Midsummer

The summer solstice came and went last week without my usual low-key fanfare. I don’t ever set epic bonfires to mark the day, or fly to the UK to watch the sunrise at Stonehenge, or travel West to the medicine wheel at Bighorn. I’ve never hosted a human sacrifice in a burning wicker man despite a partially Celtic heritage. Julius Caesar gave this account of the practice in his Commentaries: “Alii immani magnitudine simulacra habent quorum contexta viminibus membra vivis hominibus complent quibus succensis circumventi flamma exanimantur homines.” If your Latin is a little rusty (and I’m impressed if it’s not): “Others have figures of great size with limbs of wicker that they fill with live people; when set afire they are killed by being enveloped in flames.” No, none of that. I do often have a cookout with friends in the backyard, but hamburgers on the grill are all that ever get enveloped in flames. Last week the weather was not cooperating (it was cool and rainy mostly) so I let the cookout slide. But while I may not have celebrated the day with friends and a grill, I did notice – and toasted the event in my own private way.

This is the first truly summery week of weather this year in this locale even though an alternate name for the solstice (uncommon on this continent for some reason) is Midsummer. It is an odd name since one reasonably might think midsummer should fall on or about August 7, but the solstices and equinoxes were once considered to be the middle of their respective seasons. This actually makes astronomical sense, but the lag between changing insolation and seasonal weather makes the modern way of marking seasons feel more correct down here on the ground. I’m happy to regard summer as lasting until the next equinox: September 23 this year.

My habit of preferentially timing my get-togethers to an equinox or solstice rather than some nearby conventional holiday is partly practical and partly wistful. The practical aspect is that I am not competing with parties held by others, including one or more of my usual guests. The wistful part comes from marking the passage of time. The analogy of the progression of the year and the passage of life has weighed on human minds from prehistoric times to the present. Frank Sinatra released the album September of My Years the year he turned 50. I think 50 is more like August, but we know what he meant: he was feeling his mortality as folks in middle-age tend to do to an extent they hadn’t before. Robert Graves, who always preferred to be known more as a poet than a novelist, went so far as to argue that the cycle (or some part of it) of birth, love, aging, and death as represented (implicitly or explicitly) by the metaphor of the seasons was the sole subject of poetry; one can write verse about other stuff, he argued, but it doesn’t rise to poetry. As that may be, on four days of the year I am particularly aware of people and events no longer in my life, of those that are, and of what may come. Too bad I’m a lousy poet.

Nonetheless, our planet’s orbital prompts are not altogether necessary for ruminations of that kind. Nor are they necessary for parties. Perhaps I’ll hold one on midsummer in the modern sense, which is to say in early August sometime. I’m sure I can work up some wistfulness about the passage of time then, too.

Rolling Stones – Time Waits for No One