Now the cold is really setting in up here. Things are slowing and quieting down, which in a way allows me to get back into action with the reading and writing and thinking. That localized seasonality lends to a circulation of its own: constant heat and long daylight leads to a constant growth and flourishing of living things running on solar power, which paradoxically leads to a repetition and stasis as one tends to them, which is finally put to rest as the daylight wanes and the cold sets in and everything goes dormant, and one's thoughts turn inwards and one's patterns of activity and consumption shift in turn. And then one eventually gets tired of the quiet and the dark and greets the coming sun and shoots of green with joy and relief.
This is of course a privileged conception. It could be that one greets the coming winter with dread and consternation: was enough food produced? Was enough fuel gathered and stored?
The modern advanced built environment flattens this seasonality and flings it outwards. That movement and circulation makes the transition, and indeed, is accelerated in some respects. The seasonal foods are gathered further and further outwards from regions conducive to their production, according to parallel seasonal movements of their own, or which otherwise have such long seasons as to be effectively perpetual.
The movement and variation and circulation is for the most part available to those wealthy enough anyway, but it is often available all at once. There does remain a seasonality to shifting ideas and focus, but then there also arises a new internal logic of a sort of self-referential seasonality, in which thoughts and activities move in accordance with the interests and preferences of the most influential and powerful, and then of course the reactions and counter-movements to those things, all of which is in relation to what the greater system is doing and how it is changing.
Anyway, this is mostly a warm-up post as it gets cold out there. I've got some rough and abstract bones to lay down as I get going again. I've still got a whole load of things to wrap up for the season, but I wanted to get some writing in as I go. A warning that the writing might be a bit vague and esoteric for a bit as the rust gets sanded off and the joints get oiled again, but eventually we'll get going here again.
