[LINK] George Steiner on Festivals

[rfmcdonald]

I'm recommending George Steiner's possibly incomplete lecture, here, on the role of public festivals as crucial fora for the reiteration and challenging of cultural ideologies. It's not only because I admire his daring The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.. Rather, it's because Steiner's is such a brilliantly insightful mind.

The roots of words go to the heart of things. This heart can be manifold, even self-contradictory. Fasti, the Latin designation both for days on which business or affairs of civic concern can be conducted and for holidays, for days set aside in celebration of the gods. Feste, in Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's unfathomable clown, in whom the music of merriment and that of desolation are inextricable. 'Festivals' come to the language via Old French and Italian. They are garlanded ('festooned'). Spenser sees the solemn joys in the whole etymological constellation. But there are also, and immemorially, feasts for the dead, a festivitas ancient as the funeral-games for Patroklus in the Iliad. Whatever its joys, a festival, because it sets aside normal time, because it assembles human beings in a unison of feeling, will comport a touch of mortality. Again, an unnerving ambiguity inhabits the dictionary: a saturnalia explodes under the aegis of the god of melancholy, a carnival, be it in Naples or in Mexico, parades its grinning skulls. "Come away, come away death," sings Feste to Orsino in a line whose magical duplicity enacts, beyond paraphrase or logical justification, the secret sadness, the tristitia which gives to a true festival its joyous gravity.