Letters to the Editor
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2000-5000 year old books and magical beings
I see the continued reliance on thousands of years old books as just as much fantasy as Santa Claus. I'm sure this will make me pretty popular. Sorry to say so, but a scientific mind does not believe anything on the word of a 3000 year old dead guy or girl.
Belief in magical beings is dangerous. It leads to the sort of world you see now. Everyone believes that their magical being is gonna save them from everybody else. Some believe it will be their sword plus their magical being.
Okay, so I have my own kooky beliefs, senses beyond the five, neo-astrology, etc. I wouldn't base public policy on them.
Santa is a saviour to kids, he's the magical being that makes sure the good kids get toys. Santa is a great metaphor for the magical being. He ties into the christian ethic that god rewards the just and punishes the wicked. That particular Santa Claus gets busted for a lot of people when bad things happen to good people and god doesn't help.
Other people tell themselves god is mysterious and not understandable. But how then do you worship something non understandable? Do you understand it enough to worship it? Perhaps you are offending it because you do not understand.
When we lose a whole city to stupidity, few blame god, and those that do say he's punishing the wicked. Well, I blame the belief in a god who is going to make things come out okay. I believe in good levees. Like the Dutch.
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What about the Easter Bunny?!
Now, there DEFINITELY is an Easter Bunny!
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Is anyone real?
In Jewish funerals, the main idea is that the person who died will live on in people's memories of them. Pain-feeling physical personhood aside, for most of the people we know we are only the impression we make on them and vice versa. Person A imprints on person B, then B, now shaped by A, on C, etc etc. If you lived all alone, who would you be? Would you be real?
Mythical and fictional characters are just as real in that way. After I first read a Sherlock Holmes story, Sherlock Holmes was real to me. I did not think it through at that age (11 or 12), the invincible braniac was just rock-solid real, period.
Conan Doyle based Holmes on a medical school professor of his. So the effect of this professor on Conan Doyle was then conveyed by the writer to readers. Holmes was so real to his fans that Conan Doyle could not kill him off.
The only actor I ever knew personally seemed to channel characters, one in particular. Seeing him create this 19th-century character was like seeing someone create life. The character was not the actor at all, but the actor got his soul and mannerisms from somewhere ~ maybe stretching back through history to the character's time, back from person Z to Y to W, etc etc.
Some Holmes dramatizations have tried to get more at his inner life. But maybe another reason he can seem so real, at least if read at a formative age, is that we don't get his inner life. So we experience him in the same way we experience most of the people that we "know."
Some people have been disappointed or suprised that Conan Doyle who started in science ended by exploring the occult. But he'd created a character who took on a life of his own, real in people's experience of him, living in a spiritual realm. So maybe the science-to-occult path was logical.
I don't know much about Santa, but today's American Santa goes back and back and back to Saint Nicholas and whoever he was or was based on through his incarnations in various ethnic traditions. (I might leave out Coca-Cola Santa.) So maybe the gift-giving parent has through a chain stretching backward learned to give from the master.
Sorry for the blathering. I'm having a lot of trouble expressing this, and maybe it's already obvious to everyone else, it's just what the question suggested. But I think for a lot of us, "people" who are not "real" are more real to us than other "real people," and they are imprinted on us or in us in similar ways as real people are and just as vividly.
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Age Four to Twelve: on Santa and World Crisis
Caught between Hanukkah and Christmas, school out but not much yet happening in the way of seasonal here, a grocery bag two-thirds full of the ingredients for chocolate-fudge-to-give-away occupying a kitchen counter, damp clinging leaves coming in with every footprint, whether one has removed one’s shoes, or not -- how can that be?, Important Decisions to be made:
Does Santa come when the child is twelve? Yes, she says, because Santa forgot altogether, last year. At this, Santa’s helper draws a complete blank and wonders no more how it is that Santa “forgot.”
Since I detest it when people write about their own children for public consumption (a terrible invasion of privacy, without permission), I am going to tell one story about a child I used to know: at age four-years-five-months, this skeptical very-small person asked her parents, separately, about the veracity of the Santa phenomenon. Her unreligiously Jewish father prevaricated, and said something like, “Well, Santa is real, if you believe.” And her unreligious-raised-Quaker mother lied outright. Told a lie – a big, fat, juicy, “myth” of a lie -- because not-yet-five seemed awfully young to be onto the ways of the adult word and its petty mysteries.
Well. Something had to be done to underscore the truth of this untruth, so a bowl of uncooked oatmeal was placed on the doorstep for the reindeer before the child went to bed. And before the mother went to bed, it got strewn about, overturned and generally made a mess of out on the front porch. In the morning, the Little Skeptic strode right past the bulging stocking dangling from the mantel, opened the front door, and screeched about the oats: “He’s real! He IS real, Mama!! Santa is actually, fantastically real, after all! Look, just look at the evidence!”
Never lacking in vocabulary, it was concrete, if faked, evidence she had needed all along to fuel her belief in the myth. But the pleasure -– oh, life was certainly much happier with that myth intact at not-yet-five. So with tongues firmly planted in cheeks, that hand-knitted stocking will be hung once again this year, in a last-ditch effort to pretend well enough to perpetuate the myth. Maybe this year he’ll just bring fudge – could there be a stronger hint that it’s time to give up the fantasy?
And no one here knows when that girl actually, really stopped believing -– which year, at what age -– because the real was supplanted by acting in one smooth, imperceptible sort of “passing,” kind of like tripping over your first high heels and then skipping a couple of steps to make it look as if the tripping part was on purpose. Or like a boy I knew in high school who, at lunch, turned to hear someone speak, and planted his elbow smack-dab in the middle of his plate of food. When we all gasped, and he saw what he had done, his fast recovery was, “I meant to do that!” and it became, after that, his trademark joke.
This year, it’s important to look around and notice the grim in the world right now, of which we can be but dimly aware if we choose; and keenly aware if we can afford to be. I recommend something in-between: enough attention paid that we live in the Real World, ready to see opportunities to contribute materially to its improvement; and little enough that we can carry on our daily lives with the sort of lightness of spirit that lets us enjoy our good fortune, our children, our quirks and foibles – and the great good fortune we have in being able to “know” each other.
B.D., Portland, Oregon