Seq F: The Circle of Life > Cum Grano Salis

On whichever side Janus sleeps (this an unfair coin: technically, one should always win calling heads), he will no doubt always be awake on January zer0 (giving us a convenient opportunity to circle back around the Buddhist concept of Shunyata, or zeroness [and compare the analogous nirguna in Seq 8 and the opposite nihilism in e*sequitur 36], based on the idea that nothing [revisit Kay Ryan, also in e*sequitur 36] possesses enduring identity) - an actual pseudodate. He might be having a mad tea party on March 0 (ditto), be asea alone on any Anchor day (since you asked: Tuesday for the current century), hedging his bets in simultaneous conversations with G*d and Satan (dualistic diplomat and exemplar of the visual idiom "two-faced," but with a di-fferent purpose, and a conundrum to the Aymara's physical definition of futurity in Seq 7) on Doomsday (= Judgment Day [ultimately followed by the Eschaton {and see the solemn Götterdämmerung}]: There are so many! including 2/2, 4/4, 6/6, 5/9, 9/5, etc.; Friday in Ga 4.570002008), and reading this poem about himself (while contemplating Misjudgment Day or the carnal seductiveness of Miss Judgment [she, radiant {if petulant, demanding to know how e*sequiturs dare neglect l'amour ("un oiseau rebelle"), the flower song (recall Nezahualcoyotl in Anapology)} in tiara and {theoretically} g-string, adjusting her radium-illuminated designer Doomsday wristwatch {note the Doomsday Clock, set for 23:55 (midnight being the crack of doom)}], of course ESTJ on the Myers-Briggs psychometric], final winner [as is posited in the Doomsday Argument, which attempts to calculate a probable date of human extinction {note extinct states (ancient and modern), including the Kingdom of Fez, Alt Clud, Dogfeiling, Dumnonia, Algeciras, the Kingdom of Dali, the extinguished isle Elugelab, and so many, many more} {compare the Omega Point in e*sequitur 65, and noting that the last mass extinction was in Ga 4.320000000, not so long ago, earthwise}, taking into account the mathematically egalitarian principle of indifference {equiprobability} and dice flipping {Simic: "You, dear reder (unG*dlike), in the dark?"}, one concluding, for the record, that "there is a 95% chance of extinction within 9,120 years {in Ga 4.570011125 (this falsely precise, no doubt)}." Q.E.D., or - relax - another pegging extinction (an education in geological as well as human history recommended, to include Snowball Earth [during the Cryogenian Period {Ga 3.720000000-3.935000000; see*sequitur 19}] [and from negaholic Wallace Stevens' "Snow Man":

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

{see*sequitur 38}], Rodinia ["Motherland" supercontinent, or a singing- {see e*sequitur 91} or sleeping butterfly { Seq E}] and black smokers [chthonic plumage]) in 7.8 million years {ca. Ga 4.577802005}] of the Doomsday Pageant) at this very moment, just as you are:

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Janus, gazing (Newport Newyear)

All the signs are coded
in another box of hours
Sundaysun shines even on December's graveyard
(we enter innocent)
whereunder Siamese slate, two daughters sleep
elsewhere a man, alone, he was
aged "about thirty-six" (that's all we know)
Unbidden, a professional poet
calls by proxy from a stone
lamenting "Treasure Lost"
lest we forget to love everyone enough
who's dear

And not just the nameless
Young Vanderbilt's bronze bust
- kept in the house! -
a nude tormented trophy
(truly, in his twenties, to typhus)
tries to tell the tourists
about the afterlife
but can't,
constrained by library decorum
and social etiquette

Then shopping
and another sign appears
in narcolescent twilight
An actress - femme ephemeral -
emerges from a magazine
and sidles up beside yourself
to confide commercially
that "Life is short,
so make the most of yours"
in bold italic type
Remember that -
good line

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And that if you only live to be

(e*sequitur) 100,
(see Seq 7), you will have enjoyed over 52 million minutes of Actual Time (52,560,000 to be exact [Use those remaining well!]) and 3,153,600,000 heartbeats (at one per second), an accomplishment worth celebrating logocentricly (cf. treacly) (in words). However, before one congratulates the English (and Cæsar and Guillaume Le Conquérant for considering them not worth educating and thus accreting both Latin and French to Anglespeak) on the million-word linguistic rainbow palette (Wordworth) with which such an encomium might be voiced, remember that they were a primitive and superstitious lot. To wit: The Celts' First Foot (through one's door) on New Years' Day must be a dark haired (handsome?) gift-bearing (recall the so-laden Greeks) male(man).

Dark hair, we know, turns gray in time (and we are unperdurable [cf. "the feather of the quetzal"]). And so at last our fading-to-gray-turning time has cursorially flown. Now the Last Foot exits, the clichéd curtain falls, and things come to an end ("When the Day is Done"). It's 23:59:59: your correspondent has an appointment and now, too, must fly. In the magical, mysterious Umwelt outside our double-dream-drenched, hair-thatched-roofed cranial abodes (travel with me, to the accompaniment of the sheng, to the Dream Pool Essays of polymath Shen Kuo), we whisper our adieus. An owl hoo-hoos (dem debil o's; doze demonise) Debussy, Clair in the lunelight; Patti Smith ululates "Gloria" (from Horses, after Fuseli's), EndTime stage direction reads Exeunt as Mozart immodestly proffers Eine kleine Nachtmusik. Postcoitally flush with an auroral glow, Greenlandians murmur Sinilluarit; nomads somnambulating Saharan sands Lala salama. And so to bed.

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> Afterwords

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Image: Da questa finale, un nuovo inizio
Janus @ Marco Prins and Jona Lendering, livius.org.