Spectre

Blight hit my tomato crop yesterday. That fast. I picked a basket of these globus wonders on Thursday and when I went to the stalks yesterday there were rotting on the blackened vines. My neighbour spoke of a similar happening on Saturday. I know it has been a particularly wet summertime, but that it can all happen so fast is quite a marvel of nature. I can’t help but think of my Irish ancestors and what it meant for them when the potato blight hit Ireland. Are nightshades particularly vulnerable? For us, the loss of a garden full of tomatoes is not nearly so catastrophic as it was for the Irish and the potato. As I pulled the vines and prepared the heap for deep burial in the forest, I said my prayers and hoped that the blight both in its unexpected arrival and consequence would not be a portent. We do not need another pandemic. Although, one need only read history to see that these are inevitable. The world hangs on a thread. And so do we.

Halloween decorations have begun to show up in the shops and on the lawns of my community. I do not remember such a fascination with the macabre when I was a child. Of course we donned costumes and did the trick or treating thing, but decorating lawns with Styrofoam tombstones or tying flying witches to the trees was the exception rather than the rule. Interesting that our current interest in the morbid and the macabre seems parallel to our death phobia or death denying cultural practices. Does anyone have a funeral anymore? Or has the delayed and planned “Celebration of Life” replaced our collective willingness to stand shoulder to shoulder in the rawness of grief? Like our Facebook feeds. life and death have been curated and sanitized. I am offering a seminar series with Morbid Anatomy online in November. My preparatory research and reading are tuning toward the topic. I am currently pouring over Freud’s seminal work, The Uncanny. His theory of the return of the repressed is both taken for granted in the psychologies of our day and groundbreaking in his. We repeat what we cannot bear to remember. This aphorism harkens back to my earlier statement that we are in large part, her in the West, death phobic and death denying. The horror movies, the Halloween decorations, and even our dabbling in the occult are at best, an unconscious impulse to re-member, to bring back into our awareness what has been denied, repressed, avoided. If only we could see that the awareness of death is the first sign of wisdom. Bring this into our conscious reflection rather than be haunted by it.

I recall a story of a friend who met with her mother’s priest to discuss the funeral arrangements her mother asked for during the dying time. My friend was a lapsed Catholic but sought to honour her mother who was a devout member of a Church. When my friend asked the priest to clarify at what point she could deliver the eulogy, the priest informed her that a eulogy remembering the mortal remains of her mother would best be delivered at the luncheon following the “Mass of the Resurrection”. My friend was not surprisingly put off and this priestly edict reinforced her reasons for being lapsed in the Church she often experienced as arbitrary and dogmatic. She agreed to the provisional opportunity he offered to stand at the lectern before the Benediction and invite mourners to attend the luncheon. Picture this. The priest stands after the Mass that barely mentioned the name of her mother let alone her lifetime of work and dedication to her parish. He opens his robed arms ready to deliver the Benediction and nods to my friend at the lectern to his right. She reaches into her jacket and produces a stack of paper that she spreads out to read. Turning to the priest she suggests, “Father, you might want to sit down”. She had the last word. As the conclusion of the ceremony meant to release her mortal mother into her “eternal glory”, my friend spoke of the woman she was mourning. I saw this as a bold act of individuation on behalf of my friend. Today I ponder it more deeply.

Surely we are mortal and we are eternal. Our earthy time is limited. Consciousness is the remembrance of this. In remembering that we are mortal we wither recoil and deny or we strive, either consciously or unconsciously, to leave a befitting legacy. How will we be remembered or carried by our loved ones? Will we be remembered or will we be forgotten? Last night the stars tumbled over the horizon. Their beauty seduced me out of sleep and I stood awestruck for well over an hour in beholding their mystery and their beauty. Our ancients believed these pinpoints of light in the darkness were our ancestors, sending us remembrance from some other place. With the light pollution of our cities and the blue glow of our devices, we rarely apprehend their twinkle. Like the wink of a beloved elder, filled with mischief and wisdom, we rarely wonder ourselves into their ever guiding presence. How can we look up and not apprehend the vastness of the mystery? To some, this makes our smallness too much to bear so we distract and repress. To others, this emboldens us to a deeper call. A call to live and love and tend the gardens of our lives. There will be fruit. There will be blight. Oh, but the time between seed and fruit and fallow ground is as short as it is precious. I vow to live it all. You?

In honour of the life and the death written in my little garden this year, I decided to make a Scarecrow. I named him Spectre. A silly yet poignant application of my thesis here this morning. Effigies are fashioned to hold and contain and in some political actions, to compel consciousness. Spectre the scarecrow, who now stands sentry at the corner of my garden reminds me that all creation includes death. We cannot have one without the other. Life and death are not adversaries but allies. To laud one and deny the other is to deny the fullness that is possible. Our ancestors built cathedrals, painted and sculpted masterpieces that defy reason. In marble and on canvas they remind us all that we are heaven and hell clumsily rolled into clay. Though our time be brief, it need not be meaningless. It can and is a beautiful as the golden forest, as arresting as the call of migrating geese, and as soft and as fragile as the flutter of Monarchs in the meadow. Fallow time beckons, the Black Thunderbirds call to the White Thunderbirds, and the death song of creation sounds a symphony. My prayer this morning is that we will tune our instruments to the chorus. Its herald and its dirge. In full measure.

Morbid Anatomy (https://www.morbidanatomy.org/classes/the-macabre-in-story-and-jungian-psychologythe-brush-with-the-uncanny-taught-byzurich-trained-jungian-analystmuriel-mcmahon-beginning-november-4?fbclid=IwAR1EgCUKqEBDjhYOIzbWsVZHUKUrITSWlKiqiLtiAPXMMnGUsS1AN2iFFew)