2010

Well, it's just past five in the morning and I'm awake and relatively clear-headed for some awful reason, so I might as well.

This, then, is 2010, the year when everything changes. (I've just made that up. Or, more likely, someone else made that up and I've just made it up again.) From the perspective of about an hour and a half of consciousness: it's not bad. The eggs are quite good, and going back to sleep will be lovely. I feel hopeful for the rest of the year.

And it's not hard to being feeling a bit of hope right now, not least because 2009 is, to slip into the parlance of the times, finally fucking dead in the ground, and we can get on with it. The 'it' is, I believe, living and growing and loving and pushing ourselves to do more and better.

2009! It wasn't the best year for me, but it certainly wasn't the worst. I've had major accomplishments and fuck-ups, but a lot of my friends have had it really bad. Things haven't gone right, and people and institutions were, and still are in some cases, collapsing all around us. There is fear and unease in the air, and the change promised us seems less real every day.

Winter showed up late this year, or maybe never left at all: if you think of centuries as having seasons, of hundred year cycles of growth, abundance, harvest and decay, or perhaps sleep, then we''re somewhere in February of the new century, marching on through the slush and ice.

On this scale, I've been in winter for my entire adult life. The whole world has. We've just come through the coldest, hardest part of winter: January into February, when trees explode and every living thing barely clings to life, when your breath freezes in your lungs and your face goes numb the second you step outside.

We're tired, but we aren't exhausted. And ahead--past the groaning ice--is the coming Spring. It's not quite here yet, and we're going to have to work hard to make it through, but on this day especially, you can feel that it might be true, that we are perched at the beginning of a new century, waiting to rise up out of the snow.

There is, of course, no reason to think about centuries having seasons. I've just been playing the oldest trick in the book on you, and myself: telling you a pretty story about how the sun is going to come back and there will be deer and blackberries and warm summer light again, here, in the dark and the cold and the ice. It's the oldest holiday tradition. Singing to keep the dark at bay.

But the sun does come back, and the world can get better. Spring is the sweetest season. Let's bring it.

Lies We Tell To Children: Blasphemy.

My father was raised by Jesuits and fed on philosophy. His Catholicism was rich, historical, and dead. It was a tradition to be passed on, poetry and ideas, but, before he took ill at least, not a comfort, not something by which to be restricted. My mother was the youngest of five, the daughter of a Catholic and a Jew. She took her mother's Catholicism, but I'm not sure she ever felt as if she truly understood it until a few years ago, at which point she realised that the Church had few nice things to say about either of her children, and she left it. The knowledge that she chose us over a god is a gift so great I don't have the words to thank her for it.

When I was very young, I watched the Disney film Fantasia for the first time with my father. The final scene is an animated Christian afterlife which seemed, at the time, frightening and dull in succession. Before that, I was introduced to Olympus. There were creatures: horses with the torsos of bathing young women, dancing boys with the legs of goats. And there were gods! Funny drunken things, a bearded old man throwing lightning in his rages. And these chimeras were wonders, but stranger still was that my father knew every one of their names. The power of this knowledge seemed infinite. I learned the word pantheon at three.

My sister and I were both sent to a Jewish pre-school and kindergarten and spent a subsequent twelve years in Catholic schools. I was smart and obedient and shy, and so at first school was, like the afterlife I'd been promised, terrifying and boring in stages. The rituals and prayers, however, were mysterious, exacting. There were screaming prophets, strange pacts and sacrifices. I spent grade-school rushing through my work in order to have more time to read, and my favourite books were the lives of the saints, adventure tales of emperors and virgins and martyrs, and classical mythology, ancient songs of heroes and shape-shifting and rape.

Due to my parent's choice to condemn my sister and I to a youth of near constant religious training, we learned that these cosmologies, strict, contradictory, jealous, and all-encompassing though they were, were not exclusive. No culture, then, was stupid or dangerous or wrong. Everything was real. Everything was permitted. In religions and mythologies, then, there were no lies, only choices.