The snow muffles everything, but reflects some light, so that though it is long after midnight I keep moving restlessly around the apartment in a sort of glowing silence, without lights.
My sister bought me some Heian literature for Christmas, among other books; it is giving everything a strange resonance – there are three time frames: the silence and the snow and a few tiny electronic lights and screens, then the noisy, busy world, then lastly this world of slow-moving poetry and robes and the Japan of a thousand years ago. In the winter night, the middle frame has dropped out, and a strange elision occurs: the rumpled, pale blue duvet and still snowy landscape through the window blends exactly with the screens and lamps of Heian-kyo in winter – the computer lights are admitted anachronisms, but delicate, silent ones that don't disturb the vision, or illusion.
Earlier today there was another disjunct timeline, perpendicular to this one – the American government has finally lifted its ban on incoming travel for anyone who is HIV+; that ban was set in the same year of my diagnosis, 1987 (for me it was April, and the social worker who told me the news became my Jungian analyst, and now I'm studying to be one myself...). It is somewhat weird to connect the dates and their meanings – a bit like a German Jew thinking over what he was doing in 1933: well, there was Sophie's wedding, then that fight I had with Werner, and then other things happened that year didn't they... oh yes the election and all those government things.
It is plausible that this happens to everyone as they get older: the overlap of time and meaning, memory and projection, becomes so intricate that one can only sit and look at the spaces and the lines, like endlessly growing branches, that eventually connect them all to each other....
Snow, time, and night.
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