Time is seasons, seasons are sex, sex is love

And love is gone

I love these sets of season images. This one’s just a random off the internet, don’t think it represents any great artistic peak. But the constancy of the bamboo against the vagaries of the seasons is always a moving theme.

Jade Pavilion Songs (7)
Quan Deyu

Before the flowers
    You were gone,
        Did not return 
            When bright blooms shone.
Before my eaves
    Paired swallows fly,
        I miss my lord,
            Forlornly cry.

权德舆  玉台体十二首·其七
君去期花时，花时君不至。
檐前双燕飞，落妾相思泪。

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This long series of poems is in a style called court poetry, which essentially means that it was not meant to be morally improving, but offered upper-class sensual pleasures. The name of the series, Jade Pavilion Songs, comes from an anthology of poetry in this style which was released during the period of disunity before the Tang. Conventionally, that period has been remembered as a time of general immorality, when the upper classes indulged themselves rather than running the world properly - hence the failure of the empire to hold together.

In No. 7, our heroine is measuring the time she’s been alone, and in the days when the calendar of nature offered the best markers of time, she finds that every milestone carries within it whispers of the intimacy she misses. Flowers are brightness, happiness, and fecundity. Swallows are partners and childbearing.

How much happier we are today, when our digital watches bear no such meaning.