Happy New Year?

on time and tides

How do you celebrate the New Year, sequin dresses, a pop of sparkling wine, fireworks? Or something quieter and cosy? I’m a bit of a New Year’s curmudgeon, inclined to wait for the fuss to pass.

Today I came across a drawing I made back in July, but it was unexpectedly apt. I made the drawing in response to the prompt MONDAY which reminded me of Pablo Neruda’s poem Too Many Names (1958), here’s an excerpt:

Monday is tangled up with Tuesday,
and the week with the year.
Time cannot be severed with your weary shears.
All the names of the days
are rubbed out by the waters of the night.

Mondays, pencil sketch, with digital colouring, 2025.

While drawing, I thought of the remote rocky island of Neruda’s exile, as imagined in the film Il Postino ( d. Michael Radford, 1994)

Too Many Names is often read as Neruda resisting restrictive labels of time and identity. The poem suggests that night, dreams and the natural world wash divisions away, leaving a deeper continuity. Maybe this was his way of coping with exile. For those living with chronic health issues, the elemental forces are more sustaining than any celebration.

There’s a photograph of Neruda’s bedroom here. I can imagine him writing this poem from the window seat, looking out to the sea. Now I’m looking at the view from my bedroom window, last night’s fireworks have fizzled out, the winds have dropped. It’s the deep quiet of 1st January, the last day of the winter break, before the return to the hurly-burly of Mondays.

Mondays, pencil sketch, 2025