The new year and New Year’s celebrations are
traditionally the time set aside for reflecting on the year just past, and
setting goals and making resolutions for the year to come. It is a curious psychic
position in which to find oneself, not quite out of the old year, yet not fully
engaged in the new, inhabiting a liminal space which leaves one betwixt and
between, attempting to resolve the conflict between past memories and future
ambition.
This year, as in others, my family watched the New
Year’s Eve celebrations from around the world. Sydney’s fireworks display and beautiful
skyline never seem to disappoint. London focused its Eye on the New Year
celebration. Beijing’s celebration was reliably surreal and often, to a
Westerner’s eyes at least, unintentionally comical as it tried to project the
image of an ethnically diverse nation (which it is) open to individual expression
and hep to contemporary Western Culture (which it is not—but then, I just used
the word “hep,” so you’ll have to decide for yourself.). But watching the
event—I can’t rightly call it a celebration—in Hong Kong, one of my favorite
cities, was an eerily foreboding, and sad experience. The fireworks display
over Victoria Harbour was cancelled due to concerns about the ongoing protests
in the city, and the laser light show and the accompanying music that replaced
it seemed to me ominous and dirge-like. The laser show had a Star Wars feeling
to it, as though it were produced by the Palpatine Empire, and seemed to carry
a thinly veiled warning to protestors, who were raising their hands and
spreading their five fingers to denote their “five demands, not one less” for
which they are risking their careers, their safety, their freedom, perhaps even
their very lives.
These incongruities in the celebrations left a gap, a
hole, a kind of lacuna in that big pieces of the story were missing.
Instability, be it environmental, political, or social, places one in a gap, in
a psychological situation of uncertainty, or a feeling of being “betwixt and
between.” The Australian fires seem unquenchable, Brexit is ongoing, and it’s
hard to imagine Beijing won’t forcefully intervene in Hong Kong eventually. Perceived
gaps or holes reveal a lack of structure and predictability, an inability to
know anything. The gap of unknowing creates a psychological situation Homo
sapiens has a hard time tolerating. Homo or hominis means
human being; sapiens means wise, discerning, knowing. Our species is
defined by knowing, by developing expectations and methods of prediction which,
when finding ourselves in a gap, or realizing that we are enshrouded by the fog
of ignorance, is constitutionally abhorrent to us. Gaps and holes are generally
associated with emptiness, with something missing, and unless one is very wise
or has practiced seeing and thinking through the manifest appearance of
“things,” we fail to see how abundantly rich, how teeming with life and
possibility, how present with something is the nothingness, how filled with
divinity are the gaps. In antiquity, chaos defined the nature of the gods much
as chaos defines the nature of emptiness and gaps, and it’s readily apparent
that the emptiness is not nothingness, it is a teeming surfeit of potential and
possibility.
The month of January was named for Janus, who was the
unique (he had no Greek precedent), ancient (some scholars find a relationship
to Romulus, the founder of Rome), and the essential Roman god whose numerous
and elaborate rituals acknowledged his influence over thresholds, transitions,
endings and beginnings, gateways, passages, and time. His two-faced image was
what one first saw upon entering the most significant gate into the Eternal
City. The gate called the Ianiculum displayed the old face of Janus
looking into the past—into the void from which all life arises, even—while his
young face is turned to the future and possibility, as well as toward that same
void to which we inevitably return. One might think of his domain as eternity
itself, replete with births and deaths, beginnings and endings, and all
varieties of psychosociomorphic possibilities. In fact, Janus is the god of the
gap, monopolizing the liminal space and offering a way of understanding our
relationships to the no-things of life that are the antitheses of nothing.
The singular image of Janus has transformed over time
and cultures and has become, in American life, the image of aged Father Time
ceding the stage to the infant New Year. In America we celebrate the New Year
by dropping a ball amid a million people in Times Square, or a giant Pinecone
amid thousands at Leroux and Aspen Streets. As a mythologist, it seems proper
that the new year begins with a drop or a fall. So often we associate dropping
something or falling as a failure. A failure of skill, clumsiness or
carelessness, even a failure of ambition—we have reached too far, flown too
high, exceeded our capacities somehow. But falling isn’t a mistake or a crime,
it’s one of the ways that life begins. The Ponderosa Pines we all love
propagate by dropping pinecones to the ground where new life then takes root. Even
its name, Ponderosa, is a Latin word that conveys a sense of the great
weight or heaviness of these trees, and the more subtle knowledge that eventually,
heavy things tend to fall.
Falling into the gap, finding oneself in liminal space,
is often an opportunity and not ruin. It’s an immersion in the generative,
cyclic nature of existence and not a death at all. It is a felix culpa; it
is, if we can find the courage to so view it, a very fortunate fall.
No comments:
Post a Comment