nagori

Finally, a touch of winter has arrived here in Belgium. It’s freezing (but mildly), there’s patches of snow on the lawns around the frozen pond (but discreetly), it’s blowing a cold wind (but still rather gently), … in short, a pleasant winter day – that is, if you got shelter and some heating. And although a great many people warn that climate is changing and the seasons are in distress, I myself and many people around still think in terms of a fairly regular cycle of four seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter.

This is of course what you learnt at school, the seasons even fixed to exact dates: 21 March, 21 June, 21 September, 21 December. And that’s all very reasonable, when it comes to determining the span of daylight or nighttime. But basically it is an administrative or bureaucratic classification of the year (just as the world-widely used Gregorian calendar is a technocratic construction). Seasons, in the sense of those times of the year that act on the world and are experienced as such, are of a very different order. And they do not necessarily have to represent this cycle with its four phases of birth, maturity, decline and decay.

Ryoko Sekiguchi is Japanese and writes in French. She has published (2018) a precious little book, called Nagori – La nostalgie de la saison qui vient de nous quitter. A nostalgia akin to the traces of sea waves on the beach. In it she mentions several places on earth do not know four seasons. They may have two: cold and warm. Or a rainy (monsoon) season and a dry season. Other countries may know three of them: fresh, hot and rainy, like Myanmar. Or in the south of Thailand: dry, hot, and rainy. It reminds me of a few September weeks I spent in the mountains of Jotunheimen, Norway. There the season around you is determined not only by the time of year, but also vertically, so to speak, by the altitude on which you are at. High up in the mountains you had what would be considered real winter by Belgian standards: snowstorms and icy winds. But as you drove down from the mountains and crossed the tree line, the surroundings looked like autumn, and down in the valley it was sunny and warm, with flowers in bloom and trees full of green leaves.

Nagori is a mixture of attachment, nostalgia and temporality, writes Sekiguchi: “Nagori simultaneously evokes our nostalgia for something that is leaving us or that we are leaving behind, and the notion of something slightly setting off the season, as if the same thing (for instance flowers, or snow) is reluctantly leaving this world and the season that was its own.” When it comes to food, there are three terms to describe the relationship to the season: hashiri (for primeurs, the first young & fresh harvests), sakari (those of the high season) and nagori, “the nostalgia of the season that has just left us”. A nostalgia, both for the season that has passed and in the act of leaving it behind. Sekiguchi focuses on fruit and vegetables, but a similar approach is possible with, say, the moon or tea, or the famous Japanese cherry blossom.

And one can manipulate this cycle to accelerate or delay the nagori. You might think in the first place of canning or freezing, but traditionally people all over the world have been using methods such as pickling, salting, candying, drying, fermenting or marinating in alcohol.

There was a period a few decades ago, when feminist theory placed quite a lot of emphasis on space/time as an expression of the male/female distinction. Space was a masculine concept, men are out to conquer space; women, on the other hand, live with and within cycles of time. But do not all living beings, indeed all that exists, experience linear time? While on the one hand also this linear time can be manipulated (think of the food preservation techniques – plums treated as umeboshi can last for years, while the massacre in Gaza shows that one can also try to annihilate the life cycle of an entire people), on the other hand there may be linear time on which no human influence is possible (nuclear waste, the cosmos) – to the point that even the popular concept of ‘the end of time(s)’ is doubtful.

A few years ago, I wrote an essay for Thomas Project about the concept of apocalypse. In it I mentioned Olivier Messiaen’s famous 1941 quartet. “The apocalypse as the cessation of time, the disappearance of time. My recording by Het Collectief on Fuga Libera is called « Quatuor pour la fin du Temps », but the one on Philips (Spain) is called « Cuarteto para el fin de los tiempos ». There is a semantic difference between the « end of time » and the « end of times ». But from a certain point of view both are completely correct. That is: one can think it, you can think – here and now – the concept of the end or the disappearance of time or of times. But you cannot imagine the end of time, because imagination presupposes some mode of presence, and thus time. So the question is: what do you have in mind, when it comes to collapse, apocalypse, the end of time?”

For now, though, the beautiful thing is this interference between linear life time and cyclical seasonal time. And what is so precious about Sekiguchi’s book is that she makes you aware of the fact that in your life and behaviour you quite often (unconsciously) emphasise or experience either cyclical or linear time, the relationship to the passing season or to history and the long-term future. And that even within the experience of season, awareness of hashiri, sakari and nagori is possible.