No. I haven’t forgotten about the next party. The junior prom? The spring dance? The Ides of March Anna Perenna celebration surely—
The Ides of each month were sacred to Jupiter, the Romans' supreme deity. The Flamen Dialis, Jupiter's high priest, led the "Ides sheep" (ovis Idulius) in procession along the Via Sacra to the arx, where it was sacrificed.[4]
In addition to the monthly sacrifice, the Ides of March was also the occasion of the Feast of Anna Perenna, a goddess of the year (Latin annus) whose festival originally concluded the ceremonies of the new year. The day was enthusiastically celebrated among the common people with picnics, drinking, and revelry.[5] One source from late antiquity also places the Mamuralia on the Ides of March.[6] This observance, which has aspects of scapegoat or ancient Greek pharmakos ritual, involved beating an old man dressed in animal skins and perhaps driving him from the city. The ritual may have been a new year festival representing the expulsion of the old year.[7][8]
Ovid reports a legend that identifies Anna Perenna with the sister of Dido, the Carthaginian founder in Virgil's Aeneid.[4] After Dido's tragic death, Anna finds refuge from her brother Pygmalion on Malta, with Battus, the king of the island and a wealthy host.[4] Upon protecting Anna for three years, Battus counselled her to flee for her safety and find a fresh place of exile as her brother was seeking war. Forced again to flee over the seas, Anna Perenna was shipwrecked on the coasts of Latium where she was hosted by Aeneas' settlement of Lavinium. Anna's presence there made Lavinia increasingly jealous. Dido appeared in Anna's dream, exhorting her to abandon her latest refuge, from where she was swept away by the river Numicus and transformed into a river nymph hidden in the "perennial stream" (amnis perennis), and renamed Anna Perenna.[4]
Ovid adds that some equate Anna Perenna with the Moon, with Themis, with Io or with Amaltheia, but prefers the report that during the secessio plebis an old woman of Bovillae named Anna baked cakes every morning and brought them to the hungry rebels, in gratitude for which the plebeians worshipped her as a goddess. Ovid goes on to report that after old Anna had become a goddess, she impersonated Minerva to gain admission to
the god Mars' bedchamber, which is why coarse jokes and coarse songs are used at Anna Perenna's festivities, and remarks that since the festival of Anna Perenna is in the month dedicated to Mars, it is reasonable that Mars and Anna Perenna should be associated as cult partners.
“Beating an old man dressed in animal skins”…. That sounds awfully familiar.
What I do remember quite well is a meeting with a newly-hired woman therapist. (Whose name I shall forever forget.) Not too long after the egregious… 2014, “Rager of the Year”… house party for three hundred… thrown by my recently arrived daughter during our brief absence. (See: The Smell, in Confessions, for further clarification.) After weeks of attempting to reconcile boys coming and going at all hours. After multiple sessions with Syrah at the acupuncturist, trying to help her with her serious lifelong asthma. After many hours of long-winded, heartfelt conversations with my fifteen-year-old daughter attempting to explain the gravity of my illness, and the absolute necessity for honesty, clarity and forthrightness in all of our personal dealings
I distinctly remember hearing the chirpy-bright, slender, innocuous… “listen to me”… “I got this”… young therapist saying something about how… “your daughter is the new girl in town”… “social peer group interactions are very important to her, especially at her age”… “teenagers do these things these days”… “it’s no big deal”…
While I’m sitting beside Syrah…upon a cozy therapist’s couch, sipping a benign herbal tea, patiently listening to… my daughter’s carefully crafted responses… and to the “hollow wisdom” advice of this “look on the bright side” therapist. As she prattles on about… vapidly attempts to justify… my daughter’s recent “self-absorbed”, noxious behavior on all counts. I look over at my young teenage… my one and only dear daughter’s… carefully made-up, child’s face. I look into her wickedly amused… sinister-seeming eyes. And it seems that I can hear her mind. Laughing at what the foolish therapist is saying. Laughing at me. Laughing at the utter stupidity of all adults. Laughing at the whole pathetic world that doesn’t have a clue what
She-Syrah is really up to…
The blind taxi fact that bold chariots, black mustangs and recent-model Japanese imports are driving up our long drive after hours with their headlights off. The odiferous fact that our house constantly reeks of weed in the evening during school. The hilarious fact that She-Syrah is enjoying the non-stop-party that is Humboldt County… night after marathon-drug-binging-sex-partying night. The on-line published fact that… She-Syrah is a rising porn star… a fabulous, soon-to-be-famous film director… of her own iPhone Fantasy World… her Snapchat multimedia empire extravaganza attended by millions… her Twitter feed hot romances with boy-toys one and all
Oh dear. I hear my mind saying. She really believes that I don’t know she is hiding the truth… lying. Lying defiantly, stone-cold, to my face and lying with barely-shrouded, self-congratulatory glee to this ridiculous therapist
And so I say aloud. “Look at her. She’s lying to our faces. She’s amused.”
And the silly therapist looks “fake shocked” by my comment. And She-Syrah laughs even harder behind her wanton, carefully scribed mask—
“She repeated to herself, "I have a lover! I have a lover!" and the thought gave her a delicious thrill, as though she were beginning a second puberty. At last she was going to possess the joys of love, that fever of happiness she had despaired of ever knowing. She was entering a marvelous realm in which everything would be passion, ecstasy and rapture; she was surrounded by vast expanses of bluish space, summits of intense feeling sparkled before her eyes, and everyday life appeared far below in the shadows between these peaks.” p.140 Madame Bovary
“He, this man of great experience, could not distinguish dissimilarities of feeling beneath familiarities of expression. Because lascivious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he now had little belief in their sincerity when he heard them from Emma; they should be taken
with a grain of salt, he thought, because the most exaggerated speeches usually hid the weakest feelings -- as though the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow into the emptiest phrases, since no one can ever express the exact measure of his needs, his conceptions or his sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked pot on which we beat out rhythms for bears to dance to when we are striving to make music that will wring tears from the stars.”p.165 Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, 1856
What I saw then, behind the eyes of my child, mortified me. Not only the lack of a “moral compass” within her. Which apparently most teenagers lack. So I am told. But. What I felt most frighteningly, frigidly
Was a sinister presence. A hideously determined. Chilling. Calculating. Dark mystery figure. Someone. Some thing. Who would do or say anything it had to. To get whatever it was after. Some kind of wily, mean-spirited, sociopathic, non-mammalian… un-feeling reptilian monster… hungry brain stem… golem villain… gut without higher purpose
A cold-blooded, steely, remorseless killer. An axe murderess. Lizzy Borden in the funhouse mirror reborn. A punk with a pink attitude
A GREAT BIG DOUBLE-MIDDLE-FINGERS UP! GO FUCK YOURS…
Behind a false-eyelashed, fake-nailed innocence of… who me? I didn’t say that… daddy dearest… did I? Did you see me open my pretty-painted little mouth?
Oh My God. Dear Goddess! WTF….
Well.
As the therapist droned on… “oh, yes”… “it’s very important for her to go to this prom”… “at her age her whole life is about social networking and peer group acceptance”… “what with being the new girl in town”… “teenagers these days”… “you know, they do these things”… “it’s all good”
Huh? What?! I’ll be damned!! She’s suppose to be grounded for life!! After her last performance that nearly obliterated “my father’s house”!!
U-huh. Yeah. Dass whad I sed.
But.
But.
Do you really think that anyone listens to me, gringo?
“Old man in animal skins” vs. Ella, la Madonna Moderna… female therapist!!
Guess who won that round…
