November is a tentative month. That explains its grayness, a color already captured by a poet. The early chill it brings has no finality; December deserves that privilege.
I wake up at 5 in the morning and the cold is there. It is a good cold because it does not make you shiver. It is a morning cold that has earned the courage to urge the temperature to go down. But it is the only certainty that the month of November possesses. It does not own a climate but rather provides a clearing house for the shift in the way the sun shines.
November allows a light to go through the small window of the kitchen. The tall bushes with tiny flowers are bent by the wind this month nurtures. Have the birds migrated? I have not seen the two birds partaking always of the tiny fruits of the wild papaya, which have sprouted from the ground outside my mother’s room.
There is no politics in the month of November. No empty promises, no broken vows. No corruption. There is only clean, crisp air. If there are no mighty storms to broker an engagement with hope and hopelessness, November is really about casual and consensual agreement with what is good about the universe, and what is real about life on Earth.
This perception and the doubt that the world is running good can be done only in the month of November because nothing eventful takes place during this time. This is the last month before confronting December, the month that terminates the year, the season for joy and happiness and all other words to denote smiles, laughter, and merriment. And it is the month that does not require justification for any kind of surplus or excess.
December is the festive season. It offers goodness as created and constructed by the minds of men and women. Here in this month, trees are crafted into figures that blaze. The technology of taste has produced for household lights that blink following a rhythm we take to be a sign of peace and love and harmony. Even the stars that we place on top of the magical tree assume a hard-core meaning of goodwill to men.
If there is a month that senses, it is November.
We are in this month that should have felt for us the impending gloom of the pandemic. It should have given us a warning. The landscape, in hindsight, was littered by proofs that we had committed crimes against our surroundings. Storms were occurring in regions bringing about too much water while other zones were dying with drought. Fires burnt down forests and hordes of locusts swarmed over wide areas planted to staple food. By the month of November last year, it was obvious there were deaths happening in various parts of the globe.
In 2019, there were no evangelists to declare that God was dead; there were no seers to proclaim that Man was alive but killing the Earth.
Sparing nothing, the forces that emanated from oceans and those that erupted from mountains once declared dead grew wilder. People who grew tired of repeated lessons got weary of any notions of climate change, or anything that warned or predicted troubles in the future.
The geomancer could not be stopped from his trick and treat. The land always related to how we positioned our shelter. The air or the direction of the energy could always be mastered by the cunning ways of builders—staircases were cured of curlicues and windows and doors were reoriented to the north and south and east and west, depending on the propitiousness of the four winds. Many persisted in vending amulets or charms that could ward off evil intentions; some manufactured objects and breathed into them potencies of silent gods.
We look back to 2019 and stop with November, not with December. Christmas defaulted the grace for December while the month before it, with its problem of commitment, is the guilty party for the unthinking humanity. As we gathered our capability to face the end of the year, no one ever asked the most natural question about perishability.
No one talks of death in December. For all its terminal position in the calendar, it is the month that leads the beginning of the next year. November, therefore, is the easy month for deeper introspection, for demanding accountability. We were thinking small. It was not our personal demise that mattered. We should have pondered big and asked: what if this was the last good year? What if the world—its aspects of the normal, the regular, and the virtue of the everyday—was coming to an end?
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com
Image credits: Jimbo Albano