A Christmas essay. By Vinson Cunningham  Illustration by Sean Dong December’s so dramatic. For weeks, the days darken—a quickening fade that suggests a coming show. It’s depressing to leave home around four-thirty and realize the sun’s already set. But the darkness has its clarifying benefits. One of my friends, a photographer, recently told me about a new energy in his work, coinciding with the slide toward the solstice. When the light’s this scarce, you’ve got to grab it while you can. Darkness that, by contrast, makes light all the brighter; bright moments that seem to redeem the dark: that black-and-white opposition is, for me, what makes up the poignant imagery of Christmas. Think of the famous scene: wise men navigating by the stars—flaming constellations against a fathomless sky—searching the dank nooks of Rome’s empire for an incandescent child. Handel quotes the prophet Isaiah—that urgent, scathing, unpredictable voice—in the “Messiah”: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.” Right now, my living room reeks pleasantly of pine—little white pinpricks against so many dark green leaves. (The great comedian and writer Paul Mooney once made fun of dark-light talk like this, pointing out how hopelessly racialized it tends to be in a society like our own. Mocking a melodramatic pronouncement, he wailed, “It was the darkest day of my life!” Fair enough.) Looking back at the year, I can’t help but see things in this Christmassy, paradoxical way. In art and politics equally, 2024 has been—to me, at least—a swerving journey between high peaks and low depths, blind confusions and piercing revelations, the crooked and the straight. Events popped out of nowhere and dissolved just as quickly as they’d appeared. One shock followed another until, by year’s end, it was hard to feel really shocked. Maybe this way of seeing is personal for me. Almost exactly a year ago, a few days before Christmas, after a year replete with death and sorrow, I learned that I’d be a father again. Almost nineteen years between babies, and what timing! The first thing I did upon hearing it—it was nighttime; we were walking on a quiet street—was laugh. It’s been a year of surprises. Not long after New Year’s Day, I went to see “Terce,” a spectacle of music and movement—theatre in the way that all religious ceremony is theatre—by Heather Christian. The piece is a rewriting, a kind of earth-mothering desacralization, of the Catholic Mass, and of the scriptural and poetic tradition from which it springs. If you’ve sat in a pew a time or two, you might recognize some of the phrases that Christian twists into mysterious new urban-pagan meanings. The performance happened in Brooklyn, in a converted church with a high balcony and ever higher windows reaching toward the pointed roof. Surrounded by a hip choir of singers and instrumentalists, Christian strode energetically around the room like a rogue spirit, or the first initiate into a newly constituted priesthood, singing here, playing there. The crowd looked up at a screen, learning her words, willing to be changed. The scene felt like it could have been an earnest response to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Christmas Carol”: No, be not still,
But with a will
Strike all your harps and set them ringing;
On hill and heath
Let every breath
Throw all its power into singing! Around the same time, the comedian Katt Williams burst into song of a very different kind. As a guest on “Club Shay Shay,” the interview-based video podcast hosted by the Hall of Fame tight end Shannon Sharpe, Williams, always a speechifying wild card, let loose a stream of prophetic-sounding imprecations aimed at his contemporaries in the entertainment industry. He aired petty personal beefs with comics like Steve Harvey and Cedric the Entertainer, but, along the way, seemed to be pointing beyond individuals and toward a larger conspiracy of dishonesty among the famous élite. He spoke cryptically about revelations that might or might not emerge, about, say, Sean (Diddy) Combs or the famous TV preacher T. D. Jakes. Who knew? It was time for things to come to light. He sounded conspiratorial and a bit unhinged—at one point he claimed to have read, in his youth, at a rate of three thousand books a year. But, thanks to monsters like Jeffrey Epstein and disasters like COVID-19, wild conspiracy has become one of the signature attitudes of our era. Conspiracy theorizing is a sort of antidote against shock, a way to ward off the tumult of an over-eventful world. If everything’s connected, nothing’s a surprise. In his long, often downbeat poem “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio,” W. H. Auden predicted that “Reason will be replaced by Revelation . . . Whole cosmogonies will be created out of some forgotten personal resentment, complete epics written in private languages.” He could have been foretelling a rhetorical performance like Williams’s, or, more darkly, the raving political style of which it was a minor example. The spring and summer were hot with sudden conflict. In March, Kendrick Lamar and Drake—arguably the most popular rappers of their moment—started a lyrical battle that stretched on for months, culminating when Lamar released “Not Like Us,” a bopping accusation of crimes literal (pedophilia) and symbolic (cultural opportunism) which sounds like a West Coast party record. Now people play the song that vanquished Drake on the P.A. system at basketball arenas, or arrange it for horns and drums and perform it on college football fields. Drake was a world-beater, a guaranteed hitmaker for himself and others, and he’s lately become, at Lamar’s hands, a bit of a punch line. Recently he filed a petition against Universal Music Group, which distributes his music and Lamar’s. Another conspiracy theory, one I’m not so sure I don’t buy, at least in part: Drake claims that UMG intentionally boosted “Not Like Us,” essentially plotting and executing—with the help of streaming services, such as Spotify—an in-house coup against an artist who had become too big for his own good. (Spotify has denied the claim.) Maybe this is a bit of the “truth” that Katt Williams was talking about—nobody denies that the music business seems rigged against the artists on whom it depends. It’s always been like this: we’re in a dark room, groping around for dim hints. Sometimes a light glows through the window and throws shadows against the wall, and we make quick, hopeful sketches before the image evanesces. Life doesn’t offer many answers. But it does seem, these days, as if big, overweening institutions—a record label or a streaming service or a government, the shocking bureaucracy of a school—are determined to crowd out even more sun, making it all the more difficult to see what’s what. Is what I’m seeing inflation or price gouging? A big organic hit or a Netflix-pumped mirage? Nobody can seem to find the numbers to show and to prove. Everything’s interpretation. That kind of obfuscation was all I could think about in April and May, when, on TV and the social feeds dancing up and down on my phone, I watched universities sic police officers and other keepers of official violence on their students. The kids were galvanized by unprecedented images out of Gaza—explosions, white rubble, bloody kids—and decided to make noise where they lived and had the most leverage. On the day I delivered my short, sad final lecture of the spring semester for a class I taught at Columbia, I decided to take a walk through the student encampment on the campus. The kids were tranquilly giving speeches and playing music, chatting with any passerby who’d listen. They’d carefully marked the tables where nuts were served, mindful of allergies. There wasn’t much foot traffic: the administration had closed the campus to outsiders, and the air was strangely dead. By some of the news coverage, you’d think the campers in their bright tents had abducted a provost. Not many days later, I watched hundreds of police officers, a phalanx in dark blue, storm the campus, arresting students and breaking up their groupings, approaching the administrative exercise as though it were the early stages of a war. All spring, I’d been going to doctor’s appointments, witnessing the colorless miracle of the sonograph. I still don’t understand how the dorky-looking machine and the cold blue gel conspire to turn secret sounds into those silvery, fragile, beautiful images. But often, when I looked at the echo of my child’s face in profile, I thought of the kids I’d seen on other screens all year long, suffering violence, becoming acquainted with the worst. The gestational period, that slow-brewing shock, brings to mind e. e. cummings’s description, in his poem “[little tree],” of a box of Christmas ornaments: “the spangles / that sleep all the year in a dark box / dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine.” I put a book out this year and, on my travels, got to experience a pair of political surprises alongside fellow-Americans I’d only just met. I was about to give a talk in Chicago when somebody looked at their phone and murmured that perhaps Donald Trump had been shot in Pennsylvania. Later, in my hotel room, I shook my head in disbelief when I saw the now famous picture of Trump with his fist high and blood streaking across his face, his body swaddled by the bodies of his Secret Service detail. He’d gathered himself like some adrenalized animal, all instinct, for just long enough to make the attempt on his life seem like a snippet of fan fiction. Then Trump showed up to the Republican National Convention wearing a huge white thought-bubble of bandage on his ear. Improv followed by choreo: one of the great performances of the year. I was at a book fair in Idaho, under a big white lovely tent, when a rumor started going around. Again: phones. People craned down at them, hoping then quickly confirming that it was true. Joe Biden had resigned from the Presidential race—the right decision at the wrong time—leaving room for his Vice-President to run. Even then, in those first moments, you could feel the strained stirrings of “joy” that would become the much ballyhooed theme of the first month of Kamala Harris’s short campaign. After so much uncertainty, so much muddling through muck, people understandably wanted something clear and clean and good to work and root for. That fleeting early Kamala moment is, in retrospect, a sour reminder that, though the shocks are always coming, giving us the giddy sensation of a high, you can’t manufacture the true and lasting surprise—more fact than feeling—that hums under real, powerful political movements. The Olympics pluck at inner chords first sounded in my childhood. If I ever get too old to feel total glee when confronted by all those weird sports, somebody put me away. For one thing, Olympic years give nations license to fly their freak flags, just a bit. It’s a shame that conservative Catholics allowed themselves to be so thoroughly trolled by the mildly provocative, maximally loopy parody of the Last Supper that the French put on during the opening ceremony. It would have otherwise been a choice moment to ask the classic question: What’s going on with these people? And how can I join them? This time around, I was especially happy to follow Simone Biles, who is better at gymnastics than anyone else is at anything else. Before the Games, I’d watched “Simone Biles Rising,” a Netflix documentary about Biles’s recovery from the “twisties” that she’d suffered three years ago, leaving her lost in the air when she flipped. These kinds of athlete-sanctioned docs are everywhere now, pretending at objectivity but acting, in fact, as elongated hagiographic commercials. Still, it was harrowing to hear Biles describe what had ailed her, and inspiring to see her working her way back. When I watched the floor exercise that won her yet another gold medal—she gets so high off the ground that she seems to come down only by choice, like a benevolent deity condescending to meet mortals and make a home among them—I wasn’t surprised so much by her comeback as by my ability, all over again, to be deeply moved by a body and its exertions. I’m still moved, much less happily, by political disappointment, too. I was tasked with live-blogging on Election Night, and in yet another hotel room I snuggled up with some room service, typing away my hopeful jitters. The night was a downhill slope, a movement in woeful reverse, a tidal pull back into the tumult and dangerous madness of what must now be called the era of Trump. At three in the morning, there were empty plates on my bed and a knot in my stomach. Soon after the election, I went to the New York Philharmonic, to see a program led and conducted by the eminent composer John Adams. The clocks had been moved back, and the tail of the year was beginning its slide: it was pitch-black as the car took us to Lincoln Center. The program was a kind of topography, travelling from the meditative, repetitive plains cleared out by the music of the Estonian Arvo Pärt, through the troubled environmentalist worryscape of the young American composer Gabriella Smith, and onto the urban sidewalks, made mirrors by rain, conjured by Aaron Copland’s “Quiet City.” The players that night were sleek and fun, expressive and game. They didn’t shy away from the contradictions in the music. They were consummate professionals acting out the startled recognition of an encounter with brand-new noises, native to real places. When they sounded the final notes of Adams’s “City Noir,” the crowd went up in claps and whoops. The savvy and the innocence of that concert reminded me of another one I’d been entranced by: the Tiny Desk performance by the R. & B. singer Maxwell. A friend in middle school made me a cassette-taped copy of Maxwell’s first album, “Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite,” and I’ve been a fan ever since. Maxwell’s falsetto is just as strong as it’s always been, and his backup singers held his voice in a feathery bed of their own voices, making all the classic songs float. He seemed happy to be there, and genuinely surprised that the audience in the little workspace at NPR knew all the words to his songs. A truly humble superstar: there’s something you don’t see every day. Emily Dickinson gets at that rare phenomenon in her short poetic profile of Christ: The Savior must have been
A docile Gentleman—
To come so far so cold a Day
For little Fellowmen— Here’s a symbolic gesture that deeply touched me, a heartening drama on a darkening stage: the wooden Nativity scene unveiled at the Vatican earlier this month, created by Palestinian artists from Dar al-Kalima University, in Bethlehem. The baby Jesus’ manger was wrapped in a kaffiyeh. A small sign that this child—a world-historic surprise—was supposed to have lived and died for precisely the most endangered and most despised among our “little Fellowmen,” wherever they might live. My baby was born a whole month early. We weren’t totally ready. Breaking water in the morning and shoulders squiggling free in the dark of evening. Her name means Light. |
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