Tradition

The Mardi Gras festival gathers the emaciated destinies of the people around this region into a kind of weltering remembrance of the immortality of their cells, the stones steeped in the blood of their precedents and a precognitive alertness to the vector of life sure to follow and steep anew in whatever continuum of violence and of consequent regeneration describes the irreducible carnal reality some avow as under-girding the misdiagnosed realities of religion or society. The looming ritual meant as a bill of lading for our souls in exchange for a body long ago willingly forfeited, Easter, sparked off by this "fat Tuesday" parade, terrifies me the way all blind treks of routinized significance do--the unctuous release of hoarded joy into the commons of humanity remains hoarded in me and pulled at by the mob against my wishes; issues forth, squeezed out savagely like a ripe gourd in the fist of a manic angry child. What more mournful than the worm-bedecked comfort wrought by selflessness?