Faith, A Leap of

Wait a minute, hang on a moment. You're actually telling me a solar year is almost six hours longer than three hundred and sixty-five days? That can't be right. Isn't that typical? Just when you're beginning to think that it's all perfect, that the world and all its cosmology if not its inhabitants is rhyming, some fact, some pick-axe of a piece of scientific detail comes along and shows you the fallibility of it all. But that's of course why we have to go and add this extra day, this leap day, this today, to the calendar every four years. The Gregorian calendar, that is. In the Islamic calendar, leap months are not used at all. (How does that work?) It actually gets worse. Exceptions even to the leap year rule are required since the actual duration of a solar year is slightly less than three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days. (Christ, it takes a leap of faith to conjure with all this.) Rather charmingly, mind you, in some cultures it's a tradition that women can propose to men during a leap year. For example, in the flatlands across the choppy sea - in the country of my paternal ancestors, in other words - tradition has is it that women may propose on leap day February 24th and that refusal from a man must be compensated with twelve pairs of gloves. The French-Polish painter Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) was a Leap Day baby. He is considered one of the last century's greatest realist painters. I'm not a fan. I just feel uncomfortable with the work. It may be that his depictions of young girls were not pornographic at all and simply acknowledged the discomforts of early sexuality. But it leaves me cold and uncomfortable. It is as if a selfish adult statement is being made at a child's expense. Very different to the artist of this blog. She for example uses childhood as one of her themes in her art, her major theme to some degree, but always you get the impression the point is one of universality and respect - for both subject and viewer.