Rescuing Epiphany

(... from history's hooligans)

New Year’s Eve greetings, with warm wishes for The Twelfth Night on Saturday.

This year it is time for newShrink to reclaim it.

As today’s title and illustration suggest, news-focus for this January 6th anniversary week is quite different from the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol.

That dubious distinction was this date just three years ago.

But for 73 it has marked the wedding anniversary of my late parents, Dick and Jane Stoker. This arrives during my current gathering, selection and culling of photos and memorial-celebration memorabilia from her long life and their 49-year marriage. For excavation of ground assumed so long-familiar, it has turned up some unexpected treasures.

surprise gems

(Starting from center above) Remarkably, the newspaper seems to have sent a photographer to my grandparents’ home to shoot this New Year’s Eve midnight photo of my soon-to-be married parents. They’re marking the minutes on the antique grandfather clock — the one my very petite, frugal grandmother always insisted she could be buried in one day. (She wasn’t!)

New Year’s Eve that year happened to fall in a week like this one, the January 6th Epiphany wedding day to come on Saturday.

Now granted, both of them worked and had many friends in Charlotte’s downtown media environment of the day, she at WBT radio and he in advertising at The Charlotte News. It’s a sweet photo, from a very different era, and one that I cherish.

But still I must say, this had to be a verrrrry slow news weekend!

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(At left) This one is Jane’s engagement photo. It ran with at least 6 different stories for which there are clippings from both local Charlotte daily newspapers, of various stuff during their engagement period. (This was, after all, the heyday of so-called “society” pages, and those yielded lucrative advertising dollars for newspapers.)

After college Jane worked in the Tryon Street Wilder Building for colorful WBT radio personality Grady Cole (for whom the vintage Charlotte event-venue was named). One of Dick’s storied successful courtship moves was sending her bags of her favorite Hershey’s Chocolate Miniatures at her office — delivered by Western Union!?! The guy had style.

Among her preserved mementoes encased in plastic in her scrapbook is what’s obviously one of the original chocolates. It now appears so putrified I’m not inclined even to photograph, much less unseal it.

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And at right, one of many from Jane’s album of well-preserved photos: of their wedding at then-First Baptist Church (most recently site of Spirit Square performing arts center); reception at the Charlotte Woman’s Club (where later all of my piano recitals, then our “Novelteens” dance-club dances, were held); also from their post-rehearsal “cake cutting” at the Shriners’ Red Fez Club described in news items as “on the river.”

That club’s same body of water later came to be named the present-day “Lake Wylie.” That distinguishes it from the upstart, more recently created larger Lake Norman just north and up-river from the city.

But for me “the river” has always had wilder appeal, somehow more alive.

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Looking to the illustration below, two priceless discoveries in this trove are around Dick and Jane’s honeymoon. By way of lead-in to the topic, an often repeated, occasionally a “TMI, mom”/eye-roll embarrassing, Jane-quote from my mom goes something like:

“I was the only one of all of my friends who had a reallllly good time on my honeymoon!”

She must have, and he too. For every January anniversary of at least their first 12 years, sentimentally scrapbook-documented, they returned to their favorite motel at what was then-remote Marathon in the Florida Keys. (These junkets for them put me annually, happily on winter-holiday ensconced in home of the world’s best grandparents and a great-grandmother.)

According to the original-honeymoon story, after spending first nights in Columbia, Charleston and the intended Cloisters off the Georgia coast, instead of hotel-breakfast fare Jane wanted a ham biscuit. They drove out to find one, took a left turn… and wound up at the southern tip of Florida.

(The two small snapshots below are of those very skinny beach bums.)

Discovering these other two signed pieces by my dad, never seen before, left me breathless.

At left is a drawing from the top page of Dick’s ubiquitous doodle- and drawing pad. This remarkable caricature-likeness of Jane is a casual pencil drawing he apparently did of her when they were dating. (Drawings on the pages under it are of cartoon-like animal characters and such.)

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And at right, his pen & ink/watercolor of the Marathon site is signed & dated 1952. (That’s the year I would be born later, but they would not have known it yet.)

Now, that is strange to contemplate… so invisible, and yet so in the picture!

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In the final pair of pictures below, focus in both is my maternal grandfather, O. C. Fogus, whom you may recall from occasional previous mentions.

(At left) He’s with my grandmother, Ruby. (I was extremely close to both.) Here they are at my parents’ Friday night pre-wedding rehearsal “cake cutting” at the Red Fez Club.

I keep returning to this picture, for the way he looks at her here is the way he looked at her every day of his life that I well-remember with them.

Otway was gruff and crusty and dry-witted and matter-of-fact. He did not gladly suffer fools, liars or much whining.

His was also a soft-custard center. His love for those he loved — her, my mother, her sister — had a totally besotted, humbled quality. It was immutable, rock-solid-safe and a palpable thing.

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I know these things firsthand, because that’s the same way he looked at me.

(At right) It comes through in this other pricelessly new-to-me photo from when I was 6. Joy in our faces and bodies suggests the backyard shot just caught Poppy and me unposed… delighting each other as usual.

Amid the current curating-and-culling under way, these are two more keepers.

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Below is a glimpse of why I was so thankful this week to have the videographer guys on site with me several hours. They left with a bin of our selections to begin working their creative magic. Progress!

The task up-next may be where to rent that bulldozer come February…

Meanwhile, how about this for a natural, before-closing visual:

Yes, one Charlotte 8th grader in homeroom 205 seems to have saved her 1942 yearbook from A.G. Junior High/now A.G. Middle School

Fewer than a third of newShrink readers and friends are in or from Charlotte. It has been nearly 30 years since I lived there full-time. So it’s pretty astonishing how many of you, and people you likely know, have recognizable parents, grandparents or even greats- in this little volume…

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Shifting now before truly signing-off, here’s an encore re-post of newShrink’s annual look at January 6th from a range of depth psychological, archetypal, literary, spiritual and other perspectives around the world.

epiphanies

“From a consensus of major dictionaries, the word epiphany is derived from the Greek epiphaneia, which means manifested, or showing.

… across cultures

This New York Times seasonal feature story from 2018 offers a colorful cross-section:

Epiphany Celebrations Around the World (pictured above starting in left column.)

The Three Wise Men greet children during a Twelfth Night procession in Pamplona, Spain. (Credit: Villar Lopez/European Pressphoto Agency.)

The Twelfth Night procession in Madrid includes fireworks over City Hall. (Credit...Mariscal/European Pressphoto Agency)

Orthodox Christians in Kalofer, Bulgaria, dive into freezing water to retrieve a wooden crucifix, a tradition dating from Byzantine times. (Credit: Dimitar Dilkoff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.)

A Rosca de Reyes, or kings’ ring, fit for an Epiphany crowd is served in Mexico City. (Credit: Daniel Becerril/Reuters.)

An Epiphany swim for Orthodox Christians off a beach near Athens is less bracing than those in Bulgaria or Russia. (Credit: Louisa Gouliamaki/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.)

…in religions

The original uses of the word arose from both the familiar Christian Christmas story marking and celebrating the arrival of the Biblical Magi who follow a prominent star from afar to honor Jesus and other mythological pagan stories with remarkably similar elements.

The capitalized-version Epiphany has come to refer to the religious celebration date, now primarily in Christian context and in commemoration events.

…in psychology

The familiar Epiphany story from Christianity has many common threads across different cultures’ faith traditions — some much older, the Greeks, for example.

With some astonishing parallels to Christianity’s familiar Magi Epiphany story, Jung presents a detailed account of pagan festivals held on the night of Epiphany, January 5/6. These were in Alexandria and elsewhere according to the writings of Epiphanius of Salanis, Cypress. He was a 4th Century Bishop considered a saint and church father of both Eastern Orthodox and Roman branches of the Catholic Church. (from New Year’s 1.1.22 edition of newShrink, a more detailed account that you may find interesting.)

… in literature and the arts

The second, lower-case version of epiphany has also become a common description of both the literary device and the felt psychological experience of a turning point in the story, a character (or oneself.)

Our epiphanies are those moments where we have realized awareness, a new knowing, after which events are seen through the prism of this new light. (from literary devices.net.)

James Joyce’s ahas

Between 1898 and 1904 the ground-breaking Irish novelist Joyce (a contemporary of Jung pictured at center column above) created literary epiphanies as a non-fiction prose genre. They were a series of short “snapshot” pieces without much connective narrative. Epiphany was figuring prominently as a literary device by the time he was working on earlier versions of his famed Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with autobiographical character Stephen Dedalus. Later Dedalus reappears in Ulysses. (The following is from literary terms.com.)

Joyce sounds very like Jung in his observation that our epiphanies are “a sudden and momentary showing forth of one’s authentic inner self.”

Joyce’s brother Stanislaus’s letters describe epiphanies as more like Freudian slips, ways in which we unconsciously “give our more authentic selves away.” (This view also echoes Jung’s caveat: That the unconscious shadow we do not bring to light appears in our external lives, unbidden.)

Joyce’s description of the epiphany as the aha moment sounds like Jung’s soul spark. In The Divine Comedy a series of these mark Dante’s path, as he makes his descent and emergence through hell and back. From Joyce:

“[with epiphanies] the soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us so radiant.. Unlike foreshadowing, epiphany occurs not necessarily by connection with the rest of plot or story, and suddenly, as if divinely inspired.”

Here, Joyce’s ideas echo those of Rudolph Otto and William James on the nature of numinous (most simply, soul-engaged) experience:

Characters are rooted in everyday life, but epiphanies allow them to rise above ordinary consciousness in order to have revelations and realizations that demand and lead them with a changed perspective.

As is the way of fictional chracters, these described experiences can help us understand ourselves as well. That is what brings them to life for us, giving storytelling such power for connection, creative problem-solving and transformative change.

And on this topic as on so many others, the bard leaves us an enduring statement…

William Shakespeare

One of Shakespeare’s most-performed plays is The Twelfth Night, set and often performed as part of celebrations of Epiphany. As a comedy it’s generally expected to have a happy ending, which it does for most of its many characters.”

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And, that really is all I have! Talk to you next year (and more normal and regular newShrinks will resume by the end of January.)

🦋💙 tish

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… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”

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