Summer is ever promising, bringing longer lazy days, warm and restful, demanding smiles, and absolute immersion in beauteousness surroundings. By opposition Winter seems oft drab and frenetic, short hours of daylight necessity crammed with the chores and functions everyday existence demands. Spring and Autumn are by calendar and elemental positioning important stepping stones, easy stages of transition from one extreme of weather and ambience to the other, having as much chronological import and necessity as dusk and dawn to the fragile creature we have become through oft highly inappropriate and unhelpful evolution.
My consideration of time, particularly as defined by season or day/night percentile has entered a noteworthy state of flux, perhaps even gaining a decided taint of boredom with the predictability of solar circumnavigation itself. That the universe is shameless and incorrigible in its construct cannot be denied of ignored, that human kind is a direct product of that assemblage is equally incontrovertible, so any change in interaction between and betwixt the two must be pursued on purely philosophical levels, physiology being totally fixated at conception.
Philosophy is a most profound and easily justifiable pursuit yet assumes or at least acknowledges a degree of self-questioning analysis commensurate with personal relaxion, comfort or contemplativeness. Deep thinking or profound analysis are not consistent with either shivering or sweating, rather being products of the serene and tranquil, of agreeable circumstance. Disagreeable situations are far more the seeds to political discourse, where pain, discomfort, even confinement can be an avenue to enlightenment.
‘Summertime and the living is easy’ so claim the oft quoted lyrics by DuBose Hayward penned for the Gershwin opera ‘Porgy and Bess, yet quite conversely I would suggest that the summer of 2020 has seen anything but abundant ease.
An interesting side note, that the operatic score was from the hand of Gershwin is well known, that Hayward was the librettist is common knowledge, but that DuBose wrote the original manuscript, published as a novella in 1925, and also adapted the story with his partner Dorothy Hayward as a theatrical play, both book and production simply entitled ‘Porgy’, is less well known or celebrated.
The hot months of this the year of perfect vision are proving most tedious, long seemingly endless days filled with very few virgin or even impugned pursuits remaining to amuse or distract. Even that most simple of pursuits the afternoon stroll becomes a constant frustration of possible interactions, necessitating if not dual protective mask sporting at minimum sometimes difficult if not almost impossible social distancing, causing seeming endless interludes of stop-go progression, the pedestrian equivalent of those belated but still infamous summertime holiday traffic snarl ups.
Like thee I persist, we all must continue or abandon hope utterly. We have passed between the gates of the Old Bailey, entering that unknown and trepidus space beyond not unlike Justice herself standing high above, bound, blindfolded and unsure of how the scales will eventually settle. Yet I am strangely comforted by Annie, ever recalling, ‘The sun will come up tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar, that tomorrow there’ll be sun.’
Daily Abstract Thoughts 