The Changing of the Guard

Fall (unlike Autumn) is my favourite season. As Thoreau gruesomely puts it, preceding Vincent Price's spiel in Thriller by 120 years: "When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in." Life becomes singularly crisp along with the leaves and the weather. The brains of North American mankind, long melted into steamy juice by the Summer Sun, begin once more to solidfy into a semi-functioning globules. In some, the brightness of the leaves inspire a brightness of thought. These people beget ideas, ideas beget ambition, and ambition begets heartburn. The cyclical melody of nature is played out on every deciduous, while the ground base of the evergreen keeps the eternal rhythm of the Earth. Chipmunks play the kazoo, and the screeching Blue Jay does its level best to ruin the effect of Mother Nature - to no avail.

The annoyances of Summer are less pronounced, and by mid-October usually die out completely. A week-long "dog day" in the bedouin months becomes a welcome guest in the visit of several "Indian Summers", with hardly a scalp skinned. Street performers, moral campaigners, and other "characters" retire to their winter quarters - therein to devise fresh ways of pestering their arch nemesis, "status quo". Likewise most insects are silenced by the encroachment of Jack Frost. A few of Nature's own fascist party (wasps, hornets, and other uniformed menaces) survive, mainly marching up and down crab-apple trees and leaning against school-yard walls looking for trouble. These are quickly persuaded to desist from their political activities by means of a can of WD-40 and a lighter.

While many enjoy the leaves, some are especially enchanted by the dark purplish tint of the high skies. Kierkegaard says: "The reason why I so much prefer autumn to spring is that in the autumn one looks at heaven — in the spring at the earth." I don't think he ever looked straight ahead, which much to the chagrin of the Copenhagen omnibus corporation. Counterpoise his view with that of Edgar Allen Poe, who complains whiningly of  "a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens..." What a wailer! The man ought to have written murder stories! Yet both these nattering melancholiacs highlight the eternal variety and suggestiveness of the Fall sky. Its highs are the highest, its lows the lowest of the year. This applies equally well to the rhythm of the internal; for with Thanksgiving and Halloween no belly is happier than in the Fall; no colon more active.

It is no coincidence that for children school starts in the Fall. It is the tragic high point, and therefore the most dramatic part of childhood living. It is eminently poetic in its archetype: having lived the lives of semi-barbarous tribesmen, swallows versus amazons, they return to civilization, exhausted, browned, and ready to be re-colonized by insipid mental jumping-jacks. 

Yet they are cheerful! School marms well know the narcotic effect of the Fall air - how well it mixes with the rustle of new schoolbags and the odor of pencil cases - and how handily it balances out with the stern, depressive optimism of the modern classroom.

Compare the child of mid-October with the child of late-November in a 300 word essay for Monday. You will see that the high feeling of Miltonic revolt, the heartfelt childhood pentameter, "Better to reign in Summer than serve in Fall!" is replaced by a silent, slavish plodding from bell to bell to lunch to assembly to home. For the Undergrad, the Master's student, and PhD, the preceding descriptions of childhood psychology applies, taking into account the mellowing effect of age; that is, after every Fall they seem to find it harder and harder to get up again.

Halloween is the crown of the season. My enthusiasm for this really American holiday knows no bounds. Compared to the Horror Movie Marathon that is Halloween, Christmas is a preachy after-school special. The beautiful thing about Halloween is that there is no moral analysis. Unlike any other Holiday, its true spirit (the Great Pumpkin if you will) is entirely visible in its activity. There IS no spirit of Halloween besides greed, candy, and monsters. No inner moral. Neo-Pagans will claim it for equinoctal harvest rites, Catholics for All-Saint's days etc. but the import of both of those "feasts" coincide almost exactly with the frankness of Halloween itself. Halloween in all of its incarnations declares "there are two things abroad in life; sweets and demons."

People often debate whether the most cultish franchise of the Holiday Season, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, is a Halloween or Christmas movie. I believe it falls strictly in the camp of the former. Not only does Halloween abjectly conquer Christmas in a physical sense; one gets the episteme of Halloween (impish scheming, repetitive malevolence, Schadenfreude) imposed upon Christmas in its entirety. The ever-lamented "commercialization" of Christmas is Halloween triumphant.

This brings me to a tangent: The most quintessentially American work of art I can think of? I try hard, but I keep coming back to It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! The American season, the American holiday, American puritanism, American greed, denomenationalism, slang, investment, loss, litigation, exile in France, parties, military patriotism, the quest for sincerity, Jazz. There is not one part of the movie that isn't full-blooded American. 

Of course, it is the Halloween story that is typically American. It is the inverse of the Christmas story. In Christmas, the Scrooge or Grinch character starts off greedy and hates the holiday, loses their greed, and through some trial learns to become a lover of the season. Halloween stories are always the opposite. The protagonist starts off loving Halloween, and through some terrifying tribulation, is usually miserable, bloated, or otherwise disaffected by the end. Tu vuo fa l'americano!

 Halloween stories are not the same as ghost stories or horror films. Halloween is not a time for sheer unadulterated fear. I rather think late summer is more appropriate. Henry James, Poe, and Dickens incline towards December as the month of true terror. Halloween is more about mellowing death. Halloween is about the harvest moon. Halloween is America. The very act of Trick or Treating - a kind of sweet-toothed blackmail - is it not an embodiment of the American Dream? It is with strong perception that Thoreau locates the vitality of Fall in America especially:

"Europeans coming to America are surprised by the brilliancy of our autumnal foliage. There is no account of such a phenomenon in English poetry, because the trees acquire but few bright colors there. "