Keeping the Candles Lit
I remember being told a story while I worked as a host on a tour of Soho. We’d go to different restaurants and I’d entertain guests with anecdotes, true or fabricated, it didn’t really matter, I’d ask them about their lives, they rarely asked me about mine. I’d walk them around in the pouring rain through the filthy dirty streets of Soho and try to make them understand the London they were walking in was not the one I’d ever nor currently inhabited. They thought I was hilarious and asked if I was an actress to which I pretentiously responded I was a theatre practitioner actually. I listened to the same speech about jamon in a strip lit greasy basement with a dead stare and wondered at what my life had come to. No matter how talkative or friendly the group, the job offered little in the way of excitement or intrigue. The gig economy had done me dirty.
We didn’t get into the depths of the human psyche, I liked to keep it light, they were tourists on holiday wanting a fictional city to spring up and surprise them, happy to laugh at bits of the past made palatable by a pretty guide. The last stop would be for a tiny chocolate dessert in a dark, sensually lit basement with green leather sofas, the bar decked like an old apothecary on the back wall. When it was especially cold and wet I used to wrap the tour up there, letting the guests settle in, letting them stay if they wanted, order a few more rounds before heading back to their hotels. It was nearing the end of October and tours had slowed after a summer rush. I had a small group with me, mostly Americans and I wanted to get the evening over quickly, go to Sister Ray, get a record I’d been lusting after and hurry home before the rain started again. I’d had enough of Soho and leading these people through the darkening streets, along wet narrow pavements lined with bursting bin bags, I felt I was tracking along my own personal purgatory. We got to the last stop and my group, who had been pretty amicable, grew sombre sitting in the darkness, faces illuminated by flickering tea lights in small clear glass jars on the tables in front of us. A spark of atmosphere was struck, a rare thing for my never ending ragged tour.
We began, slowly, recounting tales of the dead. You’d think for a tour where I spoke nearly non stop about a part of town that had begun as a hunting ground and had at several times been a slum, bohemian paradise and sex filled harem laced with death on every corner this wouldn’t be out of place. It was. We spoke of death traditions, of honouring the dead, of the legacy of the names we had invoked tonight, Marx, Mozart, Dr John Snow and what their invocation meant. We began sharing customs from our own families either long neglected or continually upheld and one woman left an image burned into my memory. Her family had moved to the states from Eastern Europe and she described the family legacy of death commemoration being owed to the oldest living female relative she had. There was a practice she maintained that involved the acquisition and lighting of a new white candle each time a family member passed. With every accumulative death came a new candle and each one had to be lit every night. Once she died, the legacy would become someone else’s to bear but until she did the candles were hers to light and to keep lit. I pictured a little old lady in a cottage burning with light surrounded by hundreds of candles.
I’m writing this on what I’ve since learned is the official day to celebrate Samhain, the old Celtic festival of the dead which became bastardised by the Catholic Church and eventually gave way to what we now call Halloween. Samhain was traditionally celebrated when the sun was 15 degrees in the sign of Scorpio as it marks the astrological cross quarter between Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice. Among the superstitions of hauntings and unwelcome spirits come to wreck havoc on unassuming mortals, traditions largely celebrated the descent into the oncoming darkness of winter, the end of the harvest and perhaps most importantly, honouring one’s ancestors and paying homage to the dead.
We live in a death-evasive society and Western culture strives to move as far away from talking about the realities of death as possible. It is sanitised, made acceptable. We don’t talk, for instance, about the very natural process of decomposition. It’s abnormal and taboo to talk about one’s own death or death rites. We have had rising mortality rates in the UK since 2014, pandemic not included and a significant fall in the number of births. According to the New Statesman there was a 3% increase in the number of deaths from mid 2018–2019. Pre-Covid, Death was already winning this race. We have not generated a discussion around preparing ourselves for the realities of death. We don’t cultivate a sense of ancestral lineage, of honouring those that came before us, either in our own bloodlines or in terms of figures we honour in the arts, sciences, music, religion, politics or culture. In a year where we’ve experienced so much loss and so much grief on a level perhaps only our ancestors could understand it seems even more unnatural to dismiss the very pressing need for a celebration like Samhain or Halloween to be observed with the respect we so rarely give to it.
Death is everywhere in our media; in films, tv shows, books and video games, but this cannot act as substitute for understanding the great onslaught of grief caused by a personal loss and nor should it. Even in the middle of a devastating pandemic we understand the scale of the problem through death in terms of statistics but can’t comprehend the true nature of what 1.25 million deaths worldwide and 48,888 deaths in the UK actually means. Perhaps it is unsurprising that a candidate such as Joe Biden has won an election in the midst of a year dominated by death, given his own encounters with loss in his own life and the dominant narrative given to his serious approach to this pandemic. Perhaps, aside from all of the many other reasons besides for his landslide victory, we can attribute his win to his acknowledgement of death, a man who has faced the unrelenting persistence of death has a determination to set himself apart from a death defying and denying culture that has sprung up in the wake of a pandemic that has caused not only human deaths but the death of whole industries and lifestyles. The slow sweet rot of hyper capitalist neoliberalism floats on the chill autumn air and we plough on, denying the real world implications for not just the huge waves of literal human death but the death of people’s livelihoods, their security, their trust in the systems they have believed have always kept them safe. It’s been a big year for Death yet he still lurks in the shadows, shining that scythe sans acknowledgement.
We plunge into the dark heart of the year in the midst of a second lockdown and the sunlight dims, lengthening the shadows we’ve come to know a little better. It seems fitting to give some thought to how we might best emerge anew, perhaps in the spring and perhaps with a little more solemnity. To give some time, some thought to the dark, to death, to light some candles and give our ancestors a means of guiding us through this moment in our lifetime, with the otherworldly wisdom that can only come from those who’ve already experienced it.
We needed Halloween, more than ever before. In a world where we have just encountered mass death in a way we haven’t understood for over a century we need a space to honour the dead. There’s a place for Samhain, we need to keep those candles lit.
