...is that it's too soft, really. Sure, there is some icky factor at getting the whole soft entrails out of a pumpkin but that's about it1. And by the time a pumpkin is carved, lighted up from inside and possibly even danced about by kids in costumes, it's really hard to keep a straight face and not burst out laughing, what fear and such?
While I don't usually get drawn into the whole Halloween thing, this year the very young2 being as it were really too young to know better, insisted and persisted, quite unsure as to why and how one might be in fact so utterly uninterested really - not against it, nor for it, but simply entirely outside of it. So they got all dressed up, put on their best impression of supposedly scary witches, brought me their pumpkins and pleaded rather unwitch-like for my taking part in it.
As a result and possibly adding to the lack of scariness at the time, some silly childhood rhymes came to mind instantly and I let them come out loud, too, seeing how they applied all too well to the situation at hand:
Sunt vrajitorica Ica
Bataie imi da mamica
De nu-mi place mancarica.
Or in English this time:
I'm the witch whose name is Itch,
And I'll get it from my Mummy
If I claim her food's not yummy.
Seeing though the rather long faces of such young witches, I relented and asked for a knife instead. They brought me the biggest knife they could find and it was indeed quite big - their choice, not mine, worth noting. And I started carving a pumpkin, but had to tone it down quite quickly as it was starting to cause comparisons and pumpkin-envy, seeing how I didn't know there was a scary pattern to follow and apparently approved-of, familiar "scariness" and so on.
What can I say, it turned out that applied geometry can get scarier than anything, the new and unknown can get more interesting and the trouble's not that I mind scary, more that if one insists to go looking for it, I'd rather they went quite further than it's usually prescribed.
And since I was at it, other rhymes came to mind and I let these come out too, with the right intonation, with the large knife in hand:
Vaier trist prin camp ofteaza -
Vin strigoii, se-ntremeaza
Abur alb de prin sicrie.
Voi, crestinelor popoare,
Faceti cruci mantuitoare,
Caci e noaptea-ngrozitoare,
Noaptea Sfantului Andrii.
The original of the above is from a poem by Vasile Alecsandri, called "St Andrew's Night". I'm still not even happy with this version in Romanian, let alone trying to translate it now but here's at least the gist of it in a quick translation since any translation is likely better than none:
Gloomy cries traverse the plains -
Ghouls are coming, slowly shaping
Out of vapours from their coffins.
Faithful Christians of the world,
Make your crosses at great height
On this fateful, fearful night
Of Saint Andrew's!
As the witches in the audience were suddenly rather unsure and crowding together, I stopped there and let it end at that. With smaller voices than earlier, they asked eventually what that was exactly and knowing at least the name of it seemed quite enough for them this year - after all, I didn't want them to have trouble sleeping that night. So they got the pumpkin I toned-down carved along theirs, they got them all light up and they even got a picture with their cousin too, so it's all on record.
But the deeper trouble left for another time is that the verses above are already adapted, since the original is rather limping and unsatisfying to me. There is a lot of depth to the subject for any writing to bring out and feast on but somehow it fails more often than not and so each time I think of this poem or other similars, I end up itching to dive into it and make it say at least some of what it keeps avoiding3.
You see, if a pumpkin's problem is that it's too soft, a garlicky garland or even a garlic clove, whether whole or crushed has no such issue - it's neither soft, nor light in either sense, nor even easily ignored with its knobbly and tough outline, with its pungent and utterly unavoidable smell4. And witches and devils are such generic archetypes as to lack any truly scary specifics - where I'm coming from, there's a whole detailed panoply of lost, doomed, angry, evil, twisted, life-hungry and life-adverse creatures on the other side of that life-death divide that gets supposedly dangerously thin as the winter comes in, whether it's the end of October in some places or the end of November in others5.
And the trouble is that if I'm to talk of these, I'd rather do them justice - which is apparently way easier said than done, hence why I usually steer away from even trying. Because the whole point of such creatures being on the other side of life means exactly that, namely that they are the needed complementary part, deeply scary and even troubling so. If they are truly troubling it's exactly because they actually match all too well a certain reflection of the known world, not because they are "less" in any sense of the word.
It's quite the opposite, they are scary precisely because they are really easily recognizable as mirror images, entirely and utterly opposed and thus fundamentally hostile and unavoidable at the same time. There is no real "conquering" or "defeating" them, either, just like one can never truly "win" without losing at the same time, whenever one is really fighting oneself. There's only balancing them and such balancing is done better or worse at any given time. Accepting both the reality and the requirements at times unpleasant, at times painful of that balancing act seems to me to be closer to what the whole winter-night thing is all about.
Then again, perhaps the whole point is to look to the other side for a moment, even if not really aiming to truly see it, even if only squinting on purpose to make sure one doesn't end up seeing even by accident more than one bargained for. Hence the pumpkins with their crooked smiles, their warm lights in the night and the sweets they bring - to lull the senses into thinking that it's really only the shape that's perhaps seemingly scary but ultimately inoffensive. It's just the shape that is at odds, not the essence, right?
One can almost hear the unspoken "it has to be" in the above... Then again, garlic never makes sweet pies, only tinctures, sauces and even soups, all strong and clear, at times even smoky, invigorating or even supposedly curing all sorts of ills but never ever plain sweet, not even in the slightest...
I suppose some pumpkin meals could be indeed way ickier if one has to eat them and even downright scary if left long enough out in the open, but that's not even on the Halloween menu as far as I know it. ↩
My nieces, 8 and 9, respectively. ↩
I suppose the "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman at least has a better stab at this than most others and unsurprisingly it draws from every mythology or even scrap and shred of folk lore he could find, as far as I can tell. ↩
And no, I'm not talking of "vampires", sheesh. What next, pointy white canines, tomato-blooded smiles and polyester-silk capes as the height of scariness? ↩
St. Andrew's night is the 30th of November in the Orthodox Calendar at least. ↩
Comments feed: RSS 2.0