Stephen Swanson

Stephen Swanson moves on to something nicer for the holidays…the holidays! After a recent conversation group at church about the meanings and importance of the Advent season, Stephen tries to piece together something from the scraps of wrapping paper, tinsel, and fallen pine needles.

We are Filled…Literally

I’ve always enjoyed the period from Thanksgiving to New Years. Not only is the weather changing and the semester is winding down, but we enter into food season where the kitchen is filled with enticing smells every week, if not every day. There’s the prep for Thanksgiving, which leads to leftovers, which leads to stock made from leftovers, which leads to soups made from the stock from the leftovers, and this progresses on to cookies, prep for Christmas when the cycle continues, just in time for New Years, football, and Chinese New Years…mmmmm…

How Unfilling?

Of course this plenty has its negative side, gluttony of food and stuffs. In addition to a time of food, family, and friends, it is the time when advertisers tell us that we need to fill ourselves with HD TVs, Nintendo DS’s, plastic toys, and salad shooters. We all know, intellectually, that these things do not feed us through these cold months. We know that we should not spend THAT much, “But, it’s Chrismas,” right?

The 24-hour cable news machine also tells us of our emptiness, as it tries to fill its own. The TVs at school, tuned to Headline News, consistently tell all passersby how much they need to argue about the name of the season, “Holidays” v. “Christmas,” about how one should or should not spend, “Organic” v “Local”/“Wal-Mart” v “Ma & Pa”/etc., and about what to do when you realize you’ve ended up overdoing it, debt consolidation/gold/ diets/gyms/ Gold’s Gyms & Diets.

I go to church and hear the same passages from Luke, see the cute kids in bathrobes, listen to the handbells, and I love those familiar rituals, but something leaves me unfulfilled. It is not that we need more “Christ in Christmas” or need to acknowledge “The Reason for the Season”. It is so much more simple and complex than that.

“Filling” is Filling

Rather, I want people to think outside of the platitudes and simple expressions of faith and fulfillment. What is so energizing and exciting, to me, about the food part of the seasons from late November and into February is not the consumption but rather the “advent”.

I don’t mean the candles in the wreath or the little doors with candies behind them. I seek the “arrival that has been awaited” that advent really means. It is in the preparation and that magical instant at the door when you invite the visitors in to your warmth, smells, and company: your hospitality. No matter your religion or spirituality, the meaning behind this time of year touches the commonalities within all of us to be both host and hosted and gifter and giftee.

The connection between “love”, “joy”, “peace”, and “hope” of advent does surround the “Christ” candle in my tradition, but that messiah also points to the duality at the center of both Christianity and humanity, more broadly: that we are all both citizens and strangers and need connection to remember the transcendent power of hope in bringing peace and joy through love.

And so I ask that you all consider what you are feeding yourself and others, and I ask that you look for the fulfillment of the self through the other.

Also…learn to make your own stock. It’s not that hard and is soo tasty.

Travis Griffith

Christmas has always been my all-time favorite part of the year.

Well, maybe it’s in a tie with Halloween. And hot summer days on the lake. Regardless, I love Christmas because of the magic it creates and for the love I feel on Christmas Day and the eve before.

I love Christmas because of childhood memories of waking up at 3 a.m. and excitedly but cautiously making my way towards the Christmas tree to see if Santa had come yet. I was never disappointed, and the magical feeling of seeing a new toy bathed in the soft glow of the tree’s light has never left me. I call it the Christmas Feeling, but it’s a feeling that still crops up, occasionally, year-round.

As sacrilegious as it may seem to say this, Christmas for me isn’t about the birth of Christ, but about love, generosity, thankfulness and family. All things Christ represents, I suppose, but I reject the story of Jesus’ birth happening in a manger on Dec. 25.

Not long ago a friend saw some of my writing here about my search for spirituality and asked me questions about what I believe. She’s a devout Christian and a giving, loving human. She asked if I had ever considered Christianity and then invited me to her church.

I respectfully declined.

The truth is, I have considered Christianity very carefully and I appreciate many of the values it teaches (and loathe others). What I cannot accept are the stories behind the religion; Christmas being one of them.

I try to keep an open and respectful eye on all of humanity. Humans have been on Earth much longer than 2,000 years and through it all, humanity has one constant: a desire for the spiritual. It seems people today don’t give credit to the advances and traditions of ancient people. December 25th and the winter solstice have been important as early as 4500 BC; acknowledged in everything from ancient Ireland’s Newgrange burial chamber, Babylon’s Isis and Osiris myths, the Roman’s Festival of the Birth of the Unconquered Sun, and the modern day story of Christ’s birth.

When Roman Emperor Constantine declared Christianity the official religion in 350, other forms of worshiping were banned. Rather than changing old traditions, Pope Julius I declared Dec. 25 Christ’s birthday.

My intent here isn’t to persuade people away from Jesus’ story. I believe Christ was a real person, an heir of God, who’s purpose was to spread the message of love. If your truth lies in Christianity, revel in it!

During the holiday season, it’s the Christmas Feeling that I celebrate though, along with many thousands of years of humanity’s desire to celebrate our planet, our families and the love that holds us all together.

Merry Christmas and Peace on Earth, friends.

***

Travis Griffith, who recently left behind the corporate marketing world, choosing family and writing in lieu of “a comfortable life” financially, is a former atheist trying to define what leading a spiritual life really means. His children’s book, Your Father Forever, published in 2005 by Illumination Arts Publishing Company, Inc. captures only a fraction of his passion for fatherhood.

Stephen Swanson

Stephen Swanson concludes his series looking at the messages that Quentin Tarantino directs towards the artist in this summer’s Inglourious Basterds. In this final entry, the oppositions between the “artistries” of Col. Landa (Christopher Waltz) and Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) come to make a very challenging assertion to those of us who create. Both Landa and Dreyfus illustrate the dangers and potential of artists who both come from positions of social, political, or cultural power or weakness.

True Art Comes from Somewhere

With Landa’s success in untangling Pierre’s simple attempts at subterfuge, he discovers the Jewish family’s location and orders them shot through the floorboards. Shoshanna Dreyfus escapes from under the house and runs across the fields as Landa yells his promise that the “Jew Hunter” will complete his identity again. In Landa’s story, the audience witnesses the origins of Dreyfus’s future work as a direct reaction to distance herself from Landa.

The literal beauty of the shot amplifies the audience’s connection with her fear and with a hope for escape that built up through the whole course of the Landa/Pierre repartee. Tarantino opposes Dreyfus’s artistic presentation to Landa and to the Inglourious Basterds, both of which have no real defined origins or purpose beyond the power struggles between world powers and self-aggrandizement, which becomes apparent when both sides compromise their values to get what they want.

…And The Audience Should Know It

In addition to the presence of an artistic source and origin, Tarantino includes a clear directive towards the importance of communicating that origin and the responsibility to the audience. When Dreyfus enacts her revenge, part live performance/part film, she and the audiences, both in the narrative cinema and in the viewer’s cinema, are made aware of the origins and consequences of art. Dreyfus specifically targets a particular audience, just as Tarantino does, and she tells them what she does and why. In making her movie, Shosanna looks directly in the camera and speaks to the Nazi elite as she causes the fire that will consume them all, cleverly “accelerated” by the previous works that she had inherited, protected, and promoted.

True Art Speaks, Produces, and has E/Affect

As the producer and venue operator, Dreyfus must withstand the attentions of the powerful “Landa’s”. Dreyfus recognizes her chance to make her art and takes the fatal risk in transition from critic to artist. She also aims to make her art count. Dreyfus knows the stakes of her art and sets the effect to an analogous level. Tarantino purposefully overlay’s the honored, German soldier, Zoller’s (Daniel Brühl) accusations that Dreyfus cannot “feel” at same time as she awaits her chance to show him the evidence that she feels most deeply and that those feelings have consequences for those that ignored them initially.

A Conclusion of Sorts

Tarantino places the culmination of art/speech/creation outside of Dreyfus’s storyline. Although reviewers level criticism at seemingly gratuitous violence, Tarantino leaves the audience with fresh memories of Utivich (B.J. Novak) and Raine (Brad Pitt) carving a swastika in Landa’s head. In the scope of his purpose and topic, Tarantino’s film embraces art that is destructive and lacking in subtlety to both grow out of and respond to American cinema’s historical relationship to WWII filled with the gunning down of nameless and faceless “Japs” or “Jerries”, of classic Hollywood cinema, or even attempts to gain personal “worth” through individual sacrifice, such as in Spielberg’s war films. Like Dreyfus, Tarantino respects and honors that which comes before but is not contained by it, establishing in narrative and example a guide for art and artists.

***

Stephen Swanson teaches as an assistant professor of English at McLennan Community College. Aside from guiding students through the pitfalls of college writing and literature, he spends most of his time trying to remain reasonably aware of popular culture, cooking, and enjoying time with his wife and son. He holds degrees in Communications, Film, and Media and American Culture Studies from Calvin College, Central Michigan University, and Bowling Green State University, respectively. In addition to editing a collection, Battleground States: Scholarship in Contemporary America, he has forthcoming projects on Johnny Cash and depiction of ethics in contemporary film noir.