Cyclical time. My grandfather's time. His father's time, his father's father's time. What was it like to wake up to the sun, only the sun - the sun as all the generations before me, before my parents, understood it, as all the blood in us once felt it, as all the trees and deer and ants and weeds still feel it. The sun set free, set wild, unobstructed by numbers - by hours, by minutes, by seconds, by slots, by schedules, by money, by appointment, by construction. A world felt and breathed and lived in, a connection deeper and older than any idea of time. A privileged freedom I have never known and ache deeply for.
Forgetting what it is to exist in the world. Screens hither and thither, everywhere; every gas pump every check-out lane every pub every house every room every wall every pocket, beckoning relentlessly, syphoning life minute by minute into a void as the world ticks on. And the way the idea of shunning these shackles receives scorn as 'weird neo-hippie hipster shit.'
For the first time since we've moved here, just eleven days over three years ago as I write this, we had a chickadee come to our feeder. Thursday, the day after Jack's 29th birthday, the second anniversary of my grandmother's passing. I won't forget it.
These two have stuck to me for a few years:
"Only a few of us, amid the great fabrications of society, hang on to our really childish reactions, still wonder naively what we are doing on the earth and what sort of joke is being played on us. We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like little kits trying to find a gap in the fence, try to look through the cracks in the world." -Georges Bataille (from "The Cruel Practices of Art")
"We have misunderstood the stars. Clocks make our lives a slow motion frenzy. We can't get off the screen back into a world where we could live. Every so often we hear the current of night music from the Gods who swim and fly as we once did." - Jim Harrison (I can't find the source for this, it may be a misquote, but either way.)
No comments:
Post a Comment