Piercing the Veil of Time -- The Only Beauty of 2020 to Celebrate

 

This morning the cloud upon the mountain range was like a flat saucer and then a while cloud seemed to jet out of it. It was like a lance; like a bolt as what perhaps Zeus would have thrown from the top of Mount Olympus.

And it was a perfect moment to think about the end of a year when every land of our globe got touched by disease, unknown prognosis, lockdown, shutdown, elimination of socialization with fellow humans, and the wearing of the mask.

Many of these aspects of an epidemic have happened before in human history. But a pandemic in year 2020 when the world travels, when the people believe that they are invincible because man has conquered all infections with a pill or an injection, yes, in that case a pandemic is like that white “Zeus Cloud” I saw this morning.

…. I have always been attracted to the concept of a veil. Because it keeps secrets gracefully, with beauty even. A veil is what separates what we know from what we see. It dissociates our fears but also our trust.  A veil is privacy, like an iron fence can be.

And the pandemic pushed us to wear our masks, not to keep secrets from others but to not share and receive what is dangerous and contagious. Or contagious and dangerous depending if we think of the mask as a veil.

And in the privacy of our isolation, for 10 months now we have found a certain comfort. Even if large numbers of people resist the notion that a mask can be life saving.  In fact we have created virtual masks though our isolation. We may communicate even continue to work through virtual images of ourselves on a screen large or small, but we are not there. Because we are worried.

We are worried that our veil would not protect us anymore from our own secrets. From our own memories. From what we have forgotten once to say; from what we indeed once said.

And in that way, the mask protects us from sharing what we harbor, but the veil protects our time. The time we have stopped and placed behind that very veil.

… This morning I realised that the veil, like that flat saucer–shaped cloud atop the mountain range, is not only harboring and protecting frozen personal time but with the passage each one of us proceeds through, the veil becomes time itself. More, the veil becomes the mask of time. So we do not share what is harbored, through time, with others.

Sometimes even not with ourselves anymore.

So, when I took a photo, I did not think of clouds or Mount Olympus, but of a moment when our isolation within the year 2020 has suddenly pierced the veil of time!

And that is a wonderful way to end such a personal year.

 

December 28, 2020

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2020