instead, delivered to my daughter some torn and filthy underwear taunting her with the words: “Look what someone sent you!” The books were long novels because I thought my daughter would have plenty of time to read. But she never received them.
10.
On a pot in the Princeton Museum of Art, a Maya artist painted a rabbit with a white, staring eye. The rabbit is holding a stylus in its paw. The rabbit is a scribe about to letter an inscription on an accordion-folded scroll of paper made from boiled fig leaves. The scroll is stiff, treated with lime to create a snow-white surface for the inscription.
11.
In the invaluable catalogue for the exhibition of Maya art, The Blood of Kings, I found a reproduction of the carved slab that I unwrapped on Christmas Eve. The image is intricate and warrants several pages of description in the book.
In fact, the slab represents a limestone sarcophagus lid, excavated in 1952 from the depths of the Temple of Inscriptions in Palenque. The sarcophagus contained the body of Lord Pacal, a Maya ruler who was born on May 26, 603 (A.D.) and died August 31, 683. Lord Pacal ruled Palenque for 68 years having ascended to the throne when he was 12. Sensing that death was imminent, Pacal ordered the construction of his tomb with work on the grave beginning around 675.
The noble figure sprawled at the center of the slab is Lord Pacal, twisted a little, as he falls from the World-Tree. The center of his forehead is split by a jade axe (or celt) signifying that he is dead. Standing like a peanut on his nose, there is perched a bone. (In Mayan, the word for “bone” and “seed” are the same – thus, the bone signifies the hope for resurrection.) The world-tree is a Ceiba, marked with the glyphs te’ (wood) and nen (mirror) – mirror means brightness and so the tree is radiant; its wood shines. Dragons emerge as cross-members of the world-tree; from their jaws scrolls emanate, marks that signify blood – the dragons are avatars of the “Perforator God” who pierces tongues and penises to release the sacred blood of kings that revives and animates the world. Other glyphs tells us that the sap of the tree is the blood of the earth. (Sap as copal is burned as incense, just as fig-bark papers clotted with the blood of the kings were set ablaze to give the gods a whiff of the sacrifices required to drive the machinery of existence.) Pacal has fallen from the middle rungs of the world-tree, our world, and is dropping down into Xibalba, the Underworld. Xibalba is a place of bad smells, stagnant water, darkness. The maw of the Quadrapartite earth monster is open to receive the falling corpse of the king. The jaws of a mighty centipede reach up to embrace Pacal as he descends. Glyphs on the border of the slab name Pacal’s noble ancestors. Above and below the scene, skybands depict the sun and moon and Venus, the destroyer and renewer. A celestial bird, with an obsidian beak and resplendent tail feathers all dripping jewels, sings atop the world-tree.
12.
On the night before Christmas Eve, I watched a lecture in art history delivered at Stanford by Alexander Nemerov. (Nemerov is the son of a famous poet, Howard Nemerov; his aunt was the photographer Diane Arbus.) Nemerov’s lecture was an introduction to his course on the history of art. Delivered in an elegant-looking lecture hall, Nemerov appears as a shadowy figure, eclipsed by the 20 foot slides that are projected on a screen behind him.
Some of the lecture was homely, quotidian – Nemerov mentioned landmarks on the Stanford campus and told his students the dates of their mid-term and final exams. The first artwork considered in the course was a religious icon by Duccio. The 13th century image is small and scalloped on its bottom frame where candles lit before the picture over the centuries have gnawed away the wood. Mary and a sportive infant Jesus appear against a brilliant gold-leaf background, a glowing mirror-like void (nen). Mary is recognizable as the portrait, perhaps, of some local courtesan but her face is somber – she knows in her heart that the baby will grow into a man who will be crucified. The infant taps at her chin and wears a little gown like a choir-boy.
Nemerov says that images like this are alien. They are fragments from a lost world that have somehow survived the wrack of time. When contemplating them, we must respect the “otherness” of the past. As opposed to the past’s “otherness”, Nemerov posits the “glow” of the present – this is the glow investing the life that we lead. It’s the halo or aura of the contemporary. The goal of the art historian is to translate the irreversible “otherness” of the past into the “glow” of our present – that is, to let the strangeness and alien character of works of art from long ago glow with the aura of our current existence. Neither the past nor the present should efface one another – rather, they should fuse and interpenetrate while remaining, also, distinct.
Do the students understand what he is saying? They are quiet, respectful, and applaud politely when he ends the lecture.
13,
I found Bach’s Christmas cantatas on You-Tube and watched them. The music is beautiful, but, after awhile, everything sounds the same. The cantatas were performed in a Baroque church in Vienna and, sometimes, the faces of the singing choirboys or the soloists with their round, dark mouths, were intercut with pictures of creches – wood-carvings depicting Joseph and Mary, the baby Jesus and the shepherds and three kings. One shot shows a dignified-looking donkey.
The musicians are trying to reach out to me, but I can’t quite understand their message. There’s something stony about this music, marmoreal, like the faces of the effigies in the manger, that doesn’t communicate with me.
14.
On You-Tube Bruce Springsteen performs his song “The Ghost of Tom Joad” with Tom Morello. It’s a concert in Anaheim, California, probably ten or twelve years ago. The clip documents an impressively fierce and vibrant performance and I asked my son, Jack, to watch the video. But he wasn’t interested. “They’re all just old drunks,” he said, “has-beens, and it disturbs me to see this elderly rock stars.” I drove him home. The cold was appalling. Jack said: “I can’t stand seeing stuff like that. It’s so old.” I replied: “It’s not old to me. It’s part of my life.” And, I thought, there is a timeless aspect to the soul, something in me that doesn’t grow old – although I look different, I’m still the same person that I was when I was twenty.
15.
Claude Levi-Strauss, the great French anthropologist, remarked that American soldiers on their march across the continent often blew up French cheese shops and creameries where the stuff was made. The Americans didn’t like the smell of some of the cheese and said that it reminded them of decaying bodies, corpses rotting on the battlefields.
16.
Once in Jerusalem, Levi-Strauss spoke about the messages that art transmits to us from the past. Linda Schele and Mary Ann Miller, the epigraphers who finally deciphered written Mayan, were at the conference. They recalled that Levi-Strauss said: “He made the point that some of us spend our lives trying to decipher (Maya or other ancient) art, only to discover that their messages were not intended for us.”
17.
As I walked from my car in my driveway after dropping Jack at his house on Christmas Eve, I looked into the sky. The storm had cleared and the sky was studded with big, crystalline stars. The wind still roared in the trees, but the clouds were gone and I could see into outer space. Venus was as bright as an acetylene torch throbbing overhead in the south-southwest sky. I watched the heavens for a minute or two, but, then, my hands became numb and the cold pressed tears out of my eyes and my brow burnt as if scalded and, so, I hurried inside.
To the memory of Terry Dilley, Kim Lockhart, and Rick Herreid
December 25,2022
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