Happy Zeitgeist

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity..."
-Yates, from The Second Coming

It's kind of incredible to see how far world civilization has progressed, and yet how mundane modern celebrations have become. In ancient Mesopotamia, the new year was not just celebrated, but had to be ritually brought about by returning the city-state to a point of chaos; mass orgies, feasting, the dethroning of the king, and then the world is re-created by two teams acting out the mythological slaying of Tiamat by Marduk. While I am still not quite convinced that modern America isn't Babylon (our worship of towers and law, and our war-like and demonizing social rhetoric), our new years celebrations only seem to return to chaos on a surface level: screaming in the streets, drinking and fireworks and singing. While these actions certainly don't re-create the cosmos in any paradigmatic image, they do suggest that the spirit of the times is one of a general and undirected anarchy.

I, on the other hand, had a quiet evening with Sophie. We finished setting up and cleaning our new house, had a lovely dinner, watched a silly movie and played scrabble, watched the fireworks from our window view of downtown, reminisced about how positive last year was and how we planned on reaffirming our practices for 2008, called our families and friends, and curled up in bed, where I dreamt of attending a conference held in all the languages of the world.