This essay is a brief description of a strange phenomenon; its strangeness, not caused by the events, but by the fact that inversion seems to be a human desire to mock the very institutions that people devote their lives to. These practices are largely symbolic and can be found in any culture. For this discussion, it is best to not think of these events through religious or moral justifications but rather to notice how the patterns signify the end of a cycle.
Inversion festivals or traditions are inevitable; they sometimes occur as organized events but can also be recognized in your personal everyday experience. This pattern can be identified by recognizing the commonalities at the end of a cycle. Notice the common forms that occur surrounding a “last hurrah” of any given practice. The purpose of these events is to remind us, in strange ways, that there is meaning to our culture, and that meaning is not completely contained in the toils of daily life. Here are a few examples:
- Sabbath or Weekends
- Senior skip day/Graduation
- New Year’s Eve
- Rodeo or Carnival at the end of summer
- Halloween before All Saints Day (Dia de Los Muertos)
These events have a few things in common; the more different from daily life the occasion becomes, the greater the effect of the inversion. These events articulate the oddities of the real world– that which is queer, ostracized, or peripheral is brought into focus and celebrated for a brief period before putting everything back into propriety. From the previous examples, we can start to see how irony and inversion prepare us for the end.
- On the Weekends, you may get extra rest, spend time traveling, play games, let loose, or drink– all things that can’t naturally fit into the workweek.
- Senior skip day is a way to playfully throw off the system as soon as the climax of public education is in view. Somehow, there is something cathartic about releasing the desire to escape the school system by filling the end of the journey with nostalgic events.
- New Year’s Eve is the party before you take up new goals for the new year. People stay up late, drink, kiss, and do all sorts of odd superstitious festivities to welcome the end of the year. It is also the time to remember all the people who have died in the previous year.
- The rodeo or carnival at the end of summer is where animals or nomadic entertainers are invited into the town and celebrated with great theatrics. The clowns, animals, excitement, danger, and music are all patterns that flip the plot on long hot days of work.
- Halloween is a way to “exercise” all the monsters and idiosyncrasies before taking time to remember the dead on All Saints Day or Dia de Los Muertos. However this tradition is practiced, the strangeness of the tricks, decor, foods, and costumes is intended to revel in the tragedy of death.
The aesthetics of inversion is ambiguity. Carnival is a good way to think of the patterns of inversion. The gathering is typically in an obscure location near the city; the colors are all gaudy, and the lights and sounds are obnoxious. There is always an emphasis on animality and idiosyncrasy. For a clearer picture, imagine the Merry-Go-Round, where the most extravagant animals are adorned with colors, lights, and ornamentation, spinning round and round to maniacal music. That’s the picture of inversion.
But what are these inversion festivals for?
Most people who have ever lived were not so fortunate to live in democratic or just societies as we now enjoy. The constants of political history are prejudice, corruption, injustice, cruelty, dogma, and futility. Civilization is a unifying enterprise that requires relative subservience of all individuals within that population – no matter its size. Though the cultures and regulations in a group can vary in any context, the form of civilization is to cut off the excesses of personality and eccentricity that do not serve the betterment of the group. With any functional society, there will be an accumulation of invalids, slaves, exiles, foreigners, prisoners, and other people who don’t fit into the ideals of the group. Along with people on the fringe, there are ideas, attitudes, clothing styles, behaviors, and desires that don’t fit into the status quo. None of this is a mystery, but it is part of the eternal struggle of organization. Too much order will invite political strife, so there are inevitably ways that these fringe elements of reality are integrated into tradition.
The organic development of traditional inversion festivals may be an indication that they are a stable way to integrate the fringe elements of a culture into an embodied celebration of excesses. For the Jews, it’s Purim, where there’s excessive spinning and drinking and singing to celebrate the trick Esther pulled on their Persian oppressors. For the medieval French, it’s the Feast of the Ass, where Christ’s circumcision and exile to Egypt is celebrated by hailing a donkey in the altar of the church. There are more familiar examples of merrimaking today like the Mardi Gras celebrations. You can also think of the archetypal court jester who is allowed to act foolish and even mock the despotic ruler. The Plains Indians had the Heyoka, who was a sacred clown responsible for flatulating or acting drunk or any other foolish behavior during the most austere ceremonies. All of these traditions make the same point– the world is too strange to contain.
To recognize the symbolism of inversion, look for any comedic tropes used to accentuate the absurdity of the social hierarchy: pranks, irony, humor, exaggeration, metaphor, or vulgarity. The point here is not the practices themselves but the forms they fill for the purpose of temporarily inverting the social order. The prime feature of the inversions is that they are momentary; a short event to join people in an embodied reminder that perfection is not everything. The pattern follows the elements shown in the following diagram.
Our Pancake Day festival has several events that follow these patterns of inversion. The key to recognizing the symbolism is to notice that none of these practices were devised; they occurred organically, and people grew more and more in favor of the strange traditions.
- The first clue that our Pancake Day festival is a celebration of inversion is the fact that it falls on Shrove Tuesday (Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras). This is the day before Ash Wednesday, when it is expected that all the excesses to be fasted from during Lent are used up. This is the legend of our famed tradition, that an English woman in the 15th century was busy frying up the last batch of pancakes when she heard the church bells ringing, which gave her such a start that she ran straight to the church with pan in hand to make it to the Shrove Tuesday mass.
- The International Pancake Day Race is a fierce contest between the best athletes of our towns (Olney, England & Liberal, Kansas). The catch is that the race is not between the fastest and most powerful of men in the towns, but our housewives– donning the full uniform of the traditional trade: bandana, apron, and pan-in-hand. This is a fun twist on the typical idea of competition and championship that flips the gender roles while accentuating femininity. Is it silly? Is it serious? Either extreme would confuse the occasion. This ambiguity is key to identifying inversions.
- The race starts and finishes in the same fashion, the flipping of a pancake– or what’s left of it by the end of the race. This flipping is the same pattern of inversion– spinning, flipping, turning, all the things that signify this cycle of sobriety and foolery.
- The traditional prize for the lead racer has been the bellringer’s kiss. This is another trope of inversion where the bellringer is typically a fringe character of the community who may not have a reputable trade but lives by charity serving the church. To bring up an outcast in the seat of glory is to flip the hierarchy both for the bellringer, and for the champion racer.
- In recent years, the Mascot Race has added a key layer to the absurdity of our festival. Several businesses and groups around town can enter a mascot into the race which concludes the preliminary race schedule with a wild scramble of people dressed up in wild costumes: Sparky, McGruff the Crime Dog, Dinosaurs, walking Pancakes, Dorthys, Witches, Lions, Saints, and other wacky characters jostle each other down the street. This celebration of animality is prevalent in all inversion traditions.
- One of the last traditions that confirms the intuition that symbolism happens organically is that of the pipers. Every year, our celebrations are brought to attention by the disruptive wail of bagpipes that prompts both a headache and a welt of emotion at their beautiful tunes. The confusion of noise is another feature of the festival that matches the symbolic structure. The bagpipes are odd; they are foreign, intriguing, obnoxious, beautiful, and most of all, they are loud. Ambiguity in sound brings to focus everyone’s attention to a speaker or the sermon.
Why it Matters
These are strange times. On one hand, America can still be the shining example of peace, charity, and justice that the world hopes for. On the other hand, we may just initiate a nuclear holocaust out of pride to win someone else’s fight. We are richer than ever, but may default on the national debt. We have more access to information than ever, and yet we are less educated and act more senseless every year. We have the most advanced medical care of human history, and yet we are caught in chronic disease and mental health crises. All hope and catastrophe of our culture rides on the events of any given year, and somehow, our most sane pundits are comedians. These are strange times.
Pancake Day is a strange holiday that is celebrated in a small town at the center of our country. Though it is in the heartland, Liberal is at the very edge of the state boundary. We have an ironic name for our town populated by a conservative people living near the edge of a region historically known as “No Man’s Land”. Symbolism happens.
Inversion festivals are a way to stabilize society by affirming, through contrast, that the culture still has value. I believe our culture still has value and believe it or not, Pancake Day is a way to preserve our cultural heritage outside the typical American fashions. We can look to our cultural origins in Europe and assume, through their legacy of beauty and innovation, that they may have gotten some things right. In the case of Pancake Day, we are entering into the most sobering time of the year. The lenten fast prepares us for Good Friday– the death of Christ. To increase the participation in the Pancake Day festivities, more participation should be devoted to the Lenten fasts. It is here that we remember that the end is not complete.
Notes:
For anyone wanting to learn more about the International Pancake Day events, see the following links.