Light Rains Sometimes Fall

Dear Friends,

I’ve been asking myself what a season is. In the European imagination there are four, to the ancient Chinese there were twenty-four, and the Japanese named seventy-two.

In the Japanese tradition, this week is the season “Light rains sometimes fall.”

I wonder if we could think of seasons as changing daily or even hourly, and find our own names for them all.

— Sal

---

---

¶

The sadness must be some kind of original sadness — perhaps this is what is meant by lack, or sin. Are there emotions in the body of work as well as the bodily body? Both are subject to being gone. Give me one, small, physical thing: the way yellow leaves collect in the gutter or the way your own hair feels under your hand. Or the breath, whose sensations mostly go unnoticed.

¶

What is there to forgive except for forgiveness? I don’t think it’s truer, and I cannot bring myself to simply comply. The emotions are there, coming and going, going and coming. A man with a newborn wonders what it’s like to live in another country. What is ordinary and ugly far away is beautiful when translated here, but it’s hard to imagine the way it could work in reverse. Tell me what you think I should do, I say, and you do tell me, and I don’t do that thing.

¶

A beautiful old-school Gallimard paperback of Les plaisirs et les jours sitting on a table, cover coming off, place marked with folded leaves from a magazine. Which is to say, that everything we could want is right here, always. And somewhere it is midnight. I want to show you a photograph, but not any photograph that I have. How can I find it? How can I find it in time? The way we don’t always understand what we’re seeing if it is upside down. And we keep going as if there was a future, even though we don’t understand that future.

---

---

---

For some autumnal haiku:

---

Tell me your season.

---

Further adventures and new ways of seeing can be found in my book, The Uses of Art.

Artist Sal Randolph’s THE USES OF ART is a memoir of transformative encounters with works of art, inviting readers into new methods of looking that are both liberating and emboldening.

Dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent.
— Michael Cunningham

A joyful, dazzling treasure-box of a book.
— Bonnie Friedman

Here’s a guide, to waking up, over and over again.
— Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara

---