Even today, for the winter holidays in the northern hemisphere, we tend to decorate with something evergreen, which turns our eyes away from the landscape of the fallen, the colourful litter of leaves that have left much of the canopy bare. Various conifers have become popular, but also the more ancient holly boughs may still be seen. Yet, this gets ahead of our story.
The opening line belongs to Feeble, a man who has been drafted into the King’s Army in 2 Henry IV. Although it may seem odd, he doesn’t mind having been drafted, even though he has just watched a previous man buy his way out of serving:
FEEBLE By my troth, I care not. A man can die but
2 Henry IV 3.2.242-7
once. We owe God a death. I’ll ne’er bear a base
mind. An ’t be my destiny, so; an ’t be not, so. No
man’s too good to serve ’s prince, and let it go
which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for
the next.
Cited in Hemingway’s short story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, the speech demonstrates Feeble’s native philosophy about death’s inevitability. As King John says in Shakespeare’s play of the same name, “We cannot hold mortality’s strong hand”. The idea is reminiscent of the often romanticised acceptance of death practiced by certain warrior cultures. Japanese samurai are said to have embraced death upon awakening each morning. A similar thought is attributed to various Native American cultures, and the overall sentiment has been paraphrased as, “Today is a good day to die.”
An old, familiar idea which appears in so many cultures, death’s inevitability walks alongside our human experience like our shadow. On sunlit days, it is an inverse, a companionable darkness. On darker days, it may seem a reassurance or even a comfort. Even to those who leave the world at large, death remains one of the great expectations of human life, like a channel marker guiding a boat into harbour on inclement nights:
My Mind
Wenxiang*
My mind is inclined to quiet;
outside of things,
I lodge in the brush.
The sense of the mountains is best
when you reach their depths;
the source of the valley stream, distant,
is naturally purified.
For the rest of my life,
all that’s missing is death;
all thoughts and worries are settled already.
Recluses should leave no tracks;
people stop asking their names.
The last two lines seem curious, hinting more at a kind of disappearance or invisibility than an actual death. If the recluse leaves no tracks, does this mean traces of them vanish? Even their names? Does this mean that the recluse does not die, but only disappears, vanishing from the ways and perception of the living? Methods of eluding death always seem to be shrouded in mystery, but there is also much good reason for that, and it may not only be that death might hear us speaking of them, or read these words and come for us. How do we remain ‘green’, regenerating ourselves in the face of death’s absolute command?
John Williamson writes:
During the uncertain early years of the Christian Church, its greatest challenge came from a religion that was centered upon the Persian god of light–Mithras. Mithraism was a faith that was very similar to Christianity: both religions promised immortality, as well as providing ethical and moral codes of behavior. The eventual supremacy of Christianity over Mithraism was not so much a defeat of the Mithras as an effective assmiliation of Mithraic ceremonies into the rites of the Christian Church. These included baptism with water and feast involving a sacred meal of bread and wine. Even the moral connotation of light in contrast to darkness came from this ‘pagan’ cult. The choice of December 25 as the birth date of Christ was not an arbitrary one, but was chosen because that was the time of the great Mithraic feast which celbrated the return of Mithras as the sun god. **
Well, okay then. Many of us have heard of this already. Where does it take us?
Wiliamson further writes:
To an agrarian society, trees were manifestations of the gods, and therefore both trees and deities became identified with the various seasons of the year. For instance, the oak came to represent the time of year when the days began to lengthen and brighten, after the darkness of winter. The ‘defeat of winter’ led to spring, when Zeus, Jupiter, and Thor released the fertile rains on the barren winter landscape, making the earth green and sprinkling it with flowers.***
Yet, people did not live only in the warm seasons. Late spring through mid-autumn may tend to bring the fecund part of the year to the northern hemisphere, but human experience endures not only warmth, growth, and blossoming, but also waning and cold during the other half of the year. During these seasons, evergreens not only became a symbol of dormant life enfolded in the sleeping earth, but also of hope for renewal and a better life to come. Williamson writes, “To a primal agrarian society, the sight of evergreen trees like the holly during the winter months must have been a striking contrast to the naked oaks.”**** Here was green life and promise.
Charles Pythian-Adams argued that Tudor England embraced a “ritual year”.***** Ronald Hutton notes that “for most people the first sign of the opening of the season of ceremony would have been the decorating of buildings with holly and ivy on or just before Christmas Eve.”****** Here again, our minds begin with the darkness. Just as each day begins in darkness, so does the year, with only a glimmer of green, a spark of life, showing amongst the bare trees in candle or torchlight against the snow. Like the womb of human consciousness, the world seems muted. A hush hush of snow and wind tossing bare branches like crooked fingers against the greylight sky. Hands reaching for light. The infant minds of our humanity collectively seeking a light they do not yet fully know. Here’s “The Holly and the the Ivy” as arranged by Walford Davies for King’s College Cambridge in 2008:
The final lyrics end with words of budding hope:
O, the rising of the sun,
And the running of the deer
The playing of the merry organ,
Sweet singing in-
Sweet singing in-
In the choir.
The solstice marked the return of the sun, but it was only a beginning. Queen Mab in her coach riding across the eyelids of human experience. Yet, the fairies have gone from this world. Only a glimmer of them remains in story and in name. Few rituals even address them. Keith Thomas writes that “commentators have always attributed them [fairies] to the past”.******* In contrast, the green always looks forward from the now. Both Christmas and its midwinter holiday kissing cousins remain anticipatory, like a mirror that peeps into a future filled with brighter skies and canopied in green.
Not that midwinter was not a Janus too, as it still is. The two faced god looks backward and forward, sitting on the threshold of the new year’s gateway. Midwinter was a time to cast the inward eye back over the past year, be grateful and mournful, rejoice in our current presence, and reminisce about those who, for whatever reason, did not make it to this point.
Never mind that the early modern year was measured differently, that for a time, the year officially ended and began around the end of March. The bleak midwinter brought its own kind of night, dropping its own punctuation mark full stop into the marching of the year. The natural pause for a kind of sleep echoes Feeble’s coming death. For whatever Hamlet calls it, even if sleep is not quite death itself, each half-brother is only a room, only a moment away from the other. (Please see the John Waterhouse picture of Hypnos and Thanatos in the previous post, “Heat o’ the sun”.)
But, again, where does it lead us? Green trimmings around the entrance to the church? Around the parlour? Around the porchway entrance? King Holly who supplants King Oak for the winter half of the year? Is this avoidance of mortality, this averting of our gaze from barren branches, is it merely Jack Kerouac’s fallopian night? Is it as Lawrence Ferlinghetti would have it?
She loved to look at flowers
Lawrence Ferlinghetti “A Coney Island of the Mind”*********
smell fruit
And the leaves had the look of loving
But halfass drunken sailors
staggered thru her sleep
scattering semen
over the virgin landscape
At a certain age
her heart put about
searching the lost shores
And heard the green birds singing
from the other side of silence
Flowers, fruit, and leaves all blended with intoxicated copulatory ecstasy? Greenery around the doorway of the church inviting us into the the fertile recesses of promise for the year ahead? The green ivy mixed with spent matter in an attempt to generate a virgin birth, a new kind of birth that might somehow save us from ourselves?
The Green Knight stands in a winter field and Sir Gawain approaches, with great hesitation in his heart, to face him. Sir Gawain had beheaded the Green Knight long ago, a season ago, with the solemn promise that Gawain would face the same blow later. Williamson tells us, “Who the Green Man is is well established. He is the ‘descendant of the Vegetation or Nature god of (whatever his local name) almost universal and immemorial tradition whose death and resurrection mythologizes the annual death and re-birth of nature'”.********* Now the Green Holly King is at his height, and Sir Gawain fears the beheading blow that would almost certainly take his life.
Yet, the Green King is a king of understanding. Looking with his new year eyes, he sees both forward and backward, and lends self knowledge and understanding to those before him. Gawain has learned his weaknesses on his quest, and still he is afraid. He has not quite accepted death as Feeble has. He has not learned to stop leaving tracks like the sage.
The classical motif of the lovers also suggests such fecund kind of knowledge. A culmination of their physical union looks backwards to the individual selves who have been dissolved into the joining couple, and (in the sense of the green new year) that copulation also looks forward to the potential for new life. Generation itself becomes perpetuation. Even if we cannot live on ourselves, we can live on in union and procreation. In some cases, that becomes a mystical trajectory.
Christianity makes the mystery of regeneration more pointed, more direct. Midwinter, the return of the sun, becomes more about a birth. It is a birth that promises rebirth to all. King Holly, and his lover the ivy, fringing the entrance to the church, to the font of human regeneration. Like Feeble’s death, like the deciduous leaves, on may die this year and be quit for the next, or one may linger on in the green fields as it seems Falstaff does:
HOSTESS Nay, sure, he’s not in hell! He’s in Arthur’s
Henry V 2.3.9-17
bosom, if ever man went to Arthur’s bosom. He
made a finer end, and went away an it had been any
christom child. He parted ev’n just between twelve
and one, ev’n at the turning o’ th’ tide; for after I saw
him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers
and smile upon his finger’s end, I knew there was
but one way, for his nose was as sharp as a pen and
he talked of green fields.
Here again are flowers and green fields, life garlanding passing or ascendance. Ophelia strewing flowers about the court of Denmark as her spirit prepares to depart. The crown of thorns still a crown of vegetation, the cross a winter tree, Christ a green hope for new life upon it. These ideas have been shared, borrowed, and refined deliberately again and again, and here, at the winter solstice. we remember them just at the point when the sun begins its journey to return to us again.
*Hsiang, Wen. Sleepless Nights: Verses for the Wakeful. Translated by Thomas F. Cleary. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1995. Born in China in 1210, just before Ghengis Khan invaded northern China, Wen Xiang lived under the rule of the Mongolian occupiers his whole life. His poetry often reflects life’s opitimistic green shoots in the face of tension, conflict, and oppression.
**Williamson, John. The Oak King, the Holly King and the Unicorn: the Myths and Symbolism of the Unicorn Tapestries. New York: Harper & Row, 1986, 29.
***Ibid, 61.
****Ibid, 62. Williamson’s description of how holly, which so closely resembles a non-deciduous Mediterranean oak, came to be a representative northern European evergreen is especially interesting, albeit the whole book is a fascinating, meticulous examination of the symbolism of the famous Unicorn tapestries.
*****Phythian-Adams, Charles. Local History and Folklore a New Framework. London: Bedford Square Pr., 1975. The argument appears on pp. 21-5.
******Hutton, Ronald. The Rise and Fall of Merry England: the Ritual Year, 1400-1700. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, 5.
*******Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England. Penguin Global, 2012, 726.
********Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems. New York: New Directions, 2006, p. 26. Included especially for my student, C.A., who mentioned this to me in class years ago, and my nephew, J.N., who writes great poetry.
*********Williamson, 74.