December 24th

Merry Christmas Eve (if you so celebrate)! Happy belated Solstice or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or Festivus and early Annuum, if not.

On a grimmer subject: did you survive The End?

From what I understand, also a good beer...

I remember years ago now (back in the ancient history of the fall of 1999) taking a Millennialist Literature class. It was a lark. The teacher was light hearted, most of the students were light hearted, and we all had the same grim sense of humor. I knew we were all going to get along just fine when I realized the professor not only matched his sweater-vest to his converse sneakers and had drawn the seven-headed beast of Revelations with his own caricature (as the heads) on the chalkboard, but was wearing a striped and spotted tie: red stripes, white skulls. I was wearing a Fin Du Monde t-shirt I’d gotten that summer at a local pub. We laughed, we cried. We scared ourselves silly. Good times.

Thank you, Wikipedia

People seriously were afraid the world was coming to an end when the Julian calendar passed the 2k mark. Whether it was computers crashing, all hell breaking loose, Armageddon and Revelations, everyone had different ideas about what was going to happen. We read books about it, we read the literature that informed it. It was a really fun and thought-provoking class. And we took it with humor because, let’s face it, if you don’t, it can be pretty downer stuff to read about: how people perceive the world might end. Human cultures have been obsessed with beginnings and endings and apocalypses for as long as there have been definable human cultures. Longer, even, I’d bet if we could still talk to our neo-human ancestors. We talked about that, too. That prophecies and major natural and unnatural events all become part of concerns that somehow we won’t continue on. Comets and eclipses were bad omens that were signs of the deaths of kings and nations -- often self fulfilling prophecies, when the peasants rose up and killed them (like during one of Halley’s comet’s early recorded sightings in the 1400s depicted in tapestry, or the more recent Heaven’s Gate folks that decided to hitch a ride on Hale-Bopp, or the Holy Roman Emperor that keeled over and died of fright during an eclipse).

I bring this up because one of the more recent theories about what the Mayan end date was about was crossing the Galactic equator. Yeah. Like the equator of the Milky Way. Somehow, according to that guy, it coincides with the solstice and the end comes when the poles shift. Never mind that the Earth's poles have shifted HUNDREDS of times since humans first started roaming the earth. It's not unique to a single period in our geological history nor our species history. Go look at the USGS. Or NOAA (here too). Or PBS. Or NASA.

And you can see, even though we (most of us, anyway) lived and the world kept spinning, fear of the world coming to an end continued past the days of Y2K (just like it went past the Middle Ages, The Fall of Rome, and the end of the first Star Trek Series) in movies and books about aliens coming in and destroying everything, to the summer of killer comet/asteroid flicks, mega volcanoes, and climate changes. The Zombiepocalypse. Fears of nuclear war and nuclear winter carried over from the 50s. Revolution and evolution of society. Dystopian futures.

We find portents to fear in everything, from long-lost comets to rumbles in the earth, to more human-bound and inexpertly understood cultural leavings. And what we don’t understand or can’t control we fear -- even ourselves.

Mark the date at the bottom, if you will....

With all the furor over the Mayan calendar, it seems our concerns about the End-of-Days has reached another fever pitch. The fact that I’m writing this to you, and ostensibly you’re reading it, tells me that this continues even after the 21st of December, 2012. We see an end to a calendar, we see a major milestone and we fear it. Even though the experts shout, even though they rattle our cage, we’re still quietly (or not so quietly) preparing for everything to end. Personally, I’ve been singing along to REM and Great Big Sea, because if it’s the end of the world as we know it, I feel fine. I want to feel fine.

But I suspect it isn’t over. I suspect we’re just going to keep on spinning. And I have a prediction of my own that in a few months time, the day the world ends will be pushed back (like it’s been before again and again) and we’ll all keep going on living.

Because that’s what we do.

We live.

And maybe scare ourselves a little on the collective zeitgeist.

Signing off until the new year....?
-Angel

(Previously here and here...)