The making and sustaining of community requires deep presence and empowerment, with three key properties:
- Radical break. This is the community’s break from the normality of the working day. Conventions are broken; there is misrule, in the medieval sense of good order being turned upside down, and stepping briefly over the edge of chaos, before—slightly changed and refreshed—stepping back into regular life.
- Second nature is the animal spirit at the heart of the tamed, domesticated citizen: the deep reality which, if recognised and cared for, connects us with the red-blooded truth about ourselves.
- Sacrifice-and-succession affirms the ability of the community to survive—to be immortal—in spite of, or because of, the death of other communities and (eventually) of its own living members. The death of individuals in the community is overcome by birth and renewal, and the failure of some communities may be essential for the survival of the system as a whole (Resilience).
At least from my point of view, the use of this word, “carnival”, with this meaning is on the rise, even if subtlety. I have found myself having to explain what it means when trying to communicate what I took part in. Research suggests that there was a time when cultures all over the globe practiced some form of carnival and, though it looked and sounded different from place to place, it shared a similar importance.
Society, good or bad, functions according to a certain order. Order must be maintained for any group to function. There is no electrical grid without it, also no systems of care. It is worth taking time to question societal structures that provide order. The order does come with a price. In the order is also oppression – policing, taxes, justice, privatization, housing, and the division of people into hierarchical groups based on class, race, gender, religion, etc. This is how a society governs this many.
Our current systems do not actually attempt to care for all. It can be hard to truly accept this fact. Capitalism does not concern itself with the benefit and wellbeing of all. This might be a value that you personally hold, but make no mistake, the systems that govern your society have no such lofty goal. There are countless ways in which these systems sacrifice or disregard the needs of some for the many or even the few. But governing millions may require a certain brutalistic blindness to its downsides. Perhaps millions is too large a number to be governed.
Even the most egalitarian, utopic system would still cost something. We have a habit of ignoring the full cost of things. We prize efficiency but neglect what its pursuit can rob us of. The order of society asks us to behave, to fall in line, and to be “civil”. The better we behave, the better the reward we have a chance of getting, maybe. Societies around the globe were once more aware of this cost. The order that was demanded for the whole had the potential to extinguish the flame of the individual. That was the reason it was so important to practice disorder. To stop functioning as intended and to instead turn upside down whatever conventions demanded. That’s what a carnival was for.
Something in our spirit needed recognition and the freedom to break from the confines that daily life implemented. Order was the accepted norm for most days. Its reward was worth the price, but it was not lost that it did cost something to behave as expected.
Celebrations of music, dance, torchlight, mime, games, feast and folly have been central to the life of community for all times other than those when the pretensions of large-scale civilisation descended like a frost on public joy.
Carnival is a big word: it spans the buffoonery of the Feasts of Fools, the erotic Saturnalia of Rome, the holy holidays of the Church’s calendar and the agricultural year, and local days of festival in which communities, for most of history, have put down their work and concentrated on enjoying themselves.
– (David Flemmings, from his definition of “Carnival”,Lean Logic)
Christianity would consume Pagan holidays. The Winter Solstice became Christmas. Dancing around a fire was exchanged for sitting in a pew. Singing and yelling would become quiet prayer. Today, midwinter is a season to spur the economy, as are so many contemporary holidays.
Humans could not work every day. Time off was needed. All around the world for centuries we have realized time off was essential. That humans could not toil endlessly for the sake of order. But carnival was more than time off. It was a communal practice to stoke a fire within that needed tending.
Capitalism has all but extinguished this flame. The factory needed to be kept on. The fire of the forge was more important than the fire within. Industry could allow a day off for the individuals, but the graveyard shift would be present. The family went nuclear. The house – single family. Disconnection became the order of the day as it was created and its cure commodified. Medicine sells best if you first sell the virus.
The disorder of Carnival is not helpful to the state. The corporation does not need such ritual. Our financial institutions are not sustained by our days of rest and play, unless we are spending money. And the one thing order is most afraid of is a collective of free thinking individuals with access to their imaginations.
We all have some notion of what Carnival might look like. The need for the release and celebration have not been completely lost. Some sign of it exists in Mardi Gras – the last day of a week where participants get their sins out before it all comes to a close at midnight with Ash Wednesday and our repenting begins. Carnival in Brazil also celebrates the time before Lent. Pinkster, a Dutch holiday celebrated by freed and enslaved Africans turned rule upside down by granting a limited freedom for a day, and even the chance for an enslaved African to be made a King. We also watch movies and shows that demonstrate some form of unruled joy in a hedonistic ritual, even if just as a warning. There is always the Burning Man Project whose vision is to bring experiences to people in grand, awe-inspiring and joyful ways that lift the human spirit, address social problems, and inspire a sense of culture, community, and civic engagement. (Burning Man Project Vision Statement)
We make more holidays because we know the worker can only take so much. We need to know the next 3-day weekend is coming. It doesn’t matter what we are celebrating. Work is so exploitative that we can’t endure without a vacation. It is not that work is a problem, just how humans have constructed the concept. Most living beings engage in some form of work. What if work was just our contribution to life?
This past August, in Great Barrington Massachusetts, Bayo Akomolafe lifted up the Swahili word “Vunja” as dancing in the cracks. We were asked as participants to choose Failure, Decay, or Cracks as we first entered. Systems of order and endless growth do not dance with failure. Failure is to be studied and analyzed for the sake of better. Decay is something the natural world contends with. Cracks are to be filled in and paved over.
In early 2023 as part of the Surviving The Future: A Deeper Dive, I took part in an online global Carnival. I would have thought that this technological barrier would be too large to feel the real sense of spirit that was intended. I was wrong. Across a grid of screens, masks were worn, costumes, screens with faces only lit by firelight. Songs sung, poems read, all in the spirit of genuine sharing, not performance. It was silly and moving.
Later in 2023 I helped to organize a local Carnivale. We held space for the unknown to happen. A loose container that invited anyone to enter and do as they saw fit. Mask-making, costume-wearing, a bonfire, a shared meal. People offered songs, poems, a play, a prayer and we played games in the form of Theater of the Oppressed on a farm with goats and chickens who came to play.
At Vunja, Resmaa Menakem stated numerous times that “if Liberation came to us tomorrow, we literally wouldn’t know what to do with it.” The practices of Carnival are weird and can be uncomfortable. They invite us to be in relationship in a different way, to the space, each other and ourselves. That invitation is not always clear. I don’t always listen to it. It is easy to ignore.
I am interested in unsanctioned behaviors that are still rooted in care. We protest with permits – that is sanctioned behavior. We get indignant about the course of our country and go to the polls fighting for change – sanctioned behavior. And everything according to a calendar. We have even managed to sanction time.
There is a proper way to be in this society. You know when someone deviates from it. You feel uncomfortable in your body. You cross the street. We gawk at the styles we can’t comprehend, smile at the sudden joyous outburst of a child – lit by the spark they still have, but terrified by the adult who does the same, because that is not sanctioned behavior.
Resmaa was right – my body doesn’t know that liberation, no matter how badly I want it. It hasn’t been practiced enough and it hasn’t been practiced collectively.
Carnival is not a day off, nor is it the exuberant dance class (although I do also attend those on Monday nights), it is not just a celebration, and it is not a night out on the town. It is a practice of liberation that we do together by freeing ourselves from the order, its institutions, and sanctioned behavior. It is a free-for-all that embraces the irrational. Our current problems won’t find sensible solutions that we can calculate. They come from a different wellspring, of a fire that has grown weak. Not straightforward but peripheral. Less human-centric than we are used to. Carnival is the ritual that beckons a threshold that no normal behavior can even bear witness to. Once it appears, all we have to do is enter.
