Hidden in the Mistletoe

by Denis Larrivee

Strolling down New York’s East Side Avenues in mid-December one senses that the city’s merchants know all about the euphoria that is meant by Christmas spirit. There are the beaming mannequins conversing in Bloomingdales’ glass exposes, Patik timepieces, wise legacies from father to son, Harold’s delicacies left unwrapped by family hearths; all laced with northern hemlock and bound in scarlet bows. The persistence of this yearly reenactment seems to confirm a long-buried consensus over what is needed to for the season’s mood.

Its seemingly ancient heritage is deceptive, though. It is the legacy of a Christmas not so long ago, a zeitgeist of a mid-Victorian Christmas revival, captured in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The story’s captivating power has beguiled English speaking generations since. Dicken’s influence can be seen in the warmth of family gatherings, rich seasonal food and drink, dancing under the mistletoe, games and fine dress. The ‘Carol’s impact was immediate. Published on December 19, 1843, the first edition sold out by Christmas Eve. Thirteen editions followed in 1844; in fact, the novella has never been out of print, and has seen its transformation to film, stage, and even opera. Of course, Dicken’s story is not really about Madison Avenue’s annual reincarnation, or Harold’s plum pudding. Those in the know - and that seems to include nearly everyone who has read it - will tell you that it is the story of personal conversion and a reincarnation of St Nicholas’ spirit of generosity. England then was simply revisiting its own Christmas traditions in that early Victorian day and Dicken’s experience of Field Lane Ragged school, where London’s half-starved illiterate street children were cloistered, made the connection both logical and inevitable.

That sort of knowing nod from nearly us all - ‘bless us everyone’ - may not be so encompassing or revealing of what lies beneath the shimmer and behind the smile, however. An inkling of what lies hidden in the story also, and likely what Dicken’s wished to convey, can be seen in the titling. The full version, and not the abbreviated one of common parlance, is A Christmas Carol; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Its suggestion of a hidden and active supernatural aura Dickens makes explicit in the spirits of Christmas past, present, and future, who do the heavy lifting of moving Scrooge from miser to deacon minister. While academics have debated the story’s secular vs Christian allegorical message, there seems little reason to disclaim the notion that either Dickens or the enthralled public viewed the spirits as insignificant sidelines in an otherwise captivating tale; or that the sense of festivity at Little Tim’s party was both sign and medium for a visible supernatural expression.

This appeal of an unseen essence, that appears so irresistible a part of the Christmas fabric poses a challenge - undoubtedly amplified at this time of year, but latent in its provocation beyond the season - to those who require an explanation for the evident and cannot fathom how one might evoke the other, or why it should have meaning or at least a consensus meaning that they cannot concede to. Conceding the presence of the appeal, though, and eliciting the inevitable pushback to its evident challenge is seen, for example, in a recent December meeting of the New York Academy of sciences on the Will to Meaning: Seeking the Why of our Existence at which the Academy proposed its own plausible variants. Underscoring the apparently ingrained need for existential satisfaction its reincarnation at a second annual staging - apparently the major issues having been unresolved on the first go-round - sanctioned another contrarian suite of explanations. Billing for the event lay heavy emphasis on the tried and failed glitter of today’s foremost empiricist arts, from neuroscience to astrophysics, all looking to extract a why from a how, and never quite moving past the seen. Also taking up the cudgel, in a gastric guise - perceiving but not seeing and so with surer aim - are the political ambits that cannot stutter what is being uttered in the East Side frolicking festivities; Merry Christmas! Whether the sacred can grace the profane, in fact, is a query that has created a virtual string of pirouettes by occupants at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

One wonders why the appeal provokes such a vivid display, like the pulsing galactic spirals of a stellar implosion the Academy makes reference to - spinning out its radiating corona amidst the black backdrop of a starless horizon. What provocative presence needs to be silenced?

Dickens might tell us. After four novellas only one ran the presses. When an unscrupulous publisher attempted thievery over author’s privilege Dickens sued, lost his income, and spent a good remainder of his life raising funds through its recitation. He had an opportune chance to gauge enthusiasm’s stimulus. Scrooge’s pivot from the grasping materialist to the kinder, gentler ‘minister to need’ says much of the twist from ‘grab what you see’ mentality to the observant socialist moved by unseen motivations of mutual harmony and considered concern, the idea that Dickens appears to wish to convey. But then how do we view the spirits who act like provocateurs? Are they the pivot makers who merely create good will and horizontal exchange? The Carol doesn’t seem to tell us.

Or perhaps Huxley, another English don? Like Dickens, Huxley spent a lifetime of transition from the drab Cartesian proclivities of colorless family tastes to the ‘unseen behind the manifestation’. Unlike Dickens, Huxley’s taste ran beyond sacramental gestures that signify the full circle of the transformative in community organizing, leaving Christmas wraiths as sidelined instigators. As early as 1932, thirty years before his death, he elected to disclaim his familial anti-revelation sentiments that made mere epiphenomena of the transcendent. His parody of liturgical Fordism In Brave New World parodies brother Julian’s explicit endorsement of religious sentiment as a naturalized device for controlling the masses, cleaving brotherly bonds. Keeping to this trajectory, Huxley went on to explore Go-like permutations of seen and unseen, from Eastern pantheistic Unseen Manifestations, to neural revelations of hallucinogenic imbibing, to a materially emancipated form he called Mind at Large, to settle on, finally and for him, a defining faith utterance “The truth is, of course, that we are all organically related to God, to Nature and to our fellow men.” His tracking through all appears to have completed the circle from the paternal allegiance of Darwin’s bulldog to the maternal embrace of Anglican choirs.

Huxley’s pursuit through a succession of decades and variable conceivings is emblematic of the intellectual hound whose foraging sees the faint glimmer of orange and spotting the trail moves on to new ground. There is the sense of broken twigs and crushed blades of grass, but they are gestures hidden by briar understories and disguised by a shadowed canopy, above and before a rising knoll. The wonder for Huxley was, perhaps, not in the reclusive but in the sense of exasperation that was superseded to overcome all.

The other wonder, though, is the sort of unrelenting gravitation that makes the turning to the center of everything an ongoing source of new stimulation. Both these wonders are present in December’s East Side displays, the glimmer and the pull. Like Huxley’s tracking the strollers move from glitter to smile before moving on. Never quite satisfied, but always impelled, they resemble the brownian trembling that seems just chance, until distantly viewed in the accumulated flow. Never quite realizing that the glitter is not the radiance, that the object is not the subject that compels, unseen amid the seen, the strollers leave behind them Bloomingdale’s expose.

Jean Luc Marion proposes that the unseen can never be more than a glimmer, only an ever receding subject that we are incapable of grasping, which we grapple with and are grappled by - which perhaps excuses the strollers. He explains that its radiance saturates, dazzling us, and leaving us unseeing. What Marion proposes is perhaps revealing about the source of the joy we sense in December. That in our inability to assuage the hope and to quell the desire, there is a revelation of our own insufficiencies. The resolution to this paradox instead lies outside our limits. When we grasp this idea and when we see the subject of our desire we are filled with joy, both for the presence of that hand and the intention of that heart. Rejoice, Rejoice! O Israel!