A Festivus for the Rest of Us

Early this month, as a Nativity display was erected in the state house of Olympia, Washington, another sign was making the news. A purported "atheist" sign was erected there, not in order to celebrate anything, but to proclaim "there are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell." The sign did refer obliquely to the Winter Solistice, which is both a natural phenomeneon and a pagan holiday. And few people dispute that Christmas is suspiciously timed in relation to this event and the pagan holiday known as Yule or Saturnalia. But the timing of New Year's Day is just as coincidental. And the fact remains that the Nativity scene, presumably erected by Christians, did not feature a sign arguing that atheists will burn in hell. Nor have prior menorahs come with disclaimers proclaiming gentiles to be unclean.

Of course, this contrarian sign, displayed with the sole intent of annoying Christians (it did not criticize jihad, ouija or circumcision) was promptly stolen. And that made headlines too. Although I am not a believer, I have stated elsewhere that, in the words of Camille Paglia, I find that "atheism alone is a rotten corpse." There are an infinite number of things in which we don't believe. I don't care what you don't believe, just as much as I find it unhelpful, when planning a trip, to have a list of places that you are not interested in visiting. Life is too short to focus on the negative. We are born happy. But some of us spend an aweful lot of time trying to be unhappy.

One thing that I have long enjoyed is the classic sit-com, Seinfeld. In the episode "The Strike" George Costanza, one of the most eagerly miserable of characters in the history of comedy, is caught in one of his schemes, and in order to exculpate himself he ends up inviting his boss to dinner not for Christmas, but for his family's peculiar celebrations of Festivus, a holiday "for the rest of us." The episode is in part a sendup of the modern Political Correction of the Christmas season. The fact that the largest holiday of the Western year is for some people a holy day has become an excuse for the most awkward self-abasement and circumlocution. Festivus is portrayed as the sort of actually embarrassing holiday, with its feats of strength and its airing of grievances, which you might think the celebration of Jesus' birthday would have to be for people to be so fervent in their desire to avoid naming it.

This made-up holiday is so bizarre, and so appropriate for George and his disfunctional family, that you might think that it was invented specifically for Seinfeld. But it turns out that Seinfeld writer Daniel O'Keefe's father Dan had actually created Festivus in 1966 as a commemoration of his first date with his future wife. The original holiday, celebrated in February, did not feature an aluminum pole – a symbolically denuded Christmas tree. On Seinfeld, celebrants had a chance to tell off everybody who had annoyed them during the year. And the hellish holiday didn't end until someone pinned the head of the household in a wrestling match. If you want to know how the original feast was celebrated, you can read O'Keefe's book, The Real Festivus.

Festivus has entered the culture. There is also a book called Festivus, a Holiday for the Rest of Us, which deals with the mainstreaming of this celebration. And in 2008, in Illinois (but apparently not Washington) a Festivus pole was erected in the Capitol rotunda. Maybe two thousand years from now Jerry Seinfeld will be the patron saint of comedy. Maybe not. But at least, unlike the cheerless naysayers in Olympia, he knew how to laugh.

From Lovecraft to Roerich on the WorldWideWeb

Glancing through the news the other day, my eye was caught by the headline "The Mountains of Madness." The article was about an expedition to the Gamburtsev Mountain Range in central Antarctica. The mountains were discovered 50 years ago in the International Geophysical Year of 1958. This year (2008) is the International Polar Year, and a team of scientists has returned to the Gamburtsevs to try, among other things, to explain their formation. But the headline itself, "Mountains of Madness," is an allusion to a novella by science fiction author H. P. Lovecraft, At The Mountains of Madness, written in 1931.



Lovecraft is at best an acquired taste. He is generally described as a writer of horror or Gothic stories. His style is clear and his imagery quite visual, if his subject matter tends toward the alien and demonic. I read many of his stories as a teen, but hadn't revisited them since. After seeing the headline though, I thought I would try him again and see what I thought. His works are available for download at Project Gutenberg Australia.

First I read The Colour out of Space, a Gothic tale about an asteroid which crashes to earth in a small New England town, bringing with it a malevolent alien influence. The story was not very enthralling. Told as a flashback, and with no human conflicts, it lacked any real drama. But one thing was of interest. Lovecraft was apparently fascinated with science, and he mentioned several phenomena with which I was unfamiliar, including Widmanstätten patterns, which he mentioned were revealed when a cut section of the meteorite was treated with acid. Unfamiliar with the term, and suspecting he might simply have made it up, like some technology out of a Star Trek episode, I checked with Wikipedia. It turns out such beautiful fractal patterns do indeed exist, and I have pictured them here.

Next, I decided to read the longer work, At the Mountains of Madness, to which the headline had alluded and which I had remembered particularly liking as a teen. The story involves an expedition to a massive mountain range in the central wastes of Antarctica. Journeying inward the adveturers discover the remains of an ancient, alien civilization, finding to their horror that even after millions of years there is still some living presence in the cyclopean ruins. Once again I was struck by an allusion of Lovecraft's. Upon first encountering the alien habitations in the mountains, his protagonist describes them as "like the old Asian castles clinging to steep mountains in Roerich's paintings." Who was Roerich? Curious, I again checked Wikipedia, and came across an interesting artist, Nicholas Roerich, seven of whose works I have reproduced here.

Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947) was a painter, archeologist, philosopher and Orientalist from St. Petersburg, Russia. An accomplished illustrator and folklorist, he suggested the subject, collaborated with the composer, and did the stage designs for the riotous Paris debut of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, subtitled "Pictures from Pagan Russia." He was thrice nominated for the Nobel Peace prize for his work to preserve cultural artifacts. He was a noted theospohist and painted on Buddhist, Pagan and Eastern Orthodox Christian themes. His life and work are featured at the Roerich Museum (here is their website) here in Manhattan. I hope to visit it soon. Here we see an accurrate depiction of a Pagan shrine, probably in the Altai Mountains of Greater Mongolia.

Roerich travelled through Asia and the Russian Orient. He documented the area's geography and cultural artifacts and painted real, historical, and mythological landscapes and events. His style is notable for its stylization, color, clarity and dynamic themes. He is not a great figurative artist. His human figures are simple. Nature, rather than man, plays the central role in his works. But he does depict themes which evoke wonder and awe, and subjects of epic beauty. Here in Ashram we see his typical combination of the contemplative individual set in a monumental landscape of brilliant color. Note the Hindu religious iconography on the rocks.



Visitors from Overseas, directly above, depicts the Varangians, Norse Vikings who explored the waterways of Russia, travelling as far as Constantinople and the Caspian. The Varangians or Varyags are mentioned in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings as a people decieved by Sauron, and Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead (adapted as the movie The Thirteenth Warrior) tells the tale of Beowulf from the perspective of an Arab adventurer who travels with Varangians from Baghdad to Denmark and back. (In an interesting twist in light of this essay, Crichton actually cites Lovecraft's fictional Necronomicon in the biography to his book.)

The Arcadian painting For Snegurochka (the Snow Maiden) is a set design for an Operatic adaptation of the Tale by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Of a similar theme to The Little Mermaid, Snegurochka is the subject of Russian fairy tales, where she is depicted as the granddaughter of Father Christmas, or as a creation out of snow. Longing to love a mortal man she is granted her wish but at the cost of her immortality.

Descent into Hell is one of Roerich's religious works. Here we see Christ after his crucifiction but before his resurrection descending into Sheol. According to Christian belief, Christ takes upon the suffering of man, not only on the cross, but also in the afterlife. He travels to hell, throws open the gates, and allows those in the grace of God to depart. Here, in place of devils, Roerich uses deep sea angler fish, a recently discovered demonic denizen of the deep.



Battle of the Heavens, directly above, depicts a theme common to the Eurasian Steppe. The vast plains of Central Aisa, like the Tornado Alley of the American Midwest, are an area of dramatic meteorological phenomena. The worship of Father Sky has roots in the fascination of the Hyperboreans with great storms and standing cloud formations that exist where the Jet Stream, passing over the high mountains of Central Asia, causes animated hovering storm clouds to condense.

You can read about Nicholas Roerich at Wikipedia and check out Roerich's artwork the Nicholas Roerich Museum.

"The Mists of Avalon" Marion Zimmer Bradley

It is a time of change in Britain. Immigrants bringing their foreign ways expect women to surrender the power they have held in the Isle, to resign from politics, to adopt to the newcomers' standards of modesty, to submit to the religious rule of men and their Middle Eastern religion of peace. The time is the fifth century, and the invaders are Christians and Anglo-Saxons who will ally to dominate the matriarchal Pagan and Celtic society of ancient Britain. The story is the Mists of Avalon, an epic Arthurian novel of love and war, spanning three generations of British women, told from the viewpoint of Arthur's sister Morgaine (Morgan la Fey) and the women of Avalon and Camelot.

Published in 1983, this well-reviewed novel, the product of years of research by award-winning author Marion Zimmer Bradley, was a best seller for four months in hard cover and over four years in its paper back release. While the novel is set in a world of fantasy, its magic plays a tertiary role, behind that of the women whose lives it realistically portrays and the men who play a supporting role in its lovingly crafted plot.

Morgaine is a tragic heroine, struggling against enemies, convention, and even family and friends to maintain her rights and champion the freedom of the people from priestly suppression of their long-cherished way of life. Morgaine, a priestess of Avalon, finds that the power she assumes from her religious role comes at a heavy personal cost. Bradley fleshes out Morgaine as a full person, with loves and losses, triumphs and painful compromises, a hero with whom we sympathize and for whom we root as she battles for her cult, her family, for Britain, and for herself.

Bradley spent years researching the Arthurian legends and the Druidic and Early Christian religion of the Isles. Much is speculation. But the book is one of the most real works of fiction you will ever read. The story is one of people and their values set in a time which happens now to be mythical. Magic plays the most minor of roles. Suspension of disbelief will not trouble the most hard-boiled reader. Neither is this romance, which has been called a feminist tract by some, a "woman's" book. It is a full-fleshed work of high literature, comparable in scope, conflict, characterization and fullness of theme to Ayn Rand's Fountainhead or Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.

There is a made-for-television adaptation of this novel. While I have heard it highly praised, I found it an unwatchable farce compared to the original. The book is one of my top ten favorites, and is recommended without reservation.

The Doctrines of Epicurus

While Ayn Rand was quite vocal in her praise of Aristotle, much of her philosophy and many of her doctrines are strikingly similar to that of two other schools which during the Hellenistic age held much greater influence than did the Peripatos. One school, the Stoics, is mostly familiar to us in the parody of Spock, the "emotionless" pointy-eared Vulcan. The Epicureans, on the other hand, were so hated by the early Christians and Jews that epicure and apikoros became bywords for godlessness and licentiousness. This characterization was, unfortunately, a slander. Even Spinoza (actually a Stoic) in the 17th Century was branded apikoros and placed under the almost unprecedented lifetime kherem or excommunication of the Jewry of Amsterdam.

In modern terms, Epicureanism might be viewed loosely as a type of scientific Buddhism. The essence of happiness is freedom from suffering. Men suffer due to fear of malevolent gods and the chaos of nature. By studying nature, and himself, man can free himself from most fear. Suffering is short or bearable. By understanding that the gods, if they exist, are perfect, and hence wish no him ill, man can free himself from all fear. Epicurus held that study and wisdom applied in a life of freindship and moderation can lead to complete happiness. Violently opposed for his materialism and theological skepticism by the Stoics, the members of that school nonetheless held that Epicurus lived an exemplary and blameless life.

Below I have posted the forty Principle Doctrines of Epicurus. My source is Vincent Cook's epicurus.net.

The Principle Doctrines of Epicurus

1. A blessed and indestructible being has no trouble himself and brings no trouble upon any other being; so he is free from anger and partiality, for all such things imply weakness.

2. Death is nothing to us; for that which has been dissolved into its elements experiences no sensations, and that which has no sensation is nothing to us.

3. The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When such pleasure is present, so long as it is uninterrupted, there is no pain either of body or of mind or of both together.

4. Continuous bodily pain does not last long; instead, pain, if extreme, is present a very short time, and even that degree of pain which slightly exceeds bodily pleasure does not last for many days at once. Diseases of long duration allow an excess of bodily pleasure over pain.

5. It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely, though he lives honorably and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life.

6. In order to obtain protection from other men, any means for attaining this end is a natural good.

7. Some men want fame and status, thinking that they would thus make themselves secure against other men. If the life of such men really were secure, they have attained a natural good; if, however, it is insecure, they have not attained the end which by nature's own prompting they originally sought.

8. No pleasure is a bad thing in itself, but the things which produce certain pleasures entail disturbances many times greater than the pleasures themselves.

9. If every pleasure had been capable of accumulation, not only over time but also over the entire body or at least over the principal parts of our nature, then pleasures would never differ from one another.

10. If the things that produce the pleasures of profligate men really freed them from fears of the mind concerning celestial and atmospheric phenomena, the fear of death, and the fear of pain; if, further, they taught them to limit their desires, we should never have any fault to find with such persons, for they would then be filled with pleasures from every source and would never have pain of body or mind, which is what is bad.

11. If we had never been troubled by celestial and atmospheric phenomena, nor by fears about death, nor by our ignorance of the limits of pains and desires, we should have had no need of natural science.

12. It is impossible for someone to dispel his fears about the most important matters if he doesn't know the nature of the universe but still gives some credence to myths. So without the study of nature there is no enjoyment of pure pleasure.

13. There is no advantage to obtaining protection from other men so long as we are alarmed by events above or below the earth or in general by whatever happens in the boundless universe.

14. Protection from other men, secured to some extent by the power to expel and by material prosperity, in its purest form comes from a quiet life withdrawn from the multitude.

15. The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity.

16. Chance seldom interferes with the wise man; his greatest and highest interests have been, are, and will be, directed by reason throughout his whole life.

17. The just man is most free from disturbance, while the unjust is full of the utmost disturbance.

18. Bodily pleasure does not increase when the pain of want has been removed; after that it only admits of variation. The limit of mental pleasure, however, is reached when we reflect on these bodily pleasures and their related emotions, which used to cause the mind the greatest alarms.

19. Unlimited time and limited time afford an equal amount of pleasure, if we measure the limits of that pleasure by reason.

20. The flesh receives as unlimited the limits of pleasure; and to provide it requires unlimited time. But the mind, intellectually grasping what the end and limit of the flesh is, and banishing the terrors of the future, procures a complete and perfect life, and we have no longer any need of unlimited time. Nevertheless the mind does not shun pleasure, and even when circumstances make death imminent, the mind does not lack enjoyment of the best life.

21. He who understands the limits of life knows that it is easy to obtain that which removes the pain of want and makes the whole of life complete and perfect. Thus he has no longer any need of things which involve struggle.

22. We must consider both the ultimate end and all clear sensory evidence, to which we refer our opinions; for otherwise everything will be full of uncertainty and confusion.

23. If you fight against all your sensations, you will have no standard to which to refer, and thus no means of judging even those sensations which you claim are false.

24. If you reject absolutely any single sensation without stopping to distinguish between opinion about things awaiting confirmation and that which is already confirmed to be present, whether in sensation or in feelings or in any application of intellect to the presentations, you will confuse the rest of your sensations by your groundless opinion and so you will reject every standard of truth. If in your ideas based upon opinion you hastily affirm as true all that awaits confirmation as well as that which does not, you will not avoid error, as you will be maintaining the entire basis for doubt in every judgment between correct and incorrect opinion.

25. If you do not on every occasion refer each of your actions to the ultimate end prescribed by nature, but instead of this in the act of choice or avoidance turn to some other end, your actions will not be consistent with your theories.

26. All desires that do not lead to pain when they remain unsatisfied are unnecessary, but the desire is easily got rid of, when the thing desired is difficult to obtain or the desires seem likely to produce harm.

27. Of all the means which wisdom acquires to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is friendship.

28. The same conviction which inspires confidence that nothing we have to fear is eternal or even of long duration, also enables us to see that in the limited evils of this life nothing enhances our security so much as friendship.

29. Of our desires some are natural and necessary, others are natural but not necessary; and others are neither natural nor necessary, but are due to groundless opinion.

30. Those natural desires which entail no pain when unsatisfied, though pursued with an intense effort, are also due to groundless opinion; and it is not because of their own nature they are not got rid of but because of man's groundless opinions.

31. Natural justice is a pledge of reciprocal benefit, to prevent one man from harming or being harmed by another.

32. Those animals which are incapable of making binding agreements with one another not to inflict nor suffer harm are without either justice or injustice; and likewise for those peoples who either could not or would not form binding agreements not to inflict nor suffer harm.

33. There never was such a thing as absolute justice, but only agreements made in mutual dealings among men in whatever places at various times providing against the infliction or suffering of harm.

34. Injustice is not an evil in itself, but only in consequence of the fear which is associated with the apprehension of being discovered by those appointed to punish such actions.

35. It is impossible for a man who secretly violates the terms of the agreement not to harm or be harmed to feel confident that he will remain undiscovered, even if he has already escaped ten thousand times; for until his death he is never sure that he will not be detected.

36. In general justice is the same for all, for it is something found mutually beneficial in men's dealings, but in its application to particular places or other circumstances the same thing is not necessarily just for everyone.

37. Among the things held to be just by law, whatever is proved to be of advantage in men's dealings has the stamp of justice, whether or not it be the same for all; but if a man makes a law and it does not prove to be mutually advantageous, then this is no longer just. And if what is mutually advantageous varies and only for a time corresponds to our concept of justice, nevertheless for that time it is just for those who do not trouble themselves about empty words, but look simply at the facts.

38. Where without any change in circumstances the things held to be just by law are seen not to correspond with the concept of justice in actual practice, such laws are not really just; but wherever the laws have ceased to be advantageous because of a change in circumstances, in that case the laws were for that time just when they were advantageous for the mutual dealings of the citizens, and subsequently ceased to be just when they were no longer advantageous.

39. The man who best knows how to meet external threats makes into one family all the creatures he can; and those he can not, he at any rate does not treat as aliens; and where he finds even this impossible, he avoids all dealings, and, so far as is advantageous, excludes them from his life.

40. Those who possess the power to defend themselves against threats by their neighbors, being thus in possession of the surest guarantee of security, live the most pleasant life with one another; and their enjoyment of the fullest intimacy is such that if one of them dies prematurely, the others do not lament his death as though it called for pity.

Umberto Eco "The Name of the Rose"

Upon rereading Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose I am struck by the obvious influence of Jorge Luis Borges on the work. When I first read the book in 1984 I was not aware of Borges, and had only just put down my first reading of Atlas Shrugged. The book itself is presented, in Borgesian manner, as a reconstructed text based upon a partial translation of a now lost and otherwise undocumented manuscript from the late Middle Ages. The plot concerns the investigation of a murder mystery set in a fictional monastery renowned for its unique library, the largest collection of books in Christian Europe, supposedly holding works of Aristotle lost to modernity. The characters are primarily scribes or other intellectuals. Yet, unlike much of Borges' esoteric works, this novel is not merely a curiosity, an intellectual insider's joke, but a true intellectual adventure story rewarding on many levels.

The hero, William of Baskerville, a Franciscan brother, is a champion of reason who has abandoned his position with the inquisition. He saw that institution not as a means of pursuing the truth, but as the use of force to compel confessions, which, even when they implicate guilty parties, are an affront to God's justice and his gift to man of the intellect. Brother William is a follower of Thomas Aquinas, a student of Roger Bacon, and a proponent of the scientific method, although he does not, of course, explicitly identify his investigations as such.

The story is told in retrospect by the Benedictine monk Adso of Melk. At the time of the story Adso was in his teens but he writes his tale as a dying man who promises to "tell the facts without interpretation" so that the signs he conveys will speak for themselves, allowing other wiser men in the future to draw their own interpretations. Adso is a mystic, and not an intellectual, but he admires William as a sincere instrument of justice, better than he.

The novel is steeped in the intricacies of pre-reformation Catholic theology; the debates among the great Scholastic thinkers such as Abelard, Occam, Duns Scotus and the other thinkers at the universities of Paris and Oxford, the details of monastic life, the methods of copying and illuminating texts, the herbal lore of the high mediaeval period, the particulars of numerology and its place even in architectural symbolism, and of course, as one would expect in the tradition of Borges, a great deal of irony, symbolism, abstruse academic references, and the ever present contrast between substance and form, essence and accident, genus and species, and exemplar and type. We hear Latin on most every page, verse and speech in Middle English, and contemporary German, French, Italian, Spanish and Provencal. One character, Salvatore, is so deformed that not only does he physically resemble a monster sewn together from the parts of different corpses, his speech is an almost unintelligible farrago of words from Latin and all the vernacular tongues which he has encountered. Listening to him can be as fascinating (or as disconcerting) as listening to a conversation on the NYC subway between a mixed family of a Puerto Rican and an Orthodox Russian Jew whose children go to public school - English, Spanish, Yiddish, Russian, Hebrew and Ebonics all in one sentence.



Adso himself religiously promises on the first page of his memoirs not to relay "mere" visual details such as the expressions of speakers or the appearance of their faces, as they "will be long dead" by the time we read his description of events. This is an ironic promise which, thankfully for us, he breaks almost immediately. While some of the descriptions of architectural, sacrimonial and mythological details can become tedious, the book is visually vivid and his concretizations make the setting and characterizations immediate and lifelike.

While the murder mystery is the prime mover of the story, it serves as an excuse for many interesting digressions: lengthy discussions of Papal, local and Imperial politics, the details of everyday monastic life, not only spiritual, but also scribal and mundane, such as the details of animal slaughter and food preparation; the tensions between various factions within the Church advocating poverty versus temporal power, faith versus reason, tradition and the new learning, the tensions between the old feudal political and economic power of the monastic centers and the Pope versus the rising market power of the new trade centers and the monetary power of the princes.

Much of the content of this amazing and brilliant work is religious, specifically Catholic in substance. There is lengthy examination of religious themes such as temptation, sin, and penitence, the nature of God and Satan, heaven and hell, prophesy, heresy, schism and persecution, the Antichrist and the Second Coming and personal salvation through works and grace. This contemplation is counterposed to the main action of the hero, a true scholar and scientist who uses reason and observation, not suspicion and circular justifications, to solve his mystery and save much more.

This book has been made into a very satisfying movie. Yet, as with any great work of art, its adaptation into that medium has required that much be simplified, reduced or omitted. The movie retains the bare bones of the actual murder mystery, and makes Adso's love interest (Adso was Christian Slater's first movie role) much more important than in the novel. On film, cliche often replaces depth. In the novel, the first charcter to die is a young initiate who has had a homosexual encounter with another initiate. In the movie he is not, as in the book, seduced by another young man, but by an obese, leering old lecher. While the movie is a few hours diversion, this novel is an engrossing immersion in and education about a world of which many of us know little, but a world which is much closer in time than one might think. In a fictional monastery in the mountains of Italy in an age which many call dark we literally see the power of reason, the place of philosophy, and the fight of men of good will to preserve the light amidst that darkness.