The year has begun in earnest, the bright shine of commitment giving way to the tarnish of life and the arbitrary misery of marking these days a start and finding some particular meaning in the march of horrors that were already engaged, telling ourselves that the next 365 days are newly cursed with the rapid escalation of state violence in the US that was already heightening at unfortunately well-precedented rates.
It doesn’t mean anything new, anything special, that it is a new year, that the numbers on our calendar will continue to end the same way for the next eleven months, in that 26; just as we are abandoning unrealistic or unmotivating resolutions, we give in to the falsity of human time and release hope—and any reason for action—for another year. Waiting, perhaps, for the right moment to act. Maybe once every four years in a soothing ineffective cycle?
The Imagined New Year
Time is my enemy, a sad enemy to have, one that is less than a phantom. The clock cannot run out, because time is not. And yet, and yet we are unmoored without it, lost without a sense of rhythm that builds our narrative of self, of living, of movement just as it traps us in hesitation, in the “what now?”, of something that can be ruined even as it has already flown away, seconds gone back to their infinite being while we remember them, tainted and sick.
Reflecting on the origins of New Year’s resolutions again this year, I remember the intentional behind the arbitrary. The Mesopotamians celebrate the New Year as spring began. Upcoming Imbolc reminds us we are halfway there, heading out of the darkest hour of the year and toward the spring renewal that invokes the brightness of being better than our January celebrations can. The astrological clock turns to the Ram and all the bright renewing—reproducing—that comes with it. Time moves forward, start and end united and never held.
For those of us on the Gregorian calendar have inherited a new date from the Romans. The New Year is pulled back to January presided over by Janus, the two-faced god of passages. In the dark mysteries and thin stillness of winter, we invent a closure, a nearly circumscribed time we call a year, gone and changed from one moment to the next. And that notion of a year, the thing we pretended was real and named 2025 has disappeared into unbounded time, sectioned and severed like it is a thing that can be manipulated, something of the world at all.
Thresholds and Unbounded Time
Marking Janus’s duality presents a new approach at the imagined threshold of the year—Janus presides not exactly over both sides of the portal, but rather neither, living in the space that is not a space because there is no separation of then and now, of the end and the beginning. In this space that isn’t a space, we can abandon prophetic, corrupting boundedness to live in perpetuality and release the lie that any moment has been dictated for us or can be dictated by us, that there is some forward for us to move with, rather than a totality what we are, can be, and always will be manifesting, chained to iterative, containable, corruptible progress by the urge to quantify.
We are creatures of chronology and history. To ignore history is to misunderstand the present. To understand the present as present and history as history remains not just a mistake, but a lie. What is the corruption of the year 2026 that is greater than the year 2025? What does it mean for a child to be abducted one year or the next? What does it mean to hide in the attic last century or this?
The separation is the illusion, the space that allows us to pretend change is distance, and that just as we are temporally bound to move in one direction, so to is that temporality bound with us, existing in a tunnel where our past can be studied from a distance, except when it takes us over all in one, great and lumbering and loud and so low frequency that if you want to, you can ignore it’s undeniable approach.
The truth is, it was never approaching. It was always there. It is part of the threshold. There is only threshold.
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