shadows of forgotten ancestors

This is one of my pumpkins. He is a vampire (see his teeth!) & he is called Yuriy, a.k.a George.

I like Halloween. I used to enjoy dressing-up & running amok in the neighbourhood, devouring candy for a month afterward. I always liked to think of how my ancestors in Scotland likely put on similar extravagant disguises so as not to be bothered by restless spirits roaming about, & ate soul-cakes, leaving some on a plate for the departed. They prayed for them, prayed for their rest in the afterlife. This was their new year, & the coming of winter; there is so much liminality – the idea of being between seasons, between dimensions... The attention to the seasonal change is paralleled in the focus on continuity of the dead within the living; so now I always think of my own ancestors, I light candles for them, I leave them apples & pomegranates under a tree.

There is nothing evil about Halloween, nor the Celtic Samhain (sa-wen). The Christian-fundamentalist propaganda that has plagued it disturbs me; but that’s really nothing new. Something that I find more disturbing (much like the commercialization of Christmas/Solstice) is how Halloween here seems to becoming more & more gore-fied.

This gore-ification lies in the way that Halloween has become such an inane festival of horror, of ghoulish fascination with dysfunction & violence. I was trying to look for the weather on the television on the 31st & came across a horror film on nearly every channel. It annoyed me, because Halloween has nothing to do with blood & guts, really --other than I suppose blood & guts are part of corporeal existence, which cease to flow & function in the dead, etc.

Halloween is really not about demons, Frankenstein, brain-eating zombies, alien creatures, psychopaths, telepathic misfits, nor serial killers. It’s not even about Dracula. Well, perhaps vampires, in that they are very agitated, un-peaceful, & dead... (But I’ve heard that wampyry prefer to haunt the crossroads on St. George’s Day & the eve of St. Andrew, not on Halloween.)

Some folklorists have written extensively about how our modern Halloween fulfills the psychological purpose of allowing us to face, & even embrace what frightens us. But are most people really scared of aliens & masked psychopaths? Maybe in the sense that they represent the unknown & the misunderstood & the unpredictable... but generally symbolic value is low in those films. I have a feeling that most people in North America, indoctrinated with ‘Western’ philosophy are actually more afraid of death. Not theatrical improbable death in the claws of zombies or vengeful psychic girls, but our own inevitable deaths, whether by old age, cancer or car accident. I really think such things represent our fear more than do murderous clowns. Just the fact that one day we’ll be ‘here’ & then 'not here' -- on the other side of the barrier, a ‘somewhere’ that we know nothing of... But instead (in typical North American fashion) we create an unreal ‘horror’ of the cheap, gory, b-movie sort to drown in, when perhaps we would all spiritually benefit from examining that real fear of death.

Halloween morning before work I watched the Ukrainian film Tini Zabutykh Predkiv (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors)... It is a film that deals with death, but it represents it in a realistic way, in that it presents as natural, cyclic, and potentially transformative. Some of the deaths in the film are tragic, & sudden -- they are haunting because they are possible, & real, & difficult for the characters to escape.

There is a scene that has become part of my photographic memory; near the end of the film, the spirit of Marichka is luring Ivan into the woods. He follows her through the labyrythine pine trees, dizzy in the snow, and her face has the sheen of dull blue ice. She is reaching toward him, closer and closer, and when her anemic little fingers touch him, the screen goes black. Then, three shots flash by in quick succession -- three view of curling, twisting, red-willow branches against a grey sky, fleshy as arteries full of blood, & then darkness again. The next scene shows Ivan being prepared for burial.

This transition, with the branches, is so striking to me... I have often associated trees with both the circulatory & pulmonary systems of the body in my writing... last week I noticed when walking home in the dark that the mountain ash tree on my front lawn, heavy with berries, appeared as a large upside-down heart... spreading branches like arteries arising from the atria, exploding red fruits like clots bursting into the sky.

As well, this scene in the film subtly symbolizes how in death we dissolve into the environment -- our bodies physically decay, maybe a tree sprouts from the dust of bones, & our spirit too, our energy, becomes released again into nature... According to Ukrainian traditional beliefs, the ancestors dwell within the land, & they are responsible for all new life -- the birth of children, & also the growing of new crops, plants, etc. They are the shadow of all life on earth, always present, watching over us.

Earlier in the film, Marichka appears as a little fawn after her death, grazing around the birch cross at her gravesite. Ivan cannot recover after her death, & the scene of her in the woods, calling to him represents him wasting away, dying, & reuniting with her. Then they are both part of the earth, together. They become the shadows -- as the ancestors they ensure life continues, in the little children pressing their faces to the window of the funerary hut in the last scene.

The other theme of the film (& Mykhajlo Kotsjubyns'kyj's novella) that resonates with me is artistic inspiration. Maybe it's less overt in the film, but in the written work we get a very strong sense of how the characters relate to the world around them, how it inspires them. Marichka is a poet, composing & singing songs, Ivan is a little mystic, able to see & feel the spirits in the world around him. In death, they cross the barrier between themselves & the land that inspires them, they themselves become part of the earth's regenerative & creative force. They become shadows, they also inspire the legend that is the book & the film... Kotsjubyns'kyj wrote the story based on the stories & songs he heard about Ivan & Marichka while visiting Hutsul villages in the eastern Carpathians.

This film is so important to me because it resonates with how I feel connected to the world & to my own ancestors/ancestry. I highly recommend watching it, but I recognize it could be confusing, what with poor subtitling & a lot of folkloric references... Marco Carynnyk's translation of the novella is the the Rutherford library & also includes a translation of one of Kotsjubyns'ky's ethnographic essays on the Hutsuls, which is rather useful.