BEWARE ALL YOU TOWNIES
Last Round on Prats de Mollo and Bears
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One last look at the mystery of crowds and congregations in their never-ending spontaneous ability to feel together, emotion circulating libidinously, connecting participants (not onlookers) without a word (in the case of music or theatre) from feet to head and many parts in-between. This emotional-intello state builds and the gathered individuals adopt a new-found identity, one which can change direction very quickly. This promises either resolution or terror. It happens both on the floor of political conventions, at the stock exchange and high in the French Pyrénées near the Spanish border.
Terror ? Why terror ? Suppose some group decided they so liked this new-found, transcendant state, they wanted to live inside it. Maybe they decided they liked being bears, or they believed everything Trump or Biden or Macron said, and decided to start living their response.
« The music was overwhelming, the crowd moved as one, joy was in the air.» A gathering is necessary. There are no solitary joys, except for saints or children or that modern fifty/fifty contraption, the ever-isolated artist. Not to be confused with the Lone Gunman.
If the group decides they like this expression of their altered state and want to break away together, they become either a religious cult, a political party or a gang of brigands. (Or a little of all three.) A common occurrence throughout history, the violent breakaway tribes, religious dissenters, like the group that created a Manichean Christianity in these hills, only to be ruthlessly suppressed by Louis XIV. Some people want out of the ‘general drift’ of civilization. This discontent is the subject of a new film being made in the Catalan Pyrénées, where a group of friends who meet every year at one of the iterations of the annual bears-awaken festivals suddenly and inexplicably coalesces into an angry gang who take to the inaccessible hills, sleeping rough in caves and collapsing Cathar fortresses while living off the easy pickings from the fully-insured bourgeois of the vallies. They are a permanent Bear Tribe become outlaws, lost only in the matter of political ideology, which they argue about in seclusion. Are they liberal fanatics or conservative ? They can’t make up their minds. The liberals have trashed the world in the name of ‘openness;’ the conservatives remind them of school authorities. They are waiting for a new Revelation to raise its head or a leader like Saint Che to make his appearance. A really great film, although I’ve only seen ‘rehearsal rushes’ so far.
The first resolution in the case of the Fête de l’Ours comes when the bears enter the town like a conquering army, standing on a high place (any sort of metal pulpit will do) while staring down at the soot-smeared faces of the villagers, who didn’t put up much of a fight, really. At this moment the townspeople relive ancestral memories, from back in the days when warring cultures and ambitious nobles really did fight about possession of terrain. It must have been terrifying and yes, the victors may have seemed like ravenous bears. But now, as the bear stares at the crowd, he sees that everyone is a little bit bear, sauvage, messy, free of their habitual roles and costumes.
Bear and man continue to wrestle, one on one, the bear tossing his staff to a man or woman who has accepted the challenge. He or she catches the greasy stick lobbed high in the air and the ritual begins. It’s a fight to the finish: who shall rule these little towns ? Here, the bear always wins, his superior size, his fearsome costume, ferocious mien: he wrestles his opponent to the ground and makes sure to paint the man or woman’s face with a new bearish mask. Everyone celebrates with the crowd. Rite of passage, acknowledgement of our animal ancestry.
(I know what you’re thinking: this’d never happen in the States. If it did there’d be a thousand tweets and textos about the patriarchy, followed by a blizzard of lawsuits. That guy in the bear gear attacked me! Does he have a Twitter trail or Insta ? Fascist !)
Let the scientists weigh in: “Strong ancestral gene flow exists between Asiatic black bear and American brown bears even though their terrain is widely separated by distance and bodies of water... American grizzlies and Alaskan polar bears mate and produce the hybrid grolar.” Older traditions suggest bears, given the chance, liked to mate with humans, too...
But then the Barbers, caked in white, roll in and the ceremony shifts gears. The Bears had only a temporary victory. (Alas, always the case for the working class.) Barbers parade around, tossing spoonfuls of red wine at villagers like drunken priests. They have prepared a trap for the bears.
Those barbers aren’t going away. They never do ! Aligned with the blue-hatted ladies of the Civilizational Auxiliary, they let the bears win their skirmishes before inviting the marauders into the circle in the town’s central square. The bears accept: this engagement is the beginning of their doom. There, the contingent of caked-white barbers, their opposite number in the eternal duoply of light and dark, yin and yang, the many shades of order and anarchy, pick them off one by one. They shave the bears with axes (real axes but dull blades) and force them to toss their hairy skins to the crowd, who no doubt will hang them on their wall as a memento. Eh voilà! Beneath the bear is a man or woman. The barbers continue their labors until every bear is shaved and the whole crowd breaks out in a mad dance, a festivity tumult of vulgar energy, around and around feverishly. This is the peasants’ melee, a joyous rite, feet pounding the ground to the music of fife and drummers, everyone forgetful, accepting, un-caring. The village has both triumphed over the fearful scenario of real-life bears on the prowl at their kitchen window while welcoming approaching spring, suggesting that the ritual predates Christian mortification.
You may be surprised to find local church pews full next Sunday with parishioners making their Lenten vows. The Old World, all over the world, has a full calendar of rituals and obligations while our modern, constantly reinventing itself, has vanishingly few and what few remain it sniffs at for traces of “oppression.” Nevertheless, the churches are open early for solitaries and searchers. Who would you pray to if you found yourself alone in a church ?
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In his book, Bear: the story of a fallen king, historian Michel Pastoureau writes, “For a long time in Europe, the king of animals wasn’t the lion but the bear. The age-old cults dedicated to him have left their traces in imagination and mythologies right until the heart of the Christian Middle Ages. Finally, the church searched for a way to eradicate the wild beasts, terrified not only by their brutal force but even more by the wide-spread belief that the bear was sexually attracted to young women.”
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