Up With Which

Samain                                                                           Bare Aspen Moon

prepositions-timeThe day after the day after. See, there’s the sneaky part of our language. This is the day after the day after Thanksgiving. Yet, really, this is another day, neither after nor before, just a day on its own. Yes, it’s a little further along the third planet’s track around the sun, but it’s a spot on the orbit, so different than yesterday and tomorrow, but no different as a day than either of them save for the slightly less light occasioned by the planet’s tilt, now away from the sun for those of us in the northern hemisphere.

OK. We’ll not flog the old time horse anymore right now. There is a case to be made for chronos, too, but it’s the assumption we share and it obscures other, equally important ways of understanding time.

20171123_142055Anyhow leftover capon, pancetta and fig stuffing, green beans, mashed potatoes, sweet potato pie and caramelized sweet potatoes, pecan pie and deviled eggs rest in the fridge, awaiting their moment. The slow and the stuffed have gotten up off the couches, the beds, the chairs and started to move around again within their lives.

Yesterday (as my mind insists on designating it) I drove down the hill to Aurora. Jon has trees and shrubs on his fenceline that he wants removed. This is something I can do, so I wanted to get exact instructions. He showed me. It won’t take long to do and I plan to go down tomorrow (as my mind insists on designating a day/night cycle we’ll repeat as we return to this spot on our tilt-a-whirl ride of wandering space rock).

Yes, I’m having a little trouble letting go of thoughts about time. It’s just that the prepositional nature of our language is so larded with sequencing words that each time I start to use one, I jerk up short mentally, pulled on the leash of cyclical time. Henry Gustafson, my New Testament professor, talked about writing a prepositional theology. Prepositions and their less common linguistic sibling, postpositions, indicate relations between nouns. “Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in English, simply prepositions),[1] are a part of speech (class of words) that express spatial or temporal relations (inundertowardsbefore) or mark various semantic roles (offor).” wiki

Ah, well, I’ve learned something here. It is exactly prepositions work in our language to indicate time and place. No wonder I keep bumping against them as the ship of cyclical time tries to stay at the dock and not drift away. We use prepositions because we cannot make sense of our reality without locating things in space or time. In using these words though, we reveal an underlying consensus that, while definitely shared, may well not be accurate. OK. I’m in the weeds again, apparently not yet done with the idea of cyclical time.

TampopoJon, Ruth and Gabe and I went to Katsu Ramen for lunch. It’s close to their house, sort of, and I’ve wanted to eat there for a while. Ramen places are a very typical Japanese restaurant, more common there, I imagine, than sushi ones, because ramen is food for the masses, a sort of fast food. “Tampopo”, a Japanese movie from the mid-1980’s, features two truck drivers who learn how to cook great noodles.

I drove them back and returned to the mountains. Yesterday was a rest day, so I kicked back and watched yet another Marvel TV series. I’m as captivated by them as I was by Marvel Comics when Atlas comics rebranded themselves in 1961 and introduced the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Doctor Strange and the Hulk, among many others. One of my cheesy regrets about my childhood is that I, like most other kids, threw away my early collection of Marvel Comics, not realizing how much an X-Men number 1 would be worth in 2017. Hell, I’m not sure I believed in 2017 back then except as an indefinite location filled with flying cars, rocket ships, interstellar travel, huge skyscrapers and maybe a few aliens.

drStrangeMarvel has expanded its media presence to both movies and television. Spider Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, Guardians of the Galaxy, the Fantastic Four, Thor, Doctor Strange, Captain America, Iron Man all have at least one movie, some many more than that. Now on television Marvel has pulled off a rather stunning feat, populating streaming services like Netflix and Hulu with original made for television serials featuring many other Marvel characters. Right now you can watch (and I do) Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, the Punisher, the Gifted, the Runaways, the Inhumans, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the Defenders and Peggy Carter.

There is a link, which I’m not going to explore right now, between my affection for the Marvel stories and religion. I think they trigger the same impulse, the same capacity for wonder and speculation, just in different idioms.