Autumn sunshine

Autumn is my favourite month. I love the back-to-school excitement of a new year, new pens, a clean new book. I love the colours of the leaves and the sense of the season spreading through the city's streets and pavements. Most of all though, I love the days when the air is cold, the sky is a darker blue than summer and the heat of the sun on your back is coming from a lower angle. Autumn sunlight is a different colour from summer sun, and it catches things looking different.


"There is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!"

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Our necessities never equal our wants

said Benjamin Franklin, apparently. It speaks to me at the moment, as does Oscar Romero's admonition to us to "aspire not to have more, but to be more".




I think lots of people might argue this is a feature of modern, capitalist, aspirational society and part of how we got our economy into such a state. I don't necessarily disagree - and I don't want to lose the moral challenge to an assumption that consuming more will make me/things 'better'. I used to have the postcard above on my bedroom door as a teenager, it's now framed and shortly to go on the wall of my grown-up house.

But I do also think that wanting more than we have (and more than we think we can get) has been a powerful force for change, and often for making things better, easier, fairer.

Catharsis is a brilliant concept for bookish teenagers

I remember being taught about catharsis. I was in Year 9, and we had just finished reading Macbeth (literally - all the way through to sixth form my teachers chose to have us read books aloud in class). Looking back, I think catharsis was an offering to those of us who'd been getting bored, reading ahead during class or at home, and generally getting itchy about the waste of time. It  was one of the first technical literary terms I learnt, and for about six months I used it all the time, about telly, books, films and even rows with my brothers.

At the time, I thought about catharsis in terms of getting things in the open and enjoying big angsty emotions and the chance to work them through. I liked, and expected to feel better because I actively enjoyed the emotions and the validation of them being displayed and provoked through literature. 

I'm more grownup these days, and less into big displays of emotion - so for me catharsis is now less about refreshing and topping up my emotional stocks, but more about cleansing, sorting and emptying out. I expect to feel more tired and looser in my body, and to feel better because I've emptied out some stress, frustration or whatever. It's not something I go actively looking for most of the time - but there are some books, and some music that I know will do it for me. 

Sally posted on 'catharsis' because it resonates with her at the moment. I'm hoping she's feeling emptier soon.

Mercurial

So I'm going to join (by stealth) in with the weekword game. This week someone chose 'mercurial' - and it caught my attention because it's a word with a real flavour - for me, it's got some of the associations of mercury - silvery but with a kind of darkness, quick and globular (tending to form into little balls - there must be a better word).

And for me at least, to describe someone as mercurial might be full of positive connotations about sharpness, speed of reaction and some of the traits of Arial from The Tempest. But it's also slightly perjorative to me - and the negative ideas about unpredicatability outweigh the shininess for me today.