Light On Dark Water

Clock and Dragon

The Catholic world is a bit off balance, with Easter and therefore Ash Wednesday coming so early this year. Backing up from there, Epiphany was hardly over before the Mardi Gras festivities started. Last weekend my wife and I attended our first-ever Mardi Gras ball, at the kind invitation of the parents of one of our children’s friends. The dress, if not the behavior, at these events is formal, so our attendance involved my being outfitted in borrowed white tie and tails. My wife unkindly photographed me in this getup, and I look like a hapless and not very bright aristocrat who has been snatched by revolutionaries and has just begun to realize that they mean to shoot him.

The ball was a fairly sedate affair, and in that respect almost a letdown: a co-worker who attends lots of them had told me of once witnessing an all-out hair-pulling fist fight between two drunken women in formal gowns, and so I was on the lookout for spectacle, but although there was plenty of drinking, no one seemed stupidly drunk and everyone seemed to be having a fine and good-humored and relatively innocent time.

It was enjoyable, but on the whole I think I prefer being out among the rabble in the streets at the parades. I’m a little puzzled by this, as I generally don’t care for crowds and am frequently more depressed than heartened by the company of my fellow man in large numbers. But watching Mardi Gras parades fills me with a happy benevolence. I wrote at greater length on this last year, in my journal for February 22, 2004.

The Mystics of Time had their parade last night, and Karen and I watched it, as usual from the corner of Government and Franklin. The Mystics seemed to me to have some striking and, if one takes it as I do, rather unfestive symbolism in their pageantry. First, on what is called the emblem float, a large clock whose minute hand is speeding around the dial, compressing the hours into four or five seconds.

Afterwards come the dragons: first the mama dragon, Vernadean, then her two children, Verna and Dean. I take the combination of clock and dragon as references to the all-consuming nature of time—the dark backward and abyss of time (from The Tempest, I think). Perhaps the intended message is “Eat, drink, and be merry,” but it strikes me more as a warning that the eating and drinking and merry-making will soon be over.

I start every Lent filled with good intentions and generally end with an almost fatalistic sense of my own incorrigibility, with little more thought about the whole business than that I will soon be able to resume whatever pleasure—usually coffee, alcohol, or music—I’ve given up. It strikes me this year that the most pressing thing I have to do is to reduce the level of distraction and stimulation in my life. That’s going to start with eliminating music from the daily hour and a half or so that I spend in the car—a step that will be quite painful—and giving some specific Lenten texts priority over all other reading. And it’s going to require spending significantly less time on the Internet, my usage of which has really gotten out of hand since I got DSL and a wireless network at home, and which I sometimes feel is inducing in me a case of attention deficit disorder.