not native fruit

amma season

i've been absent from the weblog in recent weeks because i've been all caught up in 'amma season' - that wonderful time of the year that is better than school letting out, better than ski week, better than any holiday i can name - that time of year when amma visits the bay area from india.  we all had a fabulous time, and are still savoring our enjoyment of our time with her as she moves on her way across the country.  tomorrow will be her last day in los angeles and from there she will travel to santa fe new mexico.

as part of my service to the community this time around, i've published a new e-magazine called 'amma's forest dwellers' for old-timers, retired persons, contemplatives, hermits and the like - all of whom used to be called 'forest-dwellers' in the old folk-tradition of india.

i've also been reading Karen Armstrong's 'The Spiral Staircase.'  Years ago, I read her first book, 'The Narrow Gate,' about her time in the convent back in the late 1950's and early 1960's.  'The Spiral Staircase' tells her story after leaving the convent and eventually writing her best-selling books, such as 'A History of God.'  I found 'The Spiral Staircase' an engrossing memoir, plus entertaining (for example, her charming stories of Jacob), intriguing and educational (her description of her health issues), and I appreciated her articulate personal sharing.

i've been playing my dulcimer in the evenings more, as a part of my spiritual practice.  Toning and singing are even better, really, but i feel charmed by the mellifluous tones of the dulcimer.  like to feel the vibration under my hands and where the dulcimer lays flat across my lap.  my blue lion really truly does make exquisite sound.  very conducive to meditation.

mummers as spiritual artists

i've written about what the mummers meant to me as a child, now i'd like to write a little about what they mean to me now.  (by the way this picture is taken from the cover of Patricia Anne Masters' book, "The Philadelphia Mummers, Creating Community Through Play" )

i find them inspiring because they represent ordinary working-class people expressing their spiritual creativity in a free and exuberant manner.  these folks allow their spirit and zest for living to spill out creatively filling space and air with color and sound.  against the backdrop of an often grim and always gritty-gray environment they project an alternative.  due to their circumstances in life, they aren't a part of the mainstream culture of art or performance, don't have much money, haven't gone to art school, or studied choreography (until very recently), and no one is paying them to perform the way they do.  They are just doing it! and have been doing it for hundreds of years, and for over one hundred years in the present form as a parade on Broad Street.  This is a grass-roots phenomenon, a manifestation of the creative surge that comes up from the ground, fills the body and spills out in an arciform design, not unlike the shape of the back-boards pictured above in these Handsome and Handsome-Trim suits, or in the shape created by nature in the white peacock, pictured below, which reminds me of some of the old Handsome Suits and Handsome Trim suits that featured a white snowflake motif.

 

since reconnecting with this aspect of my childhood - the mummers day parade -  i can recognize where i got the idea that ordinary people, working class people, had some sort of inalienable right to create art.  that the rich and privileged do not have sole domain over creativity.  (this has really been an issue for me, due to the fact that when i was young i was unable to swing the necessaries to attend art school myself - long story of 'lack of support' around preparing myself to study art in any kind of formal way.  another time.)  of course, we see and acknowledge that truth in the areas of african-american music, for example, or in appalachian blue-grass music.  perhaps in music, more than elsewhere.  and i'm certainly not saying that study doesn't add grace, refinement, complexity and many other features to the various art forms.  i simply mean that the impulse to create something beautiful, uplifting, fun and self-expressive was demonstrated for me by the mummers year after year from an early age.  even the forms of their costumes, such as the Handsome Trim suits, express the impulse of creativity and expression, and is it any wonder i picked that message up?  yes, we were working class folks, for sure, and thanks to our times a number of us moved up in terms of income and even class, but not everyone.  i have an abiding appreciation for what we had and still have, and i see the joy of that treasure expressed in the mummers day parade.

new year mummer's day parade

i can't let the month of january go by without writing something about the new year's day mummers' parade in philadelphia - "place where I was partly raised."

every january 1st my mother and grandmother, or if my father were home from sea, my father would take me 'downtown' on the subway to stand in the freezing cold and wind on Broad Street, sometimes in snow flurries, to see the Mummers' Parade.  All of us kids in Philly could do the Mummers' Strut, but not all of us participated in the parade.  That privilege was reserved for people, sometimes whole families, who belonged to the various clubs, often neighborhood or ethnic community organizations, which prepared costumes, music, routines and themes all year long for the coming of the great New Year's Day parade.

We participated by *being there,* by getting cheered up, entertained, and entranced.  My mother's favorites were the string-bands.  Their performance was often in question if the weather was less than pristine, and so we would strain our ears to hear them approaching.  We could hear them before we could see the round, square or oval backboards with their bright colors, magical feathers and sparkling baubles, approaching in ranks to the accompaniment of up-beat string music. 

Looking back from here I can see what a dynamic, magical,  positive start the Mummers' Parade gave us every New Year. 

My mother wanted me to grow up as a Catholic so I think she downplayed the significance in our lives of the paganesque Mummers' Day ritual.  Although many of the Mummers are also from Catholic backgrounds, I think it goes without saying that the roots of mummery, both in Europe and America, go back to pre-Christian cultures that were absorbed into Catholicism.  Similar activities include Louisiana's Mardi Gras and other Caribbean and east coast festivals of mummery, and are found notably also in Ireland, Sweden and Russia, to my knowledge.

The root neighborhoods of the Shooters (the original name of those later called 'Mummers' by outsiders) were in the old formerly native american enclaves in Philadelphia where mixed European-African-Native American people worked along the river, later to be joined by many European immigrants and melded into what I call 'old Philadelphians' (not referring to the so-called 'first proprietor' family lines here).  Anyway, people often trace the start of the Shooters to the 'Swedes' who lived down there along the river, but of course, the early swedes in Philly - people who arrived in the early 1600's - were *men* who created children with 'someone' (native american women?) who were later self-identified as Swedes.  but of course, my pleas for native-american/european contributions to early american society seem to be falling into thin air.  nevertheless, i state my paltry case yet again.

The overall impression of the Mummers on my psyche can be summed up in this list of words: exciting, beautiful, musical, spherical, wheels, whirling, spinning, rotating, ringing, revolving, pivoting, circulating, curved, ruffled, bulbous, annular, dome-shaped, sickle-shaped, colorful, gyrating, laughing, arching, curving, crescent-shaped, glittering, gleaming, comical, imaginative, arciform, circular, coiled, waving, dancing, and finally last but not least, strutting!

there are quite a few good resources out there on the Mummers of Philly.  I'll just list a few:

the Mummers' Museum, available online
Strut! a DVD by Robert Downey Jr's father, Robert Downey Sr, a must for all Mummers' fans with footage of the 2000 parade
Oh! Dem Golden Slippers, by Claude Welch, an excellent older book on the subject - the classic!
Life, Liberty and the Mummers, by E.A. Kennedy III, an African-American author from New Orleans who became interested in the subject and who features oodles of photos and also some very interesting text
The Philadelphia Mummers, Building Community through Play, by Patricia Anne Masters, mostly text, perhaps a doctoral dissertation looking at the working-class roots of Philly's Mummers, a good read