Slipping inexorably down a gripless tube, which squirms out, in space, on itself and on ourselves, twisting and pressing like a piston, almost puffing. Down, down. With no apparent end, no light, in the darkness that grows more and more impenetrable, thick, dense. Down. Below. Sinking, lowering, descending, abysmally. In vain one searches for a brake on the descent, swirling, a hold, a crease, a wrinkle of that cold surface of black steel. One descends, instead, bottomlessly.

The last day of the year is like this. A leap without a net, dark. The supreme, last risk. Ultimate. The very thin threshold between all and null, being and nothingness, time and void.

I always felt that celebrating the end of the year was a waste of time in a meaningless revelry, exclusively to pay tribute to a convention. I was wrong. Badly.

Conventions are fraught, full, pregnant with meaning. Bloated with meaning, turgid of whys. Especially those marked rhythmically on the calendar of works and days. They are boundaries and bridges, points of passage. They initiate and terminate, initiation and end. They mark and scar the ground: the ground of time. A gate that opens or closes. Cyclical conventions are liturgy.

The sublimation of one year into another is a decisive moment that stops time for a zeptosecond. An imperceptible trifle in which mutation occurs without return. But time, cyclical, of the calendar, returns: linear cyclicity.

You slide down, down, down, and in the blink of an eye you go back up, and then, suddenly, the light explodes, majestic, imposing, irrepressible. Cyclic linearity.

One literally imperceptible instant and time changes. The blind leap opens the eyes wide. The passage is consummated, the rhythm resumes, rotates, returns, all is accomplished. The calendar is a manifestation of time and its Lord, God, who includes and embraces time, who includes and embraces everything, who unfolds and conquers time, who unfolds and conquers everything, who takes up and restitutes time, who takes up and restitutes everything.

Falling down, down the tube-chasm of anguish plummeting down blindly, the absurd finds sense, finds sense again: the absurd makes sense, because it is absurd only apparently.

The punch in the stomach of the insane vertigo of this race to the bottom of death, where everything for a moment dies and only God remains, is the wave that grandly rises again. It all ends at the end of the calendar and we are nothing. Then we are reborn with the calendar in the calendar, without merit, in a rhythmic, primordial moment and cyclical. Again. Liturgical. Thus it happens in time that returns, without returning. Never, always. Liturgy.