By Shamrock McShane, December 2008
Dark Night of the Soul Party
“In winter’s tedious nights sit by the fire with good old folks and let them tell the tales of woeful ages long ago.” —  Shakespeare, Richard II
This is when the days are shortest and the nights are longest. Stonehenge appears to have been constructed so as to line up with the sunset of the winter solstice. People didn’t know if they’d live through the winter. The cattle were slaughtered, so they needn’t be fed. The beer and wine that had been fermenting was finally ready to be drunk. This might be the last party ever.
In the Middle Ages, when the plague came, people started doing the Dance of Death, or at least picturing it. Kings, popes, emperors, monks, all jigging along with just plain folks, playing follow the leader behind a skeleton. Just to get everybody used to the idea that Country Joe and the Fish proclaimed when they and Bill Ayers, Obama’s pal, were trying to stop the Vietnam War: “Hey-hey, we’re all gonna die!”
At the same time, the solstice marks the reversal of the sun’s ebbing.
Here Comes the Sun
The Winter Solstice long ago became a party to mark the beginning of the end of the long dark night of the soul. And who knows if we’ll ever make it to morning? It was in this frame of mind that Shakespeare wrote his darkest tragedy, King Lear, first performed for the new king, James, at his winter court.
It is also, literally, the occasion for Twelfth Night, or What You Will, marking the last of the 12 nights of Christmas, when misrule reigned. It’s this sense of mad poetry, growing from the pansexual paganism of the Roman Saturnalia that drives us drunkenly to so many deaths on New Year’s Eve.
Satellite needs not more posthumous readers, so stick around. Drama awaits you at every turn.
It was in the dead of winter too, Christmas Eve as legend has it, when Shakespeare’s company covertly dismantled The Theatre that Richard Burbage built (and then lost the lease to) and trucked the timber by foot over the frozen Thames River to re-build it as the Globe on the other side.
Happy Hanukkah
Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights that commemorates the building of the Second Temple, shines forth from antiquity to spotlight modern Jews in Showbiz too, from my main man, no longer a brain-dead liberal, but a Zionist rationalist, David Mamet, to our own Orna Akad, the Gainesville playwright who yearns to find peace in Palestine.
The Lord of Misrule
The winter solstice fostered the Junkanoo in Jamaica, a fantastic masquerade that brings to mind anarchistic hilarity of Frog and Tom Miller, whose performance art blossoms at Brophy’s Irish Pub in Downtown Gainesville.
In ancient Greece and Rome, there was the Lenaia, the Festival of the Wild Women. In the dark forest a man or a bull representing Dionysus was torn apart by Maenads possessed by licentious passion. And now we have Third Eye Spoken, bringing the poetry of feminine nature into chanted reality. Find it at Wild Iris Bookstore, and Tim and Terry’s on Saturday nights, along with poet impresario David Mass and the Word is Spoken.
The New Year will bring us President Obama, and an age of change and hope. But as Spinoza tells us, “There is no hope without fear, there is no fear without hope.”
Are We Alone?
Flaubert wrote, “The melancholy of the ancients seems deeper than that of the moderns, who all more or less assume an immortality on the far side of the black pit. For the ancients, the black pit was infinity itself; their dreams take shape and pass against a background of unchanging ebony. No cries, no struggles, only the fixity of the passive gaze. The gods being dead and Christ not yet born, there was between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius one unique moment in which there was man.”
Be Not Forgot
While Rusty Salling and Gregg Jones, as Scrooge and Marley, ply their trade in their wonderfully comical and spry retelling of A Christmas Carol at the Hippodrome, Rhonda Wilson presents Toyland, a play for all ages, at the Star Center.
Matthew Lindsey and Cameron Francis, two extremely capable and facile actors take over the roles of Tuna Christmas at the Hippodrome from the seemingly irreplaceable Lauren Caldwell and Mark Chambers. But let us not forget those two remarkable performers at this dark and joyous time of year. Especially, Mark Chambers, who’s been a bit under the weather of late.
A Solstice Satellite Salute to the marvelous Mr. Chambers. And to all, a Good Night.