Mardi
Gras is a phenomenon. It is challenging to relate its details, imagery, and feeling to anyone foreign to the
experience. Last year, I spent several
days after the festival scribbling in notebooks and thwacking at my computer’s keyboard in
some foggy attempt to explain what I saw and felt, but all of it was unintelligible. I could have stayed
sober, took notes, asked questions, and stood to the side, but Mardi Gras
demands participation, and to abstain from it is to misunderstand it
altogether, and what fun would that be.
This year I'd like to creep up on it
from a different angle in an effort to explain it. To write about Mardi Gras in anticipation, to
describe the days before it arrives and take part in its preparation by joining a krewe.
There is a favorite song by Dr. John, “All on a Mardi Gras Day,” about the
day itself, but it is easy to forget that such revelry requires commitment,
spirit, and sweat in preparation for it.
The following posts, turning that phrase, shall be dedicated to that
idea, the active anticipation of my new favorite day of the year, “All for a
Mardi Gras Day.” The first post is introductory and explains why I joined a krewe:
If you search the internet for the
origins of Mardi Gras you’ll get a myriad of possibilities. The holiday dates back as early three hundred
years ago or as late as four thousands years ago. Some historians link the holiday to
Lupercalia, a Roman festival of fertility and spring cleansing that honored the
she-wolf Lupa and the forest God Pan.
In my first Mardi Gras, I superficially drew my mythological inspiration
from Bacchus, who I always associated with the wild rites of spring and my own
desire to drink and be merry and let loose.
But Pan, perhaps, was much wilder.
He was half-man and half-goat. He had a large penis. He once seduced the moon. He was audacious enough to challenge Apollo
to a musical competition, and according to poor Midas, Pan won. Apollo gave Midas donkeys ears in retribution. Later, Pan died, the only
God that ever superceded his own limits of immortality. To celebrate him, Roman men ran the streets
naked and slap women’s backsides in stride.
Others
say that the Catholic Church invented Mardi Gras by creating Carnival season as
a persuasive tool to convince Pagans to give up their savage rituals and
prepare for Christian lent. A day of all-you-can-sin merriment before 40 days of piousness. Carnival’s
latin roots are in the word Carneleveman,
meaning Farewell to Flesh. Mardi Gras, as we recognize it today, began
on the bank of the Mississippi, sixty miles south of New Orleans, and more than
three hundred years ago. The French
explorer, Iberville, landed on the bank, and recognizing that France was
celebrating Fat Tuesday, founded the first Mardi Gras in the region, naming the
bend of land Point du Mari Gras. The
festival grew over the centuries.
Walking parades featured masked men and mules--instead of tractor engines--pulled the floats. Even then, the people were wild, and violence
almost halted the festivities. Officials
tried to stop the holiday but the people simply liked it too much. The parades got bigger. The floats got
bigger. Women and black men created
their own krewes, fomenting the notion that Mardi Gras stardom is accessible to everyone, not
just wealthy white business men from the Garden District. And now, Mardi Gras, today brings in more
than a billion dollars of revenue to the city, cementing its necessity to the
people and the government. All in all,
that is long history of partying.
My first Mardi Gras was a blur. It is hard to describe the toll six days of city-wide partying and loss of inhibition takes on the mind and body. It took days to get my life back in order, and what I was left with was some hodge-podge of incongruous images as memories. Jesus and a female bunny-human standing on top of a hippie van. An army of revelers with boxes of wine feeding pedestrians on St. Charles Avenue being led by a guerilla marching band and a faun. A student telling a story about running away from gun shots on Claiborne Avenue while eating a snowball, "I kept running, fast, but I never let go of it. It was good," he said and rubbed his belly. A Jew for Jesus rabbi playing guitar on the levee, singing folk songs in the key of G about our sins, "She has super-gonorrhea 3," he sang, and "Is his penis circumsized?/I don't really know" And a 25 foot long steampunk Trojan horse on Mardi Gras morning.
The warhorse was an emblem of the experience. A singular image that made sense only at Mardi Gras. Confirmation that all of it was real and unreal. Two dozen warriors from the Krewe of Ragnarock pushed it through the Marigny and into the French Quarter. It blared rock music and had a cannon that fired confetti and purple smoke. I tried to board it but a warrior blocked me with his plastic sword. "I don't think so," he said. "You'll have to sign a waiver." I was in no state to sign waivers.
But a year later I found a different way to board the horse. To pay my dues and join the Krewe of Ragnarock, the revelers responsible for its construction, and for planning its reincarnation in this year's St. Ann's Parade. It will be a different experience. I will not be directionless, sporting the go-where-you-wanna spirit, sniffing out trails of fun (a fundog?). Instead I will have an anchor. The horse. Its corrugated plastic head my compass. But a warhorse is not born but made. There are 48 days until Fat Tuesday. And a lot of work to do in preparation for the party.
Check out the Krewe of Ragnarock online for some amazing photographs and background. http://www.kreweofragnarok.com/
