Cosmic horror and commercialized Christmas

Last week at The Critic, Sebastian Milbank published an excellent essay on MR James and the English tradition of celebrating Christmas with ghost stories. The most famous is A Christmas Carol, of course, but the “scary ghost stories” of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” used to be much more common. James’s are still the gold standard—atmospheric, spooky, and presented with a sober believability that only enhances their terror. But this tradition has mostly disappeared, leaving some people wondering why ghost stories would ever have been an appropriate way to celebrate the Nativity in the first place.

Milbank makes a strong case that the ghost story in fact complements the Nativity story, which is already a story of a dark world under the sway of violent forces human and otherwise, of a battle of good and evil waged on both the mortal and immortal planes, and of the intrusion of the supernatural and the revelation and overthrow of the hidden workings of the world. This is cosmic horror pre-Lovecraft, a horror made all too real in the mundane acts of destruction carried out by the enemies of the newborn Christ: “God incarnate is smuggled out of a homeland rendered a slaughterhouse of children by a corrupt puppet of a foreign power.”

Milbank’s entire essay is good, so please read it. But this mention of the massacre of the innocents—commemorated today, December 28, as the Feast of Holy Innocents—as well as a point Milbank raises a few times in his essay brought to mind an old but often overlooked Christmas carol that never fails to move me: “The Coventry Carol.”

“The Coventry Carol” was originally performed in late medieval England as part of a mystery play about the Nativity. A short, simple song of four stanzas, it is a lullaby sung by the mothers of Bethlehem to their children, slaughtered on Herod’s orders. Here are the lyrics in both Middle and Modern English, and here’s an excellent a capella performance. Here’s the final stanza:

That woe is me, poor child, for thee,
and ever mourn and may
for thy parting neither say nor sing,
“Bye bye, lully lullay.”

Gentle and plaintive, it is written as both the lament of a specific mother (mourning “this child” and “this poor youngling”) and of every mother of one of the innocents (“we” beg for help in protecting a child, “for whom we do sing”). The song is both individual and communal—and deeply sad.

Or, as we might put it now, “depressing” or even “traumatizing.” You’ll likely not have heard it a single time on the radio or store PA systems this shopping season. If our sanitized, secularized version of Christmas only grudgingly acknowledges the role of the birth of Christ in this annual cash cow, it certainly doesn’t want you complicating even that with something like the Massacre of the Innocents. Grief is not commercial.

To bring it back to Milbank, he notes the simplifying, emotionally foreshortening effect of commercialism several times in his essay, and that the ghost story is a way of embracing the fulness of the Nativity and pushing back against the age. Not only this, but it makes room for those who enter Christmas in moods or circumstances for which the maniacally upbeat tinsel and sleighbells version proves ill-fitting: “Reflecting on Christmas’s shadow is helpful not just as a sign of seriousness, but because it offers a real consolation to those for whom Christmas is not easy, and a touch of chill that adds to the warmth of the festivities.”

He comes back to this point at the end of the essay:

When we return home for Christmas, many of us will be wrestling with sudden loss, family conflict, or the disappointments of the past year. Rather than uncomfortably nursing these feelings in the artificial radiance of the modern Christmas, we should make sense of them through the deeper and more ancient rhythms of the turning of the year, in which light and shadow are the interplay of an unseen harmony. We should embrace Christmas as a season to mourn our sorrows and embrace our joys with equal passion.

Occasionally I’ll play “The Coventry Carol” in class and invite the students to consider 1) that this is a Christmas song, 2) what kind of baggage we bring to that concept, and 3) this song’s original audience. The Massacre of the Innocents was a common subject of medieval art, and quite likely everyone who poured into Coventry to crowd around the mobile stages to watch the play and hear the songs had lost people before their time—husbands or wives, siblings, parents, and most especially children. They participated in a lament like “The Coventry Carol” in a way most of us can only imagine. The grief of the mothers of Bethlehem encompasses them, including them in Christmas, too.

I find my students respond to this. They’ll have heard complaints about the commercialism of Christmas at least since the time they were old enough to watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (just in case we’re tempted to think this is a new problem). The Christians among them may have felt uncomfortable before with the mismatch they’ve felt between their own season of life and either the uniform, phony, lunatic merriment being pumped at them by the culture or the static, comfortable image of peace implied by the manger scene. They may have even complained about it.

What the Victorian ghost story with its supernatural horror and “The Coventry Carol” with its human loss show us is that our Christmas is the aberration, and if we want to incorporate grief—which, after all, Christ was born to conquer—we don’t have to come up with new ways of inclusion, we just have to recover the old.

Three items on learning by doing

Item: This morning Alan Jacobs shared a short post on Allan Dwan, who happened into the director’s chair by accident in 1911 and directed his last film in 1961. Along the way he gave Lon Chaney his break, discovered Carole Lombard, and—like many such early filmmakers—innovated both artistically and technically, those two aspects being deeply intertwined in filmmaking. Jacobs:

It’s fascinating to see how this industry—this art form—developed when nobody knew how to make movies. Dwan himself was the first to figure out that you could dolly a camera backwards, putting it on rails or a truck and backing up. (This actually disoriented viewers at the time, made them feel woozy). He helped D.W. Griffith figure out how to do a crane shot for Intolerance. All such techniques had to be improvised—and when an improvisation worked it became an invention. You basically had to think like an engineer, and Dwan was an engineer.

Item: Also this morning, Ted Gioia shared an essay on children and music lessons with a special focus on why so many kids quit not only the lessons but the instrument. In his own experiences with lessons, despite hating and quitting his piano them he kept playing on his own. Then:

I made up my own songs. I learned other songs I liked by ear. I actually played the instrument more after those awful lessons had been terminated. . . .

So I developed without jazz teachers, both as a musician and as a music historian. There’s some irony in that. I had access to amazing professors at illustrious universities, but jazz wasn’t part of the curriculum. In the field in which I made my reputation, I had to teach myself.

I’m not especially proud of that. Too much of what I’ve done in life has happened outside official channels. I’ve missed things by not accessing the right teachers at the right time. Things I did learn, I might have learned faster with proper guidance.

On the other hand, you learn very deeply when forced to invent your own pedagogy. And I take some comfort in knowing that there were almost no jazz teachers for the generations that came before me. Many of the jazz pioneers learned by doing—and they turned out okay.

The improvisatory, trial-and-error quality of both stories is fascinating, and both Jacobs and Gioia more or less directly point out that learning this way takes a long time—but one learns “very deeply.” Think of one of the greats in any field—filmmaking, music, writing, painting, science, even law, politics, and war—and they will almost certainly have started at the bottom, learning the nuts and bolts. Here’s a short list of directors who started off as gofers on the crew of low-budget director Roger Corman, for example.

But when you learn by doing, once you’ve mastered your art—insofar as that is possible in any art—a funny thing happens: your expertise translates into style. Which leads me to this third and final piece:

Item: Last week I saw this interesting Substack note from novelist Aaron Gwyn (whose excellent novella The Cannibal Owl I’ve just read and loved):

We all love a stylish writer, whether mannered and showy like Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy or “invisible” like Elmore Leonard. But how will a writer or artist of any kind know what his strengths and weaknesses are without doing the work?

I remember learning once, when our kids were small, that playtime dangers are not to be avoided but embraced. Climbing trees, going up slides the wrong way, jumping off of swings, doing pretty much anything on a trampoline—these are how children learn what their bodies are capable of. It both teaches them limits and gives them confidence in what they can do. But they have to do it.

This is what I hate most about AI “writing”: by offering finished products without the process, it robs writers of all kinds—whether novelists, students, or office drones drafting e-mails—of the work. It tricks people into thinking they’re able-bodied adults while bypassing the whole childhood playground experience. It’s not only instrumental and pragmatic, it weakens the person who uses it without their even realizing it. But perhaps worst of all, the work, the nuts and bolts, is not only how you master the craft and art of writing, it’s one of the most fun parts of it.

Perhaps more thoughts on that later. But for now, read all the items above and note especially the importance of play and enjoyment in Gioia’s post on music lessons, and consider how AI advocates consistently portray writing—or whatever the process in question—as time-wasting drudgery. Someone is lying.

Star Wars as a religious experience

Sunday, for May the Fourth, my in-laws took our family to see The Empire Strikes Back with the score performed live by the Greenville Symphony Orchestra. The best Star Wars movie, the best Star Wars score, live—it was great. The orchestra performed with flawless timing and great power. I didn’t think I could appreciate John Williams’s work more than I already did, but hearing the entire Empire score in concert revealed yet more of his genius.

The main draw, of course, was the movie and the orchestra, but I was also struck by the audience. The event took place not in the concert hall or theatre at the Peace Center in downtown Greenville but in Bon Secours Wellness Arena (still the Bi-Lo Center to me), with a crowd of several thousand. I fully expected wackiness—people chanting lines of dialogue back at the movie, hooting and hollering, loudly snacking, and running around in costumes during the movie.

Instead, it was one of the best filmgoing experiences of my life. The audience interacted—cheering twice, once at “No, do or do not; there is no try” and again at “I am your father”—and laughed appreciatively at some of the humor, but the mood, to a startling degree, was one of reverence.

I can’t think of the last time I saw such a large group of people sitting still, paying attention, alert and undistracted. Few people left or walked around during the movie. I didn’t see people on their phones and didn’t hear ringtones or text alerts. I didn’t even notice people talking or whispering. Even the children, some very young, were well behaved. It could be that they were taking a cue from the grownups—something important is happening, something worth our attention.

As it happens, English has a word for giving appropriate attention to something that deserves it—worship, from the Old English worðscip, “the condition of being worthy.” Our idea of worship is severely atrophied. Worship is behaving toward something, especially in the matter of attention and respect, in a manner that demonstrates its worth. The audience Sunday knew that intuitively and acted accordingly, showing, as a group, the esteem in which they hold the movie.

I’m not saying the folks watching The Empire Strikes Back with me Sunday were “worshipping” Star Wars in the narrow way we use the word now; I’m saying I haven’t seen such a truly worshipful attitude toward anything in a long time. That it came along for a popcorn space adventure—which happens to be one of the best movies ever made—is interesting.

In a nice coincidence, this week The Rewatchables dropped a long, long two-part episode on the original 1977 Star Wars. (No, I’m not calling it A New Hope.) Twice during the course of the discussion, Sean, one of the regular guests, makes the point that the Star Wars phenomenon rose during a downturn in religious adherence. He doesn’t make any arguments as to which caused which but my experience Sunday made one thing clear: people are starving for the religious in their lives, and Star Wars meets that need in a way many other overtly religious things are not right now.

Necessary caveats: the sociology of American religiosity is fraught with controversy, rival bodies of statistics, and hairsplitting distinctions, and Star Wars is a relentlessly, cold-bloodedly commercial product—now more than ever. But…

But the audience at Sunday’s concert keeps coming back to me. It was like Easter mass in Notre Dame at the height of the Middle Ages, a congregation of pilgrims and local parishioners turned together in adoration toward the altar, complete with music inspired by and inspiring religious awe. It was clearly, in the manner revealingly described by James KA Smith in You Are What You Love, a liturgy, an act of worship.

It was a marvelous experience on many levels. But I’ve been wondering ever since: what would it take to bring that kind of worshipfulness back to the things that are actually worth it?

Beethoven, art, criticism, and enjoying yourself

From the late Edmund Morris’s Beethoven: The Universal Composer, an excellent short biography for the Eminent Lives series, on the composition Beethoven undertook during a dark period before the premier of his Eighth Symphony in December 1813 and his hugely successful revision of Fidelio:

He went about the task of composing the “Battle Symphony” (known in Germany as Wellingtons Sieg, or “Wellington’s Victory”) with typical professionalism, expanding it to two movements and throwing in “Rule Britannia” for good measure. After scoring it for Panharmonicon, he composed an alternative version for grand orchestra. This enabled him to indulge his love of military field drums, beginning the piece with two enormous rattling crescendos in contrasting rhythms, as if marshaling his aural forces. In the ensuing “battle,” he marked 188 exact cues for cannon fire, with solid dots for British artillery and open ones for French, plus twenty-five musket volleys of precise length and direction, indicated by tied, trilled ghost notes. He synchronized all these salvos with his music so precisely that at the height of the conflict, six cannonades and two musket volleys went off within three seconds.

The “Battle Symphony” commemorates Arthur Wellesley’s victory at Vitoria, the victory that resulted in his elevation to the peerage as the Duke of Wellington. I’ve loved Beethoven since childhood but am by no means a connoisseur, so I had to look the “Battle Symphony” up. It’s wild. In addition to “Rule, Britannia,” it incorporates “God Save the King” as a leitmotif for the British and a French folksong better known as “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” or “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.” I’ve embedded von Karajan’s performance in this post; you really have to hear it.

Morris points out several times that critics—actual connoisseurs, unlike yours truly—hold Beethoven’s “Battle Symphony” in pretty low regard. But he also offers this important caveat:

The “Battle Symphony” is by scholarly consensus the worst potboiler Beethoven ever composed, infamous for noise and naïveté. Yet its disparagers ignore that he obviously enjoyed writing it, and that its huge popular success—fanned by Prince Karl Schwarzenberg’s defeat of Napoleon at Leipzig in mid-October—helped pull him out of the Slough of Despond.

Critical consensus matters, as it often does, over enough time, sift what is best from what isn’t, but popular success and pure personal enjoyment matter, too. Sometimes it’s good to remember that. In any art form, if you’re not having fun doing it at least some of the time, why bother?

Bonus trivia or, When Interests Collide: The idea for the “Battle Symphony” came from Beethoven’s acquaintance Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, an inventor who wanted something topical to play on the mechanical orchestra contraption mentioned above. The name sounded familiar to me, and I finally realized where I’d run across it: an early and influential Southern Literary Messenger essay by none other than Edgar Allan Poe, in which he exposes a chess-playing automaton called The Turk that Mälzel had exhibited up and down the East Coast as a hoax. Small world.