Portals

“Nothing changes on New Year’s Day.”

-“New Year’s Day” by U2

It is New Year’s Day. 2019.

Last night I gleefully toggled between marathons of Twilight Zone and Space: 1999. I had a small plate of Pizza Rolls next to me. I have precious few New Year’s Eve traditions, but Pizza Rolls are one. My Dad would make them for my brother and I as kids, part of a small buffet of snack foods. We were too young for champagne, so it was a way of making it feel like a special night. It’s different now, though. I am much older and when I get horizontal and wrapped in a blanket, well, the result is usually assured. Though I fought hard, I fell asleep at about 11pm. I was nudged awake 15 minutes before midnight so that I might witness the arrival of the new year.

Like always, the clock struck midnight and it didn’t feel like much changed.

As is the case with so much else, “New Year’s” is an artificial construct we humans have concocted together. Of course, I’ve blogged bitterly in the past about how much I dislike the concept of this holiday, but my stance has softened quite a bit. I’m still not a fan, but I am left wondering about how much the Eve/Day represent our desires.

I think we want to step through a portal. We want to move through a ring of bluish-white light that washes us clean. Suddenly we find ourselves somewhere new with a fresh start. Last year, I certainly came to understand that desire. I’m going risk sounding grandiose here and not in the way that I usually do. But that’s what happened. The year 2018 represented a portal and I crossed through it into a new world, one I am quite pleased and thankful to inhabit. More on that later.

When I ruminate on these topics, I naturally look around at what else has been written about them, from the neoteric to the arcane. All I can say is my, we do love our portals and “wormholes” in popular culture.

Sometimes it’s the thrilling idea that we’ve found a hidden doorway to someplace else, such as the Hopi legends of people and entities passing between worlds through portals. Other times it’s the utility of being able to bypass vast stretches of time and space, like on Stargate (pictured above). Both are telling about human nature.  

I was disappointed to learn that black holes are not actually portals to a parallel universe. That was the thinking in my youth (see 1979’s The Black Hole, perhaps the best film Disney ever made.) Turns out that, according to the late, great Stephen Hawking, these vortexes formed from collapsed stars draw in matter and energy and then spew it all back out in a sort of cosmological carnage and flotsam. So no traveling through a black hole to a new universe if this one begins to collapse in on itself. Yes, yes, I know it would be quite a feat to survive the crushing gravity and the distortion of all space and time, but I was sort of hoping transhumanism could help us out with that. Then again that’s pretty much my fall back for most things these days.

Guess I’ve been thinking about things in astronomical terms lately. I wrote a “Socratic dialogue” between me and my dogs about the cosmos for a nature writing class. Maybe I’ll post it on here if I can’t find a publisher. Also, the cosmological perspective found its way into my book about the College. I described the closing of Saint Joseph’s College as the center of the universe falling out and a black hole left in its place. I was left adrift to go find an entirely new universe to replace it. In redrafting, I realized that is an imperfect metaphor.

Maybe, in a way, a portal suddenly opened beneath me. I fell through the wormhole into terra incognito, being thrown and tumbled about in all directions as I did. It’s not a ride I can recommend to anyone. It isn’t much fun.

And yet…and yet…

The portal dropped me off in someplace that’s not too bad. In fact, it’s pretty damn great, really. Would I have ever chosen that portal to open beneath me for me to fall through? No. I doubt I ever would have. In fact, I know I wouldn’t have. Somehow though, it might have ended up being exactly what I needed.

That doesn’t mean I’ll ever stop carrying a raging fury for the operators of the portal generator, but that’s an entirely different can of tuna and I’m already meandering into “vague blogging”.

Life is made up of meetings and partings. Or at least that’s what Kermit told me a week ago in A Muppet Christmas Carol. Another way to see it could portals that suddenly open and take us away from somewhere or someone, only to drop us off somewhere else, somewhere else that’s becomes home. If only we could control and stabilize the openings and closings of these portals. But we can’t. Sometimes that’s all right.

So goodnight, America. Good luck nursing your hangover, should you have one.
Wherever the portal of 2019 takes you, I hope it is even better than the world you found yourself in during 2018 and that it will always feel like home. 

POST SCRIPT: The year 2019 is when the movie Blade Runner (one of my favorites) takes place. If you get a Replicant, be nice to him/her and may you always pass your Voight/Kampf test.


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