The Necessity of Absurdity
(why you need to know Baubo)
There is plenty of speculation about the origins of Baubo and what she represented to ancient peoples across the Mediterranean. Most iterations describe her as a goddess of obscenity, absurdity, laughter, the body, fertility–she is the sacred fool who reminds us that the unexpected, the absurd, can bring levity and laughter in times of deep darkness.
Remember, it's Demeter who brings winter into the world when Persephone is stolen from her. It isn’t until Persephone (that underworld queen and springtime maiden) returns to earth that Demeter brings the world back to life. But there would be no spring without Baubo.
Baubo, who in this iteration, is an elderly woman who discovers the listless, grief-stricken Demeter resting against a well, letting all the world die around her. Baubo tries to make Demeter laugh by telling her bawdy jokes (What kind of bees make milk instead of honey? Boo-bees! Why do bunnies have soft sex? They have cotton balls!), but Demeter won’t have it. Finally, Baubo flashes Demeter her own honey pot, and they laugh and laugh and laugh until little tendrils of life start to emerge, until Demeter can sit up and take stock of her own miserable self.
I need Baubo right now, this very minute. I need her to shake me out of my own exhausted, grief-filled stupor. You might need her, too. Before I mustered the will power to sit in front of this screen and sift through language that feels inadequate, each word sticking to my fingers, I was laying on the daybed in my studio, staving off the beginnings of a migraine and trying not to feel like a Demeter-shaped-puddle sloshing against a well.
So here I am, sitting on the daybed, blanket over my head, listening to the wild synchronicity of hundreds of birds living their bird lives outside my studio window, wishing Baubo was on the other side of the door. Where is that old woman when I need her to set my silly-sad brain straight with a bad joke (Did you hear the one about the tomato turning red? It saw the salad undressed.) and cajole me into laughter with a flash of her naked cooch?
Then I remember this other thing my therapist said to me (thank Baubo and Demeter and every other god there ever was for the little gems our therapists offer up) (in that particular early morning conversation, she may have been referencing the Isle of Women or possibly a dragon, but that’s for another post) (oh, but if you haven’t yet read When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill, get on that library waitlist–you need to read this book like you need Baubo to flash you): it isn’t a thing or a place that exists outside of you, she told me–it exists inside of you.
She’s not wrong, I think, still laying on my daybed, listening to the urgent, angry squalls of squirrels streaking over the studio roof. When I sit still, I can feel Baubo nestled somewhere inside my belly, whispering bad jokes (Your mama thought I was big enough. Signed, Pluto.) and flash flash flashing my intestines to her heart's content.
So now I’m sitting up, and the blanket is off my head, and I’m halfway to my desk in search of a picture I found the other day when Jenn asked all of us Joyful Practitioners to bring pictures and artifacts of our past selves to share during our Friday afternoon session. This Sarah is ten(ish), standing on a dining room chair, her arms spread wide, knees slightly bent, clearly trying to stay balanced. By the look on her face, she’s half concentrating, half goofing around, and looking through the doorway into the kitchen, looking across a threshold: close enough to puberty and middle school to see them looming in the future, but far enough away from all that grown up shit to still enjoy the freedoms of childhood. Her world was full of turning cartwheels in grassy fields, diving off the highest board at the swimming pool, riding bicycles, climbing trees, making up dances to her favorite songs from Grease, and playing what if in the backyard with her friends–pretending they lived in magical woods where her (real life) turtle, Henry, could talk and knew where to find the queen of the elves who sometimes slept in the huge oak tree on the side of the house.
I imagine ten-year-old Sarah is hanging out with Baubo, flashing my internal organs and turning everything into a song. Together they are playing what if, and I can join them.
What if…
Baubo is our mascot, and absurdity is a necessary agent for change? What if we lift our proverbial (and literal) skirts and expose ourselves to power, forcing the invisible, the obscene, into the light. It ain't the genitals that are obscene in this scenario. It’s the violence and animosity, the reckless and, yes–absurd–denial of the humanity of so many. The only way to expose this kind of absurdity is to inhabit the absurd ourselves.
Imagine a line of women–the ones who are pushed towards invisibility–middle-aged, trans, elderly, skirts lifted in unison in front of every Tesla plant and every monument that valorizes power over instead of power with. In front of every state capitol and the big ass federal capitol, too, thousands of Baubos cackling and flashing. We are life, we’ll shout. Don’t turn your face away. You think you have power, we’ll shout. This is real power.