Month: March 2019

It is quiet this afternoon. Or maybe it’s the relative stillness. There are sounds here. Pervasive and intrusive. A basketball slaps the concrete in irregular but predictable pulses, punctuated by the occasional glancing metallic reverberation of a rusted hoop. Here, inside, the refrigerator floats the persistent low-level mechanical drone of its compressor, punctuated by the liquid pop and crack of its auto-defrost mechanism, an acoustic mirror image of the basketball.

I frequently confuse the two, motion and sound. This probably has to do with the fact that they frequently cooccur, and even when they don’t, I add the missing counterpart. I clearly see the ball recoil off the rim despite the fact that there is a wall preventing any direct visual contact. And sound and motion are not separate territories of experience, after all. They are two poles on a continuum of movement, one inhabiting the micro level, the level of molecular oscillation, and the other at the macro level, a level that bleeds into the visual, into the realm of light.

This afternoon, the light of the room is a substance in motion, fluid and transient, as brilliant angular stripes of shadow and sunlight are cast by the narrow-gage window blinds onto the large wooden toolbox. The white-gold stripes vanish, then gradually reemerge, somehow brighter, in response to an itinerant cloud.

The dog sleeps on the couch, from my perspective she is directly behind the wooden toolbox. She is angled into the sunlight, with the entire front portion of her head suspended in the open air beyond the edge of the cushions. Her forehead also carries the shadow-casted sun-stripes. She is having an intense dream, and her body shudders and writhes in aborted movement. She whines in spasms that, from inside her REM-sleep world, voice full-throated declarations.    

The present moment becomes past as soon as I step into it. The best I can do is breathe my way through it, experience it as it occurs in fleeting points of lucidity that fragment and dissipate almost instantly, blown aside by loud, vaporous exhalations of the restless rutting beasts that inhabit my mental menagerie: associative half-recollections and tacit anticipation, fairytales of the past and mythical prophesies of the future.

Each instant is a non sequitur, an entirely novel emergence, and yet each is irredeemably saturated with the past. Heraclitus tells me I cannot step into the same river twice; the water of my first step has long since flowed downstream by the time I take a second. And, by extension, the me that steps into the water is not the same me that stepped before, only a moment ago. The river at my feet carries with it its entire prior course, sediment and debris from upstream, water that has passed all points along its path. In this way too, when I step into the present moment, I carry with me not merely my entire life’s experience up to that point, but the entire history of the universe.

And there is something else. Something impossible. This moment right now, as it opens itself up to me, here, as my fingers slap against the keyboard in front of me, is not the same moment that is opening itself to the dog curled up on the floor beside me, or the tree outside my window. These are not just different observational perspectives, different facets of the same temporal movement, different features of the same perpetual incipience; they are entirely incommensurate, each belonging to entirely unique experiential epochs.

And yet they coexist, cohabitate—miraculously interdigitate.

Kafka understood, but was only able to express it obliquely. We are no longer human, those of us who inhabit civilized spaces and breathe the toxic effluence of the machine. We are couriers of power, bureaucratic functionaries, servomechanisms. And it’s not simply that our daily activity is steeped in meaninglessness until our flesh is rendered of its animal vitality, but the ultimate futility of it all has penetrated the very bones of our thought, into the marrow. We are hollow vessels, cyphers.

To wake up as a gigantic insect would be a welcome change.

Emptiness is necessary, essential. It is not incidental. Our emptiness is not a design flaw. It is in fact the very source of the machine’s power. The modern world is built upon nature’s abhorrence of vacuums. Deprivation. Need. Want. Desire. Emptiness to be filled. Emptiness that begs for the smallest crumb of meaning. Emptiness that pleads for the faintest illusion of purpose. It is emptiness—our emptiness—that draws civilization along its ever-expanding planet-eating trajectory.

On some level, we know this. On some level, like Kafka, we understand too. Although we long ago learned to hide this knowledge, conceal it behind each new consumable distraction, confusing the palliative of diversion for actual remedy. On some level we know this, and we long for someone or something to save us. We wait desperately for a Sherpa to guide us back to ourselves.    

But where would such a Sherpa take us? Where would we go? Where is there other than here? There is no sturdy mountain peak in the distance, no beckoning snow-covered summit to serve as a point of reference, no visible target, no map coordinates to establish direction of travel.

Any route you choose to take through the void will lead you to the same nowhere.