Change of Seasons

It's time to stop listening to reggae, Sho tells me. It's one in the morning and the room is crowded both because it's small and because it's filled with people. And cigarette smoke, and languages, and plates of homemade Greek food, mounds of fruit, the enlarged gestures of actors, a wall collaged with images.

It is fall, and things are shifting.



If you read the I-Ching, and you toss the hexagram Ko (Revolution/Molting) this is what it will tell you:

Times change, and with them their demands. Thus the seasons change in the course of the year. In the world cycle also there are spring and autumn in the life of peoples and nations, and these call for social transformations....Man masters these changes in nature by noting their regularity and marking off the passage of time accordingly. In this way order and clarity appear in the apparently chaotic changes of the seasons, and man is able to adjust himself in advance to the demands of the different times.

It's time to bring out the guitars, the hip-hop.

Mars Volta, The White Stripes, Looker and Joy Division, Biggie Smalls and, ok, even Lil Wayne makes the cut. What we need here is something rougher, shifty, unsafe, unpretty. Summer is over, people.

Fall is a transition season. The kids pack their lunches and the costumes are sewn from sketches, and outside everything starts to die. Summer is over and it's not all in full bloom anymore and that is a relief. The air cools and dries, the leaves fall; everything smells different. When I described the kind of flowers I imagined for our wedding eleven Octobers ago, the florist understood perfectly. "Of course: Hydrangea. Berries. And roses that are just past their peak." When everything begins to change, we are entering new territory.

5

early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought;
seclusion and angels exist;
widows and elk exist; every
detail exists; memory, memory's light;
afterglow exits; oaks, elms,
junipers, sameness, loneliness exist;
cider ducks, spiders, and vinegar
exist, and the future, the future

--Inger Christensen
from "alphabet," translated by Susanna Nied