Happy New Year

Is it just me?  Or is that traditional New Year baby showing signs of apprehension and exhaustion, even before he's born?

It's hard to get ourselves excited about 2013.  The Democrats and Republicans have converted governing into a private grudge match, ignoring the real problems facing the country.  Analysts warn us that political wrangling will be only worse in the year to come, even if a temporary patch to the financial "cliff" is somehow patched together this week.  The re-election of Obama didn't persuade the Republicans that they had drifted out of touch with the nation's majority.  It just made them madder.  "Mad" in all its definitions.

Politics aside, everything just seems to be getting worse.   Hurricanes and other storms, attributable to global climate change.  Crazy mass killers in Connecticut and Colorado, as well as nonsensical killings on a lesser scale all around the country.  A nation arming itself to the teeth.  Mass unemployment.  Rampant drug use, especially in rural areas and small towns. 

The dying year, 2012, did have its good moments, the November election being one of them.  On a more personal level, my two great nieces had their second and third birthdays, showing already those tendencies toward rich talent and amazing genius that so typify my family.  I had two highly enjoyable trips overseas: to England with a 14-year-old relative, and to Morocco with my adult nephew.   I plunged into the Grand Canyon, hiking down to the river and back, all in one day -- something I'd been wanting to do for years.  

In times of stress, such personal enjoyments can tide one over until things get better.  Families during the Great Depression often found happiness in private lives that were loving, if austere.  We may be learning to follow their footsteps during our own Great Recession.  But I worry about the temptation to focus solely on private pleasures and ignore the infighting of doctrinaire politicians who seem increasingly beyond our control.

The greatest political events passed over the heads of the people like black or golden clouds.  Later it was to watch even the ruin of the Empire and the coming of the barbarians with indifference.   It was a worn-out body whose fibres no longer reacted to any stimulus.

--Ferdinand Lot, The End of the Ancient World and the Beginnings of the Middle Ages.

I once included that quotation in a commentary on the Watergate crisis, concluding that, as bad as things seemed at the time, "the fibers of our civilization remain healthy."

Today, I'm not so sure. 

But, tonight, whatever our optimism or pessimism, 2012 comes to an end, and 2013 finds himself born -- willy-nilly.  Let's all hold our breaths, vow that we'll attempt to make our civilization better and stronger, and welcome the poor, naked little tyke into the scary world that awaits him.

Happy New Year!

Traditions

Noted pianist Hayden Grey plays her original
composition, Christmas Boogie, for a
dog and a naked baby.



During their days of colonial hegemony, the British were famous for their attempts to convert every far-flung colony into a small piece of home. 

I recall a movie scene set in 1930s India.  It was a New Year's Eve party.  The men and women were dressed in formal wear, as though at a party in London.  At the stroke of midnight, the band struck up Auld Lang Syne, and the guests concluded by singing a rousing chorus of God Save the King.

In America, we're less rigid in our observances.  Even so, at least for those of us not strongly attached to alternative religious traditions, our common observance of Christmas -- including Santa, reindeer, and shopping overload -- plays a similarly homogenizing function -- not throughout any external colonial possessions, but within our own, otherwise heterogeneous and far-flung home territory.

Which is to say, I spent three days in far distant, exotic Los Angeles county, and gosh -- it was just like celebrating Christmas up here in God's own country, the Northwest Corner.

I was visiting my niece and her partner in Glendale, joined by my brother and his wife.  But the star of the Christmas celebration, of course, was the newest member of the family -- my great niece, Hayden, so recently born but already a highly personable two-year-old.  Just as when my brother and I were children, just as when my niece herself and her cousins were young, almost everything revolved around Hayden.

It all felt comfortingly familiar.  The tree.  The stockings hung by the chimney with care.  The mounds of beautifully wrapped presents, which revealed themselves when opened to be offerings to Hayden of virtually every age-appropriate gift to be found in any toy catalogue.  The rest of us unconsciously played, in our small bumbling way, the part of Magi offering our gifts to a Child.

Also familiar were the Christmas morning breakfast traditions invented by my own mother.  The turkey dinner.  The televised football games.  The mandatory viewing of A Christmas Story.  (We somehow missed, this year, both Dickens' Christmas Carol and the more modern but still usually obligatory tale of Seuss's Grinch.)

Best yet, the weather was the kind of weather that to me spells "Christmas":  Not snowy rides in one-horse open sleighs, and certainly not balmy, beside-the-pool, Los Angeles sunshine.  No, the skies were cloudy and the rain was intermittent.  Just like home!  Just like the Christmases of my childhood!

And best of all -- the jokes, the games, Hayden's wide-eyed excitement.  The sense of being surrounded by family members, of being part of a family that maintains its continuity, generation after generation.   A family whose members come and, unfortunately, eventually go -- but a family whose warmth and traditions continue year after year.  It was a great visit and a great Christmas.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Mayan endings

If you've been paying attention, you realize that at approximately 6 p.m. tonight, Pacific Daylight Time, those chosen by God will disappear from the face of the earth, having been assumed body and soul into heaven. I hope this warning reaches you in time.
--Northwest Corner blog (May 21,2011)

If you've been paying attention, you realize that at 3:12 a.m. tomorrow morning, Pacific Standard Time, the entire Earth (together, perhaps, with the Universe that surrounds it) will vanish.  A new world will replace it, but we won't be part of it.  I hope this warning reaches you in time.

Yes, these apocalypses seem to be coming around more and more frequently.

Excitement about the end of the current, 5,125-year Mayan calendar cycle has been growing now for some time.  Some experts have tried to tell us that the end of the cycle meant no more to the Mayans than the flipping of the calendar from 1999 to 2000 did for us.  But we will have none of it.  The world must end.  It'll turn itself off, as when a light switch is flipped.  Or end in a crunch when we collide with the mythical (and oddly-reclusive) planet Nibiru. 

If not the literal end of the physical world, at least our old corrupt world must end, to be replaced by a new world order of spiritual enlightenment, telepathic communication, and perhaps levitation and teleportation.  Crystals, certainly.  Vortexes.  Bright shiny beads.  Magic mushrooms.  Pyramid power.  Maybe even bell bottoms and giant afro hairstyles?  Without a doubt..

I know.  It all seems déjà vu-esque.

Even as I write, the Yucatan is packed with spiritual pilgrims -- looking forward to joining the vanguard of this renewed universe, hanging around Mayaland in the off chance that tomorrow morning doesn't bring literal obliteration.  China and Russia are reporting panic buying of candles and "essentials."  (I'm not sure what's essential if the world is to vanish.)  Famous scientist and intellectual Ron Hubbard is going underground, not to emerge until the 23rd -- just as a precaution.

A college-aged friend writes -- with controlled but perceptible rolling of his eyes -- that he is going out into the desert with his mother to bang drums, dance around a campfire, and otherwise signal to aliens that they seek sanctuary in their spaceships before the world terminates.

There was a terrible ghastly silence.
There was a terrible ghastly noise.
There was a terrible ghastly silence.
--Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Yeah, terminating kind of like that, I guess.

Saturday morning the sun will come up.  The Yucatan tourists will put away their scented oils and joss sticks.  The Chinese and Russians will put their candles and essentials to some other good use.  Ron Hubbard will emerge from his hobbit hole, grinning (?) sheepishly and reminding us that he never said he really believed anything was going to happen.

And someone will discover that a numerological interpretation of a certain phrase in the Talmud reveals that the world will end on April 1, 2013.  As Huck so wisely expressed my own feelings, "I can't stand it.  I been there before."

But then, they laughed at Noah, too, didn't they? As he was sawing and pounding away on his ark? And look where it got them.

Jumping in with both feet

When I was a kid, on one of those fairly rare, warm, Northwest summer days when my family decided on a picnic, I could play for hours in a creek or lake without getting cold.  But if I emerged from the water for a while, dried off in the sun, let myself get warm and drowsy, and then waded back into the water ....

Yikes!

Well, we've all had that experience.  The water seemed to have dropped twenty degrees.  It was literally¹ freezing.  You'd stick in your toe, wade in up to your ankles, then your knees, your hips ... it was excruciating.  Finally, you'd hurl yourself into the Arctic sea -- or be thrown in by disgusted fellow swimmers.  Within a minute or two the water again felt fine.

Rather than pursue this metaphor -- for such it is, rather than simply a tedious recollection -- any further, let me get to the point.

This is my first post in 32 days.  The longest gap between posts, in the almost six years I've been putting out the Northwest Corner.  The longest, I think, even including periods when I've been away from my computer, engaged in foreign travel.  I can't tell you why I haven't been writing.  Nothing much has happened in the past 32 days, it's true, but -- as regular readers are well aware -- lack of viable real world referents has never stopped me from writing before.

No, what puzzles me has been my failure to respond with either delight or outrage to even those insignificant events -- both nationally and in my own small life -- that usually make up my subject matter.  The problem is circular.  When I fail to react viscerally to events, I lack incentive to write.  And when I stop writing, I also stop seeking out and perceiving events worthy of my reaction.

And as the circle continues, I become more and more hesitant to take even that first step, that dabbling of my metaphorical child's toe in the literary waters of quasi-literature.  I find myself awaiting some topic worthy of a Russian novel, not simply one worthy of a short feature on the back page of a shoppers' gazette.

So, today I decided to force the issue.  To jump right into the lake -- to commit self-immersion in one fell swoop.²   Get myself wet and re-acclimated.  And so ... here I am, sputtering, coughing, and shaking the water out of my metaphorically boyish crewcut.

Will our hero thus have overcome his unseemly writer's block, and find himself reinvigorated with the juices of literary production?  As that time-honored closing formula of hack journalism reminds us: "Only time will tell!"

-------------------------------------------------
¹  By "literally," I mean, of course, "figuratively."

²  "Fell swoop"?  Why do we say that?  The expression, like so many others, is from the Bard:

All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?

--Macbeth

The "kite" -- we still use the word -- which did the (in Macbeth, metaphorical) swooping is a species of hunting bird.  "Fell" is an ancient adjective, dating back to the 13th century, which the OED defines as: "fierce, savage; cruel, ruthless; dreadful, terrible."  "Felon" is derived from "fell" in this sense.