Mayday
They jostle a small blue pill into their hand and roll it through the wrinkles of their palm. There, a lifetime of hormonal dissonance is wedged into a lifeline running deep through the center of their fist. They wonder if it could taste like candy, but settle, as we often do, for the medical marvel of something so small and yet so heavy. Something so delicate and yet so dense with expectation.
***
Today is Mayday, a holiday split into two between a world before and a world beyond the drudgery of our modern economy. Looking back one can be forgiven for envisioning the joyous maypoles of a past neither passed nor fully arrived, or otherwise imagining the radical optimism of a second international intent to shave the work day down into a mere 8 hours.
Present within it is a confluence of hope. The sense in which released rabbits might reproduce to feed us all, in which flowers might suggest the seasons wondrous frivolity, or in which we might reproduce this great abundance through labor and solidarity.
The neopagan roots of mayday are a bricolage of sometimes related, often overlapping and occasionally independent festivals, celebrations, and seasonal traditions from throughout history. Though it is an ancient celebration, with roots extending well beyond the Roman fertility festival of Floralia or the Gaelic celebration of Beltane, much of what we know about the historical roots of mayday have been lost to time and to puritanical repression. For this reason it can be difficult to trace mayday back to the ancient times we associate it with. It’s aesthetics carry us further than the history books.
Mayday is also International Workers Day, a time for protest, demonstration, and $1 subscriptions to Jacobin Magazine. In ways it is a decidedly modern holiday, first created in 1889 by the Marxist International Socialist Congress after the establishment of the Second International. It was first chosen as the date for a massive international demonstration in support of shorter work days for the anniversary of the Haymarket Affair. It is still celebrated by labor activists, unions, anarchists and communists as an affirmation of the power of working class solidarity.
More than anything, mayday might be a manifestation of time felt within the body. That is, the body which feels the changing temperatures and weather conditions of spring. The body which bends not beneath the yoke of capital, but rises to challenge its supremacy. The body which we might call an “ecological body”, as we extend out to the forsythia, the dandelions, the nesting songbirds or the desperate ticks. Or perhaps the “social body”, fed up as it is with the unjust pressure of capital and the state. If mayday is both ancient and modern, then it is so because of the profound imprint which spring leaves upon the body.
***
Their body trembles as it gently returns a pill to the bottle from which it came. It is not time to begin the regiment, as other medical procedures must take precedent. Still, it is a small comfort to hold and to handle the threshold. To roll it through their palm. The poetics of it all, that May might yield profound bodily transformations but only once they have assured the preservation of their own fertility, is not lost upon them.
