Xmas Impetus

.
(from my Facebook post:   my 'stuff' about Christmas; those of you who know me may sigh a knowing sigh. but the 6th paragraph down begins a description of the visits I made with Laura Houston Neville, Mike Neville, Elizabeth Wirth, Erin Wirth, James Houston (Jim) in Amityville this past Sunday to sing Christmas carols to two nonagenarian ladies, and the effects of those visits turn out to have been the most powerful experience of that day - which is saying something, because it was powerful enough to be with Laura and her family, all of whom I love deeply. Quite a day in Amityville.).

.

Xmas Impetus

.

I haven't put up my little tree so far. It's this shared reality business I find so suspect, and I suppose reflects some sort of germinating flicker of what ended up becoming this poem (see below) The Facts of the Biz. I don't care very much one way or the other who believes what or why, but I find I lack almost completely any desire to observe the protocol of any holiday anymore: the test of this is Christmas, since it seems to be the holiday at least in this hemisphere so laden with a sense of the necessity to celebrate it -- that not to celebrate it seems like a pouty snit, something 'psychologically' wrong with you: clearly you're resisting it for some involuted self-involved psychic snafu -- sure there's some resentment burning at the heart of why you do not savor joining the peace on earth movement as it exists in a Christmas card and therefore refuse to feel all warm and plummy and nostalgic.

.

As with most things, I credit the experience of New York City - not so much of me living in it as of how it lives in me - with offering me the only solution that is one to the conundrums of inner and outer human life: simply but repletely by vividly being those conundrums so vividly and (ultimately) entertainingly, of which one conundrum, of course, amounts to the collective vagaries of myself, I am enjoined without a struggle to accept them. Disappointment is egotism: so goes my harsh-sounding mantra which I nonetheless refuse to soften. We're disappointed when things don't go our way. But what if we stop wanting things to go our way? What if we begin to stir to like -- or at least feel ignited in us a powerful curiosity about -- things going their own way?

.

All I ever have to do is glance at this city - and every time I open my eyes I do that - for it to reassure me so much more grandly and intimately than Christmas ever could that whatever I think the cosmos is, I cannot not accept that I am it. Not just part of it. It. Everything and everyone I look at, from the lamp on my desk to the posse of teenagers howling down the street out my window on a Saturday night to the dim opposed reflections of my face that my iPhone just conjured from in this marvelous 1890s mirror I got from Frank Koumantaris many moons ago - all of that is the Thing Itself. Seen as a product of quantum mechanics or in the prose of Charles Dickens - all of this 'experience' IS the cosmos. Not just wary onlookers checking the cosmos out.

.

Christmas is clearly a bug in my ear, a stye in my eye, a bunch of thistles in my mouth - has been for as long as I can remember (first memory is me sitting on the window seat on the second floor of what was then the Kettelhack Cottage Place house in the hallway linking my brother's and my room with and to my parents' room, at night probably around 10 pm, after getting home from our yearly jaunt out to Guy Lombardo's restaurant somewhere east of us on Long Island to celebrate my mother's Christmas Eve birthday - a dinner paid for and insisted upon by my mother's stepmother whom my brother and I called nana - sitting there maybe at the age of 7 and peering out the gauzy-curtained windows into the winter night and wondering why I so rarely felt anything I was supposed to.

.

Segue to the same house yesterday, now the busy and bursting-with-Christmas Neville/ Houston/ Wirth Cottage Place house (where Laura and family live) and our jaunt with a dozen or so Amityville members of an ad hoc chorus (friendly bright bunch derived from the local Methodist Church) to sing Christmas carols to two nonagenarian ladies - both about 94 - in their separate abodes. One was a woman I'd once known reasonably well - the mother of a high school girlfriend of mine, the middle daughter of three, with whom I really was in love (my sexuality notwithstanding) and with whom I sustained one of the great friendships of my life, which she cut off for reasons I don't know if I'll ever learn, but not before she herself had produced three daughters whom I'd also grown to love - three sisters  (Chekhovian theme evolving here) whom she home-schooled and are among the most spectacularly gifted, heartful, imaginative people I know and ever expect to know -- anyway, Mrs. Carbee at 94 sat in her nicely appointed assisted-living apartment, her posture and demeanor as starchly brightly New England as I'd always seen her - cheerful, precise, ready to advise, full of life - and when I leaned down to greet her (she's hard of hearing so I did rather have to raise my voice, which therefore may have seemed like I meant to address the whole room) to tell her who I was, she lit up with an instantaneous full smile - so glad was she, I don't think especially to see me, but to recognize someone she'd known from decades ago when her own life was full of prospects it didn't have now.

.

The second 94 year old lady turned out to be the wife of the owner of village's premiere (I think sole) funeral home, an impressive white columned gray-painted manse in which, through many decades, the dead bodies of Amitvillians had been tended to and displayed and dispatched, including (in 2000 and 2003 respectively) my own father and mother. When I learned who they were, I knew this couple would know the Kettelhack name (my mother was well-known in the town for being an artist), but there was no reason to introduce myself to them – right here and now I was just another caroler. But this 94 year old lady, eyes closed, her body limp against the back of the upholstered chair she sat in, was not just another listener. As we proceeded from Angels We Have Heard on High to Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer to Silent Night I could see (since I was standing right next to her) the thinnest trickle of a tear running down her cheek from those closed eyes - a detail I describe in despair of it sounding cloyingly sentimental. But this tear was not a cliché. (No real tear ever is.) It seemed to me to be the distillation of a sweet unfathomable anguish and love born of and borne by a very particular and private life. To see her cry so subtly and inaudibly was to receive the most extraordinary gift.

.

So these ladies' effects on me and experiencing my love for the friends I was with at the very least prove to me that I can still feel. deeply - even under The Xmas Impetus. I'll probably always have the reflexes of a Christmas curmudgeon for my own tedious reasons, but as my consciousness acquires access to the equivalent what seems like a river delta - permitting a slower wider less forbidding and more easily seen array of reflections of Amityville-bred life to flow and spread out in front of me, my curiosity about their miracle is enlivened. And the enlivening of it returns me, as my Amityville-bred life first took me, to New York City.

.

Will I put up my little table-top decorated-by-my-mother-at-her-last-Christmas-in-2002 tree? I don't really want to so I don't think so. Does this signal some ongoing enmity, some festering unresolved Oedipal dilemma? I don't think so. I don't know what it signals except that I don't want to put it up and at last, at last, I find that I can do what I want and not do what I don't want and have it amount to a quiet personal never-you-mind-unless-you-want-to Alleluia. Angels sing to me, too, you know. They just don't look like the kind you see in cards.

.

They look more like you.

.

The Facts of the Biz

https://youtu.be/cMFRs-pODcg

.

Not the Holies you hoped to see,

but you’ve taken it largely in stride.

Theocracy’s bureaucracy’s

too bumpy a tedious ride.

.

Plugging you into divinity

is the job they say they’ll do.

But the spill of their magnanimity

has limits. The favors that you

.

desired from them required too much

to be processed, backed-up and aligned.

To permit the healing of sacred touch

requires ten forms to be signed.

.

So yes, they’ve now abandoned you,

and left you unloved in the lurch.

And perhaps in effect it’s remanded you

to a far better life outside church.

.

Who can be sure of the facts of the biz?

The teleological tenets that matter?

It’s possible everything’s fine as it is.

But it won’t make the Vatican fatter.

.