Look at the picture for a while, if you will, even if you cannot read theJavanese writing on it. It is a picture on a calendar for the months of Novemberand December 1978. I remember Judith and I were talking then about the like-ness between the structure of Javanese music, the way plots of shadow plays areput together, and the way calendars work. In them all, to put it very abstractly,simultaneous cycles regularly coincide, sometimes all at once, sometimes inpartial coincidences. This single principle seemed to make these various things(music, text-building, and time-reckoning) resemble each other. It seemed thenthat this is the way cultural coherence works: a few deep metaphors bind variousthings together, make them resonate and mutually reinforce each other, andmake the world seem orderly, reasonable, and harmonious.