Days to Celebrate Mothers

Though Mother’s Day as we know it with its flowers, gifts, and cards is relatively new, annual celebrations to celebrate motherhood are ancient.

Isis holding Horus

Motherhood festivities have historically been in spring, the season of fertility. In ancient Egypt, there were celebrations to honor Isis, the loving mother-goddess, who is often shown in Egyptian art with the baby Horus at her breast, much like Mary and Jesus in later Christian iconography. The cult of the great mother-goddess Cybele began in Turkey and soon moved to Greece and Rome, and she was worshipped in some form for more than a thousand years. Her priestesses led wild celebrations, full of drinking, dancing, music, and all kinds of debauchery.

As the Roman Empire and Europe transitioned to Christianity, the Church set aside the fourth Sunday of Lent as the day to honor motherhood, celebrate the Virgin Mary, and for people to honor their “mother church.”

In the 1600s, England declared a secular official Mothering Day for that fourth Sunday of Lent. It was a time when families were encouraged to get together, and servants or workers were allowed one day off work to see their mother, since many working-class families in England worked as servants on separate estates and rarely got to see each other. Mothering Day was also declared by the church as an exception to the fasting and penance of Lent, so that families could have a feast together.

When the pilgrims came to America, they stopped celebrating Mothering Day, just as they stopped celebrating most holidays that they thought had lost their religious origins and become too secular.

But a very different secular Mother’s Day was introduced to America in 1870 by Julia Ward Howe, who wanted to set aside a day of protest after the Civil War, in which mothers could come together and protest their sons killing other mothers’ sons.

The woman who really created Mother’s Day as we know it was Anna Jarvis. Her mother had held Mother’s Friendship Days to reunite families and neighbors separated during the war, and when she died, Anna worked to proclaim an official Mother’s Day both to honor her mother and all mothers and, in contrast to Howe’s idea, to celebrate peace. May 10, 1908 was the first official Mother’s Day celebrations in Grafton, West Virginia, and at a church in Philadelphia.

In 1914, Woodrow Wilson designated the second Sunday of May as Mother’s Day. It became commercialized quickly, especially in the floral industry, and Anna Jarvis was furious. She said, “What will you do to route charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers, and other termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest, and truest movements and celebrations?” But flower sales and card sales continued to grow, and Anna Jarvis died in poverty and without any children of her own.

NOTE The correct punctuation for Mother’s Day is “Mother’s Day” with an apostrophe before the “S”. Anna Jarvis, the creator of Mother’s Day, wanted the singular possessive to emphasize that each family should honor their particular mother on this day.

Welles and Freud

Sigmund Freud and Orson Welles share a birthday of May 6. Of course, even if you believe in astrology, the fact that they were born in 1856 and 1915 respectively would mean different star charts. I saw the birthdays on an almanac site this past week and out of pure curiosity looked at their Taurus description. It said strong work ethics, reliability, and an appreciation of life’s pleasures. Not a bad description of them. My deeper thoughts went to considering if there were any connections they have around psychology, movies, or magic.

From what I read this week, Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and Welles, a pioneering filmmaker, lived during about the same time. Freud died in 1939, so there was some overlap and certainly Freud’s influence ran through all of Welles’ life. Both were significant cultural figures of their time. They never met and didn’t seem to directly address each other’s work, so I’ll do it for them.

Some people know that Welles was an accomplished magician, and member of both the International Brotherhood of Magicians and the Society of American Magicians. He often did magic in his later year on TV talk shows. He never let his sleight-of-hand skills get rusty and joked that he might need them one day to make his living.

Freud wrote about magic in his essay “The Uncanny” where he explored the psychological concept of the uncanny. The word meant for him feelings of eeriness or discomfort caused by something familiar yet strange. He discussed how magic, particularly stage magic, can evoke feelings of the uncanny because it challenges our sense of reality and rationality, tapping into our subconscious desires and fears. Freud believed magic exploits our unconscious thoughts and desires, blurring the line between reality and illusion.

Those things are certainly part of all films from the earliest experiments that showed that a series of still images project could give give the illusion of fluid movement. Today’s movie magic involves complex illusions from green screens, CGI to AI-generated people and settings.

Welles was used to creating illusions on stage before his film career. I think of how in Shakespeare’s time they needed to do some stagecraft magic for ghosts and other manifestations of the bicameral mind. Did Hamlet see the ghost of his father? It seems the ghost was real and that others on guard duty also saw something, but maybe this hallucination of Hamlet, and also Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Richard III were pre-Freudian use of psychology by Will.

Freud didn’t write much about movies, as they weren’t prevalent during his lifetime. However, he did write about the concept of “screen memories,” which are vivid but possibly distorted memories from childhood. The use of “screen” because the memories are visual is interesting. Some later scholars have drawn parallels between Freud’s ideas about screen memories and the experience of watching movies, suggesting that both involve a mix of reality and imagination. Additionally, Freud’s theories about the unconscious and dreams have influenced the interpretation of films, especially in the realm of psychoanalytic film theory.

I couldn’t find any direct quotes by Orson Welles about Freud, but several articles said that he expressed admiration for Freud’s work and was fascinated by psychoanalysis. There are certainly Freudian themes and ideas in some of his films. That’s not unusual since Freud’s influence can be seen in all the arts of that time.

Citizen Kane (1941) features complex characters and explores the depths of the human psyche. Its protagonist, Charles Foster Kane, is dissected psychologically through flashbacks and multiple perspectives. Kane’s relationships seem to often return to “screen memories” with his mother and his trauma could easily generate a paper on Oedipal conflict and the influence of early experiences on adult behavior.

Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1947) is film noir and Welles goes dark and deep into themes of obsession, desire, and betrayal. The characters of Michael and Elsa Bannister, involve psychological tensions and power struggles reminiscent of Freudian psychoanalysis.

1958’s Touch of Evil is another noir thriller about corruption, guilt, and the dark corners of the human psyche. Welles’ character, Hank Quinlan, embodies Freudian notions of the id gone out of control, with his unchecked impulses leading to destructive behavior.

What an interesting conversation over scotch and cigars I might have heard if the two of them had met for dinner, watched a movie, and let me join them.

Writing the Same Poem Again

It was now ten years ago that I wrote a poem recently called “Silent Movie” and when I was publishing it on my Writing the Day poems site, the software reminded me that I had already written a poem with that title. I looked and sure enough I not only had used that title but it was a very similar poem. I changed the title of the earlier poem and revised the newer poem.

It’s not just poems. Writing on this blog about Michelangelo, I was reminded by the software that I had already written about Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel the previous year. More revision.

Damn, but this trend is disturbing. These gaps in my memory are increasing lately. I remember a routine Woody Allen used in his nightclub years that included a line about him spending a summer writing Great Expectations and then realizing that Charles Dickens had already written it.

That poetry site now has more than 900 poems (a number that surprises even me) so it’s not shocking that I sometimes forget what I had written years before.

I forget names a lot , like the names of actors in films, but also names of people I have known for decades.

My very short-term memory is dreadful. I will open a new tab on the browser and then forget why I did it. I walk down to the basement and then I can’t remember why I went down there.

Are you starting to feel worried for me?

It’s not a relief that one of my sons recently said “Who was the other guy, not Morgan Freeman, in The Shawshank Redemption?” I know a lot about films and could picture his face. Yes, we could look it up on our phones easily, but we wanted to pull it out of memory because we knew that we knew it. We could picture him. He was with Susan Sarandon for years. They met when they were in Bull Durham. He won an Oscar for Mystic River. All those synapses were firing, but no name. Bob? No. *

I write a lot about memory. I know that memory loss with aging is natural. It is normal to experience short-term forgetfulness, such as the inability to remember a person’s name you met recently. Memory loss does not mean dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, but you hear so much about those topics that you consider it.

That information stored in long-term memory from events that occurred years ago tends to remain easier to recall. I remember the first day of school, my freshman year dorm room and a girl in a Shakespeare class who I never even spoke to but stared at twice a week all semester.

Aging means a gradual loss of brain cells that affects the way we store and retrieve information. Our short-term memory progressively declines, but I keep reading that memory loss from aging does not typically affect normal functioning, nor does it necessarily get worse over time.

It’s no wonder that we boomers and younger generations have made maintaining memory an industry. I have written about and you have read about exercising your mind with puzzles, mind games, and challenging reading or classes and the need to exercise your body for better mental function, perhaps because of improved circulation.

Eat lots of antioxidants, omega-3 fatty acids, vegetables and fruits, tea and dark chocolate, cold-water fish, freshly ground flaxseed, walnuts, less alcohol, less stress, practice meditation and yoga, or at least buy some Ginkgo biloba,  DHA, zinc, lutein and zeaxanthin and take it daily.

I think what I really need is more time. More quiet. More opportunities to focus. Less input for better output. I find all kinds of good thoughts and memories come while taking a shower, weeding the garden or raking the leaves.

*Footnote: That Shawshank day, I went outside and just walked around the yard looking at the plants and all of a sudden, I found Tim Robbins, who was there all along.

Deux ex Machina

A thought came to me one morning this past week and I wrote this poem.

One morning while slowly winding the springs
in my machine, sunrise made me think
of God and how Deux ex Vita
would be much preferred by me to
life’s plot resolutions that can be explained

away as coincidences, synchronicities or, God forbid,
miracles, because the world’s not a stage,
we are not players, no gods seem
to be interested in our many lives,
good or bad, slight or critical. Nothing.

Deus ex machina is a Latin phrase that means “god from the machine”. It’s a plot device where an unexpected and unlikely event suddenly resolves a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story. The phrase comes from ancient Greek and Roman theater, where an actual crane called a mechane would elevate an actor who was portraying a god above the stage would be able to to resolve a play’s plot.

I do think that how deux ex vita would be preferable to machina. I’d prefer to see a god in life.

When some plot point in real life seems to be resolved, I would like to know it was some god. I wouldn’t be picky about which god is operating the machene – Christian, Jewish, Islamic, or that god of Deism that I have been forced to believe in due to a distinct lack of evidence of any god being involved. When there does appear to be some deux ex machina, it seems to make more sense to me that it was a coincidence or synchronicity, which is a s close as I get to a miracle.

Dark Matter and Alternate Realities

I see that a new series is coming on May 8 to Apple+ titled Dark Matter. It is based on the novel of the same name by Blake Crouch. I read the novel a few years ago and, as TV shows go into reruns, I will look for streaming series to fill the summer.

I wrote elsewhere about the “real” dark matter. I say “real” because in astronomy, dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter that appears not to interact with light or the electromagnetic field like other matter.

Dark matter isn’t something we can see but gravitational effects which cannot be explained by Einstein’s general relativity give scientists the impression that it is present. This gets complicated but it seems to be involved in the formation and evolution of galaxies. Powerful

Crouch has said that in using the term for his novel he was thinking that life is full of mysteries, but that there are many more beneath the surface that we cannot see, hidden like dark matter but felt as a presence.

Experimental quantum physicist Aaron D. O’Connell demonstrated that subatomic particles exist in quantum superposition – a fancy way to say that occupy multiple realities. Crouch imagined that if someone could build a device that allowed a person to exist in superposition. Not time travel, but travel to an alternate reality.

Of course, the novel and series is entertainment not science but you can see how the leap to considering the nature of reality and of identity, and of questioning whether or not to trust what we see before our eyes would be easy.

I looked back at some reviews of the book since it has been a few years since I read the book. Interestingly, they label it alternate-universe science fiction, a countdown thriller, pop physics and a fantasy. They compare it to C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and Lev Grossman’s Magicians books. One critic, Brian Truitt, said the novel was “a nightmarish quantum-mechanics version of It’s a Wonderful Life.” I like that comparison both because I love that film and because I consider it a dark (film noir) tale of an alternate life.

April Is the Cruelest Month

It is now May and I was looking back at last month in my journal and thinking about the line in “The Waste Land,” when T.S. Eliot said that “April is the cruelest month.” Why?  Because of its
“…breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain”

It is a month when we are thinking about spring, maybe even about summer on some unusually warm days, but it mixes new life and desire with things that have died and passed. Not all of us would agree with Eliot. He continues:

“Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.”

You don’t immediately associate winter with keeping warm, but winter snows do actually keep the soil “warm” in that protective way that snow cover helps plants and gives the bulbs the rest needed to be renewed.

But April might be the cruelest month for other reasons. My wife is one person who associates this month with bad things.

• In 2007, there was the April 16 Virginia Tech mass shooting. My son was a student and his class was involved. His professor was killed and several of his classmates were wounded.
• The Boston Marathon bombing occurred on April 15, 2013.
• April 20, 1999 was the shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. It was one of the key reasons my wife retired from teaching soon after.
• The bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 was on April 19, a date chosen by Timothy McVeigh because it was the anniversary of the bloody end of the FBI siege on a compound in Waco, Texas in 1993.

“He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience.”

The Columbine tragedy was on Adolph Hitler’s birthday, thought to be symbolic by the young shooters. The FBI wondered if the date of the Boston Marathon, April 15, was significant being that it was Patriots Day, a Massachusetts state holiday commemorating the opening battles of the American Revolutionary War. The Waco and Oklahoma City tragedies were on the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord in the American Revolution.

So, are the dates symbolic attempts to make a statement, or is there something about the month of April?

For extremists who believe that our federal government is as tyrannical as the British monarchy of our American Revolution, the date is symbolic of a war on a government by its own patriot people.

Of course, every month has its tragedies in modern and older times, but I have seen articles mentioning April as the month for not only the start of our Revolutionary War, but the American Civil War. Add to that the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. in April

I did some reading and April is no more violent statistically than other months. In fact, crime statistics usually go up in summer.

“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron wrote a book,  When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, in which she writes that “We live in difficult times. One senses a possibility they may get worse.” Her book is a Tibetan Buddhist view in how Buddhism helps cope with fear, despair, rage and the feeling that we are not in control of our lives.

The Buddhist view that despite any planning or efforts on our part, the only thing we can predict with certainty is change. While most of us rage against the night of all that, the Buddhist surrenders to the reality of impermanence.  We can center and ground ourselves. We can discover our relationship to a higher power that controls our world, no matter what name we may give to that power.

“Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-But who is that on the other side of you?”

Quotations from The Waste Land (Norton Critical Edition) by T.S. Eliot