Time and Season -- Part 3

Time and Season – Part 3
The Cycles of Time

In Parts 1 and 2 I have talked about separating time and season, treating them as separate topics in renga. In Part 3 I’d like to briefly touch on the cycles of time and how they are woven into a renga. Different levels of cycles are treated differently.

One cycle is the cycle of day and night; the twenty-four hours of our days. This cycle includes sunrise and sunset. It is a solar cycle, a cycle determined by the interaction of the earth and the sun. For this reason, I would classify verses in a renga that are centered on the daily cycle as Celestial Verses.

There are common words that refer to this cycle. These include words such as: morning, evening, sunrise, sunset, mid-day, afternoon, dusk, and dawn. There are many others. Days of the week also refer to this cycle: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday all refer to this daily cycle of time. Words like “weekend”, or “Mid-week”, also refer to this cycle, though with less definiteness.

Taking in a whole week, we move to a longer period of time than the daily cycle. Such phrases as “all week long”, or “week after week”, or “busy week”, refer to the cycle of time that consists of a full seven days. This is one step up from the daily cycle of day and night.

Notice that when we use words that refer to the daily cycle or the weekly grouping of days, we do not normally think of these words as referring to a season. That is to say the word “Monday” is not a seasonal word. Words like “morning”, “evening”, “dusk”, and “dawn”, etc., do not, by themselves, infer a season or have a particular seasonal association. In other words, these are strictly time designators and could be used in a verse to designate a time, but by themselves they would not elicit a seasonal reference from the reader.

However, when we move one level up from words designating a week-long cycle of time to a month-long cycle of time, here we find that people often have a seasonal association that they routinely connect with the name of a month. What I would like to suggest for consideration is that there is no inherent reason why we should assume a seasonal association for words that designate a month-long cycle of time. Just as we do not infer a seasonal association for the day-long cycle of time, or the week-long cycle of time, so also the month-long cycle of time has no innate seasonal association.

One can look at it this way: if I use the word “Tuesday” in a renga verse, that word can be equally embedded in a spring verse, summer verse, fall verse, or winter verse. Similarly, the word “April” appearing in a renga verse can be equally embedded in either the spring or fall seasons (and possibly other seasons, depending on specific geographical placement).

The location of renga used to be Japan, a region where the four seasons regularly unfold. In Japan it makes sense to bring the names of the months, and the seasons that most commonly manifest in those months, together, creating a single, but complex, meaning. But the location of renga today is the world at large. It no longer makes sense, when considered from the perspective of the world at large, to stick to these association since these associations are not valid for the world at large. Notice that by separating time and season the traditional associations are not excluded. But that I mean that one could link an “April” time verse to a “Spring” season verse, which is the traditional association. So nothing is lost by separating time and season and much is gained. What is gained is the ability of renga to meaningfully embody the full complexity and rich diversity of the relationship between time and season.