The Psychedelic Scrooge Satori Pocalypse

Nothing gets us in the holiday spirit more, perhaps, than reformation, enlightenment, the sudden game changing glow that turns misers into open, generous souls... what magical formula is at work, and how can we slip some in the coffee of, say, Mitch McConnell or the Koch brothers? Whatever it is, whatever the ghost of Bob Cratchit slipped into Scrooge's watered-down soup, it worked, producing three spirits of Xmas, one symbolic death / ego dissolution, one spiritual awakening and a partridge in a banisteriopsis caapi. So why don't we deal with the unspoken and unvarnished cosmic truth? Lo, Scrooge is reborn! I was in tears on Sunday watching Alastair Sim leap around his bed chambers on Christmas morning. I cried because I know what that's like -- you just came back from the rim of the hideous void and you're so grateful to be alive you can barely contain yourself... but the maid just thinks you went looney. Only Tiny Tim, his antennae already half-connected to the world beyond, knows where the goose is coming from, if you dig what I'm plantin'... in your mindgrape vineyard.

I think it would be nice if there were 'Ascendency Welcome Centers' for these kind of 'awakened' misers. I think the Scrooge awakening is going to start happening all over the world because of the cosmic alignement; people will all go off at once, like popcorn after the first early kernels. Hopefully their jubilance will override the preconceptions their family have about them. They won't suddenly be ostracized from their church or marriage. After all, this inititiaion / conversion / awakening is nothing new. It's only new in this century. Witness Hazel Court in MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH! Tamino and Pamina in THE MAGIC FLUTE. Have you? Do you want to try? Five dolla. What are you, chicken? buck buck

It's only natural to be wary since without the all-consuming threat of death --without genuinely believing you are going to die or are dying or have died, and not just for a little roller-coaster moments but for what seems like hours, days, of being dead or terrorized by death -- you will never get there. In FLUTE, Tamino and Pamina have to brave the writhing flames of the initiation mystery cave to the tune of Mozart; in MASQUE Hazel Court (above) endures an around-the-world of ghost shamans cutting out her heart upon a Satanic altar in blue-green tint and slow motion to the tune of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." And Ebeneezer Scrooge endures the cold marble of his own tombstone as all his dear possessions get tossed to beggars and fences. He even winds up at the bottom of a deep grave struggling to get out while the dirt falls around him. He screams and moans and vows to be good and twists up in his bedsheets. He has to get that low, not a pennilessness less low, for his rebirth, his reformation, his temporary cessation of toxic ego vexation, to click in on some permanent level. Why don't most Xmas movies realize that without this big looming death presence, Xmas has no deep, lasting catharsis? The holidays in the end are all about this -- sometimes even just having to talk to your grandmother for a few minutes can be enough to remind you where you're frail aging flesh is headed.

 Jimmy Stewart doesn't experience death so much in Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE but he gets a cold from trying to commit suicide by jumping into an incy river on Xmas eve -- and that's kind of the same, because suicide is often attempted as a means towards spiritual awakening as the sufferer wants to trigger their egoic death and rebirth and doesn't understand that there are easier (albeit even more terrifying) ways. Clarence the angel serves as a melange of Xmas ghosts, rescuing Jimmy and showing him the miserable Dickensian werkhaus of a place his little town would be without him.

Again, I stress that just like CHRISTMAS CAROL, LIFE would have no resonance without these scenes of grim despair, mortal loss, defeat and desperation. There would be no cathartic tears of joy if we were not allowed to gaze into the snowy void of terror at our own mortality and the grim world that awaits us once we let go of hope and selfless love. Cut out the despair, you cut out the exaltation, the tear-streaked gratitude.

The last time I was in Chicago visiting my relatives I had that same sensation, part of which was caused by the unceasingly grim weather, another part by the severely aged condition of my granny, the cancer of my father and my own mix of cigarette withdrawal and constant winter sickness. It felt like we were all chained together in order of age on a ship, and our great grandparents were already overboard and the chain was just forever being sucked down into the ship as it sailed on and we were all slowly getting pulled under by the weight of our sunken family tree...kuchunk, one link of the chain at a time, unstoppably, like grim clockwork.

Death, it's what's for dinner. Let's face it -- there's no true art without death. Without death, it's all just comedy, or pornography. So it stands to reason that mortality is no enemy to be feared! Rather it is only when we avoid her, forget what we're running from, that she has to come looking for us. Observe the lower right hand Kali, indicating 'no fear' or 'welcome' or 'how ya like me now?" or "Ta Da!" or "Look Ma, four hands!"

Instead of letting this existential dread wash away our current ego like a snake shedding its skin, it's like that snakeskin ego convinces us it would be a much better idea to cover all that mortal terror up in curtains and movie posters, sex gossip, political debate, petty seductions and longing for objects, trying to stop the progression of decay in order that this old, dysfunctional skin might stay in place around you. Sooner or later there are so many curtains and covers and objects and seductions over the face of our own mortality that we can't see it at all, and so we feel cut off.... we forget what we were even covering up in the first place and our now rotting snakeskin cover has gone rogue on us, using our own serpent venom against us the moment we so much as rub up against a tree. Still, we obey the egoic edict to pay no attention to it and instead blame people for letting us down, spouses for holding us back, parents for holding us up when we're trying to get, you know, moving!

It's like when you're looking for your keys and a part of you thinks it might be in a big clump of crap way down under your desk, tangled like Jack Torrance searching for an exit in the Shining maze of computer wires. You don't want to bend mighty low so you search any place--at eye level--getting madder and madder at not finding them and then finally you bend on down and reach into the dirt.

found your keys yet?

And there the keys are, always, deep in the dirtiest of your hidden corners, buried under rocks of crap, and now you have FOUND THEM. Ganesha! Saint Anthony! George Bailey! Hazel Court! Scrooge! Finding that sense of oceanic bliss means reaching down in the dust under the desk: you gotta get low. You can't buy your way in, and you can't possibly be too poor. No Tim is too tiny for the open heart. Make yourself poor and wretched and your old snake skin finally decides to shed, preferring not to be associated with such a loser --and you're free.

 

Mystery Cave initiation in The Magic Flute (Bergman's)

Today, of course, those who knew Scrooge would just say he was having a manic episode, that he should adjust his meds, or that he was possessed by the devil, or had gone new age. I've often wondered what it would be like if Scrooge became a ghost-of-Xmas junky, needing to give away bigger and bigger turkeys just to feel the boys are still "marvelous", needing to act all miserly and bah-humbug starting around December just so he can conjure Cratchit and wrangle another visit to that tombstone, to get that magic selfless glow again. Or what if his new open heart and generous spirit led to him being swindled of all his fortune after only a few weeks, and so he bitterly renounces Xmas as instrumental in getting him to let his guard down and becomes even more miserly than before?

Thankfully Dickens lets us know this was not the case, noting that  through the end of his days Scrooge 'kept Christmas well.' May we all be so lucky.