It behooves me, I think, to try to explain why the Christmas holidays compound life's sadness, as I said the other day they do. It's actually pretty simple. The sadness of life lies in loss. We are born (if we haven't lost already in the womb) and immediately start losing things, at last our life itself. The holidays are symbolic of our once-upon-a-time hope that loss is an illusion:
Nature doesn't really die during this time of dark and ice, but renews with the coming of spring. We don't really die, for someone born many years ago did something to ensure that we might live forever. Our families may have split apart, but during this time we can get together again as though nothing has changed.Yes, Nature for a few more seasons will be renewed, but not forever and ever. Our planet is undergoing changes and, even if Nature wins the fight to survive, it survives only for a while, until the death of the sun.
Yes, someone died, but nothing he did or could do is going to change anything about our death. The millions who believe that that is not just a myth show remarkable powers of self-deception. Christmas reminds the thoughtful that it just isn't so, and that may be the deepest sadness of Christmas.
Yes, some families have enough survivors left to mount a gathering, but it is not the same as remembered. It isn't even remembered accurately, as forgotten animosities resurface, especially when people drink too much or fall back into roles everyone thought they'd outgrown. Or someone dies on the road to Grandma's house, or spends Christmas in an airport. A statistically significant increase in suicides can be reliably predicted.
The Christmas holidays (including New Year's Day) are sad for reminding us of particular losses. Our parents are dead, some of our siblings, a number of friends. We can't quite get back into the child's belief in Santa Claus—however much authors like Tomie dePaola, in his season's sensational book, Christmas Remembered, like to try to pretend otherwise (I heard Dick Gordon's program today on NPR).
True, many can get into Christmas, don't see anything amiss. "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" continues to amuse them. They make out in the gift-exchange, they genuinely enjoy lighting up another's face with a thoughtful present. They save even more at the Christmas sales than they figured they would, even if it means spending more than they planned to. Or, if they're in retail, their store loses less than predicted. They get runner-up for best-decorated house in the neighborhood.
For them, the loss comes later. The guests are gone, the house is cold again, the lights to take down. Wrapping materials to discard. Tree to chop up. Unwanted gifts to take back for exchange or refund. The pain of the contrast between a day or two or heightened liveliness and the empty let-down of the day-after.
Loss compounded.
The dreariness of winter and the short days don't exactly help to raise one's spirits, either.
ReplyDeleteA dear friend who took a look at my blog last night tells me that he was saddened by it.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry if my blog saddens some readers. It isn't for the weak of stomach. I think that Christmas has extraordinary power to emphasize loss, and of course people don't wait for it for that purpose (although I dread it for that reason). People hope that "the magic of Christmas" (in the words of North Carolina's governor's greetings to state employees) will make wonderful things happen, but the heightened expectation leads to the inevitable disappointment of which I speak.
Defense mechanisms, of which belief in God and Christmas is an example, protect us and, ironically, protect us better the more believing we are. Those of us who can't (or choose not to) believe them anymore hope for salvation in Spinoza's sense.
"Spinoza," writes Antonio R. Damasio in his 2003 book, Looking for Spinoza, "asks for an acceptance of natural events as necessary, in keeping with scientific understanding. For example, death and ensuing loss cannot be prevented; we should acquiesce. The Spinoza solution also asks the individual to attempt a break between the emotionally competent stimuli that can trigger negative emotions—passions such as fear, anger, jealously, sadness—and the very mechanisms that enact emotion. Instead, the individual should substitute emotionally competent stimuli capable of triggering positive, nourishing emotions. To facilitate this goal Spinoza recommends the mental rehearsing of negative emotional stimuli as a way to build a tolerance for negative emotions and gradually acquire a knack for generating positive ones. This is, in effect, Spinoza as mental immunologist developing a vaccine capable of creating antipassion antibodies. There is a Stoic color to the entire exercise, although it must be noted that Spinoza criticized the Stoics for assuming that the control of the emotions could ever be complete."