Just two days past April Fool’s day, after announcing the CDC recommendation that the entire nation don masks, the President resolutely declared that he didn’t “want to wear one myself,” and a bewildered nation – convulsing yet again in laughter or despair or thanksgiving – was too mesmerized, too traumatized, too tired to notice the extravagant double entendre of the moment.
Like Masquerades, plague times are laced with misidentification, misdirection, feint and posturing, the erotic frisson of danger, the liberation from convention and stasis, and, at every turn, doubling – sometimes tragic, sometimes comic.
America has always been a place of masks and masquerades. Ralph Ellison in 1958 ruminated: “America is a land of masking jokers. We wear the mask for purposes of aggression as well as for defense; when we are projecting the future and preserving the past. In short, the motives hidden behind the mask are as numerous as the ambiguities the mask conceals.”
It may just be that Masquerade is the master key to America’s mysteries, its magics (both white and black), and its metamorphoses.
Living, as we are, in a time of masks, I am keen to explore and interpret the American Masquerade past and present. Drawing on history, natural history, unnatural history, and Christian esotericism, I intend to chart and chronicle and interrogate the multiple masks and masquerades that now shape America’s soulscape. Attentive to the semantic and semiotic explosions that punctuate every masquerade, this liminal space offered by Substack shall be my virtual ballroom to dance and dally with you, dear reader, to explore the masked meanings of Corona Time, our time.
Thank you for dancing with me.
I have known, even published, Dr. Dann for years; but far more than that, have stewed in the juices of his impossible-to-describe-fully range of startling insights spanning bird song, overnights in small town graveyards, energetic projects to split the public mind open to new insights, scoring along the way his reprise of the cyclic symphony of history on a deeper level as, fernlike, it unfurls self-awareness and liberty, fearless forays into the esoteric dimensions of Christianity, resurrecting the world of the Transcendentalists for our time... and have come out of that stew pot a much changed, much challenged, more compassionate and more daring citizen of our now. Hold on to your seat.
Time to greet the dictators.