The Transcendental Transient

Happy Easter, everybody. Here's another update from Barefoot Beirdo via Houston DeBacle at the Mission of Control:

This correspondence goes out to you from a Denny's in Downtown Sacramento, where I am celebrating the Ascension with a vegetarian Grand Slam and researching the symbolism of antlers.

At first I was focused on reindeer.  A dream back in Santa Rosa featured a dog with reindeer antlers who I found sitting in a merchandise tent beyond the finish line of a Marathon I'd just completed.  The dog got up and led me to a man I recognized as a runner from the book "Born to Run" known as "Barefoot Ted."  He and a small group of people were sitting cross-legged in a circle, and Ted was wearing reindeer antlers just like those worn by the dog.

I was reminded of this dream over a week ago while walking on the shoulder of Hwy 128-E, upon noticing a sign warning drivers of the presence of deer in the area.  Someone had cleverly affixed a red dot to the nose of the deer on the sign in order to evoke a certain reindeer who went down in history one foggy Christmas eve.

And, here in Sacramento, around the corner from Barnaby's apartment, there is a fenced-off garden within which dwells a great, horned plaster animal.  I see it almost every day when I go out to get coffee or a meal.  Perhaps the third time I walked past it, I finally realized it was something larger than a reindeer.  More likely, this sculpture is representational of a moose, elk, or antelope.

What is consistent in all of these images is the antler, not the reindeer.  Now that I understand this, I've also begun to consider when and where this theme started to emerge.  This past Winter in Santa Rosa, deer began appearing to me while I was out on runs.  The first encounter was while I was running through a wealthy neighborhood in some hills east of Downtown.  A family of deer were grazing in the front yard of a house at the end of a cul-de-sac.  I jogged in place for a while and watched them eat, and in turn they seemed to pay me no mind.

A couple of weeks later I was running on a trail separated by a line of bushes from Fountaingrove Parkway.  A gentle rustling in the brush that I assumed was being caused by a bird turned out to be from a gigantic deer who, caught off-guard by me, started to run out towards traffic.  The deer then came back through the bushes and stood, frozen, just a few feet from me as I jogged in place.  We checked one another out for a few moments, and then it bounded away into a grove of oaks.

Then one morning, heading East out of Downtown into wine country along Highway 12, I ran past what appeared to be a recently-killed deer on the shoulder of the road.  The first thing I noticed was the enormous antlers.  This was a male.  Clearly, he'd been struck by a car: a gaping wound revealed part of his ribcage and cracked bones protruded from his right hind leg.  Yet his eyes seemed totally, inexplicably peaceful.  Maybe the eyes of a deer always look that way.  Regardless, the image was both moving and perversely iconic; and for the next few miles I sort of tried to reach out to the spirit world, hoping there was some way that the deer could run, through me, upon the earth for one last time.

So, here at Denny's on Easter Sunday, I decided to look into all this, and The Great Google suggested that I look to my Irish roots.  I've been reading up on Cernunnos, a god of Celtic polytheism.

Interestingly, Cernunnos - like Barefoot Ted in my dream - is a horned or antlered figure who is often depicted sitting cross-legged.  The wikipage for this deity ends with this:

"In Wicca and other forms of Neopaganism a Horned God is revered; this divinity syncretizes a number of horned or antlered gods from various cultures, including Cernunnos. The Horned God reflects the seasons of the year in an annual cycle of life, death and rebirth."

Adding to this, from whats-your-sign.com: "Horns and antlers also point to the recycling nature of all life. Stags grow antlers in the Spring (symbolic of birth, renewal, the return of life), and fall off in the Fall (symbolic of death, introspection and hibernation). This would have prompted ancient consciousness to consider the phases of life, the cycles of being. Cernunnos would have encouraged the populous to viscerally feel the rise and fall of Nature and Time. His horns/antlers are a testimony to transience."

This transient has certainly had transience on the mind.