равноде́нствие

This moment marks the point when our friends in the northern hemisphere experience the vernal or northward equinox when the apparent motion of the Sun crosses from the celestial southern hemisphere on its March towards the Tropic of Cancer. After this transition, for those for whom this day signals the start of Spring, the daylight hours gradually start getting longer.
At extreme climes (high latitudes) during the equinoctial day, the Sun is seen to move along the horizon, marauding at dawn and dusk and extending twilight to a couple of hours in duration. Idiomatically, the card means that the new season is just around the corner—literally in Russian, on the tip of one’s nose.

frühlingsbote

комбат

Born on this day in 1899, prominent Soviet photographer Max Vladimirovich Alpert (†1980) is best remembered for his iconic image Kombat (short for battalion commander).
Though the date and the subject are not known for certain, an investigative reconstruction of events undertaken in the 1970s are reasonably certain that the political commissar—the Politruk, the officer with the responsibility of political education of their assigned unit—of the battalion who took command after the actual Kombat was incapacitated, Aleksei Yeryomenko, is shown rallying his troops for a counter-attack against the German offense. Research dates the picture to 12 July 1942 on a battlefield in Luhansk (then called Voroshilovgrad) Oblast in far eastern Ukraine, skirmishes intending to halt the advance Fall Blau (Case Blue, the codename for this summer campaign and continuation of Operation Barbarossa) towards Stalingrad.

a clean, well-lighted place

While this meme of the iconic Nighthawks in the time of quarantine has been circulating, it is worthy to note how the artist Edward Hopper (*1882 – †1967) survived some pretty tumultuous and transformational times—including World War I, the 1918 Flu pandemic, the Great Depression, World War II and the onset of the Cold War—and through that lens regard his portfolio, many of those works—Nighthawks included address the subjects of loneliness, privation and isolation.

reintegration

Captured by Pulitzer Prize winning Associated Press photographer Slava “Sal” Veder on this day in 1973, the moment of reunion on the tarmac at Travis Air Force Base in California between a just released US prisoner of war, held for five and half years in Hanoi, and his family—captioned Burst of Joy—came to symbolize the beginning of the end of the US aggression in Vietnam and signaled the time for healing and reconciliation to start.
Among the first soldiers to be redeployed in Operation Homecoming, the spontaneous, happy image belies a grim reality, like the war itself (see previously)—there being nothing redemptive to the latter tragedy even in terms of good optics, with the marriage on the verge of collapse due to the stress of the soldier’s confinement and infidelities and reflects its opposite side as well with all the lives of Vietnamese and Americans that were beyond restoration. The couple reunited under orders, it was later revealed.

(d/p) · 10ⁿ

Not to discount the suffering of anyone or prematurely make assumptions on how this pandemic will conclude, it is refreshing that we are more willing to discuss death in perspective and possibly lose tolerance for any of loss caused by avoidable behaviours.
We don’t have the luxury of being precious. For example—via Slashdot—one study suggests that the government imposed lockdown and the general aversion to travel and socialising and the attendant net reduction in air pollution may in the end save more lives than limiting the contagion itself through distancing. Estimates place the annual fatalities worldwide from travel related pollutants at seven million. Divergent as these threats (albeit years of overexposure to smog probably put more at risk of developing COVID-19 by compromised lung function) are, it is worth investigating why we react so differently to each vector and let the latter support the sustainment of the former.

amabie

Via both our friends Spoon & Tamago and Everlasting Blört we are introduced to a timely and portentous yōkai (see previously) that presents as a sort of merfolk with three trunk like legs emerging from the sea to forecast either abundant crops or epidemic.
Pictured above is a late Edo era wood block print depicting an encounter in 1846 off the coast of Kumamoto investigated by local authority, whom were told by the creature that identified itself by name that good harvests would continue unabated for the next six years and should disease spread, display an artistic likeness of it to those afflicted to ward off sickness.  I can’t sketch so well and there are many better examples at the links up top from popular illustrators, but I figured I could at least share my contribution, thinking maybe we could all draw and share our own amabie (アマビエ) as an art therapy project whilst we self-isolate.

pyhä urho

Overlooking the possibly fictional but actually assigned patron Bishop Henrik (martyred and fêted on 19 January with a well-articulated legendarium of his own), a department store clerk of Finnish-extraction in the confusingly named town of Virginia, Minnesota lamenting that his homeland did not have a figure like Saint Patrick to celebrate their heritage and as a source of shared cultural cohesion and as an excuse to extend the general revelry (this year especially, please drink responsibly by staying at home or forever forfeit the right to be around other people hereafter) invented Saint Urho (hero) in 1956. Only known to diaspora (with the exception of the folklore and ethnography department at the University of Turku), Urho is variously credited with driving out the frogs (see also) or grasshoppers (with the command Heinäsirkka, heinäsirkka, mene täältä hiiteen! – Grasshopper, grasshopper, go back to Hell!—thus saving the grape harvest but inspiring acts that seem suspiciously like Springfield’s Whacking Day, incidentally on 10 May) and one is to regale themselves in royal purple and enjoy wine and/or purple beer so as to not mix one’s beverages.