Palimpsest

True, that all my writing sits on other writing
that has been effaced to make room
for the new words, but traces remain.
Sometimes, I try to hide the past.
There are things you can never erase.

The image is a detail from The Archimedes Palimpsest (pal·imp·sest). This is a digitally enhanced image of the beginning of Archimedes’ Method, a treatise that survives uniquely in the Palimpsest. Archimedes wrote the Method as a Letter to Eratosthenes, and it begins “Archimedes to Eratosthenes Greeting.” Learn more at the Archimedes Palimpsest Project Website

The Floating Bridge of Dreams

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Reading Lady Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji –

1000 years old with its 400 tanka.
Like the Western sonnet, the tanka turns
from pivotal image to a personal response.

The past floats up to the present.

The tanka is a thirty-one-syllable poem, traditionally written in a single unbroken line. “Tanka” translates as “short song,” and is better known in its five-line, 5/7/5/7/7 syllable count form. This makes it similar to the haiku – and to the ronka form used on this site.

The Tale of Genji is about courtly life in Medieval Japan and is arguably the world’s first novel.

“The Floating Bridge of Dreams” is the title of one of the illustrations in the book.

Crystallizing

I only have to travel a few hours north of home to still find the early morning hours between midnight and sunrise to be more like winter than spring despite what the calendar tells me.

This morning, further north, but still spring,
there were ice crystals on the rocks.

It doesn’t take much change to make
things look different from the recent past.

The future – one or two seasons away?

Deep Time

Photo by Sami Anas on Pexels.com

The chronology of Earth’s history: not present,
opening into past and future, not measured
in hours, years, but epochs and aeons,
recorded in stone, stalactites, seabed sediments,
drifting tectonic plates, and stopped only by
our fallen Sun in five billion years.

Photo by Lorenzo Castellino on Pexels.com

Aion (e-on Greek: Αἰών) is a Hellenistic deity associated with time, the orb or circle encompassing the universe, and the zodiac.

The “time” that Aion represents is perpetual, unbounded, ritual, and cyclic. It is a future that is a returning version of the past. This kind of time contrasts with the empirical, linear, progressive, and historical time that we know and that was represented by Chronos. That sense of time divides into past, present, and future.

In the latter part of the Classical era, Aion became associated with mystery religions which were secret cults of the Greco-Roman world that offered individuals religious experiences not provided by the official public religions and were very concerned with the afterlife.