Hinged


 


Why, yes, I had a good Christmas. Thanks for asking.
I missed out on my chance to do a chance on a birthday post (it being my disco year--54, that, is) and a solstice post, though, like a good boy, I did my Christmas post nice and early.
And what with traveling and all, here I am in the last hours of 2006.
The temptation to review the year is powerful, but, like the little book in Revelation, it would be sweet in my mouth, but would make my belly bitter. Because although I rejoiced at the first trumpet blast in the national reaction to the right-wing abomination that's been covering our nation like a manta ray on an Australian, my own year has been full enough of tragedy that I don't want to dwell on it.
Besides, you were there. You saw it too. And you heard about it from me. It always bewildered me, while it still affected me at all, that the media would trot out their old clips and hold forth on the past year as if we'd somehow been somewhere else. 1937, say. Of course the media always seemed to confuse perspective with vanishing point, to bury 2006 and not to praise it.
While this place, as it's evolved, is nothing but perspective, So there's nothing special about December 31st.
But (So) before I get all meta on you and do a perspective on perspective, I'll just throw in a Gleaning on a key word in the last sentence: yes, 'it's'. In a nice little book on the origins of the King James Bible, the erudite author pointed out that the possessive of the pronoun it in Middle English was, in fact, his. (Yes, the way it is in German: the possessive of es is sein, just as is the possessive of er.) During the period of the KJV's composition, that usage was changing to its present state. So it not only gives one a fascinating Fun Fact that its appears only once in the Bible (Leviticus 25:5), and also explains the weird periphrases involving thereof ('and six cubits shall be the width thereof') that are not in the original Hebrew or Greek--but also sheds light, for me, on one of those badly engineered hinges of our language. Because the fact that the word its is a recent (17th century) addition to the English tongue goes a long way to explaining why we have a confusion in the language that causes everybody grief--blog posters not the least. Viewing the its/it's problem as the result of the new features written into English 7.0 makes things a lot easier to understand.

I will confess that witnessing my best of friends Tom Artis brought low damaged me in many ways--ways I'm still discovering. But one thing it did do is make my intents--maybe all of them, maybe not--more serious. I've never agreed with the old saw 'live every day as if it were your last', because if I did, I'd give up most of my larger aspirations and endeavors, to say nothing of starting continued stories. But I know that there are things I should be doing, and that thinking and writing as well as I can are two of them. (And that two more are learning to think and write better.)

One of the concepts I've always believed in is the Work. When you start to get closer to it, you know it, and things change for you--as they do when you start to move away from it. Finding out what the Work is is of course part of the Work, and most of the time it's impossible to point to or define. But it ain't the Tao either, buddy, because all sorts of banal and unbalanced things (like playing endless scales on a piano or arguing politics) contribute to your ability to do the Work. (And of course, it also is the Tao.)

It makes the belly bitter, though--that's one of the parts of the Book of Revelation I also always understood. Knowing the Work is far different from satisfaction and reward. That's dogs and tinkling bells, and that old saying of Goethe's: If they don't destroy you with neglect, they'll destroy you with honors.

This blog isn't the Work. I think I've moved closer to it as its nature has changed, though.

The year turns. There's something to be said for not changing the year right at the solstice: it's about now that the days become perceptibly longer. And you can't push the door of Janus open with your hand right on the hinge.

Happy New Year, everybody. And all I will say is that if Ronald Reagan had to die to prepare the way for Ray Charles into heaven, and Gerald Ford to herald James Brown's passage to glory, I hope the rest of our Presidents remain healthy.

Posted: Sunday - December 31, 2006 at 11:07 PM        

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