Re-Enchanting the World

 

Kathryn Jezer-Morton, "Why Isn’t Halloween Scary Anymore?"

When I was 10, I was living in the rural Northeast. That Halloween, one of the neighborhood parents took a bunch of us trick-or-treating in the back of his pickup truck. There were about five of us, thrilled to be riding around in the open truck bed after dark. Our route took us past a cemetery that dated back to the Revolutionary War, sitting down a slope away from the road, surrounded by an old stone wall and hemmed in by thick woods. As we approached the cemetery, the dad behind the wheel killed the engine. We heard some revs and cranks, then nothing. “Sorry, kids,” he called back to us from the cab. “Must be something wrong with the truck.”

It must have been on a dare that we all ended up venturing down the hill toward the cemetery into the enveloping darkness of the woods. As we nervously stood around among the headstones, a figure emerged from the forest covered in ashes, wielding a chain saw, and dragging a heavy chain around its neck. Another appeared out of the shadows, covered in birch bark. We heard a voice coming from under the fallen leaves — the ghosts were converging on us. (They had put a boom box under a leaf pile.) We ran for our lives back to the truck, which miraculously started right back up as soon as the last of us had been pulled up into the back. We peeled away, shrieking. It was an ecstatic moment of terror alongside the delicious relief of safety.

When my kids return to the parks they loved as toddlers, they are always amazed at how small everything is. “This slide used to be huge,” they insist. Sometimes I wonder if that’s the way I feel about Halloween — did it stop being scary, or did I grow up? I’m pretty sure one thing has changed: Terrifying children for sport is not as socially acceptable as it once was. The thought of parents banding together to scare their children on Halloween evokes, more than anything else, the casual and oblivious cruelty of mid-century American life. Perhaps scaring children as a practice has fallen far out of favor because real life is scary enough without a need for added theatrics. Just the same, being spooked on Halloween by a group of adults is one of my favorite childhood memories, and I say this as someone who can’t comfortably handle horror as a genre or fear as an emotion.

It was exceptional for the adults in our neighborhood to get together and plan a prank like this — this was the only time it ever happened, and even decades later, I’m impressed they pulled it off. I wonder what compelled them. I know some people were lucky enough to grow up around adults who loved staging magical or creepy spectacles for local kids, and I know it’s not always a privilege; I’ve spoken to many people who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s who had nightmares for years after enduring the antics of adults.

For my kids, Halloween is more of an aesthetic experience than a creepy one, and sometimes I wonder if they’re missing something that I intimately knew — the feeling of a thinning veil between worlds that is hard to describe in words but vividly conjured in memories. As much as I love over-the-top Halloween decorations — and I truly do; I hope the skeletons never stop getting bigger — there is another dimension to Halloween, a numinous enchanted dimension, that I wonder if they have felt before.

This fall, I am teaching night school at a local college, and I recently had my students read a section of the philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s book, The Crisis of Narration. The section, called “The Disenchantment of the World,” argues that the stories we tell have been stripped of their mystery and magic by an overemphasis, in digital media in particular, on accumulating facts and links of causality. This happened, then this, then this; a world narrated in bullet points, in a rush to get to the conclusion. This is how AI speaks back to us — in the most efficient way to convey information, in the absence of any evocative feeling. I had never taught this essay before, and I wasn’t sure of what everyone would make of it. I was a bit worried it would land as flat-footed kids these days griping.

The students at night school come from all over. Many are recent immigrants seeking to earn enough college credits to apply for a specific training program. Others are students for whom school has never been easy, who are going for a second chance after having dropped out. For easily half the people in the room, English is a second or third language, but they all understood precisely what Han was arguing in the essay. They recognized the disenchantment, and they could describe it. The classroom rippled with resonance as we discussed the chapter.

Parenting today is very consumed with “making magic” — holiday magic, birthday magic, core-memory magic. Being a good parent has become as much about sprinkling an affective fairy dust over your children’s memories as it is about keeping them fed and clothed. And yet, the disenchantment persists — it might even grow. What are we missing?

It would be easy to blame it on something like “consumer culture” or “Amazon” — where’s the magic in shopping your way to a vibe? But that’s an incomplete explanation, not to mention a boring and predictable critical orientation. Hand-making your costumes is not going to re-enchant your world. Nostalgic re-creations of aesthetics of Halloweens past won’t do it, either. Re-enchantment is an emotional process. It has to do with inviting our children, and ourselves, to experience inexplicable feelings that might occasionally overlap with fear. The fear I felt that one Halloween has lasted like a magic elixir in my mind ever since. It’s made me want to find more sources of that feeling, even just for a split second, as I attune my attention while passing an abandoned building or notice a figure pass into the shadows. I think it’s possible that one singular Halloween prank I experienced in the fifth grade permanently enchanted Halloween for me for the rest of my life. It’s crazy how these things happen.

When we cross the threshold into the holiday season, we enter a culturally significant period of memory-making. One way that Byung-Chul Han describes enchantment is when the past and the present momentarily collide, providing us a brief, overwhelming experience of being beyond time itself — “two separate moments in time combining into one fragrant crystal of time. The torturous contingency of time is thereby overcome, and this produces happiness.”

Isn’t this all we really want during the holiday season? Is one fragrant crystal of time too much for a parent to ask for? I wonder if it’s a projection of parents’ anxiety about our own distraction that causes us to salivate so uncontrollably around the idea of “making memories” with our kids. Attentiveness is a necessary condition of memory-making, and we are all spiraling to varying extents about how we are and are not attentive. Maybe our own anxiety about missing out on the important moments is having the unintended consequence of disenchanting our holidays. Maybe by trying to capture the vibe through photo shoots and cute decorations, we’re feeding the wrong dog, so to speak.

So how might we re-enchant our holidays? I couldn’t begin to tell you. For me, the Pict-o-Matic freeze-frame quality of holiday rituals and events — remember when we did this ritual five years ago? Ten? Twenty? — catapults me into a private cosmos of mourning for people and places that I’ll never see again. The enchantment of the holidays, from Halloween all the way through office-party season and past Christmas into the dead zone of the dawning New Year, is for me a feeling of proximity to past selves that makes the present day seem hyperreal. If we’re lucky enough to reach middle age, we are treated to this dreadful and amazing view of all the previous iterations of our life, and to peer over the precipice at all the future ones, and to know that in a few years, it will be this very dinner, this very outfit, this very child’s petulant mood, that will conjure for us the undeniable feeling of the weight of life.

But the midwinter holidays can be so emo. Halloween is not the time to get hung up on your personal history. It’s the invisible world, not the world of our memories, that makes this holiday so interesting. You don’t have to be a horror-movie aficionado to know that when we encounter visions or feelings that are unexplainable or mysterious, it can make us feel more real.