« 021: Christ Mass | Main | 023: Extortion » January 01, 2003

022: Hanging, Suspended in Space

I'm in the airport on New Year's Eve to pick up family flying in the from the East Coast. I've never seen Sea-Tac Airport so empty at 5pm. There is no one queuing up to the counters. Most of the shops are already closed, and the scattered people waiting in the airport all appear to be here for the duration. No one is moving; everyone is waiting. I pass a threesome playing cards. Next to them is a couple who've already gone to sleep in their stiff chairs. Over half the world has already made it to the new year; we're still waiting for it to arrive on the West Coast. Who waits longer than us for the beginning? I wonder. Alaska. Hawaii. Some tiny atoll out in the Pacific. We're not the edge of the world, but you can see it from here.

The plane from Detroit is delayed. It's the end of the year and there is nothing to do but sit and watch the clock. There is a punk girl sitting across from me, all decked out in tiger stripes and cheetah spots with dark-rimmed glasses, thigh high black boots and large hoop earrings. There is a bouquet of flowers sitting next to her. She projects attitude: both "look at me" and "what the fuck are you staring at?" When her friend arrives, she squeals with delight and leaps into his arms, all pretense gone. But that's thirty minutes into the future. Right now, like the dark-haired woman with the scarf standing behind her, she's waiting. We're all on hold.

Aleister Crowley talks about the Moon card in the Tarot as being the last moment of darkness, the final instant of winter bleakness before the resurrection which comes with the Sun. "This is the threshold of life; this is the threshold of death. All is doubtful, all is mysterious, all is intoxicating." The end of the Julian calendar is subjective; it is the West applying itself to the passage of time. The Egyptian calendar ends with five uncounted days in August. The Chinese New Year is in February. I'm not sure when the Mayan new year begins, not being clever enough to work out the Tzolkin and Haab markers. But in the West, we draw the shroud on December 31st.

6:15pm. The New Year is over the Atlantic somewhere, winging its way towards the East Coast of the United States. Times Square in New York City is already full of revelers. They are still partying in Paris, firework smoke off the Eiffel Tower has dispersed across the Seine already. In Tokyo and Australia, it is already dawn. I'm still waiting for the plane. It has landed, but none of the passengers have made the trek from the distant gate to the main terminal. I'm in a Schroedinger-ean fugue state: the passengers don't exist until they come up the escalator and I see them. I don't actually know the plane is here either. There is just a single word on the monitor -- "arrived" -- and a cluster of people waiting next to the gate. The rest of the airport is still and quiet. Even the maintenance crews have the night off.

This day is an arbitrary marker. A more personal cyclical marker is your birthday, but we've agreed that we will all celebrate the passing of one year into the next on January 1st. Mythologies celebrate the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next with instants of fire and destruction -- the old world being swept away to make way for the new world. The adherents gather around the pole to Heaven -- the axis mundi of their cosmology -- and wait to be remade in the fire of reoccurring Big Bang. They wait for that moment of light which burns away the past and fills them anew. And, in those final dark minutes of yesterday, they have a few moments to think about what they were and what they can be.

Tomorrow the airport will be full. The lines at the counters will be long and the lines through the security gates will be longer. All eighteen of the espresso stands will be working double-time to smother hangovers with caffeine. Someone invariably will try to board a plane with a six-inch knife in their pocket and will be outraged when they get pulled aside and strip-searched. Everyone in line will be hoping the fellow gets a good fisting for keeping them all waiting. There will be missed connections, children crying, and lost luggage. People will be moving again, traveling vast distances and multiple time zones as they circle this planet.

But right now, everyone is holding his and her breath. The escalator is droning, its teethed steps curling into the casing. An airline employee is looking down the moving stairway as if something has caught his attention. Two young women are uncurling a "Welcome Home!" sign in anticipation of the arrival of their friend. She doesn't know about the sign and will be embarrased as she arrives, turning red as her friends scream and cheer when they spot her. The punk girl has put her hand on the bouquet of flowers, the purple plastic crackling.

Time is so subjective. It is molded and bent around our globe. The sun is beating down on the oppositive side of the world. Are they a half-day older than me? Are my relatives getting younger as they fly west? We make our time, we make our rituals. We impose our structure on the cycles -- the 60, the 12, the 24, the 365 -- and that is the basis of our civilization. The sun doesn't care; the rest of our solar system doesn't care. The frogs, the squirrels, the lizards and the elephants on this world don't care. Time is ours. We hoard it, we obsessively count it, we grow restless waiting for it to pass. Another hour, another day, another year.

We're dying every minute, they say. Our bodies are counting down to zero. Every second is one that we can't have again. We hate waiting because it is time lost.

But time is arbitrary. We can't lose it. Our ritual cycles are arbitrary. We don't have to wait for them. You want to be reborn? It can happen on a Tuesday in the middle of the month, right after lunch. You don't have to wait for the end of the year. Your cellular time is all yours. Spend it as you want. Don't wait for anyone else.

Posted by Teppo at January 1, 2003 12:01 AM

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