A Search for some New Images for the New Year
I feel very ambivalent towards New Year. My mother hates it. When I was little she always made a point of going to bed early on Dec 31st in order to miss it. She is a historian, specialising in early Medieval Christianity - Christmas does it for her, a midwinter celebration centred around a mythic story of hope. Or - she would argue - if you prefer to be more pagan in your approach, then Dec 21st, the solstice, will do very well - the point at which the sun reaches its lowest point in the sky and stands still before starting its ascent, to bring longer, lighter days back to the world. By contrast Dec 31st, as a threshold date of seminal importance, seems to my mother, not only distinctly arbitrary and un-mystical but unnecessary - basically just an excuse for noisy midnight parties, with booze and firework bangs. So whatâs the point?
I understand her perspective. Christmas and the solstice are cyclical - they come round again, and again, like rings within a tree, and the imagery surrounding them is potent, colourful: stars, a baby in a manger, animals, angels, holly, ivy, red, gold and green. New Year, meanwhile, is all about the numbers. Counting the seconds down to midnight, counting the years up - 2020, â21, â22. There is no grand myth attached to it except, in the UK, the image of Big Ben, a huge clock face. It brings into sharp focus the units we have invented to mark and measure time: the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, some counted in sets of twelve, others in tens. It is an utterly human festival. The sun doesnât care about the numbers. Nor does the earth - it isnât wearing a new Apple watch that counts up its miles and pings every time it completes another lap. Itâs our days that are numbered, not its. This is true of our individual lives and, as many climate activists point out, of our collective life as well - the earth will carry on. We probably wonât.
It is this strict focus on our human-centred constructs, on our little Gregorian calendar, and the ignoring of a greater story, that my mother dislikes. I share her sentiments and yet I also understand our need for numbers, this year more than ever.
For a start the pandemic has muddled up the count - I spent some time the other morning, with my husband, trying to figure out whether this was the second or third Christmas since the virus started. Neither of us knew. We worked it out in the end (answers at the bottom*) - but it was disconcerting how hard it was and how much this bothered me.
Secondly, this new Year, â21-22 is particularly significant for me because I know exactly where I was, and what I was wearing on Dec 31st â11-12. I was at the Met Opera in New York, in a stretchy black number, in high heels, also black, with a gold criss-cross pattern threaded through the leather. Shoes that would make Cinderella jealous. I have not worn them since, or any other heels so high, because on January 2nd â12, I went into labour, and on the 6th (yes, it took that long), my son was born. This year we are coming up to his 10th birthday. Ten years of his life. Ten years of mine as a mother. The years pass and often pass me by, but the decades bring me up short. Make me stop. Like the sun at solstice. It is only numbers but it feels mythic, momentous, and at his age, the numbers are totemic, like talismans, carried for a whole year, until exchanged magically overnight for the next.
So, I think the numbers matter. We need them to help us keep track of where weâve been and where weâre headed, both day to day and year to year. But the numeric, linear version of time which we celebrate at New Year also tends to get us in a mess, because the image of the clock so often makes us measure not only the seconds, but what we have achieved in them, to obsess over the outcomes.
This year, when doing my Christmas shopping, I stood for a while in front of the rack of packaged experiences, looking like new release DVDs, on sale in WHSmiths. My daughter selected a âHigh Street Dining for Twoâ experience for Daddy (I am pretty sure, this was intended as a gift to him and her, not him and me). Above the rack there was a quote about giving âthe gift of treasured memories.â Our pasts are meant to be comprised of richly stocked memory banks. Our futures are meant to involve progress - that is what New Yearâs resolutions are all about, and they depress me, rather than giving me hope, since the idea that the higher the numbers scroll up, the better things get, that this year things will improve, has been so manifestly undermined. I receive emails every week now, detailing how little time we have left to save ourselves from the worst version of climate catastrophe. It is a difficult time to be a mother, to wonder what will have become of the world in another ten, twenty, thirty years. But neither the count down to the apocalypse, nor a count up to a yet better time, seem very helpful. The numbers in these narratives make me feel frightened, more lost than found.
This year, then, as I move through the ten year mark in my mothering, which coincides with a significant year for my making- I have been working on my novel for ten years too and am now redrafting it for, I hope, the final time - I am in search of some other images for the New Year, beside the clock face of Big Ben. I have been looking out for images that honour the numbers, but not in order to measure my success or lack of it, images of time-travel that are directional, not cyclical, but that take me to places that I want to be. So far, I have found two.
One from a childrenâs fairy tale. The other from a rocket.
The fairy tale is Hansel and Gretel. In the version I know, the children collect first white pebbles, and then breadcrumbs, to drop on their way through the woods so that, in the moonlight, they can trace the way back home. The pebbles work, the breadcrumbs donât - they get eaten by the birds - but either way, I think what matters for my purposes is the act of dropping something as they walk. Pebble by pebble, crumb by crumb, they mark their passage.
The other image is one from the papers: a photo of the rocket which launched on Christmas Day, containing the James Webb telescope, which, it is hoped, will orbit the earth and see far enough out into space to tell us about the beginning of the universe. Forget treasured memories from WHSmiths- letâs go looking for the start of time.
Taken together, I like these images. One so simple - just drop a pebble on a path - and the other so epically far-reaching, a million miles up in space, to search for 13 billion years ago in time. Drop stones. Send up telescopes. These feel like helpful ambitions for me, for both my mothering and my making, in the year ahead.
The pebbles are an ongoing practice, set down not only on special birthdays - they are the meals, baths, bedtime stories of every single day. Together they make a pathway through the woods. Some of them may be remembered, many of them wonât - the point is to keep dropping them. This blog is another pebble, left along the way.
What I like about the telescope is that a phenomenal amount of time, energy, effort and money went in to making it. They started work on it in 1996, which makes 10 years on my novel seems like peanuts. The launch went well but there are also, apparently, three hundred points, as the telescope unfolds, at which it could still all go horribly wrong. And, even if it works, they have no idea what they will find. Sounds like a fairly accurate metaphor for parenting to me, or indeed making anything - a show, a book - itâs one grand gamble with our time. I also like that it is intensely directionalâ you couldnât get something much more directional than a telescope inside a rocket â but so far forward-looking that, through it, the hope is we will see the past. If you pursue the linear version of time right to its limit, it turns a corner, and starts to form a circle.
And New Year, figured like this, makes sense. A pebble dropped on a moonlit path at midnight, one in a sequence. A firework-telescope, sent up into space - a meticulously planned and yet reckless and preposterous attempt to search for meaning, with zero certainty as to its outcome. That is something I can celebrate.
How do you feel about New Year?
What are your pebbles? What are your telescopes? What images might best support you, in your time-travel, while the world circles on around the sun?
Image credit:Â The back cover of Zoe Gardnerâs mother record book, an object/project for keeping track and navigation of time. To join in, for mutual peer support, do get in touch @limberdoodle on Instagram.
*(3 since it began, 2 since it came to the UK)
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