Happy New Year!
What?! I can imagine the mutterings. Has he finally lost the plot?
To tell the truth, I am not entirely sure that I ever ‘had’ the plot in the first place, but the answer is No. I am not losing my mind, for September is when my year begins anew.
A certain gentleman, much wiser than I, once said “Time is relative” and I suppose, in a number of ways, that rings true in this case. Long ago, nearly two decades, in fact, when my teaching career began, is when January 1st ceased to carry any major significance for me. I love Christmas and all the Yule traditions, but when all those millions of people around the world are counting down the seconds on New Year’s Eve, my year, based upon the academic cycle, is already four months old and merely on a short hiatus for the holiday season.
When contemplating ow the moments pass, I prefer Macbeth’s adamant “Let every man be master of his own time”, a maxim displaying simultaneously both wisdom and folly. Although it is given to each of us to spend our time as we wish, none of us can ever be master of something that slips through the grip like a handful of sand, simply changes shape and is dissipated – into the landscape, into history, into the collective consciousness.
Most summers, my family and I return to Tenby, the beautiful little seaside town in south-west Wales in which we have enjoyed so many lovely holidays, and there can be found the perfect example of time passing, yet settling like layers of dust, year after year. Every time we visit, we find something changed, updated or renewed and yet, simply walking the streets of Tenby opens the eyes to Time, with a capital ‘T’, as a presence writ large – blue plaques abound, detailing the past presence of everyone from Henry Tudor to Admiral Nelson, along with any number of artists and writers. For just a few pounds, my daughter and I often visit the Tudor merchant’s house, like visiting a time capsule, looking at old technology, learning about the foibles and superstitions of generations long since gone.
Time aside though, the more diminutive passage of time, with a small ‘t’ in our own lives was just as evident as we strolled the streets, ambled up lanes and pointed to the little landmarks of life known only to us. Just there, the rock on north beach we swam around that summer; here the shop that used to be a café, where an elderly assistant offered to warm a chocolate chip muffin, making us giggle for hours and years since; and there, the café that used to be a ceramic shop where my daughter, much younger then, painted a ceramic cat that arrived through the post to our home a couple of weeks later. That cat sits now, stored in a cupboard somewhere, a custodian of that memory. Such landmarks help to navigate not only the physical landscape but also the temporal topography of places and life, something that is becoming more evident to me as the years go by.
One group of people who do not just enjoy spending their cache of allotted time, but also celebrate it, is the haiku poets. For centuries, they have watched in wonder as the seasons slide by, celebrating each nuanced change and doing their utmost to capture every fleeting change in words, accumulating them like fireflies in a jar until their compact, tight poems come together and glow like something beautiful, made lovelier by its fleeting nature. Literary custodians of time, with every moment that passes, they delve into their Saijiki, the glittering treasury of “year-time” words, otherwise known as kigo, which contains references to everything from plants to bugs, weathers and physical reactions, each word a dense, association-packed supernova in itself that sparks connotational fireworks when used in the right place.
Take the gentle fragility of spring as presented by Masaoka Shiki:
Double cherry blossoms
Flutter in the wind
One petal after another;
the sleepy, heatstruck summer days as documented by Matsuo Basho:
I feel quite at home,
sleeping lazily right here
in this outdoor air;
or Kobayashi Issa’s attempts to fend off the lengthening evenings of oncoming autumn in companionship and gregarious chatter:
at the inn
the autumn evening
is forgotten
I felt them with me, these writers, as I began my new year with a customary stroll this September. Their eye for transient beauty, their contemplative view of the world, their collection of familiar imagery – cherry blossom, autumn winds and migrating birds, to name just a few – all of these drifted around in my mind as I carried out my own seasonal stock take, realigning Time and time, visiting the fixed way markers of one to measure the passing of the other before diving once more into the rigours of the academic year.
The walk itself was pleasant enough and seemed to pass quickly, so that I soon found myself nearing the boundary wall of St. Michael’s, a small church nestled up in the Afan valley. As I passed around the churchyard perimeter, I stopped for a moment to look inward, absentmindedly running my eyes over some of the names and dates of the headstones, being in that reflective mood as I always am at this time of year. As I scanned through the words and numbers, I halted abruptly at a sudden observation. These were words and numbers – words and numbers. That is all they were. Thousands of collective years of living and breathing, loving and hating, laughing and crying, working and resting, all buried now and curiously undefined by those innocuous squiggles that mark them, and yet fall utterly short of capturing them or defining them.
One, near to the wall over which I was peering, stood out: a man, whose name I shall not mention here out of respect, who passed away in 1963 at the age of 57. He would have been the correct age to serve during World War II, so I naturally set to wondering whether this actually happened. Did he fight, like all those others who thought they’d never see home again, and feel the relief as he finally turned his back on those European ruins to head home to his family? Maybe he never served at all. Perhaps ill health kept him from war, and was the reason for his shortened life.
Still, regardless of his status during the war, his years on this Earth would have spanned some remarkable changes, many of which would come to shape society, as we now know it. He would have lived through the invention of the television, the jet engine, the desktop calculator; he would have seen the birth of the welfare state, the NHS and the comprehensive school system, yet none of this was recorded in those symbols etched onto that slab of stone. Did he realise the significance of these things at all, I wondered, as they unfolded during his lifetime. Barring any family links six decades on, not likely, due to the sadly untended appearance of the grave, I would never know and neither would anyone else now.
As I looked at that headstone, it became apparent that I was simply adding a kind of kigo to my own personal store of seasonal vocabulary. The name and the words inscribed on its face had long since moved beyond any literal meaning and had now shifted into the symbolic, representing both the passage of time and this man’s allotted Time, now lived, complete in itself and forever unchangeable. I am not sure how long I stood there contemplating that stone and the life it represented, spending a few spare minutes before the breeze shifted slightly. I felt it across my arms, heard it slip by through the browning leaves and looked up to see it shunting the clouds onward. Always onward.
Time to go home.
