Monday again . . . and it’s that day.
Cricket, the abandoned feral dog who made himself at home here, has already been chasing things we cannot see. Sometimes, of course, it’s merely a matter of vantage point and scale: Where growth along the fence blocks my view, Cricket can see a coyote moving between the posts, trotting along the edge of the road.
Other times, it’s less comforting: It’s positively eerie to watch the dogs barking at something, hackles raised, in the drive or the next field, the entire expanse open to view . . . and nothing, nothing is there. Except it is; it just exist beyond the bounds of human perception, but not beyond that of the dogs.
As the cold deepens, the number of such incidents increases. We always found that one of the most active nights for such events invariably is Christmas Eve, usually even more so than Halloween. The air is colder, clearer, thinner; it’s almost possible to feel the threadbare nature of what separates this world from others.
In truth, if you look at Indigenous cultures the world over, seen through the long lens of history, it’s not uncommon to find practices that today we might associate more with Halloween: variants on what we now call trick-or-treating, costumery, masking, the liberal use of prophylactic imagery and the protection of fire.
Fire has gotten a bit of a bad rap here this year, just over the ridgeline as we are from what was the biggest wildfire in this land’s recorded history. i’m alays of two minds in referring to it as a “wildfire,” though, which seems to imply some accident of nature, what insurance companies like to call an “act of God.” But no deity, colonial or otherwise, had anything to do with this one. No, this existential horror was visited upon the land directly by colonial human [and official, governmental] negligence. Even that seems too weak; misfeasance, or perhaps simply misconduct, is perhaps more descriptive of that particular set of abominations.
So we are reactive now to the very word, and in a twelve-hundred-year drought, rightly so. And yet fire is necessary to survival.
These days, the same is true of masking.
Oh, it’s a different kind of masking, sure, but it’s a face covering all the same. Now, it goes at least some small way to protect us from dying of a deadly virus (although it would go much further to that end if everyone did the bare minimum that science, public health, and minimal civility require by wearing one, too).
On the colonial side of this contry’s history, the other sort of masking was a means of evading responsibiity for terrible acts. In our way, it perhaps more often resembles that of its various Halloween-related purposes: originally, evading identification by negative forces ad evil spirits that are up to no good; more commonly now, paying tribute to a character or role or vocation to be admired (or respected, if not feared).
Traditional masks often give hard form and structure to practices such as face paint, a practice whose purposes may be the same, or may be intended to instill fear in enemies. But both serve another purpose, too: an invisible masking, an intangible but effective one that occurs within our hearts and spirits, shoring up our reserves of courage and strength by allowing us to inhabit, momentarily, an identity that is not weakened by our own vulnerabilities.
Much like invisible fires.
Fire is a metaphor that seems to cross cultural and geographic lines: We use it as shorthand for strength, for bravery, for passion and commitment to a cause, and, yes, for love. In our way, all of those are bound and braided together, qualities consistently required of us to varying degrees throughout life, if we are living in the good way that was given to us in our own cosmologies. Fire protects, keeping the cold and predatory animals and less tangible threats at bay; fire illuminates, psychologically fencing off the dark that hides such dangers within it even as it allows us to acquire information, knowledge, wisdom in times and places that would otherwise keep it hidden from our view.
And so maybe it was always inevitable that the subject of this week’s photo meditation, the image above, should have come together as it did, and be captured on film by Wings in this haunting black-and-white format. He shot this one fifteen, sixteen, perhaps seventeen years ago, in our old original gallery, and what you’re seeing are masks and fetish-like carvings (and a single silver-and-stone tribute to the Four Sacred Directions) hung upon the whitewashed convex outer wall of the flue above the fireplace.
Invisible fires, indeed.
The matching image, taken either just before or (I suspect more likely) immediately after this one, will lead tomorrow’s post. It, too, is shot on film in black and white, and it shows that which is out of range in this photo: the base of the flue, flowing into the mantel and fireplace, all of the same whitewashed adobe, and with a fire burning hot and bright in the grate. Every time I see this photo, even though I can’t see the fire, I know it’s there.
Just as I can’t see a person behind the traditional masks — raising a question, perhaps, as to whether they are truly masks in the archetypal sense of the word if they merely hang on a wall, unused for their purpose — but I can see the signs of the powers they are meant to impart to the wearer.
Invisible masks. Invisible fires.
But no less real for that. Indeed, that is perhaps the very definition of power: unseen, intangible, nothing one can touch or hold, and yet its effects are active and unmistakable.
No wonder our kids love to dress up at Halloween (as did we before them).
There will be no trick-or-treaters here tonight; this is far too rural, our home set far back from the road with a heavy iron gate in between. I gather that it’s not much practiced anymore anyway, modern parents having deemed it too risky outside carefully controlled and circumscribed contexts that involve public group settings, often of the corporate variety, and plenty of daylight.
But the mystery has been lost along the way.
Tonight may be the end of the month as the world knows it, but it’s not an end of much else; nor is tomorrow a beginning, for that matter. They are merely markers along the path of this hoop we know as life, but they do have the advantage of reminding us once more of the qualities that life is meant to embody, of the virtues we are supposed to practice from our own hearts and spirits. Yes, we often need invisible masks to help us stay brave enough to do it. But we have invisible fires burning strong in our hearts.
That’s something to carry with us into the cold season now.
~ Aji
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