Walking In Early November

Night in early November. The wind shakes the trees. Leaves fly in clusters like startled birds. Damp air softens sight and thickens sound - haloed street lamps, blurred decorative lights, trains in the distance, the constant hissing leaves. Halloween has been over for days but its feeling remains. Decorations still hang. With trick or treaters come and gone these holiday trappings now have a truly haunted aura, provoking childhood memories and older, hidden histories. It’s common knowledge that the ritual of Trick or Treating came from putting out small offerings at harvest time to keep evil spirits from doing mischief. Lesser known is the history of the mischief perpetuated by the costumed “evil spirits” as the celebration become secular –a history that encompasses minor acts of property damage, arson, class rebellion, ethnic rivalries, and a terror of the poor. Mass culture and mass produced candy may have tamed Trick or Treating but the hand reaching for candy retains some supernatural power. It reaches through centuries to the sugar trade –the industry whose demand for expendable bodies fueled global slavery; it reaches back to the Haitian rebellion; to sugar rationing during wars; across the Caribbean and the southern US where poor workers still tend sugar fields and set fire to them in autumn. Halloween, the holiday of paradox, created from hybrid immigrant traditions but this year many immigrant children were afraid to go trick or treating. It was not the monster on the porch they feared. They feared ICE agents, some in halloween masks.

Skeletons are everywhere this year. They dance in gardens, socialize on porches. Their kinetic postures recall 1930’s cartoon versions of the Danse Macabre with clacking bones and marimba driven jazz. Perky as these plastic Reapers are,their lipless grins are a reminder that many of our Halloween traditions arrived with Irish immigrants escaping the potato famine. It took the roaring 20’s for these gleefully ambivalent figures to jig their way into the popular Halloween canon. Not that the traditional Danse Macabre has ever disappeared or slowed its pace. I’ve personally seen its waltz since I was a teenager in the 80’s when the famine in Ethiopia hit pop culture; when images of bodies wasting away from AIDS were commonplace and made being queer an actual mortal terror; and at this moment as my social media feed shows Isreal starving Gaza while Death frolics on American lawns. It’s one of history’s jokes that the skeleton stripped of flesh has become a kooky mascot but a starving body remains a horror.

At another house animatronic zombie figures in move in cages. Their movements are slow and uncoordinated as if weak from starvation. I wonder if images of famine and starvation would be more effective at provoking public response if we weren’t oversaturated with zombie imagery. There is a particular capitalist magic in the transformation of zombies from supernaturally exploited slaves and workers to invading, consuming hordes - a transformation in which gaunt, famine stricken bodies become soulless aggressors that give us permission to take the law into our own hands. Looking at the cages I can’t help but think of Detention Centers and how ICE agents might think of themselves as versions of the human survivors in “The Walking Dead.”

Meanwhile, at the local ICE Detention Center it’s likely that frogs, dinosaurs, and Pokemon characters dance before masked figures in Amazon purchased riot gear. Tear gas may be rolling over across the scene like dry ice fog. Though this has been happening for weeks it’s still hard to reconcile the deadly serious cause of these nightly clashes with their visual absurdity. Civil disobedience as filmed by Georges Méliès. The protestors could be the reptilian aliens played by dancers from the Follies Bergère in “A Trip To The Moon.” (Pardon this tangent into Méliès’ films but they are portraits of playful mayhem and deeply marked by the bombings he experienced at the age of 7 during the Franco-Prussian War as well as years of working in brutal factories. He also spent his career fighting against the studio monopoly of Thomas Edison (America’s first tech bro oligarch), state censorship, and even the French Army during WWI who confiscated and melted down many of his films to make boot heels for soldiers who would likely die in trenches. So here we are again at History’s penny arcade. Absurdity and terror on loop.)

Rain begins on my way home. I watch cloth ghosts transforming, ethereal to physical, as they grow wet and heavy. Soon these spirits will be taken down, laid to rest till next year. I don’t want to see them go. This year I wish just one Halloween trope was real –the vengeful ghost, justice from beyond the grave. Think of how much better the world could be if we had to face the consequences of what we’ve done to the dead (and the ghosted living).

A morning walk in search of the comfortable, calming melancholy typical of early November. The feeling of being in rhythm with the changing foliage, bright one day, tarnished the next. Thoughts of winter haven’t yet turned to dread of damp and cold. Time seeming to slow with the chill. The yearning to be a leaf released from the tree, plucked free by ghostly fingers, spiraling downward or lifted and gone on some random wind.

This year is different. Melancholy is plentiful, but comfort is elusive in the U.S. right now. I keep hearing the phrase “the Autumn of American Democracy”. To my mind Democracy, American or otherwise, has never come into full bloom but with progress we’ve made slipping away and our future precarious there’s no denying the feeling that summer has passed and left us without a harvest. We’ve become like birds and squirrels frantically gathering and sequestering our resources for the months ahead.

Still, this November is one of the loviest I can remember. And if there’s little comfort to be found there is beauty. Comfort would lull us toward winter, tempt us with hibernation when we cannot afford to sleep. Fascism, authoritarianism –these are warm, fast machines that have no time for the season’s pace.

Beauty though, that’s a waking dream, an energy, an igniting force. Think of being caught in a gusting autumn wind, suddenly feeling clean and strong while leaves spin all around like a protective circle of fire.