enda lettere #20

blooming like winter #0 — a sketchbook of problems

Happy lunar new year, gentle reader! I woke to a temperatureless, strong wind on Friday in South London, and my fancy Japanese calendar app 72 Seasons told me that this day marks the beginning of the period or ‘season’ of “Spring Winds Thaw the Ice”. How fitting. Not that any ice needs melting here.

A good spring cleaning is more appropriate now. If 2021 was my year of magical thinking, let 2022 be the year of magical doing, I thought. But for doing it is essential to do a thorough analysis of all things not-doing. The un-doing, if you please.

In today’s edition of enda lettere, I’ll philosophize about several ‘problems’, like skewed temporal awareness and the act of looking closely, and offer an ancient solution, which may or may not involve walking (feel free to jump to the last portion of the text to read about that, and further plans for the year).

when re-heated solutions don’t work: a piece from my series of window-views in the autumn of 2019, still in Hamburg, Germany.

the problem with time (not mentioning Gadamer and Ricoeur)

It was but a blink of an eye: an afternoon, gone. How mundane, I thought, for I had sat down just to answer emails, look up a few things, then scroll through my feeds, and the next thing I knew, candy floss clouds rose on the horizon against an ultramarine sky. It was getting dark. Another blink of an eye, January was gone, too quickly, compared to Januarys before. For quite a while now, there has been a problem with time.  Among the four dimensions known to us, we need the most arbitrary anchors to remain in touch with time. We anchor ourselves with our wristwatches, through the cyclicity of social obligations, work appointments, the neverending to-dos of garden work, the growth of children. Thus, a temporal girdle is still observed, and yet we can go on merrily about not living in the present at all. Or that was the case until the world ground to halt in 2020.

Pandemic time most certainly became a peculiar sensation to many, and the past two years saw a million stories of dislocated or dilated time. Our old ways to perceive the passing of time were thrown out the window as lockdown measures became the focus of our collective experience. The promise of a definite end to this madness was a flickering image on an intangible horizon, like a mirage. Small wonder that it has been easier to disappear in the sinkholes of time, to succumb to escapist tendencies, and to give away so much of our attention, to divert our gaze.

It is a trite trope that our advanced technologies and our urbanized lifestyles cut our links to natural modes of experiencing time—but have you imagined your life without the calendar app and the daily planner and the reminders of your collaboration platform? Have you imagined relying on daylight, weather, other animals and plants, as well as celestial bodies to inform your temporal awareness? In the grand scheme of things, is time itself a godly power, I ponder, ever-present, yet always beyond our grasp? Are time-bound rituals and cyclicity of our calendar systems a vehicle to catch a glimpse of godliness, of transcendence? I cannot know.

But looking for the mysterious spirit in the narrow definition of a construct we humans call time, I’ve formulated the wish to observe its changes, its passing, to experience it differently. And that required looking even closer.

the problem with looking

„I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.”

(When I am Among the Trees by Mary Oliver)

From my monk’s cell in Brighton, I finally emerged a wee bit wiser after a year. Just a wee bit, for I still ask questions like the one about the godliness of time. Also, I still couldn’t pinpoint the problem with looking closely. I had been observing the changes of the tree in front of my window, the squirrels’ every move in inadvertent landscaping, the ravens and the cat, and the lady with the loud, throaty laugh. And yet, I felt untethered, hollow, as if I observed the world through weathered windowpanes. I thought I knew the gesture to open the windows of awareness, but none of it worked: walking didn’t help, literature didn’t help, taking pictures didn’t help, writing was almost always a distant, aching desire. So what was wrong with me?

It took me some time to realize, I had a problem with looking if I only relied on looking closely, but in fact, never “broadly” enough. And looking broadly needed a new gesture.

“Once on a night journey in a train when I could not sleep for the crowd of day impressions which raced through my head, I happened to ‘feel myself’ down into my heart and immediately my mind was so stilled that in a few moments I fell into peaceful sleep.”

(from A Life of One’s Own by Marion Milner)

The ‘gestures’ I keep mentioning are part of a technique I had gleaned from the writings of British-American psychologist Marion Milner. She describes how she learned to direct her awareness into different parts of the body, or even send it spiraling outwards, into different sensations and encounters. But I had no idea how to imagine a sweeping glance, a conscious way of seeing the world in its depth and breadth.

We tend to think the way we see the world (or more precisely: the way we narrate our experience) is idiosyncratic, lending our art distinct characteristics. But we keep forgetting the rules, influences, beliefs, and trauma informing our ways of seeing and narrating; that our thoughts, words, images are mosaics themselves, being part of an even bigger mosaic. Without the real and deep exchange of ideas and experiences, we stand to look desperately alone, our myopic horizon narrowing to our own ways, to things we know, things we have already done. The way we see thus becomes an unreflective act. The result is conformity, repetition, aesthetics derived not from what’s out there, but from algorithm-proof cues.

Thus, I also formulated the wish to have a broader, richer perspective when I look at the world. This sense of breadth may be an openness to the surprising, the unexpected, something that is outside of my “relevant set”. It may be a better grasp of how the elements of a landscape relate to each other: the shared history of the people populating said landscape, the plants, the birds, the colors.

A gesture that yields results are of course asking “why?”, and involving as many elements of the landscape in finding good answers as possible to avoid the myopia of solitude. Another gesture would be the conscious expansion of awareness into the landscape, but I tend to live so much in my head, that without proper exercise I find it difficult to maintain that expansive way of looking closer.

So here’s a deceptively simple question I needed to ask myself: what would help?

a proposed solution: get exercise

“So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great distance, he could not help reverencing. ‘The sky is blue,’ he said, ‘the grass is green.’ Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. ‘Upon my word,’ he said (for he had fallen into the bad habit of speaking aloud), ‘I don’t see that one’s more true than another. Both are utterly false.’ And he despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a deep dejection.”

(Orlando by Virginia Woolf)

When the godliness perceived through time and the act of looking closer melt into each other the result is often pure poetry. This amalgamation makes Shakespearean sonnets, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and the best of travel writing burn bright with truth. Most traditional Japanese literature relies on the ritualistic observation of the seasons in nature to channel the human experience, and therein lies its age-defying beauty. Throughout the centuries, however, the luminous seasonal expressions and images have become shorthand for certain emotional states at best, and meaningless formalities at worst, like the usage of Heian-era makura kotoba (枕詞 or pillow words), the Japanese version of Homerian epithets: although their true meaning faded away, they accompanied poets well into the 20th century.

There is a fine line between the worst cliché, kitsch, and transcendence. When I was 16 it certainly did help to write about the changes of clouds and light in my diary for weeks to anchor myself in the outside world, and it also helped to take a picture of the view from my window during the autumn of 2019: otherwise, all I would have seen was darkness. But I had to recognize the limits of such methods, namely, when my response to everyday aesthetic experience becomes inevitably unreflective. The most obvious failure in my experience is oh-so-popular nature photography.

The most outrageous examples of kitsch from my photoroll, taken in 2020-2021 illustrate how low I stooped.

„In this light all narrative was sentimental. In this light, all connections were equally meaningful and equally senseless.”

(from The White Album by Joan Didion)

There wasn’t even a narrative! My justification for taking kitschy photos of flowers was that it felt damn good. That it expressed my yearning for beauty, minute observations, stillness, to be at peace with myself and the world („in sich ruhen”, the German expression for „being at peace with oneself”, or literally „to rest in oneself” is the most poignant summation of this sentiment).

If making up connections between my observations may be equally meaningful or meaningless, there has to be a better framework for looking for anchors in a more natural flow of time, as well as attaining that depth and breadth of perception I lack. A conscious stepping away from the calendars I am familiar with, the Gregorian and the Hebrew calendar may help to shift perspective, I thought.

The usage of the 24 solar terms of the Chinese lunisolar calendar has been a widespread concept in the East for centuries. These terms are based on phenological phenomena, the easiest way to keep track of time in agrarian societies; thus, there are 24 seasons at least, instead of 2, 4, or 5, and then these 24 can be further broken down into pentads, to track minute changes in nature. The 24 season-system is also the basis for Japanese compendiums of seasonal terms called kigo, essential elements of traditional Japanese poetry. Then I learned that the name of these almanacs, kiyose (季寄せ) consists of the ideograms for „seasons” + „draw near”—a precise indication of what they can achieve.

Finally, an idea came.

tl;dr or let me play a game

There. Why not draw near to the seasons? So near that I live and breathe their every little change, let them flow through me. Entertaining the thought of writing my own almanac of seasonal observations, I decided to open up the process. Just writing to feed my many notebooks carefully tucked away in several drawers felt unsatisfactory, when I can treat this space as a sketchbook and invite you to sketch with me.

Maybe I can send my awareness out into the landscape on my walks and maintain this state of looking closer, broader. Maybe I can avoid aestheticizing, maybe I can’t. Luckily, test & learns are never about perfection or finality, and I can only find out what happens to my perception if I play this game of dividing the year into 24 seasons and gather my observations here—and you’ll find out whether it piques your interest, whether you feel like adding your own observations to create a colorful collage.

In line with the 24 solar terms, I’ll share my observations in the 7 categories traditional seasonal words or kigo may fall into:

·         The season itself: how can I best sum up the 2-week season’s impressions? Does it resemble the Chinese/Japanese description at all, or does it look and feel very different?

·         The heavens: wind, clouds, light, precipitation, celestial bodies

·         The earth: the smells and colors of the landscape

·         Humanity: everyday encounters with others, people’s moods, and activities

·         Observances: feasts, holiday, traditions

·         Animals: introducing my neighbor, King Fox, the birds and mice

·         Plants: my quest to avoid taking more boring photos of trees in bloom and flowers

Blooming Like Winter is a game to facilitate living more in the moment, and finding different temporal anchors in the world of reminders, digital appointments, and empty containers of time. It is also preparatory work for a long-ish walk to be walked at the height of spring, and a hopefully healthy practice to work more with new ideas around finding stillness, walking explorations, and what it means to be Central-European these days.

Will you walk with me?

p.s. If you haven’t, read my short text about the National Blue Trail of Hungary, this 1,170-km long magical hiking trail in The Calvert Journal.