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August 30, 2007
Stumbling into the Light
Time has always intrigued me, and the experience of time is even more fascinating. I have nothing deep or insightful to say about it. Nevertheless, to attempt to say it I shall because I have ever learned that discretion is the bitter part of valor. [No, that wasn't a typo.]
The Mystery of Time
A clock ticks, arbitrary measure
of a moment--a waterclock drips
and each tiny splash gives weight to now:
but what is now? And even as I
think the word the now of that moment
passes and the thought became memory
of what slipped by.
[______________] There is no now, each
now is gone before it can be named.
A chronic waterfall, the seconds
wash over the rock ledge and vanish
with a tumble and turn; at this joint,
poised on the brink, I can see but can't
move the water flowing to, water
cascading away; no more can I
halt it, stop it on the brink, study
it, name it, and then let it flood pst.
One moment it is the unspoken
future, trips over the rocky juncture
and then is past, but no held, not owned
not ever my present, but always
passing.
In some sense now is never. That is, by the time you recognize NOW it has already slipped by. By the time you think NOW, that now is an instant in the past. In a sense all though is memory. It happens in the moment, and people constrained to our linear experience of it, it seems like now.
The Buddhists seek to plumb this mystery by mindfulness--living in the now. And if one could truly live in the NOW one would actually be living in eternity where all the chained together nows have a meaning the transcends the sequential NOW of our experience.
Or something like that.
Posted by Steven Riddle at August 30, 2007 7:14 AM
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