First: a new (lunar) year starts today: the Year of the Rabbit (except in Vietnam, where it’s the Cat). In Chinese tradition, the rabbit is gentle, clever, and swift; more generally, as prolific breeders, rabbits are symbols of fertility, rebirth, and sexuality. For the occasion, some artists’ renderings of the 2023 zodiacal rabbit.
There will be a digression on the last of these, Vadim Temkin’s hunky (digital) young man astride a giant black rabbit, which will lead me (through the miracle of associative memory) to some raunchy Cheap Trick lyrics.
Then I’ll turn to the course of some spectacular afflictions that had been visited upon me for some weeks but passed away about 5 days ago, returning me to the status ante quo of a battalion of disabling afflictions — which were, while awful, familiar. With the odd effect that returning to the old familiar felt like having recovered from a sickness, like being reborn.
Now this is the dark time of the year for me emotionally: Ann Daingerfield Zwicky’s death day (in 1985) was the 17th; today is the birthday of my husband-equivalent Jacques Transue (who died in 2003); the cold makes breathing outside air painful for me; and I’m profoundly lonely. But the sense — the illusion, really — of having been reborn has, this year, carried me through everything, made me irrationally buoyant.
Today I can do only a little bit of the program. I’ll just give you the three artists’ renderings of the zodiacal rabbit, plus my Facebook comment on the third that opened the pathway to Cheap Trick.
(#1) (Getty image)
(#2) (Chinese Historical & Cultural Project image)
(#3) Digital image by Vadim Temkin; my playful comment: Ride the wild rabbit!
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