Every Christmas I pray for a Viking feast and cold hard rain to pour. It is always the unhappiest time of the year for me , in America. The wind never seems to get cold enough here, the woods never get lonely enough, and the American people themselves, eternally clueless. They have no spines, no traditions, no memories, no history. Even the celebraton of Christmas .. and the Winter Solstice..is something these tragic people have gone about in the wrong fashion.
Look, for example, what they have done to the elves. Their interpretation of the elves ... leaves my blood boiling. Certainly someone must tell the Americans: Not all elves are little! Not all elves are like children! By the Gods, no! But then, again, as I say: the American mind has no memory. Most of the citizens in this frightening New WOrld have no concept of how deep the old "pagan" traditions once went. They are entirely Christian in a way that no Europeans - ironically - ever were. For the reader has to really think: Even once Europe was turned entirely Christian, there always remained, still, the memories of the old Gods, whether they be Viking or Greek, etc. The old Gods were born in Europe, and in many places, some of their shrines still live. It is simply not possible to forget them there...
In America, however, the old Gods (in terms of the white folk) never lived nor arrived. They are completely unknown, for the most part, to the American people, in much the same way that anything about history,in general, is entirely unknown. To the American mind, even the most "Conservative" amongst them, everything in the World begins abruptly the moment the New World is discovered, in 1492. And even then, the American mind has hardly any concept of what the world was like at that time. For the most part, nothing really gets going for the American commoner, until almost the 1800s. The ancient world, the age of the Vikings, the medieval period, the Renaissance, almost all of it is completely irrelevant to the American perspective. They say the great blessing of this country is that it has no memory. I say I sometimes suppose I agree. Mostly, however, I Think I am forced to disagree. America leaves me cold, but it is not a nice cold. I find her lack of memories disturbing, I Find her dull, i find her naive. She is like a wife who has never read nor traveled nor dreamed. For what can a country that collectively knows nothing of history possibly dream at night? What songs can a bard sing, if the bard has never seen anything? Americans cry over nothing; so too do they dream over nothing.
But now I think again of Christmas ,and those Vikings. I bring to mind an imaginary late December feast that the Vikings would have celebrated. I can imagine that the whole Viking village would have come together on a day like the one on which I write this document, Christmas Eve. I do not imagine that these people, in the year 850 AD, would have decided to sit and feast alone , with only 8-10 others, in an "Exclusive" house
. I feel they went to the center of the village, where they were all together, posisbly in the hundreds, and there did they feast and drink to marvelous delight. I can imagine the scene coming to life..the warriors pounding on the tables with big goblets of ale, the women dancing all about by the firey candles, the music that the troubadours wuold have played, the sound of the children who would jump upon the wooden tables and stomp . How joyous it must have truly been! I see a child playfully grabbing his warrior fathers big metal helmet, laughingly putting it on his head. The child is a long haired blonde boy, he has the mot beautiful Norwegian braids.. he leaps from one wooden table to the other, laughing, as his people-his community- claps and cheers. Someone hands him a sword; the child playfully pretends to engage in a duel with some imaginary dragon....
Hundreds of people gathered together to celebrate in the center of town; all of their individual hearths and homes abandoned and darkened for the night. Only the saddest among them, only the sickest, stayed home on this day and night of feasting... .
ANd is there not something so sad about this? To think that men and women all the way back in the year 850 AD, probably had a better Winter celebration than myself, in this lonely, painfully "private" New World called 'America'. For the Americans, I again cry, have no sense of community , and they have never had one, because they have no awareness of the past in which a true community existed. They insist on exclusivity, on small gatherings. It's as though every family that fled from the Old World for the New was a family of despised, lonely outcasts, who never came to the feast in the center of town, who never danced with the others, who never joined the chorus and sang.
This thought, in fact, has plagued me constantly for years: The blood of the US is the blood of pure isolation and privacy. For who else would have come here, except the despised? Take note, for example, that American prisons are some of the only ones left still using solitary confinement. No one back home in Europe uses it. Why? Because the Europeans find the type of extreme solitude the Americans favor --obsessively-- to be despicable.
Look at the American children , look at how they are raised. They are all kept apart from one another, save for special days, and special "dates". This is unfathomable to the Old World. Children ran out of the house there -- and are still running-- straight into the arms of an entire village worth of other children. They dance and somersault and play in the streets. If they are bad children, perhaps they form packs and gangs and rob you. In America, this is simply unheard of. American children are raised like prisoners: Alone, in a cubicle, in a compartment, left to stare out of a sad lonely window. If they are lucky, maybe they have a brother or a sister, or a few of them. If not, they are totally alone, left to float in deep space. Americans have no community, hence their severe bastardization of the holidays. Instead of letting Christmas breathe as the communal holiday it once was and shoud lhave remained -- the feasting holiday--they turned it into one all about gifts. Gifts are good; but even this became a perversion, because the US Twisted it into the entire meaning of Christmas. Most American adults, for example, find Christmas almost debilitating, and beyond that, perhaps hardly noticeable. Because in the States it's just about gifts, nothing else. The celebrations are not considered important. The true festivities are not considered important. How can you be festive, after all, when you refuse to gather with more than 10 people?When you consider everyone beyond your tiny family an abject stranger?
IMagine the fact, for instance, that I am a musician myself, a player of multiple instruments, from the flute to the guitar to the piano and the tambourine, and yet .. there has never been so much as a single holiday where my instruments can be revealed? The American family table at a holiday is like a board meeting in some Manhattan skyscraper: Everyone has a dour face, they are quiet, they are subdued, they discuss taxes and presidents, they argue , maybe they drink, but never do they dance, or sing, or pound the table or clap. For you need, in my mind, dozens upon dozens of people to find that sort of celebratory mood. Young people -- when alone--can find it, even if they are few in number; but adults, especially American adults in fact, need the community. Alas, they will never know it: It simply does not exist. It can't exist. Americans are terrified of it. Everyone outside the Immediate family in this country is what I call "the extreme stranger". She is a country made up of foreigners, after all, and the word foreigner is interchangeable with "Stranger". As a result of this, all families here often tend to feel as though they need live on their own island. Everyne outside their own exclusive hearth , beyond their own Christmas dnner table, is essentially a foreigner. ....
--NOTES ON XMAS EVE
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