gloomy
Deep thoughts on modern family life by Kathryn Jether-Morton.
Illustration: Hannah Bachmann
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When I was 10 years old, I lived in a rural area in the Tohoku region. That Halloween day, one of the neighborhood parents took us trick-or-treating in the back of his pickup truck. There were about 5 of us and we were excited to ride around in the open truck bed after dark. Our route took us past cemeteries dating back to the Revolutionary War era, set on a slope away from the road, surrounded by old stone walls, and surrounded by deep forest. As we approached the cemetery, my father, who was driving, stopped the engine. I heard a spinning and cranking sound, but then nothing. “Sorry, kids,” he called back to us from the taxi. “There must be something wrong with the truck.”
It must have taken courage for all of us to venture down the hill towards the cemetery and into the enveloping darkness of the forest. As we stood nervously among the tombstones, a figure emerged from the ash-covered forest, brandishing a chainsaw and dragging a heavy chain around its neck. Another appeared from the shadows, covered with birch bark. I heard voices coming from under the fallen leaves – ghosts were gathering around us. (They had placed a boombox under a pile of leaves.) We ran for our lives back to the truck, and miraculously the truck started as soon as the last person was pulled into the back seat. We screeched and walked away. It was an ecstatic moment of fear, with the delicious relief of safety.
When I go back to the parks my kids loved as toddlers, I’m always amazed at how small everything is. “This slide used to be huge,” they claim. Sometimes I wonder if that’s how I feel about Halloween. Either I’m not scared of Halloween anymore, or I’ve just grown up. I’m sure one thing has changed. It’s just that it’s not as socially acceptable to scare kids into playing sports as it once was. The idea of parents banding together to scare their children on Halloween evokes more than anything the casual, unconscious cruelty of mid-century American life. Perhaps scaring children as an exercise has become less popular because real life is scary enough without the need for additional drama. Similarly, being surprised by a group of adults on Halloween is one of my favorite childhood memories, and I say this as someone who isn’t comfortable with horror as a genre or fear as an emotion. Masu.
It was unusual for adults in the neighborhood to get together and plan such a prank. This was the only time it happened. Decades later, I’m still impressed that they pulled it off. What drove them? I know some of you are lucky enough to have grown up around adults who love to put on magic and spooky spectacles for the local kids, and I know that’s not necessarily a privilege. I’ve talked to many people who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s and had nightmares for years after enduring the antics of adults.
For my kids, Halloween is more of an aesthetic experience than a spooky experience, and sometimes I wonder if they’re missing out on something I knew intimately. It’s difficult to explain in words, but I vividly recall the feeling of the veil between worlds becoming thinner. memory. I love fancy Halloween decorations, I really do. I hope the skeletons never stop growing. Halloween has another dimension, a myriad of enchanting dimensions, and I wonder if they’ve felt it before.
This fall, I’m teaching night school at a local university, and I recently had my students read a passage from philosopher Han Byung-chul’s book, The Crisis of Narration. This section, called “World Disenchantment,” argues that an overemphasis on the accumulation of facts and causal relationships, especially in digital media, is stripping the stories we tell of their mystery and magic. There is. That happened, and this happened, and this happened. A world told in bullet points, trying to reach a hasty conclusion. This is how AI speaks to us. It is done in the most efficient way to convey information, without any stimulating emotion. I had never taught this essay before, so I didn’t know what people would think of it. I was a little worried that kids with flat feet these days would grip and land on it.
Night school students come from all over the world. Many are recent immigrants who are trying to earn enough college credits to apply to specific training programs. There are also students who have not had an easy time at school and are looking for a second chance after dropping out. Although English is a second or third language for half the people in the audience, everyone understood exactly what Han was trying to say in his essay. They recognized the disillusionment and were able to explain it. The classroom rippled with resonance as we discussed this chapter.
Today’s parenting is so obsessed with “creating magic” – the magic of holidays, the magic of birthdays, the magic of central memories. Being a good parent is as much about sprinkling emotional fairy dust over your children’s memories as it is about keeping them fed and clothed. Still, disillusionment persists and may become even greater. What are we missing?
It would be easy to blame it on things like “consumer culture” and “Amazon.” Where’s the magic in creating atmosphere in shopping? But that’s an incomplete explanation, not to mention a boring and predictable critical line. Making your own costumes won’t make your world enchanted again. Nostalgic recreations of past Halloween aesthetics just don’t work. Being re-enchanted is an emotional process. It has to do with making our children and ourselves experience inexplicable emotions that may sometimes overlap with fear. The fear I felt one Halloween has stayed with me like a magical elixir ever since. When I pay attention to passing an abandoned building or notice a figure walking past in the shadows, I find myself wanting to find more of the source of that feeling, even if just for a moment. I think it’s possible that a particular Halloween prank I experienced when I was in fifth grade may have permanently fascinated Halloween for the rest of my life. It’s crazy how something like this can happen.
The holiday season brings us into a time of culturally significant memory-making. One of the ways Han Byung-chul describes enchantment is that the past and present collide momentarily, providing us with a brief and overwhelming experience that transcends time itself. It overcomes the harsh contingencies of time, which produces happiness. ”
Isn’t that all we really want this holiday season? Is one fragrant crystal of time too much for a parent to ask for? Is the fact that we salivate at the idea of ”making memories” with our children a projection of parental anxiety about our distractions? Attention is a necessary condition for making memories, and we all swirl to varying degrees about how we are or are not attentive. Maybe our own fear of missing out on important moments has the unintended consequence of making us disillusioned with the holidays. You’re probably feeding the wrong dog, so to speak, by trying to capture the atmosphere through photo shoots and cute decorations.
So what can we do to make the holidays attractive again? We couldn’t say it. For me, the quality of a Pict-o-Matic freeze frame for a holiday ritual or event is what it is: Remember when I did this ritual 5 years ago?10? Twenty? — thrusting me all at once into a private universe where I memorialize people and places I’ll never see again. The appeal of the holidays, from Halloween to office party season and past Christmas to the dawning New Year’s dead zone, is, for me, a sense of closeness to one’s past self that makes the present seem surreal. If you’re lucky enough to reach middle age, you’ll see this horrifying and amazing view of all your lives you’ve lived, and you’ll look out over a cliff at all your future lives, and in a few years you’ll know that Probably. This very dinner, this very outfit, this very child’s irritable mood will evoke in us an undeniable sense of the weight of life.
But vacations in the middle of winter can get pretty emotional. Halloween is not the time to dwell on your history. What makes this holiday so interesting is not the world of our memories, but the invisible world. Even if you’re not a horror movie buff, sometimes we feel more real when we encounter visions or feelings that are unexplainable or mystical.
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