Attending to Our Fires
Traditions that light our dark winters. Prometheus and the Nazis. And some very good personal news.
When life gets dark, set things on fire!
The Liss household has been all lit up this month. As you can see, we are a bit of a mix here with the Filipino-Catholic-Polish-Jewish thing going on.
This past weekend we got to light the rose candle for Gaudete Sunday. The weekend is all about joy and the “it’s almost Christmas!” excitement that is particularly palpable if you have a little one in the house.
The renowned writer and translator of classical poetry
has a Substack called Word and Song, and one of this recent posts is about JOY:Our word joy, like most of our words beginning with j, such as jingle, jolly, and juniper, comes to us from the Norman French. We had the sound in Old English that we now spell with j, as in our old word for bridge, but it couldn’t come at the beginning of a word, just as our sound ng can’t, either, though it certainly does in other languages. So those French-speaking descendants of the Vikings came over with their Jacks and Jills, and they brought the word joy too. It came from Latin gaudia, joys, itself from the verb gaudere, to rejoice. Now that plural gaudia was eventually mistaken for a singular, and it gave us a noun for something fancy and happy, a gaud, and an adjective for something full of fancy decorations, something gaudy. That’s come to suggest a little too much, or too cheap, but something of the older meaning is still preserved at Oxford, where a Gaudy Night is a big reunion celebration for alumni. And something of the holiness of joy was preserved in the old custom of making the Our Father bead on the rosary fancier than the others: the gaudy.
Speaking of Gaudy Nights and reunions, Boston’s Filipino school, Iskwelahang Pilipino, had a huge Pasko celebration. I am an alumna from the class of 1992, and many of the current teachers are my former classmates. I was on stage to sing some carols with a group that spanned three generations of Filipino-Americans. There was music, dancing, and food—as is to be expected at a Pinoy gathering.
The students began the event by parading into the gym holding up their handmade star-shaped paper lanterns, called parols. Some of the older children danced the Pandanngo Sa Ilaw where they showed off difficult candle balancing skills. It was very impressive.
I did not record the students performing, but if you wanted to see what the dance looks like here’s a video of another group doing a more professionally produced version below.
Kudos to the students, staff, and families at Iskwelahang Pilipino for pulling off such a wonderful event.
As you can see, our lives lately have been full of little flames. The power and danger of fire is not lost on me. Neither is it lost on this guy…
Oh, Prometheus! He defied Zeus and gave fire to man, and as punishment he was bound to a rock where an eagle would come and eat his liver. Every night the organ would grow back and the next day the painful cycle would continue.
Prometheus has inspired many artists, from Aeschylus to Rainer Maria Rilke to Ridley Scott. Sometime between 1772 and 1774 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote a poem that posed Prometheus’s rebellion against Zeus as analogous to men’s defiance of the Christian God. In 1818, Mary Shelley invoked the name of Prometheus in the subtitle of her book Frankenstein, a novel about the unintended consequences of scientific advancement.
I think of Prometheus now in these dark days, not just because of the joy that fire can bring on cold winter nights, but because of our current relationship with technology which the ancient fire represented. Things are developing at a speed that outpaces our ability to devise a philosophy and ethical standards to protect people’s well-being and dignity. The “move fast and break things” school of thought—like that defiance of order in Rilke’s poem—has wrought something distasteful, yet utterly predictable.
The fire I am talking about is the powerful platform I am writing on right now. And the unintended consequences of the gift of fire is…
Nazis, antisemites, and white supremacists.
There I said it.
Some of you who have commented on previous posts may have noticed antisemitic infiltration. I did not block or ban these parties, but I muted them. I don’t know what that does for the rest of you, but I don’t get alerts when they post comments. (The leaders of Substack have not exactly made clear what blocking, banning, muting, etc. explicitly does. Is there a table I can reference somewhere?)
I do not believe in banning anything—people, books, whatever—but I am not sure what to do at this moment. Please feel free to let me know your thoughts on this in the comments.
Due to a childhood punctuated with real life racism—as in people throwing rocks at our house when I was little and me walking down the street as a teen and some random guy saying “You ch*nks give good f**k”—I am just not as phased by *virtual* harassment as most people. (Not that I am excusing that behavior!) However, I think we need to have some open debates about what is going on here on Substack and in social media. Whether we like it or not our contributions online form our culture and society, even if it seems diluted by sheer amount of content.
We cannot let technology operate without rules of civility, just as we cannot leave fires unattended. Things will get out of hand before you know it, and we will not be able to contain the damage. However, I believe that with commonsense and charitable debate we can avoid destruction. I know that sounds like a tall order, but I am willing to try. I hope you are too.
Substack has helped me fund an education that I otherwise would not have pursued. I have had complete strangers write me emails to encourage my writing here and my studies. A number of people have even supported me financially. The good news I alluded to earlier is that my grades came back from my fall semester and I received the highest grade I could have received. My professor said that my poems from my first class project are good enough to warrant inclusion in my final thesis. I am proud of the work I am doing, and it is because of you who are reading me here. You keep me writing.
The world is dark right now. Let our fires bring light, warmth, and joy. And let’s keep them well tended.
Addendum: For those who don’t know, here is one of the articles that started discussion. And these are letters people have signed with opposing view points:
I'm late in posting. Congratulations on your good news and you've confirmed my word for 2024---Joy! Each new year I focus on a word or phrase. Trust was for 2023. Concerning the issues of technology--- we are surrounded by darkness but we carry the light and trust that what words are meant for evil will be used for good.
A good cliche is "You can either curse the darkness or light a candle."
Clearly, you are a candle lighter of great merit.
Thanks for this post!