A change of season

Today´s the day I change the nature of the season of Halloween. Forever!

Is Halloween a fantasy or a revolt against its possibility? Nihilistic impulses shaped into pleasing shapes? A death mask of conception, a collage of cultures, a staccato cadence, or an emergence of hidden personas, a curator of forms in whose composite we hope to detect something of ourselves?

Set beneath starkly beautiful black fields, crows, corpses, shadowed alleys, blends of history and memoirs resulting in a narrative of spectral rich images, materially preoccupied, suggesting the unpredictability of the self. Uncertainty can be an attractive quality.

An uncertain manifesto is a reasonable description of every great gothic novel. But of what exactly? Time, death, failure, family, love, revenge, solitude without ever having to feel something is laid bare or outpace the term of its interpretation?

In my house Halloween is a national holiday, starting at the end of august to be exact. My grandson is a fervent Halloween fan, and his choice of this year’s theme led me to transform All Hallows eve into a whole new season!

First, let me emphasize that Halloween for us has to be gothic. I´m not in too much into modern-day gore. 

Raphael always feels passionate about supporting various causes. More often than not arousing my own sense of justice. He traveled the world over with me ever since he was a baby, and that in itself is an education no school, however renowned can provide. He has seen a lot, and his passion to defend the rights of other people stems from there. I understand the rationale behind his reasons and for his passion for supporting the rights of other people: “different people”.

His latest mission in his young life is to integrate children with “Challenges” in so-called “normal” schools. There´s nothing abnormal about what is considered abnormal in our culture, where the notion of difference is often a ground for segregation and even ridicule and shame. In fact: normal is boring. Life becomes immeasurably more satisfying when we learn to embrace the “abnormal” and the pleasure of simply being alive. There´s much to be celebrated in the mundane every day. Joy is to be found all around us if we are willing to seek it out and drop the notion altogether that life and acceptance have their foundations in “normalcy”.

Raphael loves to rummage through photos of our travels and the attached stories. He often rages quite funnily against what he sees as injustices (in adult terms: gross indecencies of our time.)

He´s like a sentient amber fixated on what is caught in the already hardening resin of his memory: a staging ground for a deeper inquiry into the horrors of real life. Reality is noisy and often bloody, and it suppresses the imagination mercilessly. And what is Halloween but imagination? A negation of rules and directives. A blurring challenging the boundaries between play and reality. Halloween is an elegant contest of contrasts.

We live somewhere, in a part of the world where Halloween is almost abhorred and I´m almost convicted of being an abusive grandparent for letting Raphaël indulge in such an obscure holiday.

What they don´t know, is whatever he rescues from this dark and dentist-promoting holiday achieves an uncanny wavering quality as if he is already home in the immaterial and his message is palliated with intrinsic beauty: There is magic beyond what your eyes can see. If you don´t open your heart – you might just miss it. the departed don´t want to be mourned; they hope to be looked back on in gratitude for the times we got to share with them and equally been happy to be a part of our lives. The dead represent the will to preserve an abolition of memory, a declaration of the transient nature of life. The dead are not scraping endlessly sad poems in praise of a never-ending mourning. The nocturnal beauty of Halloween shines but one important message: death comes to us all. Life is precious, enjoy it now! (His profundity often comes uncomfortably close to scrutiny).

Let me come back to the theme of this year's Halloween party at our place: a sad and lovelorn, tender, and tolerant monster. The book for the mood is “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley. A classic of gothic literature, with all the tragedy and plot twists.

In my darkest days, I felt a great connection with Victor Frankenstein´s creature, for he is the loneliest of all the monsters and ghosts of dark stories.

- “I am an unfortunate and deserted creature. I look around and no relation or friend upon earth.” He laments on the pages.

Despair is largely inimical to Halloween, while melancholy its pensive perfumed cousin, making of the void something paradoxically seductive.

Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the early feminist text: A vindication of the rights of women. Mary began her work on Frankenstein when she was still in her teens on a trip to France, one faithful rainy afternoon. The book explores themes of fear, exile, and loneliness. The story begins in a frozen wasteland, with letters from a young sea captain describing a perilous mission to the far north. There, the captain meets Victor Frankenstein, once a promising scientist, whose “heart overflowed with kindness and the love of virtue” but who had committed deeds of mischief, horrible beyond description.

Frankenstein´s crime was to have stitched together a giant man from the parts of other men and endowed it with life. When the ecstasy of conception is over, he is horrified by his creation which has a shriveled complexion and moves with convulsive motion. He flees from it, but the creature pursues him and murders one by one, his family members and loved ones. The retribution is a condemnation of Victor Frankenstein’s lack of appreciation of what it means to be human. When the monster confronts its maker, we learn that it felt itself to be “a poor, helpless, miserable wretch” and that he longed for companionship. The monster demands in moving words that Victor makes it a female companion, and promises that if he does so, it will do no further harm.

Victor fails to honor this romantic request and brings about his own downfall. 

Now: Halloween is nothing without a culinary fest.

In the book, Shelley writes that the creature´s vegetarianism becomes a symbol of his inherent goodness. She also shares a recipe for a green-hued corpse reviver, but I think we´ll skip that one. We´ll stay with the bread pudding made up of the components of a shepherd’s breakfast that the creature eats after it has unfortunately scared the breakfasts owner away. The bread pudding is rich, herby, and crispy, and serves as evidence that nothing can possibly go wrong with bread, onions, cheese, and cream and shows that a diet that does no harm can also be highly rewarding.

One lesson of Frankenstein is that what matters in life is not our accomplishments but how we treat each other. 

And with that let´s get back to Raphael´s philosophy and make Halloween the season of tolerance!

Embrace life with an attitude of gratitude!

Happy Halloween!