Snakestream

It is the Year of the Water Snake. In such a year, rivers burst their banks. Sometimes, when banks burst, the lands nearby suffer floods; however, in the long run, the area may reap a rich harvest.

In another life, I wrote this, which may have some relevance.

Day 1635 (Day 0002)

If I were counting, it would be Day 1635 after the Event. But I have long stopped counting. It was good to not be counting.

So maybe it is good to call it Day 0002 after the new Event. I am not sure that the new Event is that kind of Event though.

17

Seventeen, as I have had cause to remark before, is a prime number. It lies seductively between the boredom of 16 (O, square of squares!) and 18 (which bears the brunt of maturity in too many places). And so, on the 17th of every month I make a note that I have survived yet another month's ides, and am well on my way towards its end.

Year of the Water Dragon

"God is working His purpose out as year succeeds to year; God is working His purpose out and the time is drawing near. Nearer and nearer draws the time, the time that shall surely be, when the earth shall be filled with the glory of God, and the waters cover the sea."

So goes an old hymn. But the waters really are rising, bringing chaos as ever. For that is the symbolism of Tiamat, old Chaos, and water dragons. This year, if the auguries are to be believed, will be one of deep disarray and the collapse of order.

Sadly, because of the last few years, many will say, "What's new?"

Water Dragon Year This Will Be

The Chinese calendar allows one of five elements and one of twelve animals to represent each year. The year that begins on 23 Jan is a water dragon year, which of course appears once in every 60 years.

It's therefore fairly appropriate to use the idiomatic blessing 龍馬精神 (longma jingshen) or 'spirit of the dragon-horse' at this time. It alludes to the virtues of the mythical dragon-horse, normally along the lines of having dynamic strength throughout a long life. But what's even more interesting is the fact that there's a perfectly good Germanic female name which means the same thing, more or less.

That name is 'Rosalind', which has nothing much to do with roses or linden trees. The elements hros and lind are Old English for 'horse' and 'serpent', and allude to the graceful power of the archetypal horse and the wise beauty of the archetypal serpent. It's also the name of a famous Shakespearean female lead: Rosalind from As You Like It, renowned for her wit and beauty, but also for her loyalty to friends.

October the Eighth

This date in the calendar always reminds me that October is actually the eighth month. Ah well.

Gerrymandering the calendar has been covered elsewhere in this blog. The sad story of February is covered here, with a further extension here. Enjoy!

Year Of The Golden Hare

No, I'm not having a blond moment. But I am certainly wondering if this will be my Year of the Silver Hair. Little arthritic bits, a flowering of the hoar upon the head, stiffness on waking, the onset of presbyopia. Not that I haven't wondered about it before, of course.

It feels like a good year waiting to happen. I wonder how long we have to wait.

Endings and Beginnings

This is the end of the year of the Golden Tiger, a year of financial and social upheaval, according to traditional beliefs. It also heralds the beginning of the year of the Golden Hare, a year of plenty, and of social comfort. Within months, the Citadel will see a new lord and the High King will no longer have to fill the lands with war and rumours of war. The former is certain, the latter is wishful thinking.

For me, personally, the year of the Golden Tiger brought nothing but sought-for upheavals. It has ended with me realising how stress I have been under and how much faith I have unknowingly been using. It has left me mulling over the strangeness (in a fundamental sense) of God, and yet how difficult it is to become truly estranged from Him. Once a son, always a son, as they say.

I have renewed old friendships in startling ways. Old wyverns still carry their stingers, and old venom is more powerful than young. The truth of the wyvern's venom is that it is not the evil of gossip and rumour, nor the scorpion's backbiting sting; rather, the wyvern's venom is an alchemical catalyst. It forces change: "Change or die!" is its motto.

But why is that the case? It is by change that the best is yet to be. As an older sage once put it, "Old things are passed away; behold, the new has come." All things that one wishes for can only come if present circumstances change.

Every Egypt will one day have a new Pharaoh; if the new one has forgotten Joseph, then Israel mourns. But it the new Pharaoh makes Egypt not the ancient tyranny of the past, then Egypt become something new, not-Egypt in a sense.

As a child of two calendars, I get to see the grace and glory of God twice in the special way that a calendar offers. A year ends, a year begins; in one year and out the other. But something always happens in between, and as I grow older, I have learnt that each year means opportunities offered to be wiser.

Thanks be to God.

Calendar Bump

In every year, one comes to the calendar bump, that doubly prolonged section of the calendar containing July and August. It is hard to believe that there were once only ten months in the calendar, and that June became September ('seventh month') before going to October ('eighth month'), November ('ninth month') and December ('tenth month').

The calendar bump is a monument to clever chronological gerrymandering. Somebody needed to make months match. The intent was good, and it did reduce the chaos. Apparently, it worked.

To me, the July-August bump was always that chaotic part of the year in which it was too early to study for final examinations and too late to be blithely unconcerned. You were suffering great heat while feeling that the end was coming.

And now, I sit here watching the end arrive. It is like one of those disaster movies.

A Note On Birthdays

So what happens if the calendar changes so that it no longer has the same months or days as it used to have? What happens to your birthday?

In 1582, the Julian calendar was superseded by the Gregorian calendar, in yet another attempt to rectify calendar drift. At one fell swoop, Pope Gregory XIII added a 10-day correction and gave us the modern solar calendar — the one we use to this day.

Why was it so contentious? Gregory, not one to do things slowly or by halves, decided to do the correction all at once. That meant the last day of the Julian calendar was Thursday 4 Oct 1582, and the first day of the Gregorian calendar was Friday 15 Oct 1582. The days 5 Oct-14 Oct 1582 were gone forever.

So what happened to those people with birthdays which fell during those missing days? Well, there were riots and mass uprisings of course, with people clamouring to be given back the ten missing days of their lives. Somehow, a lot of people thought they'd been cheated of ten days. If you could think that, it shouldn't have been too hard to think that your lifespan had also been extended ten days, but no... human nature is infallibly bent and few thought of that point of view.

The Romans, during the time when the Julian calendar added more than a hundred days in one year, had been more sanguine. Some changed their birthdays, some kept their old ones in some abstruse mathematical conversion, some decided to go without a birthday, and some just set their birthday to be the first day of the year (on the principle that every year should have at least one day).

The Chinese are a little like that. Today is Man's Birthday, the seventh day of the Chinese calendar. Whoever doesn't have a birthday can have one today, and whoever already has one can adopt a spare one. Seems like a good idea to me! Happy birthday, everyone!

February

The story goes that the Roman calendar had gone so badly out of touch with the natural solar calendar that Julius Caesar had to make the year 46 BC a total of 445 days long, the longest year in recorded history. In doing so, some other stories say, the great Caesar took days from February and added them to some of his other favourite months (such as Julius, the seventh month) in order to give them 31 instead of 30 days.

The truth is a lot kinder to that Caesar than all this sounds. What happened was that he actually extended many of the months and kept the rest the same length; the original Roman calendar had 355 days and some sort of random adjustment. When the soothsayers said, "Add 23 days," the calendar was given a 'leap month' to catch up with the sun and the seasons.

February used to be only 23 days long during leap years and 28 the rest of the time. Now, it's 28 days long and 29 during leap years. That's a gain of six days every four years! Which goes to show that the great Caesar was a pretty fair man when it came to adjusting the calendar, and not the evil manipulator who stole days from February to give to Julius, Augustus and the rest. In fact, in his time, Julius was actually called Quintilis ('fifth') and Augustus was Sextilis ('sixth'). The later Romans renamed the months a lot, but eventually, they left us with what we have today.

Happy February!

The Power of Number

I came home yesterday and promptly fell asleep. It's been a gruelling three days or so, at the Temple of the Red Queen's Race. Let me digress a bit before I continue.

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I don't know why people give such awful names to places. I have in mind two specific names: 'Cineleisure' and 'Leisuredrome'. I shall now enlarge on this digression etymologically.

'Cineleisure' is a sort of reverse-portmanteau-abomination-construct. It is a contraction, I think, of 'cinema' + 'leisure'. 'Cinema' comes from the Greek kinema ('movement') and hence 'cine' comes from Greek kinein ('to move'), while 'leisure' is related to 'lease', 'license', and other words which imply a relaxation of control. 'Cineleisure' means something like 'a loss of control over one's movement', and even in modern English, it should mean something like 'moving while not really bothering to move'.

'Leisuredrome' is just as bad. The Greek dromos means 'a running track' or 'a race course'. This of course is something like a reversed version of 'Cineleisure'. It probably means 'a place to run around recklessly'. I seem to remember that it had a skating rink in it, so I suppose that might have been part of the idea.

The Red Queen's Race is, of course, a concept taken from Lewis Carroll. The Red Queen had to keep running just to stay in the same place; it's somewhat related to the concept of Red Tape, which is created to keep people in the same place despite running around a lot.

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Digression over, let me just say why I was so sleepy when I got home. I've had to use my brain a lot, and the food supplied was simple and extremely good. I had a sublime pastrami-on-onion-rye sandwich, a wonderfully thin apple tart with fresh vanilla ice-cream, and a host of other treats, all washed down with delicious caffeine sources. All this makes one sleepy in a pleasant sort of way.

The upshot of the whole experience was that I am now a certified provider of 'digital literacy' and 'technology infused learning'. This amuses me a lot, although I am happy to have obtained the certification; I've always felt that 'digital literacy' should mean 'the ability to talk by using one's fingers'.

But what really hit me in the head this afternoon was the thought that if not for an accident (or incident) of number, we would be ten years faster in adopting many good practices. What I'm referring to is the phenomenon known as 'Y2K' or 'the year 2000'.

The year 2000 AD was the last year of the second millennium (which ran from 1001 to 2000, just as the first one ran from 1 to 1000). A lot of people had invested into the memetic package known as 'the 21st century', in which all things were supposed to be different and the future was supposed to have arrived.

Simply because of this cultural illusion fostered by the calendar, people waited till the year 2000 (when the first digit of the year designation changed) or 2001 (especially after Clarke and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey) to do new stuff. A lot of the new stuff came out in the late 1980s or the 1990s, but many people didn't bother with it, because they were subconsciously awaiting the new millennium. That is why a former superior of mine claimed Apple was dead and refused to do anything useful with IT until 2001, for example.

Because of the power of number (or at least, the terrible illusion this calendar case engendered), we wasted a decade or more.

Chinoiserie?

Today I encountered something I'm sure has been around for a long time. It's just that I never really noticed it. The Canadian Zodiac (apparently a creation of one Charles Alexander Moffat) assigns an animal to each year in a twelve-year solar cycle. It was deliberately crafted with relation to the Chinese Zodiac, which is based on a lunar calendar and a 60-year cycle of elements and animals. Let me show you the years assigned to the various animals and you can draw your own conclusions. The following list shows [Canadian (Years Assigned) Chinese]. Note that the Chinese Lunar New Year starts in late January or early February, so there is some overlap; a person born in early January 1989 would be a Coyote/Dragon, not Coyote/Snake.

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Canadian/Chinese Year Assignments

Muskrat    (1912, 1924, 1936, 1948, 1960, 1972, 1984, 1996)       Rat
Caribou    (1913, 1925, 1937, 1949, 1961, 1973, 1985, 1997)        Ox
Gray Wolf  (1914, 1925, 1938, 1950, 1962, 1974, 1986, 1998)     Tiger
Hare       (1915, 1926, 1939, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1987, 1999)    Rabbit
Polar Bear (1916, 1928, 1940, 1952, 1964, 1976, 1988, 2000)    Dragon
Coyote     (1917, 1929, 1941, 1953, 1965, 1977, 1989, 2001)     Snake
Moose      (1918, 1930, 1942, 1954, 1966, 1978, 1990, 2002)     Horse
Grizzly    (1919, 1931, 1943, 1955, 1967, 1979, 1991, 2003)      Goat
Fox        (1920, 1932, 1944, 1956, 1968, 1980, 1992, 2004)    Monkey
Loon       (1921, 1933, 1945, 1957, 1969, 1981, 1993, 2005)   Rooster
Beaver     (1922, 1934, 1946, 1958, 1970, 1982, 1994, 2006)       Dog
Goose      (1923, 1935, 1947, 1959, 1971, 1983, 1995, 2007)       Pig

You should refer to the original article to see what traits Moffat attributed to his totemic animals. Heh. I'm a grizzly goat.

March

Hey. It's March now. Somewhere under the turnings of the earth is vigour, sparking into life. You think we have no seasons here? Let me tell you about two seasons, the season we are leaving and the season ahead.

The first of the seasons is Muddle. Muddle begins just after Christmas; it starts the moment you realise that you are confused about what to do before school starts and after the holiday season has begun to die. And it muddles on, bringing newness and chaos, newts and toadstools, rain and the promise of rain and tantalizing summery days which are just spots of light in grey and messy schedules. Muddle is the period in which the mind is engaged in work, but the heart is unwilling, and the soul is angry at the difference - but the spirit is resigned and somehow we negotiate Muddle, and the term ends, somewhere around the Ides of March.

And that brings us to Distal. Distal is the season of being further-into-the-year-than-you-want-to-be. It is in Distal that one thinks of approaching deserts and distant mirages and a sense that one is being worked to death despite it being only the middle of the year. April's Fools offer scant respite; April and all her Fools do not compensate for a long March, although sometimes they just May. And then comes June. Distal is the period in whcih the mind has taken a break, the heart has stirred to life, the soul feels ill at ease because the engine-brake is now working against the flow - and the spirit soars at the thought of a long break. Which it will never get.

Ah, life. In all my forty years, I have enjoyed it. Some people think it is sinful or immature to enjoy it this much. But I have only one thing to say: "I am young, still."

Diseases Of Our Age

January's jaundice has given way
To February's fevers just today
As if through barometers darkly see
A long march stretching ahead barrenly

And should April's cruelty not suffice
To drive home hard our human sacrifice
We come at last through our dismay to June
To take a gasping breath, and not too soon.

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Tagore's writing distills in me some odd secretion of wonder. I cannot read him all at once. So I reflect on his illumination as if a cave-bound Platonist. Here he is again.

This is my prayer to You, O God
- strike, strike at the root of poverty in my heart.
Give me the strength to bear lightly my joys and sorrows.
Give me the strength to make my love fruitful in service.
Give me the strength never to disown the poor nor bend my knees before insolent might.
Give me the strength to raise my mind high above daily trifles.
Give me the strength to surrender my will to Your love.