Spring of The Thawing Lakes
Came out of the woods early to see the River Flow.
You can call me Alex or Painter A. Other painters have the rest of the alphabet to choose from, but since my name is Alex, I called dibs (shotgun) on Painter A. I have been working on this Almanach my whole life. Consider it a gift. But I would be careful about putting too much faith in Almanachs. It’s not meant as a set of instructions, only cultural knowledge that I think can be quite useful. It has been useful to me, at any rate. It has helped me have wonderful seasons, every seasons, since my birthe here.
This Almanach is not meant to make predictions either. If that’s what you came here thinking it was, you made a terrible mistake. But while you’re here, maybe take the time and have a look around. I live in a Nordic region, below the tree-line, as I have said before. It is the spring equinox soon.
In fact, there is so much going on right now in the massive perplexity that is my interlocking machinic super-calendar that it literally, sincerely, genuinely, truly is not so funny. It’s so not funny, it is Terminal. I’m not joking, you look up Terminus or Terminalia on Wikipedia and come tell me how hard you laughed when you understood how ancient and powerful some of this “Culture-Stuff” really is. But for now, we turn to today’s page in the Painter’s Almanach (currently somewhere between its 100,000th, or 75,000th or 50,000th year, no one has the exact date, it got lost in calendar switches, hence the need for a universal Almanach of Work and Days humanity has been trying to write going on 8000 years at least).
Again, that’s no joke, we keep losing the knowledge as though the Gods were playing an evil trick on us. The name of the game this coming spring in North America, in part of the Nordic region in Canada, but likely also in the United States is a game called The Weather Game. The Weather Game started last night some time, though the Weather Games were called at different times for different people. Those who were staring at the stock charts saw it in the form of a signal having to do with coffee crops in Brazil, perhaps, or something of the sort. Others saw it in another form, the announcement I mean, of the opening ceremony of this spring’s Weather Games of the Thawing of the Great Lakes.
The Mississippi is going to be massive and alone could make the levees break. I hope someone remembered to read the signs. The Weather Games are no laughing matter. We risk floating out to sea, and that again is not meant to be funny. It’s serious, but alas, the heavens have secret plans, it seems, and keep inspiring us to do things that cause us to forget where we left the sacred Almanach. But fear not, we have great Scribes still.
Fear not. Have no fear. We will make do. Something else could happen to make it less severe. But if you didn’t know or notice, there was a lot of snow in the US this winter. In most places, that is not likely to have a lasting effect that is appreciable. In other places, though, it may be catastrophic. One has to keep track of these things, what the previous seasons were like, the string, the sequence of seasons going all the way back as far as it is possible to go back. We are not all farmers and that’s okay, but we all owe our lives to agriculture in some form, for humanity domesticated fire, domesticated the flora and the fauna, and here we are all these years later. Whatever led humans to do any of this, your guess is as good as mine. But since too many common ancestors to count did it, it’s fair to say that doing it helped THEM survive, and that our existence was made possible by their survival. So whatever they did to survive, our lives depend on it, on them doing it.
I have had too many people criticize me for my beliefs, especially my thoughts on Cultural matters (“Culture matters, period.”) But I work in the creative industries, am a constructor of cultural artifacts, and a great promoter of human cultures always in the plural. For there are many cultures, many cultural systems, and everyone belongs to at least one of them. Everyone also has the right to their nationality, which in essence means not only that they have the right to their nations, their cultures, their languages, customs, and so forth, but that it BELONGS to them.
People today, especially more or less urban, more or less young, more or less in wealthy countries, seem to think that nothing should belong to anyone. I fear they misunderstood what it feels like to not feel like one belongs anywhere. We have all felt what it feels like to Belong, and to Not Belong. And yet we pretend that nothing belongs to anyone. Do we belong on this earth? Does the earth belong to us? Can we belong to ourselves?
If there is no belonging and no belongings, then why do we have words for it? Why is language so full of possessions, possessiveness, possessors, possessing? This instance here belong to this type, this class, this point to this region. We say that, “No, nothing belongs to anyone, there are no properties, it is all really just RELATIONAL.”
Right, let us SHARE. Let us COLLABORATE on the COMMONS, right? Complete bullshit. It was relational and still is, humanity, the earth, the universe, things relate to other things (and things near to us relate more than things very far away somehow, no one has even been able to explain it properly, least not for my ears). In any case, one cannot deny that things exist, more than one thing, and so there are necessarily relations between things, all sorts of relations, relationships. Belonging is one of them.
I belong here. There, I have said it. I might feel as though I were “in exile in my own home(land)”, or a prisoner in my own home, caught in the prison of my soul, but that doesn’t phase me out much these days. The importance is that there is some sort of continuity, or continuum, in our heuristics, in the passing down of what works, of our simple rules, heuristics, passed down from one person to the next, as we move forward. If it has proven to work, pass it down, but wait… There are rules for that too! Don’t break the rules!
You have to know the rules before you can break them, and you shouldn’t be breaking them once you know them.
I will leave it at this for now. I’m fed up of being told I’m wrong, being disrespected and abused only to be told later that I was right all along. This is part of the impetus that got me to design the Painter’s Almanach. That way I could just live in peace and people could consult the Almanach if they wanted my opinion on something. Then they could scream and yell at the Almanach all they wanted, and abuse it and so forth, and then when they come back and thank the Almanach, I’ll be long gone, resting in peace somewhere. Please take this Almanach and put it somewhere safe, somewhere dark and at room temperature, never in direct sunlight. Remember where you put it, cause when the sun comes back and starts shining, and starts melting the snow, it will happen so fast that you won’t have time to react, unless you expected it to begin with and had the proper heuristics to deal with such eventualities. I tried to warn as many people as I could, but everyone just nods and the message refuses to be transmitted, the understanding that is. People always know better, until the Mississippi hits you in the ass while you’re watching something on TV. Everything is always fine and dandy, until the time the levee breaks, that is.
And sorry but that is real wisdom and it’s not Alex. I said I was Alex, Painter A., but that stuff is ancient wisdom. I am a young shmuck. But the elders told me to listen and I listened. They told me I was doing it wrong, I tried as best I could to make it right. I never did anything the way I was supposed to but I learned that in the end that’s going to be okay but that for now, it’s awful. It really is awful, terrible really, but then in the end there’s still Baby Jesus. Again, people laugh at me, spit in my face, tell me what I do is wrong, ugly, they spread lies and hatred and disdain and resentment, and then when I sing praise to Baby Jesus before the Lenten season, suddenly I’m the one who is ugly and rotten, frivolous and lukewarm and so forth. But that’s otay, because I love The Baby Jesus and The Baby Jesus loves me.
In any case, I will be writing this week. I warned people that carnival season was coming soon in Quebec (a.k.a. Winter Carnival, one of the only ones left in the world). Thas was it. It came and went like a thief in the night. This is the final stop on the tour. Terminus. Lenten season is about to begin, the equinox is on its way. Here standeth the ancient Stone Boundary Marker. Do not trespass beyond this point. This is the holy ancient sacred Terminal stone. The fun stops here. Put away your party hats and your carnival gear and get ready to put your serious, hyper-solemn Face on.
And if you give something up during Lent, 2014, try coffee. And to my friends in Brazil, let the Games begin! ☺ (Not yet, though, but I will be out of town, the dates are 28 February — 4 March this year).
What all of this means for the Nordic Serial Painter
The days already started getting longer. The color temperature is just right for outdoor painting, or photography. Right now, the sun is already setting after 17h00 (5 PM), which makes the Purple Hour at one of its sweetest spots in the entire year. The Purple Hour is a specific moment just before the sun sets, when one lives in the Lowlands, that is. When one lives in Lowland country, there’s a crucial moment right when the sun passes behind the horizon. It might be different somewhere else, but I have only ever known this area. That is the purple hour, and this time of year, Purple is a great color, especially as we slowly enter into the Lenten season. (I said “Purple Hour” because it sounds better than “Violet Hour” and essentially it ought to have been “Mauve Hour” or “l’Heure Mauve” as we say it here in French).
That doesn’t mean you make paintings with purple in them, that would be ridiculous. You wouldn’t need an Almanach for that. What you do need is the ability to know what subjects are apropos and for what seasons. It’s the same thing in music. If you were a composer of piano music, you would know what to compose for this particular time. It is as though the “Time” itself had a given quality and you were just observing what “Time” it was. In French, the “weather” is le “Temps”, so we kept it in the language itself, the relation of time and season and weather, temperature, etc. So this time of year, it’s great to come out of winter hibernation early and spend the next 10 days or so just getting the winter out of your system. Go out and observe nature, and watch her slowly make the transition to the next season which in this case is spring.
Enjoy the warm weather while you can, because my feeling is that it’s going to be a tough transition. The risk is that it melts too slowly, the accumulated snow. The other risk is not only that temperatures climb too high too quickly, but that rain patterns, systems, call them storms or whatnot, come too often and last too long. So catastrophes are waiting to happen and all we can do is pray they do not, because they might now. But we can’t predict it, so we go with a simple heuristic.
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
That’s the kind of Spring it’s liable to be,
says the Nordic Painter.[FINIS OPERA]
