Tag Archives: May day

Planting Season

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Summer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu
Groweþ sed
nd bloweþ med

So read the opening lines of a 13th-century English round, possibly written by a monk at Reading Abbey in Berkshire. The text is Middle English, distinct enough from the early modern English of Shakespeare, but possibly more legible than the Old English of Beowulf. In translation, the lines mean:

Summer has come in,
Loudly sing, Cuckoo!
The seed grows and the meadow blooms
And the wood springs anew.

When sung aloud by a Scottish commune during a May Day festivity in The Wicker Man (1973), the Middle English verse might be mistaken for modern English as sounding like “Summer is a-coming in, low sings the cuckoo.” The difference is slight but attests to the uncanny similarities and fractious differences between the past and the present that the film plays with. Referred to once as “the Citizen Kane of horror movies” by Cinefantastique, The Wicker Man is one of the most important folk horror films. Undercutting many of the Gothic origins of horror—full of structurally decaying mansions and frayed institutions and hidden secrets and buried psychic Protestant shame—the use of Pagan May Day festivities in The Wicker Man brought the bucolic and Edenic tropes of Romanticism into the horror genre.

This year, I devoted much of my time and energy to an academic book project about food, agriculture, and ecology in folk horror movies. I can’t summarize the book well in a single blog post. It’s about the importance of the ambient threat of starvation in rural horror and the limits of Gothic literature and the surge in popularity of a horror subgenre about communal identity against encroaching political and economic forces. It’s about the desire to go back to the Old Ways when the modern nation-state seems doomed. There’s also a fair bit about mushrooms.

In any case, if you or someone you know suffers from being an academic (symptoms include teaching a film studies class or something about ecocriticism, assuming that’s legal this time next year), might I suggest looking out for pre-order dates for Late Harvest: Food, Landscape, and Agriculture in Folk Horror from McFarland Books. It will likely come out in the spring of 2026, when the next season’s planting season will commence.

Christopher Lee, Diane Cilento, and Britt Ekland in The Wicker Man (1973).

The book was partly driven by my obsession with the changing of the seasons. I planted the seeds for the book last June when I took a risk and chatted with a representative from McFarland at an online pop culture studies conference. I’ve always enjoyed spooky aesthetics, though. I grew up wandering around in the woods, being perceived by crows, and so forth. The book proposal was accepted in August, and I spent the harvest season writing the first draft in a frenzy. I submitted the draft on Halloween during thematically appropriate thunderstorms, and revised the book during the dead months of winter and early spring. The timeline is seasonal, another cycle of birth, growth, death, and rebirth.

Halloween is famously an iteration of the ancient Celtic holiday known as Samhain, the mysterious cousin to May Day, a time when the veil between this world and the spirit world is thin and winter is doomed to sweep aside the abundance of autumn. What folk horror films in the tradition of The Wicker Man take seriously is the fact that for agricultural communities, planting practices are more important than toasting the spirits at the end of a good harvest. Without a proper spring, there would be no harvest to celebrate.

To me, the more interesting moments in folk horror are when nostalgia for an imagined past runs into conflict with the realities of the present. Christopher Lee’s character in The Wicker Man, Lord Summerisle, is the grandson of an agronomist who genetically modified crops to grow in Scotland’s climate, while also replicating Pagan Celtic tradition, clashing scientific futurity with the customs of antiquity. The cult he leads is bound together by two artificial structures, one that is built on the myth that the cure for modernity’s failures is in returning to the old ways, and another that is built on the illusion that stability is found in extreme isolationism.

Medievalist historian Dr. Eleanor Janega unintentionally sums up how folk horror pulls from historical and cultural records to play with nostalgia as a response to modernity. In a blog post titled “On spooky animals,” Janega writes, “There was a big drive to identify what the hell Baphomet was in the nineteenth century as a part of the general uptick in occultism as well as the nationalist drive to find medieval heroes to justify the project of statecraft.” An interest in understanding the past coincided with an interest in replicating a perceived, if rarely accurate, interpretation of what made the past meaningful to the people who lived it. Rowan Lee notes that “to have nostalgia for a past that never existed, you must go further and further back, until the details are murky enough that you can project any fantasy you’d like onto the period.” The central tension in much of folk horror is what causes people to run away from the present or the future into a nostalgic idea of how people used to live, what lost wisdom is just beneath the topsoil.

I’ve never been nostalgic, though. I want to learn from the past, but not relive it. I get excited for each new season when the previous one has run its course, and that’s about it. I plant one foot forward. Now that summer is coming in and this book project is finally finished, I want to plant something new, something different, to see what comes to fruition.

Kairos

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“Imagine you’re at a bookstore. In one section are time management books that give advice for adapting to a general sense of time scarcity and a world always speeding up: either counting and measuring your bits of time more effectively or buying time from other people. In a different section, you find cultural histories of how we came to see time the way we do and philosophical inquiries into what time even is. If you’re scrabbling for time and feeling burned out, which section would you turn to?” (Odell xiii).

It may be the least understood rhetorical appeal. My students come to class with at least some understanding of ethos, pathos, and logos, but kairos is mysterious, abstract. I sometimes describe it as comic timing, the ability to know when a punchline will land or when to add a joke in an otherwise serious speech. This makes it granular, syntactic, probably reductive.

In the introduction to Saving Time, Jenny Odell distinguishes kairos from its sibling ancient Greek word for time: “Chronos, which appears in words like chronology, is the realm of linear time, a steady, plodding march of events into the future. Kairos means something more like ‘crisis,’ but it is also related to what many of us might think of as opportune timing or ‘seizing the time'” (xvii).

Seizing the moment make more sense to me. Supposedly, Vladimir Lenin said, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” It’s still not clear to me if the quote is accurate or apocryphal.

I bought Saving Time on a whim in a one-room basement bookstore on Independent Bookstore Day. It was in a “general nonfiction” section alongside history, memoir, science, psychology, and self-help.

I only started reading it today (fittingly, May Day), but because I did not manage my time well this month, the one book I finished in April was Alexandra Teague’s memoir Spinning Tea Cups, about family, time, kitsch, tourism, grief. One line that I keep returning to is the first sentence of an essay titled “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” that reads, “The deadest of all the dead people in our family was my mother’s father” (152).

The sentence is syntactically simple, just a subject (the deadest), a verb (was) and an object (my mother’s father). It is the first sentence in an 18-page essay about the narrator’s grandfather, who died in 1944 aboard the USS Mount Hood. The last phrase, my mother’s father, effectively shrinks seven decades and three generations into three words, while The deadest of all the dead people in my family is an epigenetic treatise, a genealogy. But it’s not the construction of the sentence that gets to me so much as the moment, the atmosphere, in which I read it. This, too, is how kairos works. No matter how much time one spends revising and polishing and perfecting, timing, in the end, is everything.

The Lenin quote is easy to utilize for anything that feels momentous. Venture capitalists pushing new tech have even used it to sell their hype. If it’s not apocryphal, it’s probably about identifying resonance, patterns. Seizing the present crisis and holding firm, not backing down. Odell maintains that kairos is more hopeful because, unlike neatly demarcated and sold units of time, kairos allows us space for contingency, for possibility.

That writing moves away from the author once it has an audience is difficult for a perfectionist like me to contend with. Perhaps writing is to chronos as reading is to kairos. On one side is a long, repetitive process of self-interrogation, of trial and error. On the other is the singular opportunity to collaborate with someone else’s craft, to seize the moment and allow oneself to be moved. And being moved, being open to the contingency that other writers open up to me through their experiences, is the reason I want to read so much in the first place.

Odell, Jenny. Saving Time. Random House, 2023.

Teague, Alexandra. Spinning Tea Cups. Oregon University Press, 2023.