Happy New Year

Happy New Year

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A year and a half now since Woody Allen made the movie, Midnight in Paris

. Good friend Annabelle Lee- Adriano of the Silliman Cultural Affairs Committee gifted us with a copy sometime in November/December, as is her wont (lucky us) when impressed by a film — she likes sharing movies and record albums.

It usually takes me long to decide to sit down and view or listen. Since I was no great fan of Woody Allen there was no need to take exception and hurry. But view it in time I did and just saying I enjoyed every light moment of it would not suffice. It had a spell on me is more like it, particularly beginning at the point, about 10 or 15 minutes into the movie, we find out what the film is all about.

The Mayan Calendar thing was saying the world would end in 2012. I watched Midnight in Paris

before the year — thank God, not the world — ended .

Lunatics may abound but the idea of an end of the world has so to speak a respectable history and — meaning the Primal — pre-history, as well.

As we suggested last issue, the Winter Solstice (Dec. 21-23, interesting hmm) was likely to have been celebrated — our word for it today — with a magical rite to stop the sun from dying.

A family resemblance appears to obtain in the Jewish context. On Yom Kipur about mid-September, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the high priest, alone, goes into the most sacred interior of the Temple to say, pronounce, the holy, unspeakable name of the Lord, the Tetragramaton, and clamps his ears in the terror of the unthinkable. In the split-second after he says the Name, the Lord will have decided whether the world will be granted a new year or not. If He grants His people another 365 then the bolt will not strike.

Why in September not December is because the Jewish people have a lunar calendar and not a solar like ours. The details are of interest only to specialists. But the main idea of the world possibly coming to an end on a particular day and moment, obtaining in one of the Great Living Religions, is fascinating if you think of it.

In the Jewish, Yom Kippur context the Lord will do the balancing between Justice and Mercy with unfathomable exactness. Find us hopelessly wanting He may or He may not.

In the scientific, I’m afraid agnostic, context the end, the unthinkable, is not only not difficult to believe in — it stares us in the face, backed up not by revelation and ministry but by hard, scientifically understood facts. What’s the look saying? Man and his sciences and technology better watch out.

Hey, where’s the homunculus in all this?

In one of his movies, Woody alludes to a rival for the leading lady’s heart as the ‘homunculus’ which I find funny to this day because they were the same size.

I may have betrayed unconscious infection when I referred to Woody Allen in a 1980 story as, to his fans, a ‘a giant of contemporary humor.’

But the truth is I was never really a fan of his and nothing to do with the scandal that had been his marriage to his and Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter. He did not exactly bowl me over laughing in his entry movie What’s New Pussycat

where he appeared to have stolen more than a comic moment or two from the principal stars Peter O’Toole and Peter Sellers. That was in the 60s. In the late 70s I saw Interiors

, his somewhat vaunted directorial piece. I was memorably bored.

Midnight in Paris

was something else. Watching it just a day or week or two in the shadow of the Mayan Calendar was just right.

Why?

But let’s put it off for next issue. Happy New Year!

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