Batman and the Dalai Lama
And they are told: 'Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink our eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of mind is surprise. The only state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it."
Sir Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
The functions, of course, of both, are essentially different, the latter having been smithed through the mess of reality into the sheer anvil of fiction. In Pratchett, a Procrastinator makes history and the cosmology of time be in balance with each other, ensuring that one moment proceeds to the next, without pockets of time hiccupping, no historical event a pregnant wrinkle that did not take the time it should, of course, in the trousers of time.
Batman, however, (whew, what a transition!) is such a wrinkle in time. So is the Dalai Lama.
Let me explain. Wait, read this first. I will wait while I make some tea and milk, for your brain to get acclimated to my absolute raving lunacy when talking about time, in time. Take your time.
A moment in time, no matter how perfect, needs a second moment of the differently same, to be real. A moment, say, of an eye blink, as I already stated somewhere else, regardless of im selben Augenblick, regardless of "in the same moment," there is a duration to an eye blink, and we experience that duration. If we didn't, and if that same moment is truly the same, then it cannot have a duration, then that duration would not exist at all. For durations, of course, are promises: this will happen again. It must. A moment that cannot be repeated is not a moment: it is nothing that does not take up space in time. (In the same way that a word that cannot be used again is not a word: it is not part of language. A signature that cannot be in its very uniqueness iterated is not a signature.) All discrete things are promises and bastards (as only a promise can be, yes?): this will happen again. A hapax legomenon even needs the label, for it to be true.
In other words. A moment, for it to be real, for it to be precious, has to be double: double in its very inception, like a Czech-Irish bastard of a man. A moment, thus, is a promise: there will be a next time, baby, and that time it will be real.
Batman does not like first moments; he built an oath and a life and a rather interesting career out of it. It's ultimately an impotent oath, for it refuses to budge even in the very real threat of deaths numbering to tens of thousands (The Joker's actual body count, if not even considering that he decimated Metropolis in Injustice. If we were to include that, then his body count is 11 million people.) Who would bound himself to an oath of the sanctity of human life that includes one with a body count like that? It is the realm where the sancrosanct becomes the sanctimonious: Batman, in refusing to have a first killing moment, damned himself to never experience anything real anymore - to begin with, even. In the world of violence he chose to be an innocent until the very end, injuring but not taking a life, exactly like how "an agnostic is an atheist that didn't come," as my lover put it.
I understand, of course, the threat of first moments, and the underlying assumption behind the value of them. Being a virgin only once, your first moment of impalement should mean something: you have given the purity of yourself to a man for the first time, yada, yada, yada. Having yielded, then, to the inevitability of sex, you have doomed yourself to the snowball of avalanching, ultimately indistinguishable dicks throughout your lifetime. I get it. You are only a Vestal virgin once; and the rest of the time you are Santa Claus hauling bags of dicks for your life. Not a pretty picture, of course.
But, I will maintain, that the second time is more real: for it is only in second times that one walks, with the grace of intention and the knoweldge of a grown man, into what he was buffeted along in the first one. It is a soldier going again to campaign that makes him what he is, not his first battle, where he was snivelling like a recruit and putting on the bravado of an uncooked general. In that second war is the real soldier: convinced, convicted, molded, as promised. In that second war should the sargeant say, "Welcome to the Army, baby." (The world, after all, became what it is only after the Second World War.) It is in the second time that you have sex where the promise is kept: your first sex is never as memorable as the second one, for it is when you become a woman.
The Dalai Lama (what a transition!) is a wrinkle in time in the opposite direction: he is eternally reborn, determined by the circumstances of the birth of a baby upon the previous one's death. It is in repetition and only in repetition that one transcends the curse of first moments, and thus transcend time and have the only right to forge an identity in a world where identity is never achieved in a lifetime. Only in reincarnation are you made to be who you are, for you even rewrite the past ever anew to be the present, and thus ravage the future with a mathematical certainty: not it "must," but it will happen again, because it is thus. Thus is history always a complete Orouboros. History is written only by men who understand this.
Wen the Eternally Surprised is the offspring of Batman and the Dalai Lama, who are both wrinkles of time. And, only within the genius of Sir Pratchett, was Time herself impregnated, by the only mortal worthy: Wen himself.
They did it twice, of course. And gave birth to, what else? Twins.
Image credit of Wen: https://noirandchocolate.tumblr.com/post/655719075864002560/wen-the-eternally-surprised-founder-of-the-order
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