Manifesto

I have a wish for New Year 2013.  It is a wish, which means it is a hope, which means it has the substance of things rarely seen.  It could be nothing more than a wish upon a star.  Perhaps it is a prayer without a prayer.  It is surely an ideal, but, then, why are we given to imagining ideals if we cannot at least begin to or at least partially fulfill them?  I believe it is in our nature not to hand-wring, but, rather, to make claims upon the world about how things ought to be.

My Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary gives six definitions of “new.”  Here is the definition I do not wish for 2013: “beginning as the resumption or repetition of a previous act or thing (a “new” day).”  Such a definition leaves the before, the as-it-has-been, the yesterdayed, untroubled.  It denotes merely a new number, the tic of the annual odometer, while we continue to settle for too little, to yield ourselves to the embrace of the way-it-was, which, by habit, becomes the ever-shall-be.  Such a definition mocks the winged promise of newness; it contravenes the wished-for, the expectation-imbued.  Such a definition means we occupy time without being much occupied about it.

Here are the definitions I wish for the new year: “having existed or having been made but a short time: recent;” “recently manifested, recognized, or experienced: novel or unfamiliar;” “unaccustomed;” “refreshed, regenerated;” “different from one of the same that has existed previously.”  These definitions disturb the what-has-been, the erstwhile, with the otherwise, the fresh, the different.  They suggest that the prior can be made prismatic, the previous a preface, the antecedent an alchemy of moments.  Nothing is permanent, says Emerson, but life in transition, powered by “the energizing spirit.”

I wish for a new year of moments in which we are seized by such a spirit and taken beyond the profanation of languid and dreamless drift, beyond ossified discourse and strategic calculation and ironic detachment, taken beyond our sidewise indifference and default disdain, beyond our shadowed nooks and crannies, beyond the defensive perimeter we deploy to garrison enshrined ideas and manicured pieties and soothing ideologies. I wish for us to be taken by awe, by love, by compassion, by moral imagination, by anything real and adrenalizing and outward-reaching—and I wish for us to make our lives a narrative of that captivity.  I wish for a new year in which we engage the could-be, the there-is-more, the this-is-not-the-way-it-has-to-be.

I hope our new year deepens the familiar and pushes it to the verge of enchantment.  I hope our new year galvanizes our imagination, turbocharges it into spacious regard and makes each of us, as Henry James said, “one of those people on whom nothing is lost.”  Let’s practice, until it becomes second nature, wondering and marveling that this improbable planet, just now beginning its improbable tilt toward spring, still whirls its improbable pilgrimage around the sun.  And what a planet it is!  Madly impenetrable?  Gladly inadvertent?  It demands, even if it does not always reward, our full-gazed regard. 

Best wishes for 2013: I hope it gives us nothing we think you want, and everything we know we need.