We are, now, in the liminal space between the omnivisual beginning of the year and the process of washing that immediately follows. Looking simultaneously forward and back, as Janus commands in this month of their birth, we look to the year that was and the year that will be. Immediately following, around the middle of the month of Februum, cleaning, scrubby brushes and rubber ducks, wolves and the first hints at fecund spring, we can begin the process of washing away that old year and considering the miseries and joys that come into each life with the rains that fall, as they must.
Tortured adages aside, I think of this as a time of year that is useful for thought, and much of what I think about is words.
“January” is an easy one. This is the month of Janus, of the two faces. This is a month of beginnings and endings. Tax troubles start in January, sowing seeds for April excitement. Copyright troubles end in January, and we all sing in the rain, since we ain’t misbehavin’ but are only galloping gauchos bidding farewell to arms in the plane crazy honeysuckle roses. Janus, and so January by extension, also thought of birth and death, but nothing between except war and peace.
Death looms large over the mind, as it should, for all of us. Someone died; someone you know, or knew, or should have known better; someone you saw or heard or experienced in some distant way. Death, like birth, touches us all one day or another.
These thoughts hang heavy, but that is why we follow the month of ponderous thought with a month of cleaning.
February, you see, is related to the word “Lupercalia,” but not how you’d think. It is also fairly unrelated to the word “febrile,” but exactly how you’d think.
Lupercalia, a midwinter festival in February, is one of those beautiful words with an origin that is both shrouded in mystery and also pretty easy to invent whole cloth. You see, “lupus” means wolf, and “Calia” means rich folk being weird. Lupercalia is a cleansing festival in which rich kids run up to the wolf cave north of town, strip to their altogether, and run around waggling straps of hide at pregnant and potentially pregnant persons feverishly flailing and flogging the willing and the slow alike. The founders of the fuming fun likely intended it to foist good luck upon the child-bearing types, if more children dying of fewer diseases can be said to be luck, which it can.
If you remember that Europeans, and particularly first-attempt-Imperial Romans, didn’t have access to chocolate, you can pretty clearly see the analogs between Lupercalia and Valentines.
The revelers called the rawhide whips “Februua,” or possibly “Februa,” which means a bath, which is what the targeted individuals likely thought of, to see them all a’waggle. Why call the febr’ whip a bath? There’s the rub. Here’s a likely lie: “febr” is related to burning and smoking things, smoke and fever, fires and warmth and bubbling tubs of water and general warm things. So, the cleaning flog is also the cleaning dunk?
Now, how much of that is true? Well, coming as we have to both the beginning and the end of this matter, I will leave it to Janus to determine what is truth within these limits, and I will instead bop merrily along to the month ahead.
