Another year opens, another closes and with this closure there is much work of handing over to the army of archivists – I think I’m right in assuming that their training is not dissimilar to that of the bomb disposal heroes currently out in Afghanistan – who even by Epiphany have hauled many of the vast bales of the paper record down to Level 7 of the catacombs.
What sort of order will result? I believe it is generally referred to as dis-order.
Will I ever succeed in finding anything of 2010? Only if history repeats itself.
They carry out their work in the dead of night when the rest of us are pleasantly locked in the dreamy arms of Mother Kali.
Meanwhile that brave bunch known as the adventurers or pirates, or, I guess, piratical adventurers (why not), are fighting through any number of hostile boardrooms and jungles to line their pockets and to watch from on high (or low) as their off-spring fight over the glinting gold in their eyes. Would it be true to say that the grand old US of A was founded by these dysfunctional rapine (the OED only refers to rapine as a noun but I rather like the sound of it as an adjective) invaders? Those beasts who turned their backs on the civilising effects of the coffeehouse in search of gold and guns and freedom and learned with their ABC that socialism was to be fought against with every muscle fibre in their tough little bodies.
How soon can we hope to see that breed herded on to intergalactic or interstellar (please let it be beyond this solar system) to find their beloved freedom between the stars.
Their teapartying descendents moved in as Scrooge MacKay was out there in Texas ordering the wilderness with barbed wire and then, with scarce a backward glance, setting sail for fresh territories to plunder in the south. Come to think of it, he must be prospecting in Antarctica at this very moment. In other parts of the world (Afghanistan?) the Matador Grab-what-you-can Company, shouting their mantra: profits (for me) and freedom (for me).
Meanwhile back in the coffeehouse I surface from my dreams of derring-do, reflect on Jonathan Franzen’s happy ending to Freedom, ask for a shot of grappa and read again the final stanza of Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain (page 18 in Human Chain)
That quick unburdening, backbreak’s truest payback,
A letting go which will not come again.
Or it will, once. And for all.