May 8, 2023
Symbolic Spring: From Rebirths to Temporal Distortions
Somehow reading my own title makes me think it sounds too academic. Serves me right for using a phrase – “temporal distortions” – I’m sick and tired of, after using it a godzillion (sic) times in my doctoral dissertation. But this post isn’t academic. Hell, Symbolic Spring sounds like an awesome title for a post-rock album.
This text is mostly stream-of-consciousness. It’s about experiencing – another pearl of experiencing in a necklace containing such stuff as almond trees and Greek coffee.
It’s a post I write just because I feel like it – though this is a trick statement: All posts I write because I feel like it.
Symbolic spring? The symbolic nature of spring? Spring as a symbol? Rebirth is a hopeless cliche in that direction, I hate it. Spring isn’t about a rebirth; it’s just another instantiation of the temporal pit all humans are trapped in.
(In case you haven’t realized yet, this post will likely feel nonsensical and incoherent to you. What can I say, every now and then I need to write such posts – and publish them – as a reminder that I don’t try to please anyone; I only write them for myself. In other words, proceed at your own risk)
Symbolic Spring and the Chase for Meaning
The idea of spring being a symbol of rebirth is, as I said, a ridiculous reflection of the fact that nature “wakes up from its wintry slumber”. Of course all these metaphors are entirely anthropocentric in nature. Much like the similes in The Iliad, it’s only from our perspective that any of this makes sense.
Nature doesn’t wake up, because nature doesn’t go to sleep. To think of a symbolic spring in rebirth is to chase after a meaning that doesn’t exist.
The fragrant spring is often thought
Self Versus Self
a resonant rebirth,
and that it is; although before
must always come a death.
There is, however, another interesting dimension in this fallacy: that of time.
What Is Time?
No, I’m not touching that question. Wasting seven years of my life answering it in my doctoral dissertation was more than enough. But I can tell you this much about time: It’s as ghostly as symbolic spring. It’s only from an anthropocentric perspective time can have a meaning.
Note that I didn’t say time doesn’t exist without humans. If you’re interested in such directions of thought, take a look at Immanuel Kant. Rather, what I said was that time requires human perception to have a meaning. There is a subtle but important difference.
The idea of finding symbolism in spring (rebirth, new beginnings, insert demotivational quote here) relies on a temporal distortion: that of cyclical rather than linear time.
That is to say, the reason we project symbolic meanings – twist in the plot: all meanings are symbolic – on spring is a result of an apparent break in the “normal” flow of time. In the relentless advancement of time, one second at a, well, time, spring (and any other season, holiday, or similar pattern) seems to insert itself as an anomaly; a cyclical form of temporality that seems to greet us from a pre-Christian (that is to say, pagan) era.
Symbolic Spring as Meta-Meaning
Symbolic spring – the desire of humans to find meaning on something that has none of its own (I let you figure out the problematics here) – is about the rediscovery of something lost, the enunciation of a knowledge left behind, the hopeless desire to find an answer to a question that isn’t properly materialized.
Maybe the best expression of spring as a symbol is precisely using it as an excuse to assign meaning where there is none. Its meaning is about meaning; meta-meaning!
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Glad I read this post now, before I get deeply into LIMBO – I’ll have to reread your thoughts on spring and rebirth – and connections to The Book of Job – before I get too deep into what fits beautifully. I love accidentals – they can add so much (as long as you don’t have to pinch and twist them TOO much to make them fit).
Time IS cyclic – or spiral, if you prefer to add the forward motion. We don’t solve problems completely so much as for the current cycle – we’re bound to the seasons as much as any medieval peasant – and his Lord. We are creatures of the light, and the light pulls us into its cycling. We have no choice.
Spiral is indeed my favorite metaphor concerning time, with the added complexity that it might hide more levels of repetition. That is, the forward motion might itself occasionally be a regression, and any progress (however we wanted to define that) only local.