The Weeks

It's a curious thing, these seasons. Logic is subtle in them. When the sun is lowest, these next eight weeks from now until mid-January, the darkest, shortest of the year, the air begins getting cold and ends getting colder. Halfway through these weeks, the solstice will harken winter, but it will also bring on longer days, higher angles, more radiation and heat to be gathered. Yet, the days will get colder. More light, more heat, colder air. Into the next season, it will be the same. The hottest days follow the summer solstice, when the daylight is longest. There is a rule underlying this fact, the subtle logic of nature. There is always a gathering before a change. Roots gather energy and thrust it into the tree, buds gather energy and suddenly unfold into leaves. The factors, the variables, arrange themselves to favor new conditions well before those new conditions come about. Winter arrives before winter arrives, and so on through spring and summer and autumn again. Waves, not pistons. Gradients, not planes. The chopping up of each of these gradients and eventualities into measured time and measured seasons cannot remove their true subtlety; indeed, the chopping up provides the very standard against which to realize the intricate mosaic of constant change that reality presents. We are carvers of time and space, butchers of the universal dance, without which, the rest of our systems would falter.

They are still finding bodies in New Orleans. Human carnage in Iraq. 150,000 will be homeless across 51 states as of December 1st merely by dint of having been poor and housed in New Orleans. 10,000 unemployed a year who once worked for GM. More political crimes and indictments. George W. has put on that grimace he wore all of last year pretending he was in charge and morally aghast that anyone anyone would question his leadership. These are what post-modernists call liminal days and weeks, we stand on both sides of a boundary, everything is in flux. Old strategies are deployed, or, strategies that were once new or didn't seem like strategies suddenly become old; they are on one side, we are on the other. Liminal. A merry Thanksgiving to the imperialists, who need not wait.