Spring Awakening Moon
Night has fallen, the temperature, too and quiet dominates. It is, as I have written here before, a meditative time, a free time, a time when the world is little with us and the mind can roam free over its own landscapes. The spinning of the planet then creates a certain amount of time in every 24, almost everywhere (with the polar exceptions), when we can all become hermits. Yes, it’s harder in, say Manhattan or downtown Las Vegas, but even in these places where the bright lights and nocturnal activity pulse away, even there, the night is still a time of refuge for the soul, at least if we choose to take it.
I’ve begun watching another John Woo film, Red Cliff, which recounts the fall of the Han Dynasty in the early 3rd century A.C.E. Red Cliff is a battle site, so recognized that it might be named Gettysburg or Bunker Hill or Pearl Harbor were it an American battle of equal renown. Gradually Chinese film makers have begun to explore the long, long history of Chinese civilization and create films at least representative of key times in that history.
The Han Dynasty covers the same time period, roughly, as Rome immediately after Caesar, the time of the Emperors. I find it interesting to keep these cross cultural time lines in mind, to know that as the battle of Red Cliff rages in China, the Emperor Diocletian has decided to sever the Roman Empire into its Eastern and Western halves.