Processional Memory on Mulberry Street.

Tradition and Transgression: The Necessary Tension

By Peter R. Mossback, C-of-C-C Newsletter Athwart Historian

A Band Against the Flow

There are moments when history turns not with a bang but with a band — a brass band, trudging under garlands of red and blue, bearing candles and sacred banners down a sun-streaked tenement canyon. John Sloan, no son of Naples but a coal-country Protestant with a realist’s eye, captured one such moment in Italian Procession (1911). Yet he did not see it as a turning. Nor perhaps did the participants. But I do. I stand athwart such moments, saying: Not so fast.[1]

“A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop…”

— William F. Buckley Jr., National Review, 1955

The Village — But Not the One You Think

This particular moment unfolded in Greenwich Village, New York — a neighborhood more famously known for its bohemians, radicals, beat poets, and social flaunters than for its candlelit piety. Yet here, in the very streets where anarchists debated and artists disrobed convention, the Italian community processed with quiet conviction beneath their handmade canopy. Their ritual was not a rebellion but a reaffirmation.

This was no celebration of flux, no advertisement for the multicultural marketplace. It was something older, something slower: the continuity of a community that remembered what holy days were for. These were not Americans playing at being Italian. These were Italians declaring a sacred rhythm within the American tempo — and not quite in time.

The Ethnographer and the Athwart Historian

Our ethnographer, Eugene Bodeswell, might gently remind us that these rituals evolved, that the old world was already a palimpsest, and that processions are not fossilized. That’s his job: to observe, to document, to nod at the subtle creolization of saints and storefronts.

But mine is different. I am Peter R. Mossback. I gather moss by standing still in the stream — not out of obstinacy, but conviction. I do not trust the current. I do not want to be swept into the broad, shallow estuary of synthetic memory.

Let this painting serve as a relic of that resistance.

“Outsiders and Traditional society can exist side by side as long as the outsiders accept that they are outsiders and do not want to significantly alter the segment of society which is the sustaining component; although they often do change or influence it.”

Tradition and Transgression: The Necessary Tension

This was the balance. It can still be, if we remember.

A healthy society needs its rooted segments — its memory keepers, tradition bearers, and procession planners. The veiled girls in white, the mustachioed men in dark sashes, the candles in the afternoon sun — they are not tokens of ethnic nostalgia, but custodians of an order not yet fully erased.

Yes, the outsiders dance around the edges. Some join. Some critique. Some repackage and resell. That is inevitable. But what must remain is the structure — the scaffolding under which the sacred banner can pass.

Without tradition, there is no transgression. Without sanctity, no scandal.

What the Council Affirms

The Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists affirms the necessity of structure, even for those who rebel against it. After all, without a wall, graffiti has no surface.

To the skeptics: this is not dogma; it is dignity. A people parading their faith through their neighborhood is not a threat. It is a reminder — that history is not only what changes, but what resists change.

To the reformers: beware what you flatten in the name of access. A melting pot that dissolves everything leaves only steam.

And to the Council itself: remember this street. Remember the banners. Remember that not all movement is progress — and not all standing still is stagnation.

Let the Virgin Walk Again

Yes, Greenwich Village once welcomed the outsider and the radical — but it also hosted the Virgin. Let both have their place. The outsider must always know what it is they stand outside of.

Let the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel ring again, if only in our minds. The street was once a sanctuary.

Let it be so again.

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[1]: This noble posture of obstruction is proudly cribbed from William F. Buckley Jr., who once declared that a conservative “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so.” (National Review, 1955). The Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists has since adopted this phrase as official defensive posture #3 in our Manual for Metaphysical Traffic Control, filed between “Raising a Polite Objection” and “Building a Sandbag Wall Against the Spirit of the Age.”